Vera made a quick decision not to call for the ambulance. It was stationed at the mine site twenty-four hours a day in readiness for serious accidents and in the time it would take the ambulance to cover the distance to town, Stutz could be at her father’s with minutes to spare. When she rang Stutz at the garage she was cool and terse. “Listen, Daniel just called to say something has happened to Dad at the house. The kid says he’s sick and he’s plenty upset so I think he must be. You better get over there, fast. By the sounds of it he probably needs the hospital.”
Mr. Stutz burst into the house and upon Monkman swaying behind a chair in the living room, his face scarcely recognizable. Daniel stood beside him, his grandfather’s sleeve knotted in his fist to help anchor him. When the boy saw Stutz he began to clumsily pat the old man on the back. “Here’s Mr. Stutz,” he said encouragingly. “You’re okay now. Mr. Stutz is here.”
Mr. Stutz came very close and peered into Monkman’s collapsed face with disconcerting directness. Then he took a step backward and asked, “What’s the trouble, Alec?”
Daniel hastened to answer for his grandfather. “He can’t talk very well. He’s hard to understand.”
Stutz nodded, absorbing this news. “All right then,” he said, addressing Daniel, “we better see he gets to the hospital.” He turned to Monkman and spoke very slowly and deliberately. “Not to worry. We’re going to see Doctor now.”
He hadn’t expected to prompt a rebellion. Shaking his head vehemently no, Monkman tightened his grip on the chair. Mr. Stutz was a practical man not given to hopeless coaxing and cajoling. After several attempts at persuasion failed, he simply pried Monkman’s fingers one by one from the chair back. Daniel supported the unsteady old man from behind while he did this, his arms wrapped around his waist. Then as Monkman frantically pawed and dog-paddled the air, straining to reattach himself to the chair, Stutz kicked it out of his reach and slung one of the old man’s arms over his shoulder. “Now,” he said grimly to Daniel, “if you take his other arm maybe we can get this show on the road.”
They half-led, half-carried the old man to the truck, and as they did Daniel lapsed into tears again, tears which Mr. Stutz discreetly overlooked and allowed to pass unremarked. Daniel was crying again because this felt like a second act of treachery, helping to compel Alec to go to the hospital against his wishes. It didn’t matter that Daniel recognized the necessity of what they were doing; what they were doing seemed to be adding to the old man’s suffering. He moaned and twisted fitfully in their grip, flapping his hands and slurring protests. It upset Daniel dreadfully when Stutz made him hold his grandfather back against the seat as they drove to St. Anthony’s Hospital and the old man struck feebly at him with his hands. But all of this was nothing beside the moment before the door to his grandfather’s room was swung shut and Daniel saw him sitting blank-faced and defeated on the edge of his bed while a chattering nurse eased him out of his shirt. At that moment a wilderness of loneliness opened up before the boy.
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.
23
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
