THREE
We’re at the long-term care facility, a brick house-looking building on the bad side of downtown, where the mills and the denim plant used to be, with sallow nurses smoking out front all day long to make the place look even more like some sort of seedy rehabilitation center for homeless drug addicts than it already does. Two weeks we’ve been here now for physical therapy, more for those days he lay in the bed after the stroke than for the stroke itself. It’s hard to get a body moving again once it’s got used to stillness: atrophied, that’s what the doctor kept saying. His muscles have atrophied.
And of course Frank has to go and make it as difficult for everyone to help him as he possibly can, gives those nurses so much trouble I’m surprised they don’t give up and leave him there to waste away. You can tell he’s about back to normal because he gets real aloof any time they come by, acts like I’m not even in the room. The nurses have got him sitting on the edge of the bed, with his metal-frame walker pushed right up to his knees. Each of them, one on either side, reaches a hand toward one of his elbows, and he knocks them away.
“All it is is walking,” he says. “I don’t need any help just to walk.”
He rocks himself forward, grabs the handles of the walker, and bears down so hard that the four aluminum legs, built in telescoping rods so you can adjust the height, wobble and bend like they’re about to snap beneath his weight.
“Good,” the nurses murmur and coo. “Very good.”
“Imagine that,” Frank says. “A grown man able to raise himself up from the bed. A real miracle of modern medicine.”
The physical therapist, yet another young-middle-aged man with a yet more cheerful and firm belief in his own competence, strides into the room.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Clifton,” he says, but Frank ignores him—against all odds, he’s come to despise his doctors more than I do—and shuffles across the room, the rubber feet of his walker scuffing and squeaking against the tile, with a grim look of barely-constrained malice on his face.
“And let’s see you get a book from the shelf,” the nurse says. Frank reaches up to the warped piece of unfinished plywood they’ve got resting on long wood screws drilled halfway into the wall, pulls down one of the worn-out romance novels with dusty, soft-edged pages they have squeezed together there, and slaps it into her hand so hard she drops it.
“You want me to pick it up, too?” he says.
“I think,” the therapist says, sidling up beside me, “Mr. Clifton’s ready to go home.”
“Ready to go home?” I say. “When?”
“I’d say as early as tomorrow.”
“Don’t you think he needs more time? His hands are still—”
“He’ll make more progress at home now than he possibly could here.”
“I think he needs more time.”
“I know it can be a daunting prospect,” the therapist says. “But he won’t really need that much taking care of. He’s in pretty good—”
“That’s not what I’m worried about. I just don’t think he’s ready.”
Frank pushes his walker back toward the bed.
“Do you need to use the bathroom first?” one of the nurses says.
“When I need to use the bathroom,” Frank says, “I’ll get up and use it.”
She frowns and glances at her clipboard. “And when was your last bowel movement?”
“Mind your own damn business.”
The therapist gives me a significant look.
Through the window, the denim plant’s red brick smokestack looks so impossibly tall and thin it shouldn’t be able to stand, ought to have toppled a century ago. The word CONFEDERATION is set into it in darker brick, one huge letter atop another. Confederate Mills, it was called. Thirty-five years he worked there. Now all the buildings are empty, and the bricks at the top of the smokestack have crumbled and fallen in, and the windows are black and shattered. I wait for a shellacked hairline and dark eyes to rise above the jagged glass.
“Give me two more days,” I say.
“You’ve got yourself a deal,” the therapist says. He strides over to Frank, says, “Great job!” and raises his palm for a high five.
Frank scowls at him, turns his back, and lowers himself into the bed.
I hold his elbow as he steps onto the porch. It’s only one shallow stair, it’s hardly up off the ground at all, but he has to hold on to the railing with one hand and my shoulder with the other to haul himself onto it, and then he leans so hard he nearly knocks me down. They still haven’t got his balance right, have him canting to one side with every step. I let go of his elbow just for a minute to unlock the front door, and he walks down to the end of the porch and leans over to check on the camellias growing against the side of the house, sways like one of those skyscrapers they design to bend through storm winds and earthquakes, teeter back and forth so far you can’t hardly believe they don’t snap in two. Just watching him nearly gives me a fit.
