THE BOY WHO BRUSHED HIS FATHER’S TEETH

            Dad-blasted boy! “Travis!” I yell. “What the hell is in this bowl? It tastes like hog slop!”

            After a few minutes, my only offspring saunters in and leans against the doorway of my bedroom. Loose and uppity just standing there, he smirks. I hate it when he smirks like that. I’d like to get up out of this dad-gum bed and bust that dad-gum smirk right off his dad-gum face.

            “Why, Daddy,” says he in that silky voice he can put on when he wants to give me lip. “I didn’t realize you knew what hog slop tastes like. When was the last time you had any?”

            “Just now!” I yell and swat the bowl. It flies off the bed, breaks on the floor, and hog slop spatters everywhere.

            That boy’s face changes then, I guarantee. He frowns. He’s mad now. “I ought to make you clean that up,” he threatens. Trying to get nasty with me.

            When he was a little snot, I could catch his ear, snatch down his pants, and whale the tar out of him for less cheek than he’s showing me right now. I’d beat the sass right out of the boy. It’s been years since I had to do that, though, and I thought he was man enough to know better. Looks like I was wrong, don’t it? The sass is back with a double vengeance. Now that I’m sick and on my deathbed and can’t do nothing about it, he’s brave enough to sass me anytime he feels like it. This is what my son has come to. This is the seed I’m leaving behind.

            Lord-a-mercy.

*

            Used to be, whenever I thought about dying, I always wanted to go like my granddaddy did, in his blood-soaked Rebel uniform. Ambushed by Yankees, surrounded by the strewn bodies of his regiment, guns blazing till the last bullet was gone.      

            Or like Pa. Sweltering spring day, plowing the garden with the mule. Heart attack. Bang and it’s over. In the sunlight and open air.

            But no, not me. Me, I got to be lying in this bed, useful as hen’s teeth. Shivering under Granma’s quilts. Suffering like Granma suffered. Hurting like Ma hurt. Eaten from the inside out by a blame woman’s disease. Taken out by a killer of withered women.

            My boy looks after me, keeps me fed. Cleans me up when I soil myself. Granma had Ma. Ma had her sister Ada. Me, I got Travis, and I’m glad he’s the one wiping my butt, not some girl doing it. I don’t want no woman looking after my private parts. I don’t really want nobody but me doing that, but I ain’t got much say about it anymore, now do I?

            Not that I wouldn’t sometimes trade Travis in on a different model if I had the option.

            Like right now. Right now, I’d sell him to a band of gypsies just to be shed of him.

            I look at him leaning in my doorway, scowling like I hurt his feelings or something. He says, “I ought to make you clean up that mess,” again, just to prove he can say it and get by with it.

            “You and what army?” says I.     

            “Fifth Tennessee Infantry,” says he, just to get my goat. That was Granddaddy’s regiment. I used to rock that boy of mine to sleep with stories Pa handed down to me. Now he’s hurling them back in my face for an insult. I’d call the little snot a bastard, but that’d reflect on me, so I just don’t say nothing.

            He thinks he’s gotten the best of me, so he lights up a grin. His eyes go all sparkly. He’s got eyes like his departed ma. Pupils dark as midwinter night with starlight flickering around the edges. And lashes thick and black. I’ll give him that. He is good-looking, but in a girly way. Takes after his ma too much.

            I wipe the soup dribble off my chin with the quilt. Never prone to coddle anyone who just tried to poison me, I snarl at him. “Blasted soup tastes like boiled feed sacks. What is it?”

            “Asparagus chowder,” says he. “I got the recipe from Mom’s cookbook.” He likes doing things like that. Makes him feel he’s accomplished something. To me, cooking’s nothing but housework. That’s all it is. And where’s the pleasure in housework for a man?

            I snarl at him again. “Hog slop. Pure and simple.”

            “That’s all there is,” says he and walks away.     

            I pull the quilt up, turn over, and try to ignore being burned to death from the inside out.

