The Stand

“You’re not old, Daddy,” she murmured.

“I am, I am!” he said roughly. He looked suddenly distraught. “I’m an old man trying to give a young daughter advice, and it’s like a monkey trying to teach table manners to a bear. A drunk driver took my son’s life seventeen years ago and my wife has never been the same since. I’ve always seen the question of abortion in terms of Fred. I seem to be helpless to see it any other way, just as helpless as you were to stop your giggles when they came on you at that poetry reading, Frannie. Your mother would argue against it for all the standard reasons. Morality, she’d say. A morality that goes back two thousand years. The right to life. All our Western morality is based on that idea. I’ve read the philosophers. I range up and down them like a housewife with a dividend check in the Sears and Roebuck store. Your mother sticks with the Reader’s Digest, but it’s me that ends up arguing from feeling and her from the codes of morality. I just see Fred. He was destroyed inside. There was no chance for him. These right-to-life biddies hold up their pictures of babies drowned in salt, and arms and legs scraped out onto a steel table, so what? The end of a life is never pretty. I just see Fred, lying in that bed for seven days, everything that was ruined pasted over with bandages. Life is cheap, abortion makes it cheaper. I read more than she does, but she is the one who ends up making more sense on this one. What we do and what we think… those things are so often based on arbitrary judgments when they are right. I can’t get over that. It’s like a block in my throat, how all true logic seems to proceed from irrationality. From faith. I’m not making much sense, am I?”

“I don’t want an abortion,” she said quietly. “For my own reasons.”

“What are they?”

“The baby is partly me,” she said, lifting her chin slightly. “If that’s ego, I don’t care.”

“Will you give it up, Frannie?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to?”

“No. I want to keep it.”

He was silent. She thought she felt his disapproval.

“You’re thinking of school, aren’t you?” she asked.

“No,” he said, standing up. He put his hands in the small of his back and grimaced pleasurably as his spine crackled. “I was thinking we’ve talked enough. And that you don’t have to make that decision just yet.”

“Mom’s home,” she said.

He turned to follow her gaze as the station wagon turned into the drive, the chrome winking in the day’s last light. Carla saw them, beeped the horn, and waved cheerily.

“I have to tell her,” Frannie said.

“Yes. But give it a day or two, Frannie.”

“All right.”

She helped him pick up the gardening tools and then they walked up toward the station wagon together.

Chapter 7

In the dim light that comes over the land just after sunset but before true dark, during one of those very few minutes that moviemakers call “the magic hour,” Vic Palfrey rose out of green delirium to brief lucidity.

I’m dying, he thought, and the words clanged strangely through his mind, making him believe he had spoken aloud, although he had not. He gazed around himself and saw a hospital bed, now cranked up to keep his lungs from drowning in themselves. He had been tightly secured with brass laundry-pins, and the sides of the bed were up. Been thrashing some, I guess, he thought with faint amusement. Been kicking up dickins. And belatedly: Where am I?

There was a bib around his neck and the bib was covered with clots of phlegm. His head ached. Queer thoughts danced in and out of his mind and he knew he had been delirious… and would be again. He was sick and this was not a cure or the beginning of one, but only a brief respite.

He put the inside of his right wrist against his forehead and pulled it away with a wince, the way you pull your hand off a hot stove. Burning up, all right, and full of tubes. Two small clear plastic ones were coming out of his nose. Another one snaked out from under the hospital sheet to a bottle on the floor, and he surely knew where the other end of that one was connected. Two bottles hung suspended from a rack beside the bed, a tube coming from each one and then joining to make a Y that ended by going into his arm just below the elbow. An IV feed.

You’d think that would be enough, he thought. But there were wires on him as well. Attached to his scalp. And chest. And left arm. One seemed to be plastered into his sonofabitching belly-button. And to cap it all off, he was pretty sure something was jammed up his ass. What in God’s name could that one be? Shit radar?

“Hey!”

He had intended a resonant, indignant shout. What he produced was the humble whisper of a very sick man. It came out surrounded on all sides by the phlegm on which he seemed to be choking.

Mamma, did George put the horse in?

That was the delirium talking. An irrational thought, zooming boldly across the field of more rational cogitation like a meteor. All the same, it almost fooled him for a second. He wasn’t going to be up for long. The thought filled him with panic. Looking at the scrawny sticks of his arms, he guessed he had lost as much as thirty pounds, and there hadn’t been all that much of him to start with. This… this whatever-it-was… was going to kill him. The idea that he might die babbling insanities and inanities like a senile old man terrified him.

Georgie’s gone courting Norma Willis. You get that horse your ownself, Vic, and put his nosebag on like a good boy.

Ain’t my job.

Victor, you love your mamma, now.

I do. But it ain’t —

You got to love your mamma, now. Mamma’s got the flu. No you don’t, Mamma. You got TB. It’s the TB that’s going to kill you. In nineteen and forty-seven. And George is going to die just about six days after he gets to Korea, time enough for just one letter and then bang bang bang. George is —

Vic, you help me now and put that horse in and that is my last word ON it.

“I’m the one with the flu, not her,” he whispered, surfacing again. “It’s me.”

He was looking at the door, and thinking it was a damn funny door even for a hospital. It was round at the corners, outlined with pop-rivets, and the lower jamb was set six inches or more up from the tile floor. Even a jackleg carpenter like Vic Palfrey could

(gimme the funnies Vic you had em long enough)

(Mamma he took my funny-pages! Give em back! Give em baaaack!)

build better than that. It was

(steel)

Something in the thought drove a nail deep into his brain and Vic struggled to sit up so he could see the door better. Yes, it was. It definitely was. A steel door. Why was he in a hospital behind a steel door? What had happened? Was he really dying? Had he best be thinking of just how he was going to meet his God? God, what had happened? He tried desperately to pierce the hanging gray fog, but only voices came through, far away, voices he could put no names against.

Now what I say is this… they just got to say… “fuck this inflation shit… ”

Better turn off your pumps, Hap.

(Hap? Bill Hapscomb? Who was he? I know that name)

Holy moly…

They’re dead, okay…

Gimme your hand and I’ll pull you up outta there…

Gimme the funnies Vic you had —

At that moment the sun sank far enough below the horizon to cause a light-activated circuit (or in this case, an absence-of-light-activated circuit) to kick in. The lights went on in Vic’s room. As the room lit up, he saw the row of faces observing him solemnly from behind two layers of glass and he screamed, at first thinking these were the