“Shut up,” Doc said angrily. “Do as I say, or I’ll make you swallow this.” He held up the stethoscope.
“You couldn’t make me blink.” But he lay flat, and let Doc take his pulse, and listen to his chest with the stethoscope. He kept complaining, but Doc stuck a thermometer in his mouth, which shut him up, or at least made him incomprehensible. Then Doc went back to listening.
After a bit he removed the thermometer from Tom’s mouth and examined it. “Breathe deep,” he ordered, listening again to Tom’s chest.
Tom breathed once or twice, caught—held his breath till he turned pink—then coughed, long and hard.
“Tom,” Doc said in the following silence (I had been holding my breath), “you’re coming to my house for a visit to the hospital.”
Tom shook his head.
“Don’t even try to argue with me,” Doc warned. “It’s the hospital for you, boy.”
“No way,” Tom said, and cleared his throat. “I’m staying here.”
“God damn it,” Doc said. He was genuinely angry. “It’s likely you have pneumonia. If you don’t come with me I’m going to have to move over here. Now what’s Mando going to think of that?”
“Mando would love it.”
“But I wouldn’t.” And Tom caught the look on Doc’s face. It was probably true that Doc could have moved to Tom’s easier than Tom could move to Doc’s. But Doc’s place was the hospital. Doc didn’t do much serious doctoring any more—I mean he did what he could, but that wasn’t much, sometimes. Breaks, cuts, births—he was good at those. His father, a doctor gone crazy for doctoring, had made sure of that years ago when Doc was young, teaching him everything he knew with a fanatic insistence. But now Doc was responsible for his best friend, who was seriously ill—and maybe moving Tom to the hospital was a way to say to himself that he could do something about it. I could see Tom figuring this out as he looked at Doc’s face—figuring it out more slowly than he usually would have, I thought. “Pneumonia, eh?” he said.
“That’s right.” Doc turned to us. “You all go outside for a bit.”
Kathryn and Kristen and I went out and stood in the yard, amid all the rusty machine parts staining the earth. Kristen told us how she had located Doc. Kathryn and I stared out at the ocean, silently sharing our distress. Clouds were rolling in. It happened so often like that—a sunny day, blanketed by mid-afternoon by clouds. Wind whipped the weeds, and our hair.
Doc looked out the door. “We need some help in here,” he said. We went inside. “Kathryn, get some of his clothes together, a few shirts he can wear in bed, you know. Henry, he wants to get some books together; go find out which ones he wants.”
I went back in the bedroom and found Tom standing before the photographs tacked to the wall, holding one flat with a finger. “Oh, sorry,” I said. “Which books do you want to take?”
He turned and walked slowly to the bed. “I’ll show you.” We went to the storeroom, and he looked around at the books stacked in the gloom. A pile near the door contained every book he wanted. He handed them to me from a crouch. Great Expectations was the only title I noticed. When my arms were full he stopped. He picked up one more.
“Here. I want you to take this one.”
He held out the book that Wentworth had given us, the one with blank pages.
“What am I going to do with this?”
He tried to put it in my arms with the rest, but there wasn’t room.
“Wait—I thought you were going to write your stories in that.”
“I want you to do it.”
“But I don’t know the stories!”
“Yes you do.”
“No I don’t. Besides, I don’t know how to write.”
“The hell you don’t! I taught you myself, by God.”
“Yeah, but not for books. I don’t know how to write books.”
“It’s easy. You just keep going till the pages are full.” He forced the book under my arm.
“Tom,” I protested, “no. You’re supposed to do it.”
“I can’t. I’ve tried. You’ll see the pages ripped out of the front. But I can’t.”
“I don’t believe it. Why, the story you told the other night—”
“Not the same. Believe me.” He looked desolate. We stood there looking at the blank book in my arms, both of us upset. “The stories I’ve got you wouldn’t want written down.”
“Oh, Tom.”
Doc came in the room. “Henry, you aren’t going to be able to carry those books. Give them to Kristen; she’s got a bag.”
“Why, what am I carrying?”
“You and I are carrying Tom here, young man, can’t you figure that out? Does he look like someone ready to walk across the valley?”
I thought Tom would hit him for that, but he didn’t. He just looked morose and tired and said, “I wasn’t aware you owned a stretcher, Ernest.”
“I don’t. We’ll use one of your chairs.”
“Ah. Well, that sounds like hard work.” He walked into the big room. “This one by the window is the lightest.” He carried it out of the house himself, then sat in it.
“Put those books in Kristen’s bag,” said Doc.
“Ooof,” Kristen said as I piled them in. I went to help Kathryn find Tom’s shirts. Curiously I checked the photograph Tom had been looking at; it was a woman’s face. Kathryn lifted an armful of clothes, and we went outside. The old man was staring at the sea. It was getting blustery, and halfway to the horizon a few whitecaps appeared and disappeared.
“Ready?” Doc asked.
Tom nodded, not looking at us. Doc and I got on either side of him and lifted the chair by its arms and bottom. Tom craned around to look back at his house as we stepped slowly down the ridge trail. Mouth turned down he said, “I am the last American.”
“The hell you are,” I said. “The hell you are.” And he chuckled, faintly.
It was tricky getting down the ridge path, but on the valley floor he seemed heavier. “Change places with me,” Kathryn said to Doc. We put the chair down; Tom sat there with his eyes closed and never said a word. So strange, to have the old man quiet! Though the wind was brisk, there was sweat beading on his forehead.
Kathryn and I lifted him. She was a lot stronger than Doc, so I had less to carry. Into the forest shade we went.
“Am I heavy?” Tom asked. He opened his eyes and looked up at Kathryn. Her thick freckled arms came together at the elbows, pinning her breasts together in front of his face. He mimicked a bite at them.
She laughed. “No more than a chairful of rocks,” she said.
At the bridge we stopped for a rest, and watched the clouds roll over us, talking as if we were on a normal outing. But with Tom in the chair it wasn’t natural. On the bank upstream a group of kids splashed in the water; they stopped to watch us as we got across the bridge, which was narrow enough to force me to lead, walking backwards. Tom stared mournfully at the naked brats as they pointed and shrieked. Kathryn saw the look on his face and she squinted at me unhappily. Fat gray clouds lowered over us, the wind tossed our hair, it was cold, and getting darker… Miserably I tried to find a way to distract Tom.
“I still don’t see what I’m going to do with that blank book,” I said. “You better keep it, Tom, you might want to do some writing in it up at Doc’s.”
“Nope. It’s yours.”
“But—but what am I going to do with it?”
“Write in it. That’s why I’m giving it to you. Write your own story in it.”
“But I don’t have a story.”
“Sure you do. ‘An American at Home.’ ”
“But that’s nothing. Besides, I wouldn’t know how.”
“Just do it. Write the way you talk. Tell the truth.”
“What truth?”
After a long pause, he said, “You’ll figure that out. That’s what the book is for.”