            If he knew what I was going through, he’d act different. Better. He’d treat me with more respect, dad-gum it. If he knew about the pain in my gut. Pure. Simple. Pain. Sometimes it goes away for an hour or so. Or at least I don’t notice it as much. Most of the time it’s a dull ache that makes sure I don’t forget it’s there. Like an old cougar gnawing my bones. Sometimes, though, it’s this fireball in my gut. Like being shot with flaming arrows like Great-Uncle Jake was by Apaches. I tell you, it’s the purest distillation of pain I ever felt. It gives a whole new meaning to the word.

            Granma and Ma, they were no sissies, I’ll tell you. Going through this. Putting up with this. They were mighty hard for women. Mighty hard women. If I had known it was like this for them, I would have put the barrel of my rifle to each of theirs head and pulled the trigger. It would have been a mercy.

*

            Last fall, after I lost more than fifty pounds over the summer and couldn’t catch my breath and had heartburn all the time, Doc Flowers checked me over, then said I might want to go down to Nashville to let the specialists there look at me and run tests. He told me to have them send the results to him.

            So I left Travis to watch after the farm for a couple days, and me and Honey went to the big city. Then we came back. Then we waited. Finally, a month or so later, Doc Flowers pulled up to the house in his old rattletrap of a jalopy.

            I was in the garden, hoeing. After I finished the row, I put the hoe in the toolshed and ambled on up to the yard. Honey stood on the porch, wiping her hands with her apron, talking to the old coot about the weather. The dogs were nosing around, sniffing Doc’s shoes. One of them was marking the front tire of Doc’s car.

            Honey invited him in. Our house ain’t fancy, but it serves us fine. Keeps the rain off and the critters out. Pa built it himself, so it’s good enough for me. Honey sat in her overstuffed chair. I sat in my rocker. Doc, he sat on the couch and shook his head. He opened his black satchel and took out a bundle of papers. “Abner,” said he. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but it’s like I suspected. You’re eat up with cancer.”

            I took a long drag on my cigarette and looked out the window. What was a supposed to say?

            “How long?” Honey asked. “How long does he have?”

            Doc shrugged. “Maybe six months.”

            I laughed. “That’s what you told Ma, too. She lived three years. So much for your superior medical knowledge.”

            Doc flicked a look at Honey with an expression like he was trying to talk above a bawling kid. “I know, Abner, but all the same, that’s what got her at the last.”

            He talked to us a while. Explained our choices. What we could try. Chemicals. Surgery. None of it sounded like anything I wanted. I told him we’d think about it. He said, “Fine.” He went out to his car and headed back to town.

            Soon as he was out of sight, Honey, my wife, mother of my only child, went into the bedroom and started throwing clothes into a suitcase. That withered little behind of hers whirled around the room like a dust devil. She loved me, she said over her shoulder as she grabbed another blouse out of her side of the closet. When her pappy died of TB, though, she vowed she’d never take care of another sick man as long as she lived.      

            Travis came in about that time. Honey, she gave him the verdict, and tried to talk him into leaving with her. He looked at her, then looked at me, then said since he had just been promoted at work, he wanted to stay. Besides, he couldn’t just walk out on me.

            I told her if she made him go with her, I’d track her down wherever she went, no matter how far, and scalp her slow over an open fire.

            Travis had been borned to our middle age, and she loved him something fierce. The waves of solid hate washing over me from her glare would have stunned a bull, but then, for some reason only she will ever know, she caved in. She pushed her weedy gray hairs out of her face, clamped her scrawny mouth shut, snatched up her bulging suitcase, and departed with nary a backward glance.

            Since then, it’s gotten bad, and now I don’t blame her at all for leaving. She knew what was coming. Better than I did. I just wish that I could take back that remark about scalping.

