and her crying, and turned hard-faced and turned away. Ruth had the leisure for tears. The two of us had work to do.
Dee switched me to a four-to-midnight shift at the diner, and I went to sit by my father in the ICU before and after. My mother worked six to six. She spent her lunch and dinner hour in my father’s room. I took over the farm. At dawn I’d be opening the barn doors and checking that the culverts weren’t jammed with branches and leaves. The barn cats were wild, nobody’s idea of a kitty on a pillow on a couch, but they always came running when I showed up with the food. Sometimes I sat on the barn floor, my back against the wall with splinters picking at my spine, the bowl between my knees so that I could run my fingers over their fur. I was good with being alone, always liked it, but there’s something about doing a job alone that you’ve always done with someone else that just doesn’t feel right. Maybe it’s like making Christmas cookies by yourself. There’s nothing wrong with it in theory, but you’re really supposed to be doing it with other people, and not just any other people.
“Your brother should be here helping out,” Ruth said, and I just spit out, “Well, you could give me a hand, too.” But I knew that there was no one else, that I was on my own.
I think that was when I really began to like hospitals. There’s an orderliness to them. Your life is a mess and there they are, clean, organized, white as white, each bed in each room in the same place, everyone with a clipboard and a job to do. I hear what people are saying, when they complain about the nurse who comes to take your blood pressure at six in the morning even though you’re having a terrible time getting any sleep, complain about the lousy food and the tinny intercoms and the smell of disinfectant. They’re right about all that. But what I liked was that there were a series of problems, and the hospital figured out what they were, and how to solve them.
That’s up to a point, and up to a point is what they did for my father. They got him a bit better, and then they sent him to a rehab place, and then they sent him home after Steven and some friends of his built a ramp up the steps and moved a rented hospital bed into the middle of the living room. They taught my father to walk, but he walked like Tommy only worse, like the right side of him was the sidecar on a motorcycle. I brought him home while my mother was at work, and when he saw the ramp and the bed he started to cry. I don’t know that I’d ever seen him really cry before, even when Tom was under that tractor. But he cried all the time now, and that was terrible. So was the fact that when he talked he made no sense, but you could tell he thought he did. Usually he repeated the same word over and over. One day it was bat. Another day it was rattle. He said shit a lot, too, which upset my mother so much she would leave the room, although his mouth was such a tangle that unless you knew what the word was you might not figure it out.
Usually once a day I’d get him into the truck and ride him around the valley. It was a production, walking him out to the drive, heaving his one side into the passenger seat. I couldn’t even tell if he liked it. I would see him staring out the window, his head turned from me, looking at the old house where my mother and Ruth had grown up, the turnoff for the river and for Andover, the high school where he’d played football, the Dairy Queen and the Presbyterian church and the cemetery where everyone we knew who was dead was buried, and I’d figure he was watching his whole life passing in front of him, bit by bit, building by building.
To fill the quiet in the car I’d talk about the price of beef cattle, the straw someone had dropped over to our barn, who’d been into the diner. I took him to the diner for lunch one day, and all the guys