ESSENTIAL PARTS by Lee Montgomery
1
My father and I begin the day by placing salt marsh hay around the raspberry patch in the back of the garden. It is October soon after Columbus Day and salt marsh hay is a new idea. Past years it’s been mulched leaves but this year Pop doesn’t have the energy.
He holds a Winston between his lips and stomps the hay down with a foot.
“Hey, this looks like it will work pretty good,” he says.
He smiles like the old days, even though it seems every year I visit from the West Coast he looks more and more like his mother, a tiny woman with root hands, who I only knew as forever ancient.
I pull a few tiers from the bale and move around the back of the raspberry patch shaking the hay apart. It’s old and wet so the center is bluish white with mildew, but I like the moist feeling and examine it closely. I had always imagined salt marsh hay would be different from alfalfa, and though it is true salt marsh strands are longer and finer, the colors are the same.
All around my father’s garden are handcrafted contraptions. Little three-dimensional wooden crosses hold the melons away from the earth so they can ripen evenly. Long half-moon domes made with chicken wire that Pop calls his Peter Rabbit Keeper-Outers protect baby lettuce. An enormous walk about chicken wire cage with top netting protects the blueberries from the crows. In the back of the garden are layers of black plastic with an intricate assembly of one-by-fours to keep the weeds from growing. The baby acorn squash sleep on wooden cradles.
“What are these?” I ask, pointing to the pieces of wood.
“Those?” He moves towards them quickly, delighted I’ve asked. “Those are my squash picker-uppers.”
I see my father’s handiwork and smile. He’s such a Yankee, digging in the dirt, seeing problems and building contraptions and doohickeys for no reason other than to master small environmental problems and to pass the time.
I explore every part of him then, hunting for signs of his seventy-seven years, and symptoms of cancer, for we now know the reason he has lost weight and can no longer swallow food: he has a tumor the size of a small animal in the fundus of his stomach.
I try to kid him about the animal in his stomach. “A squirrel? A rabbit? Two cardinals?” He does not laugh, but gazes out over the backfield, blowing dragon plumes of cigarette smoke, wiggling his fingers, two of them shorter than the others because they were cut off at the ends by a snow blower.
We work silently and when all the earth is covered around the raspberry plants, we move on to the asparagus, and then back to the raspberries, where we admire our work. He pulls a few berries from the branches, and I follow him doing the same. We each place the fruit into our mouths, where they melt. I watch to make sure he doesn’t start choking, knowing that this tumor sits mockingly at the entrance of his stomach, an irony not lost on me, my older sister Lael, or older brother Bob.
When we were children, our father was the fattest of men. Fat enough so everyone who knew him called him Big Dad: BD for short. BD to acknowledge his greatness despite his shame that spoke one winter afternoon ten years ago when, thin again, he and my mother threw all of his fat pictures into the fireplace and watched them burn.
2
In the afternoon, we pull the dahlias and morning glories from their netting, placing the huge tangled vines in the garden cart and hauling it through the garden gate and down the backfield. As we walk, a bay mare and her companion, a Shetland pony, follow. Dad walks beside me as I pull the cart, and though we are silent, I am aware of this difference. He has been the cart puller for all of time, he always the stronger of the two of us, but each year he has grown smaller, his dungaree shorts and his Lands End polo shirts acting as cool evidence, folding around him like loose skin.
“What the hell did you kids do with the other cart?” he asks.
I immediately see it in my mind, the Mercedes of wheelbarrows, light spearmint green, and remember the excitement of having a four-wheeled wheelbarrow versus the traditional one-wheeler that was often tippy and difficult to move heavy loads with.
“Ruined it hauling rocks,” he says answering his own question.
“Rocks, yes,” I say remembering the grinding of a broken bearing and the oh-shit-my father-will-kill-me sinking feeling.
“Ruined hauling all those rocks, messed with the bearing, I guess,” my father says.
“Yep,” I say.
