PAPA BOB, DORIS, TRUTH AND MEMORY by Heather Lende

Papa Bob is driving me bonkers. I am afraid my father will die if he doesn’t move more. Can you get bedsores from a couch? I don’t want to write his obituary. I want to be grateful that he is with me, instead of being a nag. Dad is almost 88 and unsteady in all ways since the stroke – or “episode,” as he says – that floored him two years ago.

He is from New York, and thinks he’s been here in Haines, Alaska ten days, but it has been six months. I wouldn’t say he’s living here. He’s more like a long- term guest without any plans to leave. He alternates weekly between a bedroom across the hall from us that was our grandchildren’s playroom, and my sister’s daughter’s old room at their house on the other side of town. When he is with me, it is in some ways harder than when I was a new mother living out in the Wasilla woods while Chip worked weeks at a time away from home in an oilfield camp at Prudhoe Bay. Then, my father surprised baby Eliza and me with a visit. Dad called from the San Francisco airport and said since he was “so close” he was taking the next flight to Anchorage to meet his first grandchild. It was the best kind of fib and so uncharacteristic. My father is a planner. Or used to be. He has never surprised me like that before or since. That he did it once, though, was enough for me to care for him with every fiber of my being until, well, until I can’t, or don’t need to anymore.

My husband is great with Dad. Chip grew up in a household with his siblings, parents, grandmother and great- grandfather. It was Chip’s job to deliver old Grandpa Tom his daily dose of “medicine”: a 16oz. Schlitz and a tumbler of port, which Grandpa Tom mixed together and sipped all day while he drew pictures of trains and trolley cars. When Papa Bob leaves us for my sister Suzanne’s house, I open all the windows and wash all the bedding and slipcovers. Chip and I turn the radio up, eat spicy stews and take outside adventures all day Saturday. I am just about ready to get back to work on the next book, the next essay, write a poem even, when Dad returns and the best I can hope for is making him a really good grilled cheese sandwich for lunch. It’s an art not to burn the outside and have the cheese melted. The secret? Mayonnaise. It sounds gross, but you spread it on the outside of the bread instead of butter.

I need to finish one obituary for the Chilkat Valley News while Dad is here this week and if I do, it will be just shy of miraculous. Like all of the obits that I write for the local weekly, this one is formulaic. A selective cut – ninety- three years in seven hundred words, double- spaced, AP style. There is nothing creative about the work itself, but there is so much drama, humor, conflict, sorrow, courage, sadness, truth and memory mixed in with the process of composing one, that I’ll miss the intensity. I love learning about the way people live. Choosing and sharing the details that make one person’s story both particular and universal. There’s that, and obituaries were also my way to assuage grief, and do my part in this final ritual of community life in Haines. I used past tense just now, because this one, for an old friend, will be my last. It’s not easy to feel the weight of so much sorrow every time I’m at the grocery store. There is always someone there, usually several people, who see me and remember when I was in their kitchen, taking notes about a daughter that fell off a horse and died, a husband whose heart stopped suddenly, a son that was killed slowly by stomach cancer, leaving his wife to care for their three little children by herself. At the Chilkat Valley News we always print the cause of death, and write “died” instead of “departed.” Poet Naomi Shihab Nye was correct when she said: no one “passes away,” that they die and then they stay. Another reason that I’m retiring from what never was a profession, rather a calling, is that with my father in the house I cannot plan my days around the schedules of newspaper deadlines and families making funeral arrangements. He needs me more than the newspaper does and both the paper and my own work will remain after Dad is gone. This obituary should have been fairly straightforward, but it’s not. Doris was old. I knew her well. She led a well- documented life. The problem was her husband. I began:

Teacher, writer, and influential community member, Doris Owen
Ward, 93 died peacefully Sunday Jan. 31 at Haines Assisted Living
(HAL) of kidney failure. Relative Shannon McPhetres and the
family dog Toby were with her. Ward moved to HAL in 2016. Former
Haines Borough Manager Debra Schnabel was in the Haines
High School class of 1970 that secretly dedicated the yearbook
to her after Ward made them promise not to, she said. Schnabel
credits Ward, her English teacher for four years of high school,
with instilling in her a love of literature by challenging her to read
nine books in nine weeks. “I learned that a teacher is someone
that wants the best for her students and knows what it is,” Schnabel
said.1

Later, I tell Papa Bob we must walk more. “Twenty steps a day are not enough. You need more exercise.” He says he already worked out today.

“No, Dad, you didn’t.” I say this gently. I do not want to shame or confuse him.

