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Art is not Meant
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Hospital Memories

Gary Hull

    In a four-bed hospital ward, sixteen-year-old Eric Casey was conscious after a few days but bed and then wheelchair-bound for nine weeks. A farm accident put him there. Cheesecloth soaked in a vinegar-smelling solution covered his thighs and shins to encourage saprophytes to consume the dead flesh. His doctor said that these bacteria did the work of maggots in cleaning wounds. The stench reminded him of decaying carcasses in the pasture.
    During the day muted AM radio played “Skokiann,” “Rock Around the Clock,” “Make Love to Me,” “My Secret Love” and other top tunes.
    Interspersed were news headlines. Rocky Marciano beat Ezzard Charles to retain the heavyweight title. The Army-McCarthy hearings ended.
    Every Sunday family and friends came a hundred miles to visit. His daily human contacts were the ever-changing patients in his ward and the hospital staff. Sometimes ward mates could be interesting and diverting.
    “The son-of-a bitch shot me, Eric. With a 410. He hunted quail with that gun so the shot was no bigger than number six, but he was at close range and damned near killed me. Hell, I was in Korea. Cold winters. I shivered like a dog passing chicken bones. But nobody drew a bead on me personally as far as I know.”
    “Why would anyone do that to a likeable and funny guy like you, Art?”
    “He thought I was messing with his wife. But he didn’t have to shoot me. What a sorehead! Course he knew I could whip him if I got ahold of him.”
    Eric didn’t doubt it. Art had forearms like Popeye and shoulders like a bull. Eric was rangy, lean like cattle living on the range not in a feedlot. He was just under six feet and compared to Art looked more like the weakling in the Atlas body-building ads. Work in the sun gave both a deeply tanned face but a forehead white almost from eyebrows to crewcut.
    During his long stay, his ward mates changed. One was waiting to die from cancer. Several were comatose or unconscious much of the time. Among those who could communicate were patients whose main conversation consisted of reports on their condition. One complained frequently that botched surgery left him unable to hold his water.
    Several doors from his ward he found a fellow sixteen-year-old who introduced him to wheel chair drag racing. They used short stretches of the hall when it was empty. With all their strength they “burned out,” leaving skid marks on the floor. Maintenance workers complained and the staff forbade this sport.
    Student nurses did most of the work, from treating festering wounds to cleaning bedpans and pisspots, and making beds. More important to Eric, they boosted morale. “Bedside manner?” Student nurses had that.
    Even the plain ones looked fetching in their starched nipped-waist uniforms, blue narrow striped blouses, white aprons, and pillbox hats on the backs of their heads. Despite their tasks they managed to look spotless. They had a heavy workload but sometimes did favors that made his world a little sweeter.
    “Angela, I can’t get to sleep. Got time for a backrub with that delicious-smelling lotion?” “I know it’s late Lorrie, but I’d really like a peanut-butter sandwich.”
    His fifth-floor ward overlooked the roof of the student nurses’ dormitory where they sunbathed.
    “When are you going to be working on your tan, Kate? Will you be on my end of the roof?”
    “Maybe I will and maybe I won’t. I don’t want to take your mind off your rehab.”
    “Rehab don’t take any mind.”
    That was the problem; the mindless daily routine of rehab. In the short time Art was in the ward, he never failed to be interesting. He was coarse and funny, not comatose, incommunicative, or complaining. The encounters with student nurses were brief. They tried to distribute their attention as broadly as possible.
    Increasingly he turned inward, searching memories of the small world he inhabited before the crippling accident. He sorted his experiences into good and bad, likes and dislikes. Lengthy hospitalization provided him the opportunity to examine and evaluate his life as a restless teenager could not.
    He thought about work, play, school, sports, and romance.
    At the time of the accident he worked part-time for Herb Schwetmann. He was a neighbor who farmed a section of land, four times his family’s acreage.
    “I have three sons who went to college. They didn’t want to be farmers. Can’t blame them. I don’t see a good future for farmers. At least not most farmers.”
    Schwetmann took off his engineer’s cap and wiped his brow on his green Dickey’s shirt sleeves. He was one of the few farmers who did not wear bib overalls and grey shirts. Eric remembered his father’s complaint that those who did not fasten the bib’s side buttons and did not wear underwear could show their privates. Mr. Schwetmann wore Dickey’s pants with a leather belt. Like most his age, Eric wore denim jeans and patterned shirts.
    “There’s a race for bigger and better in tractors and machinery to make your time in the field worth it. You’ll need more acreage, bigger farms, and more and more farmers will be giving up and getting steady jobs and a paycheck they can count on. Farms the size of your dad’s won’t support a family anymore.”
    He thought of his dad’s purchase, several years ago, of a Ford tractor with rear-mounted, hydraulic lift equipment. “It’s got all the new fangled stuff to make farming easier,” his dad told him. It pulled a mounted two-bottom, fourteen inch plow.