As we make our way down the knoll toward an old well, the memory plays out. A few boy friends and I unpacked and assembled my father’s new garden cart and filled it with boulders we dug up from the earth of the barn with crowbars and shovels. I did not love these boys, and they did not love me, but we worked well together. Instead of blowing dope behind shopping malls or behind grocery stores, we blew dope working around horses and in stables. That day long ago, I had a wild hair across my ass, as my father said, about smoothing out the dirt floor of our stable so we could create another stall, but it was hard work. The weight of the boulders was too great and though we were able to clean out most of the rocks, the garden cart was sacrificed within twelve hours.
“Never did work after that,” my father smiles and I brace myself for what’s coming. “And then of course, you put kerosene instead of gasoline in that car.”
“The Chevy,” I finish his sentence. “And it ran! My dear father, it ran!”
He hoots, a sweet combination of a humph! and a ha! that blends into one lovely BD sound.
“The damndest thing,” he says. “I never understood it.”
“And you, old Daddy-o, you put your fingers in the snow blower and chopped them off.” He holds them up, the index and middle finger shorter than the others.
“That was pretty dumb, wasn’t it?”
“Sometimes, Dad, I don’t think you’re so bright.”
And he hoots again because this is what he told me as a girl when I did dumb things, which according to him, bordered on plenty.
At the bottom of the field, the post-and-rail fence ends, opening to a three-tiered wire fence that separates a meadow and woods. Directly behind the fence a defunct well remains buried somewhere. When I was a child, I loved to dig away the moss and the grass and pull up the old boards to see the stinky water, and though I have the same urge now, I don’t. Everything has changed in the twenty years I’ve been gone. All the old markers have disappeared and, under the new growth, I no longer know where to look.
We pull the vines from the cart and throw them over the fence in a tangled pile, far enough away so the horses can’t eat them and get sick. Dad stops to rest and turns to look at the back of the house and barn, monuments to his hard work over the past forty-five years: the red clapboards and white trim of the house, the ash-colored shingles of a century-old cow barn that stands three stories tall. The crest of the barn’s roof is dotted with lightning rods, their twisted steel cables falling to the ground like giants’ braids.
3
In the distance, my mother’s bleached-blond head bobs out of the glass doors that lead to a large wooden deck and a pool. She wears her Vermont Country Store white cotton bloomers, droopy at the crotch, and the Mount Hood T-shirt I bought her at the Portland, Oregon, airport. She leaves her high-tech purple walker, hobbles down the steps into the steaming turquoise water that is kept at ninety-four degrees so she can swim with her broken shoulder and pelvis. Stoyan, her twenty-five-year-old companion from Bulgaria, follows, carrying a tumbler of martinis that he places at pool’s edge. A clarinetist, Stoyan, or “The Kid,” plays jazz in Boston by night and works for my mother during the day – making drinks and escorting her to and from the pool. It is 9:30 or 10 in the morning and this is the Pooltini. Mother already had her first drink at precisely 8:45 a.m., a Gin Minty: a tall glass of gin with a fistful of fresh homegrown mint stuffed alongside her signature red-and-white-striped straw.
I had watched her then: her old tree-root legs, stunted and worn, dangled off the edge of my parents’ king-size bed. In front of her was the purple walker, reminiscent of a racing bicycle with four wheels, its wire basket stuffed with socks, notebooks, a Kleenex or two. She looked up at the bird clock that sings a different bird song on the hour and announced to my father, who was reading in a chair, “Monty, it is 8:45.” She held up three fingers to indicate the number of ounces of gin. My father swung himself forward by lifting his legs to give him the torque to get up from the easy chair. After he left, I studied my mother’s face, the folds in her skin collapsed around bones and things she cannot express, and a stunned breathlessness built in my chest. She looked at me sadly as if to say, Now what do we do? I smiled at her, trying to be reassuring, as I thought: Dunno. Dunno. Dunno.
