She had dreaded Da’s death and feared that he would never die. Weeks went by when she spoke only to him, and to the doctor who came once a day to give him morphine. Henry had been so caught up with his new wife, his new life, that he hardly ever called, and when he did she could feel him straining not to hear her need for help. He was very busy, he said. He was starting his first development and finishing his first house. He was in love, he said; he could not leave Kitty even for a day; did she need any money? He sent handsome checks she didn’t need, and when she said she was frightened, he offered to hire a nurse.
But Da slept most of the time, and he didn’t want a stranger in the house. When he woke his dreams spilled over into his conversations, and he spoke of the flock of birds he saw on the walls, of a lake where he’d once fished, of dirt, water, moss, rocks, clouds. He fell inward, behind his eyes, and he talked to Gran and to Wiloma’s dead father, and to Brendan, who was gone. There were bees, he said, in the ice that formed on their pond, and sometimes he moved his swollen hands on the sheets and said, “A reservoir?” in a voice still fresh with disbelief.
He floated through his past like a leaf on the river, and while he dipped and swam Wiloma sat beside him and read. She sat next to the bed on which she’d arranged his limbs — he’d been big, but now he was nothing but bones and knobs so dense it took two hands to lift them. She read to fend off the urge to flee and to keep at bay the scenes she saw: her own life, about to open up to her. The city where she might live, the children she might someday have — she saw the house locked, empty, gone, and the life she’d lived there finally done.
On the night before Da died, when he said, “I want to go. I’m ready,” and then closed his eyes and waited, she saw the stone walls of their house tumbled and covered with grass. Da said, “Help me,” and she thought of placing a pillow over his face, releasing them both. She picked up the pillow and held it and then knew she couldn’t; he was in pain but he was still alive. She rubbed the brittle bones of his hands instead. Then she reached for the book on his table, which had lain there all along but which she’d never touched before. Words, she remembered thinking. Distraction. The book had been written by a British scientist and published in 1872, twenty years before Da was born: The Forms of Water in Clouds & Rivers, Ice & Glaciers, faded gilt words on a faded red spine.
That night, while Da lay struggling to shed his body, she read the first few pages and learned again that water might be a gas or a liquid or a solid; clouds or steam or rain or breath, rivers or ice or snow. She had that book still, in a cedar chest in the attic. The title and long passages were still burned into her brain. You may notice in a ballroom, she read — oh, she remembered this, she remembered the words exactly—that as long as the door and windows are kept closed and the room remains hot, the air remains clear; but when the door or windows are opened a dimness is visible, caused by the precipitation to fog of the aqueous vapor of the lungs. If the weather be intensely cold the entrance of fresh air may even cause snow to fall.
In the margin, surprising her, were words in Da’s spidery hand. I have not seen this, he’d written. But perhaps it snows more heavily over the reservoir than elsewhere? All the breath in all those drowned houses …
He meant the Stillwater, Wiloma knew — the very place she’d seen tonight for the first time since childhood. An easy seven-hour drive, which she’d never made; the place Da had ranted and raved about and that her father had brooded over. Da had told his stories again and again while she and Henry sat trapped at the dining room table in Coreopsis, and the stories had been different from, but related to, the ones their father had told them on Sunday mornings. Six villages lay in that valley, Da had said; and he had been born there and Gran had come as a little girl, from Ireland; and he and Gran had married and had two boys and one had gone to China; and he couldn’t leave his farm to Wiloma’s father because it lay under the water; and the land was taken and leveled and burned. Of course she’d never made the drive, she’d always known what she’d find here. Graves, ashes, ruins, bones. Being back here was like losing her parents all over again.
In the weeks before Da’s death, he had hardly ever recognized her. She’d been grateful for that — she did not want him, did not want anyone, to know the ways in which she touched him. For weeks she had rolled his body from side to side each day and changed the sheets beneath him. She’d washed and powdered and bandaged the sores on his shoulders and elbows and back; she’d passed a damp cloth over his nipples and crotch and the deep hollows above his collarbones. She’d taken his pulse, she’d taken his temperature, she’d cleaned his mouth and ears. But Da had slept through all that, or drifted in some state that was like sleep, only wilder, and she’d told herself he didn’t know whose hands touched him.
On the night before his death, she read and dozed and tended to him and read. The sun rose and the cicadas began their August drone. From time to time she touched his head or raised him slightly or lowered him, trying to ease his labored breaths. In his dreamy state that wasn’t sleep he could follow her instructions: Lean forward, Da. Can you swallow this? The doctor had left pills for her to place under Da’s tongue, but sometimes the wedge-shaped hollow there was so dry that the pills wouldn’t dissolve. She lifted his tongue like a piece of cloth and dripped water onto the tablets, rain from her fingertips.
Swallow, Da, she remembered saying. Can you swallow? He lay somewhere between sleep and death, already far away, and when she could pull her eyes away from him, she read. She skipped around in his book and read the bits he’d underlined, trying to find what had comforted him.
What is the structure of the ice over which we skate in winter? she read. Quite as wonderful as the flowers of the snow. I have seen in water slowly freezing six-rayed ice stars formed, floating freely on the surface. Lake ice is built of such forms wonderfully interlaced.
Da and Gran had brought her and Henry to Coreopsis in the winter, when the reservoir was frozen; she and Henry had come because they had no place else to go and stayed because they were children. A stream ran through their new place and fed the onions and corn and squash; rain fell and became confused with the rain that had fallen the night of the dance and the steam that rose from the cows in winter and the snow that fell and would not stop. The old pond, Da had written in his book, near the drawing of an ice flower. I pulled Brendan out the day he went through the ice.
He and Gran had saved her and Henry just as surely, Wiloma thought, but they hadn’t been able to see it then. Exhausted, broken-tongued, they’d clung together at school, where their new classmates had treated them as if their misfortunes were contagious. But the farm had been so silent it had frozen them silent, too, and Da, so old even then, hadn’t been able to find the words to make them talk.
Da breathed through his open mouth, the three teeth that had anchored his bottom plate standing dry and yellow, like stumps. “Tonight, maybe,” the doctor had whispered, when he’d visited at noon. He’d moved his stethoscope over Da’s back and said, “His lungs are filling. It won’t be long.” When he left, she’d moistened a cotton swab and rubbed it over Da’s lips and gums. He’d moved his tongue; he’d swallowed.
You cannot study a snowflake profoundly without being led back by it step by step to the contribution of the sun, she read. It is thus throughout nature. All its parts are interdependent and the study of any one part completely would really involve the study of all. The words were engraved on her brain still — all the words she’d read those last two days. She had never been able to forget either them or the way Da had looked.