Brian Gifford

So Long as They Both Shall Live

Rita might have left Paul if she’d ever had a job, and she would have taken a job if they’d not had children, but they had six, the first just a few months after their wedding. Johnnie was their youngest. He had a beautiful voice, and he should have gone to college for training in vocal music, but he didn’t because they couldn’t afford it, and Rita blamed Paul for drinking away Johnnie’s college money.

When he was eighteen, Johnnie told Paul that he would kill him if he ever hit his mother again.  And then not long after that Johnnie ran off in a car with another boy to go find work and better weather. Before leaving, Johnnie made sure that Paul knew his threat was still good, and a few days later he called to give his mother a number where he said he could be reached if Paul ever hit her again. Over the years, the number changed as Johnnie moved around the country, but he always made sure she knew how to reach him. The number stayed the same only with the advent of the cell phone. By that time, Johnnie said he had settled in California, and although it wasn’t entirely clear what he was doing to earn a living, it sounded like it had something to do with Hollywood, and Rita was more than happy to share that news with her friends whenever they asked how her children were doing. 

While her other children did not call much, Johnnie called Rita every Sunday night. Even over the phone, he could read her like a book; if she was holding something back, he’d start singing a song about mamas and sons in his resonant baritone voice and her resolve would waiver. “Is there anything else?” he’d ask her like a priest in a confessional, and she’d always say more than she wanted. But the one thing she never had to say was that Paul had hit her, because Johnnie’s warning had put a stop to it. She’d do anything for Johnnie.

Paul was another matter. He was an irascible drunk, and he stayed drunk most of the day. The only time he wasn’t drinking was when he ran out of beer. When that happened and he started to get jittery, Rita and Paul would ride together—with Rita driving because Paul had lost his license—to the convenience store in town where he would replenish his beer and she would buy two bet slips on the Life Is an Adventure jackpot lottery game, one slip random numbers and the other one based on numbers she’d gotten while flipping through a Country Living magazine years ago:  9, 15, 29, 39, 48 and Adventure Ball 18. On the magazine’s pages there had been advertisements for things she wanted to give her children but never could, and after she started playing the numbers she couldn’t give them up; the thought of them hitting and her not having played them was too much to take. She would buy the tickets even though the cashier always made her say out loud what she was there for—as though the bet slips did not make it obvious—and she hated how the cashier muttered something underneath her breath and looked at her as if to say that lottery tickets were a tax on the poor. She did her best not to appear poor on these trips, always wearing her nicest coat and best shoes, both of which were old but still in good shape. If she won the jackpot, she would give her children everything they never had and buy a house with enough rooms for her grandchildren to stay with them. If she would only win the jackpot, everything would be alright.

On the way home this time Paul cracked open a beer, and while drinking it he became almost playful. “Hey, don’t you think you already won the jackpot?” he said, gesturing toward himself.  She had once thought so, but that had been a long time ago, in the beginning, when they were in their late teens, when Paul wooed her with love songs he sung in his beautiful baritone voice, which he had bestowed on Johnnie.  After all these years of drunkenness, she could still remember that there had once been more to him.  During Vietnam, he had served in the United States Army Signal Corps, to which only the most competent soldiers were assigned.  After the war, he had started working as a deck hand on an Ohio River barge.  And he had once saved another bargeman’s life when the man was knocked into the water by a boom; the man was unable to swim because the boom had broken his arms and ribs, and Paul jumped in to save him, guiding him onto the lifeboat that the others sent down.  It was after that experience that Paul started drinking, and he took to it with more gusto than most.  Still, he was a functioning alcoholic; he was able to work and retire from the barge after thirty years.  After retirement, he continued drinking, but for a while he did other things as well, like wood carving in the basement.  But slowly over the years those things had gone by the wayside, and he double downed on the drinking, their basement overtaken by Rita’s canned goods.

Back at the house, Paul kept drinking, and Rita began canning green beans.  “The jackpot,” she thought to herself and laughed.  The most valuable things they had were Paul’s pension and his insurance card.  It was good insurance. A few years ago, before he lost his license, Paul had run a stop sign and T-boned another car.  Thankfully, everyone survived, but Paul ended up in the hospital with a ruptured spleen, and they had given him beer when his withdrawal symptoms progressed to the point that they grew concerned that he could die from something called delirium tremens. Insurance paid for everything, including the beer.

When she first arrived at the hospital, Rita asked the nurse if the driver in the other car had been killed. 

“No, but you should be more worried about him,” she said, gesturing to Paul, apparently standing in judgment of Rita’s apparent lack of compassion for him. 

“You don’t know how many nights I’ve laid awake at night praying he wouldn’t kill somebody,” she told the nurse.   

Her canning finished, she had Paul take the jars to the basement for her.  Rita could barely make it up and down the stairs, so Paul always took them down, and he always went and fetched a can of green beans or whatever other vegetable they were having for dinner. They never touched, except on the rare occasions when Paul took his dinner at the kitchen table rather than his room and they accidentally grazed each other’s hand while reaching for something.  She had long ago given up on scolding him for his drinking, and they had settled into a peaceful co-existence.  But their detente was broken the next morning when Rita turned off the light in the bathroom. 

“Dammit,” Paul said. “You know turning them on and off makes them burn out quicker.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” she said.

“So now you’re some kind of scientist,” he said. 

At that she laughed, and then Paul did something he had not done in nearly twenty years: he hit her—hard, knocking her down. “Keep the light on,” he said. “And don’t laugh at me.” 