“I didn’t?”

“Nope.”

“Give me fifteen minutes,” he says, and leans back into the couch, closes his eyes and travels back to somewhere I’ve never been, long before I was born.

When I was a child my father ran a lot, and after each workout he’d sit in the kitchen of our big Victorian house on Long Island icing his knee and logging the time, distance and weather in his Runner’s World diary. When my mother was dying he kept an account of her doctor visits, treatments, the white and red blood cell counts, in a black pocket diary. It drove her crazy. As soon as he arrives for his week here from my sister’s house, we take out his leather folder, open it up on the sideboard in the hall, and lay out his portable office: journals, glasses, notebooks, watches, a wallet, and a flip phone that doesn’t work in Alaska. When he first arrived, months ago, he’d ask me to bring it to the table at breakfast time and he’d open one of the diaries, and say, “Today is Tuesday” and the date. And I’d say no, the date is correct but not the day of the week. He’d shake his head, and point to the calendar square, pen poised to jot down the weather, our location, a little news perhaps. I had to tell him the journal he was using was four years old. The others were even older. I gave him a new one for Christmas, but he hasn’t used it. He doesn’t take notes anymore. He also doesn’t believe he was here for Christmas. He says he’s never been to Alaska in the winter.

There’s snow on the ground when we step outside for our walk. He wears his Nike running shoes, a light down jacket, and no hat. Today’s goal is the Holgate’s driveway. My father’s daughter still, I time it for him. It takes us twenty- eight minutes and thirty- seven seconds to walk about two hundred yards. The way home is faster than the way there. “It’s a negative split, Dad.” He always coached me to finish strong. We used to run together.

“That’s because I’m cold,” he says.

A correction: It is not the Holgate’s driveway anymore. It used to be. Don Holgate died and Betty Holgate is at Haines Assisted Living. The Culbecks live there now. There are two teenage boys wrestling around in Don and Betty’s old living room, and snow machine jumps in the front yard.

My dad likes kid food now. He has a grilled cheese sandwich, Campbell’s tomato soup and hot cocoa for lunch, leaving the apple slices untouched. Afterward he shuffles to the couch by the wood stove, pulls the blanket up, and covers his face with my baseball cap. “Turn the radio off,” he says, prone. “That music is God- awful. Please. Thank you.” While he naps, I return to my desk and proofread what I wrote earlier about Doris:

Ward organized the Gym Dandy Walkers for elders that marched
in the school gym and hallways on winter days, although grammar
took precedent over exercise. “She’d take her red pen out and
correct the posters, she couldn’t help herself,” McPhetres said.
She served on the Haines Borough Public Library Board for 19
years and following that on the Alaska Governor’s Advisory Council
for Libraries for 12 years.

At our tea (me) and cocoa (him) break, I say, “Dad, when the gym reopens, we can walk inside, where it’s warmer.”

“We’ll see,” he says. “I’ll be home by then.” What he means is that the COVID- 19 pandemic will be over by then, and he can travel safely.

At the Haines clinic the next afternoon, Papa Bob introduces himself to his new, local doctor (my sister and I have finally decided to transfer his records to Alaska from New York). He describes his “typical day.” He rises early, he says, then jogs, does forty sit-ups, and always eats plenty of fruits and vegetables. “Fish. Olive oil, the Mediterranean diet, basically.” He says that since his shoulder surgery he hasn’t been able to do push-ups or swim laps. The pool is still closed due to the coronavirus, or else he may try it again. The doctor asks me if my father has been skiing on the golf course yet. He thinks Dad would like that, and my father agrees, but says that I am too busy with my writing to take him. The doctor frowns at me.

Well.

“I’ll take you tomorrow Dad,” I smile. I can barely convince him to walk to my car for a scenic drive. When I do, he turns the heat up and drops the seat back and takes a nap.

Papa Bob is not being misleading on purpose. He is not acting. He believes that he is still living the life he led ten years ago, twenty years ago, fifty years ago when he took care of my sisters and me. Now we are taking care of him. He always told stories at the dinner table. Usually about sports, like the quarterback fake in which he takes the hand- off instead of the usual running back, and carries the ball in for the winning touchdown, or the time he was caught sneaking back into the boarding school dorm, and how his buddies didn’t tell the truth and swore they hadn’t been drinking, but Dad stuck to his oath to abide by the school’s honor code and confessed that he “had a couple of beers.” They got off, but he was suspended from Taft and finished the year by correspondence at his Uncle Johnny’s rustic camp in the woods, digging and pouring a concrete, springfed swimming pool. He said it made a man of him. He’s liked cold water swimming ever since and the cornmeal pancakes he calls Uncle Johnnycakes. I make them, too. The way he told that story made me want to be just like him. Honest and brave. Dad taught me the power of true stories, but Doris gave me the confidence to write them down and share them with the world. I made sure to include her talent in her obit, but I couldn’t mention myself. It’s not a eulogy.

