CATE KENNEDY
Flexion
He misjudged the bank of the dam, people said, when they heard Frank Slovak had overturned his tractor onto himself. Not dead, they said, but might as well be. Caught him straight across his spine. Turning at the embankment, some loose earth, must have been looking the other way, and bang, look what happens.
His wife found him, they went on, pausing to let their listener visualize this, a nightmare they’d all had: hearing the faint throb of the tractor engine changing as it rolled, either roaring or cutting out; or else you’d be hanging out the washing, maybe, and look up to see it in the distance already on its side, metal glinting, upturned rake tines like fangs. Everyone had imagined, at some time, making that crazed run across the paddocks, faint with dread, the air sickeningly still over your head like the eye of a storm. Pounding through dust and weeds in that unearthly silence, steeling yourself for what you’re going to find.
Yeah, his wife, they said finally, nodding. The quiet one.
Frank’s wife notices the dust floating like a heat mirage as she drives up the track with the weekly shopping. She stares blankly at the silhouette on the horizon for what seems like a long time before she realizes it’s the huge rear wheel of the tractor she’s looking at, the vehicle tipped upside down like an abandoned toy. As she runs, she kicks off her slippery town shoes and feels dry furrowed earth rising and falling and crumbling under her bare feet all the way to where he’s lying.
“Frank.”
Eyes rolling back to her. Collar torn off the shirt she’d just ironed the night before and glass strewn around him like crushed ice.
“Turn it off.” His voice like a bad phone connection, between locked teeth.
Shaking hand into the upside-down cabin, in and around the buckled steering wheel. Then turning the key, sliding out the familiar clinking weight of the set into her hand. Post office box key, car, tractor, truck, padlock for fences. They’re hot from hanging in the sun. Stunned and slow, she can smell diesel dripping from the tank cap. What is he saying to her now?
“Phone.”
She instantly remembers the mobile phone where she’s left it on the passenger seat of the car. It’s not till she blurts this, tells him she’s running back to phone the ambulance now, and sees him swallow and close his eyes instead of shouting at her, that she realizes just how bad it must be. Sees too, as she pulls his shirt up to shade his eyes, that every emotion he’s withheld from her for the last eighteen years, every flinch and grimace and jerk of the eyebrows and lips, is boiling and writhing across his face now. It’s as if the locked strongbox inside has burst open and everything in there is rippling free and surging to the surface, desperately making its escape. By the time she’s run home, phoned for help, and returned—seven minutes there and eight and a half minutes back—the spasms have stopped and he’s lying there with his face as empty as a gaping envelope, eyes closed, doggedly sucking air in and out.
You wouldn’t believe it, people say when they hear the news. What caught him, what hurt him most, was the bloody roll bar. The safety bar that’s meant to protect you. Tell that to the Occupational Health and Safety dickheads. Some say he’s crushed his pelvis, some say he’s going to be a quad, but whatever it is, he’s fucked now. You don’t bounce back from that. And Frank Slovak, who’s a glutton for work and always has been, who’s got a temper like a rabid dog and a wife who wouldn’t say boo, he’s up in the hospital now with tubes coming out of him and they reckon the next forty-eight hours are crucial. No, it’s a week now. A fortnight. He must have fractured his . . . what is it? The vertebrae. The nerves. The man can’t feel a thing.
Frank’s wife feels sympathetic eyes behind her as she wheels a trolley round the supermarket, women on the verge of saying something, but thinking better of it, anxious not to be seen as nosy. After almost twenty years of near invisibility, the accident gives her an odd kind of glamour. There are casseroles wrapped in foil left at the front door, anonymous gifts of jam and cake and soap. It’s like flowers at a funeral, she thinks, a gracious gesture that comes too late, sympathy delivered once you’re already dead and buried. And all for Frank, she thinks with bitterness. Frank who’d rather cut off his hand than be beholden to anyone, who’s never put himself out for any of these people, never done them a single spontaneous good turn. Frank who liked his privacy to the point of glowering, hostile secrecy.
The year she’d lost the baby, he’d driven her home from the hospital—the big hospital, half an hour away, so that not even the local nurses would know—and told her, looking straight ahead through the windscreen, “We’re putting this behind us.”
No jars of jam then, no lavender soap, not a word spoken or confided, until she felt she might go mad with the denial of it. They put it behind them, all right. They harnessed themselves to it, dragged it like a black deadweight at their backs. And not a neighbor in sight, then, to drop by with a crumb of pity or a listening ear. Frank had decided that nobody was to know.
