Culling the night's litany of homicides, rapes, vehicular fatalities, and atrocities, the morning edition went front page with a nursing-home fire that killed nine. Catherine used to wonder why there was so little good news. Lately she had come to believe the supply had simply run out. It had always been her husband, Colonel James G. Bradshaw, U.S. Army Ret., who brought home the paper.

That morning she had risen at dawn, dressed, then walked the six blocks from her apartment to an all-hour market. When the car was sold it meant one less worry, one less thing to think about. Along with the paper she bought a carton of orange juice and a dozen day-old roses that had begun to turn but would be fine if she got them in water soon. James had been good with roses, an unexpected and lovely talent in a soldier. These would brighten the table where they dined each evening in a room by the sea.

On the way back she watched a full moon fade with the light growing in the east and remembered a small girl on an Indiana farm asking where it had gone. Then another memory came and turned her thoughts to the day and what it would bring.

As she wrapped a last few items with the newspaper, a page two headline caught her eye: Murder and Piracy on the High Seas. A wealthy middle-aged couple from Perth had befriended two young American couples down on their luck in the Hawaiian Islands. The story was that the foursome's boat had been severely damaged in a late-season storm off Fiji. There was no insurance and the cost of repairs exceeded what they had. The Americans claimed to have gotten most of the money but still lacked enough for return passage and something to live on till the repairs were complete. The Australian couple had just purchased a boat and had been looking for a crew to sail it home. If the four were willing, they could have a ride and get paid besides.

Eight months later, the Americans were arrested in Maui where they were living on the yacht still registered to the couple from Perth. Catherine wondered how they had died. Shot? Pushed overboard? Although she knew James had seen gruesome things in the war, a part of her always believed that most people died with grace and dignity. Now she wondered where such a quaint notion had come from.

The apartment was sparsely furnished but neat, everything clean, silverware lined up in drawers. Bathroom, bedroom, with a combination living room and kitchen divided by a breakfast bar. There was a note and a letter lying open on the counter. Both were addressed to her cousin, the only living relative either of them had. It had been five years since she'd seen him, the occasion then a visit, lasting a week and pleasant enough, but also a relief when it ended. The cousin went back to the long sunless winters that sparked Catherine's childhood, travel-poster dreams. After James retired they bought a bungalow in Belle Aire Bluffs, a suburb of Clearwater in Pinnelas County, Florida. Bougainvillea climbed the sides of the house and a stone walkway led to a backyard garden. The sun was such a presence that Catherine took to wearing the hats that became her one remaining vanity. In the evenings they walked to the harbor and watched the sunset. When they sat and listened to the gulls and the waves and waited for the lights to come on across the bay, Catherine felt a contentment whose strength surprised her. They never grew tired of the sea, being fascinated in a way only someone raised in the landlocked Midwest can understand. Oceans were not just features of the environment--to live by one was the same as dwelling in Camelot or Xanadu. They socialized little, being content with private ritual and disinclined to extend their lives beyond a familiar arc.

They explored the gulf coast in a series of day-trips that had no theme except their curiousity: Collecting shells on the beaches of Sanibel Island. Visiting a specialty nursery where the scent of rare, tropical orchids was entirely overpowering. And early one Monday morning, walking through Thomas Edison's Fort Myers home and workshop. The custodian told them the house was closed. Then let them in anyway to look around while she cleaned. Catherine remembered James sitting at Edison's desk, dust motes swirling around him in the strong horizontal light. The room itself seemed filled with a sense of purpose, as if the inventor's ghost still lingered.

The sound of the phone ringing startled her. She listened for a moment--a bill collector--then hung up without speaking.

She had always been growing something. Tomatoes in window pots in Washington, green beans in California, watermelons in the heat of a Texas summer. After they bought the house, she enlisted James to help her landscape. And while he did not at first share her interest in the plants themselves, she felt his pleasure in the quiet harmony of their working together. With no families to answer to and no financial pressures, they grew unneedful of the world and simply seceeded from it.

Catherine once joked that James married her and the military at the same time and it had taken forty years to get him alone. And though they both laughed at this, privately its truth pained her. In the beginning he joined an Army that owned considerable glory from the First World War. Those were country club years for the military, with the langorous detail of a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Then, when it became clear another world war was coming, the younger officers were quick to the possibilities. Their ideas of rising through the ranks to glory did not sit well with James. His midwest-isolationist upbringing robbed him of enthusiasm for the conflict even though he believed the cause was just. Catherine never doubted that the Second World War needed to be fought and won. It was clearly the lesser of evils. But that kind of certainty belonged to the past. Nowadays there were more wars than ever and no one seemed to know why.

