18 A Tragic Ordeal
I
I come now to the tragic, the almost unbearable part of my story. Craig had been overworking and overworrying, for many years. Nobody could stop her; when there was something to be done she did it, because she was the one who knew how to do it. She had got so that she no longer wanted a servant. We had moved about so much.
Also, there was the smog. The growth of industry in Los Angeles, especially of the oil industry, had become tremendous; the fumes were brought our way by the sea breeze, and they settled around the mountain that went up directly back of our home. Everybody talked about smog, and even the newspapers had to discuss it, bad as it was for business.
So, in the spring of 1954, we moved again; this time to the Arizona desert, as far away from industry as possible. Phoenix was where Hunter lived, and he could come to help us. We found a cottage, and Hunter had a seven-foot concrete wall put around the lot. Those four boxes that had been built for storerooms, and which had been transported from Pasadena to Monrovia, were now transported from Monrovia to Buckeye, and set down in a row with an extra roof over them for coolness. One was to be my workroom, and the others were to hold my stock of books. I still could not get away from book orders.
Craig worked as she had always done, unsparing of her strength. In the middle of the night she called to me, terrified—she could not breathe. Lying down asleep, she had almost choked, and to get her breath she had to sit up. There were two doctors in the town, and I called one. He told us she had an enlarged heart, and it was due to overexertion: what she had now was a “congestive” heart attack. The heart was no longer equal to pumping the blood out of the lungs, and she had to sit up in order that part of her lungs could be clear.
So there we were, in a strange place, both of us possessed by dread. A specialist was brought from Phoenix, and he confirmed the diagnosis. “The patient should be taken to a hospital.” She was taken to Phoenix and treated for a couple of weeks, and she got a little better; but the specialist gave us no hope.
She was brought back to our Buckeye home, and I had her sole care. I had her care for the next seven years, and there were few days when we did not confront the thought of her doom.
II
I came upon an article about a treatment for such heart conditions advocated by Dr. Walter Kempner of Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina. I wired asking for literature, and there came a copy of a magazine published in Los Angeles called G.P., meaning “General Practice.” It gave an account of Kempner’s treatment, and included x-ray photographs of hearts before and after treatment. The difference was striking, and I made up my mind that Craig was going to have Dr. Kempner’s rice-and-fruit diet. (His belief is that the cause of the heart enlargement is excess of salt in the blood, and rice is the all-nourishing food that has the lowest quantity of salt).
It was out of the question to move Craig to North Carolina. I phoned to a physician we knew in Riverside and asked if he would give the rice diet according to Kempner’s specifications. He said, “I will do it if you will take the responsibility.” Then he gave a little laugh and added, “If you will take half.” I said, “I will take all.” I arranged for a hospital plane to take us to Riverside next morning.
She didn’t want to go, but for once she was too weak to resist, and I was in a position to have my way. We had to make an early start because we had mountains to fly over, and when the sun was up the rising air would make turbulence. At five o’clock in the morning Hunter was there, and we carried Craig to our car and drove her to the little airfield of the town, not much more than a cow pasture.
It was a four-hundred-mile trip, my first by air. We flew over the road I had driven many times, and it was fascinating to see it from above. I told Craig about the sights; but, alas, she hadn’t much interest. At the airport there was an ambulance waiting, and soon she was in a hospital bed.
I doubt if anybody in the hospital had ever heard of the rice diet, and it was hard to get a large plate of well-cooked rice without gravy or butter on it. In fact, it was hard to get anything that Craig wanted, including quiet; but even so, the miracle began right away. She got well and was able to breathe lying down. After a couple of weeks she was able to walk a little.
My mind turned to that little cottage up in the Corona hills only seven miles away. In that cottage there would be no nurses gossiping outside her door at midnight. I would be the one to take care of her, and I would move on tiptoe whenever she slept. I persuaded her to let me take her there; the doctor consented, on condition that I bring her down twice a week for the blood tests that were necessary—to make sure that the supply of salt in her blood wasn’t below the minimum required. I promised so to do.
