Cornered

The old man stood in the corner of the hospice room, his wife’s head raised in the bed before him, his daughters and son in chairs and on the bed and standing to wait to say goodbye to their mother. His wife talked in a loud thin voice asking not to sell the house and the man as he always had thought to himself that she talked too much and said, “Don’t hog the trough, Mary”but she talked and he looked at his shoes cramped into the corner where the wheels of the bed were tight against the hospice room wall. The son asked “Mother! Who is buried in the backyard?” as he took a picture again and more with the blinds closed against the sun for the light of day hurt her eyes, and the youngest daughter asked, “Who are the pets buried in the backyard?” She listed the names and the oldest daughter said “asshole” at mention of the old man’s favorite gray, shot by a neighbor now dead and the old man said, “Don’t talk like that, Mary Gene” and Mary Gene looked at the others and said, “I’ll talk anyway I like.” I guess you will, the man thought, and to his dogs run down in the road by a Model A when he was 12 years ago, that same year his father died and his mother whipping more often after that, once cornering him out in a piano box where he sat smoking tobacco cigarettes with his friend and once more and something about an outhouse. The middle daughter leaned hunched over the bed and he had fed his kids well, worked hard at that, and there would be hunched over enough in their lives, he knew, before the hunching slacked and there was just a bed to lie in. And little of that had much to do with food. He knew that, the door opening as everyone was talking and a hospice administrator asked when could the family meet for a meeting and the oldest said, “Tell them to go stuff it” and the son said, “Tell them to sit on a sharp nail” and the youngest said, “You are awful” and the old man saw in the escalation and remonstration the traits he had struggled with when there was time to struggle with the like that those traits were now of his own. Then the youngest said it was time to leave and everyone gathered behind the head of the bed, the old man, too, and the camera went to the nurse who fumbled the shutter and jumped each time the flash popped up to flash and pop and the old man wondered why the flash made no light the oldest saying, “I’m seeing things. Are you?” The youngest gathered up a leather bag and coat and kissed the old woman and said goodbye, the others waiting their turn and they lingered in the door way and left with side steps saying goodbye more. When they had left the door still open slowly shut and when it clicked the old woman lifted her hand and pointed a crooked finger at the door, the hand shivering at the door and the finger pointing at the corner where the man stood and he thought maybe now they could talk but the old woman let her hand down to the hospice blankets and turned her face to look at the bedside table and shut her eyes.