She puts the casseroles in the freezer for when she might need them more, and eats at the hospital, and as she sits in the visitors’ lounge at the Formica table in the air-conditioning, she catches herself almost reveling in the luxury of eating a meal that someone else has cooked. It’s almost like being on holiday, the way they bring you a form like a menu to fill out, and come round with the trolley asking if you want tea or coffee.
There’s nothing to do but wait, they tell her. Absolving her. Then Frank, grayer and gaunter by the day, contracts pneumonia. Sitting next to him in the afternoons, dozing fitfully and reading through old magazines, she listens to the labored gurgle as he fights for breath even while he sleeps.
It must be like drowning, she thinks as she listens. Just going under, slowly losing oxygen, into blackness. Like wading into the dam; the deeper you go, the colder it gets. Something you’d almost welcome. She’s shocked to acknowledge how resigned she feels to this, how it almost seems their best option, considering what prognosis the doctors give at first. She imagines herself telling people after church: “Well, you know Frank. He wouldn’t have wanted to live that way. It’s for the best, really.” She thinks about serving those casseroles after the funeral, just something simple at the hall next to the church, something the auxiliary could help her organize. I’m forty-five, she tells herself with tentative amazement as she drives herself home. That’s not old. Lots of women in those magazines are forty-five, and they’re all getting on with life.
At the farm someone comes without being asked and puts chains on the tractor and pulls it upright and tows it into town for repairs, and someone else, quietly and without fuss, loads the yearling lambs onto their truck and takes them off to the market for her.
Let him go, she imagines herself saying should Frank deteriorate and the hospital staff offer intubation. It’s what he would have wanted. It startles her, this shift of being able to refer to him so readily in the past tense, a smooth, logical transition like changing gears.
But Frank doggedly beats off pneumonia, and the doctors start to say things are stabilizing and there might yet be a partial recovery after all, some limited movement, it’s hard to say, and she sits composing her face into relief and optimism while inside, truth be known, she feels cheated. Cheated as she watches Frank lifting a spoon to his face, scowling with a kind of ferocious, vindictive resolve, like he’s going to hit someone. Relearning it all like an automaton, determined to heave himself back.
“I’m not going to be a burden on anyone, is that clear?” he mutters to her when the physiotherapists finally leave them alone for the afternoon. And knocks her hand away, as she goes to wipe some gravy off his chin.
That’s Frank all over. Can’t hold a fork, but can still find a way to smack her out of the way.
It’s easier to nod and agree, to pretend to take his advice about what she should be doing about the farm work. Nearly two months pass, and she expects any day that one of these rehabilitation workers is going to read him the riot act and tell him he’s mad to think he’s going to return to the farm, and this anticipation, this certainty, fills her with suppressed, patient hope.
Maybe he’ll survive, maybe he’s not going to be in a hospital the rest of his life, but the argument’s over; they’ll have to move now, in any case, into town. A little unit or bungalow. Something new, with no steps anywhere because of the wheelchair. She’ll be able to walk into town every day to shop for whatever she needs, and there’ll probably have to be home help which would give her breaks—it would be understood that she’d need breaks—they even give her the pamphlets explaining what she’ll be entitled to.
She might even get a carer’s pension, on top of the insurance and what they get for the farm. A new car, maybe, with one of those hoists.
This daydreaming is halted the day Frank hauls himself up onto the machinery at the physiotherapy unit, growling like an animal and swearing a blue streak, his eyes popping with the strain, and as she watches in incredulous despair his left leg jerks itself out and wavers hesitantly above the rubber flooring, like someone learning to dance.
And while the therapist shakes her head in admiration, the doctors confer over his X rays, making up new explanations for her, saying, “He’s recovered a great deal more function than we first anticipated, it’s great news,” and all the time she’s standing there nodding like a doll, hating him so much she can’t trust herself to open her mouth.
That afternoon when she goes home the plumber is there, the same plumber who’d quoted her something impossible last year when she’d asked how much it would cost to bring the toilet inside. Only now he and his assistant are installing a brand-new modular shower unit and sink with chrome railings, telling her it’s no trouble, anything for old Frank, we’ll have this finished in no time and get out of your way, Mrs. Slovak.
You tell him hello from Pete and Hardo, the plumber says as he leaves, and tell him Bob Wilkes says he’ll get his hay baled for him and into the shed no trouble this week, so don’t worry about a thing.
The same thing, trying to show brightness and gratitude while inside her choking rage burns like a grass fire, like gasoline.
