The Hummingbird (19 page)

Shouri.

CHAPTER 13

“SO WAIT.”
I closed the black binder on my finger. “You set that up, right?”

“In what regard, Nurse Birch?” Barclay Reed folded his hands in his lap. “What are you implying?”

I sat in the kitchen chair I’d moved to his room for reading. “When you used the word
shouri
earlier, repeating it. You were preparing me.” I laughed. “No way is this historical.”

“You’ve made your decision then? This book is a falsehood?”

“How can it possibly be true? You describe events that happened right down the coast from here, but I’ve never heard about them. You have the only mainland deaths in all of World War II, but somehow everyone forgot about it? And then this guy just gives away a sword that had been in his family for four hundred years? As a symbol of peace?” I set the binder on his bedside table. “Right.”

“The decision to surrender one’s weapon hardly originated with Ichiro Soga.” He sighed expansively. “There is a long and venerable tradition.”

That tone was familiar, how he stretched the word “long” as if it had three syllables. The Professor was hinting that he would gladly deliver a lecture on the topic. Those little talks lifted his spirits immeasurably, so I encouraged them whenever I could. “Teach me about it, please.”

“Cincinnatus, for example. George Washington.”

“I’ve heard of one of them, anyway.”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus—after whom, inexplicably, the city in Ohio is named—was a Roman aristocrat of the fifth century B.C. When the Sabines and Aequi battled Rome and had captured the consul, the Senate declared Cincinnatus dictator. This decision granted him enormous military and political power, plus societal authority akin to that of a deity. He appointed a second in command, they mustered two armies, and in an attack on dual fronts that military strategists study to this day, they defeated the invaders and captured their leader.”

“Hooray for the home team.”

“Whereupon,” the Professor harrumphed. “Whereupon Cincinnatus abdicated, rejecting all power and glory, and rowed back across the Tiber River to his farm. Nineteen years later, when a senior official attempted a revolt, Cincinnatus came out of retirement to defeat the traitor, again promptly surrendering power afterward. You have not heard of him? More’s the pity, since it confirms that our culture has the attention span of a flea. But I’ll have you know, the Romans considered Cincinnatus a model of civic virtue for fully five hundred years.”

It was all I could do not to sit back and put my feet up. Nothing pleased this man more than displaying his learning. “You said something about George Washington too.”

“Please tell me you know about his return to peacetime life.”

I shrugged. “Not much.”

“What manner of education do the schools provide these days? Establishing the first modern military that is constitutionally subject to elected civilian control represents unprecedented—”

“What about Washington?”

He frowned. “My digressions have been known on rare occasions to have instructive value, Nurse Birch.”

“I’m sure they do. But I also know your supper is almost ready, and I want to hear about Washington.”

“Supper.” Barclay Reed shook his head. “It is a fetish with you. Must a meal forever be thusly worshipped?”

It was no idle question. In the past few days the Professor had entered the wasting phase, his appetite waning just as cancer began consuming him more aggressively. Already under the blanket his hip bones were plainly visible, and his legs looked as thin as crutches. His face was drawn, sagging under the cheekbones as though some of his skin had melted.

Yet he’d skipped breakfast and barely picked at lunch. Now I had a tarragon chicken and pasta casserole baking in the oven. When I’d made it before, he’d gobbled two strapping helpings.

But dinner had a larger purpose than appealing to a patient’s taste buds. The more the Professor received sufficient calories, the longer he would live. In the wasting phase, the math was simple: Food equaled time. “Every ounce of nutrition we can pack into you today—”

“How appetizingly you put it.”

“—is that much more strength and stamina tomorrow.”

He tugged that tuft of hair again. It was becoming like a tic with him, his thumb and forefinger pulling on the widow’s peak. “Boring,” he sang.

“Please, then. About the first president.”

“This incident occurred before he was any such thing.” Barclay Reed moved his chin in a circle, seeming to recollect himself. He cleared his throat. “The Continental Congress debated at length and without success over what form of government the new nation should take. Finally, they sought advice from the general of the armies that had won their liberation from Great Britain. After prolonged evasion and delay, in December of 1783 Washington rode to them on horseback from Virginia. He was arguably the most respected and powerful man in the New World. Some people feared that he would declare himself king. Others hoped that he would.”

