If I get there before you do, I’ll cut a hole and pull you through.
—"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"Last Wednesday, my sister Ann, next-to-last of the Burnettown Jowerses, looked up from her hospital bed and told her husband Vann, “Next time you come back, I’ll be gone.” And sure enough, when Vann got to Ann’s room on Thursday, she was gone.In recent days, Ann had started coughing up a little blood. Her surgeon decided to have a look inside her chest. “They just sewed her back up,” Vann told me over the phone. “She was eat up with cancer.”That was the only time I’d heard Vann’s voice break in 40 years.At age 65, Ann had endured many a trial. Our mother Susie said Ann was just fine until she was three years old. Then she got a high fever along with a bad case of measles. After that, Ann struggled in school and just about everything else. Ann started doing curious things when nobody was looking. For instance, she snuck into the watch drawer in the dining room buffet, wound all the watches until their mainsprings broke and left the whole family watchless. Then she grabbed up our half-brother’s woodburning kit and seared unintelligible messages into the pine window stools.When Ann turned sixteen, our daddy Jabo Jowers decided to put Ann behind the wheel of the family Chevy and test her driving skills. About 30 feet into the test, Ann swerved sharply to her right, off our sandy driveway and into the front yard. Then, with her voice screeching and her arms flailing, Ann headed straight for the lamppost—the lamppost that Jabo had erected years before and planted in the middle of a heart-shaped concrete slab. The slab, I suppose, was the kind of thing an artful and tender-hearted man with just a few tools and a bag of stolen concrete mix might build for his young wife. Jabo’s concrete heart survived Ann’s first and only test drive. His lamppost, bent and dented, found its way back into the slab some years later when Brenda moved in with me.Sister Ann’s real troubles started in April of 1966. That’s when our mother Susie woke up in the middle of the night with crushing chest pains, proclaiming that she was dying. And sure enough, she was. She didn’t make it to the hospital. A few nights later, after Susie was buried, Ann talked some of the female kinfolk into coming with her to Susie’s grave, where she set fire to some Bible verses and dropped them into a coffee can.The next day, Jabo and Vann took Ann to the mental hospital. There, she was introduced to electroshock therapy, which is pretty much just electrocuting your brain until you forget everything. It’s a soft reboot; some memories come back, some don’t. Electroshock therapy is barbaric, but it’s the only treatment that would get Ann back on track until Janssen created Risperdal in the mid-’90s. While Ann was in the hospital, she took up chain-smoking. She was a full-time hotboxer, smoking as hard and fast as a human can.In the years between shock treatments and Risperdal, Ann saw Jesus at the mental health clinic, all beat up and with one eye hanging out of its socket. Then and there, Jesus gave Ann the "Vision of the Shoes." He told her to go home and arrange all of her footwear into a semicircle in the middle of her living room.And she did. I watched her do it. But don’t you know, there were no supernatural results: no auras, no epiphanies, no halos popping up over people’s heads, no out-of-body experiences among the mentally healthy folks in the room. Maybe Ann didn’t get Jesus’ recipe just right, or maybe that was just one of Jesus’ helpers in the clinic.But maybe the vision did some good. In the weeks and months that followed, Ann got better—a lot better. With the proper drugs on board, she was lucid and loveable, although more than a little bit quirky. A few years ago, she even quit smoking.Even with the Risperdal, there were days when Ann reverted back to her clothes-trading routine in the mental hospital. The last time Brenda, daughter Jess and I visited Ann and Vann in South Carolina, Ann was mostly interested in trading jewelry. “Brenda,” Ann asked, “can you find me a set of screw-on ear bobs? I want to try four ear bobs—two in the holes and two with the screws.”“I’ll see what I can do,” Brenda said. Ann replied, “And I want a toe ring. Try to find me a toe ring.”Then Ann got around to what was really on her mind. “Brenda,” she said, “I want some modern glasses, like those red ones you wear.”Daughter Jess offered, “Aunt Ann, why don’t you get some blue ones, to match your blue eyes?”“Everything I got’s blue!” Ann yelped. “Everybody’s always trying to match up things with my eyes. I’ve got blue sweaters, blue pants, blue shoes and blue sheets. I want me something red.”Well, we Jowerses will take Ann something nice next time we go to South Carolina. It’ll be a while, though, because as much as I hate to admit a weakness, I’m funeraled out. Lately, funerals have been as hard on me as shock treatments were on Ann. Jess and I agree that we can’t listen to the Southern funeral version of “Amazing Grace” again. It makes Jess whimper, and it makes me blubber so hard that I shake the whole pew. I can’t look at another funeral tent, I can’t abide the Astroturf, and I can’t look at another coffin hanging on the straps of the mortuary lift. If I do, I think I might just jump in the hole.I’m just going to have to wait until there’s some grass on Ann’s grave. Then it’ll look settled.And we’ll bring you something red, big sister.