Rita laid there until Paul returned to his bedroom, wondering why a chuckle had set him off.  When she got up, she fixed herself another cup of coffee, her sixth of the day already.  She pondered how, if coffee were alcoholic, she would be no better off than Paul.  After a while, she got back up and started scrolling down the list of people on her cellphone she had called that week. Pausing at Johnnie’s number, she accidentally called him. She instantly regretted it and hung up before he could answer, but the call must have gone through because he called back a few minutes later.  She usually waited for his Sunday night call, so he was worried that something was wrong.   “Come on mom, I can tell something’s going on,” he said, and he started singing. “Tell ‘ole Johnnie what’s wrong, so he can it make it right.”

She did not want to get Johnnie involved in it, but he was insistent, and she finally told him that Paul had hit her again. “But I think it was an accident,” Rita lied. “I think he fell into me.”

“You don’t punch someone by falling into them,” Johnnie said.  “I told him what would happen if he ever hit you again, and I keep my promises.  I’ll be there in three days.”  She tried to convince him not to come, but he could not be persuaded.

For Johnnie’s sake, she couldn’t let him hurt Paul. A few years ago, Johnnie had spent time in prison for something he said was a misunderstanding, and he ended up spending more time in there than his initial sentence because he broke another inmate’s eye socket with one punch to his face. He recounted the story to Rita as if he were proud of it, and he asked her to tell his father so that he knew what he was capable of.  There was no way she would let Johnnie do something that would send him back to prison.  With tears in her eyes, she could see their destiny unfolding before her like one of the patchwork quilts she had hung on their walls, and she knew what she had to do to protect Johnnie from himself.

She asked Paul to get some green beans from the basement for lunch. Then, when he was safely down the stairs, she closed the door behind him and slid the deadbolt into place, which Paul had installed years ago as a means to punish Johnnie when he was just a young boy and got out of line.

“What the hell,” Paul yelled when the door wouldn’t open. After trying it a few more times he began banging on the door. “What the hell. Let me out.”

“Johnnie’s on his way,” she said. “And I told him you hit me.” 

“I’m not afraid off Johnnie,” he said. “I’m hungry.”

“You have plenty of food down there,” she said. “It’s not starvation you’ll die of.”

“What the hell.”

Intermittently throughout the day, Paul banged on the door and yelled to be let out.

“I need a drink,” Paul said.

“I know,” is all Rita said.

Later that day she went to the store for lottery tickets.  That night, she began praying for a jackpot win about thirty minutes before the drawing. Then she checked her lottery numbers on the 11:00 p.m. news. She won a little, but not enough to change their destiny. Paul was pleading to be let out as she fell asleep on the couch.

By the morning of the third day, she could tell that he was struggling mightily. He said that he had a headache and the sweats, and he continued to beg for her to let him out so he could have a drink. When she again refused, he began throwing jars against the basement walls. The sound of breaking glass reverberated off the walls, sounding like what she imagined a windshield shattering in a car wreck would sound like. “Let me out or I’ll break ‘em all,” he screamed.  She felt mercy for him, and her resolve almost wavered, but she had to see this through for Johnnie’s sake.

When the screaming got to be too much for her, she went outside and walked around the house. Next to the garden on one side of the house there was a chicken coop where an ever-watchful mother hen was standing guard with three-week old chicks tucked under her wings.  “You and me, we’re one and the same,” Rita said to the hen.      

Their house sat on a knoll overlooking the same river that Paul had spent his working years moving up and down.  The river had insinuated itself into his bloodstream as much as the alcohol, and as he grew more desperate his language became the language of the river. “Man down stern side,” Paul was yelling as she came back into the house, and he banged on the basement door again and again as though he had fallen into the river and was banging on the side of the barge’s hull.  Feeling her resolve weakening, she decided to go visit her sister, Geraldine, who lived a few miles down the river.

“I am worried about Johnnie,” Rita told Geraldine, not saying why.

Geraldine nodded in solidarity. “It’s because of my son,” she said, “that I came to understand just what it meant for God the Father to say that He so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.”  

“I don’t understand it,” Rita said. “We have a hen who’ll fight like crazy for her chicks to protect them from a hawk. If God is love, how could he let them do that to his son?” 

“That just proves how much God loves us,” Geraldine said. 

“I don’t know,” Rita said. 

Back at the house, Rita heard no sounds coming from the basement. Worried that Paul was lying in wait, she cleaned the house and worked on a quilt. Finally, when she hadn’t heard anything for three hours, she unlocked the door and descended into the basement.  As she slowly forced herself down the stairs, her knees were burning with searing pain.  When she finally made it to the landing, she saw that Paul was lying there among the broken glass and vegetables. She stepped down off the landing and walked toward him. Reaching his body, she touched the wounds on his head and hands, searching for signs of life. She was startled when she thought she felt a seizure cascading through his body, but then she realized that it was just her own hand trembling. She sat down beside him and picked him up, cradling him in her arms, touching his cheek, surprised at how slight he was.

Remembering that she once loved him, she whispered, “I’m sorry, so sorry . . . . But it was either me or Johnnie . . . that poor sweet boy.”

Holding Paul in her lap, she felt the closest to him that she had felt in years. Touching his face again, she mourned for everything they had lost.  “It is finished,” she whispered.  And then she waited for them to come and take her away.  

Brian Gifford has previously published short fiction and poetry in, among other publications, The November 3rd Club, The Copperfield Review, Boston Literary Magazine, Mississippi Crow, and Agape Review. He works as a law clerk for a federal judge.