The Hummingbird

by Stephen P. Kiernan

  “Please, then. About the first president.”

  “This incident occurred before he was any such thing.” Barclay Reed moved his chin in a circle, seeming to recollect himself. He cleared his throat. “The Continental Congress debated at length and without success over what form of government the new nation should take. Finally, they sought advice from the general of the armies that had won their liberation from Great Britain. After prolonged evasion and delay, in December of 1783 Washington rode to them on horseback from Virginia. He was arguably the most respected and powerful man in the New World. Some ­people feared that he would declare himself king. Others hoped that he would.”

  Barclay Reed paused, sipping water from a straw.

  “Go on,” I said. “Please.”

  “Appalling that you are ignorant of this basic history. Washington arrived not in military uniform, as everyone expected, but in a plain brown suit. He gave a brief speech on the importance of the nation’s soldiers returning to lives of peace and productivity. He declared that he intended to do precisely that, at his beloved farm Mount Vernon. And in conclusion, he gave the Continental Congress his sword.”

  “Just like Soga.”

  “Had our pilot been emperor of Japan, yes. But the point remains.”

  “Which is?”

  “Soga believed in his own sincerity. He was no longer dropping bombs, or training pilots. The I-­25 submarine lay in rusting pieces on the ocean floor. But you see . . .” The Professor raised one finger. “There was a degree of self-­delusion. Soga had convinced himself outwardly, in the name of honor. But it was untrue, or he would not have brought the sword, just in case. It took the shrine to show him his hypocrisy. Only when he had relinquished his weapon did he end the war within. Only an unarmed man can say he has truly ceased fighting.”

  The connection for me was instantaneous: “But how can you lead a man to that realization? How do you help him to see?”

  “Ah.” The Professor studied me sidelong. “Your husband.”

  The kitchen timer began ringing. It surprised us both, our eyes meeting as though we had been caught at something.

  Barclay Reed recovered first. “Nurse Birch, is he a warrior still?”

  The oven timer chimed again. I stood, smoothing down my slacks. “I’ll be right back.”

  HE WOULD NOT EAT. I watched, pretending to look elsewhere while the Professor moved things around with his fork. While the BBC blared on the large screen, he would dig absently at his plate, but the food never quite made it to his mouth.

  I tidied his room, calculating. If he ceased getting nutrition, Barclay Reed would live two weeks, perhaps less. He sipped from his straw, and I made a mental note to monitor how much he drank in the course of my shift. Without hydration, it would be over in days.

  I returned the black binder to its place of honor on the desk. By now we were reading from it every day. Yet Cheryl did not even know the book existed. I’d learned that with subtle fishing expeditions. She thought all the Professor read was the newspaper, dwelling to an unhealthy degree on the crossword puzzle. Once at the shift change I asked Melissa if she had noticed The Sword.

  “I did. I was cleaning his room and asked about it. Making conversation, you know? Since he doesn’t open up to me much. He said it was an old abandoned project. I offered to throw it out and he said sure. But then he changed his mind, in case anyone ever studied his papers. Fickle old fella.”

  I suppressed a smile. “Scholars like to hold on to their old research, I guess.”

  Another forkful left the plate. If anything went in, it was barely a morsel.

  “Professor, I think we need to talk about your diet.”

  Instead he switched off the TV. “How did you choose this line of work?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “How does any sentient person decide that hospice is a satisfying profession? I cannot imagine anything bleaker.”

  “You want to know my story?”

  He pushed the rolling tray away. “The brief version.”

  Always a dig with this guy. But it was the one tale I never tired of telling.

  “I grew up in a college town in upstate New York. Both my parents worked at the school. Mom was in admissions. She was tough, hard-­handed, farm-­raised. Early one January morning, she was driving to work when a guy still drunk from the night before veered across the road and hit her head-­on.”

  I paused to see how this affected him. His reaction would determine whether I continued.

