This short story was shortlisted for the 2013 Bellevue Literary Prize, judged by Jane Smiley, and published in the April 2013 issue of the Bellevue Literary Review. It was inspired by my father, Eldon Rohlk, who had Alzheimer’s Disease and was a farmer in Iowa. The final scene, where the main character and her husband drive her father back to the farm, has actual dialogue from a similar trip, although no kittens were involved.
By Lori DeBoer
I’d heard about people drowning unwanted kittens in the river, but I hadn’t thought of my husband as the sort to do so. That would be my father’s solution and he told Marty as much at breakfast the other morning. The tea kettle whistled, and my husband had his nose in the sports section.
My father turned to him said, “Marty, I’ll take care of those kittens for you.”
“How’s that?” he said, without looking up.
“I’ll just drown them in the river.”
Never mind that my dad for once remembered Marty’s name, those kind of niceties escaping him these days, as though the people who surrounded and loved him were beneath his notice. Something in my father’s manner, the threat in his voice, opened the past. All of a sudden I was nine and heartbroken. I was nearly fifty years beyond that now and, though I’d never left Iowa, I hadn’t gone back to my father’s farm since I went to nursing school. The farm was just an hour’s drive away, which, in my mind, was not far enough.. I reminded myself to breathe deeply. My hand shook when I picked up the tea kettle. I wanted to dump the boiling water on my father’s sorry head, but a lot of good it would do me.
Marty shifted in his chair, took another sip of coffee and set down the paper. He looked at my father, as though considering the offer.
“Well, Frank, that’s a mighty interesting offer,” he said.
My father just looked hard across the table, his arms folded across his chest. “Wouldn’t make good mousers anyway.”
“Let me think on it,” Marty said.
I gave Marty the stink eye. Sometimes I felt like I was living with two nuts, and was heading that way myself. My twelve-hour shifts at the hospital didn’t help. Neither my father nor Marty seemed to care as long as they had three meals a day and clean underwear. They probably didn’t even care about the clean underwear. I slammed my cup down, just to make a point, but dumped tea all over myself. “Christ,” I said, jerking my hand to my mouth.
“Watch your language, Suzy,” my father said and glared at me. “Or I’ll tell Dad and he’ll take you out back.”
His eyes, though faded and rheumy, looked dangerous. I’d expected some trouble when my father came to live with us in March, a couple months ago, because our trailer wasn’t exactly roomy and things were tight since Marty had been laid off with a bunch of other union guys from the packing plant in Ames. It had been a year without work for him, except for carpentry jobs here and there. Thank goodness our two girls had finished community college, were supporting themselves, and lived on their own. I’d expected Marty to get depressed, but he had not. What I hadn’t expected was that my father would be the one who would act up, for his anger to drown everything. I started mopping up the spill with a towel.
“Phyllis. My name is Phyllis,” I muttered, scrubbing the counter, hating how he called me by the names of his sister or aunt, the names of the dead. “Get it right.”
Marty had started feeding the stray in the first place, spending last fall plying her with food from our refrigerator. I’d come home from the hospital in Ames, tired from the hour drive, feet and back achy, and there would be Marty, crouching in the Johnson grass, feeding the cat the chicken I’d had in mind for my supper. It took him months to woo her, which gave him something to do with his days, I supposed. She would now take food from his hand, but good luck petting her. She wandered as she pleased.
The kittens had arrived in April, a month after my father had moved in with us. He couldn’t live by himself anymore. He got lost. He wandered in the night. Twice, he’d been found standing in the middle of the highway, buck naked. My mother would have been humiliated if she’d known, but she wasn’t bound to suffer him anymore and so the task fell to me. Marty hadn’t said much, but what was there to say? The cat was so skinny we hadn’t figured she was pregnant. Then she disappeared for a week. I could tell by the amount of time Marty spent sitting on the back steps and smoking that he was worried.
After a few nights of living with us, my father started in. I’d wake up, hearing footsteps. I’d listen to him knock about, hoping he didn’t break anything or himself. When he quieted, I’d rise to check on him. I’d find him sleeping in the easy chair. I figured he was too stubborn to negotiate the narrow hallway back to his room, or that he preferred sleeping in a chair to a strange bed without my mother.
One night I’d awakened to banging. I’d found him in the kitchen, all the cupboards flung open, coffee beans spilled across the floor. He was striking the coffee maker repeatedly on the counter.
He turned to me. “Godammit, Mother, when did we get this worthless piece of crap?”