A combination of athletic ability and patronage won James an appointment to West Point. His parents were farmers, rich only in hard work. But they were ambitious for their son and had access to the state's senior Senator through his father's Grange activities. Catherine's brother was also a cadet at the Point. She remembered the first time she went with her parents to visit him. After being shown around, the parents got into a conversation with another couple. Brother and sister walked out to the bluffs above the Hudson.

It was late afternoon and the wind coming off the river was chill. Catherine waited for her brother to return with a sweater. That's when James saw her, standing there staring down into the water. Later he told her he'd just found out he would be starting in the Army-Navy game. He was giddy with the news or he would not have been bold enough to go up to her. The wind that blew the dress tight against her body masked the sound of his approach and she started when he spoke,
"I'm sorry miss, only officers and failed cadets are allowed to jump from here". When she turned, she thought she had never seen anyone so handsome. "Well, since I'm neither, and don't want to break any rules, I promise not to jump."
They both laughed then looked away, suddenly shy. Her brother returned and began talking excitedly to James about the upcoming game. Even as he listened, Catherine sensed that James never took his eyes off her. Someone called her brother's name and he excused himself saying he would catch up later. She and James began to talk, hesitantly at first, then, gaining confidence with each other, more freely. And though only a short while passed, they both felt a resonance and a sense of destiny at work.

The following day she left with her parents and might not have seen him again. But when classes ended and summer bloomed, he showed up on her front porch one evening just as the light was fading from a June sky. Her father answered the door. James asked for the brother and was told he would be gone the rest of the month (something he'd known beforehand but did not mention). Then her parents asked him to stay the night as he'd arrived on the day's last train. When he accepted he saw the smile that Catherine could not hide. After dinner they sat on the porch in a lengthening silence. She wanted to say, tell me what you see when you travel, and what you do when you get someplace, and how it feels to be you. Tell me what you think about when you look up at the stars. Tell me everything. But what she said was, Will you write? And nodding he took her hand.

The next morning they spoke their goodbyes buoyant with possibilities. She knew he had requested and received permission to spend the summer with the Corps of Engineers surveying dam sites along the Colorado River. Three weeks from the day he left she received the first letter. They came faithfully after that and often ran to several pages of vivid description. Reading them she felt the growing poetry of his thoughts. Advancing through the Southwest he became her eyes and ears, opening a window on a world still relatively untouched, still sublime in its grandeur.

Going through their things, so many years later, she found his letters, bound with faded ribbon in the bottom of an old trunk. One had fallen from the packet and she read the sentences she had underlined: "The valley through which this tributary flows is a great bowl filled with light. Above the rim is a sky of impossible blue. The weather has been so perfect it makes me ache to see the days slip away. As I write this, a doe and her fawn watch me from a creekbank. Their eyes are the color of shade in deep woods."

They saw each other again when he returned in the fall, the parents accepting him as a suitor; and at Christmas she met his family. On a brilliant June morning, five days after his graduation, they were married in the chapel at West Point. She remembered the feel of the rings as they ran, hand in hand, beneath an arc of raised sabers to a waiting taxi. When they boarded a train for a six-day honeymoon in Miami, Catherine whispered that now their true lives had begun.

Outside, the temperature was climbing, the whole of the Gulf in the grip of a heatwave. By afternoon the air in the city would be like a touch of fever. But she had a good start on the day, and only a couple of stops to make after leaving the apartment. Then she would be with James by the ocean where the air was cooler.

A month ago Catherine turned seventy-three. It was an overcast day but no rain had fallen by the time she reached a cinderblock storefront. There were bars on the windows and doors. A hand-lettered sign said it was open till ten on weekends. Above the entrance another sign read, America, Defend It or Lose It. It was early on a Tuesday morning. When she entered the gun shop she saw to her great relief that she was the only customer. The man behind the counter looked the gun over carefully. "A nice piece, the 1911".
She said, "It was my husbands from the war. I want to trade it for something smaller. Something I can put in my purse."
She felt the man staring. Then the eyes went away, and he unlocked a cabinet beneath the counter.
"I got this .380 here, what they used to call a purse pistol. But I'll tell you m'am, it ain't worth what your 45 is."
Catherine picked up the weapon. Strange, she thought, all that time living with a soldier and never learned to shoot.

"I don't feel safe anymore. And I'm not strong enough to handle the other one."

