Gumption
I was finished with work, ready to go home, and practically out the door when the phone rang. Picking up, I hoped it would be something easy, something quick. I was tuckered out.
“Clay, its Reba.” My older sister in Knoxville.
“What’s up, Reba?”
I jumped ahead. Dad was still at home with helpers coming in every day from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon. Doing all right for 82 years old. Had to be Momma.
Reba said, “Momma’s in the hospital for some blood tests.” Something ragged in her voice.
Because Reba was a nurse living close to our parents in Oak Ridge, she had the lion’s share of the duty with them, but all five of her siblings told her we’d do whatever she needed.
“Can you come tonight?” she asked. “Sammy and Denny are too far away. Pete’s got three sick kids, and Janie’s in Nashville at a conference. Johnson City’s what? Hour and a half away?”
“I can make it in about 80 minutes, I think. I need to swing by the house first. See Marion and the kids. Tell them where I’ll be…and why. I’ll try to get there by 9:00.”
Silence.
“Is that okay?”
I heard her crying softly. “It’ll be all right, Sis. I’ll be there soon as I can. It’ll be okay.”
“No, it won’t,” she said. Then she blew her nose. “I’m sorry, Clay.”
“What’s her room number?”
Three hours later I entered room 4325 sending Reba on home because she looked so tired. More so than me. Momma looked almost gray. The nurse at the door said, “She’s in and out, come and go. You might not be able to talk with her right away.”
I stood by her bed, and she had her eyes closed most of the time, but opened them twice. The first time they were glassy and unseeing. The next time I thought maybe she knew me.
Our mother, Linda Poe Lockwood, had raised six kids. I was the baby. She had kept our father, Samuel Gibson Lockwood, out of trouble for fifty years. Up until two years ago when an affliction she had jokingly referred to as Old Timers Disease put her into a retirement home where she could be properly cared for. Not Alzheimer’s exactly, but some kind of dementia for sure. For a while she was mad as a wet hen about how she got sentenced there, saying, “Sam has got himself a girl friend! I just know it! You all aren’t helping me this way.”
But after a while, she forgot her anger at Dad and at us, and meanwhile, he learned how to cope with life without his beloved Linda. When she asked why she was in the rest home, we explained the doctor said she needed to be there. As a former nurse, she accepted that, but still didn’t want to relinquish him to anyone else. Especially to some other woman. Sometimes the look on her face showed cogs turning, trying to figure things out. She never said anything. She would drift away for a while, but she always wandered back to us.
She was back with me now, smiling and asking, “What’s your little boy doing these days? Talk about him, and talk about his baby sister, too.”
Even when she couldn’t quickly recall their names, that old spirit was back in her voice. That warm, familiar light in those brown eyes. I thought she might have been waking after a nap on the living room sofa. Crinkles around her eyes. Gray hair loose at her temples. Glasses perched on her nose as she looked over the rims. Happy.
“Tell me about your Phillip and Claudia,” she said, pleased she’d found their names.
I sat next to her bed, and she turned to me, grimacing. I hopped up and went around the bed. “Here. Let me scrunch these pillows so you can rest easier.”
“Thanks, Charl.”
Originally, I was Charles Clayton. Then she called me Claypot when I was a toddler. Before I went to school I became Charlie, but my other sister Janie helped me become Clay because that was only four letters to learn how to write, and it made me less a face in the kindergarten crowd. Now I was just her Charl. Mom’s south Alabama accent made me feel special because nobody else ever called me Charl.
I told her about my four year-old Phillip and one year-old Claudia, remembering how proud I was when I was little, and she bent down peering into my eyes when she wanted to know something. And I remembered how fierce she could be when I wasn’t doing right. When I couldn’t do something and came crying to her. How she taught me to cope and set me straight.
She approached all her kids the same way. Determined. On eye level. Up close.
“All right now,” she would have said. “Time for us to talk. This is not going to be easy, but it’s got to be done.” And would be so much easier if she was doing it with me.
