DEATH AND MRS. MORRISON
Andrea Mullen
The chainsaw was still running, but there was no way to turn it off now. Blood spattered the grass and brush she had been trying to clear as Mrs. Morrison held her jacket over her wounded left hand. She hadn’t seen much before she’d had the presence of mind to try to close the wound, but she was sure that she’d caught a flash of bone. This ridiculous little thicket shouldn’t have been this much of a problem, wouldn’t have been if she had dealt with the overgrowth on this side of the farm last year like she should have. But she got to meet her first great-grandchild last year, which took time, as did the weddings and graduations she was obligated to attend. Funerals too, which there were more of every year. Perhaps she should have taken her daughter’s suggestion and hired help, or been a little more proactive in culling the herd. She was eighty five years old, after all. That was old enough to scowl rather than panic when the figure appeared in front of her. “You, again?”
The first time Mrs. Morrison had seen Death, she was not yet Mrs. Morrison. She was ten year old Mary Jane Dalton, lying in a breathless heap on the dirt floor after a startled milk cow had kicked her squarely in the chest. He had looked exactly like he did in the Halloween decorations and scary stories her brother read, with a black robe and a skeletal face, and a bony hand resting on his scythe. She was frightened and could feel her heart skipping in her chest, but knew she couldn’t leave her family to do all of her chores by themselves. He had followed her around while she carried the pails to the cistern, dumped them in, and returned to the cows, concentrating hard on breathing regularly while she continued with the task at hand. As the fluttering in her chest had faded, so did the apparition.
* * *
Death visited her again and again throughout the years, but the incident with the milk cow had taught her that she could fight back, and win. He’d come to collect her during her bout with a particularly bad strain of influenza that claimed several of her classmates. She was pale and shaking with fever, but she waved him off in favor of her mathematics homework. He’d come again when the car accident had happened, and shook an hourglass that was nearly out of sand at her as she fought through the dizzy nausea from her head injury to pull her best friend out of the mangled vehicle. She’d seen him when her blood pressure dropped precipitously during labor with her daughter, and refused to make her an orphan. Ten years ago, when the heart attack gripped her chest in the middle of church, she learned that he could be frightened off. The memory of how quickly he had backed off when she’d shouted about how death had no place in the Kingdom of God kept her warm during cold nights for years.
The last time she saw him was in the hospital with her darling husband Felix. She held his hand while his lungs filled with fluid, singing him his favorite songs just a little out of key. She had no idea how long Death had been in the shadows in the corner—maybe it was from the very beginning, before she’d even heard the word “ventilator”—but he was impossible to ignore as the numbers on the glowing monitor got smaller and smaller, and Felix’s breathing became shakier. The doctors evicted her from the room when the alarms sounded. “Take me!” she demanded of Death as they were ushering her out. “Take me instead! Or take me, too!” He did not extend his hand to her then, and did not follow, even after the somber doctor walked out shaking his head to offer his condolences. She left that hospital with her children at her side, but more alone and adrift in the world than she had ever been.
* * *
Mrs. Morrison glared through cataract-glazed eyes. “You always look the same. Seventy five years, and you haven’t changed at all. Why is that?” Death said nothing, as usual, but extended his hand. Mrs. Morrison shook her head. “You had your chance at that,” she snapped. “Five years ago, or is your memory worse than mine? You should have done it then. I have too much to do right now, and both you and this—” she nodded to the idling chainsaw resting on the grass amid the out-of-control multiflora rosebushes and black locust trees “—are going to have to wait!” She set her jaw and turned towards her tractor, parked on a flat spot a short distance up the hill. Somehow, Death was in front of her again, waiting for her to reach out and accept his hand. It would have been so easy to accept it.
But Mrs. Morrison did not forget easily, and did not forget a perceived slight at all. She stepped around him and hoisted herself into the seat of the tractor. The venerable Farmall had seen better days but still ran well with a little lubrication and proper rest, much like its owner. Mrs. Morrison stuck her tongue out in concentration as she worked out how to steer and shift at the same time with one hand. She’d keep the injured hand elevated and wrapped of course, and it would take time, but if she kept it in first gear all the way up the hill, she would never have to take her hand off the steering wheel.
She heard a tiny rattle of brass and couldn’t stop herself from looking. The hourglass Death was shaking at her was down to a thin film of sand in the upper bulb. She glared at him as the Farmall’s engine sputtered then roared and shouted, “Well good—I still have time to put the tractor away.” Death’s skeletal face could hardly be considered expressive, but Mrs. Morrison had seen him enough times to catch a hint of exasperation in the clench of the bony jaw. The tractor lurched as the transmission caught first gear, and she was off.
