The wind of the previous Saturday had recently returned, a little less savage but more persistent and enduring, and for several nights Vera had had to brave it on her way to the hospital. A cold, stinging wind, it brought winter if not snow. Each night froze harder than the last. The dirt of the roadways thudded under her heels; even the dust seemed to have turned hard as iron filings. Vera stepped in a puddle in the dark and the ice crackled so explosively she nearly jumped clean out of her skin.
By the fourth day of her father’s hospitalization the constant wind had swept every trace of cloud beyond the horizon and the
night skies appeared black and infinite, tiny distant stars showing like a scattering of salt grains. After a fifteen-minute walk Vera’s cheeks were burning and her eyes red and streaming with tears so that she looked as if she had been weeping for days. The matronly nurse on the desk noted all this when Vera checked in and shot her a sympathetic smile.
As usual, before sending Daniel home, Vera cautioned him to be sure to lock the door and go straight to bed. However, unlike other nights, he seemed in no hurry to quit the hospital. He hung in the doorway of his grandfather’s sickroom, tracing and retracing the shape of a floor tile with the toe of his runner.
“Stutz is waiting,” Vera reminded him.
Daniel drew in the last side of the square tile with the tip of his shoe, closing it, and lifted his face to his mother. “I was wondering …” he said hesitantly. “Do you think he can hear us talking when he’s like that?”
“You mean when he’s unconscious?”
Daniel returned his eyes to the tile. “Yeah, unconscious.” He took a deep breath. “Do you think maybe he can hear us?”
“I doubt it,” said Vera. “Why do you ask?”
“I was just wondering.”
“Why were you wondering?”
Daniel did not reply.
“Did you say something around him you wouldn’t want him to hear?”
Daniel glanced up at her. “No,” he said definitely.
Another possibility came to mind. “Is there something maybe you wanted him to hear you saying? Is that it?”
Daniel bit down hard on his lower lip, shifted his weight back and forth uneasily. When he felt he could trust himself, he began. “There was something he asked me to do for him. Something he thought was pretty important. I needed to tell him I would do it, just like he asked –” Daniel broke off, shrugging his shoulders.
A moment later he straightened himself up and gave his mother an uncertain look. “So I did it this afternoon. I promised. Promised him I’d do it, just like he wanted.”
“Then it’s all right, isn’t it?” said Vera gently. “You took care of it. You did all you could, right?”
“If you’d like,” he said, “I could stay on tonight. Then there’d be two of us. It can’t be any fun sitting here by yourself all night.”
“And what about school tomorrow morning?” said Vera, struggling to hide how his offer had touched her.
“I missed school for him once,” Daniel confessed abruptly. “We did the garden.”
“It was very nice of you to volunteer to stay with me,” said Vera, “but I think you’ve had enough of this place for one day. And you need your rest.”
“I just thought maybe you’d want the company. It can’t be any fun sitting here by yourself all night,” he repeated lamely.
“I want the company,” Vera assured him, “but I want you home in bed more.” She put her arm around his shoulders and walked him to the hospital entrance where she stood watching as he hurried across the parking lot and sprang into Stutz’s pickup.
The interior light flashed on and Stutz seemed to be pointing to something on the seat. Vera thought she could recall some previous mention made of Daniel spilling a Coke. They talked on for several minutes. Vera guessed Stutz was quizzing Daniel on her father and his condition, and at one point Stutz laid a big brown hand briefly on the boy’s shoulder. Then the interior light went off and she lost sight of her son. The truck crawled stiffly away, wreathed in clouds of exhaust that the wind was folding up into the truck bed. The brake lights stuttered at the parking lot exit and then Daniel and Stutz were gone.
It wasn’t wrong to bring him, Vera found herself thinking. I’m sure it’s done him good.