None of these things were what she wanted to say but she was so nervous she couldn't think straight.
"You want protection m'am, you keep your 45 or go to a 9mm, something with some stopping power. You learn to hold it with both hands. Even if you only get an arm or leg, it'll be enough."
Catherine was already tired of the conversation and just wanted it over. "If you'll give me the smaller gun and load it for me I'll consider it an even trade".
The man didn't hesitate. "Deal. There's a month till you can take it, but we'll do the papers right now and it's yours."
The thirty-day waiting period was up today, and her first stop would be for the pistol.

It was the very old and the very young who rode buses. Until the car was sold she had not ridden one since the war. But they were always available and she often dozed and woke more refreshed than in her bed. She had not been sleeping well for some time, her nights filled with startlingly vivid dreams. These seemed to be memories, but of things she and James had never done, places they had never been. She was helpless before these inventions and often awoke in tears. Some days she rode for hours, intermittently dozing and listening to the voices around her. Hearing words spoken in languages she didn't understand and would never have time to learn. By people whose lives were so unimaginable, old women with shopping bags filled with fruits and vegetables she could not name, young girls who should have been in school, holding babies and talking to each other in machine gun cadences. Going where? She had ridden often enough that a few of the old women nodded to her when she got on; and sometimes she felt an almost overpowering urge to tell them what had happened, to hear the words out loud. To watch their faces as they listened, looking for something she couldn't put a name to, something in their eyes that would tell her that she was not alone in bearing the unbearable. But mostly she was grateful for the chance to immerse herself in a world so different, to find a kind of solace in the company of these strangers. Able to be alone with herself and her thoughts in a way she could not be in the empty apartment. It was too big for her life and too small for her memories.

Early in March, on a day that was unexpectedly warm, Catherine had gone shopping while the Colonel stayed to work in the garden. She returned in an hour and was putting up the groceries when she happened to glance out the window and saw him lying crookedly in the grass. He was barely breathing and her hands shook so she almost could not pick up the phone. In all her life she had never known such cold fear as gripped her now. She thought of the vast emptyness life would be without James. Please God, she prayed, don't let him die.

At the hospital she carefully controlled her emotions, filling out the required forms, pacing quietly near a doorway, until a doctor found her and said that James would live. Whereupon she broke down and sobbed with relief, then realized the doctor was waiting to continue. Catherine tried to look the man in the eye, to signal him to be positive, the way the Colonel told her he taught his officers to be when things were in the balance. But the doctor nervously averted his face as he spoke. Massive stroke, paralysis, condition stable. Nothing to be done now. Go home. Sleep. As she heard the words a void opened somewhere and swallowed her heart.

She returned the next day and the day after and the day after that. Waited for the results of tests that only led to more tests. Was told that it was too early to know, that in these cases anything was possible. But the weeks and the months went by and nothing changed. His synapses had been rerouted into infinity, and what he knew or still held of the world, no one could say.

At firsther grief was countered by hope and sometimes anger. All her life she believed that good was rewarded and evil punished; and though she was not an especially religious person, she prayed that God would rectify this mistake. Day after day, she spoke to James, held him, cried for them both. She knew, without any doubt, that he heard her, talked with her even, in his silence. As his condition remained unchanged he was moved from room to room, and finally to a ward where he lay with others in that terrible silence. He was able to breathe without the aid of machines, and could sit in a wheelchair and be spoonfed at mealtimes. There was a catheter and a urine bag strapped to his leg and the nurses bathed him each morning. The doctors became less and less interested. Eventually they shook their heads and said there was nothing they could do--that recovery was something Catherine should not expect.

She got a second opinion, then a third and a fourth. But one day she woke up believing that his face would never again wear anything but an empty stare. It was the first day she began to think of death as an ally. The Colonel had once told her that in war horror had always been accompanied by hope, by a belief in greater powers and a purpose not always divined but trusted. Now she felt that trust had been broken and that she must act to set things right. In the beginning, she wanted to take him home and care for him herself, tormented by guilt that she could not somehow restore him to what he had been, and the terrible loneliness that seemed to deepen every day. But she was overwhelmed by how much needed to be done for him, and fearful of her own mortality. One of the lessons of war the Colonel learned is that no one is ever really safe. Just a few months before the armistice he was miles from the front, in a secure area, drinking coffee with a group of officers and reading one of Catherine's letters. A Sergeant refilled their cups and was walking away when the officer next to James staggered and clutched his chest. He was dead even as the sound of the sniper's bullet reached them.

