The Nights I Never Told Them About

The hospital

I woke on a gurney under a light so bright it hurt, with a plastic bracelet on my arm and a cold bag of fluid running into the back of my hand.

My wife was sitting by the bed in her coat, over her nightgown, with her church shoes on and no socks. Her purse was in her lap, both hands on the clasp. Brent stood at the foot of the bed with his back against the wall and his arms folded, and he wouldn’t look at me. On the chair beside her, in a clear plastic bag the nurse had handed over, sat my white rubber boots, my smock, and my hairnet.

She had been looking at the hairnet.

“Hello, Lyle,” she said.

“Darlene,” I said. My mouth was dry as a bale. “I can explain.”

“I expect you can,” she said, quietly. “But the doctor first.”

The doctor was a young woman, thirty at most, with tired eyes. She said I had passed out from exhaustion and dehydration, that my sodium was low and my blood pressure was all over the map.

“Mr. Kincaid, how long have you been doing this?”

“Two years,” I said.

Nobody in the room moved.

“Two years,” she said. “You are very lucky it was a cold room and a soft fall and a man beside you who knew what he was looking at. If you had been driving…”

She didn’t finish. She didn’t need to. All three of us had thought of the same ditch.

I looked at the plastic bag, and I looked at my wife. And then, because there was nothing else left to do, I told her. I told her about Hal and the two dry summers and the cows I sold. I told her about the workout paper and the thirty-first of October and the number. I told her there was no Gene Dobbs. I told her about the post office box and the taxes she’d signed without reading. I told her about my father, and my mother, and the newspaper. It took a long time, and nobody said a word until I was done.

Brent spoke first, very low. “The Saturday in June. The gate.”

“I’m sorry, son. I’d been up thirty hours.”

“I thought you’d decided I wasn’t any use to you.” His voice wasn’t steady. “I told Jess, I think Dad’s done with me.”

“I was never done with you.”

“I know that now,” he said, and he finally came and stood by the bed.

Darlene hadn’t spoken. She put her purse on the floor. She took my right hand off the blanket, turned it over in both of hers, and looked at my knuckles. They were split and red and scarred white where the cracks had healed over. Two fingers had gone a little crooked from the cold.

“These are not cattle hands,” she said.

“No.”

“I knew they weren’t. I told myself a hundred times that cattle trailers could do that to a man.” She was running her thumb over the scar on my second knuckle. “Do you know what I thought, Lyle? I thought you were dying.”

I stared at her.

“I thought you had a sickness and weren’t telling me. The heart, or the other thing, the one that took your uncle Walt. I went to the library in Neosho in February and read about it. I looked up what a man does when he’s dying and doesn’t want his wife to know.” Her voice broke, just a little. “I have been planning your funeral for eight months. I picked the hymns.”