The Legs Are The First To Go

By Robertha White Morgan

DO NOT WALK OUTSIDE THIS AREA.

I can see the words emblazoned on the wing from the window of my seat in row 19C of the American Airlines jet slicing through the vast blue sky en route to Montego Bay, Jamaica.  The shade is halfway down, and the sunlight is a warm promise on my face through the thick glass of the window. I’m coming, Daddy.

*

He’d fallen out of his motorized wheelchair twice at the start of the year and had just finished a stint in hospital due to serious dehydration, which had affected his kidney function. When my mother called me in February after my father got home from the hospital, she was worried. “I have a feeling,” she’d said. “Him look little better now but if yuh able, I won’t tell yuh don’t come.”

*

The couple beside me, the man in red shorts, a black hoodie, and white sneakers, and his lady friend in striped pants, a gray sweatshirt, and Crocs are chatting softly together. The woman’s neon orange manicure catches my eyes, they're holding hands —fingers interlocked as we barrel through the pocket of the sky. An hour into the flight, we hit turbulence, and it goes on for a while. Because of the wobbling, the couple beside me adjust themselves in their seats, hands still interlocked. The woman’s head, with a spill of silky black hair, and the side of her face, visible now, rests on the man’s shoulder. His head leans towards her’s as they settle back into the seats. Peering out the window at the clear blue expanse and little clumps of cotton candy clouds, I can’t see why we are bumping and shaking so much.

*

As a teenager, I never really understood what was wrong with my father’s legs. I’d only ever noticed he was having trouble walking whenever he would go drinking with his police colleagues and would swagger home, properly soused, late at night. I remember him on those nights as a disembodied arm gripping the white frame of the kitchen door to steady himself for entry. He would weave in, narrowly avoiding bumping into the big blue Kelvinator 6-burner stove just inside and to the right of the kitchen door, always singing in his rich baritone or loudly whistling a complicated tune. He would stumble through the kitchen and on down the narrow hallway to his bedroom, bracing his left arm and then his right against the walls, listing one way and then the next like a metronome, his legs and feet not really lifting to propel him forward, but sliding across the white tiles in a strange shuffling rhythm. 

“Robert Charles,” my mother Patricia would chide him. She only used both his proper names when my father had gotten on her nerves.  My father was not fazed by my mother’s fussing.  He always joked that when rum was involved, the legs were the first to go.

*

Twenty-five minutes out from Montego Bay, the pilot announces it’s a warm, toasty 77 degrees Fahrenheit there, a world away from the 30 degrees back in Kentucky. As the pilot banks for landing, I catch glimpses of the Caribbean Sea— dark blue, pastel, then aquamarine near the shoreline, with waves like tiny white ruffles.  I leave the airplane in single file behind my seatmates but quickly lose sight of them in the crush of people inside the arrivals hall. With no checked bags to claim, immigration is a breeze, and I step out of the terminal into the sunshine. Home. My brother picks me up and we set off on the two-hour drive to my parents' house. 

*

My father is not the only one in shock when I walk into my parents’ bedroom at 3:59 pm on a random Wednesday afternoon in February.  I leave my carry-on bag in the kitchen, peel off my germy airport sweater, and stroll down the narrow hallway to the bathroom on the left, where I wash my hands. “Hello,” I say as I step into my parents' room. At the sound of my voice, my father turns his head sharply to the doorway where I’m standing. He had no idea I was coming. I’d asked my mother not to tell him in case I hadn’t been able to find a flight. I cross the floor to his bedside.

Everything is different. My parents’ giant mahogany super king bed is missing now, replaced by an adjustable, hospital-issue bed where my dad lies covered by his favorite fuzzy green blanket. He’s smaller somehow, frail.  A twin bed, taken from one of the rooms downstairs, sits next to the cot. My mother sleeps there next to him to keep watch in the night.

“Weh yuh a do yah?” he says as I reach over the metal rail on his bed to hug him. His raspy voice is pitched higher than the baritone I know and love. He looks thinner than I remember when I saw him just seven months before my children and I moved to Kentucky.

*

That August Thursday morning was hard. In the den, just before we left for the airport, my father hugged and squeezed each of us in turn, my daughter, my son, and me. His arms lingered each time, and his voice had been watery when he said, “Unnu tek care.”  My mother Pat was the only one able to hold it together. She had rubbed my dad’s shoulders, a silent reassurance. Later, she told me that though he understood why we had to move— I had received a scholarship to the University of Kentucky— he was distraught, and so were we.