Because now any fool can see how it’s going to be. Frank unable to sit at the desk, standing over her telling her how to do the books, ordering her round and snapping at her. In the truck beside her as she drives, sighing with contempt every time she crunches the gears, unable even to get out and open the gates for her, Frank hovering over her entire working day, badgering her and criticizing her and depending on her for everything. And her, running the gauntlet outside church and in town, having to dutifully tell everyone how lucky they’d been.
Limited mobility is actually going to suit Frank, she thinks, he’s been minimizing all his movements for years, barely turning his head to her when she speaks, sitting there stonily in the kitchen, immovable as a mountain. So now, with his back fused like he’s got a poker rammed down it, on one or two sticks or a walking frame, the doctors say, depending on how well his pelvis adapts, it will be Frank needing her to pull his legs sideways out of the bed and haul him into a sitting position and run for cushions, and there won’t need to be home help for that, they won’t qualify. The community worker will come to assess them and see how well she can cope, and Frank will tell them he doesn’t need help, thanks all the same, he’s got all the help he needs. It’s marvelous, people will say to her after church, the way God works.
“This your doing?” is all he says when he sees the bathroom. “Couldn’t wait to go behind my back?”
“Nothing to do with me. Pete Nichol did it.”
He shoots her a look. “What—just turned up and did it? That’ll be the day.”
Heaves himself forward on his frame to get a better look at the fitting around the sink, grunts derisively when he can’t find anything wrong.
“Better get ready to remortgage the place, then, for when his bill comes. Common knowledge the man charges like a wounded bull.”
“He said not to worry about it.” She tries not to make her voice sound too enthused, to give him less ammunition. It’s a skill, doing that.
“What’s through there?” He can’t jerk his head now, she notices. Just his eyes.
“The new toilet.”
“You’re bloody joking.” He shoulders past her and inches over there, crablike. He looks around the door suspiciously, then grunts again.
“Well, he’s left me in the shit now with Council, that’s all I can say. They’ll be straight onto me about having to pay for an easement. They don’t miss a trick, those bastards.”
“Frank, he said he sorted the easement. Left me the permit and papers and everything. They’re in on the desk.”
He pivots again, swearing as the wheels on the frame bang into the bath, to find her standing in front of him, waiting for his reaction. It would kill him, she thinks flatly, to show pleasure or relief or excitement. Her loathing is such a pure thing she experiences a secret visceral pleasure to watch him cornered like this, tormented by something as incomprehensible and enraging as kindness.
“So who came and dug the trench?” he snaps.
“That contractor he uses, Ian Harding, is it?”
“How much did he charge?”
“I’m telling you, they said not to worry about it.”
He actually grimaces with discomfort, muttering at her to get out of his way as he shuffles out. Bangs out the back door and down the brand-new ramp that someone from Rotary came and fitted last week, replacing the back step which had been broken for almost eleven years. At the end of the back yard, in sight of the hay shed, he stops short and stares at his neatly slashed paddocks and stacked bales. It’s then she sees what his limited mobility is costing him now; how his neck and head are forced to stay erect while his shoulders sag at a stiff helpless angle, hands clinging to the brakes of his walking frame, the whole of him fighting against the suppressed tremors that threaten to shake him free of it.
“Bob Wilkes did it,” she calls, but he doesn’t turn or respond. She imagines him giving up and toppling, curled there on the ground. She’s never seen him curled up, not even when she sat there with him in the dirt, waiting for the ambulance. He’d stayed in control then too, sprawled there, licking his lips every now and then, his eyes losing focus with something like bewilderment as he stared up into the delirious blue, something almost innocent.
“You just have to do this till I get the hang of it,” he mutters as she helps him maneuver into the shower. She ignores him, just goes on explaining.
“Now you lower yourself onto the seat using the handrails,” she says, “and back out your walker because you’re not supposed to get it wet.”
“Right. I’ll be right now.”
“Well, I’ll just stay and turn on the taps. See—they’re low, they put them there specially.”
“Be easier if I could stand up. Reach the bloody soap myself then.”
“I’ll look out for one of those soap on a rope things.”
God, the flesh is hanging off him. His knuckles are white and waxy as they cling to the handles, he’s as scared and frail as an old man. Scared to turn his head or take one hand off the rail. One misstep away from a nursing home. His hair needs a cut and she thinks she’ll do it later at the kitchen table.
“That’s better,” he says as she adjusts the hot tap. And she can hear that he’s about to say thank you, then stops and swallows. Even without the thanks, though, she thinks it’s probably the longest conversation they’ve had for months.