She turned around briskly and went back down the hallway to a stores room where she helped herself to a basin, soap, and towels,
just as she had done every night for the past three. In the sickroom her father still lay unconscious, his skin gleaming with a film of clammy sweat. Vera wiped that away in the fashion she might dust a sideboard. Then she went to work. He did not stir while she roughly scrubbed his feet, hands, face, and neck. In her opinion, the hospital staff was not keeping her father as clean as they might. She took her time washing him because she had plenty of time to kill. A long night faced her. She dried each finger separately. It was surprising how heavy even one thick, swollen-knuckled finger of a man who had worked all his life with his hands could be. Lying across her palm she could feel the weight of it.
With the washing and towelling done, Vera had nothing left to do but sit and wait. She considered shaving her father, but the prospect of working a razor over that deeply seamed face with its loose, folded skin scared her off. Instead, she patted some skin bracer into his crop of stiff, white bristles to keep him smelling fresh.
She sat back down in the chair. The need to be busy made her wish for other chores. If only he had a different sort of illness, one that required her to feed him, if only he had wounds to dress and clean, bandages to change. The night before she had occupied herself trimming his fingernails so he wouldn’t scratch himself during one of his spells. For good measure she had cut his toenails, too, holding a one-sided conversation with the unmoving body which had the blankets and sheets turned back over the ankles so that she could attack with the scissors. “Jesus, these are thick toenails. What have you got growing here? Three-quarter-inch plywood?”
The sobbing, nagging wind made waiting harder. Of course, the wind was all she had to listen to, the only company she had. Sudden gusts battering the windowpane like hands, shaking the glass in the sash so ferociously that she half-expected everything else in the room to set to jumping and the night-light on her father’s headboard to flickering. Then the startling lull, the moan of withdrawal, the long recovery of breath sucking at the window, a calm in which the smells of the hospital crept back into the room.
Ether, disinfectant, antiseptics that were the odours of unreality. The gap of silence magnified every sound that had been blunted by the clamour of the wind, the ticking of her watch, the stealthy, squeaky tread of rubber-soled shoes, the drifting, interminable call of the old woman two doors down who cried, “Nursie, nursie, nursie,” all night long in a voice inflected neither with urgency nor hope. And then it was back, beating the building like a drum.
So Vera waited, sleepless in the clash of the wind. Waited for her father to open his eyes, recognize and acknowledge her. It wasn’t gratitude she was seeking. He didn’t owe her gratitude for being there any more than she believed she owed him gratitude for harbouring her and Daniel sixteen months ago when she had come to the end of her strength and had nowhere else to turn. Vera thought in terms of debt rather than gratitude. It was easier to calculate. She simply wanted him to know that she was doing what she could, settling up. Decency for decency. It was the reason she never closed her eyes; so she could make plain to him who it was that waited with him if he came out of the coma.
Tonight, after nights of waiting, it happened. Her father opened his eyes and spoke. “Cold,” was what she thought he said. The wind was banging on the wall behind her, it was past four and she was dizzy from lack of sleep. So it was impossible to be certain exactly what he had said. But he had said something. Vera rose awkwardly from her chair – one leg had gone to sleep – and she hobbled to the bed. Her father hadn’t shifted so much as an inch, nor stirred a limb as far as she could see, but his eyes followed her to the side of the bed. As soon as she was close enough she noticed something else about his eyes, about the way they looked in the direct light of the lamp clipped to the headboard. They had undergone a transformation, turned cloudy, milky, the eyes of a man hardening into the eyes of a marble statue. They were practically white. And his face, too, and the pillowcase, the sheet tucked up under his chin, the stubble of his beard, all white as snow.
Vera bent low over the bed, determined that the milky eyes would know who she was. “Dad, it’s Vera,” she announced in a voice designed to penetrate. “Vera, your daughter. Can you hear me? Do you know me?”
“Cold.” This time she heard him clearly, the word surprisingly distinct in his toothless mouth.
Vera wasn’t absolutely certain what her father meant to say. “Are you cold, Dad? Do you want another blanket?”
