Noah Larsson lay in bed. An empty water glass on the bedside table. His reading glasses resting on his copy of McCoullough’s The American Spirit. The curtains are drawn closed but still the white afternoon light and heat penetrate the room.
August had been oppressive. Not under one hundred for eight days. Nineties each night.
When he awoke earlier, he’d turned on his side to get up. He needed to go to the bathroom and down to the kitchen for something to eat. He could not. He had not even the strength to move his legs over the edge or shift the weight off his bad shoulder.
The bed was the one in which his father had been born; in the house his great-great grandfather had built, in the town in which he’d cut stone from the steep, deep sides of the granite quarries.
Larsson had been a Navy man, joining right out of high school, flying crew in east coast patrol bombers.
After he was discharged, he met Margret. Two months later, they sailed from New York to Gothenburg on the Drottninghol. They took a bus to Stockholm to meet her parents. They stayed a week, returning to Boston, to take whatever jobs they could find. They were happy. They had a daughter, Ulla.
He started an accounting business he’d kept for fifty years, moonlighting selling insurance for a company in Hartford. He never took out a policy of his own. With his clients, he never spoke about illness, infirmity, or death. Just what was the right thing to do.
Margret died young. There was not a day he did not mourn for her. He raised Ulla until she married and left home. For fifty years he kept the old house. And when Ulla, too, died young, he mourned doubly each day.
He paid his bills on time, read books by Goodwin, Tuchman, and Mantel, remembering each one as they sat in rows on his bookshelves. He kept the Saab they’d shipped home from Stockholm in good running order.
He saved every nickel, owed not a penny, trusted few people, and had fewer friends. He was kind, quiet, and thoughtful to a fault. He sent birthday, holiday, anniversary, and thank-you cards. Mailed fruit boxes from Florida each Christmas to close family. Late in life he found companionship with a woman close to his age whose quiet good humor and cooking he enjoyed.
He never spoke ill of another soul. He kept a tidy home and scrupulous records. Lit a light only when he needed one, shutting it off when he didn’t. He wrote reminder notes to himself. He paid attention to the details. When he could no longer cook, he made toaster waffles and warmed Swanson’s dinners in the microwave. When he could no longer play, he watched golf on TV every Sunday.
One afternoon, he slipped on ice on the back stairs carrying the trash out. He broke his shoulder, bruised his forehead, and lay on the ice in the cold till a neighbor saw the kitchen light on at a quarter-past eight. When the ambulance came, he told them to go away. He thanked the neighbor and told the police officer he would not be taken from his home against his will and never would.
Trust one’s own counsel, keep one’s affairs in order, plan well and prepare for adversity, ask for no favors, offer kindness and accept kindness with grace . That’s all one need do.
He’d handwritten his will, leaving the house to his son-in-law. He had files and note cards for everything, catalogued photographs in boxes of envelopes by month and year, with names, places, and dates on the backs of each one. There were none of himself save for a single newspaper clipping of him at a table at the Swedish Lodge Julfest in town with a plate of Nisu bread, pickled herring, a cup of hot coffee in front of him, and a smile on his face. He found comfort in solitude as well as community.
Later in the blistering August afternoon, Noah’s son-in-law and his new wife came to check on him and found him in bed with the door and windows closed and the air conditioner off.
“Oh my God, Noah,” he said. “It’s like an oven in here. It must be a hundred.”
“Noah? Can you get up?” said the woman, “Open a window and put the A/C on.”
“Don’t you turn it on!” Noah said. “It’s old and it won’t last if you run it too hard.”
“Noah it’s so damn hot in here, you won’t last as long as the A/C if you don’t let us turn it on.”
They managed him out of the bed, to the bathroom and down on the stair-chair to the kitchen. He drank a glass of orange juice, ate an egg, toast, and a cup of coffee. He thanked them and asked them to help him move to the couch in the living room where he could rest, which they did and where he fell quickly asleep.
When they returned and tried towaken him the next morning, they called the police. The ambulance came. From the couch, in a weakened, near inaudible voice, he said, raising his head, “I know my rights. I have authorized no healthcare proxy and no power of attorney. I speak for myself. You can’t make me leave my own house! I refuse any treatment, to be placed on a gurney, or to be taken to the hospital or anywhere else. I need rest. Leave me and do not come back under any circumstances.”
They did as he asked.
He lay his head back on the pillow, closed his eyes. The afternoon was waning.
When he was younger, he had smoked a pipe, as had his father. His grandfather’s meerschaum. He imagined himself now filling the bowl with fresh tobacco from a leather pouch, tamping down the soft, thin aromatic ribbons with his finger and putting a match to them, drawing in the warm soothing sweet savory smoke into his mouth and deep into his soul.
His bones and muscles relaxed to nothingness. Gone was the sensation of lying on the couch. Intermittent light and shade through the window drift over him as at the beach when thin cirrus clouds pass slowly across the sky. Moments of cooling shade alternating with warming rays of sun. His mind finds rest, carelessly floating on a calming sea before slipping beneath it into a long dreamless sleep.
The Catfish Review 