  “Blast.” The Professor tugged on his white tuft of hair. “Proceed.”

  “She spent six weeks in an ICU, machines and tubes and no role for us but to wring our hands. Five surgeries. We spared no medical extravagance. When her kidneys shut down, dialysis. When that lowered her blood pressure, dopamine by the bucket to raise it. Which increased the need for more dialysis. Round and round, till one day in the hallway my sister Robin asked a resident when he thought Mom might regain consciousness. He said, ‘At no time has anyone here considered that a possibility.’ She gave him holy hell until his boss sauntered up to declare that everything they had done had been at our request. Worse, he was right. Our ignorance had tortured the poor woman.”

  I slid the reading chair closer to his bed, but stood behind it. “We met with the hospital’s ethics committee, brought in a minister Mom loved, and the next day removed the machines. She lingered an hour. She was sixty-­two.”

  Barclay Reed nodded, unable to face me, for once reluctant to speak.

  I lowered myself into the chair.

  “Six Januaries later, Dad found out he had pancreatic cancer. Inoperable, unresponsive to chemo. He lived seven months. But you know what? Not one night in the hospital. The local hospice provided medical care, and the rest was up to us. Robin’s husband stepped in with the kids, and she took a leave from work. She said she could make up the lost income anytime, but her father was only going to die once. I was teaching high school English by then and had the summer free.”

  I stared at my hands. This was the hard part. “For some reason, Dad had always wanted to learn to play the bassoon, but never did. We rented an instrument and found a teacher, this nerdy guy with a tiny mustache who came twice a week. Dad took lessons in the living room, then in bed when he grew weaker. The cancer spread to his bones, so we gave Dad lots of pain medicine. The teacher would assemble Dad’s instrument, lay it across him to hold, and play at the bedside. Without our asking, he started coming every day.”

  I used to consider the bassoon silly, droning and nasal. In those weeks, I realized it was actually like a cello: introspective, melancholy.

  “Hospice kept my father pain-­free and made all the other medical parts work smoothly. That meant we could do everything non­medical, the stuff that really mattered. Though most of it was actually little things.”

  Memories flooded back to me, that long summer with the house as quiet as if a newborn baby were napping. Robin and I had never been closer.

  “We had a blue china plate,” I continued. “Handed down from my great-­grandmother. My father loved using it on special occasions. Our birthday dinners, when we graduated from high school. We served him every meal on that blue plate until he stopped eating, and he loved it. Little things.”

  The Professor held perfectly still. I suppose I was the one giving a lecture this time.

  “When he died, Robin was holding one of his hands, and I held the other one. And of all things, our nerdy bassoon guy was standing at the foot of the bed, playing Bach.”

  The Professor darted a tongue across his lips. I slid his cup closer, and he gulped down some water, nodding slowly. “Excellent.”

  I stood, tugging a corner of his blanket snug. “That winter I took a hospice volunteer training course. To give back, you know? But after three patients, I knew I’d found my calling. I quit teaching to start sc
hool out here.”

  “Explain this to me.” The Professor took a moment to organize his thoughts. “A surgeon sees his patients heal and go home. A primary-­care physician prevents illness. You never receive those forms of gratification. In the end, all of your patients are gone. Doesn’t that depress you?”

  I smiled. “Actually, I’m like that musician, playing in a stranger’s bedroom, making his life pleasing for as long as possible. Besides, caring for someone during the most vulnerable time in their lives, what could be more gratifying?”

  “Are you suggesting, Nurse Birch, that Barclay Reed is at the most vulnerable time in his life?”

  “What do you think, Professor?”

  He fussed at the casserole with his fork. He pushed the basket of remotes away on the bed. He stared into space, blinking.

  “At first I suspected it was appendicitis,” he said.

  “What was?”