“Come on,” I say, and he shuffles to the door, never breaks contact between his feet and the floorboards, holding the porch rail all the while. “You need to use your walker.” The nurses even cut crosshatches into tennis balls and stuck them on its feet so they would slide across the floor easier, but he refuses to touch it.
“Why didn’t they just give me a cane?” he says. “With a cane you can at least look half respectable. That metal contraption makes you look like you belong in an institution. Walking up and down the halls in a daze.”
“Watch your step.” There’s a little bump in the doorway. He has to concentrate to lift each foot over it.
“And it’s too short,” he says. “I have to stoop so bad to hold on to it, I nearly fall over just from that.”
“That’s not true. That is empirically not true.”
He lets go of the doorway. “All it is is walking. And I can empirically walk just fine.”
The den’s dark and stuffy, with deer poking their heads out of the wall over every doorway, and a quail caught in flight over the gas logs, and a raccoon peering around the old metal trash can where we keep the umbrellas. There’s too many of them, really, too close and crowded together, but you’d be surprised how many people will bring you a perfectly splendid specimen to mount and then never come back for it. Most of them I sold to somebody else, but there were a few I could never get rid of, or got myself particularly attached to, and between them and all the dark wood paneling on the walls, it feels in here like you’re a fugitive from justice, hunkered out in the wilderness, but he pats his thighs and says, “Great day in the morning!” like he’s never seen a more beautiful sight, and does his closest approximation of hurrying across the room to sit heavily down in his recliner. I open up all the blinds, let the sluggish afternoon light seep in, but it only seems to thicken the air, makes the whole place feel like it’s caught in amber. Frank looks around and sighs contentedly.
“Great day in the morning,” he says again, quietly this time, just to himself.
He walks into the kitchen the next afternoon, wearing his dirty work pants and that same blue baseball cap, right as I’m pulling my jar of sourdough starter from the fridge to make us some yeast rolls. He loves a yeast roll. The kitchen’s a whole different feeling from the rest of the house, big and bright and open, with white walls and a black-and-white tile floor and a whole bank of windows over the counter that look out over the backyard and the bird feeders hung from the eaves. He likes to watch the birds, has a feeder strung from every gutter and limb. He’s partial to the real big, puffed-up bird royalty, blue jays and cardinals with their crests and ostentation, and to the goldfinches, for reasons I’ve never understood. I don’t care for finches much myself.
I turn on the water to warm up while I pull my sugar and potato flakes down from the cabinet to feed the starter. It’s a real good one, beige and murky like swampwater, with all sorts of stringy fungi swirling in its depths. I’ve kept it bubbling sweet for ten years now, even fed it while he was in th
e hospital. Frank makes a beeline, such as he can, for the back door.
“Where do you think you’re going?” I say. He stops with his hand on the doorknob.
“To fix that garden.”
“Get back in the living room and sit yourself down. You just got home.”
“If we get it back in working order, we might could plant some collards in time for the frost to hit them right.”
“You’re not supposed to exert yourself. Working out in the hot sun like that’s what gave you the stroke in the first place.”
“That was never definitively determined.”
He turns the knob. With the lights off and the curtains drawn to keep it cool in here, the open door looks like a blazing white rectangle, burning away the black edges of his silhouette as he surveys the land, hands on his hips, shaking his head in sorrow. His garden takes up the whole back half of the yard, long rows of staked tomato plants, and snap-pea vines twining around their trellises, and squash bursting out of mounds in huge open fronds. The watermelon vines are always strangling the cabbage. Every afternoon, he unwinds and pulls free the tendrils, curling and thin as razor wire, nudges them back over onto their black landscape cloth, and every morning they’re wrapped right back around the cabbages’ necks, trying to squeeze the life out of them. I don’t know why he bothers with watermelon anyway. The ones he comes up with are never very good. They always turn out lumpy, like they’ve got warts, with mealy, desiccated flesh. It’s all covered over with weeds now, stringy brown grasses so high you can’t hardly see the stakes.
