“Nod if you’re ready to breathe on your own,” I say. There’s sweat on Darwin’s forehead. I hope it’s the heat and not fever. I shouldn’t have warmed up the food. I remove the tube slowly from his throat. I’m getting better at it. The canker sores are still inside his lips. It’s strange being so close to his face, right near the patch on his eye. I wonder why they covered it.
“I think your eye should have some air,” I say.
I pull the tapes off slowly, they leave flat places in the creases on his temple. The eye is worse than I remember, blighted and swollen, there’s pus in the corners. I’m not sure I can look at it and feed him applesauce. I tape it back. “It’s fine,” I say. He knows that it isn’t.
“Apple custard,” I say. “Custard” sounds better than “sauce.” I guide a spoonful to his mouth, put the tip inside. “I warmed it, but it’s not hot.” It goes down better than before, even though I can’t see him swallow. I wonder if he’s hungry.
He pushes his hand against my pants. I look at his face but his fingers keep jostling, his head doesn’t move. He’s making shapes on the sheets, trying to draw something, but his hands are big, they get in the way. I kneel beside him so I can see; he’s tracing letters.
An “F” then an “A,” an “R,” and an “M.” It takes such an effort; his fingers go still. He’s worried about the animals.
“I’m keeping an eye on things,” I say. I can hear a calf outside, pulling at grass in the garden. He probably hears it too, thinks fences are down, cattle are out on the road. He looks up at the ceiling. His face is like a gravel road, rutted and uneven, one eye always open, unblinking like a puddle, the other always closed. Sometimes when I come into the room I think he’s dead.
I look into the empty fireplace, into the ashes of logs he chopped on nights he couldn’t sleep. I finish the applesauce from the tin, drink the rest of the milk, listen to his uneven breathing. I get up and force the window open to give him some air.
There’s music playing faintly in the dark. I look around the unlit garden. Callie and Dickie are dancing, her head to the side pressed into his low-buttoned shirt. He hops the track the wheelbarrow made. Callie’s taken off her shoes and gloves. The winter slip clings around her, against his legs; her feet are up on his, hooked through the straps on his sandals. They glide along where the cooch grass was. I smell the strange woody scent of the dark cigarette that floats in his free hand. The record crackles as it turns, Callie’s head goes upside down when he dips her. Dickie sweeps his drink up in his cigarette hand as they swoop past the steps, a swig for himself and what’s left for Callie. He tips the glass to her open face, and I remember how it was, the sweat from his chest on the silk of his shirt, the tan on the leather of his neck. They think they’re alone.
A dryness collects in my mouth. I want to say something so they’ll stop, but I just watch them. Darwin scrapes at the sheets, not just his fingers but the heels of his hands, an empty sound from his glaucous throat. He tries to rear up, to see if it’s real. The scratchy tango, the cigarette smell that wafts in the window. He wants to rise up but he can hardly move. Words are coming, from deep inside him, husky, barely audible. He sounds like a deaf person speaking. “Don’t let them dance,” he hisses.
I call out Callie’s name, down into the paddocks. They stop, sudden in the wheelbarrow tracks, still as a sculpture with the night dripping off them. Callie looks up but she can’t see me. Dickie doesn’t take his eyes from her. He places Callie’s hand back on his shoulder, glides her away into the shadows of the cypress, around the corner of the house, the pale winter slip floating through the dark like a witness.
I raise the kerosene lamp in my hand to light their faces as I walk towards them. Dickie stubs his cigarette on the sole of his sandal, drills it into the leather as if it won’t go out. He looks like he’s been interrupted. Callie’s not sure how close to stand, she smiles but doesn’t speak. Her hair is wet, her feet are bare, the slip is damp and askew. Her cheeks are red from drinking.
“We were only dancing,” she says.
“Come inside,” I tell her. Moths come down from the dark and hover about the lamp. She follows me up the path, walks down the hall behind me.
“We can talk in here,” I say. I unlock the door with the key I found on Darwin’s mantelpiece. The bed looks smaller than my memory of it, the room is unlit and stuffy, shadowy in the light from the lantern, the air from all those years.
“I’m going to ask him to go back to America,” I say.
“I’d be bored if he wasn’t here.”
“Then you should go with him,” I say.
She leans against the rail of the rusted bed, scratches a bite on her arm until it bleeds. She licks her finger and smears it. She doesn’t know what she wants.
“What happens if Darwin gets better?” she asks.
Dickie’s out through the window, the gramophone under his arm. He looks beaky side-on, older in the dark on his own.
“I don’t want to stay here,” says Callie.
“Then don’t.”