*

“Weh dem pickney?” He asks after my daughter and son, his only grandchildren, and I tell him the tickets were too expensive to buy three, and they are in school, so they are not with me. He nods in understanding, but his brow creases. I tell him not to worry because they are staying with their aunt in Kentucky.

*

  My father turned 70 in September last year. Despite his protests, my mother hosted a party for him. My dad flat-out refused when she told him there were 200 people on the guest list. 

“Robertha,” She’d called me one day at her wit’s end with my father’s refusals, “Beg yuh talk to your father and tell him we won’t see this age again, so we have to do something.”

“Daddy”, I’d coaxed on the WhatsApp call, “We can cut the guest list man, mi can’t come, but at least mi can join on Zoom.” My brother was the one who finally convinced him, and he agreed only after we cut the guest list to 50 people. I’d made the invitations —royal blue and gold—inviting everyone to celebrate ‘Robert’s 70^th Inning’. I joined the party on Zoom from Kentucky. The internet at the venue had not been the best, so while I could see my dad seated at the head table on a massive white chair, his blue and yellow dashiki shirt brightening his face, I couldn’t hear much of what he said because the audio kept cutting out. Only afterward, several people told me what he’d said in his remarks: “I want to thank everyone for coming out, maybe this is the last time I will be gathered with you like this.”

*

Thursday morning, as she prepares to bathe my dad, my mother asks for my help emptying his catheter. I hold the container the bag is sitting in steady to catch any spills. As my mom empties it, one drop spills onto my wrist, and I think only months ago, I was watching my husband’s nurse empty his catheter. As I leave the room, my mother rubs my father’s head, and I hear her ask him what he wants to eat for breakfast. 

*

I don’t remember what year it was when I learned about Tropical Spastic Paraparesis – a progressive disease of the nervous system- and what it had to do with my father’s funny walk. Over time, the muscles in his legs had weakened more and more, and he couldn’t walk much or very far without leaning on someone—my mother, my brother, or me for support. Eventually, he retired early from the police force and then became confined to a motorized wheelchair. He would stay in that chair for 12 years. 

*

  The house is too quiet. It’s strange not to hear the whir of my father’s motorized chair rolling out to the dining table each morning to have his breakfast.  I spend a lot of time on the twin bed next to my father’s hospital-issue cot, checking to make sure he’s still with me. He’s not eating much, and I coax him to drink Ensure between meals, where he takes only a few bites at a time to keep up the little energy he does have. Even though he’s there, I can’t shake the empty feeling building in my gut. I try not to think about what the way I feel means. Too many things I associate with him are absent from the spaces they occupied—his placemat and pill container, his cup of green tea—him rolling out to the verandah with the house phone and his cell phone in hand to keep court there for a few hours each day.  

*

My father barely speaks. When he does, it’s in a whisper, not the booming tone we know. The silence that cloaks the house is even thicker because he’s stopped clicking his tongue on beat to music only he could hear in his head, something he’d been doing non-stop for months. On Friday, the day before I must leave to return to Kentucky, I sit in my father’s motorized chair next to his adjustable bed and try to talk with him till he falls asleep. He is quiet but not restful; the TSP causes his legs to spasm at random moments, and the blanket shifts to the side, leaving his lower leg exposed. Once he nods off, I still sit there, looking at my father’s face. 

*

When I was about eight, my parents took us kids to a huge craft fair and dance at a banquet hall in the next town over from ours. That night, my dad and my mother commanded the dance floor—my father never missed an opportunity to ‘drop legs’ at parties. Legs pumping, waists whirling, sweat on their faces, they drew a crowd. I remember peeking round the legs of the others watching them and seeing their bright smiles as they danced. Neither of them ever needed an excuse to celebrate.

*

 It’s Saturday morning, I haven’t done enough, the visit is too short, but I must go back.

*

The last photo of me and my father — a quick selfie I snap with my cell phone camera before heading to the airport — is blurry. I kneel beside the hospital bed that my dad sleeps in and lean my head next to his on his pillow. In the photo, my dad’s face, his left arm, and hand-- folded into a loose fist and propped against his brow, are visible. The top edge of his fuzzy green blanket— which he’s pulled up to just under his chin because he’s always worried about the “raw breeze” only he can feel—fills up the bottom right corner of the frame. 