4
A day later in the cool morning, Mother and I sit on the steps of the pool as the sun hangs in the center of a brilliant blue umbrella sky, illuminating the pink petals on her bathing cap and her large blue eyes, stony and stunned.
“Knockers up,” she says.
Surrounded by turquoise blue, she deeply draws her Minty from a straw. “Knockers up,” she says again, lifting herself while trying to swallow. “You bet your bippy.” I laugh. No one in the world still quotes Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In but my mother. She stretches out and begins to swim sideways, her strong arm in motion, the other limp, broken at the shoulder. There is talk here of hope and daring: My mother confides in me. She wants to pee in the pool.
“Go ahead, Mumzydoo,” I say. “Pee!”
As a child, I always dreamt of the future. As an adult, I dream of the past. Today, as I watch my mother swim, I remember a story about an old neighbor who placed a secret dye in his pool to detect any pissers. The chemical reacted with urine so that streams of red would issue from between the legs of offending parties. This is one of my father’s stories from long ago. I can still see the shift in his shoulders as he hunkered down in his favorite leather wingback chair, fiddling with something in his hands, to tell me more about this eccentric neighbor who also had a sky-high radio tower in his front yard. In the foreground, Mother continues to swim, complaining that she doesn’t have the courage to pee in her own pool and though I can hear her, I am distant, spinning through time and memories of my father. I eventually land on a bright Saturday morning where I see myself as a nine-year-old girl with a forty-five-year-old man digging fence postholes in the field below. My grown-up arms feel the weight of the wooden handles, the exhaustion of the cupped blades hitting another rock. My father stands over me holding the crowbar ready to pry the hidden rocks free of the earth.
This is how we live our lives, Daddy-o and me. We dig in the earth and move mountains of horse manure. We plant postholes for post-and-rail fences. We pull wood across fields. We build dining room tables out of found wood and spend winter months constructing tongue-and-groove stalls. When I grow up and move away, we conduct our projects on the phone with thousands of miles of distance between us. We repair chairs, hang window frames, plant tomatoes and corn, roof barns, wire phones and electricity, remove banisters, and put in French doors. We engineer projects into eternity, all monuments to our Yankee ingenuity, and while we work together over the phone, my father hoots and humphs as he shares his tricks of the trade.
5
Soon after I arrive that October, my father and I sit together in my parents’ bedroom, me on the arm of his easy chair, and plan the door for the cellar bulkhead I will build for my new home in Portland. “It’s not hard,” he says. “The challenge, I think, Lee, is sinking those holes.”
I smile, trying to visualize exactly what he is saying.
“Holes? Where? In the side of the cement?” I ask.
He smirks and takes a breath as if to say, Exactly how is it that you could be so dumb?
I walk outside to the bulkhead my father built forty years before and study his strategy. There is a damp, musty smell of autumn and, below me, a path of sky-colored slate stepping-stones. Within sight is the fertile lawn of the side yard, where I spent an afternoon as a child watching my father’s mother – at seventy – crawl in circles under the lilac, patiently poking through blades of grass with a finger, hunting for four-leaf clovers.
I measure the boards, drawing a picture of the door’s framework, and then return to my place on my father’s easy chair, where we talk about this bulkhead I will build. He tells me about the beauty of lag bolts and insists that I will need a bore. I know nothing of lag bolts and bores, so he draws me a picture. We do this, drawing pictures of boards – one-by-fours, two-by-tens, and the little quarter-by-quarter boards that will help the water stream down and away. My father, a lefty, draws with his hand bent in the shape of a horseshoe in front of him, his arm, wrist, and hand twisted into a half-circle above the page.
I am thickheaded when it comes to spatial decisions and I do not understand this concept of boring a hole, nor the benefit of a lag bolt, so my father says, “Come on, kid,” groaning a little as he pushes the footrest of his easy chair to the floor.
We walk though the breezeway and into the barn, traipsing down the hollow wooden steps at the far corner of the building, past smells of hay to more doors and walls of stone where his fingers, those lovely stubby fingers, pluck out a fat bolt with a shiny knob.
