The Hummingbird Read online

  Before I’d rung the bell, Cheryl opened the front door. A squat woman wearing a red dress with pink polka dots, plus purple cat’s-­eye glasses, she greeted me with a quick hug.

  “How’s everything going here this morning?”

  She looked at me over the top of her glasses. “Deborah, you are about to have your hands full.”

  “That’s nothing new,” I said.

  “You’ll see. This patient’s a prize.” She gathered her things into a giant white handbag, pecking my cheek on the way out.

  “Is the new one here yet?” a voice yelled from inside the house. “Has the latest victim arrived?”

  I glanced after Cheryl, who was climbing into her bug without a flicker of interest backward. “Good morning, Mr. Reed. I’ll be right with you.”

  “I haven’t got all day,” he bellowed. “I am dying in here, you know.”

  You sound pretty healthy to me, I thought, then stuffed it away. For many ­people, appearances of strength are the last thing they want to surrender. I followed the sound of his voice to a half-­open door, on which I knocked.

  “Dispense with the formalities, would you please?” he barked. “You’ll be wiping my bottom soon enough.”

  And just like that, I had his number. I’d dealt with tyrants before. Often they turned out to be the ones who were most frightened. Fortunately, worry is a treatable condition. I might be able to help him.

  I pushed the door open. The room smelled of old newspapers. The man on the bed had burst capillaries on his cheekbones like upside-­down tree roots. His shock of white hair stood straight up. He appeared thin but not skeletal, with the distended stomach common to liver involvement.

  Cheryl had left him propped up, a rolling tray to one side that held water and a newspaper, with a cluster of remote controls in his lap. Among them there was, I noticed, no telephone.

  “A woman,” he exclaimed, rolling his eyes. “Yet another woman.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Reed. My name—­”

  “Doctor Reed, if you please. Or Professor Reed, ideally. What are your credentials, may I inquire?”

  “Oh. Well, I’m a registered nurse with a graduate degree in social work.”

  “My, my. And your last name?”

  “Birch. Deborah Bir—­”

  “I shall call you Nurse Birch. Did you know that I have already eaten sixteen bananas today? What do you make of that?”

  For someone so sick, he certainly had spark. There was a forward set to his jaw, too, a ferocity, that made me like him. He was not going to go gently, and I admired his spirit. “I don’t know. Sixteen seems like a lot of bananas. Should I make something of it?”

  “Weak evasion, Nurse Birch. But the question,” he pointed a bony finger, “the central question is whether or not you believe me.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Whether or not you believe me? It is the only thing that matters.”

  “Then I do not believe you.”

  He folded his hands in his lap. “Your reasoning?”

  “A perfectly healthy person would have a hard time eating more than five or six. And someone of your age and intelligence would know better than to upset his stomach needlessly.” I smiled at him. “You did not eat sixteen bananas today.”

  He leveled his gaze at me. “Are you calling me a liar, Nurse Birch, you there with your smug little Cheshire Cat grin?”

  “I am calling you a tester, Professor Reed. You are testing me, and I am answering you directly and honestly. So now: How many bananas have you eaten today?”

  He peered down at his collection of remotes, stirring them absently. “I have always detested bananas. I can’t abide them. The preferred fruit of baboons, after all.”

  “Well, if I’m counting correctly then, Professor Reed, the number of bananas you did not eat today is exactly sixteen.”

  He drew himself up at that, giving me a long appraising glare. “You,” he said at last, crossing his arms on his chest. “You may take my blood pressure.”

  TO SAILORS IN WARTIME there is but one deity, and he has a single manifestation: weather.

  In July of 1588, the English navy defeated the superior Spanish Armada with the assistance of severe storms off the coast of Ireland. Weather wrecked twenty-­four of King Philip II’s mighty one-­hundred-­and-­thirty-­ship fleet, ending Spain’s reign of the oceans and establishing England as a global naval power.