So for half a year more we lived in that cottage. I was nurse, cook, housemaid, chauffeur, and guardian angel. I cooked a pot and a half of rice for Craig every day, and she was so well that it was a miracle. Even the cautious doctor had to use extravagant language when he set the newest x-ray photograph beside the earliest one. I said to him, “Don’t you think that is remarkable?” His answer was, “I should say it is spectacular.”
The results of the rice-and-fruit diet were so spectacular that I decided to try it myself. I didn’t want to bother with blood tests, so I added celery to the diet—it is a vegetable of which I happen to be fond, and it gave me what I thought was the necessary bulk for safety. I added a spoonful of dried-milk powder for a little more salt. We were both having large quantities of fruit juice, mine being pineapple because it is the sweetest. Both of us took vitamins.
Throughout most of my writing life, certainly for a half century of it, I had been accustomed to say that I was never more than twenty-four hours ahead of a headache. But from the time I adopted the diet of rice and fruit, which I still follow, I ceased to have headaches, and I have even forgotten, now, what a headache feels like. Nor have I had any other ailment, not even a cold.
But to return to my story. With the good doctor’s permission I took Craig back to our Monrovia home, and we got some apparatus that was supposed to take the smog out of our bedrooms. We lived there in peace and happiness for a while; but then Craig discovered that she could no longer bear to eat any more rice. She began trying all other kinds of health foods, in particular bread stuffs that were supposed to be low in salt. Also, she could no longer stand the blood tests, because the nurses couldn’t find the vein in one wrist, and the other wrist had become sore from too much puncturing.
So all the heart troubles came back; and there was something worse, called fibrillation—an endless quivering of the heart that was most distressing and kept her awake at night. I had gotten an oxygen tank; she would call me, and I would get up and put the little cap over her nose and turn on the valve and wait until she had had enough, and then turn off the valve and go back to bed and sleep, if I could, until she called again. Neither of us wanted a stranger in the house, so I had her sole care. I cooked her food, served it, and cleaned up afterward.
Every day I took her outdoors. I took care of her flower beds, and she would gaze at them with rapture—her poppies, her big red rosebush, her camellia bush that bloomed every April, and a wonderful golden oleander that bloomed all summer.
Every night I put her to sleep with prayers. “Dear God, make her well,” was what I wanted to say over and over again, but Craig insisted it must be, “Dear God, make us well.” I didn’t need any help so far as I could see, but I said it her way; when the fibrillations got bad, I would say it over a hundred times, or maybe two hundred, until at last she went to sleep. I could never tell when she was asleep; so I would let my voice die away softly, and wait and see if she spoke.
That was our life for several years. Every now and then I would try to persuade her to have some rice, just a little at a time; and that little, alas, was not enough. She was tired of it and forbade me to mention it. Month after month her condition got worse, her pain harder to endure. The kind doctor would try pills with some new outlandish name, and I would get the prescription filled and do my best to learn which was which.
III
It was during this period of long-drawn-out pain and struggle that Craig wrote the beautiful book, Southern Belle. She wrote about herself and her lovely childhood and girlhood, all because I pleaded with her to do it. She wrote about her life with me, because she wanted to set me straight with the world. Sometimes I would sit by the bed, and write to her dictation; but most of the time she would write lying in bed with her head propped forward, holding a pad with one hand and a pencil with the other.
It was a tiring position, and after she had been doing it for months, she developed a pain near the base of the spine. I knew from the beginning that it was a question of posture and tried to persuade her of that, but in vain. I would take her to specialists, and they would examine her and give their verdicts—and no two verdicts were the same. I am quite sure that none of these doctors had ever had a patient who had treated her spine in that fashion. Craig wouldn’t let me tell them; I wasn’t a specialist—only a husband—and I must not influence their judgment.
How many of these dreadful details shall I put into a book? Of course, anyone may skip them; but I had no way to skip them. Craig had stood by me through my ordeals, and she was all I had in this world—apart from the books I had written and the one I was writing. The only other person who could help us was Hunter, and he would arrive from Phoenix eight hours after I telephoned. He was there when Craig became delirious from pain or from the injections that the doctors had given her. He would comfort me when I, too, was on the verge of becoming delirious at the sight of her suffering. She would say that she was suffering from cold and would have me pile every blanket in the house on top of her; then she would say that she was suffocating and would throw them all off. I remember a night of that, and then I could not sleep in the day. We had to have her taken to a hospital; and she hated hospitals, each one had been worse than the last.
