He’d noticed them already earlier in the summer, usually walking to the car at night after ballgames, but they’d belonged to the darkness in the periphery beyond the lights and for the most part had seemed extraneous and inconsequential to his life. Now they seemed much closer, louder. And, strangely enough, hearing them made him feel just that much more at home.
He got out of the car and softly pushed the door quietly to until the latch caught, then crossed the lawn and continued onto the narrow walkway connecting the house and garage. The black ceramic knob appeared like a hole in the garage door until touching it proved otherwise. Pressed to his palm it felt preternaturally cool. He turned the knob, felt the latch release, and opened the door just enough to reach in and search for the old fashioned light switch which projected like a ceramic burl on a hand-hewn beam. Touching with his fingertips the rippled adze-cut surface, he followed the smooth conduit up from the switch to the nail upon which the key lay flat against a shallow cup in the wood surface. Or rather, he felt where the key should have been. Someone had removed and not returned it.
“Damn,” he said softly, and began considering what to do next. He decided immediately against getting his mother out of bed. Instead, he walked around back of the house and opened the storm door to the screened porch and sat down on the futon placed against the north wall. He felt too tired to bother opening it out into a bed. There was a pillow on each end and a comforter draped over the back, in case someone might need it. In the distant sky, pink lightning lit up the interior of a cloud. He waited, counting, for thunder, until finally he gave up and bunched the pillows together on the east end of the futon. Lying down, closing his eyes, he pulled the comforter up and shivered with pleasure.
After what seemed a moment the shudder and squeak of the heavy side door letting go awoke him. Sunny walked out, his toenails clicking across the threshold before going silent against the rug. A larger presence accompanied and the storm door opened, initiating more clicking as the old dog descended the steps to the blue stone landing embedded in the ground. Opening his eyes he saw his mother still in her pink nightgown standing with her back to him watching the dooryard. Closing them again, he felt a slight stinging tiredness beneath the lids.
“There’s coffee brewing on the wide shelf,” his mother said.
“Is it even sunup yet?” He asked the question, keeping his eyes closed, already knowing the answer. The question however elicited a slight pause imitating serious consideration as his mother called up the words to her favorite recitation. She coughed, paused, and began quoting in delicate singsong:
There are horses neighing in the far off hills
Tossing their long white manes,
And mountains flash in the rose-white dusk,
Their shoulders black with the rains…
After a further slight pause, she concluded: It is morning.
She let the storm door close and turned, walking back past him into the kitchen. A minute later she reappeared carrying a coffee in each hand. Kyle noticed the slight tremor which steadied as soon as she placed the cups on the little table opposite the futon.
“You should have called. I would have waited up,” she told him as he rose to join her. He stretched his left arm over his head, making an arc of his torso as he bent sideways.
“That’s exactly why I didn’t,” he said, letting out a little groan. “Oh, that muscle aches.”
“Serves you right,” she said, steadying herself on the hand rest as she sat.
He pulled the opposite chair away from the table and sat down then too, and they sipped the first half inch of their coffees in silence. He mentioned the missing key, and his mother chuckled softly. “I think CieCie used it last time she was here.” Still hoarse and clogged with sleep, her voice barely managed the words before shutting down altogether. She coughed to clear her throat and took another sip of coffee, gazing off at an angle across the back yard.
“Your father’s not good,” she said at last, confronting the fact directly. “The doctors call it brown lung disease. They say it was caused by his inhaling grain dust all those many years. I think of him filling bags at the mill, breathing in all that junk when he was still just a boy, and it makes me wonder…” She left the thought hanging as she continued to look out over the yard.
“What Ma?”
“Why were we all so stupid back then?” She held the coffee cup with both hands in front of her lips, but then put it back down. “In all the years I’ve known him I don’t think I saw him wear a mask but once. And that was only because Leroy insisted on it when we insulated the attic.” She smiled wanly into the coffee cup still enclosed in her hands. “Good old chain-smoking Leroy.”