    “See that John Deere G over there, Eric? You see how much bigger it is than the A standing next to it? The G is the biggest row crop tractor. Pulls a three-bottom sixteen inch plow. But it’s old. Going to be replaced by bigger and better.”
    Eric nodded. “Can I drive it?”
    “Sure can. You have to watch out for the hand clutch. It’s sticky. You have to push hard, push past the kink in it. Otherwise it won’t engage and you might just lurch forward and stop.”
    He liked to drive tractors but not long days cultivating rows of corn. The endless rounds reminded him of a mouse treading a wheel in a cage. He liked putting up hay because this was a task shared by small farmers like his dad, who had joined crews for cooperative labor such as harvests or cutting wood in the winter. This was economically important, especially for small farmers, and a social occasion for young and old.
    Conversations serious and frivolous, gossip, jokes, and pranks mixed fun with the toil. There was constant banter between Eric and other kids in the crew.
    “Bet you can’t throw this brome bale over the wagon like I did, Eric.”
    “You dumb ass. All you need is to stack the bales four-high. Anything more is wasted effort.”
    “I saved your life. I shot a low-flying shit-eating bird.”
    “Did you clean him and eat him?”
    Eric remembered hand fishing along a half mile of creek with an age-mate on the work-crew. They searched beaver and muskrat holes, sunken logs, and brush.
    “They’re too slick and strong to hold, Ed.”
    “You have to get into their gills, Eric. Look out for the spines behind the gills and on top of the catfish. You get stuck with them and it’ll sting for a while.”
    “There’s one in this hole. He’s clamped my fingers in his mouth! Ow! Feels like being squeezed by a big pair of pliers.”
    “That’s ‘cause he’s got rough ridges in his mouth, not teeth like a walleye. That just helps you hold him. You got him!”
    They caught a dozen channel cats, one weighing six pounds, and a half dozen carp and buffalo. The local judgment was that carp from running streams were better eating than catfish. Carp from still, stagnant water took on the flavor of the water and the bottom, and might have a bad taste. Twenty miles to the east, on the Missouri River, several commercial fishermen caught and sold carp, as well as catfish, although the relentless channeling of the river greatly reduced the habitat required for the large harvests of Eric’s grandfather’s day.
    Less pleasant for Eric to recall was his first romance in which he had peaks of ecstasy and despair within six months. He found tall, athletic Sarah irresistible with her prominent chin, wide-set green eyes, Italian bob haircut, and easy smile. She was a year younger.
     “Hey Sarah, why don’t you ride your pony over to my place? I’ll jump on behind you and we can get our cows in to milk.”
    “I got my own chores to do and if I get on a horse with you it won’t be to round up the cows.”
    “You mean we might find something else to do?”
    “Yeah. As long as you mind your manners. I don’t want to have to wrestle you. I’m afraid I’d hurt you.”
    He saw her throw hay bales and scoop ear corn into the crib. She was strong and agile and the best volleyball player in their high school’s conference.
    Both had driven cars in the country since they were fourteen. Licensed to drive at sixteen, he could take her to the closest town, ten miles from their rural high school. Here there were two theatres, one showing “A,” the other “B” movies. The car and the movies provided opportunities to release passions. They explored one another and tried things that they’d heard lovers did.
    “Why do they call it French kissing?”
    “Guess it’s because they invented it.”
    “The older girls say it makes them hot.”
    “You take their word for it? Don’t you know?”
    “A girl has to keep some things to herself.”
    There were town girls considered prettier by his friends but his thought and feelings focused on Sarah. It must be love, he thought, because for him no other girl existed. Sarah must feel the same.
    “You and your folks coming to the school carnival? There’ll be people from all over.”
    “Yeah. We’re coming with Larry’s folks. Old family friends. I promised to make him feel at home in our school event.”
    “Larry? Old friends? You never mentioned him before.”
    “Through our families I’ve known him ever since I can remember. He goes to school in Brown county.”
    They talked about the school carnival for a week afterward. He could not accept that family loyalty required her to accompany Larry all evening.
    “I don’t like threesomes.”
    “This was strictly social, not romantic like when you and I go out together. I was the only one he knew there.”
    “Well, you didn’t have to lay hands on him!”
    “You don’t understand. We played together as kids.”
    He could not let it go. With pain he remembered telling her after a fit of temper that they were through. His pride would not let him take those words back.
    “Just as well,” she said. “When you grow up maybe we can get together again.”
    He thought about their rural high school, a consolidation of precincts with one-room schools called Wolf Creek Union. When it was created thirty-five years before, some did not have autos and those who did found the dirt roads irregularly passable. It was ten miles from the nearest town and in severe snow and mud it could be reached only by foot or horse. Some said that the decline of the population and improved roads made Wolf Creek obsolete.
