Guy Vanderhaeghe - Homesick

The doctor told them that Monkman had had a stroke. He said it was too early to make predictions about an outcome. Sometimes elderly gentlemen recovered from such blows, sometimes they didn’t. For the time being, it was important to get the patient settled and quiet. Perhaps it was better that he have no visitors until tomorrow.

After Stutz phoned Vera with this news, he and Daniel returned to the house to collect the personal effects Alec would require – razor, underwear, slippers. Going from room to room, hunting up these articles, something came to Mr. Stutz’s attention. It was in the living room that he first noticed deep scratches in the floor. Monkman’s standards of housekeeping had declined badly since Vera had left last Christmas and he seldom bothered sweeping up the dirt and even sand he was constantly tracking into the house from the garden. Daniel had once told him that walking across his floor sounded like scrunching your way over spilled sugar. When a chair bearing all of Monkman’s two hundred and twenty pounds had been skidded over this dirt it had acted like sandpaper, producing deep scratches and gouges in the surface of the linoleum. What surprised Stutz was that this damage was not confined to the living room where the old man had been found, but was spread throughout the house – in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the downstairs bedroom. He studied the intersecting trails of many laborious journeys in a doorway, a welter of cuts and tears, one overlapping another. They resembled the angry scribbles of a child and had come close to obliterating the pattern of flowers on the linoleum.

How many trips back and forth? Stutz asked himself. How many days?

“Daniel, when did you last see your grandfather?”

“Last Saturday.”

Stutz had briefly talked to him Tuesday. Today was Friday. One thing was certain. All this hadn’t happened today. All these marks hadn’t been made in a single day. He had a vision of Alec alone, staggering from room to room behind the chair, blundering desperately through a vacant house.

They were leaving when Daniel spotted the straw fedora on the hook by the door. He took it down and set it on top of the bundle of his grandfather’s things.

“You better leave that here,” suggested Mr. Stutz quietly. “He isn’t going to have any call for a hat in a hospital.”

“But he’ll want it to come home in,” said Daniel.

Stutz left it at that. Daniel and he went out together. Halfway to the truck Stutz remembered. He turned back and locked the door on the puzzle of scars. Nobody would be coming back to the house tonight.

Four hours after he was admitted to St. Anthony’s Hospital, Alec Monkman was stricken by another, much more severe stroke. From that moment on he swung between coma and brief explosions of agitation when he tried to escape his bed and clawed, whimpering and bewildered, at the I.V. tube inserted in a vein in the back of his hand.

Circumstances, it seemed to Vera, dictated she take charge. Despite the differences which existed between her and her father, she was not going to have it said his daughter let him die like a dog in a ditch. To see he did not harm himself during one of his “spells” – Stutz’s description – she decreed he would be watched around the clock and she drew up a schedule of shifts. From eight A.M. to four P.M. Mr. Stutz would keep him company. After school let out, Daniel would sit with him until his mother closed up The Bluebird at eleven. Vera’s shift was what the shaft sinkers called the graveyard shift, midnight to morning.

Vera only desired to get through her father’s last days as people would expect her to, without giving rise to comment, or worse, scandal. She purchased an expensive winter coat, matching scarf and gloves, matching shoes and handbag so when she paid her visits to the hospital she would be presentable, respectably dressed. It had been a long time since she had bought herself any good clothes. The importance of dressing well was linked to a feeling of anticipation, a feeling that she was standing on the brink of an important event for which it was necessary to prepare – like running away to join the Army, or choosing Stanley – an event the consequences of which it was impossible to foresee.

Because of the hours of his shift it was Mr. Stutz who most often received visitors as Monkman’s proxy. He took deep satisfaction in their numbers. Old customers and neighbours paid their respects, employees dropped by to inquire as to his condition and left, shaking their heads, quiet, subdued. Mr. Stutz accepted their offerings – the get-well cards, the home-made squares, the boxes of Black Magic chocolate – with ceremonious dignity. “Alec thanks you,” he said to each.

Among the first visitors to make an appearance at St. Anthony’s were the old men who played cards at Alec’s house and borrowed money from him before Vera put the run on them. On their arrival they displayed a reluctance to be drawn too far into the sickroom despite Stutz peremptorily beckoning them from his chair beside the bed. They remained huddled a step or two inside the door, milling about, craning their necks at the patient and blinking owlishly.

“It’s a shame,” someone in the back of the group volunteered. “Life’s a bugger,” observed another. There seemed to be nothing further to venture on that topic. The old men uneasily eyed the medical rigmarole, the bottle of I.V. fluid, the transparent plastic tubing, the oxygen tank. They appeared on the verge of stampeding at any moment. Huff Driesen, who led the delegation, said, “If he comes around… you’ll tell him we came to ask after him?”

Mr. Stutz solemnly nodded.

“He was a prince of a fellow,” declared one of them with fervour. That seemed to sum up, exhaust all that there was to say.

Murmuring agreement they filed out, stumbling hard upon one another’s heels in their haste to quit the room.

Mr. Stutz was sadly, dutifully resigned to this business of dying. When Alec was both conscious and quiet, Stutz would draw back the blankets on his bed, hike up his hospital gown, take his penis delicately between thumb and forefinger, aim it into the neck of a plastic flask, and patiently wait for the trickle. If he wasn’t given the opportunity to frequently relieve himself, the old man would wet the bed. During his “spells,” when he tore at the I.V. tube, jerked his head from side to side, kicked and tangled the sheets about his legs, and cried out unintelligibly, Mr. Stutz pinned him to the mattress, leaned his face close to the old man’s ear, and advised him in a whisper, “Don’t you fight it now, Alec. Let it be. Let it come,” until he grew quiet again.

In the course of Vera’s and Daniel’s vigils these upsets were uncommon, and, if they did occur, were much milder. Stutz told them they were lucky the old man kept banking hours. Daniel dreaded having to sit with the old man, feared his “spells,” feared even more that it would be his bad luck to have him die when they were alone together. He had never seen anyone die and didn’t intend to if he could help it. Once, when he was offering lame excuses as to why he couldn’t take his shift – something about decorating the gym for a dance – Vera nearly told him he needn’t worry, most people didn’t die in the evening. She had read that somewhere, or heard it, she couldn’t recall. Something made people hold out through the dark hours. It was in the morning they gave up the ghost, in the light, at the end of their strength. But Vera caught herself in time and didn’t make the observation.

No one had come right out and said it yet, that her father was dying, and she didn’t know how Daniel would take to hearing it, especially coming from her. When he said, “I thought it was the nurses’ job to look after sick people,” Vera replied, “It is. But they can’t be with him every minute. I know it’s not easy for you but it has to be done and there’s no one else to do it but us, the family. This is part of being a family. Take your school books and study. If he gets bad, call a nurse. If you occupy your mind you won’t think of it, you won’t feel so bad.”