I told Mother I was leaving. Dad might survive, I said. And if he does,
strep can’t be what kills him.
Mother’s business came to a halt. The women who worked for her stopped
concocting tinctures and bottling oils and instead made vats of salve—a new
recipe, of comfrey, lobelia and plantain, that Mother had concocted
specifically for my father. Mother smeared the salve over Dad’s upper body
twice a day. I don’t remember what other treatments they used, and I don’t
know enough about the energy work to give an account. I know they went
through seventeen gallons of salve in the first two weeks, and that Mother
was ordering gauze in bulk.
Tyler flew in from Purdue. He took over for Mother, changing the
bandages on Dad’s fingers every morning, scraping away the layers of skin
and muscle that had necrotized during the night. It didn’t hurt. The nerves
were dead. “I scraped off so many layers,” Tyler told me, “I was sure that one
morning I’d hit bone.”
Dad’s fingers began to bow, bending unnaturally backward at the joint.
This was because the tendons had begun to shrivel and contract. Tyler tried to
curl Dad’s fingers, to elongate the tendons and prevent the deformity from
becoming permanent, but Dad couldn’t bear the pain.
I came back to Buck’s Peak when I was sure the strep was gone. I sat by
Dad’s bed, dripping teaspoons of water into his mouth with a medical
dropper and feeding him pureed vegetables as if he were a toddler. He rarely
spoke. The pain made it difficult for him to focus; he could hardly get
through a sentence before his mind surrendered to it. Mother offered to buy
him pharmaceuticals, the strongest analgesics she could get her hands on, but
he declined them. This was the Lord’s pain, he said, and he would feel every
part of it.
While I was away, I had scoured every video store within a hundred miles
until I’d found the complete box set of The Honeymooners. I held it up for
Dad. He blinked to show me he’d seen it. I asked if he wanted to watch an
episode. He blinked again. I pushed the first tape into the VCR and sat beside
him, searching his warped face, listening to his soft whimpers, while on the
screen Alice Kramden outfoxed her husband again and again.