“Doris did so many things, but primarily she was a writer,” friend
Joan Snyder said. Ward was a longtime contributor to the Chilkat
Valley News. She wrote “Look Who’s Here!” an occasional column
profiling summer visitors and in 1986 founded the popular “Duly
Noted” column because she said, “So many things go on that
don’t deserve much space, but they deserve a mention, because
they are history.”

After her husband died, Doris and I were standing out in her yard and she was crying. Doris usually made light of trouble. Cracked a joke when the news was bad. She was as un emotional as my parents. That’s one of the reasons we got along so well. “Keep a stiff upper lip,” they’d all say, and please no “gnashing and grinding of teeth.” It was a shock to see her bereft. I asked if there was anything I could do. “You can write ‘Duly Noted,’” Doris said, handing me her pocket notebook and a pen.

Me?

“It’s simple,” she said: Never leave home without the notebook and pay attention to spelling. Names can be tricky, always ask even with simple names. Nanci is not the same as Nancy. She said writing about the people in this town would be the most important work I’d ever do.

I’d been gathering bits for the “Duly Noted” column for a few years when the paper needed an obituary done and no one else wanted to write it. They figured birth announcements, weddings, and funerals were the same beat. I’ve written about five hundred obits since 1996. My first book was published in 2005, and it and all three since then are anchored in the news of life and death in this town, thanks to Doris.

I went to a clairvoyant once with my former neighbor Betty because she wanted to contact Don, and their son Jonathan who died decades before Don did with three other local young people when his commercial fishing boat sank. The clairvoyant told Betty her menfolk were doing well and were together in the spirit world. She told me that I have many “spirit guides” watching over me. Could they be the subjects of my obituaries? Yes, she said. They want to thank you. Do I believe that? Will you keep reading if I answer that I really hope that is true? Betty says when she dies she will come back and let me know for sure what is beyond the veil. While I have doubts about what’s next, even though I attend church faithfully, I am certain that there is something eternal about families.

I don’t write “Duly Noted” anymore. My daughter Sarah does. Before my children arrived, my father was always Dad. Our children call Chip Dad, and so they named him Papa Bob before he could tell them to call him “Macho Man.” Now my grandchildren have named me Mimi. When I am Dad’s age, will Eliza, Sarah and their three other siblings call me both Mom and Mimi the way I slip between Dad and Papa Bob? In the end will I only be doddering Mimi? If I live that long? My mother, or Grandma Sarah as they called her, died when she was seventy- one. I am sixty- two. I’m not ready for my dad’s second childhood and I have one foot in it. I am not ready for sans everything . Will I ever be?

I tell you what: If he doesn’t shut the bathroom door the next time he pees, I will rent a house in Oregon so he can take a pill and put us both out of this misery. Chip says to use earplugs when I’m at my desk. Dad’s been in the bathroom a while.

“Everything okay down there, Dad?”

“Do you have a laxative?”

* * *

My notes from interviewing people about Doris read: observant, smart, kind, curious. Community minded. Active. Dry sense of humor. Pithy. Capable. Generous. She taught school in her hometown after college. When the state of Arkansas decided all public school teachers there would learn how to deliver babies, she said “Heck no,” and went to Japan to work as a journalist for the U.S. Air Force News in Nagoya. In 1963 she headed to Alaska to teach. A single woman of “a certain age, in those days anyway,” one friend said. She chose Haines because it had a Presbyterian church and her father was a Presbyterian minister. She was 44 when she got married and still returned to Arkansas every summer by herself. In her obituary I wrote that Doris Owen wed Karl Ward in 1970. He died in 1997. That’s all.

I did not write that he was the school superintendent, or any of this:

Karl Ward received awards from students, local teachers, businesses
and the University of Alaska. He was twice given an award
for contributions to student activities. The University of Alaska
Southeast gave him a meritorious service award for his work in
education and his “strong, positive influence on youth,” according
to a December 1989 “Southeast Log” article.

That was all in the big Chilkat Valley News front- page story about Karl’s crimes written by the newest editor and owner, Kyle Clayton.
However, I did write this:

Ward loved her Schnauzer, Beau, who died before she did.

