This House of Sky (37 page)

Dad no longer could work at all, except to do the smallest repairs around the house, but the loss of that fifty-year habit of effort seemed to dismay him less than I had thought it would. He spent time reading, watching Grandma as she fussed at flowerbeds until she had a moat of color around almost all the house, somehow making himself fit so mild a routine of life.

But in other ways, surprising disquiets might break out of him now. Never a very political man and hardly a sympathizer with the strange long-haired counterculture which had begun to prance before him on the living-room television set, Dad was furious and bitter about the clubbings at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago:
Godamighty, I thought this was a country where the police weren't supposed to beat up on people.
The war in Vietnam worked confusions on him. He wanted not to see his country lose a war, and yet
What the hell is it we want over there anyway?
It was as if with sickness fastened into his own chest, he saw any sickness of the nation all the more sharply.

Time was carving fast at one in that Montana household, and hardly at all on the other. In her oaken way, Grandma went on now as if age didn't apply to her. At the start of the summer of 1968, when Carol and I had come to White Sulphur for Grandma's seventy-fifth birthday, Dad declared:
If I ever reach seventy-five, she'll still be up and pushing me around in a wheelchair.

Even now, she was bolstering his life in dozens of ways, tending, nursing, scolding, puzzled by whatever had taloned into Dad's lungs but automatically ready to do all that his situation demanded. And almost as if she had the impulse to push back against the grayness settling over Dad's life, she now began to turn out vivid quiltwork.

Through her years of crocheting, Dad and I loyally had made encouraging and admiring noises, and I often marveled that she could follow the tiniest intricacies of
pattern. But I had never cared much for the frilly doilies and lacy tablecloths that flew from her needle, regarding them as something like her everlasting games of solitaire, played in thread. But the quilting flamed away any opinions of that sort. What Grandma turned out now, in the living room as Dad watched from his haven of chair, danced with brilliant colors—snipped-and-sewn diamonds of ragwork marching and playing and jostling like a meld of rainbows, or some resplendent field of tiny flags from all the universe. To come out of our ungaudy family, this was an absolute eruption of bright art, and I blinked in wonder at this gray-haired woman I thought I knew so entirely. For her part, Grandma simply produced each quilt, demanded
Now then, isn't that pretty?
and gave it to Carol and me or someone in her sons' families. When we all had quilts galore, she began selling them, and there are valley households now with half a dozen blazing in their rooms.

And across seven hundred miles, in Seattle, Carol and I settled to our own changed life. Carol rapidly had maneuvered from one job to the next, and always up; within a year after our arrival, she had a professorship, teaching journalism at a community college. I was making my expedition through three solid years of reading and seminar work to the professorship of my own—one slog-step to the next, the only way I have ever known to get a thing done.

Along with that trudged the decisions needed for Dad. The dying of a parent is a time without answers, only anguished guesses, and I wished that I were an older and wiser guesser, able to come onto some angle of insight which would declare:
Here, this is to be done.
I wished a thousand useless longings, and amid them made whatever small tactics I could reason out. The main guidance I set in myself was that Dad should not be written off, not be allowed to write himself off, as an invalid. It may even be that in following this notion during his first few years of emphysema, not enough allowances were made for his illness. But he was surrounded in the family by three of the world's dogged souls, and he himself had persevered through past health woes.

Deeper than that lay the belief, also endlessly mulled in me, that it would be preferable for him to pace out an active but shorter life rather than an inert lingering. We could not talk about this in so many words—a failing in our family perhaps, yet none of us ever had seen much reason to say aloud what made itself plainly known—but my father had proclaimed as much with his earlier life.

Occasionally my estimates of how much Dad could be encouraged to do would overrun his capacities. During one of their visits to Seattle, Dad and Grandma were taken by us across Puget Sound on a fine afternoon to a play given in an outdoor theater. I had known that the theater seats were spaced down a hillside; what I did not know was that there was a descent of a few hundred yards before the topmost of the seating.

