The Eyewitness

     She was always the rock - the one that the family could lean on for strength and wisdom about, well just about everything. 

      She always knew where to find the best watering hole to catch all kinds of bass, the best meadows where perennial wildflowers, including Aster and Milkweed grew, where colorful butterflies clustered that the kids could catch with a net.  And she knew the best trails for hiking and birdwatching, which were her very favorite things to do. 

She could always sew and knit and crochet and mend the kids’ clothes with the best of them. 

And cook – well, she could outcook anybody. Her apple pie recipe with its super-secret ingredients always won First or Second Prize every year at the county and state fairs. And she had the blue ribbons to prove it.

      Her house always smelled of that apple pie or chocolate chip cookies or fresh baked bread. Her kids and then her grandkids and their friends could always count on her to have those freshly baked cookies and cold milk ready and waiting after school. 

It almost made school worthwhile just to know those ooey, gooey chocolatey cookies would be a kid’s reward at the end of the day of learning multiplication tables and long division. 

By the way, when would a kid ever need to know long division when you’re up in a tree house hiding from your kid brother or sister and fending off the bad guys from stealing your horses or rustling the cattle? 

But she always knew where we kids were and would come and yell for us to come down. And how she could yell! The kids knew when she used “that voice” that you had better come running to dinner right now or pay the consequences!  

      But those happy, carefree days were gone now.

      No more cooking apple pies and chocolate chip cookies. No more sewing new little pink Easter dresses with fancy lace around the collar and hem for the girls or  little white shirts with a little bow tie for the boys.

These days she spent her time in a wheelchair, hour after hour staring out the big picture window at the front of the institution that was now her home.

      Her kids and grandkids had long since moved away and rarely came to visit, except on holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas Eve once in a while.

      She was silent now, too. That booming authoritative voice had been silenced a couple of years ago by that dreaded disease. 

But she could still see well enough.

So she just watched and waited.

      It was spring now and colorful birds of all kinds would come in flocks to eat from the birdfeeders and splash in the birdbaths. At least three different species of hummingbirds came to the feeders that the staff kept filled with bright red sugar water.

      She loved to see the birds chatter and fight for a spot at the birdfeeders. That was really the only activity she enjoyed these days.

      Oh, the staff always tried to get her involved in other activities, such as arts, crafts, knitting or even painting. But she had no interest anymore. 

But she had a secret. She had her own activity.

      And she just watched and waited.

      She watched the birds and the visitors and the doctors and the nurses. There was such a variety of activity and comings and goings that sometimes she got dizzy just watching!

      Almost every day, she would see ambulances drive up to the side of the building, which was the emergency entrance to the facility. 

The big strong strapping young men who sometimes were dressed in blue pullover shirts wearing big funny looking baggy pants with suspenders and large clunky boots would ease out a stretcher from the back of the ambulance. 

Even in her state, she pondered who that poor person was stretched out on the gurney. Would their family come to see them? Would their grown kids come bringing their own screaming children with them? Or would they just become another lonely, featureless resident of the facility. 

She wondered. And she watched and waited.

      It was a particularly bright and sunny day with lots of activity and people and ambulances. Lots of ambulances.

      Usually one or two, maybe three came in one day. But today there were four, no wait, five came, five, as she counted on her fingers all the big red ambulances with bright shiny silver things on the side of the truck. They drove in and out all day dropping off their human cargo.

      And today she did something different. She reached into the pocket of her old tattered cooking apron. She still wore that old apron every day, just in case someone asked her to bake a batch of her famous chocolate chip cookies. She would be ready she thought. But no one ever asked.

But now, she pulled out a small plastic rectangular box with a strap from her tattered apron’s pocket. It was a Kodak Star 110 Point and Shoot camera.   

It was one of the few possessions, other than a few clothes, that she had brought with her to the nursing home. It was like a trusted friend with a perfect memory.

   Over the years, it had captured pictures of her husband, their little ranch house, the horses, the cattle, the birds native to their area, their dozen or so dogs and of course, their four kids, and their assorted little friends. Then soon enough, their rambunctious grand kids’ antics were all captured by that amazing little camera.

As each ambulance came this particular day, she took a picture as each of the patients was removed from the back of the ambulance. She held the vintage camera up to her eye and clicked. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.