And this:

She enjoyed beading, ceramics, woodworking and a cup of coffee
or a glass of wine with friends. She rode a zip- line at 89. On
her 93rd birthday she took a spin in the sidecar of a motorcycle.
Former Mayor Mike Case declared June 13, 2004 Doris Owen
Ward Appreciation Day, in honor of her “significant contributions
to the life of our community.” The community room at the library
is named for her. “Doris was truly a community- minded person,
and she had such a joy of life,” retired librarian Ann Myren said.

I cannot imagine my dad on a zip- line. But he did skydive for the first time when he was in his late seventies. His girlfriend insisted. He
loved it. The free fall gets longer every time he tells that story.

I also did not include any information from Kyle’s 2018 Alaska Press Club award- winning investigative reportage in Doris’s obituary:

Four Haines High School alumni came forward this week detailing
sexual abuse by former Boy Scout leader, school principal and
superintendent Karl Ward, who died 21 years ago.
The men decided to speak out after news circulated of Ward’s alleged
sexual abuse of Rick Martin. Martin, who killed himself on
March 11, left a video on his phone stating he was fondled and
later raped by Ward.

I wrote Rick’s obituary.

That’s when I decided not to write any more. But I did, and here I am, writing another one. It’s for a friend, I tell myself. Although I didn’t really know Doris at all, did I?

Back when Doris wrote “Duly Noted” and was looking for bold face names for the column, she called me to confirm that my mom and dad were visiting. She already knew how to spell their French last name (Vuillet), that they lived on a farm in the Hudson River Valley, and that we had all eaten dinner at the hotel with my sister and her husband. “It’s a small town,” she said. My father called her “my friend Doris” and loved seeing his name in print.

* * *

At dinner tonight my father tells stories about his school days. He was captain of the wrestling team at Taft and played football and lacrosse there and at Middlebury. He was small, but scrappy. He liked being the underdog. He saw himself as David and his opponents as Goliath. “The one attribute that contributed to my success on and off the field, and you have it too, Heath, is that we never quit. We never give up.” He sips his wine. (Should he be drinking with all that medication? Can I stop him?) Chip mimes corking the bottle. Dad asks for more bread and butter. “You need to eat your broccoli first,” I say, sliding the bottle toward me and filling my glass to keep him from finishing it. In his large gardens on Long Island and later the Catskills, my father grew chard, cucumbers and raspberries, but tomatoes were his pride and joy. He was the self- proclaimed “Tomato King” of Ruth Place, Highland Road, Prospect Hill Extension. The only three addresses of his adult life. He golfed with my mother who was much better than he was, and was her biggest fan. Dad body- surfed at Jones Beach, ran the New York City Marathon and swam in the annual Hudson River crossing sponsored by Pete Seeger and his clean water group. He swam it in his wet suit and goggles the year he turned 79, the same year he retired as an executive of a luxury Swiss watch company. Dad may have been one of the oldest people to complete the swim. He held an 80th birthday party and family reunion in Alaska during our oldest daughter’s wedding week. Looking back, it was pretty pushy. The wedding was enough work for me, and it should have been all about the couple – Eliza and Justin – and it was. My father managed to spin his piggy- backing on our big party for them as generous. “Your father loves to hold court,” Chip says. “Dinner is the highlight of his day.” The only time he’s awake is between five and eight in the evening.

Now he puts a little salad on his plate but doesn’t eat it. So much for the Mediterranean diet. “Thank you for a lovely dinner,” he says, a sweet old gent, pushing up on the arms of his chair, tearing the antique rug underneath it a little more than he did last time, and steadying himself on the table top before carrying his plate to the kitchen with two hands, concentrating. I am poised to leap up and catch the plate, or Dad, if need be. Even the dogs look anxious. That’s when my

father turns into my son. The old man is a boy, five years old, proudly, carefully, clearing his own dishes.

I always thought Dad would die running or in his garden. Swiftly. Looking like and sounding like his old self. Or perhaps he’d leave us the way my mother did. Terminal cancer is awful, but once she was diagnosed we knew how it would end and when. “It’s not like the movies,” my father said fifteen Aprils ago as we left her hospital room to eat deli sandwiches to-go in nearby Central Park. “We have to remember to take care of ourselves, too,” he insisted when I didn’t want to leave her. I was afraid she’d die alone. She did, a week later, while we were out to lunch.

“I think I’ll head home tomorrow,” Papa Bob says as he shuffles from the kitchen back to the couch and sinks into it.