  Likewise, Benedict Arnold capitalized on weather in October of 1776 to thwart the British navy on Lake Champlain. Outmanned and outgunned, Arnold sailed through a dense fog and escaped during the night. Eventually he grounded his ships, setting them ablaze to prevent the English forces from capturing even one. It is not difficult to imagine the glow of burning timbers, reflected off the water and refracted by fog, visible for miles—­a torch to alert King George III to the colonists’ determination to win themselves liberty.

  In September of 1942, for the crew aboard the I-­25 submarine off the coast of Oregon, weather stood between them and their mission as solidly as a fortress’s battlements. Weather tested their stamina. Weather called into question if they would ever make it home.

  Home. The dream of all sailors, of all times and races. The crew of the I-­25 was no exception. But these were not American seamen, patrolling U.S. waters in a defensive posture with weekend passes waiting on shore. Home for the crew of the I-­25 lay more than 4,800 miles away, in the Land of the Rising Sun.

  The sub had orders from Japan’s Imperial Naval Command to conduct a surprise assault against the United States, and the weather was not cooperating. But the ship’s leader was a patient man. Lieutenant Commander Meiji Tagami, a graduate of the prestigious naval academy in Hiroshima, had captained the submarine since it had gone into ser­vice in November of 1941. The attack his orders called for was no Pearl Harbor. Given that the purpose was to incite widespread public distress, one might call it terrorism.

  Thus far, however, the mission consisted of waiting. All that Labor Day weekend, the skies hung shrouded with clouds. Wind drove the waves to swells of ten feet or more. Rain poured relentlessly like a melancholy mood. Meanwhile the crew, ninety-­four strong—­plus one special passenger and his volatile cargo—­had a perilous task to perform. It would require surfacing in daylight. It would call for prolonged vulnerability to American defenses. It would depend entirely on that one passenger, and he not even a seaman.

  Beneath the waves an ocean is calm, without the churning that characterizes the surface. Thus there remained no point in leaving the undersea; rough waves on top would pound the sub broadside. No sailor could keep a foothold on the decks.

  Moreover, the emperor’s strategy required clear skies. While some sailors believed His Majesty Hirohito possessed divine powers, so far none had seen his commands flatten the waves. It also did not matter how skilled or courageous that special passenger might be. Without weather as an ally, the mission would fail.

  Nonetheless, the essence of the matter is this: In the autumn of 1942, the Japanese navy attacked the mainland of the United States. The plan was to set the forests of the Pacific Northwest on fire.

  The U.S. Department of War, in keeping with information-­suppression policies later propagandized as “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” prevented the populace from learning much about that mission. Today the record is public, but few Americans know what happened.

  Yet the events, and their repercussions, warrant examination now because they contain illuminating instruction about the nature of warfare and the challenge of peace. They offer useful instruction to our troubled present time. An age later, they deserve the light of day.

  CHAPTER 2

  I WISH I COULD SAY I had won him with that first exchange. But then he refused to be bathed. The remotes controlled two televisions, both of which had satellite ser­vice and video players attached, but e
verything he tried to watch that day wound up boring him. He experienced some confusion in the afternoon. And when I tried to help by offering him applesauce, he slapped the bowl across the room.

  It happened to spray on a bookshelf. It’s my job to be observant, especially on early visits, but I was just annoyed enough with the clean-­up task, it wasn’t until I finished that I focused on the actual books. The author’s name was clearly visible on spine after spine: Barclay Reed, PhD.

  I was still kneeling, paper towels in hand, and I bent closer. The publishers were all university presses, so I presumed these were scholarly works. But the titles hooked me even so:

  Dying of Thirst: The Role of Oil Supplies in the Japanese Defeat

  Lost Words: How Inaccurate Cable Translation Led to Pearl Harbor

  Begging to Surrender: Japanese Peace Overtures in Early 1945

  Wow. What a mind this man must have. What a body of knowledge. And what a contrary way of thinking.

