Ransom Brooks was a content old gentleman. His zest for life was incredible for a man his age. His mind, still as sharp as ever, rarely wavered or faltered. At the center of his world was his beloved wife of fifty-five years, Mable Leigh. Mable Leigh was the light of Ransom’s life. His whole world revolved around her. Together, Ransom and Mable Leigh had experienced the horrors of World War II, felt the blush of pride as Neil Armstrong took his first steps across the surface of the moon, wept with tears of sorrow after the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, and shook their heads in confusion when rap music hit the scene.
Ransom and Mable Leigh were visited often by their three children, all of whom were now grown with families of their own and still lived close to their parents. At times the tiny, one-story house on a cul-de-sac was filled to capacity with Brooks children and grandchildren spilling from every open doorway. Ransom and Mable Leigh led a nice quiet life and were thankful for every new day they experienced. Life was good.
* * *
Mable Leigh hummed softly to herself as she made her way around the tiny dining room. Armed with her worn and nearly featherless feather duster, she carefully swished the duster across the frozen smiling face of one of her many Hummel figurines that were perched comfortably inside the massive cabinet. Mable Leigh had begun collecting the cherub-like figurines many years earlier when Ransom’s military tour of duty took him to
Out of the corner of her eye Mable Leigh noticed a dust ball gently blowing under the dining room table. “Can’t stand these dust bunnies,” she said with a slight frown on her face. “Dang things just seem to go ever which way they can.” She abandoned the figurines and slowly walked towards the table. Placing one weary hand on a chair back for support and the other on her thigh, she painfully lowered the weight of her body down onto one knee. As she reached under the table to grab the dust ball, it moved.
“Dangit!” she exclaimed, “Get back here.” Her breath caused it to move again. “Stop that!” she said as if scolding an unruly child. In defiance, the dust ball remained mere inches from her grasp. Mable Leigh placed her free hand on her bent knee and pushed herself up from the floor. Her heart was racing and she began to sweat.
“Phew, see what you do to an old lady like me. Oh Lordy,” she said as she felt herself getting dizzy.
“Ran—” she started softly as she clutched her chest with her right hand and fell to the floor. “Ran—Ran--.” Her voice barely rose above a whisper. Her left hand grasped the lace table cloth. The striking centerpiece, a yellow and lilac fluted vase filled with fresh cut flowers that Ransom had given to her the day before with a note that read simply “Just because …” came crashing to the floor.
* * *
Ransom was stretched out in his favorite worn leather recliner. The house had been a little drafty the past couple of days, and he wore the cardigan that Mable Leigh knitted for him two years ago, despite her arthritis, to keep him warm and cozy on chilly days and nights. He absently plucked at a patch of fuzz balls that were beginning to form on the left elbow.
Ransom yawned a hearty yawn, stretched his bony but sturdy arms high above his head, then reached down beside the chair to pick up Mable Leigh’s latest copy of Essence. Although he swore he enjoyed reading the magazine for its interesting articles, the fact that he loved to look at the beautiful black women featured throughout the magazine wasn’t lost on Mable Leigh. He began to scan the table of contents. When he came to the article titled “Swimsuits and You: A Summer Preview” he blushed like a schoolboy and quickly flipped the pages until he reached page 65. He smiled a satisfied grin as a long legged, curvaceous model wearing a small scrap of material that was supposed to pass for a bathing suit smiled seductively at the camera.
“Ahh, if only I were thirty years younger,” he laughed, “then I reckon I’d still be with Mable Leigh.”
As Ransom settled himself more snugly into the recliner, he heard a soft thud. He sat up straight and cocked his head to one side, then the other, to listen for the unfamiliar sound again. Silence. “Must be getting old when I start hearing things,” he joked. He relaxed his body and sat back in the chair. Then he heard it. A loud crash. He knew that this time it wasn’t his imagination.
“Mable Leigh?” he called out. There was no answer. “Mable Leigh Brooks, you hear me talking to you woman?” he said with a bit more urgency. Still no answer. He placed the magazine across the arm of the recliner and, moving as swiftly as his bones would allow him, rose from the chair. Fleet of foot, he walked/skipped/ran in the direction of the dining room.
“Mable Leigh,” he called out yet again, “you okay honey?” He half expected her to come bursting out of the dining room with an irritated look on her face.
“Ransom Brooks, you done lost your mind hollering like that and scaring the natural life outta me!”
Winded, he stood in the doorway and held onto the door jamb for support. Mable Leigh was sprawled out on the floor in an awkward position, her hand still clutched to her chest. The fabric of her floral print shift was crumpled between her bony fingers. Scattered about her motionless body were the fragrant flower petals. Ransom blinked hard several times to ward off the impending stream of tears that were fast approaching. He would not allow himself to cry. “Crying is foolish; crying is woman’s work,” he’d told Mable Leigh on more than a few occasions when he caught her sobbing at a T.V. movie of the week or one of her soap operas.
