Well, obviously Oogesti was not his name. It comes from u gv sdi, which is a Cherokee nickname for a possum, though the word for "possum" they officially teach now is si-qua-u-tse-tsa-s-di. It was what I called a friend of the Cat Sanctuary who grinned, growled, and hauled away the recycling, for a few years. His real name was of English origin and will not be mentioned online, since his children are still alive.
He was some sort of distant relative of mine. On the Cherokee side, though he looked White. I never paid much attention to him until his wife died, around the same time my husband died. He was still forty years older than I was but he started going out and drifting around just to see if anyone had anything he could do to keep busy.
Oogesti had a big television set and a big reclining armchair. Some day, when he could no longer go out and make himself useful, he planned to use those things. For a long time, even if he and I cooked at his house, he avoided the armchair, left the television set alone, and sat at the table or on the couch.
I liked his little old house. I expected that at some point I'd be the housekeeper and home nurse, and put a claim on the house as part of my wages. That's a fairly common arrangement in my part of the world, when people's children all have their own homes. I used to take a load of laundry out to Oogesti's house and clean the place while the laundry was going around.
He talked about dates and marriage and "girlfriends." I thought he wouldn't be a bad stepfather to have, but it soon became obvious that Oogesti didn't want to remarry any more than my mother did. Neither of them needed money. They were set in different ways. Still, when some of The Nephews stayed at Mother's house, Oogesti was always useful and welcome there. The kids loved him, and he them.
They liked my Significant Other in a shy, awestruck way. He was serious, usually working on something when they saw him. They watched him work and made sure they didn't get in the way. But Oogesti would sit down and read their favorite storybooks or play little-kid games with them. They called him by his given name and, shortly after arriving at "Grandma's House," they asked where he was.
Oogesti and his wife had had a Dog Sanctuary for some time. When Dusty the Shelter Cat was not working out for me, Oogesti adopted her, and she became the Queen of the Cat Sanctuary on his side of town. Dusty had seemed like a little spring kitten at the shelter but, when new cats joined her and Oogesti, she presented herself to them as a tough old street fighter. Somehow it seemed that new cats always were willing to humor Dusty and act scared of her (she was a small, slim cat), and Dusty always softened up and even acted friendly with some other cats before they found their homes.
Mother was in the process of losing all of her and a half-dozen other relatives' savings on an investment that might have been profitable if she hadn't tried to make it grow too fast. There were always things to do there, too.
Good times were had by all for several years. Well, less good times, too, but that's beside the point here. Anyway, one foggy night, as he was taking me home, Oogesti's vision and driving were so bad that I volunteered to drive, and he thought I'd better. In the next week, Oogesti scheduled cataract surgery.
"Lie down as soon as you get home," he was advised, as was his daughter, who made time in her busy schedule to take him home from surgery. "After that, stay at home and lie down as much as possible for ten days, to prevent hemorrhage and loss of all benefits of the operation."
I walked out toward town on the day after the operation and saw Oogesti sitting on a rock beside the road. "I'm not going to stay home, but I thought I'd better not try to walk too far uphill at one time," he explained. He could see clearly. He was delighted with the results of the operation and planned to have it done on the other eye as soon as the surgeon thought advisable. He wanted to drive around town telling everyone how well his operation had gone. More good times were had by all, all the rest of that summer.
The second operation was done in early October, 2013. The day after the operation was a fine, mild day, and of course Oogesti was out on the road, sharing the good news. He found me sorting a load of plastic and metal for recycling and started to load it into his car.
Then he said, "Excuse me," and walked up the road, around a corner of the hill. I remember that the old slang phrase, "Off to do a Billy Carter," popped into my mind as I continued bagging up and loading recycling. (The service we used asked that recycling be sorted into bags; I used up lots of plastic shopping bags.) After five or ten minutes had passed, I thought it might be a good idea to check on him.
He was lying face down in the middle of the road. He had fallen forward, bumped his nose, and spilled a good deal of blood into the sand.
"Are you all right?" I stooped down beside him.
"Dizzy," he said. "Can't see."
"Hemorrhage?"
"Yeah. That." He was disgusted.
His pulse was normal. "Any sort of pain?"
"Only where I fell!" He was thoroughly disgusted.
"Can you get up out of the road before anybody drives past?"
"Help me."
"Do you want to call the doctor?"
"No. See if I feel better." He was in denial.
"Should I get my phone, anyway? It's in the house."
"Mine's in the car. But just stay here for a while."
We had been sitting on a log beside the road for another five or ten minutes when the Professional Bad Neighbor drove up. Several people in his family are born with a deformed face. It looks like a lopsided grin and can be considered cute when they are young, at least until you realize that it is not a smile. Any real expression does grotesque things to their faces. The Bad Neighbor got out of his truck, looking grotesque, and shouted, "What's the matter with him?"
"Fell and bumped his nose," I said.
"Shouldn't you call a doctor?"
"He didn't want one..."