And then she slipped the little camera back into her tattered apron pocket after taking each picture.

And she watched and waited.

She wasn’t trying to capture a once-in-a-lifetime photo of a beloved relative for a special place in their family photo album, she was trying to capture the moment, the action. Something wasn’t right to her. Even in her weakened state, she saw something.

Even though there was a seeming constant parade of different ambulances today, the same EMT attendant was on every ambulance, pulling out each unfortunate patient. As each one was removed, that one young man seemed to linger over the vulnerable patient just a little bit longer than the rest of his fellow rescuers did.

So she continued to watch and wait.

      Today, after the nurse rolled her over to her usual spot in front of the big picture window, she motioned for the nurse to bring her the newspaper. She pointed to a stack sitting on the table just out of her reach. 

The nurse said in an unrecognizable accent, “You vant me to bring you newspaper?” 

She nodded emphatically. The nurse was surprised by the request, but willingly brought the newspaper stack over to the old lady.

The old lady in the wheel chair could still see and read very well. No one even suspected she could read, much less comprehend the day’s news and headlines.

As she scanned the first section, she found what she was looking for. The headline read, “City Nursing Home Records Another Death.” The subhead read, “Twelfth Death in Just 3 Months Confounds Local Authorities.” 

She read the article and it said that deaths in a nursing facility were, of course, to be expected. But the patients all seemed to die mysteriously. Theirs was a facility of old people, not chronically ill people.

She put down the paper and looked out the window just as another ambulance drove up to the emergency room door.

And she watched and waited.

The old lady in the wheelchair motioned for the attending nurse to come over to her.

“Yes,” the sweet looking young nurse said. “Do you vant somethink? Are you hungary?” the nurse said in her now familiar foreign accent. 

The old lady reached into the tattered old pocket of her tattered old apron and pulled out the vintage camera. She pointed to the camera and motioned to the nurse to open the film compartment. The nurse opened the compartment and a small roll of undeveloped film fell into the nurse’s hand.

The old lady motioned for a pencil that was lying on the table next to that stack of newspapers. The nurse handed it to the old lady who scribbled a note with a very shaky hand that she wanted the film to be developed. “I want to see these pictures,” is all the old lady could manage to scribble.

The nurse understood the note. “Okay, I vill hafe the feelm made for you. It may take vhile, though, this is really old camera and vee’ll have to find place that steell develop this type feelm,” said the young nurse with the foreign accent.

The old lady smiled. 

And she turned back to the window and she watched and waited.

After a few weeks and just when the old lady thought they must have lost her film, the young foreign nurse brought her a colorful envelope.

“Here are peectures for you!” the nurse said.

The patient opened the envelope’s flap and pulled out the photos. She looked carefully at each one. 

There were pictures of a bluebird, a cardinal, a hummingbird at the feeder, a young male doctor, a small child splashing in the birdfeeder. 

Then pictures of each patient that day as they were removed from the back of each ambulance came next. And there was the same young man as he lingered over his patient. The same scenario was portrayed as she flipped through each picture.

That little vintage camera had captured that ambulance attendant as he placed his big strong hand over the mouth and nose of each unconscious patient as the helpless victim was waiting to be wheeled inside the facility five different times.

She had captured the moment, the action as she watched and waited day after day.

      The old lady motioned for the nurse to again come over to her. The nurse did as she was instructed.

      “Yes?” the nurse asked. “Vhat I do for you?”

      The patient pointed to the picture and to the ambulance technician’s hand which plainly showed it was covering the nose and mouth of the helpless person on the gurney.

      The nurse gasped and ran to get someone.

      Soon the nurse returned with the head administrator of the facility. “You look, you look at peectures,” she exclaimed pointing at the photos in the old lady’s hand. The administrator looked at the first picture and then the next picture and then the next. With each picture his eyes grew wider and the expression on his face grew more concerned.

      He took the photos from the old lady’s hand and he hurried back to his office yelling to his secretary to call the police right now! 

      The old lady could hear the administrator on his phone and talking in a very loud scared voice. The old lady could only hear parts of the conversation, but she did hear him say, “Yes, yes there are pictures and you can see his hand over their mouth…” and the voice was muffled and trailed off.

      The old lady smiled widely to herself and then she turned back to the window, patted the vintage camera in her old tattered apron’s pocket and she watched and waited.