Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [166]
After writing, I’d drive the ten miles to my father’s house to try to do whatever had to be done. Peggy was pregnant with their second child, and she needed help caring for Pop, who was bedridden and in constant pain.
Before the accident, they’d moved to East Rocksvillage, the rural part of Haverhill, where they’d built a small house into the side of a hill overlooking acres of open field and a ridge of trees. Their paved driveway was long and steep, and because their front door was four feet off the ground, Jeb and I had had to rip out the steps and build a winding forty-eight-foot ramp for Pop’s wheelchair. We did this two days before he came home from the hospital. Jeb and I lay out the ramp’s angle which by law could be no higher or lower than one inch per foot. This allowed a crippled person to wheel himself up or down it without help from anyone else. We went to work digging three-foot holes for the posts, and because we thought this ramp was temporary, we skipped mixing and pouring concrete footings. Friends came over and pitched in, Sam Dolan one of them. When the sun went down, we turned on the porch light and set up a halogen lamp and aimed headlights and kept working. We lagged treated two-by-tens into the posts and nailed in crosspieces and ripped sheets of plywood and tacked them down. There was a hopeful, nearly festive charge to the air; there was nothing we could do to save Pop from what had happened to him, but we could do this. We were also still under the illusion that Pop would walk again one day, that his casted left leg was not nearly as damaged as it was, and that his main challenge would be learning how to walk on the new prosthetic leg for his right.
The first time I saw him home from the hospital he was lying on his living room couch, his casted leg propped on three pillows, the right leg of his sweatpants folded up under his stump. He wore a Red Sox T-shirt that used to be tight around his chest but now was loose, his upper arms thinner than I’d ever seen on a grown man. His beard, always trimmed, was long and shaggy, and his cheeks were gray, the whites of his eyes yellowed, but he was smiling up at me, raising his atrophied arms to hug me as I leaned down and kissed his cheek. It was rough with stubble, and he smelled like oily skin and damp hair and cotton bandages.
My five-year-old sister Cadence was talking to him, asking him about a drawing she’d done, did he like it? It was dusk and the TV was off and their golden retriever Luke lay on the floor in front of it. Peggy was cooking in the small kitchen.
Now it was a month later, and Pop hadn’t even left the house. He lived in a haze of pain that never lifted and most of it came from his left leg. If it wasn’t positioned in just the right place on the pillows, he told me it was as if sharp knives were slashing into his nerve endings across bone. Peggy was the one who took care of Pop, but when I was there I learned how to prop the leg at an angle that did not hurt him as much as another. Sometimes half an inch to the right or left or up or down is all it would take to make it far worse or far better, but like a neighborhood bully, the pain never quite went away. And he told me the phantom pain of his right was sometimes worse, that where his lower leg and foot had been, the actual air there hurt. Sometimes I’d see him reach down and pass his hand through it, this limb he no longer owned but haunted him like some disgruntled ancestor.
I laid a towel across his chest, took scissors and trimmed his beard. I lathered his cheeks and throat and shaved him. Sometimes I’d take over bedpan duty, a task Pop made easier by rolling onto his side and calling out in a weakened Marine Corps voice, “Get in there, boy, and wipe that ass!”
But there were times he clearly hated having to get help for this, and he would thank me more than once and I’d tell him not to worry about it. What I did not tell him was that I felt joy doing