  I straightened with a mouthful of questions, but the Professor had fallen asleep. His head lolled to the side, mouth slightly open, though one hand still clutched a remote. I stood there, watching his chest rise and fall. The moment was a pre-vision, of course, my first glimpse of how I would see him last. How small a thing a human being is, really. How brief.

  I hoped he wouldn’t fire me like he did the others. He’d won my heart already, the crusty coot.

  While he slept, I tiptoed into the kitchen. Now I had a few minutes to collect the man’s back story.

  The kitchen could have been an operating room, it was so spotless and spare. I prefer soup on the stove and bread in the oven, a rolling pin on the counter with flour stuck to it. A messy kitchen signals a full life.

  But this room’s sparseness did not feel like impoverishment. Rather, it indicated a fastidious attention to order, not unlike the manicured gardens. I opened the refrigerator: one mustard jar, half a stick of butter. Otherwise the inside was as empty as if the fridge had just arrived from the store.

  Some might call it snooping. But part of my job was to understand his wants—­and back story was essential, because things can get mighty psychological toward the end. Symbolic. The sicker a patient becomes, the less likely he is to ask for anything directly.

  I remember providing care to a farmer with advanced respiratory disease. Neil lived out in the hinterlands, and it was a whale of a commute for me. But I was glad to have his case because his family was determined to honor Neil’s desire not to die in a nursing home. They arranged a hospital bed beside the big window in the old farmhouse parlor and took turns caring for him. This family—­adults, two sons and a daughter, mom deceased though photos of her hung all through the house—­was admirable, very committed, taking time away from work and their own families to help their dad. Every time I drove out there, Neil’s pain meds were appropriate, the oxygen tank was handy or in use at low flow, and he appeared comfortable and clean. They barely needed me.

  One afternoon during a stretch of beautiful clear weather, he was in bad shape when I arrived. Fidgeting, tossing his head from side to side. The daughter was massaging her father’s hand with lotion, which he had loved as recently as the day before. Neil was not responding now, just wagging his head as if he wanted to tell the whole world: No. Whatever it was, no.

  The next day was worse. By afternoon everyone’s nerves were fraying. The family tried everything: warm compresses, Gregorian chant. After a quiet hour, Neil would start tossing again. They wanted to increase his pain medicine.

  I understood the temptation. The lungs are magnificent organs. If you laid all of their crannies out flat, they would be the size of a tennis court. However, the tissue is rich with nerves that sense oxygen deprivation acutely. Even the toughest person, if he can’t get a good breath, is going to zoom right up the anxiety scale. A good belt of lorazepam will quiet those nerves right down. But of course the oxygen debt will grow deeper anyway.

  In my experience with respiratory disease, head tossing signals agitation, not pain. When I arrived the next morning, another bluebird day, the family was in shreds. They looked exhausted and pale. The elder son said it was like having a baby cry, no matter what you did, for three straight days.

  The daughter led me to Neil. He was squirming, unable to speak, but struggling to tell us something. She started to cry. She said, “I think my father’s suffering needs to end. I think we need to increase his dose as high as it takes to ease this pain.”

  That would mean the end. Not that the morphine would kill him. But it would put him so soundly to sleep, he would not wake up to eat or drink, and that is how he would finish.

  Sometimes there is no alternative, especially with certain nasty bone cancers. But I saw Neil’s body fretting there, and I had a contrary hunch—­to lower the meds. It held some risk, of course. I might increase his suffering. But if we cranked up the meds, whatever important thing he wanted to settle would instead go undone for all eternity.

  “Let’s cut way down for a while,” I told her. “If he begins to ache, we can always bring the dose back. But we might get a lucid moment. Maybe we can find out what’s eating at him.”

  The family held a discussion out on the sun-­drenched porch. After a while they invited me out to join them.

  “Go ahead,” the daughter said. “But if he starts hurting, we call the cavalry.”

  Around noon, Neil awakened a bit and asked for his bed angle to be raised so he could see out the window. At about two, he woke again. I called everyone into the room.

  “Now, Neil, I need to ask you something,” I said, with the family circling the bed. “We can see that something is not right with you.”

