Swing Low (2 page)

But this business of “wanting attention” embarrassed me to such an extent that I vowed to remain quiet. Besides, it wasn’t attention I wanted so much as clarification. But they’re busy, these nurses, and I understand that I baffle them. I baffle myself. As for walking, my second-favourite chaos-dispelling activity, they frown on it. They’re afraid I won’t come back. (And yet they don’t know why I’m here.) After I was admitted for the second time, they attached a wander guard to my wrist, a little device that makes a bell ring at the nursing station should I get as far as the front door. I had actually escaped previously; that’s why they put the wander guard on me. The nurses promised my older daughter, Marj, that I would not be discharged over the weekend. He will tell you he’s fine, she said, and he will be convincing, but please don’t believe him. There’s nobody at the house, my mother is exhausted and on the verge of
having a nervous breakdown herself (from taking care of me they don’t say) and is staying in the city for the weekend. Please don’t let him go home.

They promised they wouldn’t. In less than an hour I was out of there.

It didn’t turn out well. I don’t know exactly what happened or why I have these painful blisters on my feet. Naturally I asked but a well-meaning nurse in training mistook me for a large four-year-old and said, Oh, you’ve been a busy guy in the last couple of days. Busy, adds a doctor, having a psychotic breakdown. All I knew is that everything blew apart in my brain.

It’s extremely difficult to get a straight answer around here. I imagine I walked for several miles before returning to my empty house, or that I returned first and then went for a fifteen-mile walk around and around town, I don’t know. I can’t find Elvira. In any case, I’m back in my brother’s care for a while, and my daughters are very upset that I was allowed to leave in the first place. I suppose they didn’t want me to see the blood or to find out the truth about Elvira. I am still not being told where my wife is, other than “in the city, resting,” and I suspect she is dead. I suspect I have killed her. A friend came to see me and told me that on the day I was accidentally discharged he had given me a ride for several blocks, and we chatted like old times, but I don’t remember that. My brother told my younger daughter, Miriam, that I smell bad. Thankfully I shifted into my catatonic gaze at nothing to save him the embarrassment of thinking I’d heard. Also, I’m not sure why there is blood on my kitchen floor, or whose it is. I asked him where Elvira is
and he said the girls had told him she was very, very tired. And in the city, resting.

I don’t believe him. I don’t believe anybody. What I do believe is that I have accomplished nothing in my life, nothing at all. I have neglected my children and I have killed my wife. There is nothing left to do now but record the facts, as I always have.

I
was born, in this very hospital, maybe even in this very room, on May 31, 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression (how apt) in the same year that Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi. I include that fact for no other reason than because I read it in the hospital copy of the
Winnipeg Free Press
just this very morning. That’s part of my regular morning routine. That and checking on my friend Hercules in the hallway, and making a few rounds of my own. Checking up on morale.

And then what? I suppose I just lived, as a baby, with my parents and my older sister, here in Steinbach. A little to the north and west of Steinbach is the city of Winnipeg, to the south the border to the United States, to the east the lakes and rocky terrain of the Whiteshell Provincial Park and also a forest called the Sandilands. Directly west is farmland, very fertile, the best in the country, sunflowers, canola, alfalfa,
you name it. In the middle of all of this sits Steinbach, a wealthy, industrious town of ten thousand or so, settled by several Mennonite families in the late 1800s. The Mennonite communities on this, the east side of the Red River, are called Ditzied, in Low German meaning “this side.” The Mennonite communities on the other side of the Red are called Yantzied, meaning “that side.” Of course, to the Mennonites living on the west side of the river, it is just the opposite. Both sides believe that those from Yantzied are less sophisticated and more religiously conservative. Naturally it’s an argument with no end.

My grandfather, a baby at the time, was the youngest member of the “migration” that made its way from Russia to this patch of land promised to them by Queen Victoria and given to them for nothing by a government eager to have the land farmed and settled. He came close to dying and was nearly pitched overboard on the way. The Mennonites have a long history of moving from place to place in search of religious freedom. Here, apparently, they have found it. Thousands of Mennonites who stayed behind, in Russia, were eventually killed by the army, but some managed to escape. My friend Henry, for instance, fled Russia as a child sometime during World War Two and spent years wandering through Europe with his mother. The last thing I remember knowing about Henry — he told me this himself, at a barbecue — was that he had leased a brand-new Ford Saturn with an excellent mileage and maintenance policy.

When I was two I choked on a peanut and my mother said that incident might have shifted the fault lines in my brain and made me the anxious man that I am today.

When I was three and a half years old I was sent to the neighbours’ with a message. My baby sister had died, and thank you very much for the soup. Did you thank her for the soup? my mother asked me when I got home. Yes. You were polite, then? Yes. And the other message? Yes. A year later my little brother was born to take my dead sister’s place, and my mother, understandably, doted on him. She made it very clear to me and my older sister, Diana, that we were never to feed him peanuts or ice cubes. Nobody had ever told me that I’d had an incident with an ice cube, and in fact I think my mother made it up on the spot, but I appreciated her including it in the short list of banned treats for the baby. In my four-year-old way of thinking, addled, mind you, by the peanut incident, I saw my mother’s inclusion of the words “and ice cubes” as a tender gesture meant to relieve some of the burden I felt as a person my little brother should not come to resemble. Don’t choke on a peanut, you’ll turn out like Mel. Oh, and also avoid … ice cubes! In my mind there were hundreds of little boys like myself who had had incidents with ice cubes and were just as guilty of being “off” as I was, and so I felt less responsible and less alone, and I was grateful to my mother for reducing some of the pressure I felt at the time.

