Chapter 8 (Part 5 of 5)
(continued)
BY THE SPRING OF 1986, the Fort Snelling V.A. Hospital in Minneapolis pronounced Steve free of cancer and rated him one hundred percent disabled, service-connected. That was good financial news for Cherie. Counselors advised her about how use her benefits to qualify for a V.A. loan so they could buy a house.
Cherie transferred her brood to their new home in the quiet Indian Trails neighborhood in north Spokane. Gazing from the car windows, the kids took in the emerald green of their new world, a prosperous middle-class suburb under towering pine trees. This was the first house the Rodgerses had ever owned. It was an attractive cedar rancher, with skylights, nestled at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac where the kids could play safely.
Physically and mentally, Steve was still severely handicapped. He needed the wheelchair to get around much of the time. Using a walker, he ventured out for block-long treks in the neighborhood, at a glacial pace. He constantly nagged Cherie to let him help her weed the yard and babysit four-year-old Dean.
But in 1987, before he was ready for such tasks, the cancer returned: stage-four astrocytoma.
That Christmas the multicolored lights on the Rodgers’s artificial tree blinked and twinkled, and Steve and the three children snuggled together on the couch and gazed at them for hours on end.
“We’re going to leave the tree up,” she gently told the children. “This might be the last Christmas we have with your Dad, so we’re going to celebrate it longer this year.”
The children accepted the news matter-of-factly.
He was undergoing tests at Holy Family Hospital when Steve told his wife, “I’m being pulled away. The force is pulling me away, and I can’t control it.”
“I know that. I can see it,” Cherie said. By then she could smell the cancer.
“I tried so hard to fight it, but I can’t make it stop.”
Cherie realized that Steve wanted her permission to die.
“I understand,” she reassured him.
With that, Steve relapsed into a coma.
The neighborhood was aflame with the fragrant blossoms of spring, and the birds were singing when Cherie took down the Christmas tree at last. She put Steve in the hospital bed that Hospice had installed in their bedroom. She slept next to him.
Every four hours around the clock she refilled the phenobarbital in his IV to prevent seizures. She didn’t need to set an alarm; some internal clock woke her unfailingly in the blackness of midnight and four in the morning to attend to him.
At midnight on July 3rd, Cherie was sponging off Steve’s face when he suddenly grabbed her arm. It scared her.
“Oh, he’s died,” she thought. “I knew he was going to, but I wasn’t expecting it now.”
But when she looked at Steve, his eyes were wide open and he was gazing intently at her.
“I love you,” he said.
She was shocked he could speak.
“I love you, too,” she answered.
She could see that her husband wanted a final word with her.
“You take good care of my kids,” he said.
“I will,” she told him. Then she quipped, “I can’t believe what some people do to avoid turning forty.”
Steve laughed.
“I’m going to be really old when I die,” she said. “But you, you’re still young. I’m going to be like eighty-five, and you won’t know me.”
“I’ll always know you,” he told her.
Forever afterwards she felt she would have lived her whole life just to hear him say that.
Two days later Cherie was sitting on Steve’s bed, holding his hand, when he exhaled with a whoosh. The air from his lungs felt like it went right through her. It was his last breath. She sat quietly with his body for a few minutes. Steve now looked like a wax figure. For the first time in her life, Cherie felt that she grasped the nature of the human soul.
The body is just a temporary container. Death sets the soul free.
She collected the clothes in which she wanted her husband buried: fine-wale brown corduroy trousers, a blue popcorn knit sweater she had given him in college, his heavy black Army-issue horn-rimmed glasses, and his favorite running shoes. She retrieved Steve’s prized military watch from a dresser drawer and gave that to the funeral director, too. The watch hadn’t worked in months. Its battery was dead.
The funeral was held at Assumption Parish, a small service attended mostly by family. Draped over the casket was a beautiful Hudson's Bay Company traditional wool blanket, prized by the Blackfeet, one of Cherie’s most cherished possessions.
As the priest was speaking, a familiar beeping sound rose from inside the casket and hung in the air. Clearly audible to all present, it was the alarm on Steve’s watch. Cherie remembered his promise to come back, and smiled.
The honor guard fired blanks from their rifles, signifying full military honors. Steve’s blanketed casket was lowered into the ground. The crowd drifted away, but six-year-old Dean held his mother’s hand and wouldn’t budge.
“Where’s the dirt?” he asked.
“It’s under that tarp.”
Dean led her by the hand, and pulled back the tarp.
“I want to wait until they put it in. I don’t want Daddy to be cold.”
Cherie then explained her son’s request to a man standing nearby with a spade.
Only the two remained behind to watch the man shovel dirt over the coffin. Cherie held Dean’s hand, while tears streaked down the cheeks of the gravedigger, mother and child.
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, thoughts of Steve were never far from Cherie’s mind. She was still a young woman, strikingly attractive in an unadorned way, and her warm personality attracted the attention of men. But Cherie wasn’t interested.
One November morning in 1992 she awoke at four a.m., the ritual she couldn’t shake. Steve had been dead for more than four years, but some internal signal still prodded her at midnight and four. This time was different. Glancing from the clock to the hallway, Cherie felt a jolt of fear shoot up her spine. Standing in the doorway of her bedroom was the silhouette of a man.
Cherie bolted up and reached for the phone.
“It’s okay, it’s me, Steve,” said the figure. She recognized the voice immediately.
Cherie froze as the specter walked over and sat on the bed next to her. He put his arm around her and hugged her.
“I told you I’d come back if I could,” he said.
Cherie tried to quell the feeling of ecstasy. “I might be dreaming,” she said aloud.
“No,” came the deep, reassuring voice. “Remember? I told you I’d come back if I could, but it might not be in the way that you’d think. Do you understand?”
Cherie relaxed.
“Well, how are you?” she asked. She didn’t know what else to say.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Everything is fine.”
Cherie could see that. Steve looked normal. In fact, he appeared to be in perfect health. The cruel wounds of his illness were gone. She put her hand on his right knee. Her fingers pressed the ribs of the cords she had buried him in. She laid her head on his shoulder, her cheek against the unique knit of the funny old sweater. Steve smelled like he had as a healthy young man.
He obviously had things he wanted to tell her.
“It’s like a big waiting room where I am. You have a chance to visit with people,” he told her. Cherie pictured him with famous characters from history.
“You were right. I don’t need a watch. There’s no concept of time there,” he said, then warned her, “I can’t come back whenever I want.”
It occurred to her that fifty years might be nothing to him.
For five minutes she rested her head on his shoulder. They didn’t speak again before Steve silently disappeared.
Cherie stayed awake until sunrise.
SITTING ON THE FROZEN GRASS in front of Steve’s gravestone, Cherie fought depression. Only recently had she paid off the last of the sixty thousand dollars in medical bills that remained after Steve’s death. By naming “John Doe Rodgers” as a defendant in what became known as “The Christmas Complaint,” Betsy Cowles wasn’t just going after Cherie. She was also pursuing resources Steve had set aside for his widow and children.
But that’s not what bothered Cherie the most. It just seemed wrong to involve Steve in the lawsuit. He hadn’t done anything to Betsy Cowles.
“I know it’s not what happens that matters, but how we handle it,” Cherie said aloud to the gravestone. “But how are we going to handle this?”
At that very moment, a raven landed out of nowhere and hopped to within six feet of her. The bird cocked its head and stared her in the eye. There were no other birds to be seen anywhere.
As quickly as that, Cherie’s doubts disappeared. She knew what she would do.
END OF CHAPTER 8
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