May 14, 2014 Pisgah National Forest, North Carolina

The vulture pushed off of the pine needle floor of a stretch of the Pisgah National Forest that opened onto a meadow. The bird rose upward upon the fifth downward thrust of its wings. Holding its wings at a slight upward dihedral angle, it was borne aloft by rising warm air. Tipping and righting its wings, it drifted slowly in wide circles, easing southeastward. Solemn choruses sang below, given voice by breezes fanning through the bald stone corridors of North Carolina's Smoky Mountains.

After gliding above the French Broad River for several miles, the vulture's acute sense of smell picked up fetid odors that hung above the Homeward Angels skilled nursing complex near Marshall. The bird's shadow drifted across the red-tiled roofs of the facility's two brick buildings and its expansive green lawns.

One year ago the vulture had fed in a garden below, where the perfumes of marigolds, salvia, cannas, impatiens, hydrangea, magnolias, and shrub roses floated upward in the morning air, mingling with the miasma of despair and death.

It had been then that Homeward Angel resident Edwina Elliot, in a drug-induced contortion of time and space, had wandered from her room at the rear of the skilled nursing building and into the garden. Sheena Moore, the eighteen-year-old resident assistant, who was charged with Edwina's personal care, had not been aware that Edwina had been missing from her room. On the morning of her charge's departure, Sheena had been outside smoking. She had been engrossed in a conversation with her stud, a boy named Melvin who wore baggy pants that hung below his knees and a baseball hat, the visor of which pointed to the rear, a metaphor for the direction of his life.

As Edwina had shuffled down the pebbled garden path, she lost her footing and had fallen backwards, hitting her head upon a rock. She had lain on her back, benumbed, unaware, eyes closed.

Before the accident, Sheena Moore had given Mrs. Elliot two doses of Seroquel, an antipsychotic drug. Mrs. Elliot had been a bother to Sheena—a troublemaker, a handful, uncontrollable.

During breakfast Edwina and the Cherokee Indian sculptress, Kamama Jones, another troublemaker, had laughed too loudly. They had complained that the scrambled eggs were too dry, and that the hashed-brown potatoes had contained saltpeter to tame the resident men's desires. Such disruptions were not tolerated at Homeward Angels. Calmness and monotonous routines ruled.

An antipsychotic drug pacified one of every three residents of the home. Very few were schizophrenic or suffered from bipolar disorder, conditions for which the drug was indicated. No matter. It was the drug of choice to keep the peace.

No one had seen the vulture fall upon Mrs. Elliot. With its short, hooked beak, it had torn and swallowed her stomach's flaccid and wrinkled flesh, and innards. Nor had anyone seen the ravens gather at the feast, pecking and pulling at Mrs. Elliot's eyelids, coveting the delicacies beneath.

Nor had any one shed a tear when Edwin Sevrin, the groundskeeper, discovered Mrs. Elliot's ravaged body. Edwin had chased away the feeding birds with his shovel, undaunted by the vulture's menacing hisses and grunts, and the horrid odor of Mrs. Elliot's barely digested flesh that the raptor had regurgitated to repel him.

The staff agreed that Mrs. Elliot had been close to death, if not already dead, when attacked by the birds. Furthermore, even if alive, in her drug-induced comatose and nerve-shattered state, Mrs. Elliot would have felt nothing as she gave up her flesh to the vulture, her eyes to the ravens, and her soul to God.

Edwina would no longer be a burden to her family, who had been spared a report on the true circumstances of her demise and the sight of her remains. What sort of death could have been more natural than to be snuffed by a creature of nature, chuckled Sheena Moore, a nature lover.

The birds had left to Edwina's apathetic son and daughter only vague memories of their detached relationships with their mother, and the quiet desperation of their mother's self-imposed martyrdom for her family, self-sacrifice to which she had been addicted.

For $8,000, the mortuary had prepared Edwina for a modest casket burial next to Mr. Elliot, the family's first victim of Homeward Angels. The cost of Edwina's burial had been covered mostly by the proceeds of her $10,000 life insurance policy that she had purchased to save her children of her burial expenses. Her son had attended a three-minute graveside service that had been performed by a minister who had never met his mother. Edwina's daughter, Wilma, whom the deceased had not seen in four years, had a Pilate's lesson and could not attend the service. The minister had said a few of the usual things that are said about the dearly departed.

Edwina's son and daughter had spent six months squabbling over their mother's meager worldly remains. The son had relented in disgust to Wilma's claims, never to see his sister again.

Only the Cherokee Indian, Kamama Jones, had mourned Edwina's passing. They had been kindred souls, bound by their humors that mocked their fates, and by their stoic acceptances of the madness of the home.

The Homeward Angels staff had gone on without remembering the name of the 83-year old woman who had died in the garden on that May morning one year ago, or the way she had died. They had been too bewildered, absorbed, and exhausted by the demands of the half-living, drugged-up carrion that lay muttering and shouting for them from beds with iron safety sidings. Yet, they could not help but share some of the depression and ennui of these residents.

As they always did, residents slumped in wheelchairs and worn imitation leather chairs in the halls and common areas of the home, heads bowed, eyes open, but almost unseeing. Some stared at televisions, potted plants, beige walls, threadbare oriental carpets, and dusty windows, devoid of will, emotion, or purpose. They inwardly cursed the sponsors and caretakers of their creeping passages and begged visitors to take them from the home. The grandfather clock in the reception area ticked on, measuring the residents' remaining days. Like all past spring seasons, this spring held no promise of rebirth for them.

* * *

This spring, the revisiting vulture sensed that there would be no feast in the garden as there had been a year ago. It circled above the home once and then rode thermals to 500 feet. Flying west toward the soft hazel nebula from which spread a final golden flush above the silhouette of the Smoky Mountains, the bird had returned to its forest home, where it was revered for its age, and sometimes eaten by hungry young.

* * *

Kamama Jones lay in her bed, remembering that spring morning a year earlier, imagining the garden where Edwina had been taken from her.

She put her legs over the side of her bed, stood and moaned, wincing from sharp pains that knifed through her back, ribs, knees and hips.

She chanted her friend's name in lamentation. To honor the one-year anniversary of Edwina's death, Kamama had carved a likeness of Edwina in ash wood and wrapped it in a shroud that she made from hemp threads dyed with black ink. She had laid the carving in a miniature casket that she fashioned from tree bark and glue and left a note for Bill Jenkins, an orderly she had befriended, asking him to bury the casket in the place in the garden where Edwina had died. Bill...