The Watch

The Keeper of Hours

Chapter 18: The Watch

Curtis called at eleven-fourteen on Sunday night.

Mama Tate had been in bed for two hours. She had not been asleep. She had been lying in the dark with her hand on the small phone Yvonne had moved to the nightstand last week, because Yvonne had, after the visit Friday, decided that her mother should sleep with the phone within reach until the call from Curtis came. The phone had been on the nightstand for two nights. Mama Tate had not, in either night, slept fully through. She had been waiting.

The phone rang.

"Curtis."

"Mother Tate. It is time. The nurse just changed shifts. The night nurse said it would be the next several hours. Grandma is not awake. The breathing has changed. Pamela got in from Atlanta at six. The pastor came at eight and prayed. He left. We are alone in the house with the nurse. Grandma asked, two days ago when she could still talk, that you be the only other person in the room when she went."

"I will come, son."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Forty minutes."

"Yes, ma'am."

She set the phone down.

She got up. Her hips made their announcement. She did not, tonight, acknowledge them. She crossed to the door. She turned on the hall light. She walked to the spare room.

Yvonne, who had been sleeping in the spare room every night for the past two weeks since the visit to Mother Wells's house, was already sitting up. Yvonne had heard the phone through the wall. Yvonne was already in jeans.

"Mama."

"Drive me, baby."

"Yes, Mama. Carl is on his way over. He will be here in fifteen minutes. Tiana will meet us there in case Pamela needs a nurse in the room."

"You called them already."

"I called them when the phone rang. I had them on standby since Friday. You go put on the sweater. The night is cool."

"Yes, baby."

The drive took eleven minutes.

Yvonne drove slowly down Park, then turned onto Saratoga, then pulled up in front of Mother Wells's small white house at eleven thirty-three. The street was quiet. The streetlight on the corner had been out for a month and the city had not yet replaced it. The houses on either side were dark.

There were two cars in front of the house. Curtis's blue Honda, and a small white Toyota — the night nurse, Mama Tate would learn — and across the street, an unfamiliar gray sedan that turned out to be Pamela's rental. Carl pulled up behind Yvonne in his green Tacoma. Tiana arrived from the other direction in her Civic.

The five of them stood for a moment on the small front walk in the night.

"Mama," Yvonne said. "We are here for whatever you need. We will not come in. Tiana will sit on the porch in case Pamela wants a nurse to talk to. Carl and I will sit in the truck. You are not alone out here. We are right here."

"Yes, baby."

"You take as long as you need."

"Yes, baby."

Mama Tate climbed the porch steps. The green book was in her purse. The blue dark hat — the one for sick rooms — was on her head. She had not changed out of the housedress she had been wearing under the sweater because there had not, tonight, been time, and Mother Wells, she had decided in the car, would not mind a housedress.

Curtis met her at the door.

He had been crying. He was not, tonight, hiding it. He looked, at twenty-six, like the small boy who had spent his summers at this house since he was eight years old, and who had been raised, in his way, by the woman now in the back bedroom, and who had been carrying, for a year, the small private grief of knowing that the carrying he was doing for her was the last thing she would let him do.

"Mother Tate."

"Curtis. Take me to her."

He took her.

The bedroom was the same bedroom. The pale yellow walls. The yellow curtains. The small lamp on the nightstand, on low. The oxygen concentrator was off — Mama Tate registered this, and registered also that it had been off for some time, because the small humming she had heard on Friday was absent and the room had the specific deepened quiet of a room that had passed beyond what machines could do.

The bed had been raised slightly at the head. Mother Wells was on her back. Her hands were on top of the quilt. Her eyes were closed. Her mouth was slightly open. The breathing had a small new rasp at the bottom of each breath. The breathing was the breathing of a body that was beginning the long quiet work of letting go.

Pamela was in the small armchair on the other side of the bed.

Pamela Wells-Brown was forty-eight, a nurse manager at a hospital in Atlanta, the daughter of Mother Wells's older daughter who had died in a car accident in 2005 and whose son Curtis had then been raised in Pamela's household until he had moved to Memphis to be with their grandmother three years ago. Pamela was a tall, careful woman in a navy zip-up sweater over scrubs. She had been at her grandmother's bedside for five hours. Her hair was pulled back. Her eyes were dry — Pamela was the kind of woman who cried in cars, like Yvonne — and her face was the careful watchful face of a woman who had been waiting a long time for the next breath to be the last one.

"Pamela."

"Mother Tate."

"Baby. I am sorry it is tonight."

"I am glad it is tonight, Mother Tate. I have been driving down every other weekend for a year. Tonight I am here. The Lord arranged the timing."

"He did, baby."

