Alice Munro - The View from Castle Rock

“I am not blaming you-,” I say.

“Well then. Do not blame me.”

The nurse has finished talking on the phone. She tells me I will have to go to Admitting and fill out some forms. “You’ve got his card?” she says. And to the doctor, “They’re bringing in somebody that banged up on the Lucknow highway. Far as I can make out it’s not too bad.”

“All right. All right.”

“Just your lucky day.”

My father has been put in a four-bed ward. One bed is empty. In the bed beside him, next to the window, there is an old man who has to lie flat on his back and receive oxygen but is able to make conversation. During the past two years, he says, he has had nine operations. He spent most of the past year in the Veterans Hospital in the city.

“They took out everything they could take out and then they pumped me full of pills and sent me home to die.” He says this as if it is a witticism he has delivered successfully many times.

He has a radio, which he has tuned to a rock station. Perhaps it is all he can get. Perhaps he likes it.

Across from my father is the bed of another old man, who has been removed from it and placed in a wheelchair. He has cropped white hair, still thick, and the big head and frail body of a sickly child. He wears a short hospital gown and sits in the wheelchair with his legs apart, revealing a nest of dry brown nuts. There is a tray across the front of his chair, like the tray on a child’s high chair. He has been given a washcloth to play with. He rolls up the washcloth and pounds it three times with his fist. Then he unrolls it and rolls it up again, carefully, and pounds it again. He always pounds it three times, once at each end and once in the middle. The procedure continues and the timing does not vary.

“Dave Ellers,” my father says in a low voice.

“You know him?”

“Oh sure. Old railroad man.”

The old railroad man gives us a quick look, without breaking his routine. “Ha,” he says, warningly.

My father says, apparently without irony, “He’s gone away downhill.”

“Well you are the best-looking man in the room,” I say. “Also the best dressed.”

He does smile then, weakly and dutifully. They have let him wear the maroon and gray striped pyjamas that Irlma took out of their package for him. A Christmas present.

“Does it feel to you like I’ve got a bit of a fever?”

I touch his forehead, which is burning.

“Maybe a bit. They’ll give you something.” I lean close to whisper. “I think you’ve got a head start in the intellectual stakes, too.”

“What?” he says. “Oh.” He looks around. “I may not keep it.” Even as he says this he gives me the wild helpless look I have learned today to interpret and I snatch the basin from the bedside stand and hold it for him.

As my father retches, the man who has had nine operations turns up the volume on his radio.

Sitting on the ceiling

Looking upside down

Watching all the people

Goin’ roun’ and roun’

I go home and eat supper with Irlma. I will go back to the hospital after supper. Irlma will go tomorrow. My father has said it would be better if she didn’t come tonight.

“Wait till they get me under control,” he said. “I don’t want her upset.”

“Buster’s out somewhere,” Irlma says. “I can’t call him back. And if he won’t come to me he won’t come to nobody.”

Buster is really Irlma’s dog. He is the dog she brought with her when she married my father. Part German shepherd, part collie, he is very old, smelly, and generally dispirited. Irlma is right-he doesn’t trust anybody but her. At intervals during our meal she gets up and calls from the kitchen door.

“Here Buster. Buster, Buster. Come on home.”

“Do you want me to go out and call him?”

“Wouldn’t work. He’d just not pay no attention.”

It seems to me her voice is weaker and more discouraged when she calls Buster than she allows it to be when she speaks to anybody else. She whistles for him, as strongly as she can, but her whistle, too, lacks vigor.

“I bet you I know where he’s gone,” she says. “Down to the river.”

I am thinking that, whatever she says, I will have to put on my father’s rubber boots and go looking for him. Then, at no noise that I can hear, she lifts her head and hurries to the door and calls, “Here Buster old boy. There he is. There he is. Come on in now. Come on Buster. There’s the old boy.

“Where you been?” she says, bending and hugging him. “Where you been, you old bugger? I know. I know. You gone and wet yourself in the river.”

Buster smells of rot and river weeds. He stretches himself out on the mat between the couch and the television set.

“He’s got his bowel trouble again, that’s it. That’s why he went in the water. It burns him and burns so he goes in the water to relieve it. But he won’t get no real relief till he passes it. No he won’t,” she says, cuddling him in the towel she uses to wipe him. “Poor old fellow.”

She explains to me as she has done before that Buster’s bowel trouble comes from going poking around the turkey barn and eating whatever he finds there.

“Old dead turkey stuff. With quills in it. He gets them into his system and he can’t pass them through the way a younger dog would. He can’t manage them. They get all bunched up in his bowels and they block all up in there and he can’t pass it out and he’s in agony. Just listen to him.”

Sure enough Buster is grunting, groaning. He pushes himself to his feet. Hunh. Hunh.

“He’ll be all night like that, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe never get it out at all. That’s what I can’t help but be scared of. Take him to the vet’s I know they won’t help him. They’ll just tell me he’s too old, and they’ll want to put him down.”

Hunh. Hunh.

“Nobody even goen to come to put me to bed,” says Mr. Ellers the railroad man. He is in bed, propped up. His voice is harsh and strong but he does not wake my father. My father’s eyelids tremble. His false teeth have been taken out so that his mouth sinks down at the corners, his lips have nearly disappeared. On his sleeping face there is a look of the most unalterable disappointment.

“Shut up that racket out there,” says Mr. Ellers to the silent hall. “Shut up or I’ll fine you a hunderd and eighty dollars.”

“Shut up yourself, you old looney,” says the man with the radio, and turns it on.

“A hunderd and eighty dollars.”

My father opens his eyes, tries to sit up, sinks back, and says to me in a tone of some urgency, “How can we tell that the end product is man?”

Get yo ham outa my pocket -

“Evolution,” my father says. “We mightVe got the wrong end of the stick about that. Something going on we don’t know the first thing about.”

I touch his head. Hot as ever.

“What do you think about it?”

“I don’t know, Dad.”

Because I don’t think-I don’t think about things like that. I did at one time, but not anymore. Now I think about my work, and about men.

His conversational energy is already running out.

“May be coming-new Dark Ages.”

“Do you think so?”

“Irlma’s got the jump on you and me.”

His voice sounds fond to me, yet rueful. Then he faintly smiles. The word I think he says is… wonder.

“Buster come through,” Irlma greets me when I get home. A glow of relief and triumph has spread over her face.

“Oh. That’s good.”

“Just after you went to the hospital he got down to business. I’ll have you a cup of coffee in a minute.” She plugs in the kettle. On the table she has set out ham sandwiches, mustard pickles, cheese, biscuits, dark and light honey. It is just a couple of hours since we finished supper.