Sacred and Soiled

Sacred and Soiled

By: Christie Leigh

It started like all the worst stories do-with a shout from the other room: “I’ve got to poop!”

“Granddaddy, NO!” I screamed. “Please don’t do this to me.”

“It’s not safe to hold back when you’re old!” he barked.

I ran into the kitchen gagging. “Ewwwww.” I grabbed the phone and called my Mom. “Mom! You’ve got to come home NOW!”

“What’s wrong? Oh my God. Is Ginger ok? What happened? Is she breathing? Is she alive?”

“Ginger is fine,” I said. “I am not. Granddaddy said he’s gonna poop! You’ve got to come home!”

“Come home?” she answered as if I had just asked her if she had ever heard of a pill that turned a hippo’s hair green. “Christie, I’ve got 15 patients sitting in the waiting room and four in rooms. Do NOT call me again unless someone is dying,” and she hung up. I immediately called back. She answered, knowing it was me. “WHAT????”

“What time is Laney coming?” (Laney was his babysitter and my next door neighbor and she looked like one of the blonde haired blue eyed models you see posing in men’s magazines).

“She should be there at 3:00” she said.

“But it’s 4:15. Mom PLEASE” I begged.

“GOOD BYE!” she growled with a whisper and hung up.

“Cwistie!” Granddaddy hollered! You better get in here! You can’t leave me like this!”

When I entered the bedroom, there lay Granddaddy rolled on his side with a sheet, heating blanket, and wool coat over his head. His body was sinking into his bones which perfectly replicated a one-legged skeleton. What was left of one leg perpendicular to the other stuck out like a withered stump wrapped in leather. He was facing me. He had undone his diaper and reconnected the tape on either side of his stomach, which had collected into a blob of skin on heavily soiled sheets. There my Granddaddy lay in a diaper overflowing like a toddler with a stomach virus.

I remembered how dignified he looked, standing before the congregation in his grey suit and tie and how everyone lined up to shake his hand as they left the sanctuary. Now, here he lay dying in a t-shirt and diaper in my old bedroom. No one lined up to see him anymore.

“Get the wipes!” he demanded.

“I reached across the side table, grabbed the container of wipes that sat next to his Bible and glasses, and pitched the wipes in his general direction.

“There” I said and ran back out of the wood-paneled room and holding my nose.

“Get back in here! I can’t wipe my own backside!” he barked and pushed the wipes in my direction.

“Granddaddy!” I barked back. “I can’t wipe your butt! There’s poop all over you!”

“You’ve got to!” he yelped and began unpeeling the mushy diaper from his skin.

I grabbed an enormous handful of wipes, covered my nose with my top lip, and started cleaning. “There,” I said. “I think I’m done.”

“Not yet,” he said. “Put some pepper on me!”

“Pepper?” I said. “What in the world are you talking about?”

“Right there,” he said and pointed to a container of baby powder on the t.v.

“That’s not pepper; that’s powder,” I said, and squeezed a puff of powder on his butt, put two Kroger bags over my hands, rolled up the old diaper, and hastened on the new one. “There. Done.” I said with confidence.

“That was awful,” he said. “Laney is much better at that than you.”

“Well,” I said, “Laney’s not… and we heard the doorknob turn in the kitchen.

“I’m here!” Laney called out.

“Thank the Lord,” Granddaddy said under his breath and called back, “Laney! Get in here girl!”

“Sorry I’m late,” Laney said, setting down a bag from Starbucks. “I brought your favorite muffins-couldn’t remember if you liked chocolate or the birdseed one, so I got both.”

“Where’s yours?” I asked.

She laughed. “Girl, I can’t eat that many calories.”

Granddaddy yelled from the bedroom, “That’s why Laney has such a nice figure. You know if you would stop eating so much and went to the gym a few times a week, you could look more like Laney!”

I ignored them both.

“What about me?” Granddaddy hollered from the bedroom.

“I’ll be right there!” Laney replied.

We heard some papers shuffling before a big huff. Then he said in a loud whisper, “I got some dirty pictures in here I want to show you!”

I froze. Laney laughed. “He means old missionary photos. If there’s dirt in the background, he calls them ‘dirty picture.’ He thinks he’s hilarious.”

“Gross!” I said. “I’ll put a stop to that right now!”

