The View From Castle Rock Part 18

But before he would leave for the hospital he had to take me out to the barn and show me where the hay was, how to put it down for the sheep. He and Irlma keep two dozen or so sheep. I don't know why they do this. I don't think they make enough money on the sheep for the work that is created to be worthwhile. Perhaps it is just rea.s.suring to have some animals around. They have Buster of course, but he is not exactly a farm animal. The sheep provide ch.o.r.es, farm work still to be done, the kind of work they have known all their lives.

The sheep are still out to pasture, but the gra.s.s they get has lost some of its nourishment-there have been a couple of frosts-so they must have the hay as well.

In the car I sit beside him holding the can and we follow slowly that old, usual route-Spencer Street, Church Street, Wexford Street, Ladysmith Street-to the hospital. The town, unlike the house, stays very much the same-n.o.body is renovating or changing it. Nevertheless it has changed for me. I have written about it and used it up. Here are more or less the same banks and hardware and grocery stores and the barbershop and the Town Hall tower, but all their secret, plentiful messages for me have drained away.

Not for my father. He has lived here and nowhere else. He has not escaped things by such use.

Two slightly strange things happen when I take my father into the hospital. They ask me how old he is, and I say immediately, "Fifty-two," which is the age of a man I am in love with. Then I laugh and apologize and run to the bed in the Emergency Ward where he is lying, and ask him if he is seventy-two or seventy-three. He looks at me as if the question bewilders him too. He says, "Beg your pardon?" in a formal way, to gain time, then is able to tell me, seventy-two. He is trembling slightly all over, but his chin is trembling conspicuously, just the way my mother's did. In the short time since he has entered the hospital some abdication has taken place. He knew it would, of course-that is why he held off coming. The nurse comes to take his blood pressure and he tries to roll up his shirtsleeve but is not able-she has to do it for him.

"You can go and sit in the room outside," the nurse says to me. "It's more comfortable there."

The second strange thing: It happens that Dr. Parakulam, my father's own doctor-known locally as the Hin-doo doctor-is the doctor on call in the Emergency Ward. He arrives after a while and I hear my father making an effort to greet him in an affable way. I hear the curtains being pulled shut around the bed. After the examination Dr. Parakulam comes out and speaks to the nurse, who is now busy at the desk in the room where I am waiting.

"All right. Admit him. Upstairs."

He sits down opposite me while the nurse gets on the phone.

"No?" she says on the phone. "Well he wants him up there. No. Okay, I'll tell him."

"They say he'll have to go in Three-C. No beds."

"I don't want him in Chronic," the doctor says-perhaps he speaks to her in a more authoritarian way, or in a more aggrieved tone, than a doctor who had been brought up in this country would use. "I want him in Intensive. I want him upstairs."

"Well maybe you should talk to them then," she says. "Do you want to talk to them?"

She is a tall lean nurse, with some air of a middle-aged tomboy, cheerful and slangy. Her tone with him is less discreet, less correct and deferential, than the tone I would expect a nurse to take with a doctor. Maybe he is not a doctor who wins respect. Or maybe it is just that country and small-town women, who are generally so conservative in opinion, can often be bossy and unintimidated in manner.

Dr. Parakulam picks up the phone.

"I do not want him in Chronic. I want him upstairs. Well can't you-Yes I know. But can't you?-This is a case-I know. But I am saying-Yes. Yes all right. All right. I see."

He puts down the phone and says to the nurse, "Get him down to Three." She takes the phone to arrange it.

"But you want him in Intensive Care," I say, thinking that there must be some way in which my father's needs can prevail.

"Yes. I want him there but there is not anything I can do about it." For the first time the doctor looks directly at me and now it is I who am perhaps his enemy, and not the person on the phone. A short, brown, elegant man he is, with large glossy eyes.

"I did my best," he says. "What more do you think I can do? What is a doctor? A doctor is not anything anymore."

I do not know who he thinks is to blame-the nurses, the hospital, the government-but I am not used to seeing doctors flare up like this and the last thing I want from him is a confession of helplessness. It seems a bad omen for my father.

"I am not blaming you-," I say.

"Well then. Do not blame me."

The nurse has finished talking on the phone. She tells me I will have to go to Admitting and fill out some forms. "You've got his card?" she says. And to the doctor, "They're bringing in somebody that banged up on the Lucknow highway. Far as I can make out it's not too bad."

"All right. All right."

"Just your lucky day."

My father has been put in a four-bed ward. One bed is empty. In the bed beside him, next to the window, there is an old man who has to lie flat on his back and receive oxygen but is able to make conversation. During the past two years, he says, he has had nine operations. He spent most of the past year in the Veterans Hospital in the city.