*

            Some afternoons, Travis takes my Winchester and goes hunting. He likes to hunt whenever he can. When he’s off work from the dam. When he ain’t wiping my moldy backside. Whenever he’s finished whatever chore he’s set himself in the garden or kitchen. After he’s chopped firewood and stoked the stove. After he’s drawn water from the well. After he’s slopped the hogs and fed the chickens.

            When he’s through with all that, he takes my rifle down from the peg on the wall over the bed. There’s plenty of woods and pastures around here where my boy can hunt. I used to take him with me all the time. We’d go every chance we got when he was a little squirt.

            Har. It just come to me. It just now come to me why we call kids squirts. You know. Pappy’s little squirt. Har. Think about it. What squirt are they talking about? If you can’t figure it out, ask your momma later. Right now, I’m telling you about Travis hunting.

            So anyway, the afternoon I’m telling about, he took my rifle down off the peg in the wall over the bed. “Where you going?” I asked.

            “Hunting.”

            “Any fool can see you’re going hunting. What’re you hunting this time?”

            He looked at me not much warmer than a glare. “Whatever pops up,” he said at last.

            “Sometimes I wonder what you do out there in the woods alone,” I said. “Most of the time you don’t come back with nothing anyway. What do you do out there?”

            He gazed out the window.

            I looked at him looking out the window. “Squirrel,” I finally said. “Get me some squirrel to eat.”

            After he left, I rolled myself a cigarette, and lay there watching the smoke drift away. Just drifting away to nothing.

*

            At night I keep my dentures in a glass of water on the stand beside my bed. The other morning, Travis was in the room when I was putting them in. “These things sure taste vile,” I said without thinking. Just one of those things liable to fall out of a fellow’s mouth when he’s got other things on his mind. Or nothing. When he’s tired of thinking about all the things there are to think about while lying in bed dying, and he ain’t thinking about any one thing in particular.

            Travis went into the bathroom and came back with the toothbrush and box of soda I keep in there. “Give them here,” he said.     

            “What?” asked I.

            He frowned at me. “Your teeth, goofus. What do you think?”

            I looked at him with enough of an incline to let him know I thought he was out of his skull, shook my head, and said, “Huh-uh.” Which ought to be enough for any decent person. Not him, though. Not my boy. So we argued over it half an hour. When he stooped over me like he was on the verge of reaching in my mouth and plucking my teeth out himself, I finally told him, “Okay. Okay.” I handed him my teeth. “You want to do every last little thing for me. You want to take every last little shred of dignity away from me. Sure. Go ahead.”

            He grinned at me. “I’ve already done that, if you hadn’t noticed,” he said. “Now I’m trying to help you, you old bandicoot.”

            That sass of his comes from schooling. He got too much of it. After high school – which  was more than I got and which should have been enough for him – after high school, he worked his way through two years of vo-tech. Not content to be a farmer. Too good for just any old job. Had to get himself a career. Down at the dam. The federal dam. On the river. Worked his way up. Not content to be just a worker. Had to be a foreman. Management. Youngest supervisor they got. A big shot.

            Never could get himself a wife, though. Not that I ever caught him trying too hard. Girls would fall all over him at school. Him with that dark, wavy hair and those broad shoulders. Those eyes of his. Girls would follow him home. Call to him from the edge of the woods. He never looked twice at them, though. Once I thought he was flirting with Deloris Goverson, but he was only making fun of her. He never had no intention of sparking her. Not that I minded that. The only form of life lower than a Goverson would be a mad dog.

            So there he was, washing my teeth for me. Me lying in bed with the quilt pulled up to my chin, thinking about things like that while watching him. So I said to him, “What are you now? Twenty-six? Twenty-seven? When you going to get a wife?”

            He never missed a beat, just kept scrubbing away on my dentures. “What do I need a wife for?” he asked.

            “Fool question,” was what I answered. “You need a wife so you can have kids so when you get old and sick, they can wash your teeth for you.”

            “That’s the lamest excuse for wallowing with a woman I ever heard.”     