That’s how it would start, and it would end with, “All right. Now you know what to do. Whatever you do, Charl, do it like you mean it! Use your gumption!”
At first, I wasn’t sure what gumption meant, but I sure as hell knew what she was telling me. “Buckle down and do right, boy!” She preached that sermon all through my growing up, consistent through the years, and every one of her six children knew her sermon by heart. “Do it right! Use your common sense!”
One time I was fixing a flat tire on the ’47 Jeep she’d given me, and I couldn’t slide the tire back on the rim, and I got frustrated and lost it. I wanted that Jeep to run as much as I wanted anything in this world. I was tired of borrowing somebody else’s vehicle. Out in the shed on the far end of the barn, I hurled that tire iron at the barn wall, the impact like an explosion when it hit the corrugated tin, which startled me and irritated me, too, and I started cussing loud as I could, startling hens so they scurried into ragweed and Johnson grass.
Standing there steaming, I tried to figure out another way to manhandle that tire, and Momma came traipsing around the corner carrying the egg basket. She took a look at me with the tire half on, examining my face and my predicament, a smile slowly emerging on her lips.
“What you got here, Charl?”
Sullenly, I showed her how close I was getting, but the tire was slipping off again and again. I muttered, “If you’d help me, I think we can get it back on.”
Surveying the situation, she said, “You don’t need me.”
I was not happy she said that.
“Splash some water on the tire,” she said, “and try it again.”
I wanted to forget the tire, but, reluctantly, I did like she said, dipping a can into the cattle trough, splashing the tire with brown water, and don’t you know it, the damn tire slipped right on like it should. She just stared at me. On eye level again.
“Mechanics do this kind of thing every day. I could have helped you out, but you wouldn’t have learned anything if I had. You can do anything you put your mind to if….”
“…If I use my gumption,” I said, shaking my head. “I know. I know.”
She was right again, damn it!
She stepped closer. “Listen,” she said. “You’re just a sophomore in high school. Your brothers and sisters are either in college or out on their own, but I always knew you were the one I should give this Jeep to. Even when you were just my baby Claypot, I knew you’re the one who’s got the notion of how things work, and you get that from me. None of your siblings can do what you can do.”
“Huh,” I said. I never knew she saw me that way.
She took my hand, squeezing it, laughing that hearty ain’t-life-grand laugh of hers. “You’re the one, Claypot. I always knew that.”
Dad never professed to have a mechanical brain, but Momma did, tearing things apart, putting them back together, and I was right there with her, figuring things out. Making things go.
“Shoot!” she said, heading into the lean-to, searching behind the Jeep for more eggs. “Nobody can do everything, Charl. I’ve messed up more times than I can count.”
She put a hand on my shoulder.
“And I learned something every time I did. You’re going to remember all this.” Her intent expression softened before my eyes, warming into a smile.
“You’ll always remember this trick with the tire rim, won’t you?” She was right. I was always going to remember this. Her laughter was the most excellent sound I ever knew. Pure fantastical exultation! But now she was worn out, not exactly laughing.
After a while she looked at me. “I’m going to close my eyes, Charl. You go ahead home.”
“I’m staying with you, Momma.”
“Well, turn on the television if you want,” she said, pleased to have me stay. She loved The Beverly Hillbillies, especially the character, Granny. I did, too. But it wasn’t on.
“Turn the sound down a little. That won’t bother me.” She placed her glasses on the tray beside the bed. Unadorned, her face was somehow younger. Vulnerable. Later she woke up, and I could tell she wasn’t comfortable.
“What is it, Mom?”
“What?” She looked at me. “Oh, it’s you, Charl. It’s just a little catch in my back.” She moved around a little. “Feels like chinches.”
“Chinches?”
“Like the ones on that black man I was nursing down in Mobile.” A smile back on her face. “That old man the chinches were eating on.”
I pulled my chair closer, asking, “What are chinches?”
“They’re a kind of bed bugs. The ones I’m talking about were big as cockroaches.” She put her glasses back on, reinvigorated for the telling.