“We’ve had it for years, Dad,” I said, trying to soothe him. I walked toward him and took the coffee maker out of his hand, set it back on the counter. “Let me help you with it. Why don’t you sit down?”
“You damn well better make me coffee,” he said. “Thought you could sleep in while I did the milking, did you?”
I’d stood there for a moment, gathering my wits.
“How about if I take over the milking this morning,” I said, forcing myself to use the same, even tone I used with stubborn patients. I rested my hand on his shoulder, pained at how skinny he felt. “You deserve to sleep in for once. You’ve been working hard.”
My father batted away my hand. “You do the milking?” he said. “You think I’d trust you to do that without screwing it up?”
I felt my face flame. He sat down at the table, staring at me. Without another word, I made a pot of coffee and started cooking eggs and bacon. Pretty soon Marty wandered in, rubbing his eyes. “What’s going on?” he asked. “It’s four in the morning.”
I shrugged, threw on more bacon, and put another piece of toast in the toaster. Marty sat down, though he looked beat. If there’s food, he’ll eat.
“What you doing up, Frank?” he asked my father.
“Gotta get a start on chores,” said my father. He looked at Marty curiously. “How long you visiting for? You might as well make yourself useful, instead of eating up all our food.”
Marty looked at me, his eyebrows shooting up, but I looked at the linoleum. It was varnished by decades of use, but we couldn’t afford to replace it. I loved how grooves were worn in the floor in front of the sink and stove.
“You look like you could do a day’s work,” said my father, elbowing Marty. Even at eighty, he was still a man who elbowed other men, testing their mettle, seeing if they would fight back. That’s how he had managed everyone, even the livestock. I once saw him slam a two-by-four on our buck’s head for chasing me. I still remember the crack of wood meeting skull. When I was afraid of getting into the pen to give the pigs their five-gallon-bucket of corn or of sticking my hands in the nests to gather eggs, my father would roll his eyes. “You gotta show them who’s boss,” he’d say.
The bacon started burning and I stood there, watching it smoke, before I forked it onto a plate and set it on the table.
We heard the kittens were in trouble before we could find them, heard their tiny cries. I’d been called in on a Sunday to take over a shift in ICU and was coming home, for once, while it was still light. Marty was holding a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He was trampling down the grass in a circle in front of the trailer. He smiled when he saw me, but his eyes had dark circles under them.
“What’s up, babe?” I asked.
He had a funny, faraway look. He took a couple of draws on his cigarette, then crushed it on the railing and flicked the butt into the grass.
“Your dad was in rare form today,” he said.
“What happened?” I wanted to go in and soak in a hot bath, but I sat on the steps, watching my husband. Lately, part of him seemed to be shrinking away. His face looked thin.
“Your father broke a beer bottle. On purpose,” said Marty, pointing with his pistol finger at the side of the trailer. He laughed. “You should have seen it. He threw that sucker so hard it made a dent in the wall. Surprised he missed me.”
My head hurt. “What was he doing with a beer?”
“Lucky, I ducked,” said Marty, doing a little dance, as though he’d just scored a touchdown.
“Did you say he could have beer?”
Marty frowned. “Just because the man’s memory is going doesn’t mean he should be deprived of all life’s pleasures.”
I didn’t know what to say. Marty was home most days with Dad, not me. I felt badly. I ran the numbers in my head, wondered if we could afford for me to turn down a few shifts. I imagined all the things that could go wrong at home, that would go wrong. I worked with these kinds of patients, saw them reduced to slobber and spit and vacant stares until the bramble in their brains started crowding out their vital functions, one by one, until the last thing they forgot was how to have a beating heart.
In the silence, I heard a peculiar sound, distant and muffled, almost like chicks peeping. “What’s that?” I asked Marty.
He took a swig from his beer. “Oh,” he said. “You hear them, too.”
“Hear them?” Then I understood.
“Yep,” Marty said. “That mama cat had a litter.” He gestured with his beer. “Under our trailer.”
The day after he chucked a beer at Marty, I took Dad to the doctor’s office, as if some good would come of it.
“How can I help you?” asked the doctor.
“I’m not a young man anymore,” my father said.
“His memory’s gone,” I said. We’d talked at the hospital before about my dad’s condition, but I wanted the doctor to hear for himself.
“That’s a bunch of phooey.” Dad stood slightly bent, with his hands in his pocket. “I call that baloney.” He started shuffling toward the door, muttering to himself.
“We really need to take care of this,” I said.