Barclay Reed paused, sipping water from a straw.

“Go on,” I said. “Please.”

“Appalling that you are ignorant of this basic history. Washington arrived not in military uniform, as everyone expected, but in a plain brown suit. He gave a brief speech on the importance of the nation’s soldiers returning to lives of peace and productivity. He declared that he intended to do precisely that, at his beloved farm Mount Vernon. And in conclusion, he gave the Continental Congress his sword.”

“Just like Soga.”

“Had our pilot been emperor of Japan, yes. But the point remains.”

“Which is?”

“Soga believed in his own sincerity. He was no longer dropping bombs, or training pilots. The I-25 submarine lay in rusting pieces on the ocean floor. But you see . . .” The Professor raised one finger. “There was a degree of self-delusion. Soga had convinced himself outwardly, in the name of honor. But it was untrue, or he would not have brought the sword, just in case. It took the shrine to show him his hypocrisy. Only when he had relinquished his weapon did he end the war within. Only an unarmed man can say he has truly ceased fighting.”

The connection for me was instantaneous: “But how can you lead a man to that realization? How do you help him to see?”

“Ah.” The Professor studied me sidelong. “Your husband.”

The kitchen timer began ringing. It surprised us both, our eyes meeting as though we had been caught at something.

Barclay Reed recovered first. “Nurse Birch, is he a warrior still?”

The oven timer chimed again. I stood, smoothing down my slacks. “I’ll be right back.”

HE WOULD NOT EAT.
I watched, pretending to look elsewhere while the Professor moved things around with his fork. While the BBC blared on the large screen, he would dig absently at his plate, but the food never quite made it to his mouth.

I tidied his room, calculating. If he ceased getting nutrition, Barclay Reed would live two weeks, perhaps less. He sipped from his straw, and I made a mental note to monitor how much he drank in the course of my shift. Without hydration, it would be over in days.

I returned the black binder to its place of honor on the desk. By now we were reading from it every day. Yet Cheryl did not even know the book existed. I’d learned that with subtle fishing expeditions. She thought all the Professor read was the newspaper, dwelling to an unhealthy degree on the crossword puzzle. Once at the shift change I asked Melissa if she had noticed
The Sword.

“I did. I was cleaning his room and asked about it. Making conversation, you know? Since he doesn’t open up to me much. He said it was an old abandoned project. I offered to throw it out and he said sure. But then he changed his mind, in case anyone ever studied his papers. Fickle old fella.”

I suppressed a smile. “Scholars like to hold on to their old research, I guess.”

Another forkful left the plate. If anything went in, it was barely a morsel.

“Professor, I think we need to talk about your diet.”

Instead he switched off the TV. “How did you choose this line of work?”

“I’m sorry?”

“How does any sentient person decide that hospice is a satisfying profession? I cannot imagine anything bleaker.”

“You want to know my story?”

He pushed the rolling tray away. “The brief version.”

Always a dig with this guy. But it was the one tale I never tired of telling.

“I grew up in a college town in upstate New York. Both my parents worked at the school. Mom was in admissions. She was tough, hard-handed, farm-raised. Early one January morning, she was driving to work when a guy still drunk from the night before veered across the road and hit her head-on.”

I paused to see how this affected him. His reaction would determine whether I continued.

“Blast.” The Professor tugged on his white tuft of hair. “Proceed.”

“She spent six weeks in an ICU, machines and tubes and no role for us but to wring our hands. Five surgeries. We spared no medical extravagance. When her kidneys shut down, dialysis. When that lowered her blood pressure, dopamine by the bucket to raise it. Which increased the need for more dialysis. Round and round, till one day in the hallway my sister Robin asked a resident when he thought Mom might regain consciousness. He said, ‘At no time has anyone here considered that a possibility.’ She gave him holy hell until his boss sauntered up to declare that everything they had done had been at our request. Worse, he was right. Our ignorance had tortured the poor woman.”