He made no attempt to answer. His eyes tracked her as she stepped to the foot of the bed, wriggled her hands under the blankets, and pressed one of his feet between her palms. It felt like a block of ice. “Jesus,” she said, “you are cold, aren’t you? We better see what we can do about that, hadn’t we?” She went to the wardrobe, rummaged about noisily in it, and reappeared holding up the socks he had been wearing the day he was admitted to hospital. It was a trial to get them on him. He was unwilling or unable to cooperate, his feet remained stiff as boards, each toe as unyielding as a picket in a fence. The elasticized nylon socks kept snagging on calluses and corns, making tearing, rasping sounds as she tugged at them.
“There.” Finally she had got them on him.
“Cold.”
Now she had something to do besides sit and wait. She talked to him as she bustled around the bed. “Yes, yes, I know you’re cold, Dad. Just be patient. There’s an extra blanket up on the shelf in the wardrobe. Wait until I get you tucked up in that.”
When she had, he said it again. “Cold.”
“I understand. I know you’re cold. But just give yourself a minute to see if you don’t get warmer with the blanket. It’s a nice wool blanket. See?”
Poor circulation, Vera supposed. She laid her hands on his calves. As cool to the touch as spoons in a drawer on a summer day. She flew about the room emptying whatever the wardrobe
contained onto his bed – two more wool blankets, a counterpane; last of all, an extra sheet. “Not any better yet? Jesus, you can’t still be cold. You just want to see me run, that’s it, isn’t it?” She flapped out the sheet and let it float down upon him.
“Dad, Dad?” she cried anxiously. “Is that any better? Can you hear me, Dad? Do you know who it is, Dad? It’s Vera. I’m Vera.”
“Cold.”
She worked on with steady, angry determination, unwilling to give up. She found more towels in the bathroom and wrapped them like puttees around his legs. Still he grew colder. When she touched him she could feel it; her hands came away chilled and damp. Nervously she tried to blot away, wipe away, the sensation on the bedclothes.
“Cold.”
“Goddamn it, I know you’re cold. I’m trying. Don’t you see me trying? You try, too. Move your legs a little, rub them up and down on the sheets. Do you understand? Can you hear me?
Rub your legs on the sheets!”
Nothing stirred, responded, but his eyes.
Vera wouldn’t quit on him. Somehow she wrestled her father into his shirt. He was all dead-weight and it took all the strength in her to pull him upright and prop him there while she manoeuvred him into the shirt. His hospital gown kept getting in the way and she managed to stab only one of his arms into a sleeve, the one that didn’t have the tube in it. She was trembling and panting breathlessly by the time she finished. Cold and again cold and cold once more. Over and over cold.
Vera muffled him up in the last bit of clothing she had, her coat, even though she knew it was hopeless. At last there was nothing to place between her father and the cold but herself. Vera pressed him close. He fell silent. She looked into his eyes until, an hour later, she saw them finally overcome, the last of him to be possessed.
Guy Vanderhaeghe was born in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan in 1951. He is the author of six books of fiction. His first two books were collections of short stories:
Man Descending
(1982), which won the Governor General’s Award, and the Faber Prize in the U.K., and
The Trouble With Heroes
(1983).
My Present Age, a
novel, was published in 1984. That novel was followed by
Homesick
in 1989, which was a co-winner of the City of Toronto Book Award. His third book of short stories was the highly praised
Things As They Are?
(1992).
The Englishman’s Boy
(1996) was a long-time national bestseller and won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction and for Best Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for The Giller Prize, and the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the world’s largest monetary award for a single book.
Acclaimed for his fiction, Vanderhaeghe has also written plays. I
Had a Job I Liked. Once
. was first produced in 1991, and won the Canadian Authors Association Award for Drama. His second play,
Dancock’s Dance
, was produced in 1995. He is currently completing a screenplay for
The Englishman’s Boy
.
Guy Vanderhaeghe lives in Saskatoon, where he is a Visiting Professor of English at S.T.M. College.