He can’t go home, but he doesn’t know that. He will forget about it in the morning. He does not know how to use the phone anymore. I help him place calls to old friends. He and Toby have been best friends since the 7th grade when they met at the Emerson School for Boys in Exeter, New Hampshire. The school was not named after Ralph Waldo, rather after its owners, Mr. and Mrs. Emerson. The boarding school for about twenty- five boys was in their big house and barn. Dad says he was sent there because his parents were in Europe. His sister, my Aunt Jeanne (who is 93), attended the Mary Burnham School for Girls, owned by Mary Burnham. My father says that Toby went to Emerson because his father had died and someone in the family wanted to pay for his education.

Toby composes baseball haikus in his free time. He reads one to Dad over the phone. He recently moved to an assisted living facility with his wife, Irene. “It’s one of those places,” my dad says, after we hang up. “Toby doesn’t need it, but Irene is not well.” He has misunderstood Toby’s condition, or refuses to acknowledge it. Toby is in hospice care.

My sister calls and says Irene phoned to say Toby is dying and would like to talk to Dad. I tell my father. “Give me fifteen minutes,” he says and hits the couch.

Two days later after lunch, I dial Toby’s number and hand him the phone. The goodbyes are harder on me than on him. I listen from the kitchen, looking back at the table and Papa Bob’s suddenly small shoulders with the Navajo- inspired Pendleton blanket draped across them. He’s cold. I’m in a T-shirt. He grips the phone tight to his ear.

“Remember the Emerson School for Boys?” my father says. “You and I were there over Thanksgiving, and there was an ice storm. We played in the birches, just like the poem, remember, Toby? No it wasn’t Walt Whitman . . . it was . . . Yes, Frost, Robert Frost. And how ’bout that night we walked all the way home from Green Mountain? Christ, that was something.” He’s laughing now. “It was the girls, Toby, they were much more fun than the Middlebury girls. Oh no – I don’t mean Irene, or Sally (my mom) of course.” He tells Toby he is heading back to his farm next week. “I’ve been in Alaska almost two weeks. It’s time to get back to my tomato plants.”

Toby’s son calls a few days later to tell me he has died. When I let Dad know he is stunned. “Toby? He wasn’t even sick.” He wipes his eyes.

“Are you okay, Dad?”

“I’m fine,” he says, and pretends something is in his eye. “I think I’ll lie down. Then we will call Irene. Give me fifteen minutes, will you?”

***

Back in the fall, Suzanne, who is a social worker, flew to New York, swooped him up and brought him here to be safe during the pandemic. He hadn’t shaved in weeks. His clothes smelled. The garden was weeds. There were mice in the pantry and a squirrel’s nest plugged the bathroom fan vent. Suzanne told me this in a whisper. Our other sister Kathleen, who has been living very near Dad in New York for most of her life and now has health issues of her own and can’t be his caregiver, said it was horrifying, that our father had become that kind of old man. Both my sisters believe I am not taking Dad’s decline as seriously as they are. My friend Betty’s house smelled of cats. She slept in her clothes until she moved into assisted living. She used a sleeping bag because she couldn’t make the bed by herself. “Growing old is the pits,” she says. I know of much worse crimes than mice in the pantry.

When Doris died I didn’t tell Kyle at the paper that her caregiver had asked me not to mention Karl in the obituary, and that she did not want it “to win any awards” like his Karl Ward stories had. That news made The Washington Post and CNN. My obituary will not. It will be about her life, not his.

Doris Ward wrote poems for and spoke at special Haines events,
hosted a monthly coffee klatch at the Haines Senior Center, and
judged the Southeast Alaska State Fair creative writing contest.
She was a devoted member of the Presbyterian Church. She put
her appreciation for community life into words in brief, pithy letters
to the editor closing with an “Atta boy to each performer” or
“Another blessing of living in Haines.”

Kyle had published some of those letters, but not all of them because he has only owned the paper for a few years. He did not know and like Doris the way the other editors all had. That may be why a former Haines High basketball player told him this on the record and he printed it on the front page.

“Karl Ward came out on his porch, drinking, and touched me, too.”
[The young man] said he told the teacher who he was living with
what Ward had done to him. “The teacher did nothing.”

We moved to Haines shortly after Dad’s surprise visit to Wasilla, in March 1984, and Karl was old and ill by then. I never really knew him. Only Doris.

After Kyle’s story had been published, after Rick’s death by suicide, I played Lucinda Williams’ song “Compassion,” from a poem by her father Miller Williams, on the radio during my weekly volunteer shift at KHNS. Doris emailed that she knew and admired the former poet laureate of Arkansas. She had taken a class from him in college. “His father was a Methodist minister, but that’s not his fault,” she quipped. “Compassion” was one of her favorite poems.