"He ought to see one," said the Bad Neighbor. He knew Oogesti's real name, and shouted it out. "Do you want me to call an ambulance for you? You need to see a doctor."
Nothing was wrong with Oogesti's hearing. Cell phone whipped out. Button pressed to turn it on. "Yes, call them," Oogesti said, facing the facts at least. He'd been wrong, and now he was blind, with no hope of restoration even of blurry vision ever again.
The Young Grouch drove up. The way he's acted sometimes when people surprised him at home, I thought he might decide to beat up the Bad Neighbor. He recognized Oogesti, though, not as a relative of his but as a friend of his grandfather's and uncle's, and came over to us. "Would it be better for him to sit in the truck?" Oogesti recognized his voice, gave the Young Grouch and me his arms, and let us guide him over to sit in the Young Grouch's truck. It wasn't much but the young man wanted to do something, and Oogesti let him.
At this time none of us knew the Professional Bad Neighbor for what he was. All I remember noticing about him was that he stayed on the scene, trying to give the Life Saving Crew the impression that he was the grown-up and the Young Grouch and I were children. I remember finding that annoying, but less annoying that it would have been back when he was wasting a perfectly good opportunity to do the world a favor and get killed in Vietnam, when the Young Grouch and I really were children.
Then the ambulance rolled up, and some more strong young men started to lead Oogesti into the ambulance, and he lost it. I'm not sure whether it was that he didn't know their voices, or was afraid lying on his back might do more damage, or was just starting to feel the emotional weight of what he'd lost.
"It's all right," I said, "they're only taking you to the hospital."
"Don't need a hospital."
"Where else is the doctor going to see you?"
He settled down and let himself be strapped in, and then I was sitting in the front of the ambulance, filling out a paper, tucking Oogesti's watch and glasses into my pocket. I thought I ought to go to the hospital to help them locate his daughter; but the EMTs said they'd be taking Oogesti to the hospital in the helicopter. I'd have to get myself to the hospital.
No sooner had this information sunk in than another neighbor's car rolled up. "Where are you going?"
"To the hospital. Mr. -- got up too soon after surgery and has to go back."
That was an interesting story, so the neighbor was glad to drive me to the hospital. I thought it would have been nice if she'd stayed to take me back, but she didn't. Driving only five miles per hour over the legal limit, we beat the helicopter to the hospital by a good fifteen minutes.
I told the emergency room staff I'd come "with" the patient who'd be arriving by helicopter any minute now, gave his name and age, the name of the doctor who'd removed the cataracts, his address, the names of his children. "That's all," a nurse said. "Emergency patients can't have visitors and we can't discuss anything with anyone but the next of kin. You can go now."
I walked out just in time to see the helicopter land. I looked, but I'd seen Oogesti the last time I ever would see him when we'd loaded him into the ambulance.
He was eighty-seven years old. He remembered the tuberculosis epidemic; he'd seen people die, but he'd never had the disease or the antibiotic that was used to prevent it. He had been ill exactly once in his life, with a gallstone, which had been quickly treated. He'd retired from a government job after thirty years of good service. He'd sung in a band that sold several records. He'd been made an honorary elder of the Lakota Nation--although, and because, he'd been unable to document that he was part Cherokee. He had a great-grandchild who looked Cherokee, as he said most of his siblings and cousins did. He'd been recognized by one of those Special Resolutions, in the state legislature, as an artist. Like most of my relatives when they get to that age, he'd had another forty or fifty years' worth of things he wanted to do, but he'd known he'd had a longer and better life than most humans.
Mother's house was close to the hospital. I walked out to tell her the news; we had dinner and did a few errands, and she took me home.
Now it was entirely up to Oogesti's children to tell me whether he'd even survived. None of them ever told me a thing. He'd been married twice. The first wife, still living with one of her children, had walked out because she was tired of Oogesti's lame-brain extrovert company. Her children were barely on speaking terms with their father but had made it clear that they were opposed to the idea of another stepmother, if Oogesti had been serious about giving them one, which I don't think he ever was. The daughter of the wife who had died had been friendly when she was ahead of me in school, but I thought the idea of a stepmother who was younger than she was might cause her to panic too--never mind its being a joke--and I'd avoided her too. A few days after the trip to the hospital, a man who looked like Oogesti walked up and said "I've come to get my father's car," and I said, "Take his watch and glasses, too, while you're here," and there was an end of it.
I thought Oogesti had probably died, or had a stroke, in the emergency room. He was strong enough to survive the hemorrhage and intelligent enough to adjust to being blind, I thought. But if he was alive--patients had phones in the hospital. He certainly knew my phone number. He'd be calling everybody to report on the outcome of whatever had been done about the hemorrhage. He'd call me, for sure, either to tell me to come out and be his housekeeper, or to tell me whether his sister out west had officially invited him to move in with her. Whenever we'd talked about the housekeeper job he'd always said he'd prefer, if possible, to live with his sister. Either way, it was not in Oogesti's nature not to tell me what was going on. So my phone didn't ring, and the phone at his house had been disconnected, and after a few months the newspaper reported that his little house was up for sale. So I figured he'd died, and his horrid son had been so opposed to the idea of another stepmother, even younger than the first one, that nobody had even notified me of the funeral.
