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By Root 683 0

it through the pain. His neck was stringy and long as a cooked turkey’s. We took the back way to the hospital, through miles of woods, lonely houses like possums in the dark, half caught and then left behind by the headlights. Junior let me hold his hand. When we arrived at the hospital, Randall and Big Henry half dragged, half carried Daddy through the doors to orderlies who were standing there as if they were waiting for us, and they put him in a wheelchair. We sat in the lobby. The orderlies wheeled Daddy next to us. They left us to whisper with the night admitting nurse, who rose from behind her desk, her scrubs pink with red hearts on them, wearing red Crocs, carrying a clipboard. Daddy bent over in the wheelchair, and the blood ran like a starving stream down his thigh, soaked into the seat, and the nurse began to ask questions and looked at Daddy as he sat up, his head rolling back, and saw his hand. The nurse had a gap between her two front teeth like Mama. She tucked the clipboard under her arm, grabbed the handles, asked Daddy’s name. Randall answered as she wheeled Daddy away and followed.

Junior fell asleep sitting upright in his chair and sagged over on Big Henry, who sat slumped over, his elbows on his knees, trying to rub the blood off his hands. It pinked and spread over his skin like a jellyfish. A white couple sat three chairs down from us; the man was bald with wispy hairs like dandelion fluff around his ears, and the woman had red hair that stood up in a curly thin afro the way that older white women’s hair often does. Their clothes were clean and faded along the ironed edges. Every few minutes, the woman would rub the gold crucifix at her chest, and the man would take off his silver-framed bifocals and polish them. They studied the receptionist station the whole time we were there and never looked over to Big Henry and his hands, Junior’s feet that kicked in his sleep as if he were dreaming of falling, and me. I wondered who they were waiting on, but I never found out because a nurse came for them and they disappeared. The waiting room was scrubbed clean and pale; it smelled of Pine-Sol, coffee, and weariness.

When Randall and Daddy walked out of the long hall, it was three o’clock in the morning. Randall looked older than Daddy under the lights, and Daddy’s eyes were glazed as if he was drunk, clear and shiny as the glass water jugs I’d filled, but he was not mean. He shuffled along next to Randall, his hand wrapped up to the wrist in gauze and tape so that it looked like a webworm moth nest wound tight in a pecan tree, a yarn of larvae eating at the ripe green leaves beneath to burst forth in black-winged flurry in the throat-closing heat of fall. Only Daddy’s hand would not emerge whole and quivering. Daddy’s hand would be not the moths but the bare branches, like bones, left under the husk.

Now Daddy sleeps. He hasn’t slept this late since the week after Mama died, when I found him at the table, on the sofa, beside the sink in the bathroom, in the hallway, his torso over the threshold, his legs out. Cans and bottles, mostly beer, lay about him like smaller versions of himself wherever he was. The sun is over the tops of the trees, flooding down into the small clearing around the house. All of the fans are blowing at all of the windows, so the house hums as if it is alive. Big Henry sleeps on the sofa. Randall is snoring in his room. Daddy’s door is closed. The chicken coop stands with three walls still, the tractor lightly touching it as if providing a thick, rubber-muscled shoulder to lean on. Junior is watching a rerun of Reading Rainbow, the volume so low it is barely louder than the fans. He does not turn it up.

We left Skeetah in the shed last night. He did not run with us to the car. When we came back to the house, he was asleep in his bed in the room he shares with Randall, wrapped up in his sheet, so I only saw the lump of him. He wore his shoes still, and they stuck out of his blanket like bristles on a toothbrush. In place of the curtain he’d dragged a piece of tin he’d salvaged, probably