Just behind our heads, on the mahogany chest of drawers under one of the two walls of windows in the room, the TV, my father’s constant companion, which always blares his favorite station, sits silent. It’s been off the whole four days of my visit. In the photo, I am smiling, almost all my teeth visible. There’s no trace of the apprehension and guilt I feel about leaving so soon and leaving at all after only four short days. Guilt because I feel I’m leaving my mother to face whatever’s coming alone, though I know my brother Zack and my sister Coleen have been trading off weekends to stay at the house with my parents. 

As I snap the shot, my father’s face is relaxed, his brow slightly creased. He appears to be looking at the camera but that’s just a skill he’s mastered over time. “Look here Daddy” I say as if I don’t know he can’t see me, my phone, or the light from the camera. Two years ago, the nerves in both eyes had given up the ghost, leaving him blind. He is smiling too, with no teeth showing. We look a lot alike. I have his oval face and round, prominent nose. Our mouths crease in the same spots, making apples of our cheeks. Robert and Robertha. 

*

My dad was the one who saved me from being named Emerald, as my mother had wanted. They had already had a girl, my older sister Coleen, and my dad had just decided on his own that the next child would be a boy, and that boy would be named Robert, after him. When I popped out on September 25, my father decided to give me his name anyway. 

*

In the shot, my father’s head leans toward mine, facing the right way, though I know he can see nothing. Maybe even then, he’d already been staring into the void.

“Nuh bother go nowhere when mi gone enuh,” I say to my father as I reach out to hug him on Saturday morning. 

“Where mi going?” he asks.

“Mi nuh know” I say, “Just don’t go nowhere, me and the kids want to see you when we come back July.”

My father smiles, “Hmm’ alright,” he says. I squeeze his hand — it’s soft and warm—and turn to go. I hug my mother in the kitchen and leave for the airport.

*

9:51 on a blustery Tuesday morning in April, I wake to the trill of my cell phone.  I stretch my right arm from under my gray fleece blanket and root beneath my pillow for it. There’d been a storm the previous night, and Lexington had been under a tornado warning. The kids and I slept in.

“Hello,” sleep is still in my voice.

  “Robbie,” I roll out of my blanket and sit straight up when I hear the low, serious tone of my mother’s voice.

“Robbie, the suffering is over. The hospital called me in the middle of my devotion this morning. They said he passed at 6:47.”

My stomach drops. Even before she’d started speaking, I had known my father was gone. There’d been several tense moments in the previous few weeks, and I'd been living each day with a dreadful expectation.

“Bawl if yuh must mi love.” My mother says.

I don’t say much after that. My mother does not stay on the call. She needs to call my sister and the rest of the family. 

The sky outside the bay window of the house in Lexington is somber and gray. I perch on the edge of my bed, head and shoulders bowed under the weight of the news.

“Samara, call your brother,” I say to my daughter sitting at her desk across from my bed. 

“What happened?” She asks me, picking up on something in my voice. 

“Call your brother,” I repeat. She leaves the room, and I hear her calling down the stairs to my son Micah. His footsteps are loud on the wooden staircase before he bounds into the room. He takes one look at Samara standing next to me, rubbing my back and at my bowed head and leaky eyes, and he’s alarmed.

“What is it, what is it, what’s wrong Mom?”

*

 On a different bed, in a different bedroom, in a different country, at the end of what’d been a long and draining day, mere months before, my children had been in my position. I’d told them their father had died. All three of us were lying in bed when I broke the news.

“Daddy’s gone.”

We’d fallen asleep to the sound of my son’s sobs. 

*

On the first leg of my American Airlines flight back to Kentucky, I’m again in a window seat, this time 19A. On the wing of the craft is the same warning:

DO NOT WALK OUTSIDE THIS AREA.

I wish I’d said what I’d been thinking that morning to my dad out loud, “Do not walk out of your mortal coil.”

*

“Grandpa died,” I say. The space after I say those words is loud. They are both quiet. They fold their arms around me as I weep. My daughter rubs my back. The thought that we are just three fatherless children rolls around and around the cluttered emptiness in my head.

By Robertha White Morgan