  “The soreness in my lower abdomen, the fever and weakness.” He spread a palm on his belly. “One Sunday afternoon the pain intensified, till I swear I saw stars. With what in retrospect may not have been my wisest judgment, I drove myself to the emergency room. The doctor was cast for his job, handsomely gray at the temples and bright-­eyed despite obvious fatigue. He did tests, white blood cells and I don’t recall what else, only to conclude that they were inconclusive. He had been reluctant to incur the expense of a scan, but at that point he felt there was a choice. I could go home and risk a rupture, with potentially fatal internal bleeding, or undergo a scan. Some ­people fear those machines, I’ve heard, because they’re noisy and close. Nonsense. It’s just a machine. Later he brought his laptop to my room, if that is what you can call one of those emergency spaces defined by a curtain yanked round you on a shower rod. He pulled up the results, exclaiming ‘Now isn’t this interesting?’ But any medical layman could see what the scan had discovered. My appendix was inflamed, oh yes, but more importantly—­as he showed me, as I could not fail to see—­it pointed like a hot finger directly at my kidney. At the tumor on my kidney.”

  “Uh-­oh.”

  “He said it was operable, in which case my troubled appendix had just saved my life. The following day a surgeon opened me to excise the tumor, but the growth was not as firm as they’d expected. The thing burst, sowing progeny throughout my innards. He performed suction, I was told, meanwhile observing that the entire lining had white dots of metastasis. He took the offending appendix, then sewed me up without having removed any of the cancer.”

  The Professor pointed one rigid finger at the ceiling. “I will never forget that scan image, and the inflammation sticking upward. J’accuse.”

  With that, his hand flopped in his lap like a dove taken down by a hunter.

  I leaned forward and placed an arm on his bed. I was still wary of touching the Professor, but I wanted to be closer, for both our sakes. “Thank you for sharing that story.”

  “Yes, well.”

  “As you would say, Professor: Blast.”

  He sniffed. “As you would say, Nurse Birch: Ouch.”

  And there it was: The fact of his mortality. I felt a swell of compassion for this strange, brilliant, difficult man.

  When Barclay Reed had asked me a few weeks back what the purpose of suffering was, I should have answered by saying that it had the potential to create this very moment. Because this was the place where my work always arrived, every patient, every time.

  If you think of a person, anyone, even someone you dislike, if you imagine for a moment how one day they will lose everything—­family and home and pleasures and work—­and ­people will weep and wail when they die, you cannot help it: You feel compassion for them. Your heart softens. What’s more, every single human being is going to experience this same thing, without exception: Every person you love, everyone you hate, your own frivolous struggling self. It is the central lesson of hospice: Mortality is life’s way of teaching us how to love.

  The path before the Professor would not be a long one. My job was to make the journey as good as possible for as long as possible. How to do that would unfold one moment at a time.

  I pointed at his dinner. “You’re not going to eat any of that, are you?”

  He studied his fork before laying it down. “Apparently not.”

  “Let me get it out of your way then.” I scooped the plate from his tray. “Is there anything else I can get you? Anything you think you could eat?”

  Barclay Reed grinned at me, his head tilted forward like a boy asking for seconds on ice cream. It was as playful as I had ever seen him. And we had just reached such a trusting place.

  “What?” I asked. “What is it?”

  He raised his hands as if in prayer, then drummed the fingertips on one another. “Might there be any more strawberries?”

  MICHAEL WAS CURLING DUMBBELLS in the driveway when I came home. The weights looked cartoonishly large, like balloons connected by pencils. He wore a sleeveless T-­shirt, his arms engorged by effort, his face radiant.

  What I felt, plain and simple, was lust. He was so strong. There in the car I remembered a time when I climbed away from Michael in the middle of lovemaking and stood at the bedside just to ogle him there.

  He smiled. “What’s up, Deb?”

  “Oh lover, I’m just admiring you.”

  He held out his hands. “Do it closer.”

