When the phone rang, she jumped into action. Mary Francis kept a pad of paper and a good pen on the end table next to the phone so she didn’t have to look around for one. She left instructions with every member of the First Street Apostolic Church Prayer Tree to call her any time day or night.
“Hello? Yes, hello Margie. No, it’s not too late to call. I was just sitting here reading. Yes. Oh really? How long ago? Which hospital? Oh yes, of course. I’ll be there as soon as I can. I just have to get out of my house coat and into some presentable clothes. Ok. Ok. God bless.”
She finished writing as she hung up the phone, and then took a beat to look over her notes scrawled in impeccably neat cursive handwriting. Everyone, from the pastor to the bank clerk, always commented on her neat and beautiful her penmanship. Sometimes she smiled when she thought about the compliments her thank you and condolence cards received, even though t conceit was a sin. Looking over notes, she went through her memory trying to figure out where she knew the name Albert Branson. She mouthed it silently. Albert Branson, Jr. ICU Ward. She set the pad of paper down, walked into the kitchen, and opened the freezer. It was three quarters of the way full of frozen casseroles. She used to make them fresh. But then there was the problem of time, and getting to the store to buy what she needed. Then there was the dish – always having to try and get her casserole dishes back without sounding mean or nagging. Now, she made them in advance in aluminum pans and froze them, so all she’d have to do is take one out and pop it in the oven. Voila, she would think. Martha Stewart had nothing on her.
She chose a nice green bean casserole – her signature dish – and put it in the refrigerator to thaw out. Then she walked to her bedroom to change clothes. The full size bed was covered with piles of clothes that would, at some point, end up going to one of the church charities Mrs. Mary Francis worked with. She used to pile them on the floor, but bending over to pick them up hurt her back. She couldn’t leave them piled on the kitchen table – she needed that space for cooking and for writing out her thank you and condolence cards and for putting together holiday care packages for the less fortunate. The bed was the only place put the clothes.
The couch was just fine, though, thank you very much – and it wasn’t like she needed all that space, anyway. Anyway it kept her close to the phone. In case someone called. And someone always called. Since Norman died, all she did, it seemed, was run to the hospital and collect things for the church. She barely spoke to anybody anymore unless somebody was sick or dying or needing a new coat. The only person she really talked to was her husband. Her husband’s picture, actually. She talked to him everyday. It was a habit; she’d grown so accustomed to talking to him over forty-five years of marriage that one he was dead, she simply kept on. Mary only had a few pictures of him – he absolutely hated getting his picture taken, even if it was just for the church directory – and of those few that one was her favorite: young Norman in his Army uniform. He had the picture taken during the war, and he sent it back to her with one of her letters. She used to have all of his letters, but they were destroyed that summer in ’57 when the entire valley flooded and everything in the shed was soaked through. The loss was a heartbreak for her, of course. In those letters he wrote her from Italy, he told her about his days, what Italy was like. Parts of them were almost poetic. At least, what she thought was poetic. It wasn’t a Hallmark card, but it had its own quality. Its own fineness. And when he finally came home, and they finally got married, Mary expected that he would keep talking. But he talked even less. And at that, he rarely talked above a whisper, even to the children when they were living at home. When he died of the cancer (he smoked filterless cigarettes for years, even after Mary herself had quit) he was sitting in his easy chair, drinking a cup of warm milk and watching a rerun of The Lawrence Welk Show. At least he’d been able to pass on at home, she had told herself and others. At least he didn’t die looking like a pin cushion in some hospital bed.
“Do we know Albert Branson, Jr, Norman?” she asked the picture. It didn’t answer her. He wasn’t smiling in the picture. It was more of a cocky smirk, the way a young man smiles. Sometimes she thought about the young girl she was back then – a giggly young thing. Pretty, too. Jack Masterson had chased her pretty hard – he’d gotten a farm exemption and didn’t fight in the war. But she wasn’t one to cheat, and she promised Norman that she’d wait. “Even if it’s forever” she’d said. And she meant it, too; even if silly Jack Masterson started waiting for her to get off work at the bank so he could walk her home and try to hold her hand.
She stood in front of her closet, looking through her clothes. It was important to choose an outfit that sent the correct message. Nothing too black, of course; there would be time enough for that, and it looked ghoulish. But it couldn’t be too bright and cheerful, either. That tended to put people off when they are coming to terms with the imminent death of a loved one. Mary chose one of her favorite winter outfits – a thick corduroy skirt, long sleeve white blouse, and her wine colored sweater with the floral print – that her daughter Jean bought for her two Christmases ago. Jean, she thought. Does Jean know an Albert Branson, Jr.? She couldn’t remember the name from when her daughter went to school. It was late, or she’d call Jean; and Jean had to be at work early. Working extra because that no account husband of hers left. Mary told her daughter to marry somebody from the church; if not THEIR church, then any church. But she’d married some boy she met in college, instead. Mary had been proud of her daughter when she had gone to school; but now she realized that the place had ruined her. She ran off and fell into temptation… came back with a TATTOO, purple hair, and a bunch of outfits that made her look like a New York City hooker. (Mary had never been to New York but she watched enough police shows to know she didn’t need to go just to get mugged and raped and maybe murdered.) What was worse was when Mary learned that her new son-in-law was JEWISH. Norman didn’t say anything about it, though, so Mary kept her silence and her opinion to herself and to Norman.