"They took out everything they could take out and then they pumped me full of pills and sent me home to die." He says this as if it is a witticism he has delivered successfully many times.

He has a radio, which he has tuned to a rock station. Perhaps it is all he can get. Perhaps he likes it.

Across from my father is the bed of another old man, who has been removed from it and placed in a wheelchair. He has cropped white hair, still thick, and the big head and frail body of a sickly child. He wears a short hospital gown and sits in the wheelchair with his legs apart, revealing a nest of dry brown nuts. There is a tray across the front of his chair, like the tray on a child's high chair. He has been given a washcloth to play with. He rolls up the washcloth and pounds it three times with his fist. Then he unrolls it and rolls it up again, carefully, and pounds it again. He always pounds it three times, once at each end and once in the middle. The procedure continues and the timing does not vary.

"Dave Ellers," my father says in a low voice.

"You know him?"

"Oh sure. Old railroad man."

The old railroad man gives us a quick look, without breaking his routine. "Ha," he says, warningly.

My father says, apparently without irony, "He's gone away downhill."

"Well you are the best-looking man in the room," I say. "Also the best dressed."

He does smile then, weakly and dutifully. They have let him wear the maroon and gray striped pyjamas that Irlma took out of their package for him. A Christmas present.

"Does it feel to you like I've got a bit of a fever?"

I touch his forehead, which is burning.

"Maybe a bit. They'll give you something." I lean close to whisper. "I think you've got a head start in the intellectual stakes, too."

"What?" he says. "Oh." He looks around. "I may not keep it." Even as he says this he gives me the wild helpless look I have learned today to interpret and I s.n.a.t.c.h the basin from the bedside stand and hold it for him.

As my father retches, the man who has had nine operations turns up the volume on his radio.

Sitting on the ceiling Looking upside down Watching all the people Goin' roun' and roun'

I go home and eat supper with Irlma. I will go back to the hospital after supper. Irlma will go tomorrow. My father has said it would be better if she didn't come tonight.

"Wait till they get me under control," he said. "I don't want her upset."

"Buster's out somewhere," Irlma says. "I can't call him back. And if he won't come to me he won't come to n.o.body."

Buster is really Irlma's dog. He is the dog she brought with her when she married my father. Part German shepherd, part collie, he is very old, smelly, and generally dispirited. Irlma is right-he doesn't trust anybody but her. At intervals during our meal she gets up and calls from the kitchen door.

"Here Buster. Buster, Buster. Come on home."

"Do you want me to go out and call him?"

"Wouldn't work. He'd just not pay no attention."

It seems to me her voice is weaker and more discouraged when she calls Buster than she allows it to be when she speaks to anybody else. She whistles for him, as strongly as she can, but her whistle, too, lacks vigor.

"I bet you I know where he's gone," she says. "Down to the river."

I am thinking that, whatever she says, I will have to put on my father's rubber boots and go looking for him. Then, at no noise that I can hear, she lifts her head and hurries to the door and calls, "Here Buster old boy. There he is. There he is. Come on in now. Come on Buster. There's the old boy.

"Where you been?" she says, bending and hugging him. "Where you been, you old b.u.g.g.e.r? I know. I know. You gone and wet yourself in the river."

Buster smells of rot and river weeds. He stretches himself out on the mat between the couch and the television set.

"He's got his bowel trouble again, that's it. That's why he went in the water. It burns him and burns so he goes in the water to relieve it. But he won't get no real relief till he pa.s.ses it. No he won't," she says, cuddling him in the towel she uses to wipe him. "Poor old fellow."

She explains to me as she has done before that Buster's bowel trouble comes from going poking around the turkey barn and eating whatever he finds there.

"Old dead turkey stuff. With quills in it. He gets them into his system and he can't pa.s.s them through the way a younger dog would. He can't manage them. They get all bunched up in his bowels and they block all up in there and he can't pa.s.s it out and he's in agony. Just listen to him."

Sure enough Buster is grunting, groaning. He pushes himself to his feet. Hunh. Hunh.

"He'll be all night like that, maybe. I don't know. Maybe never get it out at all. That's what I can't help but be scared of. Take him to the vet's I know they won't help him. They'll just tell me he's too old, and they'll want to put him down."

Hunh. Hunh.

"n.o.body even goen to come to put me to bed," says Mr. Ellers the railroad man. He is in bed, propped up. His voice is harsh and strong but he does not wake my father. My father's eyelids tremble. His false teeth have been taken out so that his mouth sinks down at the corners, his lips have nearly disappeared. On his sleeping face there is a look of the most unalterable disappointment.