“You always were a worrier,” said my father, his hand on the knob.
I’d lost count of how many times he had slipped out of the trailer in the night. We lived within a stone’s throw of the river. Something was bound to happen. Dad grumped off to the waiting room, while I stayed and talked to the doctor, who refilled his medicine but pronounced him healthy as a horse. “Healthy, except for his mind,” the doctor said. “Those old farmers don’t quit.”
When I went out to the waiting room, Dad was gone. Good Christ, I thought. I hoped he was in the bathroom, so I knocked on the door. No answer. The receptionist told me he’d just left.
I ran out, but he wasn’t on the sidewalk in either direction. I hoped to find him sitting in my car, arms crossed, a frown on his face, cussing me out, but he wasn’t there either.
Dammit, dammit, I thought, jabbing the keys several times at the ignition before they slid in. I started the car and looped around the neighborhood twice before I saw him. He stood in someone’s front yard, in the shade of a maple tree, staring up at the house as though he were deciding whether or not to buy it.
I pulled over to the curb and unrolled the window.
“Dad,” I yelled. He didn’t respond. I got out and walked up to him. The grass was thick under my clogs, and tulips poked up along the sidewalk. “Dad,” I repeated, grabbing his elbow. “Why’d you run off like that? I was worried sick.”
He looked at me with pity and shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
As the mornings grew warmer, the kittens patrolled early, sneaking out of a crack in the trailer’s skirt. They would come out two, three at a time. Some were ginger, most were black. They were wild; they would startle at any old shadow and make a dash for it, peeking out at us with dark eyes. We saw the mother more during the day, but at night she hunted. She was scrawny, with big tits, and I felt sorry for her. My shift got off late, but I’d sit on the back porch in the dark, eat a bowl of cereal, and watch for her. The crickets would sing, and the kittens would climb out of their hole and pounce on each other like maniacs. If I tried to pet them, they’d scatter. Before I went in, I’d set out the remaining milk in the bowl. It would be gone by morning.
The trailer needed fixing. Marty had been waiting for the spring rains to let up before digging into the repairs, but he was glum about not having gotten to it earlier. For some reason, he didn’t mind the mother cat but hated having the kittens around. His signs for “free kittens” had been ignored. There were enough cats running around our corner of town, rummaging through garbage, and catching vermin and birds down by the river. He wanted to take them to the pound, and I wasn’t fond of that solution either. I was of the opinion that if animals and people fell into your lap or household, you ought to take care of them.
By May, it was clear we had to do something about the kittens running around but they refused to be gentled. Marty tried to take one by force and had been razored for his efforts. I was home when it happened, sitting with Dad in the living room, trying to get him to eat some popcorn. He was so thin, nearly threadbare. When the kitten howled, Dad jumped. “What was that?” he asked. “You got a raccoon problem?”
Marty burst in, swearing, droplets of blood welling on his hands. “Phyll, that little sucker got me good,” he said.
I pulled my husband to the sink and ran hot water over his fingers, letting the punctures bleed.
“Did he bite you or just scratch you?”
“I think he just scratched me,” Marty said. “But if we are going to have them around, they should have their shots.”
We had cats on the farm, but they weren’t pets. Neither were the dogs, for that matter. They worked. Every spring, Dad would take a tractor and pull the grain bins and smaller outbuildings off their foundations. The rats would run out, and the dogs chased them, throwing them some fifteen feet up in the air, it seemed, again and again, until the rats died. No pet ever set foot in our house and, while Dad might buy Purina pet chow in the dead of winter, in the summer the cats and dogs had to fend for themselves.
When I was nine, Dad came home with a couple of black-and-white spotted rabbits. Mom had looked at Dad with disapproval and murmured, “Is that a good idea?” I helped him build a hutch out of wood and wire, which we set up in the barn. It was my job to feed them. I went down to the alfalfa field and gathered armfuls of sweet-smelling stalks. I spent hours with my rabbits, naming first them and then all their babies. They grew big and bouncy. I would let them out in the barn but not outside, for fear they’d run away.
I arrived home from school one day to find the cage empty. Nobody I knew ate rabbit, unless they shot it, so their slaughter shocked me.
“All the love in the world isn’t enough to keep an animal as a pet,” my father had said. “We only raise animals to eat or make money.”
I know now, as an adult, we were poor and that Dad rented instead of owned and that the farm he’d grown up on had gone to his older brothers instead of him. I guess he’d done the best he knew how but I wondered how he could grow some things and not others.
