Visiting Tom

by Michael Perry

  When Anneliese got the news, she called Arlene to arrange a food drop and offer rides to the hospital. Tom was doing real well, Arlene said. Their youngest daughter, Emmy, had taken her in to visit him, and several neighbors had called or dropped by with food.

  Ever since we moved here and I joined the local fire department rescue service, I have figured one day the pager would go off and the dispatcher would give the Hartwigs’ address. I can’t say I dreaded it; I just knew it might be coming. What I did dread was not being home to help when that call did come in, and now it has. I’ll go see Tom tomorrow, but tonight as I walk out to close up the chicken coop at dusk, I look out across the valley to the darkening ridgeline that overlooks the Hartwig house. I think of how it must have been the day they took him in, the kitchen empty and still, Tom’s honey jarred and on the shelf, Mister Bigshot curled in his fur, Cassidy flopped and snoozing by the door, and then the sound of that siren warping past. Maybe the cat twitched, or the dog raised an ear, and then everything shaded back as it was, just the interstate wash and the restored cuckoo clock ticking.

  In the hospital he looks tiny against the white sheets. When I first poke my head around the corner he is drowsing against the raised head of the bed, and seeing him with his eyes closed catches me off guard. The privacy and vulnerability of someone asleep—I suddenly feel I am intruding, rather than visiting. I am withdrawing when his eyelids slowly rise. He looks drugged and disoriented. Then he registers me and his eyes open fully and brightly and as if he were pulling open the old familiar screen door he says, “Well, hello, Mike!”

  “Tom . . . how y’doin?”

  “I’m an airhead!”

  He tells me the whole story then, beginning with the headaches and tipping over on the bike, and it’s the same old Tom, animated and crinkling his eyes. The only obvious difference is cosmetic: the right hemisphere of his head has been shaved to the skin and inscribed with a semicircular staple-puckered scar roughly the diameter of a biscuit cutter. On the other side of his head, the hair remains as thick as ever. It is as if someone began to give him a Mohawk and quit halfway through the job.

  He describes the surgery dispassionately but in great technical detail. Quite the same, in fact, as he would describe a particularly tricky move on the lathe. He says they tried to relieve the pressure with burr holes first, but then had to lift a portion of skull and get right in there to scoop the curdled blood and stanch the bleed. You know he grilled the surgeon, because he’s talking about the dimensions of the piece of skull removed, how the stapler worked, the parts list required for the repair. “I got three titanium plates, and each a’them has got four titanium screws. That’s how they held the lid on. When I saw the X-ray, I said to Arlene, ‘I thought they went to Kmart and got pop rivets!’”

  In the end, he says, they got most of the blood out, but a little air bubble remains.

  “So I’m an airhead!” he says again.

  I am a registered nurse by training. Nearly twenty-five years have passed since I last worked in a hospital and I am terribly out of practice, but in my final position I cared for people who had suffered strokes and head injuries, so I retain a basic eye for the flickers and shadows of countenance that betray lingering effects. I watch closely, but see none of this in Tom. His gaze is direct and bright, the impish glint is intact, and he is full of stories. With an eye toward his postsurgical weariness, I make a number of attempts to leave by backing slowly toward the door. Every time I get within reach of the handle and begin to excuse myself, he says, “No, and then there was the time . . .” Even this is a clue that Tom is running on all intellectual cylinders, because the use of “No, and then . . .” (pronounced as “No, an’nen”) to extend (or reclaim!) a storytelling session is a colloquial conversational tic I grew up hearing around the counter at the feed mill and any number of kitchen tables and fall into regularly myself. (“Yah, and then . . .” also works, but it’s the “Nah” construction you hear most often and that I find most intriguing on breakdown because of the odd non sequitur nature of giving oneself permission to speak by breaking silence with the word no.) So with each “No, and then . . .” Tom is telling me his faculties are functionally and stylistically intact.

  Finally I move decisively for the door. “I’m gonna hit the road, Tom. You be sure to let us know if you need anything. Or Arlene. Anneliese has been checking in on her, and so have a lot of the other neighbors.”