“Close the door,” I say. “You’re letting all the cold air out.”
“Looks like Guam out there. I may have to fish out my machete.”
“You weren’t even in Guam.”
“You ought to’ve sprayed the weeds,” he says.
“You know how I feel about sweat.”
He makes to start through the door. I grab his elbow. Its loose-hanging wrinkles are rough and dry. Water hisses from the faucet. “The doctor said—”
“I ain’t going to exert myself,” he says.
“It’s too hot. I’m exerted just from standing here.”
He tugs his elbow loose. “You can stay cooped up inside all day long if you please,” he says, “but I’ve got to grow us some food,” and lumbers across the yard, through the knee-high waving grasses, leaves me standing in the doorway in the hot sun. I’m already sweating.
I slam the door. The water rushing from the tap’s so hot steam billows from the basin, and I have to turn it back cold to get it the right temperature. I open a little crack in the drapes over the sink so I can watch him slowly picking his way across the yard, swaying back and forth with each step and looking down at the dirt from a great height, while I measure out the sugar and stir it into the warm water, turn it cloudy. Stubbornest man I ever saw. All of twenty-four hours he’s been home, and already he’s trying to send himself back to the hospital. It’d do him right to fall and break a hip. Least then he’d be laid up, couldn’t run around finding new ways to send himself quicker to the grave.
And instead of just spraying the weeds like he usually does, he leans over, with one hand on his knee, and yanks them from the ground by the fistful. I don’t know if he’s trying to prove that he’s capable of doing it, or if he can’t manage to walk the extra fifty yards to his shed for the weed killer or even a hoe, for heaven’s sake, or if the stroke permanently damaged the part of his brain that knows the first thing about keeping a garden, but either way, it makes me so mad watching him I go back and throw the door open again.
“If you fall out there,” I yell, “you can find somebody else to call you an ambulance.” He waves the shout away like it’s a gnat.
I don’t leave the kitchen the whole time he’s out there. I stir the potato flakes into the water, pour it all into the jar with the starter, and set it on the windowsill to bubble in the sun, and then I pull myself up a chair to the back door and wait.
Thirty minutes later, he trudges back in, sopping wet, lets the screen door slam behind him with a loud crack. I hate when he lets the screen door slam. On the edge of the garden there’s a big pile of weeds he’s pulled, drying in the sun with all the soil shaken from their roots, but in the garden itself you wouldn’t know he’d done a thing. Looks like there might—might—be a thinner, balding spot in the grasses near the tomatoes, but if you tilt your head to the left, even that little bit of progress vanishes.
He sets my jar of sourdough starter in the sink, pulls three pinkish tomatoes from his bulging pocket, and sets them on the windowsill to ripen. “There were a few survivors,” he says. “Despite you.”
With shaking hands, he fills himself a glass of water and chipped ice—the dispenser set in the freezer door sounds like it’s grinding bone before it breathes out the little shavings—and drinks it down so fast I’m afraid it’ll kill him. I saw a special on the news about marathon runners who sweated out so much salt and drank so much water it threw their systems out of balance and they died on the spot. The color drains from his skin, washed down by the water, and his Adam’s apple rises and falls with each swallow, a stone rolled away by the flood. I press the back of my hand to his cheek, the way you’re supposed to feel the wood of a closed door when you suspect there’s a fire on the other side. It’s warm and damp, which is at least better than cold and dry. Cold and dry means you’re having heatstroke. I learned that from one of the many informational brochures the smiling doctors provided me.
