His Last Nine Words

By W. A. Smith

A collection of interconnected stories concerned with the loyalty, love and desire that bind families together and the emotional and spiritual forces that may rip them apart. Fathers yearn for deeper connection with their sons; sons chafe under their fathers' control and wonder about their own lives. From aged patriarchs to distant dads to a Vietnam vet who fears he cannot have children to a five-year-old boy and the Hollywood grandfather he has never met, these are very real characters and stories that capture the small, epiphanic moments of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: W. A. Smith
• Release date: Apr 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301803934

W. A. Smith

William Atmar Smith was born in Charleston, South Carolina, attended schools in Charleston, and graduated from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He received his M.A. from San Francisco State University. His stories have appeared in a variety of literary venues including Aura, Berkeley Fiction Review, Cimarron Review, Crucible, Five Fingers Review, New England Review, and Algonquin Books’ New Stories From the South, The Year’s Best, edited by Shannon Ravenel. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and their four children.

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Praise for His Last Nine Words:

Here are ... compassionate stories about decent people attempting to live decent lives. Bill Smith's characters are strong and touching and very real. They will live with you a long time.

— Molly Giles, author of Rough Translations, Creek Walk and Other Stories and Iron Shoes

"...the brief Delivery is a story ... of outstanding distinction. Its cryptic title - not the simple indicative clue you might think - leads readers into a fresh image of a fine doctor. For depth of feeling and quiet moral dignity, it reminded me at once of The Doctor Stories by the poet-physician William Carlos Williams."

— Edmund Fuller, The Wall Street Journal

His Last Nine Words

Stories

W. A. SMITH

.

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2007 W.A. Smith

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

Table of Contents

DELIVERY

THE WAY HOME

A KIND OF MEMORY

LUNCH WITH THE INDIANS

BACKGROUND

THE BIRDBATH

FACTS OF LIFE

RAIN

HIS LAST NINE WORDS

CROW'S FEET

REMEMBER THAT ROAD?

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Author Photo: Suzy S. Smith

William Atmar Smith was born in Charleston, South Carolina, attended schools in Charleston, and graduated from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He received his M.A. from San Francisco State University. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and their four children.

Also by W. A. Smith

A HISTORY OF THE WORLD

SONS OF THEIR FATHERS

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the following publications in which these stories originally appeared:

Aura: "A Kind of Memory"

Berkeley Fiction Review: His Last Nine Words

Cimarron Review: "Rain"

Crucible: Crow's Feet

Five Fingers Review: The Way Home and Background

New England Review: The Birdbath

Outerbridge: Lunch With the Indians

The Short Story Review: Delivery and Remember That Road

Delivery was chosen for inclusion in Algonquin Books' first annual New Stories From the South, The Year's Best, selected and edited by Shannon Ravenel.

For my family

DELIVERY

Emerson Johnson joined up soon after FDR finished his Day of Infamy declaration to Congress. Emerson was twenty-five, putting the final touches on his internship. He and Grace had not yet celebrated their first anniversary when he left. But Grace said later they both knew he would be coming back.

So much we hadn't done, she explained.

When the Japanese surprised most of the hemisphere that Sunday in December, Grace was watching a football game with friends. Emerson loved to play, throwing and catching equally well, but he couldn't be there. He was assisting his father in a delivery, which, as it turned out, was not one of the uncomplicated ones we're used to hearing about. Emerson's father, Charley, received a phone call from a man who said he was not the husband, just a good friend. The man was nervous. He spoke in a whisper that sounded like cold wind blowing through pine, telling Emerson's father the woman was in awful pain, the baby was coming any minute. She could die, the man said. Emerson and his father grabbed their black bags and drove to a tenement house on Spring Street.

The woman was lying on a pale cloth mat in the front room. The man was bent over her. There was a sofa, a little wooden table, and two straight-backed chairs. The man's huge hands clenched and opened in dull, broken movements; his eyes stared down at her as if she were at the bottom of a canyon. Emerson's father whispered, If he's not the husband, there isn't one.

The man told them she had slipped down a flight of stairs two days before. Should've been there to catch her, he mumbled. The elder doctor looked at his son and said they must get her to the hospital quickly, this was not going to be so easy. Emerson bent down to her, running his fingers through her damp hair, telling her to relax as much as she could. Have you chosen a name? he asked.

Each breath was a moan, but she never cried out. Her eyes were open, tracing the comfortable, imperfect line that joined the wall and ceiling. In a clear disciplined voice she said, Been tryin' to have a baby, seems all my life. Figures I'd stop thinking 'bout it so much and then it'd happen.

She closed her eyes. Some doctor told me I couldn't have one, turning her face toward the three men. Said I weren't fertile. She looked at Emerson who still had his fingers moving through her hair. What you say now? she asked.

