Read Online In Memory of Junior by Clyde Edgerton - Free Book Online Page A

or less give up. I have to prop his back up with the pillows, then get his legs down off the side of the bed for circulation. He’s lasted a long time this way, and Miss Laura she going down so fast, I think maybe he be the one to outlast her, instead of the other way round.
    Miss Laura, she can stand on the floor and walk over to the window and back. We still do that twice a day. Once at ten and once at three. Social services all for that. But sometime it seem like she don’t even know where she is. She don’t even look out the window no more like she used to. She used to would stop and stand there a little while and mumble a little something. Now when she get over there she just turn around and head back like she be glad to lay back down.
    She used to mostly talk about Mr. Glenn, about all she had to do for him for all that time before she got sick. She tell me about having to pick him up outen the bathroom floor and all that. She tell about other stuff over and over too. That’s where he kept falling—in the bathroom. Butat least she had one of them high commode tops, which I didn’t know nothing about while Lorenzo were down and out. You get a little bitty low commode down close to the floor, and you try to get a sick man, a dying sick man, down and then up off it without him toppling over in the floor, then you be doing a pretty good balancing act. You be leaning back with all your weight pulling him up and if your hand slip loose you go over backwards yourself. And once he topple down there on the way down, instead of on the way up, then you know where he gone shit. He gone shit in the floor. And who gone clean it up? Mr. Clean? Michael Jordan?
    How bout them naming that highway after Michael Jordan? Pick my chicken. What that young whippersnapper done to get a road named after him except look out after hisself, doing what he love to do all his short life, big and strong with all that natural gift from God? What else he done? Seem like to me the one they name the road after would be somebody who done looked after somebody they
have
to look after—while they love the person but hate all that cleaning up and toting and heaving and lifting and shaving and wiping and feeding and scraping driedup stuff you don’t know what it is off the floor and the table legs. Humph. And you doing all this when you ain’t feeling so good yourself and ain’t got enough money to buy no bed sheets and run plum out of energy but have to keep going anyway, no matter what.
    Michael Jordan? You think he ever short on bed sheets? And if he ever been, you think he ain’t more than made up for it? And they name the road after Michael Jordan?
    I know Miss Laura she done a lot, because Lorenzo heonly lasted bout two and a half years after he got down. Mr. Glenn he lasted I think about eleven years. And them boys of his not much help. Course my chiren was the same way.
    When I was growing up people took care of the old folks. We did, anyway.
    What would get me down most is Lorenzo’s bowels, you know. And then there’s no worse smell in bed sheets than piss less it be bedsores. Lord a mercy I would
keep
sheets in the tub. I wish I’d had the washamachine that’s here at Mr. Glenn’s. If anybody wanted to know what I needed I’d say lord honey I could sure use a washamachine.
    What about my little hallway with the cracks in the floor I travel back and forth on to the bathroom with my Lorenzo. Why don’t the government pave that and name that after Michael Jordan? Sha. I just don’t get it. A man make his living jumping up and down with people screaming all over the place and him making enough money to pave Hanson County three times over in gold-plated concrete getting a big four-lane highway named after him while at the same time hundreds of little women in North Carolina breaking their own backs scrubbing up after a sick, broke-down husband who done worried hisself down to a nub