  “Yep,” says Tom, and rattles off the names of people who have called or stopped by, both here and at the house, and ticks off a list of what each came bearing. It’s a marvel how orderly he keeps his head. But as he recites the list, I detect a shadow note in his voice, a hint of thickness that betrays not a neurological impairment but rather a full heart.

  “You’ve built up a lot of social security, Tom,” I say.

  “Yah!” he says, with a grateful chuckle. “Nah, and then . . .”

  I’m still failing to make my exit when a woman and man my age arrive. “Hello, Emmy,” Tom says, and I realize this is his youngest daughter. We’ve never met before. We exchange general greetings, then I take my leave. Behind me, as I exit the door, I hear Tom exclaim, “I’m an airhead!” I smile, realizing I have been present at the birth of a story to rival the crooked shovel handle. And the best part of this one? It travels with him, the punch line residing in his hairline.

  Leaving Tom in the hospital, I head out on another glitzy mini-tour, my entire entourage sitting behind the steering wheel of my station wagon. When I realized this leg of the tour would take me through southern Wisconsin and right past the house of another old-timer who has long intrigued me, I arranged a visit, and am exiting the interstate toward his home now.

  To clarify: I now and then describe Tom Hartwig as an “old-timer.” As an octogenarian, he would certainly seem to qualify, but then again his mother lived sharply for twenty years beyond that and clearly there is more to becoming an old-timer than the accumulation of birthdays. My brother John, who is just now hitting his mid-forties, has comported himself as an old-timer since the age of three. I am two years John’s senior but have always considered him the elder; while I spent high school focused mainly on trying to contain the quarterback option without messing up my hair, John was teaching himself taxidermy and trapping, reading Foxfire books, and assembling his own black-powder rifle. He is a man of broad practical skills and an evergreen appetite for knowledge that most recently led him to obtain his pilot’s license, so keep an eye to the sky: That will be him at 750 feet in his 1964 Cessna 150, blaring along at 43 knots with his blinker on. Further cementing his accelerated old-timer status, he lives in a log cabin he built himself, owns his own sawmill, and recently—having obtained the plane and pilot’s license—constructed a fully operational runway in his front yard using his own personal bulldozer. Sometimes I remind him that I am a really good typer.

  Today’s functional—as opposed to chronological—old-timer is roughly my age but could be an old-timer for his name alone: Robert Frost, no joke. I have followed Rob from afar for a few years now as he blogs about his attempts to carve out a sustainable life in a suburban setting. Apart from greeting each other briefly after a book event once, we have never spent time together, but I feel both his approach (best described as gearhead meets greenie) and his operation are at least loosely relevant to some of the things we’re trying to accomplish on our farm and so merit a closer look.

  He greets me in the doorway of a house in a subdivision that looks like any other subdivision, and if not for a few homemade rain barrels out front or the dump truck load of mulch on the driveway, you’d figure it was the home of just another guy commuting to work in the big city and then back home to the vinyl siding—and indeed it is. If you follow Rob out back, however, you’ll find that in between commutes, he and his wife, Meriah, have gone off the manicured lawn rails and deep into an alternate ecosystem. There are tiers of raised gardening beds, a hoop house, a large rack of serial compost bins, an
d various stands of uncommon foliage. Nearly every square foot serves a purpose, even when it looks deceptively otherwise. “This is our rain garden,” he says, pointing to what looks like a nice little brushy patch. “Exclusively native plants, holds fifteen hundred gallons of runoff.”

