“Do you think you will sell out of the club?” Bruce said.
“If I got a good enough offer I might. I’ve got a feeling this whole racket is going to be a flash in the pan.”
Bruce laughed. “Here we go round the prickly pear,” he said.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
His mother rose to clear the table for dessert, and he saw her wince. “What’s the matter?” he said.
“Oh, my darned hip!”
“What’s the matter with your hip?”
“I don’t know. Rheumatiz, I guess. I must be getting old.”
She made her special face and limped like an old crone into the kitchen. Across the table Bruce’s eyes met his father‘s, and he saw the question there that he knew must be in his own. And the fear.
Thereafter he had two things to watch, one working in his father and one in his mother. His father’s problem he did not worry about. It made no great difference to him whether the old man sold the club or not, except as it might affect his mother. But his mother’s condition was another thing. Once he had noticed that she was hiding a pain, he couldn’t seem to look up without catching her wincing or favoring one side—the same right side always. Her appetite was like a bird‘s, and she got out of breath easily.
“Maybe it’s the altitude,” he said. “Maybe this is too high for you.”
“Oh, it isn’t anything. I’m getting old and rickety, that’s all.”
But he watched her, and he saw that now in the afternoon she lay down for a rest, something she had never done as far back as he could remember. And when the old man powdered up his discolored cheek and went into town he heard her ask him to bring out some sleeping pills. The fear that made him sensitive to her least gesture of weariness or pain made him pretend with her. He kidded her about her rheumatiz, told her that all she needed was a little exercise, like a nice dip in the lake. When she took him up he was horrified and wouldn’t let her. The lake was getting too cold. Finally he compromised on a mild walk, but when they came back she was out of breath, weak, her mouth set in a hard line. They had walked less than a mile.
“Your hip?” he said.
“I guess I’m not much good any more.”
“You’re going in and see the doctor.”
“Oh, fiddlesticks,” she said. “It’s nothing but a little stitch. Prab ably I’ve got an abscessed tooth or something.”
“It wouldn’t do any harm to find out.”
“All right,” she said. “If it will make you feel better I’ll go, next time I go in.”
She lay down and rested for an hour while he sat in the sun and whittled aimlessly. At five-thirty his father came back. “Well,” Bruce said. “Sell the gold mine?”
His father hesitated on the step as if debating whether to sit down and talk or go inside. “I can make a deal, I think, if I want to. Where’s your mother?”
“Lying down.”
“Sick?” His father’s face turned sideways to look at him with a fixed, almost vacant expression.
“Her hip’s hurting her.”
The old man chewed his lip and took off his hat. His hair, Bruce noticed, was getting thin, and he was almost white above the ears. “What the devil you suppose that is?” he said. “It just seemed to come on all of a sudden.”
“I know what I’m scared it is,” Bruce said.
His father’s eyes wandered away. He tapped his hat against his trouser leg. His lips moved slightly, and he blinked his eyes.
“I’m taking her in to the doctor tomorrow,” Bruce said. “There just isn’t any point in not finding out.”
“Yeah,” his father said. He flapped the hat against his leg. “Yeah. Well....” He went up the steps and into the house. Bruce followed him, almost as if he were guarding his mother, keeping people who were worrying about selling gambling houses from bothering her with their problems.
She was still, apparently, lying down. They went together down the little hall between the partitions and looked in the door of her bedroom. She lay face downward on the bed, and as they looked they could see her body writhe.
“Mom!” Bruce said. He jumped to the bed and knelt, his arm over her shoulder. “Mom, for God’s sake!”
Her shoulder stiffened. For a moment she kept her face in the pillow. Then she turned it and smiled, and he saw that her cheeks were wet. “I’m a baby,” she said.
Bruce looked at his father, irresolute at the foot of the bed. The old man wet his lips and came closer. “Maybe,” he said, “maybe you ought to take a couple aspirin.”
She smiled again, and as she shifted on the bed the smile froze whitely against her teeth. “I’ve taken ... six,” she said.
“Damn it,” Bruce said wildly. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“I couldn’t seem to ... make much noise.”
Without saying goodbye or where he was going, Bruce went out of the bedroom, walking fast, running as he hit the back steps. The Ford,was blocked into the garage by the LaSalle, so he took the LaSalle. As he roared out the drive he saw his father run to the front door to look after him. At the paved highway he didn’t even bother to wonder which way he was going to turn. He just turned. There were cottages, stores, little centers for groceries and boats and fishing tackle, in both directions on that side. He let the LaSalle out, and was startled at how fast it leaped under him, how smoothly it ran, with hardly a sound except an eager low humming. His foot was almost to the floor when he saw the first store, and he rode the brakes through the loose gravel of the turn-out. A man came running out of the service station with a pail in his hand, as if he were going to a fire.
Bruce leaned out the window and shouted. “Know of a doctor close around here?”
“Might try the C.C.C. Camp,” the man said. “Know where it is?”
“No.”
“Go right on. Exactly seven tenths of a mile, I measured it. There’s a sign ...”
