The Last Fair Deal Going Down, page 13
“I don’t care. I don’t want to know,” he said, and walked away from me to begin arranging the boards into two piles. I stood still, carefully crunching the rest of the cookies inside my coat pocket. Then I went to help him.
“I saw another rat,” I said.
We built farrowing stalls with the boards. This took us three weeks — twenty stalls. I did the regular chores by myself. One or two days a week Ansol would take a day trip with his wife, Ann, and granddaughter, who had been bequeathed to them after his daughter divorced her relationship with her husband and did not want the burden of the child, restraining her movements, hindering her chances of remarrying, and reminding her of how they had adopted the girl in order to save the marriage. And after they had got the child (at a young age because they wanted a fresh start) its skin had started to turn dark, never black, but some color they could tell would never go white again . . . darker than it ought to be. This was likely not the last, but one of the last thinly balanced dominoes that finally toppled the precarious tower of their lives together. During the one-week divorce proceedings Annabelle was with diverse and deliberate attention introduced into Ansol’s house, in such a way as to appear at the end of the week that she belonged there.
Mrs. Brenner had told me this one afternoon in the secrecy of her kitchen. This unfolding had been carefully planned, as though she had gone over the sparse material in her mind for the last nine years, both making sense of it to herself and finding the most delicate, dramatic way to tell it — which after several years become one and the same thing. Ansol and Annabelle were together in the school bus then, and Mrs. Brenner, between my last gulp of milk and a piece of cake, warned me to keep the story away from Ansol, who though he would not ever fully understand it, might at least see far enough into it to recognize a hint of the ghastly business of child manipulation, which would send him into a period of rage comparable to the time he had seen his son from across a field setting fire to a wingless owl lying in a puddle of gasoline, and had run screaming across the corn stubble to beat the child with his fists and kick him unconscious, and had for weeks after that time refused to come out of the house, sitting and rocking back and forth in his rocking chair, staring at a portrait of his father without actually seeing it — more like looking at it because the chair was pointed toward the wall and the picture was on the wall and he was watching the wall.
Many days I was left to work alone. Mr. and Mrs. Brenner and Annabelle were of the age when traveling is important, and they took day trips. Things were good then. Everything was good before the hospital. The farrowing crates were completed. The sows had another two or three weeks before they needed to be watched. I learned how to work. Those duties I had could be completed in one hour; my manner of doing them, however, took seven hours, without an unoccupied minute.
On these days I would leave home at seven-fifteen A.M., beginning to drive when it was still dark. Out of the city and onto the gravel, the ice and snow became first gray, and then a ghostlike pale. I drove with my window down and could smell the cold light coming as though out of the ground because it was not in the sky — not until after I had parked the truck and gone into the Brenners’ house where I plugged in the coffeepot that Ann had filled for me the night before and checked the refrigerator — where, waiting for the coffee to perk, I watched the color sneak into the sky out of the kitchen window. Then I drank the coffee and washed the cup and pot.
Outside, I started the tractor and let it warm up, though tractors run fine, cold. Then I drove down to the other buildings and hooked up a lowsided wagon to it. Behind the barn I parked the wagon beside a hinged wooden window opening into the corn bin. I walked around to the front of the barn and took the ax from the inside wall and carried it to the water tank to break the ice that had formed during the night, flipped the broken pieces out onto the ground, and carried the ax back.
After eighteen shovels of cracked corn I closed the door and checked the huge mousetraps made for rats. I drove out into the lot and spread the corn by standing in the wagon and throwing the corn out with the shovel so that it sprayed out across the entire bottom of the bunks. Then back for the supplement, which had to be shoveled down onto the noses of the cattle and let fall down between their heads onto the corn.
With this infinitesimal restraint I looked for watery eyes, indicating vitamin deficiency, fixed broken bunks, fed the sows, cleaned the barns, being sure not to drive the spreader into snow deeper than eighteen inches for fear of getting stuck, ate lunch, sharpened the plow and disc, checked the water in the storage tank, refed the cattle, and checked to be sure the bedding was dry.
Some days the Brenners would be gone during the week and I would make sure Annabelle had not forgotten to wake up and leave for school. Mrs. Brenner had told me that Annabelle, because of her insecurity, would often hide food — take pieces of hamburger from the table, wrap them up in her napkin and hide them in her bedroom. In case she ever ran out. The basement was also a favorite place of hers to hide food; the thousands of jars of canned fruit and jams provided perfect cover. I never forgot this and even while I was driving her to school I would watch her quick eyes, wondering if she was looking for food. Sometimes I would offer her cookies and sandwiches that had been left in her refrigerator (Mrs. Brenner said that Annabelle would never go out into the kitchen to get food herself, and would only hide food that had been given to her, either by being put on her plate at dinner time or given to her as a snack in the evenings). She never refused, and put the cookies or sandwiches deep into a gigantic pocket in her coat. I never heard her speak, except tiny, instant words when asked a direct question by Ann or Ansol. She never answered me.