Kyle couldn’t help smiling too, despite what he’d just heard.
“So,” he began. “What do they say? Have the doctors made a prognosis?”
“Oh, Kyle,” his mother sighed. “I truly wish I could say different, but they don’t give him much chance. Or much time, either.”
After that, neither of them had much of anything to say. They finished drinking their respective coffees in silence until, standing and taking his cup with hers, his mother placed three fingers lightly on his forearm and said, “It’s good you came home.”
His father wasn’t the man he remembered, lying gaunt and docile in bed. The sheet pulled to his chest left his arms fully exposed. A thin drip tube connected to the inseam of his left elbow; the other showed a yellow tinted bruise, possibly the result of a prior hookup. His father smiled when he saw them, his mouth moving wordlessly behind the clear plastic mask as his mother went directly to adjust the pillow and help prop him up. Kyle moved more slowly and cautiously closer, and came to a stop just off the foot of the bed.
“Hey old man,” he said, touching the rounded edge of the lowered stainless steel safety rail, as if by doing so he could convey some manner of affection. He wanted to add, “You look terrible,” but didn’t quite know how to make it sound like the joke he wanted it to be. He didn’t know how to talk about his father’s condition, so instead spoke about the summer he’d had playing ball, which continued the conversation they always engaged in on the phone.
“The club wants me to sign an extension” he started, “and maybe play winter ball. I had a 3.40 ERA before hurting my arm.” Out of a sense of propriety, he stopped short of adding: “That’s pretty good.”
Having finished all that he could think to say, Kyle watched his father remove the mask from his mouth and let it hang loose beneath his chin. Breathing on his own with difficulty, he whispered, rasping, “I am proud… of you… son.” Replacing the mask to recover his breath, he took it away again, concluding, “I always… have been.”
At that point a young nurse came in, smiling and asking how everyone was doing. She checked first to make sure the drip tube remained securely taped to the back of his father’s left hand, before uncoupling the line midway to the nearly empty bag hanging from the metal stand beside the bed. Swapping it out for a bulging full one, she reconnected the drip line, snapping a fingernail smartly against the new connection. Satisfied everything was all right, she retreated as quickly as she had advanced, her high sweet voice trailing goodbye as she disappeared out the hospital room door.
Soon Kyle’s mother left, too, and in the quite interval that followed, unsure what else to do, he pulled up a chair and placed two fingers wide of the narrow seams of a baseball, demonstrating the grip of a split-fingered fastball.
“Why,” his father said, taking the ball from his hand, “that’s nothing but a forkball.” And for once, he had no trouble delivering the words, along with a sense of impatience, beyond the confinement of his mask.
Somewhere in the distant quiet a crow cawed three times. Early sunlight flooded half of the room, imparting an orange glow to the cherry stand at the side of the bed. Kyle dressed and started downstairs, encountering the fragrance of perking coffee and the soft clink of china and silver being laid out on hard polished maple as his mother set the
dining room table.
After breakfast he took Baron for a long walk, going up the spine of the back field to the edge of the woods expecting to look over the valley and see a floating bank of fog coming up off the river. Only this morning there was no floating fog, just a vague haze dimming the valley. He walked in one of the dual tire marks left by a four-wheeler, following the dog, but even staying to this trail the dew in the grass permeated his boots and the bottom third of his pants. The dog got soaked, too, and his coat clung to his ribs dripping wet on his return from a short and unsuccessful run at a deer.
After the walk, Kyle went to the barn. He planned to cut the grass when it dried, but the mower deck needed to be put back together first. Johnny, their hired man, had barely started the repair before being called away to help hay the field across the road, leaving the broken belt in a loose coil on the seat of the lawn tractor. So Kyle drove into town to get a new one, with Baron sitting shotgun beside him.
Inside, the hardware store smelled like feed in front and cutting oil out back where a stack of newly threaded six inch nipples sat girdled with masking tape on the work bench. A quart coffee can held parts of an old chain saw that lay partly dissembled on a newspaper laid down in a half-hearted but no less