Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [187]
Along both walls of the corridor to his bedroom we’d screwed in wood rails and he’d grab one on each side of his chair and pull himself rolling fast into the room where he slept and wrote on a desk he’d hired me to build, one he could roll up to, one that his surviving leg wouldn’t bump underneath. Three years after his accident, Pop had taken out a loan and hired Jeb and me and some mutual friends, Beau Mullen and Jack Herlihy, to remodel his house. If we hadn’t needed the work, we would’ve done it for free, but we did need the work so five days a week for two and a half months, we changed his home from what it was to what he now needed.
Jeb did the design, and we cut away and hauled off the old deck, we poured new footings then tore out walls and ripped away half the roof. We built a larger living room with a small deck he could wheel out to, one that looked over the wading pool he’d had installed. We built a larger bedroom for Cadence, a brand-new one for little Madeleine. We tore out the wall separating what used to be his and Peggy’s bedroom and their library, and now his bed sat up against a wall of floor-to-ceiling books and there was more natural light streaming in from the windows facing the hill of poplars behind his house.
Later Jeb and I poured concrete footings for the posts of the long, staggered exterior ramp, and we ripped up the plywood decking and nailed stronger, much longer-lasting pressure-treated two-by-sixes. As the boards aged and bowed slightly, his wheels would make a clacking sound over them not unlike a far-off train’s.
Pop had made peace with his crippling. Once, sitting straight in his wheelchair, he’d looked over at me in his small dining room and said, “I’d stop on that highway again. Even knowing what I was going to lose, I would.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve learned so much.”
I couldn’t pretend to know what he’d learned, but I and others had seen a change in him that was not solely physical. When I was a boy, my memory of him then is of a man in constant motion, even when he was sitting. It was there in his eyes, a dark and restless intelligence and a kind of hunger, too. When he wasn’t sitting—which was reserved, it seemed, only for writing and reading and eating—then he was running or mixing a drink or he was talking and talking, carrying books out to his car to drive to a classroom where he would talk some more.
Then he was gone, and when we saw him once a week, when we four kids sat with him in a restaurant he could not afford, there was still that restlessness, that hunger, his body poised as if he could stay just a little while because there was work to do, so much to get done.
And he got it done too. Despite three broken marriages, four children from the first, two ex-stepkids from the second, and two daughters from the third, he got it done, and it was art. Whenever I read his work, I was pulled easily into a vision that was both bleak and redemptive, one illuminated with a kind of ancient love and compassion I could only associate with the divine. My father’s work was a deeply compelling blend of the profane and the sacred, like a drunk confessing his sins to a good priest only to go out and commit them once more but this time not as unconsciously, not as cruelly, and not as if that would forever be his fate.
Off and on throughout the years, my father had said in passing that he’d always saved the best part of himself for his work, that he relaxed with his friends and family. But since getting run over on the highway, that no longer seemed to be the case. He still wrote every morning. He woke, transferred himself to his wheelchair, wheeled himself first to the bathroom, then the kitchen