“This is a lag bolt,” he says holding it out in the palm of his hand. I take it between my fingers and examine it.
“It needs a jacket,” he continues, taking it back and turning it around in his hand. “You drill the hole, put in the jacket, and then screw in the bolt.”
I listen to his breath, cherishing each inhalation and exhalation, remembering the smell of him, of cigarettes in hard red boxes and Old Spice.
“That’s what it is. And that there – ”
He points to a short two-by-four with different-size drill bits and bores standing at organized attention.
“ – is a bore . . .”
Everything about my father is tired and sad, but when I look around this magnificent shop with its ancient stonewall foundation and shelves packed with drawers and small containers full of materials to feed, fix, fertilize, build, repair, and grow, I see the things that shaped him. And me.
That summer I will use these diagrams to execute our plan, and asking questions of the silent and the invisible, splinters of our conversation float back to me.
How do you get through the cement?
You need a powerful drill. You probably have to rent it.
On that trip in the autumn, the first of many over the following eight months, I save things. I save everything: little pieces of paper, hospital bracelets. I save grocery lists, and Post-it notes that say “Sorry for being such a dope, Love Dad.” I memorize his license and Social Security numbers. On Halloween, I find a bore, the perfect size at a flea market when visiting friends on a respite in the Berkshires, and throughout this time from October to June, I keep the bore as a bookmark in my Filofax and, in other places, diagrams of cellar doors, patterns to bore holes in the bottom of whiskey barrels, telephone-book-high stacks of clinical trials and literature about new treatments in stomach cancer, five notebooks documenting what he ate, what he didn’t eat, copious charts and notes of medications, old photographs, condolence cards, and the St. Francis and Lady of Lourdes emblems sent by a friend who prayed for him at the Lady of Lourdes shrine in Cleveland, Ohio.
In a journal, I find a small piece of paper reading Brigham and Women’s Hospital, 75 Francis Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02115. Floor 7, Section C, Room 55, 732 – 7705. His name is handwritten in the blank.
If there is a beginning, then, it is here: the beginning of the end.
6
Pop lies in a hospital bed closest to the door. “Is there any mail,” he asks. His face goes blank. I yell for the nurses. They rush in. No blood pressure. Panic. Small bottles, big needles. They plunge potions into him, and he revives.
After an hour of watching his blood pressure obsessively, we sleep, me in a chair, my father spread in his bed like a king. As evening comes, I watch his fingers follow the tubes from his body to each machine, tugging to find each source, each destination. He taps the pump, the IV machine, the lung sucker-outer, his lips pursed in concentration, his eyes curious and concerned.
Three days earlier, as John Glenn readied himself to orbit the world, a team of surgeons removes a constellation of tumor and organs from my father the size of two Webster Collegiate dictionaries. They remove it all together with many hands, snipping organs as they go, the spleen, the tail of the pancreas, the lower third of the esophagus, two thirds of his stomach, tying off arteries and veins, buttoning. Heave ho, one-two-three, it spills into a stainless steel pan, its little arms torn, leaving behind the abandoned, angry fingers in lymph nodes, sunning themselves on a kidney, on the liver, in the bone.
7
When my father wakes up after five hours of surgery, he has two questions.
“Is it cancer?” is the first.
He turns toward me: His head moves chaotically, his eyes roll as he struggles to open them. I can barely hear him because his mouth is under an oxygen mask, the rest of him full of plugs and wires and pumps.
“Did it spread?” is the second.
My older brother Bobby, sister Lael, and I stand by his bed. When he opens his eyes we all scream, pushing ourselves into view, waving hello. We are exhausted with waiting. Lael and I move through empty magazines. Bobby reads the same page of a novel in Italian. All of us hold our breath in the family waiting room as the hours move like glaciers, every so often calling our mother, who is waiting at home by the phone. When the surgeon’s call finally comes, we sit motionless and then Lael and I stand, pushing Bob to answer the phone. He turns away from us and slips a finger into his ear so he can hear. A minute later, he points a triumphant thumb up into the air. We crowd around him for the news, but when he hangs up, he is silent, only waving a hand. He leads us into a family room, shuts the door, and sits down, but doesn’t say a word. Instead, he removes his glasses and begins to cry, burying his head in a palm, being ever so careful to keep one thumb in the air. Lael and I know nothing, but we know our father is alive. We cry, too, and fall one by one into disorderly heaps of relief on the desks and in chairs.