He took his foot off the running board and Bruce slammed the car into second. The gravel spattered. Bruce’s hand went onto the horn and stayed there as he swung around a party of girls parked at the roadside with a flat tire. They started to flag him down, and stood with upraised arms and opened mouths as he roared by. At exactly seven tenths of a mile a road wriggled off into the timber, and he tramped on the brakes and careened in. Back in the timber a half mile he came to four long low barracks, one of them with a flagpole in front. A man in army uniform was sitting at a desk inside.
“Is there a doctor here?” Bruce said.
“Not right now,” the officer said. “He went into Carson this afternoon. Ought to be back by now.”
“Damn!” Bruce said. He was panting as if he had run all the way from the cottage. “You haven’t got any morphine or anything here, have you?”
“The doctor’d have to give you that,” the officer said. He rose from behind the desk.. “What’s the matter?”
“My mother’s in a hell of a pain,” Bruce said. He looked at the officer and saw that the officer thought he was out of his head. It wasn’t worth explaining. “Could you ask the doctor to come over when he gets back, if he comes in the next hour?”
The officer nodded, then lifted his hand and made a motion of shooting a revolver at the door. “Here he is now,” he said.
Bruce was at the car door before it could open. “Can you come over and look at my mother?” he said. “She’s had cancer—carcinoma—had an operation for it. Now she’s got awful pains in her hip. I don’t know what they are. She’s been taking x-ray treatments ...”
“Wait a minute,” the doctor said. He was in army uniform like the man in the headquarters building. “I’ll get my bag.”
He stepped out and walked with what_seemed callous slowness into the building. In five minutes he came out, closing his black bag. “You lead,” he said. “I’ll follow along.”
“I can take you and bring you back.”
“No thanks. I’ll drive my own.”
To the o
fficer, standing before the building, he said, “Tell that lousy cook to keep my dinner warm, Harry.”
She was still in pain when they got back. Bo Mason sat at the head of the bed holding her hand, looking helpless and clumsy. He got up when the doctor came in, and stumbled against the chair. The doctor set his bag where Bo had been.
“Hello,” he said to the woman on the bed. “Having a little pain, eh?”
To Bruce he said, “Can you put a tablespoon in a pan of water and boil it a couple minutes?”
Bruce went out, and his father followed him. “Where’d you find him?” he said.
“C.C.C. Camp.”
“Couldn’t you get anybody better than that? He’s probably some horse doctor.”
“I don’t give a damn,” Bruce said. “He can give her a shot of something. I was just looking for somebody quick, and he was the quickest.” He filled a pan with water and threw a spoon into it. Leaving it on the burner, he went back into the bedroom. The doctor had his mother bare to the waist and was pressing with his finger tips under her arm, feeling down the scarred side, over the bulge of her hip bone. Bruce turned away. But when the doctor had covered her again, without comment, and gone into the kitchen to sterilize a needle, and came back with a hypodermic full of brownish liquid, he watched, because that was what he had got the doctor for. The needle stabbed in, a slight bump of liquid swelled under the skin.
“That will fix you for a while,” the doctor said. “You’ll sleep a good while, probably. Then you’d better go in and see somebody in town.”
She nodded. “If she wakes up,” the doctor said to Bruce, “give her some orange juice or broth or milk, anything. If she doesn’t wake up for a long time don’t worry.”
He pulled the quilt across her. “I wouldn’t even bother to undress,” he said. “You’re getting sleepy already.”
“I can feel it in my tongue.”
“You’ll feel it all over in a minute,” he said. He went out and held the door open for Bruce and his father, shut it quietly.
“How long since her operation?”
“A year and a half,” Bruce said.
“Umm.”
“What is it?” Bo Mason said. “What could be giving her pains like that way down in her hip? She’s awful hard to hurt. I never saw her cry for pain in my life before....”
His voice was almost babbling. The skin of his face was slack. The doctor shrugged and shook his head.
“You’d better get her in to a specialist,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to say, but my guess would be that it’s a secondary growth. When that stuff gets so far along it breaks off and the bloodstream carries it around. You say she’s been short of breath?”
“For the last month or so,” Bruce said.
“Sounds like lungs too. Probably she’ll have to be tapped.”
“Has she got’ a chance?” Bo said.
The doctor looked at him a moment. “I doubt it,” he said.
She slept until past noon the next day, and when she finally awoke, fuzzy-tongued and drowsy-eyed, she had apparently been dreaming. Her mouth was drooping and sad. That evening she asked Bo if they could go back to Salt Lake.
“Salt Lake?” he said. “What for?”
“I want to,” she said.
“I don’t know why you’d want to go back to that smoky hole for the winter when we could go to L.A. or somewhere.”
“Bo,” she said. “Couldn’t we? Even if you don’t sell your share in the club, couldn’t we?” She took his hand and held it, watching his face. “That’s where Chet is,” she said, and Bruce saw that it shamed her to have to tell him. She was going to die and they all knew it. The next morning, his face gray and haggard, Bo went down and without a word to anyone closed the deal for his share of the club.
Bruce closed up the cottage by himself, refusing to let his mother get up. His father had gone down to the coast, vaguely on business, and would meet them in Salt Lake. It was clear enough what he was going for. With the club sold, the notes of the Denver gamblers laid away to mature, the move back to Salt Lake coming up, his mind frayed and undone, he turned naturally and immediately back to whiskey. It would give him something to do, it would bring in a little cash.