  He tilted his head on the pillow, eyes fixed on me.

  “We are all ready to do our best. What is it that you need?”

  Neil raised one arm like an imitation of the Grim Reaper and pointed out the farmhouse window. “That field. Four perfect haying days in a row. That field needs mowing.”

  The younger son laughed. “Hell, dad, we’ve been a little busy, you know. Taking care of you, I mean.”

  “Never mind, damn it.” Neil threw back his covers. “I’ll do it myself.”

  And with everyone panicked, helping and fussing, Neil wrestled on his overalls and boots, then shuffled to the barn as slow as a snail. The oxygen tank’s wheels squeaked as he pulled it across the barnyard. His sons hoisted him into the tractor seat. They strapped the tank up behind him. They made him promise he would keep the rig in low gear. And by golly, Neil mowed that field all by himself.

  I watched from the porch with a mix of worry and admiration. Row by row, the grass behind the cutter bar lay down as if it were resting.

  Later, when we helped him back into bed, Neil was sunburned and dehydrated and mosquito bitten and content. At my last check, he slept quietly. I drove home that night feeling better than I had in weeks.

  When the call came at five the next morning, I knew what news Neil’s daughter would be delivering.

  “You all did a great job,” I told her. “You let him finish what he needed to finish, and on his own terms. What a loving gift.”

  I’m just a hospice worker, a temporary visitor to a patient’s inner circle. But I believe words like those carry enormous weight. They can leaven the grief of a family that has just done the truly hardest job.

  THE PROFESSOR HAD NO FAMILY, I remembered that from Central Office’s notes. But that did not mean he was without a past. I wandered into the living room, scanning for clues.

  The first noticeable thing, of course, was the glimmering lake. One wall consisted of sliding glass doors. But I examined the room before venturing outside. A wheelchair sat folded into itself in one corner. Furniture in muted colors, not looking especially inviting. Another bookshelf, the titles in Japanese characters. A gong in one corner that was bronze with a black rim, maybe four feet across
. Hanging in a little cloth pocket on the dark wood frame was a mallet with a head the size of my fist.

  I pushed the gong with one fingertip, swinging it ever so slightly. But my skin left a mark on the polished metal. I wiped it with my shirt, and as I lifted the fabric, the gong made a little sour sound. I stepped away, and the room was silent.

  There was a dining table, four chairs pushed snug as if to keep them out of the way of something. On the wall hung rows of black-­and-­white photographs. There were hooks in blank places where other photos had been, but someone had taken them down. I examined the remainders: Young Barclay in a tux, accepting some kind of award. Tall Barclay, towering amid a group of Japanese men. Sharp Barclay, standing at a podium, one finger raised, mouth open as if he was about to bite something.

  One more, at the far end, showed Barclay in Bermuda shorts, but in a formal shirt, hands on his hips and wearing an imperious expression. Facing him in a doorway stood a little Asian girl in the same pose: hands on hips, but with a sweet smile. Since the patient’s papers said he had no family, I wondered who she might be.

  I slid back one of the glass doors and stepped out onto the deck. From across the lake I could hear children laughing; school must have let out for the day. The water was gorgeous, glinting and bright. On the Professor’s deck I counted two lounge chairs, both thoroughly cobwebbed, and a grill with its cloth cover drawn down tight. I dipped my fingers into the lake. Cool. Still too early in the year to swim. As an older ­couple canoed closer along the shore, I turned back.

  I was latching the sliding door when he called out. “Nurse Birch? Nurse Birch?”

  I hurried into his room. “Are you all right?”

  He appeared completely awake. “That is a preposterous question to ask a hospice patient. Pose a better one.”

  Always on offense, this one. “Well, do you speak Japanese? I noticed some of your books.”

  The Professor held up ten fingers, wiggling one at a time. “Ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyu, ju.” He wagged his right hand. “Migi,” and his left, “hidari. As you can see, I am practically fluent. Now it’s my turn: Did you strike my gong?”