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Sure it hurts but you can pull through it. Up till this time everybody had been exhorting him to “hang on, Old Timer. Jed’s leg was shaking with the force of his heartbeat. He’s either going or coming.”Įverybody was there in less than ten minutes- Chuck and Sue, Kit and Zane, Shan and her fiance Jay, Jay’s dad Irby, Sheryl and her husband Bill, Faye, my Mom… my whole family except for my dead daddy and Grandma Smith down with age and Alzheimer’s. Then too much, with the little monitor lights bleeping faster and faster, and I ran to the phone to call the motel where I had just sent most of the family for some rest, Faye included. And the snow I brushed across his lips to ease the bloody parch where all the tubes ran in caused him to roll his arms a little. And we noticed some reaction to the cold. Zane and I had been carrying plastic bags of snow to pack his head in trying to stop the swelling that all the doctors told us would follow as blood poured to the bruised brain.
The Betas formed a circle and passed the Loving Cup Around (a ritual our fraternity generally uses when a member is leaving the circle to become engaged)īut it’s an earlier scene I want to describe for you all, as writers and friends and fathers… up at the hospital, in cold awful Spokane: Paul Sawyer read from Leaves of Grass while the boys each hammered in the one nail they had remembered to put in their pockets.
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Paul Foster put in the little leatherbound New Testament given him by his father who had carried it during his sixty-five years as a minister. Faye put in a snapshot of her and I standing with a pitchfork all Grantwoodesque in front of the bus. Somebody put in a quartz watch guaranteed to keep beeping every fifteen minutes for five years. I put in that silver whistle I used to wear with the Hopi cross soldered on it. People filed by and dropped stuff in on Jed. I learned a lot about Jed that I’d either forgotten or never known-like his being a member of the National Honor Society and finishing sixth in a class of more than a hundred. The preacher is also the Pleasant Hill School superintendent and has known our kids since kindergarten. While we were singing Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain, Zane and Kit and the neighbor boys that have grown up with all of us carried the box to the hole. With all my cousins leading the singing and Dale on his fiddle. About 300 people stood around and sung from the little hymnbooks that Diane Kesey had Xeroxed - Everlasting Arms, Sweet Hour of Prayer, In theGardenand so forth. Still is, like winter holding its breath for a week, giving us a break. Susan Butkovitch covered this in satin for the pillow while Faye and MG and Gretch and Candace stitched and stapled the brocade into the box. I told him get it out of sight fast but be sure to pluck and save the down. And last month, Bob, Zane was goose hunting in the field across the road and, just like I did years ago after Faye and I were fresh wed, thought he saw a snow goose and mistakenly killed a swan. It was a piece of Tibetan brocade given Mountain Girl by Owsley fifteen years ago, gilt and silver and russet phoenixbird patterns, unfurling in flames. And you, Ed, would have appreciated the lining. You would have been proud, Wendell, especially of the box-clear pine pegged together and trimmed with redwood. Page found the stone and we designed the etching. We built the box ourselves (George Walker, mainly) and dug the hole in a nice spot between the chicken house and the pond (Zane and Jed’s friends, actually). I’ve got to write and tell somebody about some stuff and, like I long ago told Larry, you’re the best backboard I know.