“By hell, it would make me laugh if it didn’t make me want to kill him,” Bruce said to his mother. “What if we get raided in Salt Lake? That would be a fine help to getting you well, wouldn’t it? Why couldn’t he wait till you got back on your feet, at least?”
“He’d just sit around and stew himself to death if he didn’t have something to keep him busy,” she said. “I don’t care. He’s better off doing something, even that.”
She was thinner, a week had made her thinner, and her cheeks looked sunken, but her eyes were still a sudden and incredible blue, unmisted by sickness. “You’re not going to be too comfortable going across in the Ford, either,” he said. “He might have thought of that.”
She shook her head and smiled. “Don’t worry about me. You help us get moved and then you go back to school and be the head of the class.”
“Head of the class,” Bruce said. “I’ve been head of the class quite a lot, haven’t I?”
“You have,” she said, and the pride in her voice made him crawl. “You’ve got a good head. You can be an important man if you try, Bruce.”
“Will you promise to come and live at the White House?” he said. With a fury that was close to tears he went back to his half-finished packing. There were only two possibilities that he would go back to school this fall. One was that she would die before school opened. The other was that he would deliberately leave her to die with only the old man for company. He would have cut his throat before he would have agreed to either.
They were packed for two days, waiting, before they had word from Bo. He wired from Salt Lake that he had taken an apartment and that they should come on. In the afternoon a truck came and got their freight. The next morning at six, with the woods all around them showing the first fall color and the lake a sheet of pure emerald and the eastern sky so pure and blue it hurt the eyes, they started down the Big Rock Candy Mountain for home, for Salt Lake City, for the spot where the dead was buried and the living would die, and there was for Bruce none of the exhilaration that had blown him westward in June, though he was now more truly than then going home.
IX
All through September she lay dying in the dark little apartment, in the bedroom through whose open windows in the morning Bruce could smell the bitter tang of the winter pall of smoke, coming down now, settling in the evenings and lasting until the valley breeze cleared it out about noon. Through those windows, when he came in at six or seven o‘clock to find his mother wide awake, awake for no one knew how many hours, maybe all night, he could see the thin morning sun touching the back lawn of the apartment house opposite, and the yellowing leaves of the hickories along the sidewalk, like sunlight cut into long ovals.
But no sun touched the bedroom. It was gloomy even at mid-day, and more than once Bruce felt like kicking the windows out of their frames, tearing down the curtains, pushing the wall out to let one sweep of sun and light cleanse the room. The very air in the place was the color of patience and pain. The old man might at least, he thought, have found her a pleasant room to die in.
He told her so, obliquely. “A pleasant room to be sick in,” he put it, but she smiled at him from the bed, trying to braid her long hair with fingers that tired after a few motions. “It’s a nice enough room,” she said. “It could be more cheerful, but then your dad never did have much of an eye for what made a house pleasant.”
“No,” Bruce said. “Here, let me do that.”
He took the rope of hair from her and braided it, found a rubber band for the end of each braid, and lifted her while he smoothed out sheets and pillow. “Now what for breakfast?” he said. “How about some ham and eggs this morning?”
Her smile was like the smile of a very old, very wise, very gentle grandmother. “Maybe some o
range juice,” she said.
“Nothing else?”
“I’m not hungry, really.”
Seeing how thin she had grown, he said miserably, “You need to eat to get your strength back,” and he saw in her eyes, the bright, incredibly blue eyes, unmarked and clear, that she was smiling inside herself at the idea of getting her strength back. If she pretended not to know that she was going to die, she did it to spare him, not herself.
“No milk?” he said. “Some milk toast, maybe?”
“No thanks. Just some orange juice. Don’t go to any trouble.”
“I’ll bring you in an orange and you can peel it yourself,” he said. He took the tray from the bed table and went into the kitchen. Orange juice, when she had hardly eaten anything for ten days! He squeezed a big glass of orange juice, poured a glass of milk just in case it might tempt her, opened the icebox door and got out some grape juice for the same reason, scooped a dish of bright jello. The icebox was full of invalid’s dishes that he had made and never got her to eat. He ought to give it up, he thought, lifting the tray. He ought to quit urging her to eat, let the weariness take her, shorten it for her. But how could he? She didn’t want it that way. She wouldn’t deliberately shorten her agony one second.
Play it out till the whistle blows, he said bitterly, and hardened his mouth at that football-field stupidity that was here somehow present in his mother and that he could neither fight against nor condemn. Sixty to nothing against you and the other team with a first down on your five yard line, but play it out, break your neck on that last tackle in the end zone. That was the way she had done it all her life, and there was no changing her.
His father was in the sickroom when he came back, standing near the door looking big and uneasy and out of place, his lips forming the platitudes that were all he could ever say to her now. How you feeling this morning? Having any pains? And, stooping to look out the window, Nice day again outside.
He moved aside when Bruce came with the tray. His eyes were bloodshot and wandering. “There you are,” Bruce said. “Let’s see you clean that tray.”
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