A Visit To The Red & White Store: I Hear Dead People

“Let’s go!” My husband was impatient.

I set the cooler full of drinks on the floorboard behind the front seat and the bag full of snacks on the back seat next to my sister. “You’re the one who gets to hand out the goodies!” I said to her.

“Better be nice to me then!” she joked.

I climbed behind the wheel of our rental car and turned to my husband, sitting in the front passenger seat. “Where to?” I asked him.

“Diamond Lake,” he answered.

“Good choice!” My sister’s voice resounded from the back seat.

We drove through Roseburg, turning onto Diamond Lake Boulevard and headed east on Highway 38. The road parted fields of tall yellow grasses, dotted with blackberry bushes laden with berries. Dilapidated old barns stood majestically on weathered frames amid tall, green Douglas Firs. The river wrestled chaotically over rocks revealed by summer time water levels. Panting deer lay in green shaded meadows at the foot of rock studded mountains that pierced the cloudless sky. Hawks glided on the gentle breezes, searching below for field mice.

“Look!” I said, pointing at a road sign. “Crater Lake is open. We’ve got our National Parks Card so we can get in cheap. Do you guys want to see the Pinnacles?”

“Yeah!” my husband answered.

“I haven’t seen Crater Lake in a long time,” said my sister.

“Cool!” I smiled and followed the signs that would take us to the lake. I arrived at an intersection and stopped. It was then I saw the sign for Chemult.

“Let’s go to Chemult and see if the Red and White is still standing.” I suggested waiting at the stop sign.

“Grandma and Grandpa’s store!” said my sister, sentimentally.

My husband grinned and nodded. He loved spontaneous adventure better than a planned road trip.

I turned onto the two lane highway framed on either side with red pumice and thick groves of dust coated pine trees and headed towards Chemult. I drove several miles before arriving at the small town where my grandparents had operated their business. Their small grocery store had opened to the public from the front. They had lived in the back, entering the store whenever a customer opened the door, striking bells hung to alert them to the visit.

We parked in front of the small store built of wooden planks once painted white with red shutters.

“Wow. It sure looks different.” I said. My sister nodded. We looked at the two story façade built of graying boards. The second story served as a bulletin board for product advertisements. The windows held even more placards for items sold inside. It was a chaotic mess. I remembered the windows of my youth. They had held neon signs advertising beer and nothing more.

“Let’s go inside.” My husband said.

We walked through the door, announced by an electronic beep. The nostalgic smell of the old Red and White filled my nostrils. Unfinished wooden floorboards and Red Man tobacco still permeated the store.

“Do you remember how the store was set up?” I turned to my sister.

“Not really,” she answered. “Do you?”

“Yeah.” I pointed to the southwest corner of the store. “They built a wall there and installed coolers. That used to be where Grandma and Grandpa entered the store from their kitchen. The counter and register was there.”

I took my sister and husband on a tour of the small store, describing the set up I remembered. A clerk behind the register listened to my dialog while waiting on customers.

I got in line so I could talk to her. “My grandparents used to own this store when I was a child,” I told her. “We’re visiting our roots. Is there any way we could look in the back?”

She smiled. “Sure.” She asked a coworker to mind the register and volunteered to give us a walking tour.

“The bathroom is in the same place.” I said, noting the updates. The shower stall had been removed and an antique dresser holding live plants sat in its place. The toilet was now installed on a wide platform.

The clerk stepped into the long walkway to the back of the house. “This is the cooler.”

“This used to be my grandpa’s bedroom. I think he died here.” I said to her.

“Wow.” She said. “This room is haunted. We’ve seen a man standing here. We have a clerk who is kind of lazy. She’s told us that she’s heard noises during her shift. We think that he doesn’t like laziness.”

The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I believed her. When I was 10 years old, my grandpa died. He appeared to me in a lucid dream, scared, reaching his arms out to me and calling my name. The third time he called my name, he started to rotate with the spinning vortex behind him. He was sucked into the vortex, still calling my name. I knew he had died, frightened and resisting his death. It made sense that he was still at the Red and White. I told the clerk about my childhood dream.

The clerk walked us to the back of the house. “This is the storeroom,” she said.

“Oh my God!” I said. “Our school pictures used to hang there forty years ago!” I pointed to an area on the back wall. The wood had darkened with time, except for five rows of three by five inch rectangles. I looked on the north wall of the room and spotted a light irregular shape. “The deer head used to hang there!”

The deer head had been a four point buck that my grandpa shot. It weighed 345 pounds and the meat was so tough even the dogs couldn’t eat it. Its rack measured one inch wider than a regulation doorway. It was the only deer head my grandpa had ever mounted.

A train rumbled by and the house began to shake and rattle. “When I was three, I was sleeping on the couch, under the deer head. A train went by and rattled it right off the wall. I woke up to the deer’s horns straddling my head on either side of my ears, its eyes staring into mine. It scared me and I screamed. The room filled with my parents and grandparents. They all made such a fuss that I started crying. They finally calmed me down with the promise of ice cream from the store.” I recounted the memory to the clerk.