He goes to set the glass on the edge of the counter and misses completely, drops it so it shatters on the floor, and then, as if this isn’t bad enough, bends down and starts grabbing at the pieces with his bare hands, when you can’t even tell the glass from the ice. I slap his elbow away, pull a dishrag from the drawer, drag the trash can and chair over, and sit while I pick up the splinters. Time shows real quick which is which: the ice shrinks, its edges soften and spread, but the pieces of glass stay sharp in their puddles. It all gets flung into the trash just the same.
I wipe the water in circles across the tile, spread what I can’t soak up thin enough to evaporate. The wet spot dries into a paler, shinier gray than the rest of the floor. The whole house needs a good mopping.
He pulls down a can of chicken noodle soup from the cabinet. Why he’d want soup for lunch when he’s already so hot is beyond me. Doesn’t make any sense. He has trouble clamping the can opener on, can’t steady his hands enough to get the little sharp wheel flush against the rim. He examines the can opener as if he thinks that’s where the fault lies, winds the crank and watches the gears fit cogs into notches and slowly turn the blade. Before he decides to start tinkering with it and the afternoon ends with me having to go buy a new can opener, I snatch it out of his hands, open his soup, mix it with a can of water, and put it in the microwave. I don’t say a word while I smear the mayonnaise on his bread for his tomato sandwich, and I don’t say a word while he takes the last tomato from the basket, rinses it, and tries to slice it. After he cuts off the cap, all he manages to do is squash the whole thing until the juice and seeds come spilling out across the cutting board. He’s using the wrong knife, but I don’t say a word.
He takes his food to the living room so he can watch the court channel. I’m not hungry, but I piddle around in the kitchen for a while and wash some dishes real loud to make a point before I finally go in there to be sure he isn’t keeled over dead from a sodium imbalance. He isn’t, but he’s hunched so far over his TV tray that he might as well be, and even across the short distance from the bowl to his mouth, his hands shake the chicken soup from his spoon. It splatters on the tray, and the broth runs in a stream over the edge and into a yellow puddle on the floor.
I stare at him, then at the puddle. The broth trickles loudly into it.
“It just kept happening,” he says, doesn’t even look away from the screen. “Thought I’d enjoy my lunch and clean it up when I was through.”
They’ve found Little La
rry’s body. It was inside a trash bag, stewing in a puddle in a highway ditch two hundred miles from his hometown. A skeletal lady with enormous bifocals and prodigious wrinkles found him when her radiator went haywire and started spewing so much smoke she had to pull off to the side of the road. Got out of her car, went to look under the hood, and there in the ditch was a black trash bag, shiny and wet from the rain, with a tiny, pale hand sticking out the open top.
“Just as soon as I saw that tiny, pale hand,” she croaks, “I knew whose it was.”
The press is camped outside his mama’s apartment building, waiting for a statement. She lives on the second floor, so all the cameras are on the ground, tilted upward. After a while, her door opens, and she’s standing there in nothing but a ratty sweatshirt and some pink satin underwear that at some point long ago in its sad history was meant to be seductive. Her blond hair is wadded up and falling loose all around her head. Deborah Norris, that’s her name. She takes one look down at the cameras with wide, empty eyes and shuts the door.
I drop the same soggy dish towel on the floor, rub it around with my foot, and leave it there for him to pick up. He can do it easier from the chair than I can from standing.
“You want the rest of my sandwich?” he says, staring at the wrinkled, shining black lump of the trash bag between the policemen’s legs. “This tomato’s too dry.”
I turn around and leave the room.
After he’s gone to bed, I sneak to the back door. Outside, the moon’s light makes everything look like its surface, silver and barren. The trees rustle, full to bursting with sleeping birds. You see so many of them during the day, always moving as if there’s some churning engine inside them that won’t ever let them rest, darting solitary from branch to bush to power line, or wheeling in flocks so huge their movement against the sky looks like space itself spreading and collapsing, it’s hard to believe they can settle so silent and still in the trees at night, disappear so completely.
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