"Shut up that racket out there," says Mr. Ellers to the silent hall. "Shut up or I'll fine you a hunderd and eighty dollars."

"Shut up yourself, you old looney," says the man with the radio, and turns it on.

"A hunderd and eighty dollars."

My father opens his eyes, tries to sit up, sinks back, and says to me in a tone of some urgency, "How can we tell that the end product is man?"

Get yo ham outa my pocket- "Evolution," my father says. "We mightVe got the wrong end of the stick about that. Something going on we don't know the first thing about."

I touch his head. Hot as ever.

"What do you think about it?"

"I don't know, Dad."

Because I don't think-I don't think about things like that. I did at one time, but not anymore. Now I think about my work, and about men.

His conversational energy is already running out.

"May be coming-new Dark Ages."

"Do you think so?"

"Irlma's got the jump on you and me."

His voice sounds fond to me, yet rueful. Then he faintly smiles. The word I think he says is . . . wonder.

"Buster come through," Irlma greets me when I get home. A glow of relief and triumph has spread over her face.

"Oh. That's good."

"Just after you went to the hospital he got down to business. I'll have you a cup of coffee in a minute." She plugs in the kettle. On the table she has set out ham sandwiches, mustard pickles, cheese, biscuits, dark and light honey. It is just a couple of hours since we finished supper.

"He started grunting and pacing and worrying at the mat. He was just crazy with the misery and wasn't nothing I could do. Then about quarter past seven I heard the change. I can tell by the sound he makes when he's got it worked down into a better position where he can make the effort. There's some pie left, we never finished it, would you rather have the pie?"

"No thanks. This is fine."

I pick up a ham sandwich.

"So I open the door and try to persuade him to get outside where he can pa.s.s it."

The kettle is whistling. She pours water on my instant coffee.

"Wait a minute, I'll get you some real cream-but too late. Right on the mat there he pa.s.sed it. A hunk like that." She shows me her fists bunched together. "And hard. Oh boy. You should of seen it. Like rock.

"And I was right," she says. "It was chock-full of turkey quills."

I stir the muddy coffee.

"And after that whoosh, out with the soft stuff. Bust the dam, you did." She says this to Buster, who has raised his head. "You went and stunk the place up something fierce, you did. But the most of it went on the mat so I took it outside and put the hose on it," she said, turning back to me. "Then I took the soap and the scrub-brush and then I renched it with the hose all over again. Then scrubbed up the floor too and sprayed with Lysol and left the door open. You can't smell it in here now, can you?"

"No."

"I was sure good and happy to see him get relief. Poor old fellow. He'd be the age of ninety-four if he was human."

During the first visit I made to my father and Irlma after I left my marriage and came east, I went to sleep in the room that used to be my parents' bedroom. (My father and Irlma now sleep in the bedroom that used to be mine.) I dreamed that I had just entered this room where I was really sleeping, and I found my mother on her knees. She was painting the baseboard yellow. Don't you know, I said, that Irlma is going to paint this room blue and white? Yes I do know, my mother said, but I thought if I hurried up and got it all done she would leave it alone, she wouldn't go to the trouble of covering up fresh paint. But you will have to help me, she said. You will have to help me get it done because I have to do it while she's asleep.

And that was exactly like her, in the old days-she would start something in a big burst of energy, then marshall everybody to help her, because of a sudden onslaught of fatigue and helplessness.

"I'm dead you know," she said in explanation. "So I have to do this while she's asleep."

Irlma's got the jump on you and me.

What did my father mean by that?

That she knows only the things which are useful to her, but she knows those things very well? That she could be depended upon to take what she needs, under almost any circ.u.mstances? Being a person who doesn't question her wants, doesn't question that she is right in whatever she feels or says or does.

In describing her to a friend I have said, she's a person who would take the boots off a dead body on the street. And then of course I said, what's wrong with that?

. . . wonder. She's a wonder.

Something happened that I am ashamed of. When Irlma said what she did about my father having wished he'd been with her all the time, about his having preferred her to my mother, I said to her in a cool judicious tone-that educated tone which in itself has power to hurt-that I didn't doubt that he had said that. (Nor do I. My father and I share a habit-not too praiseworthy-of often saying to people more or less what we think they'd like to hear.) I said that I didn't doubt that he had said it but I did not think it had been tactful of her to tell me. Tactful, yes. That was the word I used.

She was amazed that anybody could try to singe her so, when she was happy with herself, flowering. She said that if there was one thing she could not stand it was people who took her up wrong, people who were so touchy. And her eyes rilled up with tears. But then my father came downstairs and she forgot her own grievance-at least temporarily, she forgot it-in her anxiety to care for him, to provide him with something he could eat.