“This skinny old black fella was on my ward. Every morning when I came around to check on him, he had specks of brown or red on his sheets. Every single morning he looked miserable! Well, he was a nice old man, and I decided I was going to do some investigating of those specks. I came by one night shift with a flashlight, and, sure enough, I found chinches. They only come out at night, you know, and they were eating that old man alive! The specks on his sheets was his blood.
“We threw out his mattress and bedding and sprayed his bed, which was made of wicker, and those bed bugs just fell out on the floor. We took the bed outside in the daylight and sprayed it two more times, but I did some finagling and got him a solid wood bed. That did the trick. He was real grateful.”
“I bet he was.”
The strength evaporated from her voice as she wound down. For a while she slept with her glasses on. I slipped them off her just as a slender, narrow-faced little brunette nurse entered the room, walking softly to the bed. I got up while she was doing the things she needed to do, and I went out into the hall so I could catch her on her way out.
“How’s she doing?” I said.
“Well as can be expected for 79 years old.”
“What’s ailing her?”
She shook her head. “Her tests won’t come back for three more days.”
I went back in and watched The Waltons on her television. One of those episodes after the actress who played Granma had her stroke, not just acting like she’d had a stroke. It was the real thing.
Momma woke with a start. “Sam, it’s time to go,” she said, staring at me.
“Mom, you feeling okay today?”
She put on her glasses, studied me a second, and said, “Yes, Charl. I’m just tired.”
She slept again, and I removed her glasses again. I had the sound down low, watching a John Wayne war movie, not following it closely, glad to be watching her all through the night and into the next day, if need be.
“Sam, are you ready to go see Grandmother?” she said in a strong voice, reaching her hand out to me. “Do you think we ought to take the pictures off the wall?”
“It’s not time to go yet, Mom.”
She put her glasses on, studying me some more.
“Soon, Charl, soon you need to go home to your babies.”
I wanted her to come home with me, too, so she could see Claudia and Phillip again. I wanted her to be around them as much as possible. Teach them things like she’d taught me. But I remembered how Phillip had gotten upset when she’d told him Christmas would be coming soo, and it was February. “Gramaw,” he’d whined. “Didn’t we just do Christmas a couple months ago? Santa got me a dump truck. He’s already come, Gramaw.” He turned to look at me, wanting an explanation that I didn’t have ready. But Momma had one.
“Oh, Phillip, you’re right,” she grinned. Then rubbed noses with Phillip, adding, “I always want it to be Christmas.” He liked that.
She blinked a couple times and then said, “I was dreaming about Chickasaw.”
“What’s Chickasaw?” I said.
“That was the Black Unit down at Providence Hospital in Mobile. When I first started on nights down there, the Catholic sister who ran the Unit fussed at me for waking up a patient to give him his sedative. You don’t have to wake them up to give them sleeping pills, Charl,” she said. “That’s just common sense. If they’re sleeping, let em be. But I was new, confused, and scared to death that I’d bust out of nursing school. I didn’t want to go back to Lower Peachtree and the rest of Wilcox County with my tail between my legs.”
“What you did doesn’t sound so bad to me,” I said.
“No,” she said, “but you’ll understand why I got so worried when I walked by this little black boy, maybe twelve years old, and he woke up throwing a fit.”
You mean he was fussing at you?”
“No, I mean a real fit. Convulsions. He had the lockjaw, and they were keeping him sedated. I just happened to be there when he came out of sedation, and his body took him into tortuous convulsions. The next day when he died, I thought I’d killed him. But I learned later as how he wasn’t ever going to get well. Nothing I or anybody else could do for him would have saved him.”
“That’s rough,” I said.
“That boy bothered me a long, long while,” she said. “He was a big part of my nursing education.”
“You want to sit up?” I asked.
She sighed, “Okay.”
I took her arm and pulled her up, but she had a pained look.
“Maybe not,” she said. “Best lay me back down. My middle feels tight.”
I let her drop back like she was before. She sighed again and looked me over.
“Talk to me a while longer, Charl. I want to hear your voice.”