8
After surgery, we visit intensive care every hour for five minutes.
“Don’t touch him,” my brother says during one of our regulated visits. When I see my father’s eyes lift, I place my hands on his forehead. Each time I do, my father pushes his consciousness to the top. Bob wants him to rest. I want to reassure our father. “Don’t touch him,” Bob says.
My father struggles to pull off his oxygen mask to tell us this: “I am a very sick boy.”
Lael stands still. She is our leader – the eldest, the boldest, the brightest – now subdued by a cold and terror that is apparent even behind the large tortoiseshell glasses that make her look like Atom Ant.
Days later, the doctors do not tell my father any truth about this cancer.
“What did they say?” I ask.
“Oh, it’s just an ordinary cancer,” Dad says.
“They didn’t say anything else?”
“Nope.”
I have spent days on the Internet so I know that ordinary gastric cancer has a ten percent survival rate at best.
I call my brother at work and don’t mention this news. Instead, I harass him.
“Hey, Bob,” I say. “Guess what?”
“What?”
“I’m touching him, Bob. I’m touching Dad all over.”
Bob laughs.
“Oh, Bobbolou,” I say in singsong. “I’m touching him all over. You better get here quick.”
9
One evening after I leave the hospital, I drive west towards our family’s home at dusk, and watch the late autumn New England sky, so beautiful it makes me weep. The sun sweeps from the soft blues and pinks and then turns to deep charcoal toward night. I stop the car on the side of a cornfield and find myself wishing for things, impossible things: Time travel. Clocks turning back. Organs returned. My father is missing a stomach. He has no spleen. He is missing the tail of the pancreas. How does it happen that a man can live without these essential parts? Standing there, I can’t help but imagine that empty space in the middle and hear imaginary sounds: snorts and soft clatter, the slapping echoes of wet organs knocking around.
10
This is a dream: My father is in a blue room. He lies in a hospital bed and stares at the ceiling, smirking. It is a room I do not know, but it is familiar. It is square and has windows on every wall. I look into my father’s eyes. They are his eyes, hazel, small, and squinting. In the corner, tears pop out in crystals, brilliant translucent stones. “I have seen so many miracles,” he half smiles. He stands and walks. We will be going to the doctor. He does not say this but it is something understood. He is all bones, but strong. His pelvis is a wide disk, his bottom droopy with skin.
I remember his frozen feet days before he died. His bare feet slip-slipping as they shuffle; my father’s wide feet with weird toes like mine. When his circulation begins to shut off, his feet turn blue like icicles. I rub them trying to coax his blood. His feet hurt and on his last night he cries out in pain. His arms flail. He is frightened. I kiss his face and turn away. Because the doctor forgot to call in the prescription for liquid morphine, and the hospice pharmacy forgot to call the hospice nurse, and on and on, my brother Bob and I are left alone with our dying father in the middle of the night. It is two in the morning and because my father was screaming, we grind up morphine tablets in an eggcup to slip into his mouth. So horrible is my father’s face, we grind up more and tranquilizers, too. As we drip them in the well between his teeth and tongue, I notice my father’s hands, and see how they have not changed, and feeling my own, I remember how I sleep, fingers numbing and frozen together crossed over my chest. As I watch my father die – two breaths reaching, swallowing, and a click – this is what I think about: I realize how I am like him, how I cross my hands over my chest when I sleep.
Lee Montgomery’s work has appeared in Story, Iowa Review, and Denver Quarterly. She is a senior editor at Tin House Magazine.