    Thirty-two high school students attended. Nineteen boys went out for six-man football, basketball, and track. A boy with arms atrophied by Polio served as student manager, school comedian, class officer, and spirit-lifter. All twelve girls, including Sarah, played volleyball. The superintendent governed the school, coached the men’s sports, and taught history and government. Eric conflicted with him in all three roles.
    At his request, Mr. Oestman reevaluated his essay in American history. He left even more red ink on Eric’s paper and did not raise his grade.
    “I’m trying to help you improve your essay. You have to be able to accept correction in anything you undertake in life or you’re not going to learn.”
    He offered advice on football. “Coach Oestman, Salem puts its ends out to the sidelines and throws the ball. That’s how they beat us last year.”
    “No Eric. We need to run the ball. Last year we didn’t and that’s why we lost.”
    “But they ran better than we did out of their formation.”
    “Look! You play and leave the coaching to me.”
    He learned that a team-mate took Sarah to town. In the locker room Eric confronted him.
     “Cal, I hear you’re chasing Sarah.”
     “I wouldn’t call it chasing. She sure as hell isn’t running.”
     Eric threw him to the concrete floor, leaving an abrasion on his forehead where it struck the wall. The coach walked into the room at this moment. Neither boy would give an explanation, so the coach concluded the matter the next day. A witness and Cal’s swollen and blue forehead testified against Eric.
    “Eric, you’re suspended from practice and benched for the next game. For your own good as well as the team’s. You need to learn to respect authority and the players need to know that nobody can put their personal interest ahead of the team.”
    A week later the coach told him that the team wanted him to return.
    “You don’t have to tell me what the team thinks. I’m not playing football anymore.”
    He knew that built-up resentment about Sarah, his coach and teacher, and his team-mate, drove his actions, but he could not stop himself. Standing at an open assembly hall window on the second floor, he saw Mr. Oestman, the sum of all authority, walking below. He threw the cherry bomb twenty feet behind him. The superintendent did not look back when it exploded as Eric expected. He looked up into Eric’s eyes. The wooden stairs reverberated as he stomped to the second floor.
    “Now you’ve done it! You’re going to pay for this. I’m tired of this rebellion and disrespect.”
    The penalty was suspension from school for the rest of the year with no make-up of work missed. Eric cared enough about grades to ask Mr. Oestman to reconsider the grade on his history essay. His parents wanted him to go to college because they thought college was the key to whatever was better in life. Like Mr. Schwetmann, they did not see a future for small farmers like themselves.
    For Schwetmann, a future in farming required more land, bigger machinery, and chemicals to kill weeds and pests, and to fertilize crops. He read this in Progressive Farmer and other publications that kept the farmer up to date and urged modernization. Eric’s father said he’d heard of stuff like this being used “back east,” but used no chemicals except for 2-4-D to kill Canadian thistles and other broadleaf weeds in the pasture and around the place.
    “You see the leaves on the new corn, Eric? I’m going to put together something on the G I can use to kill what’s causing this. The A has the cultivator on it and I’ll need it for the weeds in the corn. I hate to use that big heavy thing for this, but the G would otherwise be idle until I plow wheat stubble.”
    Eric looked at the clutter of hoses and aluminum pipes across the tractor. Attached to the horizontal pipes were nozzles aimed down for the corn rows. Strapped to the back was a fifty-five gallon oil drum filled with a repellent smelling liquid and connected to a tangle of hoses. To avoid this mess, he did not mount the tractor from rear as usual. Instead, standing in front of the huge back wheel he grabbed a hand hold and pulled himself up enough so that he could put a foot on the pulley and vault into the seat. He was agile and foolish enough to do this.
    The improvised spraying rig was not working well. The nozzles kept clogging and backed-up chemical dripped. He repeatedly dismounted to clean them and then reclaim his position behind the steering wheel. On his last such athletic effort, in seeking a hand-hold he grabbed the hand clutch. It did not stay engaged. It was “sticky” as Mr. Schwetmann said.
    The tractor lurched forward, knocked him down and stopped on top of him. There it remained for three and a half hours. The neighbor who found him did not know what to do.
     “I’ll go home and get my axle jack and lift it off you.”
     “Just drive the damned thing off!”
    Clutch engaged, the tractor would have knocked him down and left him behind with a broken pelvis but likely no permanent damage. After three and a half hours of compression and the steady drip of corrosive chemicals he had extensive and enduring muscle and nerve damage. After nine weeks in the hospital he left with braces on his legs, large skin grafts, and extensive scarring on his legs and his stomach where the skin for grafting was removed. He refused to wear the braces and within a month walked unaided with a limp. He would not play football or run track again.
    He talked as little as possible about the accident because people asked how it happened. He did not want to explain that he recklessly vaulted into the tractor seat from in front, over the pulley. People might say, “The kid’s got no judgment.”
    Diverting the questioner’s attention was his common tactic.
    “What was it like pinned under a John Deere G all afternoon?”
    “Boring. I had no top-tunes radio to listen to or magazines to read.”



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