MAJOR GRAY
The street was dusky pink in the light of the setting sun. Katie was out on the porch as usual.
She didn't marry until she was twenty-nine. “I almost didn't marry,” was what she said.
And when she did marry it was to an older man with a son by another marriage. It was a favorite story, and I had heard it more than once, but I never minded hearing it again.
Katie had been dating an officer who was married, but she didn't know it, because he was out on assignment with the Army Corps of Engineers, and he’d left his wife back in Kansas. He took Katie to a party at the officer’s club. Bill Gray sat on her other side, and they liked each other right off. Bill was the senior officer.
But that night Katie found out the other man was married, and the next day she asked Doctor Bunkley what to do. He said “Quit seeing that man,” and although she hated to give up those parties at the Officer's Club, she took his advice. Bill heard about it and liked her for it. He called her up and asked her to go to the next party with him. So there she was, with the senior officer!
She came to the door that night the way she always did, all prettied up and blind as a bat because she was too vain to wear her glasses. Bill said, “Katie, go back in there and get your glasses on so you can see.” She took his advice, too.
All the men at the party decided they'd get the Captain drunk, but Bill could hold his liquor and he drank them all under the table. Not long after that Bill and Katie got married.
They were the happiest couple in the world, the way Katie told it. They lived in Del Rio for three years, and they used to go across the border every weekend to haunt the bordertown bars. They used to go to Mrs. Crosby's for margaritas and to a place called Umberto's where they ate fried quail and drank Mexican beer. Or else they'd go to a Chinese restaurant, which Katie insisted was actually very good, or else they'd get cabrito, barbequed goat, which I had never had. Katie swore by it.
But then in the war Bill went to India, and when he got back four years later, his health was ruined. Still they had a good time making mint juleps in that same little house in Austin until Bill started getting tunnel vision. He had a brain tumor, and they couldn't save him, even when they operated three times. It killed him by degrees, over a six-month period. Then the rose of sunny memories would fade, and the cool black horizon of her later years would face her.
Katie pored over and over how her husband had wasted away and how Larry came to visit him from school and was so shocked to see how thin his father was. A boy who’d been shot was in the same hospital room, and a crowd of religious people came and stood around him. They prayed mightily until he rallied, and he was completely cured.
An old black man with a bad back helped Bill get to the bathroom across the hall. Then Bill lay in a coma for a month while Katie lived in a little room in Houston near the hospital. She still hated the city, and for the first time I saw bitterness pass by like the acrid smell that Katie described, the smile gone from her lips, her shrewd old eyes screwed up as she paused far off in her recollection.
A preacher came back, the same man who'd led the prayers for the boy, and after all those other chaplains had prayed about sins and restoration of health, this preacher said, “I didn't know Major Gray was so bad.” And when he prayed, all he said was, "Lord, release this man from his suffering," and within three hours Bill was dead.
Katie went back outside and sat down under a tree on a bench. A mockingbird
perched up above her head and sang his little heart out as only a mockingbord
can, with those sweet full notes. He sang until Katie heard him and remembered
how her mamma and her daddy had a pair of mockingbirds that lived and
nested in their yard for years. Katie said she thought the bird must
have sensed her sorrow.
I said I thought maybe it could. I looked at Tulip. "Animals understand a lot," I said. "They know when you're sad."
Tulip was looking at me, listening, and now she turned gravely to Katie.
Katie said "Yessir, they know about sorrow. Mockingbirds mate for life, and you can't tell me they don't feel sorrow. He was singing to cheer me up, and he stayed there a good long while after I noticed him."
Then she saw Tulip watching and listening, and she said "Oh you sweet baby, you understand everything I say, don' t you?"
I said “I think she does understand everything we say."
And Tulip hopped up, huffing and wagging her tail.
“She knows,” Katy cooed in baby talk and put her face down close to Tulip’s. "She knows what we sayin’. She knows we's talkin about her. I love you Tulip. You know Katie loves you." Next
