Hold The Line

At eleven-thirty on Vera Power's last night at the switchboard, the Thompsons are the only people left on the line. Vera wipes her hands on her apron, takes a breath, then lifts the receiver. “Busy as all get-out tonight,” says the unmistakable voice of Blanche Thompson. “Don’t look like they’re going to miss you one bit, do it?”

Vera doesn’t answer. She serves herself a drink at the refrigerator, right from the bottle. She doesn’t remember doing it, that’s the funny thing. Tamaracks blow in the wind. The rain on leaves sounds like a herd of bears.

A minute to midnight she takes the last call, puts her palms flat on the counter. “We are going out pretty soon,” says Gary Rogers. “You want us to swing by and pick you up? Have you one last party?” Vera sees the let the queers burn in Hell arcing over the switchboard, the crossed-off buttons for Vera I The Neighbor The Outside Person.

Vera prays Gary can’t hear the voice on her end, the voice tearing out and out of the wires. “No,” she tries to say, but sobs are clogging up her throat, crying unheard. “No, no, no,” she whispers, crying herself breathless.

It's eleven-forty when the hardware store calls about a delivery that won't come till Thursday and Vera puts Frank through and thinks: Probably the last time I put Frank through to anybody. She doesn't say it. She says, "Go ahead, Frank, you're connected," then lets him go, and the clock on the wall takes its time and then some.

On Choctaw Street, in the house with the blue shutters, Ruth Ann has been beside her father's bed since suppertime, and the supper's getting cold on a tray near the window because neither one of them has eaten. Her father's breath has gone all papery, in and out, in and out, and the doctor came at six o'clock and said what the doctors always say when they put things nice and easy, and Ruth Ann still hasn't called her brother. She keeps thinking about it, then standing up and not making the call.

"You better call Del," the old man says, his eyes still shut, the words scraping their way out of his throat like gravel through a busted septic tank.

"I will."

"I'll say it a fourth, if I have to."

He laughs, or does his best with it, and it cracks into a cough that lasts longer than either of them wants it to. When it stops he says, "Your mother claimed last call was the barkeep's way of seeing if you had enough manners to leave on your own." He smiles without opening his eyes. "I always reckoned that was just about the nicest thing anyone ever said about drinking."

"You've told me that every year of my life."

"Reckon it could be the last I'll have the chance to." He coughs, and raises his hand when she moves to get up. "I ain't being morbid. I'm being honest." The man peers at her then, his eyes the color of creekwater, and for a moment he is no longer dying or old or even her father but a predator, an otter or a mink. "Call your brother, Ruth Ann. Not for me. For yourself. You don't want to carry this stone."

Vera could transmit this. There's a method for this, a slower method, where you wait for the information first, then the plug-in, and it should indeed be a few minutes there and Ruth Ann.

Vera certainly knows the voice, it's the Pruitt girl and still she's not kin to Vera but a name from church suppers and the feed store, will have to wait, but there's something loose-grained about that voice, something unraveling in it, that causes Vera to patch the board more urgently than she has in years, more urgently than her hands have any right to at fifty-eight, trying to tape an information lead, murmuring, waiting, taping again, and all the while the big wall clock moving its gray arm toward midnight and the first instant when none of this; the plugs, the cords, the woman saying hold the line, honey — will be here in its place, all of it done by a machine instead and not caring that there's a man on Choctaw Street who's beginning to go short on breath.

"Got him," Vera says. "You're through. Hush, don't lose the connection."

She could disconnect now. It's the job. Connect them and step away, let the wires carry what's private between the people they belong to. But Vera leaves her hand resting near the cord a moment longer than she needs to, some old animal instinct telling her not to let go of this one so fast, and in that moment she hears Ruth Ann say, "Del, it's me, you need to come," and hears a man's voice, tinny and far off, ask what's wrong, and hears Ruth Ann say the word Daddy in a way that answers the question entirely.

Vera pulls the cord. It isn't hers to keep listening to. She sits back in her chair, and for the first time in thirty-one years feels the peculiar weight of everything these wires have carried through her hands — arguments, proposals, birth announcements, a hundred thousand small mercies and cruelties, all of it passing through her palms like water through a sieve, none of it ever hers, all of it, in some way, hers.

Midnight comes and with it the lights on the board downtown go dark, one by one, not all at once the way you thought but gradually, the town’s voices switching over to whatever comes after whispers and sighs.

You sit very still in your room and listen, surprised by a sound so foreign. A woman stands among her garden, raked and mulch-spread, listening to a quiet the garden’s never known in thirty-one springs.

Ruth Ann goes back to the bedside, having said all you can say into the telephone receiver, and still the breathing gets more faint, and she finds she’s glad for the excuse to take his hand, which is as cool and light as a bird’s foot, and hold it, and not let go.

For there’s nothing else you can do really, is there? Nothing but not leave him (you feel this now) and that’s what you meant without knowing it, what you hoped for — this dark room, the two hands, the lamp low.