Behold by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epub, ebook, QuarkXPress
Publisher: Crystal Lake Publishing
Published: 2017-07-28T04:00:00+00:00

A WARE THAT WILL NOT KEEP

John F.D. Taff

Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover

Breath’s a ware that will not keep.

Reveillé

A.E. Housman

Phil stopped on the sidewalk in front of the modest brick bungalow, inhaled the air the house seemed to exhale. Inside, atop a bed so big it made him look like a child, his Grandpa Lev lay dying. The old man’s death seeped through the pores of the structure, rolled over the lawn like a miasma, hung in a heavy cloud over the roof as if the structure respired with the same labored, gray exhalations his grandfather breathed.

Grandpa Lev had cancer, which had started in his lungs but had quickly burrowed into his bone marrow. Perhaps a year to live, he was told; a painful year. There had been tears all around, but none from Grandpa Lev. Phil had seen simple acceptance in his grandfather’s demeanor, but something else, too, something deep; as smooth and familiar as a worry stone rubbed in cracked hands for many years. Something Phil was sure no one else saw.

Grandpa Lev was a Polish Jew of the old-school persuasion, whose alumni included Lot and Job, the ones who accepted all God threw at them and more with a weary meh and a determination to press on.

So Phil knew that look.

It was acceptance.

The old man’s face held the look of someone who had just been told to finally pay the bill . . . a large bill that had been hanging unpaid for some time accruing interest. It was the face of someone who accepted that, but who was also rueful of the price.

Phil knew that his grandfather would tell him what that price was here, today.

Shivering, he walked to the porch, used a key to let himself in.

***

Inside, his grandfather’s possessions looked dull, drained of color, objects in a sepia-toned picture. It was as if they, too, were slowly dying, fading.

Phil turned toward the glow of late afternoon light that slanted down the narrow staircase, warm with golds and oranges and delicate greens. The light played on the dozens of framed photos that hung on both sides of these walls, giving a fitful life to the dead. Relatives that had come to this country, many of them, most of them on a wave of shock and pain and death that continued to resonate in their family, in their country . . . in their faith.

Phil climbed the steps slowly, feeling the weight of their scrutiny.

Grandpa Lev’s room was a strange combination of Old World and high-tech. Dark, heavy wood furniture sat cheek-and-jowl by exotic medical equipment, beeping devices on poles, blinking boxes squatting atop his grandmother’s linen chest. Tubes and wires ran across the floor, met at the bed.

The old man caught sight of his grandson over the shoulder of the nurse, who was adjusting a line from one of the hanging bags of fluids, down to where it entered, by needle, the back of his grandfather’s heavily veined hand.

A smile broke out on his grandfather’s face, bright enough to push away the denser shadows hanging over the bed.

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