I was almost embarrassed to feel myself becoming excited to see spring come. Ansol told me everyday for three weeks that it was too early to begin plowing, that the ground was still frozen. And everyday I would walk around the fields and jump up and down on the dirt, feeling sure that the ground had thawed during the night. I was glad for the rain because it would help dissolve the ice. Things were good then, so good that I did not notice a terribleness within the Brenners’ house. Ansol had slipped quietly into the house to get us some food — quietly in order that his wife would not hear him and try to give him some leftover coffee cake that neither of us had liked and she was trying to unload. Even Annabelle wouldn’t eat it. She would hide it, but she wouldn’t eat it. Mrs. Brenner was talking to her daughter on the phone: Vickie, who had recently remarried, wanted her child back. Mrs. Brenner explained to her that it was not healthy for Annabelle to be traded around — that Annabelle was at an age where her friends were important to her, and being taken away from them now — when for the first time she did have a few friends, shy, rabbit-like girls that she visited occasionally and who came to the farm and played very quiet games in her bedroom — would be wrong. Vickie demanded she have her daughter back, and Mrs. Brenner asked why it would be different this time — that the girl’s color was still not white and . . . and Ansol heard her. He walked out of the house with two sandwiches, walked into the nearest field and stood holding them as though he had forgotten he had them, as though they were extensions of his hands. I went out to him and asked again if the ground was ready, jumping up and down on it to show how it gave.
“Who cares?” said Ansol. He did not offer me a sandwich or look at me.
“I care,” I said.
“Go clean the barn,” he said, and I did not see him for two weeks. Mrs. Brenner said he had gone away, into Des Moines. But then he came back and told me that it was time to plow.
“You take it out first,” I said.
“No,” he said. “You go ahead. You help me through this spring.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
I hitched the plow and drove out into the first field, one of my favorite ones, with steep hills and a creek running through it. I let the plow down.
I don’t remember anything else about this time.
I woke up in the hospital; Nellie and Paul were sitting in the room. I could not see very clearly and it took a long time to know where I was.
“Where am I?”
“In the hospital.”
“What am I doing here?”
“You had an accident,” said Paul.
“What!”
“The tractor fell over on you, on a soft shoulder of a hill.”
“How long have I been here?”
“Five days.”
“Five days! What happened to me?”
“You’ve had a concussion, and a skull fracture.”
“What.”
“We were afraid you would die. The doctors didn’t know,” said Nellie.
I told them to go home and passed out. Two days later I saw my doctor. I had been sleeping and he was looking at my chart and seemed to have been awake for the last thirty-six hours.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” he said, and put the chart back onto the hook at the end of my bed.
“I’m so tired all the time,” I said. “And I tried to get up today and was too weak and too dizzy.”
“Don’t try to move around yet,” he said.
“What’s the matter with me?”
“Your head’s not well.”
“Come on, doctors don’t talk like that.”
“Your brain is still bleeding. Try this,” he said, and put his hands out in front of him and swiveled them from his wrists in half circles, in unison. I tried and could not make my left hand follow what my right hand was doing.
“I’ve never done that before,” I said, sure that it was a trick to keep me in the hospital . . . something that doctors practiced in Med. School. He muttered and wrote down something in my chart.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” I said.
“Probably not,” he said, condescending and flat.
For the next two months I practiced twisting my hands back and forth. And every time he would come in, I couldn’t do it. Sometimes he would talk to me and would seem as though he had forgotten. Sometimes he would even walk out of the room — then come back and say, “Can you do this?” and move his hands.
“Why can’t I remember those five days?”
“That just happens,” he said. “It’s natural in this type of accident.”
“Will I ever get it back?”
“Probably not. You’re lucky to be alive. I even expect your memory isn’t too clear about the first couple weeks after that.”
I was ashamed to admit that I had no idea of how long I had been in the hospital, how many spinal taps, or how many days I had slept completely through.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said, but I was sure from his face that he was lying, sort of. But that might have been my own apprehension. It wasn’t. He said he scratched the bottom of my foot with a key, but I couldn’t feel it.
Ansol came to see me at least twice a week and talked all afternoon. He was uncomfortable in the hospital and stood up every time a nurse came in. Once, before he had come, an orderly told me that he, Ansol, was paying for my hospital bills and calling up every day to see how I was doing. The orderly told me that Ansol might be doing this in order to make me think that he was a good fellow — so that it wouldn’t occur to me to sue him, which he said could bring me in some fifty thousand dollars. I told him that I did not want to sue, and the orderly said that he would tell Ansol that I had decided not to — just so he would know he wasn’t pulling anything over on me. I told him not to say anything and that if he did I would break his head.
Nellie came everyday and would sit with me even when I was asleep. Sometimes after I woke up I seemed to know Nellie had come and gone, not wanting to wake me. This frightened me because I was afraid that she had come, that I had talked to her, and then had forgotten, retaining only a sense of the memory. I would ask her the next day or call her on the phone and she would tell me that I had not been awake.
