That was our life for several years. Every now and then I would try to persuade her to have some rice, just a little at a time; and that little, alas, was not enough. She was tired of it and forbade me to mention it. Month after month her condition got worse, her pain harder to endure. The kind doctor would try pills with some new outlandish name, and I would get the prescription filled and do my best to learn which was which.
III
It was during this period of long-drawn-out pain and struggle that Craig wrote the beautiful book, Southern Belle. She wrote about herself and her lovely childhood and girlhood, all because I pleaded with her to do it. She wrote about her life with me, because she wanted to set me straight with the world. Sometimes I would sit by the bed, and write to her dictation; but most of the time she would write lying in bed with her head propped forward, holding a pad with one hand and a pencil with the other.
It was a tiring position, and after she had been doing it for months, she developed a pain near the base of the spine. I knew from the beginning that it was a question of posture and tried to persuade her of that, but in vain. I would take her to specialists, and they would examine her and give their verdicts—and no two verdicts were the same. I am quite sure that none of these doctors had ever had a patient who had treated her spine in that fashion. Craig wouldn’t let me tell them; I wasn’t a specialist—only a husband—and I must not influence their judgment.
How many of these dreadful details shall I put into a book? Of course, anyone may skip them; but I had no way to skip them. Craig had stood by me through my ordeals, and she was all I had in this world—apart from the books I had written and the one I was writing. The only other person who could help us was Hunter, and he would arrive from Phoenix eight hours after I telephoned. He was there when Craig became delirious from pain or from the injections that the doctors had given her. He would comfort me when I, too, was on the verge of becoming delirious at the sight of her suffering. She would say that she was suffering from cold and would have me pile every blanket in the house on top of her; then she would say that she was suffocating and would throw them all off. I remember a night of that, and then I could not sleep in the day. We had to have her taken to a hospital; and she hated hospitals, each one had been worse than the last.
IV
I cannot bring myself to tell much about the end. I do not think that many could bear to read it. At times she became delirious, and wasn’t herself any more; I had to make up my mind to that. Then suddenly she would be herself—her beautiful self, her dear, kind, loving self, her darling self, agonizing about me and what I was going to do, and how I could manage to survive in a dreadful world where everybody would be trying to rob me, to trap me, to take away the money that she had worked so desperately to keep me from spending.
Three times during that long ordeal I found her lying on the hard plastone floor of the upstairs kitchen that we had made for her. The first two times we were alone in the house, and since I could not lift her, I had to call the ambulance to get her back in bed. The second time she was unconscious, and I called the doctor again. He thought these were “light strokes,” and later on the autopsy confirmed the opinion; but she had not been told.
The third time was less than a month before the end. Her nephew, Leftwich Kimbrough, was with us, so we two carried her to bed. I sat by, keeping watch, and presently I heard her murmuring; I listened, and soon went and got a writing pad and pen. They were fragments of a poem she was composing while half-conscious, and I wrote what I heard:
Stay in their hearts, dear Jesus,
Stay and make them kind.