Actually it turned out that his older children were holding him incommunicado. The last time I saw Oogesti alive was almost five years before he died--in 2018. I never saw an obituary in the newspaper. It was 2020 before I thought of checking online, and saw that an obituary had indeed been posted, saying that "the family's wishes" were to have no funeral. Oogesti's older children did not want to act polite to any of his friends.
He might have been a difficult patient. He might have been unreasonable. Knowing Oogesti, I'd guess that he probably was those things. He could be very annoying even while healthy. How he reacted to having his own plans and wishes for "real retirement" totally discarded, I would imagine, must not have been a pleasant scene to watch.
Maybe they honestly wanted to get to know their father before he died. Maybe they did; maybe a bond was formed; maybe Oogesti felt honored by his children in some way. I hope so.
Meanwhile everyone else's lives went on. Most of what the world needs to know about my life is already on this web site, somewhere or other. The world does not need to know anything about anyone else's life. Except that, over those years when everyone thought Oogesti was dead, and then the years when he really was dead, my neighborhood was not as friendly a place as it used to be. Nobody really quarrelled with anybody. Once in a while people still spoke pleasantly and did nice things. But less often. Unpleasant things happened and suspicions arose. Some of the suspicions, when spoken aloud, were indignantly rejected--but someone was certainly trying to make the neighborhood less pleasant than it had been.
All my life I've been well aware that it was a great blessing to live in a neighborhood where doors weren't locked. Now they are.
Nobody wanted to recognize a harassment campaign when we first saw it. Maybe an animal broke something, carried something off, knocked something over. (And in some cases a four-legged animal really did.) Maybe the wind blew a door open, the damp air caused nails to work their way out of walls, the earthquake caused things to fall off the shelves and land all the way outside the fully enclosed shed. Maybe we'd forgotten where we'd put things that went missing. Right, and maybe the water line burst because it had frozen--in July. Maybe a chilled, slow-moving snake just blundered up toward Gulegi's house, in May--maybe snakes find ways to chill themselves on warm nights! But surely, if a human being was doing the kind of stupid pranks that were being done, it had to be a kid. No full-grown man with a job would be sneaking around in the middle of the night picking screws out of door latches so doors wouldn't stay shut, releasing mice and rats in batches into cellars, pulling rain gutters off roofs...Even when you hear a noise like footsteps on your roof and like a claw hammer prying out nails, you tend to believe it was really just squirrels. But around the time some of the leaks in my roof reopened after having been fixed, I heard noises like footsteps and a claw hammer.
Long story short: that's what Professional Bad Neighbors do, when they want to acquire a lot of land for less than the owners would consuder as a price, especially when the owners like living where they do and aren't interested in selling. In a family where the average IQ score is high, the Professional Bad Neighbor was "the smart one" before I came along. He's intelligent, in a sick way. He didn't get much opportunity to be creative or clever on his job. He's made it a hobby to try to "run the (families) off" our ancestral land, which we have so carefully preserved.
I heard "Maybe X did that," and "Would Y have done that?" and I'm quite sure that X and Y heard "Maybe Priscilla did that," too.
So one day, about two years after Oogesti really died, I went into town and heard, "People are saying you killed Oogesti. Saying they found his body in the ditch beside the road!"
"Say WHAAAT," I screamed, and "Who said that? Where'd they get a crazy story like that? I never heard for sure that he was dead, but if he is, he died in the hospital. That was years ago. When did you hear such a tale?"
"It's been all over town--this summer!"
"Who could have started it? His children know better than that, and don't stand to gain anything from it--so who could possibly..."
"All I heard was, they found him beside the road..."
"Well, all I say is, it's not a good idea for anybody to go around repeating stories like that! Prozac Dementia is what it sounds like. Pure dementia!"
I went home and filed that under the inexplicable random unpleasantness of a morally corrupt world. I have loved, and lost, and missed, quite a few other people more than I ever did Oogesti. I listened to his stories, because they were interesting, and let him make himself useful when he could, and was prepared to be his housekeeper in exchange for his house; that was about all. That might well have been more than his other "buddies" and "girlfriends" felt for him. But who could be so nasty...
A little later I heard the Professional Bad Neighbor boasting about his successes in bad-neighborship, and all became clear. Nobody seriously believed Oogesti was murdered. Anyone who knows his real name can find his official obituary. He died, more than ninety years old, in a medical care facility approved by the Nanny State. But someone who ought to have been able to remember finding Oogesti beside a road--sitting on a log, on the steep bank above a road that has no ditch--was nasty enough to have spread an outright lie. For a Professional Bad Neighbor, a lie no one could possibly take seriously is minor. He's done so many things that were worse.
It's been about a year, and from time to time, from someone who knows very well that nobody "killed" Oogesti, I still hear: "What did happen to poor old Oogesti?"
This is what.
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