She smiled briefly. I was thinking what to talk about when the little brunette nurse came in to administer medication.
“How you feeling, Mrs. Lockwood?”
“Not so bad.”
The nurse offered me her friendly smile, saying, “This medication is going to help you feel even better. In a few minutes you’re going to feel light-headed.”
She looked at me, adding, “Thought you both’d want to know that.”
As she went out the door, I said, “Thanks very much.”
When I got back to the bed, Momma allowed as, “I can feel it working already, Charl.”
“You want to go to sleep?”
“Nah.” She waved her hand in the air. “I feel like talking a bit. You recollect when I found that scuppernong wine in Kate’s attic?”
“No, ma’am,” I said, slipping into the chair.
“Well, let me see,” she said, “When I was in the Navy, I got to come home on leave in the fall of ’44, and my sister Kate brought her little girl Sharon by to the homeplace in Coy to see me, and we remembered we had toys in the attic. I went up to look, and I found one of my dolls for Sharon. I also found a bottle of scuppernong wine, evaporated down to maybe just half a bottle. Golden like sauterne. When I showed it to Kate,” she asked me, “You think it’s any good?”
“Let’s try it,” I said. Kate was older, but she always wanted to know what I was thinking. What I’d do. In a way she was like a little sister instead of a big sister.”
She grinned about that a while, and I thought she was right about Aunt Kate.
Then she came back to the story. “So we did. And let me tell you, I never tasted anything so incredibly delicious in my whole life! Smooth, warm, burning all the way down to your gullet, and potent, too. Every swallow pure gold down your throat. Kate got positively giddy, and I had to hold Sharon as we were driving the Ford home to Opp. We almost ran into the ditch four times. I remember that like it was yesterday. Winston was flustered with Kate, let me tell you. Kate was schnockered.”
She laughed that hearty laugh, which I wanted to capture in a bottle and save for years to come. To have forever. I asked her, “Did you finish it all off?”
“Oh, yeah! We were gay as birds! I didn’t even object when Kate gave Sharon my doll. My doll, mind you! Not hers. That’s how good that scuppernong wine was. I could have given my doll to Reba or Janie. Or shoot! I could have saved it for your Claudia.”
Her brow was wrinkled with consternation.
I said, “You did what you thought best, right?”
“I did that,” she said, reaching for my hand to squeeze it. “Always tried to do that.
There’s nothing more important than your children, Charl. Nothing more important in my life than you and your sisters and brothers. Nothing! You take care of your little boy and baby girl. After everything, they’re all you got.”
She showed a warrior’s face. Fierce, she was.
“I hear you, Momma. Loud and clear.”
As I saw the warrior lose some of her indomitable resolve. I also saw that what she had was in limited supply. There’s only so much of it in this world, and I was studying it close up.
“I’m feeling that light-headed feeling,” she said, slurring the last word a little bit. “Just like that nurse said I would. She knows her stuff, doesn’t she, Charl?”
“Yes, ma’am. She knows what to do for you.”
I stood and pulled the blanket up to her chin, and in less than a minute she was asleep. I turned off the light and sat watching for a while, listening to the sounds in the hallway, thinking about things. After a while I took the elevator to the basement for a burger and coke, wolfing them down, visiting the restroom, buying a paper. And then back to Momma.
Sunday morning she woke me up with her moaning.
“You okay, Momma?”
“What?” She studied my face closely, as if she was trying to place me.
“It’s Clay,” I said. “Tell me what’s hurting.”
“This leg hurts me,” she said, patting her thigh.
“Bad?”
“Just pretty bad. Not awful bad.”
“Is that all that’s hurting?”
“I feel so bloated,” she said.
I went out to the day nurse, a sweet looking girl, who said, “I can give her something else in 45 more minutes.”
“Can’t you do it now?”
“No, sir, I can’t. But I’ll come see her first when I start on rounds. How’s that? Put her first.” offering a smile, which was all she was going to give up.
I said, “Thank you, ma’am. I appreciate any help you can give her.”