“Now you need to put the brake locks on this every time you pull up, understand? Don’t forget—up with the handrails, step onto the rubber mat, both hands on the walker handles, then release the brake.”
“I’m not stupid,” he snaps, but his eyes are following her every move, the pupils dilated.
She gets him dressed and into the kitchen, cuts his hair and shaves him. One of the casseroles, defrosted, with rice—he can manage that. Then she tears a page off the pad and lays it down in front of him, places the cordless phone handset next to him.
“What’s this?”
“Phone numbers. You’ve got some calls to make.” She feels a surge of courage as she says it, there on the other side of the table. She taps the list. “People to ring and thank, now you’re home.”
“Don’t bloody start that nonsense. I didn’t ask for any of those do-gooders to come around.”
“Frank,” she says. “I’m not arguing with you, I’m telling you. If you ever want another favor done, and believe me you’re going to be calling in a few, ring and let people know how much you appreciate what they’ve done for you.”
“Or what?” He looks strange, fighting to maintain an attitude of derisive scorn as he sits there in pajamas, his hair neatly combed and the muscles wasted on him after all these months on his back.
“What do you reckon?” she says, exasperated. “We go under. We sell up.”
And when he looks at her with familiar, narrow contempt she picks up the hand mirror lying there next to the scissors on the table, and a steady exhilaration pumps through her as she deliberately angles it to face him.
“Take a good look,” she says, “and get on that phone.”
In bed, already planning in her mind the tasks of the next day, she listens to the fan ticking over their heads and feels the forgotten, heavy presence of him lying beside her. She thinks about the physiotherapist at the hospital, lifting Frank’s legs and folding them against his body, turning him on his side and gently bending his arms from shoulder to hip. Flexion, she’d called it. Exercises to flex the muscles and keep the memory of limber movement alive in the body, to stop those ligaments and tendons tightening and atrophying away.
“Just like this, Mr. Slovak,” she’d said, that calm and cheerful young woman. “You can do these yourself, just keep at it,” and she’d taken Frank’s hand and made his arm describe a slow circle, then flexed the elbow to make it touch his chest. Down and back again, over and over, a gesture like a woodenly acted entreaty. “Do you want me to leave you this page of instructions on these movements, to jog your memory?”
Frank, submitting hatchet-faced to the procedure, had given his head one slow, stiff, dismissive shake.
“If I need a set of instructions to remember that,” he said tightly, “you may as well carry me out in a box right now.” The girl had just laughed indulgently at him, Frank’s wife remembers now. She must send those staff members a card and a present, thank them all for their forbearance.
She hears Frank exhale, then silence before a ragged, hiccupping intake of breath. She glances over and makes out the shape of him in the moony dimness, flat on his back and still as a tree, arms at his sides like a soldier at attention, and crying soundlessly, eyes screwed shut and face contorted like a mask. His mouth is a black hole of terror. Glinting tears leak into the furrows etched around his eyes and nose, pour down to wet his freshly barbered hair. She’s never seen this, and it’s mortifying. They’d warned her about acute pain; she wonders about getting up and giving him some tablets, but she’s so shocked all she can do is turn her head back to look up at the ceiling and spare him the shame of her scrutiny. They lie stiffly side by side.
“When you got up, to go and call the ambulance,” he says, “I thought: well, now I’ve got ten minutes. Now would be the good time to die, while you weren’t there. That’s what I could give you.”
Lying there, she has a sense of how it is, suddenly: willing your limbs to move but being unable to lift them. The terrible treasonous distance between them that must be traversed, the numbed heaviness of her arm.
But she finally reaches over and takes his hand. It’s not even like it’s his any more, the working calluses vanished into soft smoothness like a beach after a stormy receding tide. She wouldn’t recognize this hand now, especially not the way the fingers grip hers. Squeeze my hand, the therapist had said. That’s good, Mr. Slovak.
Frank’s wife lies there, feeling the pulse in her husband’s pitifully thin wrist under her little finger. She understands better than anyone, she thinks, the painful stretch of sinew, the crack of dislocation. Remembers herself running back over the paddocks, flying barefoot over stones and earth, looking down distractedly in the ambulance later to notice the dried blood on her feet. How fast she’d run, and how much faster she’d run back. Now, in the dark bed, she raises her arm with Frank’s and gently flexes both their elbows together. She places his hand wordlessly, determinedly, over his heart, and holds it there.
