The Aide Who Drove Ludie to the Ocean

Ludie did not say anything.

I stopped the chair and stood beside her, and I watched her face take it in. I have seen people be born and I have seen people go. I had never seen anybody look at anything the way Ludie Cobb looked at the Atlantic Ocean that afternoon, like somebody had opened a door on a room she had lived next to for seventy years.

“Well,” she said after a long time. “It’s still here.”

“It sure is.”

“I thought maybe they would have moved it.”

I laughed, and she laughed, and then neither of us laughed. The wind pulled at her hat, and she put up one thin hand to hold it.

“I want to touch it, Joelle,” she said. “I want my feet in it. I don’t want to look at it from up here like a picture.”

I looked down the beach. It was forty yards of soft sand to where the water began, and I had a transport chair with narrow wheels and a woman who weighed ninety pounds. I had not planned this part. I had told myself the boardwalk would be enough.

“Ma’am,” a voice said behind me. “You need a hand?”

There were four men in waders and canvas coats coming off the beach with long surf rods over their shoulders. They had Hampton Roads Surf Anglers on their caps, and the biggest one, a gray-bearded man with a face like a boiled ham, was looking at the chair.

“She wants to put her feet in the water,” I said. “It’s her first time since 1955, and I don’t think I can get her down there.”

The big man looked at Ludie. He looked at the hat. Then he leaned his rod against the rail.

“Tommy Ray Gaskins,” he said. “Ma’am, it would be my honor.”

They did not ask me anything else. Two of them took the front of the chair and two took the back, and they carried Ludie Cobb down across forty yards of soft sand like they were carrying a bride. Tommy Ray walked ahead of them, testing the ground.

I came behind with the tote bag, carrying the oxygen machine against my chest like a baby, and I do not believe I was entirely breathing.

They set her down on the hard wet sand where the waves ran out, a few feet back from the line of foam. Tommy Ray knelt in the cold sand, took off her left shoe and her stocking, and laid them in her lap. He took off the right one, too, and set it beside the first.

“Take your time, ma’am,” he said.

The first wave came in about as far as her ankles, thin and gray and cold. It ran over her feet and the skin there, thin as paper and spotted with age, and I watched her whole body jump.

Then she laughed.

I have heard a lot of laughter in a nursing home, and never one like that. It started somewhere deep in her chest and came up out of her like water out of a spring, and she put both hands over her mouth.

“Burl!” she said, out loud, to the sky. “Burl Cobb, it’s still here! It’s still here!”

The second wave came in higher. It reached her calves and soaked the hem of her blanket, and the four fishermen stood around her in a half circle with their caps in their hands.