With my dad wandering, most nights I slept fitfully, and three months of this was beginning to take its toll. That night I dreamt about cats, barns full of cats, cats in the hay lofts, cats in the creamery, cats in the hog house, cats hanging on the screen door of the house I’d grown up in, begging for table scraps. They cried so much they woke me up.
I blinked. It was morning. The howling continued and, even though I was used to hearing patients in pain, the sound alarmed me. I got out of bed, but I was so tired. I felt like I was never going to catch up on my sleep. I was having trouble making small talk at work, had forgotten tasks. The layoffs were starting to hit the hospital and, because we were short staffed, people were edgy. I was afraid I might lose my job, and then what? Here I was, seven years from retirement but living paycheck to paycheck. Marty and I didn’t talk about work, because he had little to none. If he got up with Dad, he went outside for a smoke, then headed back to bed. Nothing bothered him.
I stood for a moment, listening. The sound seemed to come from beneath the floor, as though it were piped in. I heard Marty and Dad talking in the yard. I went out and found Marty trying to pry back a corner of the trailer with the claw of a hammer. Dad stood there, offering suggestions. The howling continued.
“What’s going on?” I said
“Somebody’s in trouble,” Marty said, yanking at the metal skirting. Sweat ran down his face and soaked his shirt. The hammer lost contact and the metal snapped, winging him. He swore, stuck a finger in his mouth.
“Let me do it,” my father said. “You’re not doing it right.”
“I got it, Frank.”
“You gonna let a little bitty kitty get the best of you?”
“Don’t worry, Frank,” Marty said, taking his cap off and running his hand through his hair. “I’ll take care of them.”
“What would you do with cats?” my father asked. “In town? Pretty useless, if you ask me.”
Marty started beating on the skirting with the hammer.
The pounding hurt my head.
“Well, Frank, you tell me. What would a farmer like you do with a litter of mean-spirited, noisy kittens?”
I don’t know what got into me. I grabbed the hammer out of my husband’s hand and shook it at the two of them, screaming, “Stop it!” Dad looked rattled. Marty stood up and tried to hold me, but I pulled away. “Just leave me alone,” I said. “I’m going for a walk.”
I found myself down at the river. It flowed slowly. I hadn’t been there in a long time and I realized it wasn’t deep enough to drown in. Dad would really have to try, and he was too damned bullheaded to get himself killed. I had grown up and went to church with farmers who’d lost fingers to pigs and arms to augers. As a nurse, I’d treated farmers who had tangled with a piece of equipment. God forbid they did wiring or welding in a dusty grain bin or got themselves drowned by grain. My father had once stepped over an open auger, having been too cheap to replace the cover, or perhaps he’d had no use for it. He’d gotten his leg caught and somehow, though in his late sixties, had summoned the strength to free himself. He had gone to the doctor, because Mom made him, but he only had a few bruises. The doctor told him to go home and buy a lottery ticket.
I sat by the river for the better part of the afternoon before I followed the path back.
Marty had already ripped apart the trailer’s skirt and rescued the stuck kitten. Dad, it seems, had bandaged the kitten up. By the time I came home, the kitten was in a box in the kitchen, Dad was asleep in his chair, and Marty had bumps all over every patch of exposed skin from bugs he’d run into underneath the trailer. He was trying not to scratch.
I applied some calamine lotion. This was the second time in a row I’d had to doctor him. “Worst case of chiggers ever,” Marty said.
“Don’t be such a baby,” I said, but I found a spot on his neck that wasn’t all bit up and kissed it.
A long time ago, Dad asked me to help him farm. He’d ridiculed me all those years for being a girl instead of a boy, for being weak. I told him I wouldn’t waste my nursing degree. He’d been angry. He’d finally bought the farm and had no one to help him. I promptly stopped going home then. Mom and I would talk by phone, and she’d come to visit us and her granddaughters. Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen much of the girls since Dad moved in with Marty and me. They had boyfriends and jobs and were off doing their own thing.
Once, Mom had brought Dad along to visit us. Just once. It’s not even worth describing.
A storm blew in that night. The branches from the lilac bush scraped against our bedroom window. The trailer rattled and felt, for a moment, like it would come off its foundation. Beside me, Marty slept, one arm flung up as though he were shielding his eyes. He breathed regularly, which made me happy; I’d watched so many patients die. The helplessness of my job ate away at me, more than the hours or the shitty way doctors treated us. I put my head on Marty’s chest, stroked his belly. He was turning sixty in a year, but he still felt solid. He stirred and I hoped he would wake up, even though I knew that was selfish of me, this desire for company in the night.