I pointed out all the changes I could recall to the clerk. She seemed genuinely interested. She told me she really loved the store and hoped to buy it one day. She told me there was a memorial garden on the east side of the store. We were welcome to visit it.

My sister and I went out to see the garden. The plaque nailed to the ancient pine commemorated a Viet Nam veteran, the son of the family who had bought the store from my grandma. The blue and yellow flowers in the garden spilled their fragrance into the air, attracting bees. My sister and I sat on a bench in front of the plaque.

“Can you believe that?” I said. “I was hoping he would appear to me. He did when he died.” I remembered how scared he was. “I just want to know he’s alright.”

“Me too,” said my sister.

Three loud raps echoed through the side yard, startling birds into flight. I looked at my sister. We glanced toward the small rectangular window just under the eaves. “I guess your hubby wants you to go back into the store,” she said.

We stood up, stretched and walked back around to the front of the store. As we opened the door, my husband walked out and handed us a soda.

“What were you knocking for?” I asked.

“I didn’t knock,” he said.

“Who knocked? Was it the clerk?” I asked.

“I didn’t hear a knock. What are you talking about?” he answered.

My sister’s mouth dropped open and her eyes widened.

“Wait.” I said.

I popped my head into the store, locked eyes with the clerk, and asked, “Did you just knock on the window?”

As I glanced at the window, I noticed the large rack of commodities in front of it. Someone would have to climb the rack to reach the window. I looked back at the clerk.

“No. Why?” she asked.

“Uh, I heard knocking.” I said, feeling stupid for saying it. “Did you hear it?”

“Oh!” she gasped. “No. Our haunt, your grandpa always knocks three times when he makes noises.”

I grinned and nudged my sister. “I guess he was letting us know he’s okay.” I felt calm, loved, and relaxed. My hardworking, no nonsense grandpa was still managing the store he loved from the other side.

“I want to get some pictures,” I told my sister. She and I pulled out our cameras. My husband turned on his video camera. It was no use. All of our batteries had died.

My Dad Has A Brain Tumor And It's Inoperable

I drove my father to his doctor’s new office, yesterday, for a general checkup. We talked about the wooden beams bracing the ceiling and the glass block walls in front of the reception area as we waited. Everything seemed to be alright. After a lengthy wait in the lobby, the nurse called him in, weighed him, and showed him to an examination room where she asked him to get up on the exam table.

“DAD, DO YOU WANT TO SIT IN THIS CHAIR? MOM SAT IN A CHAIR WHEN SHE WAS HERE.” I said loudly. My father can’t hear out of his left ear and has impaired hearing in his right ear.

“Nah. She said ‘the table,’” he answered.

Once my 78 year old father shakily perched himself on the table, the nurse told him that he needed to have his Coumadin levels checked. She pricked his finger, put the blood on a test strip and waited for the results.

I asked, “What’s a Coumadin?”

She looked at me and said, “It’s his blood thinner medicine. We have to check his blood every month.” She looked sideways at my father and winked. “JOE HAS NOT BEEN TOO GOOD ABOUT THAT,” she said loud enough for him to hear. He smiled.

I said, “We’ll have to change that.”

She continued, “If his blood gets too thin, he could hemorrhage. If it’s too thick, he could have a stroke. Aaaand…,” as the test unit beeped, she looked at the test strip, “It looks good. Keep his dosage the same.”

“Okay.” I replied.

She wrote the information into his chart, and then looked up at my father, waiting on the edge of the exam table, “DOCTOR WILL BE IN TO SEE YOU IN A LITTLE BIT.”

While we waited, my father strained to look out the window. The window shade was the type that closed from the bottom to the top. It covered the lower half of the window, blocking the view of everything, but the grey, overcast sky. I walked over and adjusted it, so he could see the trees covered in yellow, orange and red foliage and the birds practicing their flight south.

The doctor came in, said hello and checked my father’s chart.

“HOW ARE YOU DOING?” he asked my father. He nodded to me.

“Oh, okay,” my father answered.

“WELL, TODAY WE’RE GOING TO TAKE BLOOD FOR YOUR CEA.”

“What’s a CEA?” I asked the doctor.

“It stands for cancer embryonic antigen. It’ll tell us where the colon cancer has gone.”

I took notes as he spoke.

He turned back to my father. “ARE YOU GETTING A FLU SHOT?”

“Yes! I almost forgot about that,” answered my father.

The doctor checked the chart once more. “THEN I’LL GIVE YOU THE PNEUMONIA VACCINE, TOO. IT’S DUE.”

My father nodded.

The doctor stood up. “THE NURSE WILL BE IN TO POKE YOU,” he nodded to my father, then to me. He handed me a lab sheet that had itemized procedures listed on it. He had circled the items for my father’s treatment plan.

