David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

The truck had a handle above the door frame that you could grab to pull yourself up onto the seat; Paul used both hands, but I still had to take his legs and hoist. I could feel the bones.

We took back roads, dirt roads when I could find them. Cornfields with ranks of tubular stubble, broken-back barns with Holsteins standing outside in the mud. Hunting season had started—that morning I’d heard gunshots in the woods—and we passed a double-wide where a buck hung from a kids’ swing set, one front hoof scraping the ground.

“My kind of place,” he said. “You know, when they say you’re dead meat—like isn’t meat dead by definition?” He snapped the buck a salute. “Shit, I should’ve settled up here. Come to think of it, I have settled up here.”

“I always thought you’d get a place out of the city. At least for weekends.”

“I think that would’ve ruined it,” he said. “I was really just into the songs. Hey, can we have the Stanleys?”

“I just want to say,” I said. “I admire how you’re dealing with this.”

“Yeah, wait till the screaming starts.”

I put in a Stanley Brothers CD— Can’t you hear the night bird crying? —and he began packing a bowl. He blew out the first cloud of skunky smoke, then held it out to me. I put up my hand and opened my window.

“You mind cracking yours just a little?” I said. “If this is that shit you had last summer…”

“That? That was fucking ditchweed.” He exhaled again. “Yeah, actually I wouldn’t advise you.” He closed his eyes. “Okay. Better. I haven’t heard this for fucking ever.”

After a few miles, he packed the bowl again. “What’s so weird,” he said, “I can’t tell if something’s beautiful anymore. Like, is that beautiful?” He pointed at the CD player: the Stanley Brothers were singing “My Sinful Past,” where the harmony comes in on A hand reached down to guide me .

“Well,” I said, “I’m not always in the mood myself.”

“Okay, you don’t want to talk absolutes,” he said. “Can’t blame you there.”

I stopped at the convenience store outside of West Rumney—we’d run out of milk. “Anything I can get you?” I said.

“I’m disappointing you,” he said. “You want to know what it’s like.”

“Not unless you want to tell me,” I said. “This isn’t about me.”

“See, that’s my point,” he said. “Listen, would they have eggnog this early? I mean in the year?”

“That’s a thought.”

“Yes it is,” he said. “Good for me, right? Could you leave the thing on?” We’d switched over to the King recordings; the Stanley Brothers were singing “A Few More Years.”

But when I came out with the milk and a half gallon of eggnog, already with holly wreath and red ribbon on the carton, he was sitting in silence. “I didn’t want to run down your battery,” he said. Could he have been crying? His eyes had looked red all day. Though of course he’d been smoking. I had to help him get the eggnog open and hold the carton up so he could sip. “How did Bob Cratchit drink this shit?” he said. “Guess I can cross this off too.”

Back at the house, he lay on the sofa for a while, then got up, bent over, groaned and picked up the mandolin case. “You know, I haven’t played since your million-dollar bash,” he said. “I want you to have this.”

“Come on, no way. I could never play mandolin for shit. There must be somebody who could really—”

“Fuck somebody ,” he said.

—

Just two days later, he’d gotten so weak that Heather brought him a walker, which he used to get back and forth to the armchair and the bathroom. Then he stopped making that trip, so she brought in a commode; he could get his legs over the side of the bed, and if you’d bring the walker over he could get to his feet, go the two steps by himself, turn and sit, in his open-backed hospital johnny. And then Janna had to help him; he wouldn’t let me. And then the bedpan. And then the day Heather came to catheterize him. He said to Janna, “Here goes our last chance.” That was the same day Heather hooked him up to the morphine. “Think of this as the baseline,” she told us, “and then you give him more by mouth. This is in your hands. You understand what I’m saying?”

After our car ride, he never wanted music again, and he had no interest in hearing the World Series. He’d brought pictures in standup Plexiglas frames: a photo of Simone, a postcard reproduction of Scipione Pulzone’s The Lamentation (1591)—I looked at the back—and a snapshot of the two of us standing in front of my house. I set them up on the table by his bed, but I never saw him look at them.

He screamed when we turned him to prevent bedsores—it took me and Janna together—but still insisted on being turned, until he didn’t. When he could no longer drink, we swabbed the inside of his mouth with supposedly mint-flavored sponges the size of sugar cubes, on plastic sticks. At first he’d made faces at the taste of the morphine; then he was sucking at the dropper.

One day, the day before the last day, he motioned me to bend down and whispered, “Why will you not just do it? They’re not gonna say shit to you. She knows.”

“Buddy,” I said, “you know I can’t.” Which she did he mean? He’d gotten to a point where he was conflating Heather and Janna.

“I’m not your buddy,” he said. “You cocksucker.”

On his last night, we both slept in the living room with him, though I guess “slept” isn’t the word—Janna on the sofa, me on the floor—and took turns getting up every half hour to dose him again. I’d stopped drawing the morphine up to the exact line on the dropper: just squirted in as much as it would hold, then watched the tip of his tongue touch at the green crust on his lips. I’d write down the time and “20 mg,” hoping they wouldn’t check my chart too carefully against what drugs would be left. When the light finally started turning gray outside, I switched on his bedside lamp—I saw his eyelids tighten—and gave him the next dropper, ten minutes early, then another one for good measure. In a while, the moaning quieted down; I turned the lamp off, went to the window and saw pink above the mountains. I pulled my fleece over my sweatshirt and went out to feed the hens. Frost on the grass, a faint quarter moon still high.

Walking back to the house, I saw the light go on in the living room. Janna was standing over his bed and holding his hand, the one with the needle taped to it. “Where were you?” she said. “He was asking for you.”

I leaned over him; he was still breathing, but with shallow breaths. “Should we call them?” I said.

His eyes came open and he said, “I’ve never been here before.”

“Don’t be afraid,” Janna told him.

He rolled his head an inch to one side, an inch to the other. “I don’t know how to do this.”

“You can just let go,” she said.

“Oh, fuck,” he said. “You are one stupid twat.”

Janna’s head jerked back, but she kept hold of his hand.

“Is there anything you want us to do?” I said.

He closed his eyes. “You won’t.” He began drawing harder, deeper breaths. “I keep being mean,” he said.

“Rest,” I said. I took his other hand.

He rolled his head again. “I need to get this right.”

Janna put her other hand on his, over where the needle went in.

“We both love you,” she said. “It’s okay to go.”

“I don’t know,” he said.

We watched him breathe. It took longer and longer for the next one to come, and then there wasn’t a next one.