“Tell him to let her out,” I said.
Politically, I have a lot of differences with many I encounter here. When visiting the homes of reactionary friends and neighbors, I enjoy hiding their copies of books by Glenn Beck and other lunatics around the house while my hosts cook or adjourn to relieve themselves. Ducking into a garage to deposit the latest ravings of Ann Coulter into a bag of aging peat moss lifts the spirit as unfailingly as a summer tent revival. But I am trying to behave. I have a Cardinals cap, but cannot always remember what it is they play. Yesterday, when I heard that Evie Cullers is sick, I took her a dessert and listened to her talk and talk. She was recovering nicely from her respiratory difficulties, but I fear that after my sludgelike pudding, life support will be required. “Where did you come across this?” she asked when she gazed into the bowl.
I water the roses, try to keep them alive as there is still no rain. I no longer think of selling this house my father built. Maybe my attachment is temporary nostalgia, but I don’t think so. I’d like to come back here in the summers at least. This is my home, my trees. Because of the drought, a lot of trees have died or are dying, and according to an article in the Post-Dispatch, many have been so damaged that the losses will continue for three or four years, even if the clouds finally decide to open. My father would be hurt to see this. He worked so hard to give his little trees a chance.
. . .
The last time I saw my father was over Christmas a few months before he passed away. His face was pale; it had gone from gray to pallor hard to gaze on without fear. Because of his arthritic knees, stiff after two operations, he could barely get around, though he made a cane for himself in his workshop in the basement. He kept calling my attention to that cane; he had tried to make it special, something beyond an old man’s walking stick. When, unbeknownst to him, I watched him trying to go a few steps without it, I knew that the life we had shared together was coming to a close. A few days before my arrival, before our last holiday, he pulled his sciatic nerve struggling with the mattress on the antique bed where I try to sleep, trying to make it comfortable.
A few days before I left to go back to New York, he was in such pain that I took him to the emergency room. Betty stayed at home, but—still astonishingly spry then—ran out into the street as we left with the gloves my father forgot to wear, old work gloves from his lumberyard days. It was the coldest kind of winter afternoon and he hurt so badly that even breathing seemed hard labor. I watched him as he dragged himself to the admissions desk—weak, sad, and sick. He needed something fast for relief, but when the nurse said we would have to wait, probably for a couple of hours, he made no complaint, just shrugged his shoulders and made a joke. He made the old starched nurses feel like babes.
I remember my father at church, passing the communion plate during the service to the old, blue-haired high school principal, finally retired. “Take two,” he told her as he handed over the tray with the grape juice in tiny cups. “They’re free, you know.”
For the longest time, there in the emergency room, he got no help and we sat with me on guard, watching him, his cheek still wet from melting snow. So tightly did he clutch the handle of that cane that I thought his fingers would leave their marks in the wood. Finally someone saw the shape he was in and ushered us into an examining room. A doctor scrawled a prescription, but Big George could barely make it back to the car. When I found an open pharmacy, I think he was scared to wait alone. His heart was so vulnerable, ready to give out; something could happen and we both knew this and it was hard to leave him even for a moment.
He watched me, my every step away, from behind the frosted window of our old Lincoln as I trudged across the snow to buy the pills. On the way home, he looked straight ahead, not at me, and whispered, “Getting on time to die.”