I slid the reading chair closer to his bed, but stood behind it. “We met with the hospital’s ethics committee, brought in a minister Mom loved, and the next day removed the machines. She lingered an hour. She was sixty-two.”

Barclay Reed nodded, unable to face me, for once reluctant to speak.

I lowered myself into the chair.

“Six Januaries later, Dad found out he had pancreatic cancer. Inoperable, unresponsive to chemo. He lived seven months. But you know what? Not one night in the hospital. The local hospice provided medical care, and the rest was up to us. Robin’s husband stepped in with the kids, and she took a leave from work. She said she could make up the lost income anytime, but her father was only going to die once. I was teaching high school English by then and had the summer free.”

I stared at my hands. This was the hard part. “For some reason, Dad had always wanted to learn to play the bassoon, but never did. We rented an instrument and found a teacher, this nerdy guy with a tiny mustache who came twice a week. Dad took lessons in the living room, then in bed when he grew weaker. The cancer spread to his bones, so we gave Dad lots of pain medicine. The teacher would assemble Dad’s instrument, lay it across him to hold, and play at the bedside. Without our asking, he started coming every day.”

I used to consider the bassoon silly, droning and nasal. In those weeks, I realized it was actually like a cello: introspective, melancholy.

“Hospice kept my father pain-free and made all the other medical parts work smoothly. That meant we could do everything nonmedical, the stuff that really mattered. Though most of it was actually little things.”

Memories flooded back to me, that long summer with the house as quiet as if a newborn baby were napping. Robin and I had never been closer.

“We had a blue china plate,” I continued. “Handed down from my great-grandmother. My father loved using it on special occasions. Our birthday dinners, when we graduated from high school. We served him every meal on that blue plate until he stopped eating, and he loved it. Little things.”

The Professor held perfectly still. I suppose I was the one giving a lecture this time.

“When he died, Robin was holding one of his hands, and I held the other one. And of all things, our nerdy bassoon guy was standing at the foot of the bed, playing Bach.”

The Professor darted a tongue across his lips. I slid his cup closer, and he gulped down some water, nodding slowly. “Excellent.”

I stood, tugging a corner of his blanket snug. “That winter I took a hospice volunteer training course. To give back, you know? But after three patients, I knew I’d found my calling. I quit teaching to start school out here.”

“Explain this to me.” The Professor took a moment to organize his thoughts. “A surgeon sees his patients heal and go home. A primary-care physician prevents illness. You never receive those forms of gratification. In the end, all of your patients are gone. Doesn’t that depress you?”

I smiled. “Actually, I’m like that musician, playing in a stranger’s bedroom, making his life pleasing for as long as possible. Besides, caring for someone during the most vulnerable time in their lives, what could be more gratifying?”

“Are you suggesting, Nurse Birch, that Barclay Reed is at the most vulnerable time in his life?”

“What do you think, Professor?”

He fussed at the casserole with his fork. He pushed the basket of remotes away on the bed. He stared into space, blinking.

“At first I suspected it was appendicitis,” he said.

“What was?”

“The soreness in my lower abdomen, the fever and weakness.” He spread a palm on his belly. “One Sunday afternoon the pain intensified, till I swear I saw stars. With what in retrospect may not have been my wisest judgment, I drove myself to the emergency room. The doctor was cast for his job, handsomely gray at the temples and bright-eyed despite obvious fatigue. He did tests, white blood cells and I don’t recall what else, only to conclude that they were inconclusive. He had been reluctant to incur the expense of a scan, but at that point he felt there was a choice. I could go home and risk a rupture, with potentially fatal internal bleeding, or undergo a scan. Some people fear those machines, I’ve heard, because they’re noisy and close. Nonsense. It’s just a machine. Later he brought his laptop to my room, if that is what you can call one of those emergency spaces defined by a curtain yanked round you on a shower rod. He pulled up the results, exclaiming ‘Now isn’t this interesting?’ But any medical layman could see what the scan had discovered. My appendix was inflamed, oh yes, but more importantly—as he showed me, as I could not fail to see—it pointed like a hot finger directly at my kidney. At the tumor on my kidney.”