The terrain felt rougher than normal, but the Farmall made it to the open barn door. Mrs. Morrison drove it inside and killed the engine before she noticed her visitor. He stood by the sliding door, shaking the hourglass at her so hard that it clanked. There was less sand in the top than ever before. She sidestepped him again and began pulling at the sliding barn door with her good hand. “Shouldn’t leave the door open. Kids will get in. You know as well as I do that won’t end well.” The barn door shut with a thud, and Mrs. Morrison turned to see Death just behind her, again extending a hand. She simply scoffed at this and marched off toward the fences.
She had a brief dizzy spell as she reached the gate. Perhaps she was losing a bit more blood than was healthy. She leaned on the fence for support until the spots cleared from her eyes and gave the gate a solid push. Death was again in front of her, apparently puzzled. “Well, this is a working farm!” she said, gesturing at the fenced-off pasture with her good hand. “I can’t just let the herd go anywhere, can I?” Mrs. Morrison was gratified to learn that empty eye sockets can indeed roll.
Another dizzy spell struck her as she reached the door to her house. She forced the spots from her eyes and pressed on through the kitchen door. She reached for the cordless phone that hung on the wall, one of those large-button models that her son had given her when her cataracts began to cloud her vision, and hit the first button on speed dial. Death looked on as Mrs. Morrison listened to the phone ringing on the other end.
“Hello, Susan? Yes, dear! I’m well, but I’ve had a little bit of an accident. Do you think you could come over and—it was the chainsaw. I hurt my hand. Well, I might need stitches, but you—all right, if you insist. I really think you could put them in, though, I won’t need that many. All right, dear. I’ll see you soon. Love you, too.”
Mrs. Morrison hung up the phone and muttered through gritted teeth. “She said she was calling an ambulance. I really don’t understand why she can’t just do it herself on the table here—she is a nurse, after all.” Death gestured insistently with the hourglass. Only a few grains of sand remained. Her eyes stubbornly shot away from it, and widened when she saw the awful mess that she’d tracked right into her kitchen. The blood had finally soaked through the thick canvas jacket, and was dripping on the floor, and here and there on the walls were smears from where she’d leaned to keep her balance.
“Oh dear, this won’t do,” she said, shaking her head. “This won’t do at all!”
Mrs. Morrison took a clean dishtowel from the drawer and packed it onto the jacket. She covered it with a plastic grocery bag to keep it from dripping more, and reached for the roll of paper towels stowed neatly above the sink. “My mother would have a fit if she saw this on her spotless kitchen floor. You know her, don’t you? I assume you were there when the stroke happened.” Mrs. Morrison stopped scrubbing. “She didn’t suffer, did she? I mean, I never asked…I always assumed that it was too quick for her to even realize what was happening, but no one was there to know. So. I’m asking now.” Mrs. Morrison looked up at the apparition. “Did she suffer?”
Death stood silent for a moment, cocking his head to one side, and regarded Mrs. Morrison. Then the skeletal head moved—left, right, left, right.
Mrs. Morrison closed her eyes and exhaled. “Good. Thank you.” Death reached out to her again, but she waved him off and returned to her work on the floor. “No. Not now. I’ve done it for five years on my own, so you can wait until I’m ready.” She got to one knee to wipe a spot where her jacket must have grazed the wall, bracing herself with her left shoulder to ward off the dizzy spell. “I’ve left such a mess here, and with company on the way!”
The last few grains of sand bounced into the neck of the hourglass as the knock came at the door. “Mrs. Morrison?” a man’s voice rang through the open window. “Are you in there?”
“Come in!” she shouted, rising to her feet again. “The kitchen door’s open!” A matter of seconds later, two paramedics opened the appointed door. She recognized one as a former classmate of her son’s but couldn’t place a name to the face—John Something? Maybe James? “So I suppose my daughter called you,” she said as she lifted her arm up to show them. “I apologize for the mess, I tried to clean.” Her son’s classmate rushed to her side as his eyes went wide, and the other paramedic immediately moved to get a chair for her.
Mrs. Morrison smiled—she’d finally remembered. “Jeremy, is it? You were in my son’s graduating class.” The man nodded as he unwrapped her makeshift bandages. “So, I think I just need a few stitches. Can you do it here?” she asked. Jeremy shot a meaningful glance to the other paramedic.
Mrs. Morrison looked away from the two men for a moment as she sunk down into the kitchen chair that the paramedic had offered her. Death was still in the room, but was getting harder for her to see. The impulse to offer her own hand was strong. Her mother, the rest of her family, and her dear Felix were all there in that place of rest and refreshment she was promised, and she had the chance to join them. But here, there were grandchildren and great-grandchildren to spoil on their birthdays, and graduations and weddings to attend. There were cattle to sell and calves to raise, and no one else would clear those awful multiflora rosebushes in the western pasture. All that aside, Jeremy was trying to tell her something important, and it seemed rude to leave as he was talking to her. She pressed her lips together in a smile and slowly shook her head in the direction of the skeletal figure in the corner.
The skeletal hand now held an hourglass in which the sand was flowing upwards. Death stowed it in his voluminous black robe, and with a heavy soundless sigh, faded away.