Spring arrives finally, completely. The sycamore trees reach out into the air, and a constant breeze sweeps through the city, tickling the tiny buds that unfold like hands relieved of pain. A bright sun coats everything in a thin layer of honey-colored warmth.
Cohen stands beside the bed of his father. Calvin is dead, his death declared accidental. Only Cohen’s mother was in the room with him when he died, and afterward she finally agreed to eat, walking to the cafeteria with Ava and Thatcher, still humming hymns to herself.
Cohen stares down at his father’s body. A shiver of sadness passes through him, and for a moment he feels unbelievably cold. A nurse comes in, asks him to sign a few things.
“Do you mind if I wash my father’s body?” he asks suddenly, and the words surprise him nearly as much as they surprise the nurse.
“No,” she says. “I don’t mind.”
“Do you have a container I can put some hot water in?”
She returns with a small white bucket, and the water in it steams. She backs out of the room, closing the door, and everything goes quiet.
Cohen begins with his father’s head, gently wiping the stubble that has formed during the week. It is rough and coarse, like a short-bristle brush. It springs back after the cloth passes, spraying a fine mist.
He moves down to his father’s face, sliding the cloth in the hollows of his eyes, the dimple under his nose, the roundness of his chin. Calvin’s jaw is stiff and unyielding, and this more than anything breaks Cohen’s heart. He’s crying now, the tears washing his own cheeks, dripping from his own nose, gathering under his own chin.
He peels back the sheets and undresses his father as if he’s a child, untying the gown and pulling it gently off his arms, stripping it away. The cloth has grown cold again, and he dips it in the hot water, the steam rising. Cohen washes his father’s body slowly, wondering what a father-and-son relationship would be like if the son would wash his father while he was still alive. Would they love each other more? Would that kind of a washing break down the usual barriers? Would a different kind of life, a different kind of knowing, push up through the rubble? Washing his father, he feels like he knows him in a way he never knew him before. He feels a kind of tenderness toward this old body.
Cohen washes his father’s feet, remembering the stories from his childhood, stories told to him by Miss Flynne about the time Jesus washed his disciples’ feet. The flannel-board Jesus wearing only a kind of loose-fitting toga over one shoulder, bent at the knee over a stone bowl, his disciples looking on in astonishment. The shock! The impropriety!
His mother comes into the hospital room, but Cohen doesn’t look up, doesn’t say anything, and for once he feels no judgment from her—only a kind of curiosity. She watches as he finishes, saving his father’s arms and hands for last.
His father’s hands. The same hands that wore a baseball glove and threw the ball to him over and over, back and forth, under a blue sky. Now so old. So utterly and completely finished. Cohen gently moves the hot cloth through his father’s fingers. They, too, are already stiffening.
Cohen puts the cloth back in the white bucket. He covers his father’s naked body with the white bedsheet and takes a step back from the bed as if to survey his work.
This is it, he thinks.
His mother comes around the bed and stands beside him. They remain there together like two pillars, and Cohen doesn’t want to leave. His mother reaches over, takes his hand with both of hers, and turns toward him. When he doesn’t look at her, she puts her forehead on his shoulder and cries.