James Salter - Light Years

“How is he?”

“Very bad.”

“Will he recover?”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Nedra, I’m so sorry.”

“Well, what can we do?” she asked. “I’m staying at the house.”

“Are you comfortable there?”

“It isn’t that bad.”

“How long do you suppose… What do they think?”

“He seems so weak, so far gone. This morning I was shocked at how far it had progressed.”

“Do you want me to come down?”

“Oh, no, that really wouldn’t do anything. It’s very sweet of you, but I don’t think so.”

“Well, if you need me…”

“Viri, these hospitals are so awful. You ought to design a hospital, with sunlight and trees. If you’re dying you should have one last look at the world—I mean, at least you should see the sky.”

“It’s all efficiency.”

“Damn efficiency.”

When she returned to the hospital her father was asleep again. He woke as soon as she came near, wide-eyed suddenly, aware. She sat by his bed through the long afternoon. For dinner he took only a few sips of milk.

“Papa, you must eat.”

“I can’t.”

The nurses came in occasionally. “How are you feeling, Mr. Carnes?”

“It won’t be long,” he murmured.

“Are you feeling better?” they asked.

He seemed not to hear them. He was being enclosed in an invisible shroud. His mouth was dry. When he talked it was barely a mumble, deep, almost unintelligible. Several times he asked what day it was.

That night, exhausted, she bathed and went to bed. She woke once during the night. The sky, the street outside, were absolutely silent. She was rested, calm, alone. The cat had entered the room and sat on the window sill, looking out.

By morning her father had gone into a coma. He lay helpless, breathing more evenly, more slowly, there were pads of moist gauze on his eyes. She called to him: nothing. He had said his last words.

Suddenly she was choked with sadness. Oh, peace to you, Papa, she thought. For hours she sat by the bed.

He was stubborn. He was strong. He could not hear her now, nothing could rouse him. His arms were folded weakly across his chest like featherless wings. She wiped his face, adjusted his pillow.

Viri called that evening. “Is there any change?”

“I’m going out for some dinner,” she told him. She talked to the children. How was Grandpa, they asked. “He’s very sick,” she said.

They were polite. They didn’t know what to reply.

It took a long time, it took forever; days and nights, the smell of antiseptic, the hush of rubber wheels. This frail engine, we think, and yet what murder is needed to take it down. The heart is in darkness, unknowing, like those animals in mines that have never seen the day. It has no loyalties, no hopes; it has its task.

The night nurse listened to him. It had begun. Nedra leaned close. “Papa,” she said, “can you hear me? Papa?”

His breaths came faster, as if he were fleeing. It was six in the evening. She sat all night as he lay there gasping, his body working with the habit of a lifetime. She was praying for him, she was praying against him and thinking to herself as she did, You’re next, it’s only a matter of time, a few swift years.

At three in the morning there was only the light at the nurse’s desk, there was no doctor. The corridors were empty.

Below was the dark, impoverished town, its sidewalks crumbled, its houses so close there was not even space to walk between them. The ancient schools were silent, the theater, its windows covered with metal sheet, the veterans’ halls. Through the center ran not a river, but a broad, silent bed of rails. The tracks were rusted, the great repair shops closed. She knew this steep town, she was friendless here, she had turned her back on it forever. In it, sleeping, were distant cousins, never to be claimed.

She listened to the terrible struggle that was going on upon the narrow bed. She took his hand. It was cool; there was no feeling in it, no response. She watched him. He was fighting far beyond her; his lungs were fighting, the chambers of his heart. And his mind, she thought, of what was that thinking, trapped within him, fated? Was it in harmony, his being, or in chaos, like the people of a falling city?

His throat began to fill. She called the nurse. “Come right away,” she said.

His breath was frightening, his pulse weak. The nurse felt his wrist, then his elbow.

He did not die. He went on with the awful breathing. The effort of it made her weak. It seemed that if only he could rest from it he would be all right. An hour passed. He did not know how he was exhausting himself. It was a kind of insanity, he was running on and on, had stumbled and gotten to his feet again a hundred times. Nothing could stand such punishment.

At a little past five, abruptly, he took his last breath. The nurse came in. It was done.

Nedra did not weep. She felt instead that she had seen him home. She suddenly knew the meaning of the words “at peace, at rest.” His face was calm. It bore a gray ash of beard. She kissed his cheek, his bluish hand. It was still warm. The nurse was putting in his teeth.

Outside, the tears began to run down her cheeks. She walked dazedly. She made a single vow: not to forget him, to remember him always, as long as she lived.

The funeral was simple. She had requested no services. Near gravestones that said simply, Father , and crosses of stone carved to look like logs, amid tilted obelisks and markers for children— Faye Milnor, Aug. 1930–Nov. 1931 , a small stone, a hard year—he was buried high on the hill, in a quiet section in back where the graves were slightly disordered. The town, dense with trees, seemed asleep in the afternoon, distant as a painting done by a primitive. She glanced at names as she walked. There were pigeons on the path. Miniature flags waved in brief ripples.

The gravedigger was a young man, naked to the waist, his long hair drawn back and tied.

He nodded politely and stopped working. His dog was lying in the grass beneath a tree.

“Go ahead,” she said.

The lid of the vault was already in place.

“This is a really good spot,” he told her. He had a narrow face. His front tooth was broken. “The next time you come, the grass will be up.”

“So soon?”

“Well, you have to give it a couple of weeks.”

“Yes,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“David.”

He was Mexican, she realized. “David…”

“Yes, m’am.”

He went back to work. His arms were lean, but he shoveled steadily. Far off was the dome of the cathedral, gray on the sky. She waited until the grave was half filled.

“Is that your dog?” she said.

It was a dog like a collie, with a long, narrow nose.

“Yeah, she’s mine.”

“What’s her name?” Nedra asked.

“Anita.”

She looked out once more at the town. “They’ll take good care of it?”

“Oh yes, m’am,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

She gave him ten dollars as she left.

“No,” he said, “that’s all right.”

“Keep it,” she told him and walked down. The path seemed steeper. In places the tall iron fence around the cemetery had collapsed. Overhead, quite abruptly, the sky had grown dark.

Her father’s suits were laid on the bed to be taken by the Salvation Army, his shirts, his empty shoes. The earth had thudded down on the crypt in which he lay. All the ornaments, hats, belts, rings—how plain and cheap they seemed without him. They were like theatrical things—seen in the daylight very ordinary, even deceiving.

She kept a few of the photographs; the house and its furnishings she put up for sale. She was wiping out all traces, stepping back into a life unconnected to this, a life more brilliant, more free. She had waited here once for seventeen years, desperate years, the air filled with quiverings of the world beyond; would she ever be part of it, would she ever go forth?