            “What?” I said. “You think you’re never going to get old? Never get sick? You got some special arrangement with the Lord God Almighty to live forever? Well, then, what about the wallowing itself? Don’t you have any manly urges?”

            For the briefest moment, for the littlest time, he hesitated, but then he picked right up again. “Nope,” said he. “None I can’t manage.”

            “You lie,” I accused. “You ain’t nothing but lying.”

            He glared at me for half a dozen heartbeats, then handed me my teeth. “Here,” he said, his voice hard as tack. “Try these.”

            I answered his glare with my own, but I took my teeth and pushed them into my mouth. “Better.” I nodded.

            “That’s all right,” he said. “You don’t need to thank me.”

            I glared at him. At him thinking I should be grateful. Thinking that he deserved to be thanked. I could have told him to get out of my house, but I didn’t. I could have called him all sorts of nasty names because he deserved every one of them, but I didn’t. I have enough sense not to go too far, much as it gripes me.

            He took the toothbrush and soda back into the bathroom.

*

            That old quack, Doc Flowers, insists on coming out once a week to check on me, though I keep telling him not to. I tell him that I ain’t going to pay him, that I wouldn’t pay a vet to keep coming to look at a dying mule, but Doc shows up anyway. I don’t know if it’s out of Christian piety or country curiosity. He gives me potions to help with the pain, but they usually taste like Travis’s soup, and after a while, they get to where they don’t help no more anyway.

            Today, after he’s looked me over, after he’s looped his stethoscope around his scrawny neck, him and Travis stand side-by-side at the foot of my bed, looking at me. Looking at me hard, I mean. “I’m sorry, Abner,” Doc says, “but you can’t have more than a couple of weeks left.”

            I hold up my arm, thin as a fence rail, and make a show of examining it close. Under the quilt, my legs are boney thin, too. When I shave, that face in the mirror ain’t none I ever seen before. My lip curls, and I snort out a laugh. “I sure hope you’re right,” I tell him. “This ain’t living, and I don’t want no more of it.”

            He pushes his little glasses back up his nose and shrugs. “All I can do is give you morphine.”     

            He gave Ma morphine. Without it, her face would twist and crimp, looking strained and haunted; with it, she’d smile and sleep. I’ve told him, though, that I’ll not ever touch a drop of the stuff. A branding iron burns in my gut, and I stare at him. I hiss through clenched teeth, “Then what dad-gum good are you?”

            He looks at my son. “Can I talk to you?”

            They go out to the front room.

            I feel like telling them if there’s anything to say, say it to my face, but I don’t want to. I don’t want them to. I don’t want either of them to say anything to me ever again.

            After a while, I hear the front door open and close, then Doc’s rattletrap fires up. It pulls out onto the road and goes away. Travis comes back into the room.

            “What is it this time?” I ask. “He going to change my medicine again?”

            Travis doesn’t look at me. He stares at my rifle hanging on its peg on the wall. “Doc says it isn’t any good. There’s nothing else he has to give you. Only morphine.”

            I say nothing. Nothing needs to be said, so we say nothing.

            He takes down my rifle. “I’m going hunting,” my son tells me. “Squirrel. Your favorite. So maybe you’ll stop belly-aching about my cooking. I ought to be back before dark.”

            Instead of taking the Winchester, though, instead of tucking it under his arm and walking out the door with it like he’s always done before, instead of doing what he’s talking about, he lays the gun beside me on the bed. In easy reach of my trembling hand.

            “You,” say I. “You like hunting too much. All the time hunting but never bringing nothing home.” My voice sounds rough. Not human. Like a. Something. Like I don’t know what. My eyes burn, but I hold back. Nothing, no amount of pain, no death warrant by no doctor is going to make me shed tear one in front of this boy of mine.

            His dark eyes glitter. Sparkle like stars. “Goodbye, Daddy,” says he. “Take care of yourself while I’m gone, hear?”

            And he walks out the door without looking back.

* * *