  As I climbed out of the car, he finished his curls without turning my way. Yet it made him sexier. He was concentrating. At a previous time, I would have pawed him shamelessly, pulling him into the house, hiking myself up on the kitchen counter. Instead I watched him finish. He put the weights down and wagged his hands as if to dry them.

  “Hi, lover,” I said. “How was your day?”

  “Not great,” Michael answered. “Frustrating.”

  Well, good-­bye lust. Once upon a time, arriving home meant I could recover from my day by spilling about it. Now whatever happened at work was obliterated by whatever I found in the driveway. I suppose I was learning to live in the present, but sometimes it felt mighty tiring.

  I gave him a kiss on the neck, tasting salt. “What was frustrating?”

  “Gene. Or his plastic leg, anyway. I decided to help him out, you know? Getting the replacement screw. But it’s classic Defense Department contracting. The prosthetic uses a rare gauge. We drive all over town, finally find one the right size, and then the slot turns out to be reverse-­threaded.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Normal screws tighten when you turn them clockwise. His leg’s slot is designed for a screw that tightens counterclockwise, don’t ask me why in hell.” He picked up the dumbbells again. “We spent the whole day, literally nine to five, chasing one screw, and we totally struck out. I came out here to lift so I wouldn’t go smashing things in the basement.”

  Michael began pumping again, alternating arms in sets: three with the right, three with the left. His chin pointed forward on each curl, as if his jaw could pull the weight upward. And his breath came loudly in the rhythm of each lift and drop.

  “You know, sweetheart,” I began.

  “Yeah?”

  I leaned back on my car. The thought was: Assume a casual pose, and perhaps the message will arrive more lightly. “That’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”

  “Smashing things?” Michael continued lifting as he grunted his reply. “Cause I haven’t broken anything, Deb. Not a toothpick.”

  “Well, sweetheart, you broke that guy’s car—­”

  “He had it coming.”

  “—­and almost every morning there’s a few pencils.”

  “Look.” Michael paused, both arms down, the weights pulling his shoulders into a curve. “If it is now a problem when I break a freaking pencil—­”

  “I’m not saying that. I’m just thinking about the other
night.”

  The right arm started again, a slow upward grind. “Which night?”

  “The thunderstorm.”

  He switched to his left, eyes fixed ahead, but I knew that was not about lifting anymore. Michael did not want to look at me.

  “You were upset,” I continued. “Which is fine, of course. Except that you took out your gun.”

  “And did nothing.” Lift, drop. Lift, drop. “Not even load it.”

  “How was I to know that? Sweetheart, it scared me.”

  “In the hands of a responsible person, a gun is nothing to be afraid of.”

  He was making me do this, forcing me to reason with him about something that should have required no argument. “Would you say you were a responsible person that night?”

  Michael dropped both weights on the lawn. “You can’t give me one second’s peace, can you?”

  “Actually, peace is exactly what I want to give you.”

  “After I already said I was frustrated.” He pointed a stiff finger at me. “Nagging is not peaceable.”

  I let that one go. Michael regretted saying it, too. I sensed it in the way he strode away across the lawn, swinging his arms out and back like a giant bird. I stood there on that lovely July night, still in work clothes, just wanting to step out of my clogs and drink an iced tea, maybe sit a moment before making a dinner I would probably eat alone.

  In a minute he had flapped his way back. “Tell me,” Michael said.

  “Tell you?”

  “Come on.” He waved his hands in invitation, though it seemed more like a boxer taunting his opponent from across the ring. “You’ve got a bone to pick, I should hear you out. Dr. Doremus says that all the time, that ­people who care about me are worth paying attention to. You go ahead.”

  “Really?”

  He held his arms wide. “I’m not lifting.”

  “Well.”

  I tried to picture it then, the meeting room or restaurant where Soga gave away his sword all those years ago. What it must have taken for him to decide, to make a personal surrender, to give up a defining part of his past. But this time the idea would not come from the warrior himself. Would Soga have offered his sword if his wife had suggested it?