And then, after an interval:
Oh, the poor lonely nigger,
Bring love to his soul.
Later, I wrote underneath, for the record: “Craig’s murmured singing after bad fall. I mentioned to her, it was Good Friday Eve, 1961.”
You will recall my account of the visit of Judge Tom Brady, founder of the citizens’ councils all through the Deep South. From earliest childhood little Mary Craig Kimbrough had wrestled with that race problem of her homeland. She heard and saw both sides; the fears of the whites, for which they had reason, and the pitiful helplessness of the ignorant blacks. Now, in her last hours, she was pleading, in the first couplet for the whites whom she loved and in the second for the blacks, whom she also loved.
One day she would eat nothing but soft-boiled eggs, and the next day she would eat nothing but gelatine. So the icebox was full of eggs and then of gelatine. One elderly doctor told her that the best remedy for fibrillation was whisky; so here was I, a lifelong teetotaler who had made hatred of whisky a part of his religion, going out to buy it by the quart. Craig insisted that I should never buy it in Monrovia where I was known; I must drive out on one of the boulevards and stop in some strange place and pay for a bottle with some imbecile name that I forgot. That went on for quite a while, and the time came when Craig was so weak that I couldn’t manage to hold her up while she tried to walk the length of the room.
V
She wouldn’t let us call the doctor because he would order her to the hospital. But the time came when we had to call the doctor, and he called the ambulance, and poor Craig was carried away on her last ride. She was in the hospital for three weeks, and it cost us close to four thousand dollars. This seems an ungracious thing to mention, but I am thinking about what happens to the poor—how do they die? Perhaps they do it more quickly, and don’t have day and night nurses by their bedside. This sounds like irony, but I let it stand.
In addition to the nurses and the husband, there were Hunter and Sally, his wife, two nieces, and a sister who had come on from Alabama. What they saw was a hideously tormented human being. I pleaded with the doctor—surely there must be some ethical code that would give him the right to end such torment! But he said that stage had not yet been reached.
I won’t tell much about my own part in it. I would sit and gaze at the features of my beloved who no longer knew me; or if she did know me she was angry because I had let her be brought to the hospital. I would sit there blinded with my own tears, and then I would get up and try to get out of the hospital without making a spectacle of myself.
Why do I tell such a story? Well, it happened. It was life. It is our human fate. It happened to me, and it could happen to you. This universe is a mystery to me. How beauty, kindness, goodness, could have such an end visited upon it will keep me in agony of spirit for the rest of my days on this planet. I do not know what to make of it, and I can draw only this one moral from it: that nature has been, and can be, so cruel to us that surely we should busy ourselves not to commit cruelties against one another. I know that I had for half a century the love of one of the kindest, wisest, and dearest souls that ever lived upon this earth; why she should have died in such untellable horror is a question I ask of God in vain.