Dale was used to seeing blood, working out-of-doors and with his hands the way he did, and yet the sight of Ida’s bloodspurt from the doctor-lanced boil took Dale’s breath away. “He fainted,” Ida said, right there in the office before them both, Ida and the doctor, looking over Dale — amazed at what could fell a man.
Love — not of the kissing sort; I never even saw them touch — but shadowing one another the way they did in sickness, toward the end, when Dale’s heart had become the thing we knew would kill him — in their every movement bent to each other, love it was.
The special diet, the new hours, the slow, deliberate life Dale slunked in as in a too-big coat, playing at being old and near to dying, when he was not so old, only that he looked it and was afraid.
The mean life I thought Dale led — even so, he loved it and was afraid. He was afraid of being ambushed, so that the clothes he wore were the clothes I guessed he wanted to be found in — ready for it, the next, last bed.
Every day the suit then, brown or gray, the polished shoes, the dark, sour socks. Water-combed his hair and shaved, close-shaved, three times a day shaved and hands washed until the short nails wore away, translucent and smooth as water-beaten glass and not as I remembered — not yours, yellow, bark-thick, carelessly much used and bruised in what you do.
Gardener, laborer, lover — you, I love your thumb, the thumbnail’s scrape of me.
In the story of our lives, nothing much happens but that we drive past the same town sometimes and remember. A long time ago and for a long time, I knew them, Dale and Ida. I leave a lot out when I tell you they were poor and childless, so that I thought as a child I was the saving of them — or could be.
They are both dead now even as you drive past the like houses, the churchyards, the graves.
You say, “Maybe we should find a house.”
But we like this way, I know, turning in each morning the last room’s heavy key and wishing perfect strangers a good day.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christine Schutt lives and teaches in New York City.