Ransom slowly walked to where Mable Leigh lie and sat down on the floor beside her. Her eyes were wide open and her face was a mask of pain. He stretched his legs out crossways beside her, gently raised her head, and placed it in his lap.
“Mable Leigh, come on now woman. Wake up honey.” He sniffed loudly and blinked rapidly. He would not cry. “Don’t you die on me, woman. You’re my world. We still got a lot of living to do.” Even as he spoke the tender words, Ransom knew in his heart that Mable Leigh had left him. His body shuddered involuntarily as he ran his hand along her cheek and thought of all the good times that he would miss with her. Watching the grandkids and great-grandkids grow up before their eyes. Seeing their daughter finally remarry after her husband of twenty years left her for a younger woman. Beaming with pride as their eldest son was appointed to the Supreme Court. She would miss all of those things, and much more. Ransom kissed Mable Leigh lightly on the lips and gently closed her eyes for the last time. He placed her head ever so gingerly on the floor, stood with great difficulty, reached for the phone, and called an ambulance. Then he called his children.
* * *
Ransom, Jr. was the first to arrive at his parents home. He and his son, Ransom, III, who just celebrated his twentieth birthday the day before, had been splashing around in the family pool, behaving like a couple of kids who had never seen water before, when the call came. Father and son not only shared a closeness envied by others, but they also bore an uncanny resemblance to one another, often being mistaken for brothers.
Ransom, Jr. floated around the pool in the bright yellow inner tube. The sun glared down on his smooth ebony skin as he recovered from another frontal water pistol attack from his son.
“I guess I should be getting out of this water soon. I’m starting to prune.”
“Yo dad, I thought men your age just prune naturally?”
“Go ‘head youngin’, you can’t hang.”
“Awww what you know about that?”
“Boy, you’d be surprised,” Ransom, Jr. said as he began to swim to the edge of the pool. His wife, Tawana, rushed out of the house holding the phone.
“Ransom!” she shouted.
Both men turned towards the sliding glass door and waited for her to acknowledge which Ransom she was talking to.
“Baby, its papa. Something’s wrong. He sounds pretty upset, but he won’t tell me what’s wrong.”
Ignoring any precept of backyard pool etiquette, Ransom, Jr. jumped out of the water and sprinted to Tawana and practically snatched the phone from her hands.
“Dad? What’s wrong? Is everything okay?”
* * *
The paramedics worked feverishly to resuscitate Mable Leigh. “Clear!” one of the men shouted as he attempted to shock the life back into her. Mable Leigh’s body jumped uncontrollably, but she failed to regain consciousness. “Clear!” the paramedic shouted again.
Ransom and his eldest son stood off to the side and watched helplessly as the paramedics fought to revive Mable Leigh. “Please help her,” Ransom whispered. “Please.”
“Dad, what happened?” Ransom, Jr. asked, his voice small and cracked with emotion.
Ransom slowly looked at his son, shook his head in resignation, and finally allowed himself to cry. At 2:53 p.m., Mable Leigh Brooks was pronounced dead at the age of seventy-four.
As the coroner’s office carried Mable Leigh’s body out of the home she had spent the last forty years in, Ransom stared vacantly at the dining room floor. He finally walked out of the house and onto the porch with Ransom, Jr. at his side. Intrigued by the roar of the ambulance sirens, a small crowd had gathered on the Brooks’ front lawn and were whispering amongst themselves. A midnight blue Lexis pulled up to the curb, followed closely by a white Jeep Cherokee. Joyce and Leroy arrived in time to see their mother’s covered body being carried away on a stretcher.
Joyce, the youngest of Mable Leigh’s and Ransom’s children, stared at the retreating form. Her eyes began to gloss over. She had just popped her Tae Bo workout in the DVD and was readying herself to struggle through the routine when she received the call from her father. She ran two stop signs and three red lights in her haste to get to her parents’ home.
“Daddy, what happened to momma?” she asked, her words sounding strained and unlike her own. She looked to her father, then to her brother, searching their red rimmed eyes for an answer. Neither of them spoke immediately. Ransom, Jr. hung his head down on his chest and sighed heavily.
“She had a heart attack. Momma’s gone.” A fresh stream of tears fell from his face.
Leroy gasped loudly and fell to his knees. Unlike his father, he saw no shame in a man crying as he buried his head in his hands and cried like a baby. In the background, the coroner’s van drove off silently and disappeared around the corner.
The Brooks’ huddled around each other on the tiny porch that Saturday afternoon in May and cried, together, as a family.
-- END OF EXCERPT --