When I got back, Momma’s eyes were closed, and she was still. I walked over close to see how she was, but I couldn’t tell if she was even breathing. For a moment I was afraid of the worst. I touched her hand, and her eyes popped open.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey, yourself.”
“How’s your leg?”
“Not so bad now. It was worse that first night.”
“Huh?”
“When I broke this leg,” she said, “back in 1978, I was carrying a little rug stepping down, coming out of the van, and I hit an uneven place in the pavement and fell, breaking my leg in three places. You were in grade school, I believe, Charl.”
“I remember that,” I said. “Did it hurt you bad right away?”
“Well, now let me see,” she said. “No. It didn’t hurt at all, but I could feel pieces of bone scraping together. Didn’t even hurt when they put me in the cast. But the doctor told me, ‘It’s going to hurt plenty tonight.’ He gave me percodan, saying, ‘You can take half of one every two hours, as needed.’”
“Did that work?”
“Hell, no, it didn’t work!” she laughed bitterly. “He was right about the hurting. I took nine percodans that night, and nothing even touched the pain. I sweated through my nightgown and took it off. Put on another one and sweated through it, too, suffering through that entire, dark, hellacious night.”
“You want me to go talk to the nurse again? There’s about 45 more minutes before your next pain med.”
“Nah. I can make it that long. I’ll be all right. You can do anything if you put your mind to it. I’m just going to grin and bear it. You’ll be with me the whole time, won’t you?”
“Yes, m,” I said, but I wasn’t so sure. It might be Reba. She said she’d be back tomorrow sometime.”
“Your sister’s a good un, Charl. I was a nurse, and I know good nursing when I see it.” She thought about that a while and then said, “Never thought she’d be nursing me though.”
She lay quiet a while. Then she lurched a bit as if she’d forgotten I was there and had just discovered I was nearby. Out of the blue, she said, “I crawled up our hill with this leg.”
“When was that?”
“I was still wearing the cast, but I went down the hill to the garden without my crutches. Didn’t like them much. They hurt my armpits, and I was always hard headed, you know?” she grinned. “Well, I miss stepped and rolled my good ankle on a rock I didn’t see and fell at the garden gate. Everybody was home, but you were all up at the house or doing chores at the barn. I yelled my head off, but all I got was hoarse. So I started crawling up to the house.”
“That’s over a hundred yards,” I noted.
“Yup. That’s about right. I figured I’d crawl a while. Then stop and holler some more. Then crawl a while. I probably wouldn’t have to go very far. At least, that’s what I figured.”
“So who rescued you?”
“Nobody,” she said. “I crawled right up into the car port, and Sam found me lying on the patio when he came home. I was too hoarse to yell any more.”
“Damn!” I said.
“That’s what Sam said,” she told me. “Your Daddy carried me into our bedroom and stripped me out of my dirty clothes, wrapping me in clean towels. Then he brought me a double bourbon, and I slept like a baby in swaddling clothes. I had to get a new cast, and that didn’t go so good. But it wasn’t as bad as that first night. Damn percodan wasn’t worth a tinker. The doctor ended up giving me something else that took the edge off. Can’t remember what it’s called. And you didn’t sleep a wink, you poor dear.”
“Why wouldn’t I sleep?”
I saw the cogs turning and turning as she eventually acknowledged I was son, not husband. She confessed, “For a minute there I thought you were Sam.”
“No. It’s just me, Momma.”
I sat and put my hand on hers. “I wish I had found you at the garden gate,” I said.
Closing her eyes, she smiled. Later, I gave her water, and she said, “You want some of this, Charl?”
“No, Momma. It’s for you.”
When she slept, and I did, too, until the morning when Reba came bustling in with a new nurse.
“Momma. Clay,” she said. “This is my friend, Betty. We were in grade school together.”
Reba was her old self, happy, energetic, confident. Betty was a chunky little blonde who hadn’t aged as well as Reba. Reba came right up to the bed, asking, “How you feeling, Momma?”
“Some better.”
But she didn’t sound like it.