When I left the hospital it was winter again. It was also dark, and I had left by way of the fire escape to avoid the notice of those people who knew I still could not move my hands correctly. I wanted to surprise Nellie and Paul and decided to hitchhike home. Twice I became unstable and leaned against a building while my equilibrium rearranged itself. At Sixth Ave. I stood with one foot on the pavement and one foot on the curb to avoid the possibility of being arrested for illegally hitchhiking, a law that allows the Des Moines police to make money and harass people in the name of safety. I placed one hand on my hip and extended the other above my head with the thumb perpendicular to the ground. This was the classic stance, the form of which was worthy of the phrase “hitching a ride.” I disliked many of the contemporary antihitchhikers, who not only refused the humility of this attitude, but also felt no obligation to entertain the driver after they were picked up; they offered nothing in return for the ride, the effort, or the gasoline money; they demanded to be recognized as serious, merely by their position along the road; their faces did not even betray a desire for a ride, as though they had come by some misunderstood quirk of fate to be standing, half dazed, along a roadway. The pages of these people’s activities are always very short and often they will not answer when asked where they are going, but indicate by grunts and groans when they are getting off, with no explanation or story behind their passage. When I drove I never gave them rides.
I resolved not to be like that, an antihitchhiker.
I stood in that spot from nine until midnight. Then I walked down the street, where it would be easier for the cars to stop. From every group of cars that approached me, I would pick one out and tell myself, “That one will pick me up.” When this plan failed I applied it in reverse, saying, “That car will never pick me up,” and then “Those cars will never pick me up.” I tried staring straight into the eyes of the drivers, forcing them to encounter me, and they stared back and drove by. I was becoming tired and dramatically exaggerated this circumstance. They registered compassion for me and drove by. My head began to hurt. I was angry and disgusted and tired and hungry. I sat down on the street and haphazardly tried to light some paper lying in the ditch by flipping live matches into it. I began to curse and say obscene things to myself. An old Mercury stopped after an unmistakably long time. I climbed into the back seat and told the aging bricklayer I wanted to go home. I put my head against one of the back windows, feeling as though my head might explode. “Things are changing,” he said, “for the better. There are better ways of doing things nowadays. More sensible. I can remember when hitchhikers used to stand with their thumbs stuck up in the air about their heads. And what’s the use? Everyone knows . . . .”
I went to bed immediately on returning home, without waking Paul and Nellie with the joyous news of my arrival. I slept soundly and was not discovered in the house until the next evening, when I woke up and emerged into the living room. They were happy to see me. Paul was suspicious and called the hospital. It informed him of my escape. We argued and I stayed at home.
I continued to be dizzy and could not remain active for even short periods of time without headaches — splitting headaches, that began as a small needle of pain inside the back middle of my head and spread in a muffled explosion around the upper skull, as though looking for a way out. Seeing was difficult during these attacks and talking was impossible because of the intense irritation caused by vibrating the pain with the words.
Yet I was still not aware of the depth of the destruction — of the penetrating overcast wrought by the accident . . . only hints that the concussion was more than a headache, was more than a metal pin placed in my skull to hold it together, more than the dizziness and jumbled coordination. Dr. Sheldon came to see me once and scratched the bottom of my foot with a key. This time I felt it. He said I was getting better.
“What about those five days?” I asked. “I still don’t remember them.”
“You probably never will. Forget it.”
“That’s a bad joke.”
“Stay in bed and don’t walk around for more than ten minutes at a time.” He looked again as though he could tell me something else, but maybe it was because he looked tired.
“Why don’t you get some sleep?” I asked. He said something to Nellie and Paul in the living room and then left.
Because reading books was too painful, and no bedridden person enjoys listening to the radio because it constantly reminds him that he has nothing to do, I built toothpick houses, buildings, and apartments.
At first I constructed simple structures. Then I had Paul bring me some balsa wood and I added stairs and elevator shafts and balconies and real wooden walls with windows. I built awful rooms and rooms that might be nice to be in.
Successful in varying degrees with these projects, I began a super structure, a windmill with a shaft and a small wooden hand crank to turn the wheel around. I recognized that I had many structural and aesthetic problems to solve and . . . woke up and saw the completed windmill sitting on the floor beside my bed, more shoddy than I had imagined it would look, with even a couple of glue smears.... I called Nellie, but she could not help me. I called Paul and he said that I had built the windmill during the last three days and had carried it into the living room once to work on it in the better light, and had sent him out for thin thread-wire to use in the base. My memory had disintegrated another part of its stuff.
Nellie called Dr. Sheldon and he came; he sat down at the kitchen table and Nellie gave him some coffee. “He doesn’t remember the last three days,” she was whispering to him when I entered the room.
“What’s wrong with me?” I asked him, beginning to take offense in his practice of not sleeping before coming to see me.
“Don’t worry. It’s usual in this kind of accident to have a blackout . . . before you are fully recovered.”
“What could be wrong with me?”
He waited, and then with a visible effort started his tired voice again. “In accidents like yours it is sometimes possible for the victim — ”
