A country woman, of our ilk, taken aback to find herself in such a grand house, surprisingly tall, taller than he’d dreamed her up earlier.
She approached timidly, head down, as if afraid she might say something that would, at this fraught moment, harm or confuse him.
Will you excuse us? she said.
I withdrew.
Withdrew from the orb of his thoughts.
She knelt beside the bed with some difficulty, arthritic from all those years of farm- and housework.
What song is this? she said and hummed a little tune.
“Bluebird Lane,” said my charge.
Remember that table in your room? she said.
You painted it red, he said.
With gold trim, she said.
I’m dying, he said.
Oh, my boy, she said.
Then she spoke to him so softly I couldn’t hear.
But he was, it seemed, comforted.
I edged back into the orb of his thoughts and confirmed it.
Yes.
All was well, he felt. He was off the hook. His mother’d just said as much.
There’d been some sort of misunderstanding here lately, he felt her to have said. Lots of mean talk and allegations and strange idiots showing up at the last minute. But he’d done nothing wrong. On the contrary, he’d always been a good boy, who’d become a good man, and had gone out and done all sorts of interesting things that she and her people, and his father and his people, being poor folks, had never had a chance to do. That made a mother proud. Yes, it did.
So, no: he’d done nothing wrong.
At all.
On the contrary.
He should go on now, to glory.
Are you in glory? he asked.
She smiled uncertainly, got slowly to her feet.
Someday, she said. Maybe. But one such as you? Should just go right on ahead.
He began truly dying.
His mind was no longer accessible to me; he was no longer thinking, not in the conventional sense, had begun the transition, was merging with all-that-is, leaving the husk of himself behind, becoming something both more and less than he had ever been before.
His wife, sensing what was happening, rose.
Their daughter rose too.
