The Valve
On the sixth of October my doctor in Norland sent me to a cardiologist at the heart hospital in Evansville, because he did not like what he heard when he put his stethoscope on me. I had been short of breath on the walk to the post since August. I had told myself it was my age. It was my age. It was also my aortic valve.
The cardiologist was a young woman with a gentle voice who drew me a picture on a pad of paper. The valve was narrowed to a fraction of what it ought to be. She said I was in a risky place to be, and she said it plainly because I asked her to. Left alone, she told me, a man in my condition has a year or two. Replaced, a man in my condition may have ten.
They set the surgery for Thursday the third of December.
I drove home from Evansville with the radio off. I called my daughter Jolene in Indianapolis from the driveway and told her, and she cried and said she was driving down, and I said not yet. I walked out to the shed and sat on an overturned bucket. And I thought, as clearly as I have ever thought anything: this is the end of my business with that bell.
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
Winifred Stroud had spent eighteen months of her life carrying one man to his grave. I had watched every day of it. I had seen her hands. And I was going to walk across a pasture and ask her to start in on another. I was going to ask her to sit in a waiting room in Evansville and then a kitchen chair beside a recliner, for a man who had at best a few good years and at worst a few good months, and who would be, whatever he said, a man she would have to bury.
I had no right.
I told myself that every afternoon for nearly a month. I kept ringing the bell, because I did not know how to stop without it meaning something. And on Friday the sixth of November, which was the thousandth afternoon, I made my tally on the pump house door. It occurred to me that a thousand was a decent, round, respectable number to stop on. I could take the bell down on Saturday. I could tell myself I had rung it for a thousand afternoons and that it was enough. And a woman at a sink who had moved a curtain for two years and nine months would, in time, stop looking at the window.
I want to be honest about what that was. It was not generosity. It was a man looking for a reason to quit before he got turned down.