Betty moved to the bedside. “Mrs. Lockwood, I need to take your temperature and pulse.”
While that was going on, Reba and I moved over to the window, talking quietly.
“Thanks, Clay,” she said, hugging me. “I had to get some rest.”
“No problem.”
“How’s she been?”
“Okay. She’s been telling me stories from Mobile and when she was in the Navy.”
“Did she talk about when she broke her leg?”
“Yeah. She did.”
“She told me about that, too. Twice.”
“Is her leg the main problem?”
“No. The real question is her swelling. What’s causing her to retain so much fluid. That’s why we’re doing the blood tests.”
“What do you think it is?”
“Could be a lot of things. Some pretty serious. We got more lab work that’s supposed to be ready soon. Maybe by Wednesday.”
“She seems happy enough,” I said. “At least, when she’s not hurting.”
“Even when she’s hurting, she’s a trooper.”
“She is that,” I said, relieved Reba was back. I needed to get on back to Johnson City.
“Can you be back here Wednesday?” Reba asked. “I want to talk with you and anybody else who can get here about how she’s doing.”
“If I need to be, I’ll be here.”
“You do,” she said. “I’m calling the others, too. Later. After I’ve visited with Momma a while. I need to do that.”
“Want me to call them?”
“No. I better do it.” She pulled me close again. “Thanks for getting here so fast Thursday.”
“Momma would have done the same for me. For any one of us.”
Reba stared at me, chin quivering, but she got hold of herself after a second or two, nodding and looking out the window.
At her bed I said, “I love you, Momma, and I’ll see you again in a couple of days.”
I leaned down to kiss her, and she grabbed my hand, and gave it a squeeze. “You don’t have to come back, Charl. I don’t want to burden you. Go home. I’m all right. I can handle things.”
Then the cogs were turning, turning, turning, and she had an expression blended with so much sorrow and tenderness, I choked up so much I couldn’t have said anything else if I’d tried. I got down on eye level with her, and she smiled that old, warm smile, familiar since my youth. When I was real little and ever since.
She knew exactly when to tell me, “I have always loved you, Claypot.”
The trip back home to Johnson City went quickly because I was running back through everything. Her stories. How she looked. Her diminishing energy. Her laughter. I loved that the best.
Tuesday at 5:15 A.M. Reba called and told me, “Momma died a few minutes ago. I want you to know at the last I got into bed with her, holding her, whispering, ‘We all love you, Momma.’ I thought we all wanted to tell her that.”
I couldn’t say anything, and for a while it was a phone call with two people just listening to breathing on the other end.
The funeral was going to be Friday, and I had to tell Marion and the kids, but I was wondering, How in the world do I do that? And remembering a lot of times with Momma. Times when I was little. Times when I was able to please her like I had a couple of years before she went into the retirement home.
Marion and I had brought Phillip to see his grandparents, and Dad had taken Marion and Phillip out to the barn to see the piglets. Momma said her lawn mower wasn’t pulling the way she thought it should.
She glowed a bit when she suggested, “Let’s take a look at it together, Charl.”
I discovered a shear pin had disintegrated, and I took the thing apart for her.
“I’ll just sit here in the shade and supervise,” she said, fanning herself with her garden hat, the floppy straw hat she always wore outside.
Using a screw driver, I sawed off a portion, replacing the drive pin with a piece I made. Then I put it all back together again. She handed me any tool I needed, but didn’t say much. Re-assembled, the drive worked fine, and we were in business, cutting grass again.
When I finally got it running and shut it off, she was amazed, her face beaming at this minor mechanical miracle. She put her hat back on, clapping a hand on my shoulder.
“How’d you learn to do that, Claypot?”
“You taught me, Momma. You’re the one.”
Born in North Carolina, Danny Thomas grew up in Tennessee, went to college in Alabama, and taught high school English before graduate school at the University of North Carolina where he earned a Doctorate. After 35 years in Human Resources he retired in 2006, then started writing. Find him on his website, or tweet him @DannyThomasAuth.
