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Chapter
50
Blood Moon
Owen Murphy thought he heard a gourd
banjo playing somewhere. From the bed, he could see his fiddle
and bow propped up on the bureau where he had asked Alexander
to place them in view. That view was getting mighty limited
now, and not likely to improve, except by varying light shining
on his deathbed.
Now, evening moonlight, today sunlight,
last night starlight, all came in through the window of the
upstairs room.
Outside, the arc of the full moon,
swinging upward and westward from low in the northeastern
evening sky, began colliding with the shadow of the earth.
The minutes ticked away. The sun’s reflected light began waning
toward full eclipse from east to west. The darkened part of
the moon, in time, turned a thin, watery blood red.
The fiddle kept reminding Owen of
people he’d met and liked in his life. The faces appeared
in his memory as if out of the fiddle, and he would recall
time and place, thereabouts anyhow. A few of those friends
and family seemed to be coming in to his room and standing
by the bed every so often. Sometimes, he would hear threads
of old fiddle tunes, and hymns playing. He saw his fingers
working the strings from beyond his bow, beyond the bridge.
The room was very dim. The light of
the moon almost overpowered the small bedside lamp. He tried
to blink his eyes. His vision seemed clouded. I’m going blind,
he thought, I’m a white stick walking. Not walking, not anymore.
Owen turned his face to the glass,
and felt the tears run from his eyes down to the white linen
of the old pillowcase Teresa insisted he have. His wife Ellen
had used that pillowcase at the end, Teresa reminded him.
That was 18 years ago. Ellen died in this very room, in this
very bed. Owen missed her. He closed his eyes from the early
moonlight outside. He tried to imagine Ellen coming to greet
him. Would she be young? Or, would she look wrinkled like
me today, he wondered.
A pressure on the bed revealed itself
in Rosie, his granddaughter. She touched his cheek. Her hand
felt like the hand of an angel.
“Grandpa,” she said in her matter
of fact voice, “today we went on a field trip to the Mississippi
River. We saw swans running on the ice and flying
away south.”
Owen tried to speak. He could not.
He imagined the magnificent tundra swans flapping their long
white wings as they ran across backwater ice in twos and threes,
launching themselves in low, flat trajectories, then gathering
with a few companions, climbing the ridges of air near the
northeastern Iowa
bluffs. White, very white against black bluffs in the shadow
of a November evening.
“Grandpa,” said Rosie again, “we saw
pelicans, too, their wingbeats are slower, and black underneath.”
Owen reached for the child’s hand
with his bony fingers. His lips could no longer make the shape
of a kiss. His hand shook. Rosie touched his brow and kissed
his cheek.
“Rose,” said her father nearby. “Your
grandpa is tired, honey. Let him rest.” Alexander looked tired
himself. The hospice nurse had been there mid-afternoon to
see how Owen was doing. When the old farmer had retreated
just after harvest from his chair downstairs to his bed for
the last time, she’d brought morphine and showed Alexander
how to use it.
Rose stretched out beside the old
man and lay very still, careful not to press against his frail
frame covered by the old quilt. Grandma Teresa, Owen’s 93
year-old mother sat in the wooden chair by the bureau. Her
hands were folded in her lap. She seemed to be praying or
drowsing. Michael, Rose’s brother, age 11, leaned against
the doorway looking down at his feet. Delbert Crawford, Owen’s
friend from childhood and lifelong neighbor had come and gone
just after supper.
Alexander had never seen Delbert cry.
He had taken Owen’s hand in both of his powerful farmer's
hands, and said, “Take care, Owen. Thank you, my friend.”
Then he left the room, descended the stairs, and walked out
into the cold night. Owen himself had not cried until then.
Father Norbert Marquette arrived earlier
that afternoon for the sacrament of the sick, supreme unction,
the last anointing of Owen Murphy. When the family left the
room, Father Norbert leaned his close to Owen's dry lips for
the last confession. Then with the family around the bed,
he touched the holy oil to the old man, and placed a small
crumb of the host soaked in the wine upon his tongue while
reciting the words of peace. The family prayed together with
the priest, echoing his thanks for the life of Owen David
Murphy, for the resurrection, and for the life everlasting.
