The Wedding Suit I Wore to the Hospital

Waiting

When I got to the maternity floor, they would not let me back right away. The baby had come five weeks early, and they had taken him down the hall to the special care nursery to watch his sugar and his temperature.

So I sat in the waiting room for three hours with a television playing a cooking show nobody watched. I read a farm magazine from last summer twice. I called my neighbor Dale and asked him to check my heifers at ten and two.

“I got it,” Dale said. “You go be a grandpa.”

Around six, Ben came out to find me. He looked like he had been up for two days, which he had. Ashley’s water broke Tuesday night and the labor went the long way.

“He’s in the room now,” Ben said. “They brought him back. He’s little, Dad. Five pounds and two ounces.”

“Is he all right?”

“They say he’s all right. They say he’s a strong one for thirty-five weeks.” He rubbed his face. “Come on back.”

So I followed him down the hall, and I got as far as that doorway, and you know the rest of that part.

The Hallway

The door had not even finished closing when it opened again behind me. It was the nurse, Pat. She caught up with me by the drinking fountain.

“Mr. Kessler,” she said. “Hold on. There’s a sink right in the room. I can get you a gown to go over your clothes. Lots of grandpas come straight from work.”

She meant it kindly. I could tell she had done this for a lot of years and had seen a lot of families say a lot of things in doorways.

“I appreciate that,” I said. “I do. But I’d rather go home and come back right.”

“It’s forty miles,” she said. She must have seen the address on something. “Each way.”

“Yes, ma’am. I know the road.”

She looked at my coat. It had manure on the cuff and a little dried blood on the left sleeve from a heifer I had helped that morning before daylight. It had baling twine in one pocket and a pair of fencing pliers in the other.

“I’m not going in there smelling like the sale barn,” I said. “Not the first time. He only gets one first time.”

Pat took her glasses off and let them hang on the chain. “Visiting goes till nine thirty,” she said. “For you, I’ll pretend I can’t read a clock.”

The Road Home

I drove north on 83 with the empty trailer rattling behind me and the heater running and the radio off. The sun was getting low over the hills and the ditches still had old snow in them, gray and crusted.

I want to be honest about what I was feeling, because I have told this story a few times since and people always want me to say I was angry.

I was not angry. I was ashamed.

Not of the cattle. I have never been ashamed of the cattle. Those cows put Ben through college and paid for his wedding and kept the lights on through the drought of 2012, when half the ranches around us sold down to nothing.

I was ashamed because I had not thought of it. Joanne would have thought of it. She would have met me in the hospital parking lot with a clean shirt on a hanger and said, “Walter, for heaven’s sake.”

For forty-four years I had a wife who thought of things like that. For three years I have been a man who forgets to buy coffee filters and uses a paper towel.

So I drove, and I talked to her a little, the way I do in the pickup when nobody can hear me.

“He’s here, Jo,” I said. “Five pounds, two ounces. I haven’t seen him yet. I went in looking like a hired hand.”

The hills didn’t answer. They never do. But the sun went down red behind them, and she always liked a red one.