Trudy Deere Goes to Heaven
I’ve been in the hospital four days when they put another
woman in the room with me—an old farm wife from Beardstown,
name of Trudy Deere. Trudy Deere has been in a car
accident. She’s recuperating.
I don’t say a word to her. I don’t have nothing to say that
people want to hear, anyway. So I keep my mouth shut.
Besides, I heard her tell my sister that she has five
children of her own, so I know what she thinks of me, lying
in my bed with my face to the wall when the nurses bring
the baby in. It’s nothing against the baby in particular,
but nobody can see that. I’m a bad mother is all they see.
People like to speculate. I guess by now everybody has
speculated about me.
I lie here in my hospital bed in this white room under
these white sheets wearing my white gown, and I think about
Billy’s hands and breath and legs and skin all over me. I
think about all of it from beginning to end, over and over.
He’s out there someplace, like a coyote. Sometimes late at
night, when everybody’s asleep and the nurses are down the
hall at their station, I think I can hear him howling. I
picture him on a hill, his head thrown back. I know he’s
probably all the way to Mexico by now, but still I can hear
him like he’s right outside the window.
There used to be animals all over the place around here,
not just coyotes but foxes and wildcats and wild turkeys.
You don’t see them much anymore, but sometimes you’ll see
where they’ve been. When I would go off with Billy, we’d
see coyote tracks, and I’d put my hand on the place where
their paws had been.
There are coyotes and foxes and wild turkeys in the zoo
over in St. Louis, I hear. They must breed and have their
babies right there in the zoo. And the babies must never
know nothing but the zoo and people looking at them and
living in pens. Or is that all they know? Maybe something
gets passed on from their parents—like we pass on our blood
and bones—something that reminds them of what they are,
some old memory that comes down. The coyotes were in the
woods back before Columbus, before Jesus, before anything
we know. You mean to tell me all that history can be erased
by a few years in a zoo?
They roll the baby into my room again, in her little bed,
and leave her next to me. My sister, Mary Helen, sits
beside me and talks, but I don’t say a word. I turn my back
on her and make myself as cold as a dead fish. After a
while she gives up on me and talks to Trudy Deere instead.
When they first brought Trudy Deere to my room, I thought
he name was Trudy Dear, but then I saw on the door that it
was with the two es. Mary Helen wants to know all about
Trudy Deere’s accident. Trudy Deere says they had to
perform an emergency operation on her, and Mary Helen says,
“I do declare!”
Trudy lowers her voice and says that she actually died for
one whole minute, and Mary Helen gasps and says, “Oh, my!”
Trudy swears to God it’s the truth, and Mary Helen says,
“Of course it is,” but I can tell she’s wondering.
Neither of them says a word for a long time. Me, I’m lying
here with my eyes shut thinking this is the first
interesting thing I’ve heard in four whole days, and now
Mary Helen is going to let it drop. I like here helpless
all the time, listening to people talk about the price of
soybeans and corn futures, or Eisenhower and the war, or is
it going to rain or not. When my family comes, I have to
listen to them, which is worse. They say how I’ve made my
bed and now I’m lying in it. They tell me I should’ve
gotten engaged to Leaner Filson, and remind me how the
Filsons own about “half the goddamn county,” is how they
put it. And when Leander comes home from Korea, then how’s
he going to feel? How’s he going to feel when he gets a
letter about me and the baby? I can tell everyone was
hoping this baby would look like Leander. All those Filsons
have red hair, and white skin that blisters in the sun.
They’re like moles, if you ask me. They’re like animals
that live in the ground—delicate and pale, with tiny pink
eyes. You can take one look at the baby and see she don’t
come from that family.
So that’s what I’ve been listening to every day, and now
finally someone says something interesting, and Mary
Helen’s just going to let it pass. I hear her walk to the
window, and I can picture her looking out. Just when I’m
about to give up, she says, “What was it like?”
Trudy Deere says it was like going down a long black
tunnel. And then she stops, like that’s it.
A long black tunnel, huh? Well, maybe Trudy Deere was on
her way to you-know-where. I want to ask was it getting
warm, but I haven’t said a word to her yet, and this
doesn’t seem like the time to start.
“And then I saw a bright light,” says Trudy Deer all of a
sudden. “And I saw angels.”
“Did you see Jesus?” asks Mary Helen. Like if Trudy Deere
had seen Jesus she might forget to mention it.
“No.”
“But there was angels?”
“There was three angels with the prettiest faces you ever
saw, like on a Christmas card.”
“Is that a fact,” says Mary Helen.
But, Trudy Deere says, she wasn’t ready to be dead yet. She
says she explained to the angels (like they’d care) that
her middle daughter is fixing to get married, and there are
all the preparations to make for the wedding. She hasn’t
even finished sewing the wedding dress, for one thing. And
now Trudy Deere starts telling Mary Helen all about the
pattern she picked out for her dress, and it sounds just
like the one Mavel Reynolds’ mother made for her when Mavel
got married. I tell you, that dress didn’t turn out nothing
like the picture.
“It’s a Simplicity pattern,” says Trudy.
Sure enough, that’s the exact pattern Mrs. Reynolds made
for Mavel. Trudy Deere must’ve had about the weakest
argument against dying them angels had ever heard. I’m
surprised that they didn’t laugh in her face. Instead, they
came up with a deal!
The angels explained to Trudy Deere that she came down to
earth to do a certain thing, but she wasn’t doing it, and
so it was time for her to die. It was like she hadn’t made
the payments on her car, and now the bank was repossessing
it.
“They said that?” asks Mary Helen.
“That’s right; they did.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said I sure was sorry, and would they give me another
chance,” Trudy Deere says. So the angels told her she could
have one more chance, but she’d better do what she was
supposed to do, or they’d have to come back and get her,
and this time it would be for good.
Just when I think Mary Helen is never going to get around
to it, she asks, “And what was it? What was the thing
you’re supposed to do?” It sure wasn’t sewing that wedding
dress.
Trudy Deere says it’s the dangest thing, but she can’t
recall what it was. They told her, but it slipped her mind,
and now she just can’t, for the life of her, recall what it
was.
“You mean you can’t remember?” asks Mary Helen, like she
didn’t hear Trudy Deer just said two times.
“No, I can’t.”
Now Mary Helen repeats the whole thing back: “You mean to
tell me that you had angels speak to you, and they told you
your life’s purpose and that, if you didn’t fill that
purpose, then they were going to come and take you back—and
you forgot what they told you?”
Trudy Deere says, “You ever woke up from a dream, and you
could just about recall it, not not quite? It’s like that.
It’s so familiar that if someone said it, it’d be like
hearing my own name. You know?”
But I don’t think Mary Helen does know. She makes a noise
in her throat, the noise she makes when it’s her turn to
talk, but she don’t want to take it.
“It’s like God in heaven reached down and put a treasure in
my hand, and then I dropped it,” says Trudy Deere.
I cover my head with the blanket and curl into a ball. I
can hear the beating of my heart and feel the heat of my
breath. I make a hole in the covers to peek out. The baby
is beside me in her little bed. I can’t see her, but I can
her hand where she’s raising it straight up in the air,
with her fingers out, like someone has asked a question and
she’s got the answer and is only waiting for her name to be
called.