"Grandma asked me, on the phone last Wednesday, that if you could come at the going, you should sit in the chair by her right hand. I have been on her left. She wanted you on her right. I will move."

"Pamela. You stay."

"No, Mother Tate. Grandma was clear. She said Pamela, you have been on my left side since you were three. You stay there. Mother Tate sits on the right. The Lord will know which hand is which. I am moving."

She rose. She came around the foot of the bed. She kissed Mama Tate gently on the cheek. She walked back to the small wooden chair she had brought in from the kitchen, which had been set up at the left side of the bed, and she sat. The armchair was now Mama Tate's.

Mama Tate sat.

She set her purse on the floor. She did not, tonight, get the green book out. The book was for later.

She took Mother Wells's right hand.

The hand was cold at the fingers and warm at the wrist. The small pulse at the base of the thumb was there but slow. Mama Tate had held this hand at countless prayer meetings, Communion services, the funerals of every other Mother of the Board who had gone before, and the hand had been the same hand for forty-eight years. The hand was different tonight. The hand was beginning, in the small honest physical way bodies begin, to be elsewhere.

Curtis stood at the foot of the bed.

The night nurse — a calm, middle-aged woman named Rosa, who had been with hospice for nineteen years and who had the small careful posture of a woman who had been at this work long enough to know when to be furniture — stood by the door.

The room was quiet.

After a while Mama Tate began to pray.

She did not pray aloud. She prayed the way she had been praying for fifty years, with her finger — though her finger tonight was on Mother Wells's hand instead of on a page — and the names that rose were the names of every shared morning between her and Mother Wells, the names of every Sunday school class they had taught together, the names of every funeral they had attended in the same row, the names of every woman on the Mothers' Board over the four decades they had served together. The names were a long quiet line in her chest. She did not need to say them. The Lord knew the line.

The hours passed.

The breathing changed at one-twenty.

It did not, at first, get harder. It got slower. The pauses between breaths got longer — three seconds, then four, then six — and Mama Tate watched Mother Wells's face for the small movement that would mean the next breath, and the next breath came, each time, just before Mama Tate had begun to worry. The pattern was the pattern Tiana had described to her two weeks ago, when Tiana had sat with her grandmother at the kitchen table and had told her, gently, what the going looked like in the women on the unit. Tiana had said: Grandma, the going is not what people think. It is not dramatic. It is slow. The body knows. The body lets go on its own. The room around her becomes the room.

The room had become the room.

Pamela watched her grandmother across the bed. Pamela was very still. Pamela was praying too. Mama Tate did not know what Pamela's prayer was. Mama Tate did not need to know.

Curtis, at the foot of the bed, sat down quietly on the small bench his grandmother kept at the foot for her shoes. He did not, in the next hour, move from the bench. He looked at his grandmother's face. He did not cry. He had cried earlier. He was past crying for now. He was watching.

Rosa, by the door, did the small unobtrusive checks she did every fifteen minutes — the wrist, the forehead, the small look at the breath count — and then she sat in the small folding chair she had brought in, and she did not interrupt.

The room was the room.

At two-forty-eight Mama Tate spoke for the first time in an hour.

She said, very quietly, leaning toward Mother Wells's ear: "Sister. I am here. The keeping is here. The Lord is here. You go when you are ready. I have the book. The names are kept. You can let go."

Mother Wells did not, in any visible way, respond.

The breathing continued.

Mama Tate went back to the silent praying.

At three-fifty-five Mother Wells's eyes opened.

They opened slowly. They did not, at first, focus. The lamp on the nightstand was on low and the light in the room was the specific deep amber of a sick room at four in the morning, and Mother Wells's eyes — when they opened — were the eyes of a woman who was looking at something not in the room.

Pamela rose halfway from her chair.

"Grandma."

Mother Wells did not turn her head.

After a long moment her eyes shifted. They focused. They focused not on Pamela. Not on Curtis. They focused on Mama Tate.

"Sister."

The voice was small. Smaller than Mama Tate had been prepared for. It was a thread of voice, the voice of a woman whose lungs were nearly done with the work of voicing, but it was Mother Wells's voice, the voice Mama Tate had been hearing in the pew at Mt. Calvary since 1979.

"Mother. I am here."

"You came."

"I came, Mother."

"The book."

"In my purse, Mother. I have it. Lillian. James. Tamika. The rest. I have them all. I will keep them. I will keep them tonight. I have already started. I will keep them every morning until I cannot. I will pass them to the next."

Mother Wells did not, for a moment, react. Her eyes stayed on Mama Tate's face.

Then a small, clear smile crossed her face — the smile of a woman who had been afraid of one specific thing and had just been told the specific thing was fine, and whose face had let out the long held breath of the fear.

"Sister."