Have compassion for everyone you meet,
even if they don’t want it. What seems conceit,
bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign
of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on
down there where the spirit meets the bone.2

I never asked Doris what she knew.

When I saw her at Haines Assisted Living in the months and the few short years she lived after the story broke, I said hello, but she couldn’t hear me, or pretended not to. She sat at the big round table, alone. I’d sit in the sunny alcove with Betty, who needs a wheelchair now but used to ride her bike over to our place on summer days, and tell me to come pick as much of her rhubarb or apples as we could eat. Betty called me the night Don fell in the hallway. I was there when Al Badgley from the ambulance crew explained that if they took Don to the clinic, he would probably end up on a medevac to Seattle and because of his age and health, he may not return. Haines does not have a hospital. Cancer, heart disease, organ failure cannot be treated here. Don asked to be carried back to bed. He died six days later. Betty lived by herself as her Parkinson’s disease progressed, but when she fell and broke a hip that changed everything.

Betty has lived at HAL ever since she called the fire department twice in one morning after seeing a forest fire that wasn’t there. She regularly sees a black cat and children dancing on the lawn outside her suite that no one else can. At the exam following the big false alarm, a doctor at the clinic told Betty she couldn’t drive anymore due to her hallucinations. Betty objected to the term saying, “You can’t see love, and you can’t see hate, but they are real.”

Kyle also included this in his story on Karl:

Norm Smith, who attended school from the seventh grade until he
graduated, said he had never heard any such allegations against
Ward. “To hear that about Karl Ward, I’m having a hard time believing
that,” Smith said. “He was the principal when I was there.
I always thought he was a good guy myself.”

Norm is my sister’s husband.

Norm is gentle with Papa Bob. When he stays at their house they watch British mysteries and World War II documentaries. Norm waters down Papa Bob’s wine. My father was born in London. His mother was American and his father was French, and enlisted in the French Army and survived being a German prisoner of war. Norm’s father’s troop liberated one of the Nazi death camps. After the war, my father stayed in America where he’d been sent to be safe, attended boarding schools and was shuttled to relatives for holidays.

I know where you may think this story is going, and I am sorry if I misled you by weaving the Wards’ story with Papa Bob’s. All those years in boys’ schools and all that time away from his family, he was treated well. He remembers his youth fondly. Toby was there, and he was a happy man, too. To the best of my knowledge (and judging by my father’s vivid dreams that are so real to him) there is no villain like Karl in the shadows of Dad’s memory. It’s just a coincidence that I was writing the obituary for Doris while caring for Dad, and that truth and memory became the theme, but the truths I’m learning from them both are as different as the memories, or lack of them. I was going to cut the part about Karl and Doris out of this story, because these tracks don’t converge. But I didn’t. It’s difficult to sort the present from the past, even in real time, isn’t it?

Sometimes endings are happy. Sometimes things turn out well. My father says he has lived a good life. He says he’s lucky. I know I am. My sisters and I had a happy suburban childhood in a big old house on an oak- lined street with two parents who loved each other and us. Azaleas, sunburns, church bells, good dogs, ball games on the radio when Dad put up the storm windows and Sunday dinners by the fireplace. We liked school. Our teachers were good. This is something that may be harder to believe than Karl’s crimes. Why is that?

***

Joan was Doris’ oldest friend. She is a retired public health nurse that never married, and says if you want to live a long healthy life don’t have kids, and take care of your teeth and your feet. Joan is in her nineties and lives on her own and still swims at the pool most mornings. We are in the locker room. I am dressing and she is sanding her corns with an emery board when I ask her who else knew about Karl, back then.

“Everybody,” she says.

“Everybody?”

“Everybody. That’s all I have to say on the subject. Poor Doris.”

Kyle did ask Doris what she knew about Karl’s behavior, and he wrote that she replied through “a third party” that she wasn’t ready to talk, and would never be, but was “in shock and in mourning of a life she thought she had.”

I have a friend who used to be a divorce attorney in Los Angeles. She believes that Doris didn’t know. She says love really can be blind. “I’ve seen it myself. You would not believe the lies people tell themselves about stuff happening right under their noses. It’s incredible. Once, as I was about to leave HAL after a visit with Betty, I asked Doris if I could do anything for her. “Can I bring you something next time I come? Chocolate? Wine?”

“I want my car, and my house and my stuff,” she said, half smiling, in that Arkansas twang that I had missed hearing.

