The Old Farm Truck That Gave Daddy Back

The month on the porch

Daddy came home from the hospital the first week of December. He was weak, but his color was better, and the infection was cleared.

The doctors sent him home to the farm with a bag of pills and his same dialysis schedule: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, nine in the morning, thirty miles away at the center in Hereford.

The farm sits northwest of town on a county road, a mile and a quarter off the pavement.

Daddy rents the ground out now to a young man from Dawn named Jeff Raney, who farms it in wheat and milo. That year the field along our lane was in stubble, waiting on spring. Daddy still walks the field lane every day he can.

Before the hospital he drove himself to every treatment. He’d been doing it for two years.

Four hours in the chair, then home by two, a nap, then out to the barn to see what the wind had done. That was his life, and he was proud of it.

After the hospital, he needed rides. And for a man who had never once in his life asked for a ride, that December was the longest month he ever lived.

I took Mondays and Wednesdays mornings. I’d leave my house in Hereford at seven-thirty, drive out to the farm in the dark, and find him already on the porch steps in his brown canvas coat and his tan felt hat, sitting there in the cold like a man waiting on a bus.

“Daddy, it’s twenty-six degrees,” I’d say. “You can wait inside.”

“I can see the road better from out here,” he’d say. And he could.

From those steps you can see the county road coming for two miles, and the grain elevator at the crossroads past that, and the whole flat world beyond it.

Our neighbor Gene Whitaker took Fridays when he could. The county has a rural transit van that would have done it, too, but it ran on its own schedule, and Daddy would have had to be ready at six for a nine o’clock chair. He did it twice and came home gray.

Tina had Mondays to bring him home. That was her part. She showed houses in the morning, then drove down from Amarillo and picked him up at one when treatment let out. She said it was the one thing she could do.

She was late every Monday in December. Not five minutes late. Forty minutes, an hour, one time an hour and twenty.

She’d text him, but Daddy doesn’t read texts, so it didn’t matter what she texted.

I didn’t know how bad it was until the third Monday, when the dialysis nurse called me at work.

Pat

Her name was Pat Ochoa, and she had been Daddy’s nurse for two years.

She was fifty, short, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a voice that could calm a horse. Daddy thought the world of her.

“Lacey, I don’t want to stir anything up,” she said on the phone.

“But I found your dad on the bench outside at a quarter to two. In that wind. He’d been out there since one.”

“Why didn’t he wait inside?”

“He said he didn’t want to take up a chair somebody else needed. Honey, nobody needed it. He just didn’t want to be a bother.” She was quiet a second.

“He’s a proud man. You know that better than me. But he can’t be sitting in the cold after treatment. His pressure drops.”

I got in my car and drove over there on my lunch, and he was sitting in the lobby by then with a styrofoam cup of coffee Pat had bought him out of her own purse, and he looked up at me like he had been caught at something.

“Tina’s coming,” he said. “She’s just running behind.”

Tina came at two-twenty. She hugged him and apologized and said a showing ran long, and she meant it. She looked tired.

I walked them out to her new SUV, and Daddy got into the passenger side of it slow, using the handle on the ceiling, and he did not look at the dashboard one time the whole while.

I stood in the parking lot after they left. The wind was blowing grit off the feedyards east of town, and you could smell them the way you always can in Hereford in winter.

I thought: he is going to sit on those porch steps for the rest of his life, waiting on somebody.

I could not stand it. Not one more month of it.