Grandma was perturbed, and fretful during the play. I had said,
We'll get him out of here somehow, don't worry about it.
Although Dad had continually said he was sure he could make the slope by taking it slow, he must have been edgy about it as well. Starting up, he at once went breathless.

Carol and I looked at one another: he was going to have to be carried out. I went to the stage, borrowed a straight-backed chair from the set. Seating him in it, Carol and I lifted the chair between us and started up the trail.

It made an awkward and severe load, which we denied over and over, and in our gritting paired exertion we took him out of there like a potentate. At the top, he could walk perfectly well on level ground. In double relief, I panted:
Told you we'd get you out somehow.
And die episode did prove that, if shakily.

One thing more soon was proved: that when it was needed, we could draw together the strongest of family thews, live as a single household. The main decision, as so many others by then, was mine, and I came to it reluctantly, believing so entirely in the independence of lives. But there was the greater belief that my father must be helped in whatever way possible to live, and so in the autumn of 1968 I arranged that Dad and Grandma would come to Seattle to stay with Carol and me until die following spring.

Neither of them wanted the move. It would uproot them from everything familiar. Yet they saw that it was as I said: Dad could not undergo another mauling winter of chest infection. Seattle's mild coastal climate was the needed measure against that. Reluctantly, but on my word, they came.

When the pair of them had unpacked, I suddenly asked:
What did you do with Spot? Leave him with somebody?
Grandma answered slowly.
No. There was nobody right to take care of him and we knew we couldn't bring him with, so I
...
we had him done away with.
The day before they left, she had asked Dad, Spot's lifetime foe and idol, to take the aging dog to the veterinarian.
I'd rather have gone through a beating,
my father said now in my living room, but he had done the task, petted the bold old head as the needle's sleep crept through the dog, had him buried carefully on a ridge above the valley.

I turned and walked to the bathroom, locked the door, turned a faucet full on, and wept. For a jaunty white-and-brown dog, for my beset family which could not be spared even this loss—for being able to meet grief only in my own company this way.

I think now that Dad and Grandma settled into our expanded household with less tension than I did. Not that there wasn't much for them to wonder at in the unpredictable new locale. Day and night, ambulances would howl along a street below us on their way to the hospital which treated burn cases. Carol and I had stopped hearing the banshee sound of them after our first few weeks in the house. Grandma heard every one,
hmpfing
each time to think of yet another disaster in this severe city-world.

Nor did she ever accustom herself to the telephone's blat from the kitchen; each time it jangled, she started in surprise, which in turn twitched Dad's nerves. From him:
What are ye jumping about?
From her:
Gee gosh, I can't help it, and what're you jumping about yourself?

The telephone skirmish was daily, sometimes almost hourly, but betweentimes the pair of them passed the day more smoothly than could have been foreseen. Much of the morning they sat at the living-room table, Grandma playing her offhand solitaire, Dad pointing wordlessly whenever she overlooked a card to play, the both of them glancing every few moments out of the window to the city and its unending tributaries of traffic. A crew came to work on the railroad tracks nearby, and Dad studied their labors by the hour. He noticed that the heftiest of the workers arrived and went with great irregularity, and began an ironic game of foremanning him from the living-room. I would arrive home from the university for lunch and be told:
My man was ten minutes late again this morning. I'm gonna have to jack him up about this bein' late all the time and all the time.
The next noon,
He's gettin' better, my man is. Only about five minutes late this morning. I'll get a full day of work out of him yet one of these times.

Dad had a grimmer game for himself each late afternoon. The doctor had ordered him to walk as far as he could
every day. At first, he would come back from fifty yards down the street, desperate, out of breath:
Godamighty, I can't walk any more than a baby.
But the next day, he would try again. Grandma seldom went with him on these efforts, did not offer to go, was not invited. They both accepted that he would have to do this battle for breath by himself.

At last, an afternoon when I was on my way home from the university library and met him several blocks from the house and at the base of the slope which skirted away below our neighborhood. As 1 came up to him, Dad was panting but able to say:
I told myself I'd work up to walking this far, and I've done 'er.