  After a tour of the yard I help Rob distribute composting material obtained from a teardown of his methane midden, which is basically a hut-sized pile of chopped brush and other compostables piled over the top of two repurposed fifty-five-gallon drums and 290 feet of coiled garden hose. The intent here was to generate both heat and methane; the methane was to be captured in the barrels, the water in the hoses would carry heat to the house. (Continuing the theme of parallel old-timerism, the methane midden is to Rob Frost what the cannon is to Tom Hartwig—the neighbors find it unusual, hope no harm will come of it, and ultimately aren’t sure what to think.) In its maiden run, the midden was a flop, although a qualified flop, because Rob devoted an entire blog post to all the lessons he learned in the failure. This is a signature move of his—laying it all out there. “Environmentalists need more critical thinking skills,” he told me while we forked apart the experiment’s dark brown remains. A true motor maven who once built street racing cars and exudes an enthusiast’s love for tools and power, Rob has little patience for absolutists, and after being lectured for using a motorized tiller, has been known to take to the comment section of his blog to explain how much soil remediation can be accomplished with one cup of gas. And he isn’t just throwing the term cup around. He really does track these things. He is a geek for specifics and minutiae, as evidenced by snippets and phrases from today’s yard tour: This is riddled with fungal mycelium . . . bioremediation . . . the heavy metals don’t trace out real high . . . thermophilic bacteria . . . apex predators . . . I hear this talk and I hear echoes of Tom, especially since Rob is wearing dirty boots and working a pitchfork as he utters them. With his relative youth, heavy beard, and wrestler’s build, Rob doesn’t look like Tom, but you can hear a resemblance. “That’s ‘twelve-pack rock,’” he says, pointing to a large decorative stone in one corner of the garden, and while I’m trying to figure the geologic reference he says, “ ’Cause the guy charged me a twelve-pack to put it there.” Hacking at a patch of backyard sorghum with a cabbage knife, he says, “A lot of my tools will be useful in a zombie invasion.” My favorite grin comes when he introduces me to his ten-cubic-foot wheelbarrow, which looks large but unremarkable until you learn he has christened it HUBRIS. You can imagine he would applaud Tom’s crooked-shovel routine.

  In a final parallel between Tom and Rob, our entire afternoon is spent talking over the sound of howling traffic. Rob Frost’s property butts against the very same interstate that slices through Tom’s acreage four hours upstate from here. Rather than defeat Rob’s spirit, the location seems to drive him. In addition to the hoop house and raised beds, the modest-sized yard is crowded with fruit trees and fruiting shrubs, and last year it yielded 150 pounds of potatoes, 30 pounds of lettuce, and 800 pounds of food in all. In the process, he and his family make 3,000 pounds of compost per year, save 65,000 gallons of rainwater, and have created an ecosystem so vibrant it attracts prey and predators alike. From the kitchen window Rob’s two children can see goldfinches in the prairie garden and red fox on the hunt.

  Before I leave, Rob, Meriah, and their two children share dinner with me, a feast in which nearly everything—the potatoes, the tomatoes, the carrots, the squash, the sage, the thyme, and the oregano—come from the backyard. On the way out, Rob shows me his garage, which hasn’t held a car for years and is appointed in a manner most similar to Tom’s shop.

  Back on the interstate, I turn on the radio, a mistake I rectify by snapping it right back off when the purple-faced politics pour forth—an experience akin to opening the garden window, only to be greeted by the rear end of an explosively diarrheic donkey. But the toxins are catalytic, and in the subsequent soothing sound of nothing but wheels, and with many miles to go, I pluck up a thread I’ve been teasing in my head and give it a think.

  When I walked into Tom’s hospital room, Fox News was playing on the television. The sound was down, so we were still able to visit as it flickered all Red, White, and Blue. I didn’t think anything of it, because once when we were discussing television in general, Tom told me he only watched the History Channel and Discovery Channel. Then he added, “And I’m a conservative, so I watch Fox News.”

  You get into trouble pretty quickly when you start making broad declarations about the disenchantments of contemporary politics (and a quick review of how Cicero’s whole deal went down will help reset the bar), but still: It struck me that we live in an age in which Tom’s statement would be taken in some circles as reason to dismiss every word he uttered thereafter. In particular I was thinking of our discussion among the beehives when he described the decline of frogs and what it might signify, and the possibility that a large chemical manufacturer might be messing up his bees. When I called him a tree hugger that day I was shooting him a friendly little needle, but I was also thinking that our tendency to paint everyone in shrieking binaries really leads to some missing out. Sometimes Ray Wylie Hubbard sings about tattered angels; sometimes he sings, “Screw You, We’re from Texas.” Sometimes you gotta listen to one to get to the other.

