“Well then, who created it?”

“I don’t know the answer to that. And I don’t care.”

I see that my father’s face is not as usual, that it is not agreeable (that has been its most constant expression) and not ill-humored either. It is stubborn but not challenging, simply locked into itself in an unyielding weariness. Something has shut down in him, ground to a halt.

He drives himselt to the hospital. I sit beside him with a washed-out can on my knees, ready to hold it for him if he should have to pull off the road and be sick again. He has been up all night, vomiting often. In between times he sat at the kitchen table looking at the Historical Atlas. He who has rarely been out of the province of Ontario knows about rivers in Asia and ancient boundaries in the Middle East. He knows where the deepest trench is in the ocean floor. He knows Alexander’s route, and Napoleon’s, and that the Khazars had their capital city where the Volga flows into the Caspian Sea.

He said he had a pain across his shoulders, across his back. And what he called his old enemy, his gut pain.

About eight o’clock he went upstairs to try to sleep, and Irlma and I spent the morning talking and smoking in the kitchen, hoping that he was doing that.

Irlma recalled the effect she used to have on men. It started early. A man tried to lure her off when she was watching a parade, only nine years old. And during the early years of her first marriage she found herself walking down a street in Toronto, looking for a place she’d heard about, that sold vacuum-cleaner parts. And a man, a perfect stranger, said to her, “Let me give you a piece of advice, young lady. Don’t walk around in the city with a smile like that on your face. People could take that up the wrong way.”

“I didn’t know how I was smiling. I wasn’t meaning any harm. I’d always’ve rather smiled than frowned. I was never so flabbergasted in my life. Dont walk around in the city with a smile like that on your face.” She leans back in her chair, opens her arms helplessly, laughs.

“Hot stuff,” she says. “And didn’t even know it.”

She tells me what my father has said to her. He has said that he wished that she’d always been his wife, and not my mother.

“That’s what he said. He said I was the one what would have suited him. Should’ve got me the first time.”

And that’s the truth, she says.

When my father came downstairs he said he felt better, he had slept a little and the pain was gone, or at least he thought it was going. He could try to eat something. Irlma offered a sandwich, scrambled eggs, applesauce, a cup of tea. My father tried the cup of tea, and then he vomited and kept vomiting bile.

But before he would leave for the hospital he had to take me out to the barn and show me where the hay was, how to put it down for the sheep. He and Irlma keep two dozen or so sheep. I don’t know why they do this. I don’t think they make enough money on the sheep for the work that is created to be worthwhile. Perhaps it is just reassuring to have some animals around. They have Buster of course, but he is not exactly a farm animal. The sheep provide chores, farm work still to be done, the kind of work they have known all their lives.

The sheep are still out to pasture, but the grass they get has lost some of its nourishment-there have been a couple of frosts-so they must have the hay as well.

In the car I sit beside him holding the can and we follow slowly that old, usual route-Spencer Street, Church Street, Wexford Street, Ladysmith Street-to the hospital. The town, unlike the house, stays very much the same-nobody is renovating or changing it. Nevertheless it has changed for me. I have written about it and used it up. Here are more or less the same banks and hardware and grocery stores and the barbershop and the Town Hall tower, but all their secret, plentiful messages for me have drained away.

Not for my father. He has lived here and nowhere else. He has not escaped things by such use.

Two slightly strange things happen when I take my father into the hospital. They ask me how old he is, and I say immediately, “Fifty-two,” which is the age of a man I am in love with. Then I laugh and apologize and run to the bed in the Emergency Ward where he is lying, and ask him if he is seventy-two or seventy-three. He looks at me as if the question bewilders him too. He says, “Beg your pardon?” in a formal way, to gain time, then is able to tell me, seventy-two. He is trembling slightly all over, but his chin is trembling conspicuously, just the way my mother’s did. In the short time since he has entered the hospital some abdication has taken place. He knew it would, of course-that is why he held off coming. The nurse comes to take his blood pressure and he tries to roll up his shirtsleeve but is not able-she has to do it for him.

“You can go and sit in the room outside,” the nurse says to me. “It’s more comfortable there.”

The second strange thing: It happens that Dr. Parakulam, my father’s own doctor-known locally as the Hin-doo doctor-is the doctor on call in the Emergency Ward. He arrives after a while and I hear my father making an effort to greet him in an affable way. I hear the curtains being pulled shut around the bed. After the examination Dr. Parakulam comes out and speaks to the nurse, who is now busy at the desk in the room where I am waiting.

“All right. Admit him. Upstairs.”

He sits down opposite me while the nurse gets on the phone.

“No?” she says on the phone. “Well he wants him up there. No. Okay, I’ll tell him.”

“They say he’ll have to go in Three-C. No beds.”

“I don’t want him in Chronic,” the doctor says-perhaps he speaks to her in a more authoritarian way, or in a more aggrieved tone, than a doctor who had been brought up in this country would use. “I want him in Intensive. I want him upstairs.”

“Well maybe you should talk to them then,” she says. “Do you want to talk to them?”

She is a tall lean nurse, with some air of a middle-aged tomboy, cheerful and slangy. Her tone with him is less discreet, less correct and deferential, than the tone I would expect a nurse to take with a doctor. Maybe he is not a doctor who wins respect. Or maybe it is just that country and small-town women, who are generally so conservative in opinion, can often be bossy and unintimidated in manner.

Dr. Parakulam picks up the phone.

“I do not want him in Chronic. I want him upstairs. Well can’t you-Yes I know. But can’t you?-This is a case-I know. But I am saying-Yes. Yes all right. All right. I see.”

He puts down the phone and says to the nurse, “Get him down to Three.” She takes the phone to arrange it.

“But you want him in Intensive Care,” I say, thinking that there must be some way in which my father’s needs can prevail.

“Yes. I want him there but there is not anything I can do about it.” For the first time the doctor looks directly at me and now it is I who am perhaps his enemy, and not the person on the phone. A short, brown, elegant man he is, with large glossy eyes.

“I did my best,” he says. “What more do you think I can do? What is a doctor? A doctor is not anything anymore.”

I do not know who he thinks is to blame-the nurses, the hospital, the government-but I am not used to seeing doctors flare up like this and the last thing I want from him is a confession of helplessness. It seems a bad omen for my father.

“I am not blaming you-,” I say.

“Well then. Do not blame me.”

The nurse has finished talking on the phone. She tells me I will have to go to Admitting and fill out some forms. “You’ve got his card?” she says. And to the doctor, “They’re bringing in somebody that banged up on the Lucknow highway. Far as I can make out it’s not too bad.”