Once, an hour before dawn, his breath left him and I was sure it was
the end: he was dead and would not be raised. I rested my hand on a
small patch of bandages while Audrey and Mother rushed around me,
chanting and tapping. The room was not at peace, or maybe it’s just
that I wasn’t. For years my father and I had been locked in conflict, an
endless battle of wills. I thought I had accepted it, accepted our
relationship for what it was. But in that moment, I realized how much
I’d been counting on that conflict coming to an end, how deeply I
believed in a future in which we would be a father and daughter at
peace.
I watched his chest, prayed for him to breathe, but he didn’t. Then
too much time had passed. I was preparing to move away, to let my
mother and sister say goodbye, when he coughed—a brittle, rasping
hack that sounded like crepe paper being crinkled. Then, like Lazarus
reanimated, his chest began to rise and fall.
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