I was about to blaze into the bedroom and scold him when I heard the screen door in the bedroom open and slam and a loud voice say, “Scoot over old man!” We heard the channels on the TV change and the sound of metal against metal like a cymbal crashing.

“What’s your number today?” the voice said.

“Lucky seven!” Granddaddy shouted.

“Too obvious!” David shot back. “37”

When I stuck my head in the door, there in the bed with my freshly diapered Grandfather was a young man with a head so full of dark wavy hair that he looked like a shampoo model in a men’s magazine. He leaned forward, fluffed and stacked his pillows, then adjusted the bed to the sit up position with a remote control. He stretched out his legs and flopped himself back down on the pillows as if he was about to go to sleep. He wore blue scrubs and a name tag with a red cross and letters too small for me to see. He held a prosthetic leg in his right arm and every time he moved, the metal leg banged into the metal bed frame and made a sound like a cymbal. He was so tall his feet hung a foot off Granddaddy’s full size bed. Shocked, I asked, “Who are you?”

“David. P.T. Do you know if your Mom went to the store? We’re out of Diet Coke.”

“Oh yeah. I remember. I’ll check,” I said and went back to the kitchen.

“He wants a Diet Coke,” I said to Laney. “What are they betting on in there?”

“They watch Deal or No Deal every day. They’re trying to guess which suitcase has the million dollars. Diet Cokes under one of the cabinets,” Laney pointed. “Your Mom stocked up yesterday.”

There are 41 cabinet doors in my Mom’s kitchen, so I started in the general direction Laney pointed and started making my way to the sink. Every cabinet was stuffed to the gills with containers and appliances and mail and a million other random things my mother probably tossed in when she needed a space on the countertop. The next cabinet was stuffed with boxes of letters, photos, and notecards. I lifted a withered box from the cabinet and set it on the countertop. The yellow weathered note cards were held together in stacks with rubber-bands so delicate that the slightest tug on a single card left it crumbling like a dried leaf. Despite their confines, the ink on the cards looked as fresh as if he had just written them yesterday. He always had nice pens. I thought. I remembered how often a member of the congregation had surprised him with a fancy pen at Christmas and birthdays. He always overreacted. “My goodness! What is this? Will you look at that! Ain’t that the nicest pen you ever did see!” He would take the current pen out of his suit pocket and add the new pen, knowing he had a drawer full in his desk drawer.

“Where are they?” I asked as David rolled Granddaddy into the kitchen in a wheelchair.

“Where my drink at Cwistie? I’m thirsty!” Granddaddy said and rolled himself to the cabinets.

“I’ll get it.” Laney said politely and bent over to find the drinks. In a split second, Granddaddy rolled his chair over to Laney and smacked her on the butt. Whack! “I just love it when you wear those white pants!

“Granddaddy!” I shouted. “You’re a preacher!”

“I’m a MAN!” he shouted back and took a big bite out of an onion.

“Brother Todd!” Laney yelped, eyes wide. She looked at me covering her mouth as she laughed and said, “I can’t believe he did that!”

“I cannot believe you just did that,” I said to Granddaddy, my eyes bulging, “And what are you eating?”

“An apple.” He said and held the apple up to show me.

“That’s not an apple! It’s an onion! Granddaddy, you stink!”

“Do not.” He said and rolled back into the bedroom.

David helped Granddaddy back into the bed, let himself out the bedroom door, and as the daylight faded the house grew quiet, and so did we. That’s when I heard him talking.

“I know,” he said. “They come all the way up to the store this morning and left the gate open in the pasture.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Oh, just watching the store for Daddy. He went back to the church to lock the door. I can’t leave. Will you run down to the pasture and shut the gate?”

“Sure,” I said and walked back into the kitchen.

“I’ll be home soon Daddy,” he said, and I realized that in his mind he had gone back to his childhood when his Daddy owned the little store across the street from the church where he and Granddaddy preached.

I sat down at the table and held my head in my hands and remembered one night long ago when Granddaddy took my hand and walked what felt like a mile into the shallow waters of the gulf of Mexico. I must have been five or six. I remembered thinking he was like Jesus walking on water, and I felt a tear drop as I heard him cry out for his daddy who had been dead fifty years or more. One year later, I stood at the pulpit in Granddaddy’s old church, holding one of his yellowed notecards. I read his words, just as he had, in the same slow cadence he used on Sundays. “I remember,” I told them. “I remember all of it. Even the onion.”

And somehow, that felt holy.

The End