IV
I cannot bring myself to tell much about the end. I do not think that many could bear to read it. At times she became delirious, and wasn’t herself any more; I had to make up my mind to that. Then suddenly she would be herself—her beautiful self, her dear, kind, loving self, her darling self, agonizing about me and what I was going to do, and how I could manage to survive in a dreadful world where everybody would be trying to rob me, to trap me, to take away the money that she had worked so desperately to keep me from spending.
Three times during that long ordeal I found her lying on the hard plastone floor of the upstairs kitchen that we had made for her. The first two times we were alone in the house, and since I could not lift her, I had to call the ambulance to get her back in bed. The second time she was unconscious, and I called the doctor again. He thought these were “light strokes,” and later on the autopsy confirmed the opinion; but she had not been told.
The third time was less than a month before the end. Her nephew, Leftwich Kimbrough, was with us, so we two carried her to bed. I sat by, keeping watch, and presently I heard her murmuring; I listened, and soon went and got a writing pad and pen. They were fragments of a poem she was composing while half-conscious, and I wrote what I heard:
Stay in their hearts, dear Jesus,
Stay and make them kind.
And then, after an interval:
Oh, the poor lonely nigger,
Bring love to his soul.
Later, I wrote underneath, for the record: “Craig’s murmured singing after bad fall. I mentioned to her, it was Good Friday Eve, 1961.”
You will recall my account of the visit of Judge Tom Brady, founder of the citizens’ councils all through the Deep South. From earliest childhood little Mary Craig Kimbrough had wrestled with that race problem of her homeland. She heard and saw both sides; the fears of the whites, for which they had reason, and the pitiful helplessness of the ignorant blacks. Now, in her last hours, she was pleading, in the first couplet for the whites whom she loved and in the second for the blacks, whom she also loved.
One day she would eat nothing but soft-boiled eggs, and the next day she would eat nothing but gelatine. So the icebox was full of eggs and then of gelatine. One elderly doctor told her that the best remedy for fibrillation was whisky; so here was I, a lifelong teetotaler who had made hatred of whisky a part of his religion, going out to buy it by the quart. Craig insisted that I should never buy it in Monrovia where I was known; I must drive out on one of the boulevards and stop in some strange place and pay for a bottle with some imbecile name that I forgot. That went on for quite a while, and the time came when Craig was so weak that I couldn’t manage to hold her up while she tried to walk the length of the room.
V
She wouldn’t let us call the doctor because he would order her to the hospital. But the time came when we had to call the doctor, and he called the ambulance, and poor Craig was carried away on her last ride. She was in the hospital for three weeks, and it cost us close to four thousand dollars. This seems an ungracious thing to mention, but I am thinking about what happens to the poor—how do they die? Perhaps they do it more quickly, and don’t have day and night nurses by their bedside. This sounds like irony, but I let it stand.
In addition to the nurses and the husband, there were Hunter and Sally, his wife, two nieces, and a sister who had come on from Alabama. What they saw was a hideously tormented human being. I pleaded with the doctor—surely there must be some ethical code that would give him the right to end such torment! But he said that stage had not yet been reached.
I won’t tell much about my own part in it. I would sit and gaze at the features of my beloved who no longer knew me; or if she did know me she was angry because I had let her be brought to the hospital. I would sit there blinded with my own tears, and then I would get up and try to get out of the hospital without making a spectacle of myself.
Why do I tell such a story? Well, it happened. It was life. It is our human fate. It happened to me, and it could happen to you. This universe is a mystery to me. How beauty, kindness, goodness, could have such an end visited upon it will keep me in agony of spirit for the rest of my days on this planet. I do not know what to make of it, and I can draw only this one moral from it: that nature has been, and can be, so cruel to us that surely we should busy ourselves not to commit cruelties against one another. I know that I had for half a century the love of one of the kindest, wisest, and dearest souls that ever lived upon this earth; why she should have died in such untellable horror is a question I ask of God in vain.
She died in St. Luke Hospital, Pasadena, on April 26, 1961. Her ashes were shipped to a brother in Greenwood, Mississippi, and were interred in a family plot in the cemetery in that town.