Doctor Salt by Gerard Donovan

Author:Gerard Donovan [Donovan, Gerard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471136955
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

SALT 3

Twelve years passed like a bandage.

One day my father came home from work with a strange cough, and in a couple of weeks it had grown in him like a vine that ran little wires through his lungs and also through the house, through the walls; I lay at night in bed and listened to him struggle. Then he got a stomach ache that made dull spoons of his eyes, and barely a week later he looked as if ten years had been added to his forty-five.

He continued to work in the lumber yard attached to a large home improvement store where he prepared special orders and cut the wood to size, and if no special orders came, he stacked the incoming wood using his forklift. But most of the time he was the man who cut the wood, and I think I knew why he liked that job. He wore his earmuffs, his goggles, his apron and special gloves, and he operated the large precision saw in his own space, a fenced-off part of the store by the yard, away from customers and away from the rest of the world. I wondered what he thought about to fill the time every day since he was so good at his job. On evenings and weekends I often found him in his armchair in the living room watching black-and-white movies taken from four shelves of video tapes, maybe three hundred films, most taped off the television and titled with a black felt-tip pen on the labels. I stood at the door behind him and saw the flashing lights from the television and saw his face in the dark, often smiling in a kind of peace, because he was a lonely man, even if that’s where his happiness lay, smiling as if the film were a ship he’d lost contact with and found again.

But he contacted something else, too, that made his skin pale and the spoons harden. He went to the doctor who put a scope to his chest and made him breathe deeply, tapped him here and there like a wall before the nail is hammered in. That doctor then referred him to another doctor, and my father made the appointment straight away because my father had a job and health insurance; the second doctor had him tested and scanned. The results came back in a couple of days. When the doctor called and asked my father to come to his office to pick up the results, I knew that the vine must have shown up somewhere on the map, and I guessed it was that same vine of silence that started growing after my brother died. Anyway, my father brought home a lot of pills from the doctor’s office and lined them up on the kitchen counter, taking one of them every day. He did not get better. I often held the pillboxes in my hands and urged them on. They looked like better pills to me because

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