***

Papa Bob is looking out the window at the snowstorm and says he wants to go home as soon as planes are flying. I tell him we will need to wait until the spring, when the weather is better, when the Covid rules are easier, we hope. I don’t say that we will need to pack up his belongings, and sell everything. I don’t say that he will either come back to Alaska where two of his daughters and four granddaughters and eight great- grandchildren live, or he will have to move to a nursing home near the farm. Noble Horizons overlooks a cemetery. (Truly. You can’t make this stuff up.)

“You don’t need to travel with me,” my father says. “I came here by myself.”

“No you didn’t.”

“I didn’t?”

He finishes another cup of cocoa and heads for the couch that we now call his. “What do I have to do to put the heat on in here? Drop another quarter in the meter?” The wood stove glows orange. I tuck the wool blanket around his feet and hand him my hat to cover his face. “This is very comfortable,” he says stretching out. “Who chooses this God- awful music? Turn the radio off, would you please?”

My sisters guess that our father may have early Alzheimer’s, but he passes his Montreal Cognitive Assessment at the clinic. On the scale of 0–30 he scored 25 and showed “very mild impairment.” It’s a high score for a man his age, and in the “normal” range, according to his doctor. I know Dad is not all there. So does everyone close to him. Numbers can lie, too.

It’s morning again, and I am at my desk on the landing halfway between the upstairs and downstairs, and as much as I’d like to stay in the quiet zone, Dad’s day needs to begin. I shout up the stairs, “Papa Bob, Sleeping Beauty, it’s time to wake up.” It’s 10:30. When he doesn’t respond to my third call, I check on him. It’s dark. The curtains are closed. He’s curled up with his back to me. I step closer and listen for breath. I touch his chest.

“I’m not dead yet,” he says.

I’m going to die of a heart attack before he does.

At breakfast he announces that Bill Clinton is a “very personable guy,” and Hillary? “Not so much. That is her trouble. Otherwise she would have been president. She should have been. ‘So it goes,’ as my friend Kurt Vonnegut says, ‘and so it goes.’ ” I don’t think my father knows Vonnegut, or the Clintons. How would he? Chip used to speculate that he was in the CIA and not the watch business. He did travel a lot when I was young. Lately he hasn’t gone much farther than his bedroom. I’m worried that he won’t be able to climb the stairs soon. Then what will I do? We don’t have a bedroom, or even a room with a door on it, downstairs.

* * *

The crash wakes us up like an explosion. Chip and I find Papa Bob on the slate floor in the hall at the bottom of the stairs, lying on his back, spread eagle. His head rests on Chip’s size 12 rubber Crocs. There is no bump or blood on the back of his head, thanks to those “silly shoes” as Papa Bob calls them, but there are crushed saltines everywhere. He likes midnight snacks. I kneel down and Dad says he slipped on his way up to his room and fell backwards down a few steps. He tried to grab the newel post but missed it. He insists that he’s fine. He could use some help getting up is all. I don’t think we should move him until we are sure there’s no neck or spinal injuries. But Dad is pushing his way up before we can stop him, so we grab his arms and hoist him into a sturdy chair. I shoo the dogs back and hear Chip talking behind me.

“Bob?” he says. “Bob, you okay?”

My father is not listening. His arms are rigid and his hands are gripping and releasing. His torso shakes. His mouth moves soundlessly. One eye stares at me and sees nothing. The other eye watches the wall.

Oh God.

Is this it? Chip is holding Dad’s shoulders, maybe so he won’t fall out of the chair as he seizes? I can’t look. I can’t hold my father’s hand. I can’t even walk past him to the kitchen phone when Chip says, “Call the ambulance.” Instead, I run upstairs and dial 911 from our bedroom. “Please hurry,” I say. “It may be nothing . . . but it may be serious. I don’t know. ” The dispatcher tells me help is on the way.

My father is alert when I return. Our neighbor, a policeman, is there too. Michael heard the emergency call, and says he’ll wait at the end of the driveway for the ambulance. I’m glad it’s freshly plowed. Light snow is falling. The ambulance beacons flash in the kitchen windows, red and blue. It’s so quiet. Dad has come back to his senses. He greets the three volunteer EMTs sheepishly. Chip and I know them all. It is the “A” team. Literally. Both Als, Badgley and Giddings, and Darwin. Al B. calls Dad “sir,” and Darwin hands us masks. (It is funny to type that now. So much for survival of the fittest.) We had forgotten all about Covid.