My father adjusted his seating and grimaced. “I gotta… get off …this table. My legs…they’ll lock up,” he said.

He slid forward and eased off the table. He walked to the window and looked out at the new construction going up just west of the doctor’s office. He walked around the small room and looked at the autographed and numbered duck prints mounted on the walls. The expression on his face said he wanted to be anywhere but in that room.

The nurse opened the door and entered the examination room. She took the lab sheet and read the doctor’s orders.

“I’M GONNA POKE YOU A LOT TODAY.” She said to my father. She set up for a blood draw.

I said, “YOUR BIG VEINS MUST MAKE IT EASY TO GIVE BLOOD.”

My father answered, “That’s what they say. Then they go to take blood and find out they roll. They think I have good weins….Damn!”

“VEINS?” I prompted.

He nodded and didn’t talk very much after that. After his blood draw, two vaccinations, and the nurse’s promise to call with the results of the CEA test next week, he was in a hurry to leave. I had to stop him from walking out of the office while I made his next appointment.

On the way home, I said, “LOOK AT THE COLORS OF THE TREES. THOSE RED LEAVES ARE SO BEAUTIFUL. IT’S WONDERFUL TO SEE THE SEASONS. WE DON’T GET THAT IN SAN DIEGO. IT’S ONE SEASON ALL YEAR ROUND.”

“It’s as good as….it’s as good as…,” my father stammered, then stopped.

I turned slowly to look at him, as I drove. He looked scared. He raised his hands, palms up, in front of him as if to say, “I don’t know what’s wrong.”

I asked, “ARE YOU HAVING TROUBLE TALKING?”

He nodded, then looked down towards his lap. He slouched in resignation. His ruddy complexion paled. His eyes watered, yet his jaw tightened in defiance. He still had fight in him.

“IT’LL COME BACK.” This had happened once before.

He looked really scared. This man, who fought his last bar fight in his 60’s, who outran cops rather than be apprehended, and who ruled his kids and his wife with an iron hand, was helpless against the tumor growing on the left side of his brainstem...the side that controlled language. I took him home and fed him. He ate silently and then took a nap.

After his nap, he began to speak, again, although slowly. “I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t understand what people were saying. I still can’t see right. It’s like being cross eyed.”

Later that night, he told me he had a horrible headache. I knew the tumor had been growing, putting pressure on his brainstem, causing the speech dysfunction and the pain.

“DO YOU WANT A VICODIN?” I asked.

“What’s that?” I give him Vicodin twice a day for pain management. Hospice has prescribed them for the pain his cancer causes. The prescription says I can give him up to three pills, twice a day.

“IT’S FOR PAIN.”

“Yeah, I’ll have one of those,” he said.

I gave him one and he went to bed. Later, I woke him for his last set of medications and asked him how his headache was.

“I must have slept it off,” he answered. He took his medicine and quickly went back to sleep.

My father has said that he felt he would die on his 79^th birthday. It’s in two days. I’m hoping that when he goes it’s with clarity of mind, so he can hear me tell him to save me a place on the other side.

The Hospice Card: What Will I tell Her When He's Gone?

“What’s that green card?” my mother asks. She is diabetic and has Alzheimer’s.

“What?” asks my father. He is deaf in one ear and has impaired hearing in the other.

“The green card…” she says softly at first and then, “THE GREEN CARD!”

“What green card?” my father asks.

“It says Mercy Hospice,” she prompts.

The card in question is taped to a list of emergency numbers and attached to the wall next to the calendar. It tells the hours of operation of Mercy Hospice for weekdays from 5:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. and after hours, weekends and holidays. It gives phone numbers for each time frame and says to ask for the nurse on call. The card is for my dad. He has a cancerous tumor on his brain stem. The doctor’s gave him 5 ½ months to live 6 ½ months ago.

“Hot spice?” he says, teasing my mother with his favorite vernacular for Hospice. He likes word games.

“Hospice. HOSPICE!” My mother says the words slowly and loudly. “What is it for?”

My father gets up from the couch, and shakily walks across the living room to the calendar wall. He nearsightedly fumbles with the various papers and cards taped to the wall around the calendar.

“Green. GREEN!” barks my mother. “Why is it there?”

“Hot spice.” My father says as he finds the neon green card.

In a split second, he makes a decision to spare his forgetful wife of 55 years the truth of the matter. It brings tears to my eyes as I stand in the kitchen, cooking breakfast for them.

“I don’t know.” he says, “You expect me to know everything?”

“Well, that’s why I MARRIED YOU. Now, you DISAPPOINT ME.” She says teasingly, punctuating the last two words of every sentence by yelling them, a recent symptom of her Alzheimer’s.

I swallow the lump in my throat. Even though she is teasing like she always has, the message is hurtful when put in perspective. He doesn’t tell her so he can save her from hurt. She says the thing that hurts, because she is unaware of his dire situation.

And I wonder what I will tell her when he is gone.