She shook her head and refocused on the task at hand. Her mind was wandering more than it used to; though she supposed that was just old age. “Albert Branson Jr. There weren’t any Bransons at the church. She hoped it wasn’t a child; it just about broke her heart when children died. It wasn’t as common as it used to be, and whenever it did happen, it was always something tragic. Like the Miller boy, who was swimming in a creek and decided to dive in to impress some girl – she couldn’t remember the girl’s name, but she remembered hearing she was wearing a skimpy little bikini that didn’t leave anything to the imagination. No wonder, she’d told herself and others, that the boy went and did something dumb. He jumped in head first, shattered his neck bone, and drown.
Going to the hospital made her feel useful. It was an important service, she thought, to gently remind people near death that there was an afterlife. That they had to be Right With God. People, she knew, got all tied up with life and everyday things, and they forgot about their God. Norman had been like that, too. After Norman died, she dove straight into her church work: gathering the clothes for charity. Then getting on the Prayer Tree. Then she talked to Pastor Roberts and he put her on the Grief and Funeral Committee. She’d tried to get put on the Baptismal Committee, too, but Pastor Roberts told her that might be unfair to other people in the church who wanted to serve. (Even though, she noted to herself, there was an empty spot on the committee until Nora Richards agreed to do it after her husband was finally saved.)
Besides, after Norman died she understood she had a calling. It came to her suddenly in the middle of the night. She was sitting up on the couch, watching some late night infomercial about skin cream – one of those things that was supposed to erase the years and make you look younger. She was sitting there telling Norman’s picture about how it was vanity, pure and simple, and that the problem with those women was they were in Hollywood and never went to church. No one in Hollywood went to church as far as she could tell. Just look, she told herself and others. Look at the kind of movies they make nowadays. It’s not a movie unless some girl takes her clothes off or somebody gets killed in some bloody and horrible way. She considered it a shame, too, because she used to love going to the movies. It was the one treat she used to allow herself while Norman was overseas. She loved going to the movies and seeing all the glamorous women in the flowing gowns and the men dressed up in their suits and snappy looking hats. Everybody danced and the endings were always happy. She didn’t even mind when Jack Masterson sat next to her and tried to get fresh; she slapped him away and went back to watching her movie. She couldn’t think of the title. She could swear, though, that it had Van Johnson in it. Or maybe not.
Thinking about those things always made her sad; so Mary did was she always did when she was sad. She read her bible and prayed. The insomnia was bad back then, which was why she was awake at such a late hour. She hadn’t slept a full night through for six months after Norman passed. She read her bible and prayed that God would let her sleep.
About twenty minutes later, the phone rang. At first, she wasn’t going to answer it; but she thought it might be Jean. When she picked up, it was Margie, her branch in the Prayer Tree. Jack Masterson – her husband – had fallen off his roof trying to fix the shingles – which he had no business doing at his age, anyway – and he’d broken his back. The doctors thought he was probably going to die between his age and the internal injuries, and Margie begged her to come to the hospital and sit with her. She didn’t know what to do, she said. The doctors were telling her one thing, but she didn’t know what to think, and would she just come and listen and be another set of ears and keep her company? Without missing a beat, Mary Francis told Margie she’d be there, stood up, got dressed, and was at the hospital on the ICU ward. Normally, nobody but family was allowed, but the night nurse was a member of the church (event though she sometimes worked on Sundays, anyway.) And there was broken up old Jack Masterson, lying in his hospital bed, dying. The doctors were telling Margie that there was very little they could do. If they operated on him, the trauma would probably kill him. If they didn’t operate, he was probably going to die, anyway.
Margie was inconsolable. “What do I do, Mary?” she asked through her tears. “I’ve prayed and prayed and prayed, and I still don’t know what to do. The only thing I could think of was to call you. Jack always said you were the most pious woman he’d ever known.”
That made Mary blush, just a little. “We ought to pray over him again,” Mary answered. “And we’ll pray until something happens.”
And they prayed. And prayed. The nurses had never seen so much praying; one of them, who wasn’t in the church, was so moved she cried and prayed along with them. They prayed loud and they prayed hard. They sang hymns. They quoted Psalms.
An hour later, Jack Masterson died. But two other patients on the ICU ward started to improve. One of them ended up leaving a week later and lived another two months. That was when Mary made the connection, and her calling was born. From then on, whenever somebody was near death, they called her and did the Calling Back. This was especially important if the people weren’t right with the Lord. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. But it had given her something else to do. And from then on, she slept soundly every night, unless the phone rang.
Mary checked that she had her car keys and her bible. It was the family bible – the one that had hers and Norman’s and Jean’s and the grandchildren’s names listed in them. The corners were worn thin from use and the binding was coming apart. She turned to Norman’s picture. “I’ll be back soon, she said to Norman’s picture. The picture didn’t respond. She grabbed her coat, bundled up against the winter cold outside, and opened the door. The rush of cold wind surprised her a little, and made her drop her keys. When she bent down to pick them up, she realized she was wearing slick bottom shoes that might cause her to slip on the ice and snow between the house and her car; then she turned around to go back in and put on more appropriate shoes when the wind gusted again, caught her bible, caused it to fall in the snow bank next to the porch. When she reached down to pick it up, she slipped and fell head first off the porch.
Gilda, she thought. The name of that movie was Gilda. After that, she thought nothing at all.
