I keep my eye on the white Ford as it turns from the highway onto Main Street, then drives slowly, block by block, siren blaring. Pop and I have rushed down from the rims and cut through the back alleys toward the flashing lights. The people of Petroleum—the busy, the unemployed, the curious—come out of their homes and businesses, caps pulled down over their faces. A cramp forms beneath my ribs, and Pop is breathing too hard.
Pete turns onto Crooked Hill Road, and many are now walking behind his truck, shielding their faces from the dust. Something big is happening and they want to be part of it. Some of the ranchers have also followed the noise, driving pickups and tractors down the highway and back into town. I don’t know why we’re running, only that it feels as if we must.
“I think he’s going to our house,” I say.
We take the quickest route. I’m beginning to sweat, though I can see my breath in the cold.
Pete has pulled into our driveway, and most of the others have gathered there, too. My father and I are out of breath. Pop maneuvers between neighbors to greet his friend. They talk privately for a moment and then Pete opens the back of his truck. My father, still winded, takes over, sliding the draped body out. Every face in the crowd is solemn, stoic.
“God bless Albert Purvis,” Pete says to those assembled, and the men take off their hats and hold them to their chests.
I look at the bowed heads, still trying to slow my breath. I touch the white sheet. The man on the Wall of Heroes. The man who let a fourteen-year-old boy hang in a harness for hours.
My father and Pete carry Mr. Purvis down to the basement, and I follow. The way they keep the sheet from slipping off, the way Pete gently puts his hand on the old man’s shoulder as they set him on the metal table, says what they think of him.
I slip on a plastic apron, grab latex gloves from a box. Slowly I pull back the sheet, revealing hair that is thin and coarse, a color neither brown nor gray; eyelids opening like faulty shades; cracked lips set in a relaxed frown. This body, still dressed in the hospital gown that I will mail back, has held all his prominence and all his secrets. In the end, he is not a hero so much as a man. It is the case with all who come here—flawed, vulnerable, human when they hoped to be so much more.
I fold the sheet down only as far as his collarbone. That’s enough when I have company. And even this may be too much for Pete before I’ve done my work. But it is the scar on Mr. Purvis’s cheek that he and Pop need to see—a bluish-white indentation left by that ember from the Great Rimrock Fire. A final reminder of his sacrifice and their shame.
Pete looks more at the sheet than the man, his weight resting on the stronger leg, his hands retreating to his pockets. Soon, Pop leaves, then returns with a large plastic bag containing Mr. Purvis’s glasses, a photo, and a neatly folded blue suit. He puts his hand on my arm, a gesture, it seems, of warmth, of words we couldn’t find on the rims or last night.
“Take good care of him,” Pete says.
I wait until the men have gone to the kitchen, where they speak in solemn voices. I hear the sound of dishes being taken from the cupboard, the jar of pickled eggs being opened, metal tongs reaching inside.
Alone now, I remove the sheet. Mr. Purvis is yellow and dry like crepe paper, purple veins running beneath his sharp shoulders and hips. The white hair on his chest is sparse, his belly distended, eyes yellow where they ought to be white, milky where they ought to be brown. I close them gently with my thumb, but slowly they open again as if he’s curious to see what happens next.
I sit with him for some time, just holding his hand.
Mr. Purvis was the oldest resident of Petroleum. Though he was not much of a talker, he could, if pressed, tell you about the earliest homesteaders in this area. He could tell you what it was like when there was a bank and a filling station. He could tell you about shooting wolves back when the law still allowed it. He was the last of a generation, and now there is a sense that the town is turning over to a new era—if it survives—in which its people did not build the homes they live in and do not remember the reason their families sought out this untamed land in the first place.
My fingers trace his small, dry veins. The backs of his arms are mottled with spots and gristly nubs. I smooth my thumb over his wrist as if releasing the sting of the hospital’s needles and tubes. The palms of his hands are blotchy, bruises under his nails. I untie and remove the hospital gown. My eye goes to the liver, bulging, as I expected, under the right rib cage. If I open the belly, I know I’ll find walls of scar tissue and the hard liver, covered with what look like Rice Krispies.
I flick a switch and the machine chugs and pulses in the background while I run a wet sponge over the loose skin of his arm, the discoloration on the back of his hand from the hospital IV. I bathe his concave chest and his tight, pregnantlike middle. By the time of his viewing, when he is dressed in the blue suit his family supplied, there will be no more sunken eyes and cheeks, no trace of jaundice or the sores from his intense itching, his cirrhosis a secret between his widow, his doctor, and now me.
I turn off the machines, and when they have quieted, I study the photograph. In it, Mr. Purvis holds a true whopper of a fish. Pop would know what kind. I study his smile—mouth closed, laugh lines on the outer corners of his eyes and something about his mouth looks as if he’s holding in a joke. I’m determined to capture this happiness, as I pull the wax string tighter, then pad his mouth with bits of cotton to get the expression right. I will make him the man his wife wants the town to remember, going back and forth with the photo, adjusting the cotton and the tension in the string until I can almost see a smirk.
Finished with Mr. Purvis for now, I wheel him into the fridge, then wash my hands and start a load of wash. I find my father and Pete at the kitchen table. They have eaten a good number of eggs, one still on my father’s plate, drips of pickling juice speckled across the table. They had been talking rather intensely as I came up the stairs; I know by the sudden hush that my father has already told Pete about our talk on the rimrocks.
“He’s looking better,” I say and sit with them at the table.
There is no sound, except for the scrape of the chair leg against the linoleum tile as I pull my seat closer. And then the sound of the chair leg scraping again after, realizing I feel too close to the table, I move myself back. Pete sweeps crumbs into his hand and claps them onto his plate. Finally we sit still—the last egg uneaten, the last word unsaid.