"Mother."

"The Lord."

"He is here, Mother. He is in the room with you. He has been waiting."

"Yes."

"You go to Him, Mother. You go on. Pamela is here. Curtis is here. I am here. Lillian is on the other side waiting. James is waiting. The cloud is on the other side. You go through to them. We will be along in our own time. The keeping does not stop. You go."

Mother Wells closed her eyes.

She did not, immediately, breathe.

For a long second the room held a silence that was not the silence of the breathing-room. It was the small silence of a body about to make the decision the body had been preparing to make.

Then she breathed once more. It was not a deep breath. It was a small clean breath, the kind a small child takes before going to sleep.

Then she did not breathe.

The room did not, at first, move.

Pamela's hand had gone to her own mouth. Her eyes were on her grandmother's face. Curtis had risen from the bench at the foot of the bed and had come to stand behind Pamela's chair with his hand on Pamela's shoulder. Rosa, by the door, had not moved.

Mama Tate held Mother Wells's hand.

The hand was the hand of a woman who had, two seconds before, gone home.

Mama Tate did not, in the first long moment, let go of the hand.

She closed her eyes.

She did not, in the closed eyes, immediately weep. The weeping would come later. The weeping was for the kitchen, in the morning, with Yvonne. The weeping was not, at this moment, for the room. The room was for the going.

She said, in the silent way she had been saying things to the Lord for fifty years:

Lord. You came for her. You came at four in the morning, the way You said You would come, the way You came for the foolish virgins and the wise. You took her clean. The going was clean. The keeping was kept. Receive her. She has been Yours since 1953. She has carried Your people without complaint. Receive her with the welcome that is owed to a keeper who has carried for seventy-three years. I will see her again. I will see her soon. Tell her, when she comes through, that I will be along behind her in my own time, and that I will have the green book under my arm. Tell her I said the names are safe.

She opened her eyes.

She looked at Pamela. Pamela was crying silently. Pamela's hand was on her grandmother's hand on the left side, the way Pamela's hand had been on her grandmother's hand since Pamela was three.

"Pamela."

"Yes, Mother Tate."

"She is gone, baby."

"Yes, Mother Tate."

"She went well."

"She did, Mother Tate."

"You did good, baby. You were here. The Lord arranged the timing. You did not miss it. Curtis did not miss it. I did not miss it. The three of us were here. She had what she asked for."

Pamela nodded.

She could not, for a moment, speak.

Curtis, behind her, leaned down and put his arms around her shoulders, and Pamela turned her face into her cousin's chest, and Curtis held her, and the two of them — the granddaughter and the great-grandson of the woman who had gone — wept quietly.

Rosa, by the door, came forward.

She did her own small checks. The wrist. The eyes. The small careful confirmations she had done many times. She nodded — to herself, to Mama Tate — and she said, quietly: "Time of death, four-oh-two. I will need to call it in. I will give you the room for ten minutes first."

She stepped out.

The door closed behind her.

The room was, for the first time, fully theirs.

The three of them sat with Mother Wells for ten minutes.

They did not speak. There was nothing to say. Pamela kept her hand on her grandmother's left hand. Mama Tate kept her hand on Mother Wells's right. Curtis stood behind Pamela's chair with his hand on Pamela's shoulder.

The sky outside the yellow curtains had begun, somewhere in the last hour, to take on the small first gray of a Monday morning in June.

After a while a bird began the small first announcement in the dogwood tree in the back yard. Then another. Then the small full chorus that begins, in spring, before the sun is up.

Mother Wells had gone before the birds. The birds, in the small gentle way of the world, had not yet been told.

Mama Tate, for the first time in the long night, allowed herself the small quiet weeping she had been holding back. She wept with her hand still on Mother Wells's hand. She wept the way old women weep when an even older friend has gone before them — the small slow tears of a woman who has lost a sister, not in the loud way of sudden grief but in the long way of a grief that has been preparing for a year.

Pamela came around the bed at some point and put her arms around Mama Tate's shoulders. Mama Tate let her. They held each other for a long minute. Curtis came and stood in front of them and put his big hand on top of both of theirs. The three of them stayed like that.

After a while Mama Tate lifted her face.

"Babies."

"Yes, Mother Tate," they said, almost together.

"She is in the cloud now. She is with Brother Wells. She is with her mama. She is with the others. She is at the prayer-floor on the other side, where the praying is the looking. She is fine."

"Yes, Mother Tate."

"Curtis, you call Yvonne. Tell her to come to the door. Tell her to bring me my sweater. The morning is cool. Tell her — tell her your grandmother has gone home."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Pamela, baby. You stay with your grandmother until the people come for her body. You sit on the left like she wanted. You do not need to do anything. You sit. Curtis will manage the door. Rosa will manage the calls. I am going to go home. I am going to come back this afternoon when you have had a chance to sleep. We will sit on the porch. I will tell you about your aunt Tamika and what your grandmother handed me on Friday."