She made a last check of the apartment, though there was little to miss in the near empty rooms. Most of the furniture had been sold with the house, Catherine having no use for it. When she moved she brought only some clothes and a steamer trunk filled with mementos. Everything was boxed now and labeled for her cousin except a photograph lying in sunlight near the window. In it the face of a young woman is smiling up at the camera. She has honey-brown hair, short and curled, and her cheeks have the overly rosy glow characteristic of hand-tinted photographs. It was James' favorite and she meant to have it with her.
There really wasn't much else to do. An airline ticket and the letter went into an envelope, and that was that. She sat for a moment gathering her resolve. Give me strength she prayed to a God she was no longer sure she believed in.

Before the car was sold, she drove to dozens of nursing homes, eventually finding one with ocean frontage in an exclusive residential area. It looked more like a country club with a rambling stone wall enclosing the manicured grounds, and a wrought iron gate with a smiling attendant. All of the patients had private rooms and the hallways did not smell of urine as had most of the other facilities she toured.

She had also come to expect seeing patients herded together, their wheelchairs tangled and touching like bump-cars at an amusement park when the current is cut. But here there seemed to be as many nurses as there were patients. Gardenia and star jasmine grew beneath the window of the room that would be his. It calmed her to think of him there, and she signed a contract and arranged for his transfer on the same day.

For awhile Catherine had been insulated from what anything cost by multiple insurance policies, James' military pension, social security, the equity in the house, and their savings. Bills and financial correspondence piled up mostly unopened. When the house was sold, it was not for the money but because she could not bear living there alone. The months went by and the seasons turned and then suddenly, everything was gone. Very soon, James would have to leave this place beside the sea because she could no longer afford to keep him there. The government would pay for the Colonel to go someplace else. But it would not be someplace where the patients were clean and the air was good, where you could hear the wind and the waves. And maybe she was glad. Maybe the graciousness and beauty of the surroundings had lulled her into accepting the unacceptable. But now she would take up this last duty as the good wife of a soldier should.

Anyone watching the entrance that day would have seen an elderly woman get off the bus and stand near the wrought iron gate blinking in the late afternoon sun. She carried a bundle in her arms that held the dress-uniform of an officer in the United States Army and a pair of leather shoes spit-shined to a high gloss. You would have noticed she struggled a bit with her package and that she was a frequent visitor from the familiar way the attendant waved her through the gate. For a while longer you could have watched her walking resolutely up the sidewalk, until she was lost from sight around the curve of the drive.

One of the nurses found a vase for the roses and fussed over them when she placed them on the Colonel's dresser. A breeze infiltered the room as the weather in the Gulf shifted gears, and Catherine moved nearer the window. A hummingbird hung motionless in the air outside. She leaned back and let the memories wash over her. They had been married over half a century, a fact no less astonishing than that she had never wished it otherwise. How could she let them put him in one of the other places she had seen? More than once, she had become frantic, imagining the horrors he suffered: Unable to cry or scream or voice the fear and pain he must experience, to endure helplessness and humiliation every waking minute of every day. She could not chance dying first and leaving him like this. Why should they be parted when they were everything to each other? As they had been in life, so they would be in death. She laid her cheek against his and held him, rocking softly, waiting for the day to end. As the shadows in the garden lengthened, she called for the nurses and explained that it was a special occasion. They were pleased at this and helped her get the Colonel into his uniform. Then, like so many times before, she pushed the wheelchair out onto the path that led down to the sea. Everyone was at the evening meal and the grounds were empty. The light was soft and insubstantial and Catherine continued until the trees opened to a beach where she could hear the small surf breaking. She was crying now and could not see, only placed the barrel where she felt the blood pulse beneath his skin, whispering over and over, My Love, My Love.

When the shots rang out the birds rose from the trees, then settled again quickly as the sounds were not loud and carried only briefly into the gathering dark.

Sometime later a nurse found them. A full moon had risen, sending shafts of light into the garden through the trees. The breeze was steady from the southwest. And when it stirred the branches, light rippled over the ground like water.

The nurse was named Gabriella after her grandmother. In the Guatamalan village where she was born families took care of the old with love and honor. When she arrived in the United States she had been grateful for this job and did not consider her work demeaning, as some of the other nurses did. She had gone to give the Colonel his evening medication and was puzzled by the empty room. Searching the grounds she found them lying half in shadow. Making the sign of the cross she considered the figures before her. They seemed only to be sleeping and might wake if you called their names; but when she moved closer she saw they were no longer answerable in this world. She had been taught not to fear death, but to understand that in its presence many things are revealed. She knelt in prayer asking her ancestors to welcome these lost ones. Then a cloud passed in front of the moon. And in the darkness she imagined that a great wave had come for them, their souls rising to meet it like winged vessels of light, journeying through the night to a day that is always dawning, never far from the shore, never far from the sea.

Copyright FITZJAMES 2003