With an intoning of the Holy Trinity, and the amen, the priest
went out.
Rosie began singing in her high, best
children's choir voice, "Bright morning stars are rising."
The family joined in, "Bright morning stars are rising,
bright morning stars are rising. Day is a-breakin in
my soul." When Alexander heard a harmony note, he turned
to the door where Laura was standing, singing along in an
alto voice he was hearing sing for the first time.
Not long after Delbert left the house,
Alexander went downstairs to the kitchen where Laura was washing
and drying the supper dishes. She wrapped him in an embrace.
"I'm sorry," she said. "You
will miss him so much."
"I will. We've lived and worked
together almost all my life. He's never lived anywhere but
in this house, on this farm. It makes me very sad to see the
land he loved, the farming of it anyway, killing him today
for trying to earn of living." Alexander was weeping.
"He didn't know, hon', very few
people knew that those pesticides would be killing the farmers
who used them twenty and thirty years later," Laura said.
"We knew. How could we not know?
We could see the results, couldn't we?" he asked emphatically.
Alexander pulled away from her and
walked outside to look up at the now faint, bloody water moon
still rising in the east. Except for the faintest white arc
along its southern edge, the eclipse was complete. The air
felt crisp, clear as crystal water. Bright stars closed in
on the darkened moon.
Laura took Alexander's arm. "We'll
have a child," she said. "Boy or girl, we'll name
it Owen. He would like that." Alex leaned into her where
they stood watching.
When the moon was full again at 11
p.m., Owen Murphy simply stopped breathing. Fifteen minutes
before, he had opened his eyes wide and looked at his family.
They held him close.
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Next...
Chapter 51.
Thanks
for these resources:
NCI Fact Sheet:
Agricultural Health Study, National Cancer Institute,
May 2, 2003
Cancer
Mortality Maps & Graph Web Site, National Cancer Institute
Hospice
Net – For patients and families facing life-threatening
illnesses
National Hospice & Palliative
Care Organization (NHPCO)
Is
the Decline of the Increasing Incidence of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma
in Sweden and Other Countries a Result of Cancer Preventive
Measures? Lennart Hardell, Department of Oncology, University
Hospital, and Department of Natural Sciences, Örebro
University, Örebro, Sweden; Mikael Eriksson, Department
of Oncology, University Hospital, Lund, Sweden
John
Hartford – Renowned songwriter and old-time fiddler and
riverboat pilot who died in 2001 after a 21-year struggle
with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
David
G. Hyatt - Banjo Enthusiast and Maker of Gourd Banjos.
Also, "Gourd Banjos: From Africa To The Appalachians"
by George R. Gibson
Clean Water
Authority Restoration Act (CWARA) of 2003, RiverKeeper
Testimony
of Senator Russell D. Feingold, before the Subcommittee
on Fisheries, Wildlife and Water of the Senate Committee on
Environment and Public Works; Oversight Hearing on the regulatory
and legal status of Federal jurisdiction of navigable waters
under the Clean Water Act. June
10, 2003
World
Water Monitoring Day, October
18, 2003
Smithfield
Foods Employees Test Water Samples as Part of World Water
Monitoring Day Observance, News Release,
U.S.
Newswire, October
20, 2003
Changes
to Clean Water Act Could Spell Disaster for Wetlands,
Ducks Unlimited, November 10, 2003
The
Upper Basin Chronicles,
Chapter 50 was written and edited by John Gabbert.
Upper
Mississippi Basin Stakeholder Network
and the Upper
Basin
Chronicles © 2003 Saint Mary's University
of Minnesota.
Your
comments are invaluable. Please email feedback to The
Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 50.
The
characters presented here are purely fictional, and neither
bear resemblance to persons living or dead, nor represent
the views or opinions of Saint Mary's University
of Minnesota.
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