  I’m trying to trace this frayed thread of thought back toward Rob Frost and the idea of what it might take to keep this country rolling in the long term. From our private conversations I can state with conviction that Rob and Tom don’t spend much time marking the same side of the ballot. And so it follows that they would not choose the same leaders. But what of it? Neither is the sort to spend much time behind leaders anyway. The day Tom and I discussed the television I said, Yes, but, Tom, have you known a politician in all your life you liked? “Nope,” he said, flatly and without hesitation. “They go in there with their big ideas . . . and no matter who you put in there, they’re limited by the regulations and the money. And in politics you either scratch their backs or they scratch yers . . .” After a pause, he said, “But what’s wrong now, there’s too much antagonism against each other. Y’get nothin’ done then.”

  When I think of Rob and Tom, I don’t think left or right, I think git’er done, gonzo. I think of an avowed Republican who dares suggest that perhaps in regard to frogs and honeybees we ought to consider something other than the annual report, and I think of a green gearhead who dares suggest purity can be crippling and now and then we might need to augment that curlicue lightbulb with a modest gasoline chaser. I think if Rob showed up at Tom’s place with one of his eco-friendly rocket stove gasifier contraptions that was in need of tweaking, you wouldn’t see the two of them for a week, and all the sounds coming from that shop would be busy, happy sounds.

  I think, more old-timers, please—whatever their bumper stickers, whatever their age.

  Homebound on the final day of the mini-tour, and autumn is setting in. All along the highway the sun hits the hills at such an angle that every visible color begs to be accessorized by a pumpkin. The leaves are several shades of fire, even as the cool air implies you’d best get serious about what’s coming. The chill edge is a friendly nudge, like a mother sweetly suggesting you go back upstairs and fetch a scarf, just in case.

  Tom has been transferred to a nursing home now, doing a brief rehabilitation stint before they send him back home. The facility is located half a mile off my route, so I drop in. After asking for directions at the nurse’s station, I work my way through a warren of halls until I locate Tom’s room. The door is ajar and I can see him in bed, fully clothed and lying atop the sheets in his stocking feet. Again there is the slight shock at how small he seems. And seeing him supine on that bed, bootless in his familiar farming clothes, is somehow more jarring than was the sight of him wearing hospital garb. Perhaps hearing me, he turns his head.

  “Well, hello, Mike!”

  He looks a shade more hale than he did in the hospital.

&
nbsp; “Howdy, Tom. How’s it comin’ along?”

  “Oh, I’m a-doin’.” He gives me a report on his therapy, how they’re having him walk the halls and recover his balance.

  “You going stir crazy in here?” He’s still lying flat on his back as we visit.

  “Nah, it’s all right.”

  “I thought you’d be itchin’ to go?”

  “Weaahhll, yer here, no sense fussin’ about it.” When he says “yer,” he’s referring to himself, not me.

  “I suppose.”

  “I sleep. It passes the time.”

  Throughout the exchange he is pleasantly matter-of-fact, betraying no hint of boredom, let alone depression. It’s hard to square his pleasant acceptance of the situation with the resolutely independent man I know him to be, and I find myself wondering if he truly is that copacetic. If he really does have some ability to just put his independence in neutral. To go from the Tom I know who stumps around the yard and up to the garden and out to gather the honeybee swarms to a guy who happily naps.

  “You just kinda seem to be able to adjust, Tom.”

  “Weaaahhll . . .” He tails off into a shrug and a smile.

  We visit awhile, then I take my leave, stepping back out into the autumnal sun. It’s a short drive home from here, and the final stretch takes me down the road along which little Tommy used to catch the school bus. Looking north, I can imaginarily backtrack his boyhood path from the road, across the field, down into the bottomlands, across Cotter Creek, and up the cut to home, where now—through a passing gap in the trees—I catch a glimpse of the red barn and white silo on their perch overlooking the interstate, the big trucks and little cars sweeping past nonstop while in his little room south of here, Tom waits in patience.