Papa Bob insists that he is fine. “I just slipped a little going upstairs.” He adds, “Goes to show that when you stay in good shape like I do you can handle these type of events better.” Al G. asks him what day it is as Darwin tapes wires to his chest and draws blood from his finger. Dad says, “What day is it? Hmm. That’s a good question.” He looks at the cuckoo clock. “It must be tomorrow since it’s after midnight.”

Too quickly I add, “Papa Bob and I never know what day it is, do we Dad?” They all seem to run together these days. “We spend half the time looking for our glasses, his and mine.”

Everyone smiles. The questions keep coming, and my father answers them. No, he never lost consciousness. He is not now and never was dizzy. Does his elbow hurt? It’s bleeding. “A little scrape, is all.”

I don’t mention the seizure, or stroke, or whatever that horrible spasm was. Chip whispers something to Al B. in the kitchen who then asks Dad if he wants to go to the clinic.

“I’ll stay here. I’m good. Thank you. I appreciate your time.”

Al B. speaks in a soft Texas drawl and wears rubber boots and a red EMT jumpsuit. “How ’bout we make a little deal?” They will drive the ambulance back empty if Dad can make it to his own bed “without any assistance.” Al helped carry Don to bed. Protocols must have changed. Or does my father have more time to live than Don did? How do you know?

I really wish he’d wear pajamas. His boxers are loose. His legs are too thin for his knees. They look like boulders. I want to tell the EMTs that Dad sleeps downstairs, on the couch. That’s not a lie. I called the ambulance because I was scared my father would die. I still am. I don’t want him to be alone when that happens. He needs to be home, with us. Al B. waits. Al G. looks down. Darwin packs up the medical bag. My father does not make eye contact with me or anyone else. He wipes his eyes. Mine are wet too. It’s not supposed to be like this. Macho Man has left the building. “I’m sorry, Dad. This is my fault. I called them.”

He sighs with a whistle like the air going out of a football and stands, steadying himself on the newel post.

“I’ll grab some pants and your meds and come with you,” I say.

Dad glances right, weaves left and by God he charges by me and straight up the stairs, chest out, arms pumping, skinny legs dancing on the steps. All I see are the seat of his skivvies and his feet, with one black sock on and one sock off as he rounds the corner on the landing by my desk. All of us – the Als, Darwin, Chip, me – scramble behind him, much too late to break the fall. But he doesn’t fall, or even slip. He is in his bed, covers pulled up to his chin before we catch him.

We are all smiling, even Dad. “Thanks, fellas,” he says from the pillow, breathing hard. “I apologize for calling you out on a night like this.” Al B. does make us promise to see a doctor in the morning, “just in case we missed anything.”

I check on Papa Bob before going back to bed myself. He is still awake.

“Hey, Heath, do you have any Tylenol? My back is killing me.”

“Dad!”

“I’m fine. My back hurts, is all.”

“You scared me.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I thought you were having a stroke.”

“Stop it. I’m fine.”

“What if you cracked a vertebrae?” I say, handing him the pills and a cup of water. He winces when he sits up. “I have had a good life. I’m not afraid of death.”

“I am.”

“Heath, please. They don’t call me Macho Man for nothing.” He hands me the empty cup. “As my friend Kurt Vonnegut says, ‘and so it goes.’ ”

“Dad?” I say from the hallway, before I close his door. “I love you.”

“I love you too, honey.”

“And Dad?”

“Yes?”

“I’m glad you’re here.”

“It has been a nice visit. I think I’ll leave at the end of the week. We’ll make reservations after breakfast.”

NOTES

1. The excerpts from Chilkat Valley News owner and editor Kyle Clayton’s stories about Karl Ward come from articles published by the Haines weekly paper in April and May of 2018. Clayton and the Chilkat Valley News won an Alaska Press Club award for his writing on Ward’s crimes and the community’s response. Lende’s obituary for Doris Ward was published in the paper in February 2021. They may be read in their entirety at Chilkatvalleynews .com.

2. Miller Williams’ poem “Compassion” is from The Way We Touch: Poems, published in 1997 by the University of Illinois Press. The short poem is also the inspiration for a longer song of the same title written and performed by his daughter Lucinda Williams on her 2014 album, Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, by Highway 20 Records. Miller Williams earned many honors over a long career of teaching, editing, and writing, and delivered his poem “Of History and Hope” at the second inauguration of President Bill Clinton. Miller Williams died Jan. 1, 2015, at age 84 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.

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Heather Lende is the author of four books of nonfiction published by Algonquin Books: If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name (2006); Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs (2011); Find the Good (2015); and Of Bears and Ballots (2020).