We Fade in a Quiet Room

My uncle Stack is in his mid-nineties.  He has been in pretty decent health up until the last few weeks.   Unfortunately, a couple of strokes have landed him in a nursing home. After a phone call from my cousin, who suggested Stack  may be declining, I stopped in to see him before going home from work two evenings back.

I found Uncle Stack in a room at the end long hall with shiny floors that skipped sunlight against the eggshell walls.  The staff had wheeled an ancient and inordinately skinny man out and left him in the hall about halfway down.  Sleeping in his wheelchair, the old man slumped entirely to one side and looked eerily like the worn and curled wick of a spent candle.

I strode by the old man, making a point not to look at his face.  What if I knew him?  What if he was once a job push on a constructions site where I worked?  What if I had dated his daughter during highschool and brought her home late one night?  I entered a quiet room and found my Uncle Harry—Stack—sleeping in a bed barely big enough to support his tall frame.

Tall as the smelter’s smokestack.  That’s how he got the nickname.

I simply watched Stack sleeping for a few minutes, thinking that I might do only that and then turn and leave for home.

No.  I wanted to talk with Stack.

I gently shook him.  “Stack?”  

His eyes opened.  Gray eyes.  Shallow.

“How you doin’, Uncle Stack?”

A blue depth slowly came to Stack’s eyes.  You might imagine trout swishing through such blue pools as that.

“How are you feeling, Stack?”

He smiled, seeming to recognize me—me, the little boy in a blue jacket who fell into a fresh cowpie that day nearly fifty years ago when we drove to Montana City to dig earthworms from near the banks of Prickly Pear Creek.  My dog Sandalwood was still alive then.   Jets were still allowed to sonic boom directly overhead.  I wore my jacket in the heat of summer.  “I’m fine,” Uncle Stack suggested.  “I sleep a lot.”

“Me, too,” I said.

Stack’s hair looked more yellow than gray and his lips were cracked and stiff from lack of moisture.

“Would you like some water?” I asked.

”No,” he said. “The water is ice cold.  The food is bad.”

“So…how have you been, Stack?”

“Good.  They move me around a lot.”

“Has Loren been in to see you much?”

“Some.  They move him around a lot.” 

A somewhat uneasy silence fell over the room again.  I thumbed through a Smithsonian Magazine until I saw the photo of a dead horse.  Uncle Stack’s eyes slowly rolled around the room and then settled on me again.  “You still work up here?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.  “Still do…”

--Mitchell Hegman