Said

I fed my father what as it turned out the future would call his last meal (tho at the time neither he nor I was required to think it that exactly)— ground chourico & chopped green pepper open-faced on a burger bun, french fries, a cupcake with icing almost chocolate in flavor—alarming, a departure from his diet of low-sodium, zeroed-out trans fats & sugar-free vegetables with high fiber- scores, suffering as he had been for years from barbarian cholesterol & geriatric diabetes (the nurse shrugged simply & said "why not?"— meaning of course that we should get it, all of us, he was going to die, and soon). A few loose chitters of ground sausage fell onto his johnnie from the fork I lifted to his mouth—they left tiny, paprika-red dots of oil on the sheer cotton, prussic red, corpuscle red like the small scabs my sister and I had left on his face while helping him shave the day before. A week earlier I had visited him at home; the day an unusually warm day in a March unusually cold. He was telling me how he'd gone out into the yard to get some sun only to return minutes later to the house, the wind far too strong— he said he worried that if the wind took his hat from his head, he might die while chasing it. I made a joke—forced to, I thought—chasing a hat, I said, that might be a better death than most, I said maybe the death certificate would read "killed by the wind." He laughed all right. You know, he said, you've really got a lousy sense of humor. Better than nothing, I guess—(did he say that, or did I think it?). Later he said . . . he'd said earlier . . . then I said . . . he said . . . I said . . . I said . . . I said . . . Say now that this might be all that's left for consolation, this might be love at the end, the confidences exchanged— all these pratfalls, & this skin chapped by a blade, and your willing servant's shaky hands, then a short trip to be washed a last, finally blameless time (so the scriptures say) in the blood of the lamb: a smell like the smell of sweetgrass burning crosswise the length of a dry plain and sent by a wind whose swiftness has in it the bright voices of kindergarteners, children born of a hardship town.