Cricket

Ah, Friday. It was the end of a particularly rough week, and I’d made plans to venture outside of the OC for the day to have lunch with a couple of friends and help out in Family Advocacy. I was pretty excited to just step back and take it easy; I’d been feeling slightly burnt out as of late.

As much as I absolutely love my work and my life here, at nine months in I’d be lying if I said that all of it doesn’t catch up with me once in a while. Just the Tuesday before, I’d come home from an exceptionally tiring day and gone straight to bed at 7:30 without saying so much as a “hello” to any of my housemates. Needless to say, in a family of eleven, if one goes to bed before double-digits it really isn’t fair to ask for or to expect silence. Therefore, I stumbled out of my room with my comforter a half-hour later, snuck through a seldom-used back door while the rest of the crew was otherwise occupied in the kitchen, and crawled into my van to rack up some REM points. This started out as a pretty sweet idea until somebody discovered my absence a couple of hours later and the entire house organized itself into a frantic search party, thinking that I’d snapped and embarked on some manic tear through the Appalachian hills as a result of my less-than-stellar day. I awoke in the front seat of my Chevy Uplander to the sound of my name being bellowed by the Jackson House men and echoing all around our hollow. Bless their hearts, but I wound up not quite getting the night’s rest that I so desperately needed.

So, when a housemate held our phone out to me on Friday morning and said that it was Earl’s daughter calling, I couldn’t help cringing. She’d told me the day before that her dad had been flown to Lexington from Kentucky River Hospital, and I’d asked her to keep me posted. Wish granted.

I softened when I heard tears in her voice. “They’re doing surgery,” she said. “My whole family is there and they want me to come. Can you drive me?” I sighed internally as I glanced at the kitchen clock and let thoughts of my low-key Friday vanish. “Give me a couple of hours, okay?”

We drove the two hours from Vincent to Lexington in time to meet the rest of the family after Earl had come out of the operating room. We waited inside a small room for a report from the front lines. Sarah was there, as were another one of her daughters and Earl’s two brothers from Indiana. Earl and Sarah’s two sons and their wives were in town, also, but were out grabbing lunch. I tried to gauge from the mood of the present company how gingerly I should tread.

“So are you one of them liberals from New York?” the smaller brother asked me, his eyes small and hard.

“Actually, I’m part of the red minority in that state,” I answered slowly.

Well, from that point on, we were all the best of friends.

A nurse entered the room and gave us an update. It turns out that the burning Earl had been experiencing for the past few weeks was a two foot-long blood clot in his right leg. Had he not suggested that as a possibility to the doctor in Breathitt County, we’d have been gathered for a very different and much more upsetting circumstance.

I spent the entire day with the whole family waiting for Earl to be wheeled to his recovery room in the ICU. They’re a mixed bag, to be sure, and they certainly made their presence known in the sixth floor’s main waiting area. Earl’s two brothers are complete opposites: Andy is a slight fellow, with his hair neatly parted on the left and a bright green and purple polo shirt tucked into his blue jeans; Ricky’s gray hair was parted straight down the middle, and overalls covered his substantially larger gut. The two sons present were big, beefy men – one is a mechanic, while the other followed in his father’s footsteps to become a truck-driver. The women all remained quiet, dozing on and off throughout the afternoon. Not the men, however.

“Check out how her second toe is bigger’n all the rest of ‘em,” one son whispered theatrically to Andy.
“She’s like a monkey,” Andy concurred.
“Where’s she from again?” another brother asked Laura on the other side of the room.
“New York,” Ricky interrupted.
“Well, how in the hell did she wind up here?”
“Not enough Republicans up there for her.”
“Well, she’s no fool.”
“We should call her Cricket. Sorta sounds like Bridget. And she’s tiny. Like a cricket.”
“Way she snorts, though, makes her sound like a barnyard.”
“You know the way to tell a woman’s from ‘roud here? Barefoot and pregnant.”
“Well, she’s already practically barefoot.”
“Didn’t she date that Jimmy boy a while back?”
Here I interjected. “I did NOT date Jimmy. We got pizza once.”
“Well, we might have her pregnant by May, after all!”

After a while, the brothers took one of Earl’s sons and set out in search of food, weary from an afternoon of merciless teasing. The rest of us continued our vigil. Finally, at long last, a nurse came in to us and said that our guy was able to start receiving visitors two at a time. I smiled at his son and daughters, but Sarah took my hand. “Come on, baby,” she said, standing up stiffly. “Let’s go see Dad.” I hesitated and looked at their kids, but they nodded eagerly, so I walked arm-in-arm with Laura past the nurses’ station and into Earl’s room.