I tried to find my words for acclaim:
Hell, then you're just a lot stronger than you were. The doc will be tickled with you.
But he shook his head, as if he could not afford to admit triumph.
I know I can't do much. This is a helluva way to have to live, creeping along weak as a kitten.
I had no words at all for that, and we started for home, silently paired in his trudge.

To describe that half-year of the four of us under a single roof does not go far toward an understanding of it. I am not sure there is an understanding to be had, only reactions, reflexes. The time flowed well enough, yet none of us wanted to repeat the experience, nor did we. Carol picked her way through the situation the best of us all, turning the snappishness between Dad and Grandma with amusement, granting Grandma the share of chores she sought, even confounding one of Grandma's stone-cut sayings:
No kitchen is big enough for two women at once.
More than any of the rest of us, perhaps, Carol simply remained herself. Grandma, I think, felt entirely unrooted. She missed family and friends, missed the gossip and life-pattern of the valley, missed a house of her own, missed everything there was to miss of sixty years spent in Montana.
Dad seemed tugged between his past and the life I was trying to make for myself. He met our citified friends more easily, followed my university work more interestedly. Yet he did not manage to feel settled and adjusted either, uneasy with the torrents of people he saw rivering along streets and sidewalks, the lockstep of houses thousand upon thousand, any of the dimensions of the city.

For my part, I felt again the crowdedness I had tried to pull myself away from—from a too-small prairie sheepwagon, from the half-house in Ringling, from so many unprivate places, so much of those Montana years. Relationships between me and both Dad and Grandma were richer and fuller than I had expected—they always were—yet I still fiercely wanted what I so long had wanted, a chosen space all my own in life.

With spring came the declaration from Dad and Grandma that they were ready to return to Montana. I agreed. The winter had worked out to plan: Dad had escaped all chest infection, he was very much stronger than when he had come, he seemed better able to cope with the emphysema. I drove the trip to Montana with them, to keep Dad's nerves steady for the time ahead of him.

In a matter of a few months, Dad's propped-up health plunged apart. The chest infection hit, there was hospitalization again. But worse, day-by-day signs of failure started to show now. He began to fall deep asleep any time of the day, for alarming periods, then be unable to close his eyes at night.

Grandma saw this in astonishment, then fury:
No wonder you can't sleep at night, sleeping all day long too. Gee gods. Get up and around and you'd get over that sleepy-headedness.
His usual answer was to sit forward for some minutes with his head in his hands, despairing, then to fall back again as if exhausted. I checked with his doctor at the clinic, and was provided the unbrambled version of
Grandma's viewpoint: Dad was in carbon dioxide narcosis, caused by his lungs' failure to rid themselves of their after-breath wastes. The carbon dioxide residue worked like a slowing drug in his bloodstream. The remedy was for him to get up, walk, ride an exercise bicycle, anything to get the deadening buildup pumped from him—exertion demanded exactly when he felt least able to make any.

This period of narcosis, with Dad asleep hour upon hour and his skin color with a dangerous hint of bluing in it, like some dark seepage beneath ice, was the most terrifying yet. It seemed very much like death practicing on him. We were in a time of quickening erosion—of the deadly gullying in my father's lungs, of my grandmother's failing chance to bolster his life, of my inability to find medical help which would make much difference now. My father day upon day lay back in his big chair in the living room in White Sulphur and gilled in air, as if out of breath from the long stopless run through life. But that it was not stopless, each of us knew too well. We could read that in the bulk of the oxygen tanks which came oftener and oftener into the house now.

I can chart my father's last years by the medical apparatus that attached itself to his existence. The first, the machine that blew a fog of medication into his lungs, sat at his bedside with some innocence. A bland metal-gray in tone and not much larger than a typewriter, the device awaited him several times a day, took in his puffs of exertion and traded out its mysterious mist, sent him away breathing less hard. But next to come were the dark-green oxygen tanks, huge as battleship shells, and their conveyor-like pace to his bedside was the tempo of doom for him.