Spring 2015
And yes, he has been missing her terribly the past year. There it is. He has been missing her terribly.
He carries two long iron bars from the garden shed down the slate path. They are heavy things,
two six-foot bars of crude iron, and it feels good carrying them, stretching his muscles, gripping something
of heft and ignorant purpose in his two big hands. Isaac Stritch is at an age when most men are past
the strenuous life. And his profession has always been of the less-than physical. Assistant Professor.
Associate Professor. Professor of History. Sibley Chair of History. And now Emeritus. But here he is still doing
this kind of work and relishing it. He has a big body, more the arms and hands of a teamster than a
Professor of History but of a real teamster of the old days that wrangled with harnesses of mules and
draught horses. Or, more apt, the big hands of a quarryman because that’s what he’s been for the last
forty years. This backyard. This hill. These rocks. The steep backyard that the house sits at the top of
is nothing but stones. Patricia’s herb garden. He stops just beyond the reach of the expansive summer
porch and lays the two bars on to the grass next to the exposed old stones. Gently.
“I wish you weren’t in the hospital. Such a disgusting smell. Pervades everything. Clothes, books,
hands, hair. I get the smell in my nostrils and it takes no small amount of work to get the smell out.”
She smiled weakly and not with her usual enthusiasm. Her hair hung limp that morning on either
side of her face against the faded hospital gown. Ducks, he remembers. They gave her a gown with
little faded ducks to add to her indignity. It was all he could do to look away.
“I wish you were feeling a bit more chipper. Maybe when the doctor comes he can give you something
to perk you up.”
But what? What could he possibly give? This had started -- this entire upheaval of both their lives
really -- a year and a half before. The prognosis and the treatment and the loss of the beautiful braided
golden hair and then what they thought of as remission. Things were fine for months until that past
week before the hospital when everything seemed to fold in on . . . Yes, on both of them, really. She
had made him promise when her hair grew back (iron gray, not golden, not the Devon gold of the
English girl he had married) that there would be no more treatment. The doctor knew her wishes, a
comforter it seemed by nature, standing at her bedside as much as their daughters did.
“I’m thinking your mother would like to be freshened up a bit. You know, brush out her hair, back
away from her face a bit so she doesn’t look so . . . well, bedraggled. Make her seem more like herself.
Maybe even do up her face a bit. I brought her cosmetics. Whatever she keeps in those little bags on
her side of the vanity. I’ll just go for a walk right now. Let you all have at it. Get some fresh air. Just
leave you four to it then?”
They flanked Patricia’s hospital bed and he did not even wait for a response, never really looked
at their faces so as to remove himself from the potential of arguments. There were always arguments
now that they were grown. Adulthood had not instilled reason in them and he could no longer impose
his will. They never seemed to move fast enough, only stood there forming the arguments in their
heads. Slow things, all four of them. Susan. The two middle ones. Even the youngest, Jaimie, whom
he had some hope for early on. At one time. But now . . . He did not need to meet her eyes. They
always seemed in a hissing state.
“But morphine, Doctor. Can’t you pump her full? At least morphine.”
Isaac pleaded less than badgered. Needled as a fellow professional, however presumptuous. The
doctor stood in the hall with Isaac Stritch and answered all his questions. A young, well-scrubbed,
pink face that looked vaguely familiar. An old student perhaps? Isaac Stritch did not keep in touch
with any of them, never one to be chummy in the first place, enjoying the certain formality that was
The Linnet's Wings