The chaos of the hospital bullpen dissolved in the peace of Earl’s dimly-lit room, and I felt the usual calm associated with this man fill me up. He looked exhausted but comfortable in the hospital bed’s clean sheets, his long white hair swept back across his pillow. His eyes met mine and his eyebrows shot up in pleasant surprise. I felt my eyes prickle with tears as I asked, “How're ya feelin’, Earl?” Flint struck steel somewhere deep in his eyes and that old wry grin flitted faintly across his lips. “Mostly with my fingers.”

The Country Poet

“I’m not sure I’m the girl you’re looking for,” I said doubtfully.

Hannah shook her head. “He’s not trying to court you. He just needs a friend. He can’t talk to nobody in this town.”

I wasn’t convinced. It’s not that I didn’t trust Sam; I did. I just wasn’t confident that my involvement in this particular piece of family drama would yield positive results. He was having trouble with his woman – actually, with two of his women. His ex-wife was giving him grief over custody of their two kids, and his current long-term girlfriend had stolen from the family and used the money to buy drugs. And although Hannah was simply worried about her eldest son, I couldn’t help but feel like I would walk into my office on the morning after our conversation to a very angry dope head and a twelve-gauge.

“Just take down his number,” Hannah pleaded. “He saw you in town the other day and said to me, ‘Mama, I just feel like I can trust her.’”

Against my better judgment, I added Sam’s number to my contacts list. I kept it there for a week or so and contemplated what my best move would be.

As much as my common sense was telling me to lose the number and forget about it, I couldn’t. Sure, my job title is “Elderly Caseworker” and I have absolutely no professional or personal background to help a fellow through a situation like this one. But this was family. Just a few weeks ago I’d gone to their reunion and shared stories, laughs, and wonderful food with the whole lot of them. Heck, I’d even gotten up in front of a hundred strangers and belted out “Amazing Grace” with banjo and steel guitar accompaniment. In short, there was an established bond there, and it counted for way more than common sense. And so I decided to call Sam.

Truth be told, I was as curious as I was concerned. Sam is your quintessential stone-faced, strong and silent farmer. Tall and gaunt, his face is a constant ashen color, his cheeks and eyes sunken in and partially hidden under a baseball cap pulled down low. He seldom smiles and never laughs. And while he’s always regarded me with kindness, I’d never had a conversation with him that extended past “Hey, how are ya?” Frankly, I could count on two hands the number of words I’d actually heard out of his mouth. Needless to say, I was intrigued to find out what it was that he believed he could share with me.

I waited one night until the Jackson House had wrapped up dinner and walked outside onto our porch with my cell phone. I found his name and hit Send, a strange butterfly fluttering in my stomach. Sam’s voice ended the ringing on the line and I told him who was calling. “Hiya, Sam. It’s Bridget. Your mom gave me your number.”

He sounded a little awkward on the other end, though not at all surprised. We exchanged pleasantries for a few moments, but it quickly became apparent to the two of us that if we’d never spoken this way when spending hours in each other’s company, then we certainly weren’t going to start on the phone this night. So we jumped right into it.

Sam told me about the two women he’d loved – how he’d given everything he could to them and how he’d been taken advantage of when they both turned to drugs. He told how his first wife had tried to use his kids to hurt him, and how his current girlfriend had proven to be a pathological liar.

“Bridget, I know that I’m capable of loving so much,” he said, his voice rising with emotion. “I just want to find a woman who’s going to love me as much as I love her.”

I’m glad that we were having this conversation via phone because, for the half hour that Sam poured out his soul to me, my mouth hung open. I’d had no idea that underneath that gray, non-descript exterior beat a heart so full of warmth and passion. I remained silent for a long time and let Sam get everything off of his chest. He talked about being lonely, and how at thirty-nine he believed that it was too late to start over. He said that he felt trapped in this place due to the custody battle involving his kids, and knew that his options (so to speak) were limited here. He insisted that he really loved his current girlfriend despite – and really perhaps because of – all of her problems. He was eloquent in his sincerity, his speech almost lyrical in its beautiful honesty. Sam became a country poet to me that night, tragic and sad and much wiser than I.

Sam and his girlfriend are still together; he took her back, much to his family’s chagrin. He’s helping her to work through all of her issues with the patient stoicism and loyalty of a saint, and he continues to work constantly to support her and his children. Sam and I have since resumed our smile-and-nod friendship. There’s a certain understanding in our eye contact now, though. Our “Hey, how are ya?” is like a secret code for “Hang in there. Sometimes love is tough. But it’s always worth it.”