Emerson's father shook his head, pressing his hand against the woman's bloated abdomen. The baby wanted to come in an unorthodox position, its head was wrong.

I didn't know she was like this, said the man, hands still working the dark air near his pockets. Not 'til a couple weeks ago. Been out of town. He lifted his eyes from the woman and glanced confidentially at the two doctors. He carried his own hoarse whisper like a cross, sounding as if he wanted to offer his life story right then. Complete surprise, he said and fell silent.

At Roper Hospital they did a cesarean, attempting to free the child, but he was stillborn. The woman was too weak to withstand the sight of her lost son; she was fifty-two and undernourished. She died on the table with Emerson's left hand on her porcelain forehead. The man who was not her husband had already left the hospital when the two doctors emerged from the delivery room. Their hands dangled uselessly at their sides.

.

Shortly afterward Emerson left for basic training. In two months he was overseas. There was never any question about going. He promised Grace he would be back. Honor and luck will triumph, he said, smiling, then grave: You and I have so much more to do. He told her he loved her as life's twin. Emerson expected to be a poet in those days.

He was a doctor in his twenties with the marksman's dream painted on his thin helmet. Three and a half years, cutting and tying off, speaking calmly as he'd been taught. I'm learning this new surgery on my knees, he wrote...bending over the faces' face, needing more hands and tools, more light.

In Belgium, quite by accident, he ran into an old friend from Charleston. He and Cambridge Walker had known each other since before they were born, and Emerson thought the chance reunion was some sort of miracle. They spent an afternoon together. We were meant to see each other over here, he wrote to Grace. Each of us was to know the other was surviving.

Emerson and Cambridge had their picture taken standing in a field under the only tree in sight. The light behind them clings like ice to the branches. The expression on their faces makes it seem for the moment there is no war near that place; they might be on a weekend camping trip. Their friendship retouches the photograph. They have their arms around each other's shoulders, relaxed, and Emerson is wearing the vest Grace sent to keep him warm. Bridge looks as though he has a good joke to tell, soon as the shutter clicks.

He wrote poetry in every country and sent them home to her. From Morocco:

Africa, hot bed of maddened men you are

Life-line now of bloodcrazed fools

Who would your God-given beauty mar

With grotesque, man-made tools;

I hold no love for you

But will not beg release

Until your blood-washed sands I've crossed—

My stepping-stones to peace.

Twenty-four years later, Emerson's father, Big Charley, bought a mahogany box with brass handles on the sides and a drawer beneath. He said it looked to him like a music box that could play a symphony. He polished it. Emerson's mother lined it with material from a pair of Army cavalry pants Big Charley had worn in 1917, during The Great War. In the box they arranged the medals awarded to their son for his part in World War II, The second one to end 'em all, as Emerson's mother put it.

When the lid of the box was raised, three black cases with gold lettering announced the Silver Star and the two Bronze Stars. Inside the bottom drawer two Purple Hearts and a rainbow of campaign ribbons lay pinned to the olive lining, glistening as if sunlit.

Emerson's parents presented the gift to him on his forty-ninth birthday. When he unwrapped the box and glimpsed its contents he was overcome for a moment, as if he were standing again in some flame-hardened field on the other side of the world. This was the first time Emerson's son, Charley, understood that if he watched closely enough he could see his father's memory working, flashing recorded light there in his dark brown eyes.

Charley once happened upon his mother as she stood in the den, her back to the door, looking down at the mahogany box. Grace ran her hand lightly across the top of it. Charley could tell his mother thought she was alone in the room. She whispered to herself with sad affection. Above and beyond the call of duty, she said.

The boy looked in the box and smelled the ancient green of his grandfather's cavalry pants. He saw the Purple Hearts, George Washington's cameo face, and he thought of the horseshoe-shaped scar on his father's skull.

When Emerson was still bald from the operation, he traced the scar with an index finger and told his son a good friend, and great surgeon, had sewn that horseshoe for luck.

Frank went in there to take a look, he said. Nothing but some scar tissue. Emerson patted his shiny head and pulled on the purple fright wig friends had given him as a joke. He screwed up his face and rolled his eyes at Charley, making the boy laugh. Now, he said in a clown's bitten voice, we wait and see. Any way you look at it, Son, I'm better off than I was.

In Czechoslovakia, 1944, a sniper's bullet found the right side of Emerson's head as he was searching for a pulse along the neck of a young corporal. The blast threw both men into a foxhole. The corporal survived, and Emerson went on to write a handful of poems during his convalescence. One or two years later a certain numbness began to come and go on his left side, in the leg and hand. It drifted in and out. Emerson conjectured there