Speaking of babies, there’s one outside my room, directly across from the nursing station. Only in a rural hospital would a psychiatric patient and a premature baby be housed
next to one another. They need to watch him very closely. His name is Hercules and he weighs a little less than four pounds, although the nurses tell me he’s gaining weight nicely. My concern for Hercules has made me so nervous that I often stand next to his crib and stare at him for lengthy periods, while I wait for a meal or a visitor or for 9:30, when I make my regular call to the city. Should he be sleeping for this long? I’ll ask the nurses. Yes, Mr. Toews, he’s fine. Should this tube be under his mattress like this? Yes, Mr. Toews, relax. Excuse me, but, uh, Hercules looks uncomfortable. Okay, Mr. Toews, we’ll be right there. Very good, I’ll say, very good. If I’m in my room writing, as I am now, and I hear one of his machines beeping, I’ll jump up and rush over to his crib. We’re on it, Mel, the nurses will say, or, Mel, you’re a little jumpy today.

Yes, well … there isn’t much to do here. Yesterday I asked one daughter how long I’d been here. About ten days, she answered. Ten days! I said. That’s rather long! There was so much to be done back at the house, I said, the flowers, the yard, the packing. I know, she said, everything’s being taken care of, all you have to do is rest. Don’t worry about a thing, okay? Everything’s going to be okay. I promise. I promise. Then I’d launch into the Where is Mom? Where is Mom? Is she dead? And daughters tell me she isn’t, only resting, only very, very tired. I have vowed to get better. It’s my fault she’s tired, but daughters tell me it’s not, nobody’s to blame. Tell her I love her, I say, and they promise they will. She loves you too, Dad, we all do. Sometimes I think I have spoken to her on the telephone. The girls say, You have! You have! Every morning at 9:30
you talk to her on the phone. She tells you she loves you and you tell her you love her. You ask if she’s getting some rest. Yesterday you talked about baseball. You talk to her! Don’t you remember?

Well, sometimes. I’ve written it down so that I will remember. Elvira loves me. So do the girls. I love. I love. In hearts, like a schoolboy. The girls say we’ll get through this. The girls say the yard is fine and the income tax is done. The girls say nobody in town blames me. The girls say the car insurance is paid. They say the air conditioner has been fixed. They say we will be together again soon, very soon. That’s another thing I write down a lot. They say we will be together again soon. Sometimes the girls write it down for me, when I can’t, in big block letters on my yellow legal pads. WE LOVE YOU. MOM LOVES YOU. THIS IS NOT YOUR FAULT. YOU ARE A GOOD FATHER. WE ARE PROUD OF YOU. PLEASE TRY TO REST. PLEASE DON’T WORRY. YOU’LL BE TOGETHER WITH MOM SOON. PLEASE BELIEVE US. WE LOVE YOU AND ALWAYS WILL.

Yesterday my daughter shouted in the hallway outside my room: When will he be seen by a psychiatrist? Shouldn’t he be transferred to a psychiatric hospital? He’s told you he wants to be helped! When will he get it?

I am absolutely mortified to hear this and I am worried that Hercules will be woken up by the shouting and that my brother will hear it too and be embarrassed. When I hear my daughters discussing my situation I try not to listen. Often, to distract myself from the goings-on in the hallway outside my room, I focus on the objects in my room.

I have several of what the nurses call my personal effects with me. A painting, by my granddaughter, of a red sailboat, yellow sails, blue sky, entitled “Summer Memories.” There is one tiny figure on the deck of the boat. I’ve stuck it on my dresser mirror, under the tiny clasps that keep the glass secured. I also have a book of poetry given to me by Elvira before I was hospitalized. The poet was one of my first students, a man now more than fifty years old with grown children of his own. I have a lovely handmade glass vase with several yellow tulips in it, on the windowsill, and two very large Snickers bars on my bedside table.

I also have tracts, given to me by various visitors, and a Bible and a devotional book on Corinthians and a brochure advertising a new housing development on the edge of town. On one of my walks, after the wander guard was removed, I stopped in at the model home they use as an office and picked one up, for no reason whatsoever. I show it to my visitors from time to time, hoping to divert the conversation away from me, and often my visitors will indulge me and we’ll chat, awkwardly, about the pros and cons of another housing development such as the one described in the brochure.

I took what they call a kitchen test the other day. I’m not sure why. The results? Patient is able to make toast but is unable to remember how to operate a can opener. A secret: I’ve never known how to operate a can opener. You gasp, it’s shocking, I know. I lied to the kitchen testers. I took advantage of my
forgetfulness and told them that operating a can opener was simply another thing I’d forgotten how to do. Oh, the subversive pleasure I, as an elementary school teacher, got from lying on my kitchen test … I have told a few other white lies during my stay in the hospital, it seemed simpler. How are you, Mel? Fine, fine. Be sure to say hello to Jake for me. Is he still enjoying his work at the printer’s? Oh, for sure, Mel, he misses you coming in with the
Class News.
Wonders when your next project will be ready. Oh, I’m working on it, Mrs. H., I am, I just need a little time.

I can’t remember what Jake looks like. I suspect Mrs. H. is irritated with me, I miss Elvira. I don’t want to open cans of tomato soup. I don’t want to borrow ten dollars from my daughter, I don’t want an old man’s haircut at the personal care home, and I don’t want to have to ask for clean underwear. My driver’s licence has been taken from me, my belongings are packed away in boxes. I don’t have another project, Mrs. H.