The thunder flashed, and I thought about the kitten. He was probably scared. I got up to check on him, padded barefoot down the hall, and switched on the light above the stove. When I picked him up, his body was limp and warm, and he opened his eyes halfway. I could feel his tiny ribs, see his fur vibrate with his heartbeat. He began to purr. I cupped him to me and rubbed my nose in his fur, which smelled milky and sweet.
I felt my dad standing there, in the living room. In the dark, he looked like he used to, before so much of our lives had happened and been ruined.
He stepped toward me. “Excuse me, nurse,” he said. “I’d like to see my wife and baby now.”
“Not now, Dad,” I said. I wasn’t in the mood to humor him.
“Dad?” he said, breaking into a smile. “I guess I am. Now isn’t that the grandest thing?”
On the way to the farm I’d grown up on, the houses thinned, and the lawns gave way to fields whose color depended on what was planted. I always thought the contrasting squares looked like the quilts my mom and aunts used to make. Dad craned his head the whole time to inspect the corn and beans.
“Boy, those crops sure look good!” he said. “We’ve had a lot of rain this year at the right time.” He spoke as though he had been out a lot. He formed a cup-sized circle with his fingers and thumbs. “I bet the stalks will get this big.”
His sudden good mood took me by surprise. I left the talking to my husband. I steadied the box with the kittens beside me in the backseat. I looked for landmarks. As we got closer, the scenery started to look familiar, though somehow strange, as though I’d made it up.
We turned right at the first gravel road past the curve in the highway. The dust flew for a quarter mile. Our house still stood, though the wood had weathered gray through the white paint. The line of pine trees that once served as a windbreak had huge gaps. We parked in front of the barn. We sat for a moment or two; I realized I was holding my breath.
“What are we sitting here for?” my father asked. “Time’s a wasting.”
“Sure thing, Frank,” said Marty. “Sit tight while I come around and get you.”
Dad was already opening the door. Marty took the box of kittens off my lap. “Come on,” he said, winking at me. “Time’s a wasting.”
Dad shuffled across the graveled lane, taking small steps. “Whose farm is this?” he asked.
“It’s yours,” said Marty.
“Mine?” He pointed a thumb to his chest. “I don’t believe it.”
I remember all the buildings being painted, and the weeds trimmed. The chicken house sagged as if under the weight of a million winters now, and so much of its tiled roof was missing that it looked gap-toothed. The red paint on the barn made it seem rustic, the kind of relic someone would tear down and sell pieces of wood from for a few bucks in an antique store. Dad saw all this, too, took it in somehow. I heard him muttering that the weeds needed trimming and the barn could use a paint job. “Phyllis,” he said, turning to me and fixing me with a grim look. “You’ve got a lot of work to catch up on.”
I don’t know what made him come and go like that, how one moment he would be gone, time-traveling decades into the past until he thought I was his little sister Suzy or his newlywed wife, then the next minute, without warning, he would reappear, pop back into our time and act as though nothing had happened. I knew that at some point he wouldn’t reappear.
So I said yes, didn’t we have a lot to do.
“Your mother would like that,” he said. He looked awkward for a moment, as though he was considering giving me a hug or a kiss, but had thought better of it.
The kittens were meowing and scratching at the box so Marty tipped it over. I sat on the lawn and watched them crawl out. We couldn’t catch the mama cat, but the rest were old enough to be weaned and would probably do okay. As they darted among the dandelions, my dad walked to the barn and opened the door to the creamery.
“Here kitty, kitty,” he crooned. “Here, kitty!”
And they came, pausing at the edge of the steps but clearly drawn by the smell of long-ago vats of fresh milk and the traces of rats and barn swallows and generations of cats, the musky aroma of sheep, the crisp stench of cows, the ammonia of pig piss, and the sweetness of alfalfa hay—all the life that still lingered here. The kittens stepped into the doorway and were gone, then popped outside again, and we three watched them play for a long while, until the afternoon faded and it was time to return home.
———
This short story was shortlisted for the 2013 Bellevue Literary Prize, judged by Jane Smiley, and published in the April 2013 issue of the Bellevue Literary Review. It was inspired by my father, Eldon Rohlk, who had Alzheimer’s Disease and was a farmer in Iowa. The final scene, where the main character and her husband drive her father back to the farm, has actual dialogue from a similar trip, although no kittens were involved.