"Yes, Mother Tate."

"And Pamela."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Your grandmother loved you, baby. She loved you the whole time. She did not always know how to say it. She was a woman who did not say love easily. She loved you anyway. She told me about you many times. You knew that."

"I knew that, Mother Tate."

"Good."

She rose.

Her hips made their announcement, and tonight she acknowledged them slowly, because she had been sitting for five hours and the long sitting had cost her body something she would not feel fully until tomorrow. Curtis came around to help her. She let him.

She walked to the door.

She turned back at the door.

She looked at Mother Wells in the bed. She looked at her for a long moment. She did not say goodbye. The keepers of Mt. Calvary did not, even after the going, say goodbye in sick rooms. She said the small benediction Pastor Briggs had taught her in 1971 to say at the bedside of the just-departed:

Sister. The Lord be with you. The keeping continues. We will see each other again.

She left the room.

In the front room Curtis was on the phone with Yvonne. Rosa was at the kitchen table making the calls she needed to make to the hospice service and to the funeral home. The front door was open. The screen was closed. The first early light was coming through the screen.

Yvonne was at the door inside two minutes, with the sweater. She had been sitting in the truck with Carl since they had pulled up. Tiana came up the porch behind her. The three of them came into the front room.

"Mama."

"Yvonne."

"It's done?"

"It's done, baby. She went well. She went at four-oh-two. Pamela was on her left. I was on her right. Curtis was at the foot. Rosa was at the door. The Lord was in the room. She knew us. She said my name. She closed her eyes. She went."

Yvonne took her mother into her arms.

She did not, in the holding, say anything. She held her mother. Tiana stood beside them with her hand on Mama Tate's back. Curtis, who had come in from the porch, stood across the room with his arms folded and his eyes wet.

After a long while Mama Tate stepped back.

"Babies."

"Yes, Mama."

"Take me home. I want to be in my own kitchen when the sun comes up. I want to make coffee. I want to copy three more names into the book. Then I want to sleep in Eldridge's chair through the morning. Then I want to come back here this afternoon to sit with Pamela. We have things to do. We will do them slow."

"Yes, Mama."

She turned to Curtis.

"Son."

"Yes, Mother Tate."

"You did good. You were a good grandson. You stayed. You let her go in her own bed in her own house. The Lord saw it. He will be with you. You sit with Pamela now. The two of you have to manage the next several hours together. You eat something. You drink water. You sleep when you can. I will come back this afternoon."

"Yes, Mother Tate."

She walked out onto the porch.

The street was the same street. The houses on either side were beginning, in the small way houses begin, to have a single light on in a kitchen here and there. Down the block a man was getting into a truck for an early shift. A woman was putting out trash. The neighborhood was waking up.

Mother Wells had gone before the neighborhood.

Yvonne walked her down the porch steps. Carl was at the bottom of the path with the truck door open. Tiana followed behind them.

In the truck, Yvonne started the engine. She did not, immediately, put it in gear.

She looked at her mother.

"Mama. You all right?"

"I am all right, baby. Drive me home. The wind is good."

Yvonne drove the four blocks home slowly.

In her lap Mama Tate had her purse, and in the purse was the green book, and on the right side of her body was the small absence of the hand she had been holding for five hours, and the absence was the absence of one keeper at the prayer-floor, leaving a small bright space that the next keeper — by the long quiet logic of the work — was already moving to fill.

The keeping continued.

The cloud of witnesses had gained, at four-oh-two on the first Monday in June, one more.

Mama Tate, when she got home, did not, this morning, sleep first. She made the coffee. She sat at the kitchen table. She opened the green book. She copied, in her own old hand, in two-inch block letters in the new composition book — three names to a page, the way she had been writing for three weeks — Lillian Wells of Greenwood, Mississippi, the first keeper of Mother Wells. James Wells of Memphis, the husband. Tamika Wells of California, who has not spoken to her family in twenty-eight years, who is held now by the next.

She underlined Tamika.

The sun came up through the kitchen window.

Yvonne sat across from her with her own cup of coffee and her own quiet face.

The keeping continued. The list grew. Mother Wells was at the other prayer-floor now, on the side where the praying was the looking, and Mama Tate was on this side, with the green book under her hand, and the small green-gold light of a Monday morning in June was coming through the window above the sink, and the work — the long quiet work that had begun in 1974 and had been added to this spring and was now passing from one keeper to the next — continued, and would continue, and would not, while Mama Tate had hands, end.