The thing that to this day stands out as most remarkable is the smell: the awful gassy smell of decay. It would get in my nose and would stay long after spending only a few minutes; just enough time to pack his wood in and have the obligatory cup of tea. At first I thought it might be dead mice because sometimes I saw dead mice in traps. But then I started thinking it might be a propane leak; I told him to turn off the tank. Finally I got the odd idea that it was a body decaying under his house. Only I didn’t know who it could be, dead and stinking under his house.
I hadn’t lived in the area long; I had bought the property in the spring, gone away for all summer and came back in the autumn.
I tried to help the old man but I grew to resent him. He was always talking about suicide and playing all kinds of mind games with me to make me feel sorry for him and to feel guilty if I didn’t help him all the time. He lived in a stinking, dirty, rotten, cabin with an old, short, obese, sick, dog that would cough all the time and shit right out side the front door.
He wanted me to cut all his wood for him on my property and then haul it up to him and split it and stack it and then every day come up and pack it in to his stinking house. Now, I was at first willing to help the old sick man: until I grew to hate seeing him. His wood usage was insatiable, I realized he was using, and I lie not, about 3 cords a month! He wouldn’t ever put on a sweater; he just sat around in an 80 degree, leaky cabin all winter long, shoveling his neighbor’s wood into his stove.
He had a catheter with a bag full of pee strapped to his leg that he showed me more than once. Also he took out his partial, once, just to show me. When he would blow his nose he would talk about what was coming out of his nose. And often talked of constipation and how once a nurse had to stick a finger up him to help him shit. Sometimes, when I would come to pack his wood in he would come to the door in his underwear: briefs. God, I hated going over there.
And maybe I could have over looked everything if it wasn’t for that smell that would stay with me and make me feel like I had been permanently damaged by it. There was also the awful feeling, that a drowning man had grabbed onto me and was pulling me under.
Soon I got so I couldn’t stand to go up there. I would time my walks so that I could be pretty sure that I would not run into him on his frequent drives to the mailbox. Every time that he drove to the mailbox he would pick up my one piece of junk mail, put it into a plastic Wal-Mart sack and tie it to my gate. My gate was locked and I parked my vehicle right in front of it, the walk up to my cabin was long, steep and icy, so I was fairly sure he wouldn’t be coming up.
One day I saw him on the road. He said the doctor told him he had 6 months to a year to live. So he was going to have hydrogen peroxide injected in him to cure him of the cancer. You’d think that I would go up there and help him out….but I just couldn’t ….I just couldn’t stand to be around him.
Last time I saw him he had the catheter tube coming right out of the fly of his pants and the bag just hanging there. He said he was moving to Palm Springs.
The other day, I heard he died. I felt relief.
