Artifact
Dammit, dammit, dammit!” The rhythm of my cursing matches the rhythm of my hoe chopping crabgrass and foxtail snaking around half-grown cornstalks. The curses are under my breath so my father, working three yards away, can’t hear. If he hears, he’ll work his hoe faster and grumble under his breath, “You think this is hard? I coulda showed you hard when I was your age!”
I hate chopping weeds. It is repetitive and mind numbing, and it’s hot as hell. One good thing, though, is that I’m getting stronger—muscles are showing up where I haven’t had muscles before. And I’m getting better at it. Lord knows I’ve had enough practice. Since Dad showed me how to chop at an angle and pull toward myself at the same time, I almost never slip up and sever a corn stalk, no matter how close the weeds are.
I pause and straighten my back, resting my hands on top of the upright hoe handle. I look at my father; sweat drenching his faded work shirt and the band of his green Ag Center hat. The man never stops. He never stops. In a few minutes he’ll tell me to finish weeding the remaining rows of corn while he climbs on his tractor to go clear underbrush behind the cabin.
I’d rather be anywhere but here. My friends are back in my neighborhood in town riding bikes and shooting baskets. I’m stuck working in this giant garden my parents plant annually on property outside of town in what we call “the country.”
I can’t figure Dad out. He escaped the tobacco farm he grew up on, got a college degree, and was settling into a new, well-paying job as an accountant when he and Mom bought the property a few months after they married. He had been a bachelor a long time. Marriage must have made him miss being miserable. Why else go back to a plow?
Mom insisted they live in town for the sake of any children they might have, but she liked the idea of a country getaway. She liked the thought of growing and canning a year-round supply of vegetables. Thank God they stopped at vegetables and didn’t recreate the annual hog-butchering festival of his youth. The way they are you’d think it was 1888 instead of 1988.
Dad looks back at me and raises one eyebrow—his signal for me to quit lollygagging. With a scowl, I resume chopping. As I dig a clump of grass, I catch the sun reflecting from a smooth brown surface. What is this? I bend and pick up a rock embedded in a dirt clod. I break off the packed dirt and brush away the excess. In an instant, I know that I’ve found an intact Indian artifact, an arrowhead, or maybe even a spear point. It’s that large.
I’ve found a few arrowheads in the garden before. The Canawhay tribe among others had lived and hunted the New River Valley for thousands of years before European settlers either drove them to extinction or forced them onto reservations. I read a lot about Indians. I keep the artifacts in my sock drawer in a carved wooden box, and I take them out from time to time, imagining the warriors who lost them.
What were they like? Did they have sons? Did a warrior father teach his son the skills he needed to be a man? I imagine a father and son making arrows together and stringing their bows. I see them hunting, tracking their prey through the underbrush, ignoring pricking briars and poking limbs as they creep up soundlessly on a massive, ten-point buck. The father glances at the son, an unspoken signal for him to take the shot, to make his first kill. The son raises his bow as the father taught him and lets the arrow fly—a perfect hit.
After giving thanks to the deer for the gift of its life to sustain the tribe, the father solemnly addresses the son, congratulating him for becoming a man. With his thumb, the father smears some of the deer’s blood on the son’s forehead so all in the tribe will see and acknowledge the milestone and celebrate when they return.
“Hey, Dad!” I call and look up. As I do, I see the old man clutch his chest and grimace. He staggers and drops his hoe, falling across and crushing three cornstalks. “Dad!” I yell. I stick the arrowhead in my pocket, throw my hoe to the ground, and run to where he’s gone down. “Dad!” I say again, but I can see he’s unconscious. His face is gray and he’s barely breathing.
I run to the house and yell for Mom, who comes right away. We have no telephone at the cabin, so Mom jumps in the old station wagon and drives it over a ditch directly into the garden, crushing tomato plants and corn stalks in her path.
We wrestle my father’s dead weight into the back seat, and Mom tells me to get in the back with him to keep his head propped. She lifts his head and upper torso, and I squeeze in under. Mom jumps in behind the wheel and flies down the rutted driveway onto the dirt road leading to town. Dust boils up, letting everyone within five miles know we’re coming.
She barely glances left or right as she runs stop signs and red lights barreling into town toward the hospital. All the while, I’m cradling my father’s head. It’s the closest I’ve been to his face since I stopped kissing him goodnight when I was eight. I feel his rough whiskers. I notice the curve of his jaw and the angle of his nose, features I see now when I look in the mirror. I detect a tiny scar at his hairline I’ve never noticed before.
Mom screeches to a halt at the Emergency Department entrance, and a nurse comes running. A medical team assembles quickly, and they lift my father onto a stretcher and wheel him through double doors. Flustered and upset, my mother follows them in, leaving the car running with the doors open. She also leaves me. I stand motionless, my brain filled with static.
I don’t know how long I stand there, but a man in coveralls rushes by bringing me to my senses. He yells, “Hey! You’ve got to move that car. You’re blocking the ambulance bay.”
I start to say, “I don’t know how to drive,” but he’s gone before I can get the words out. Do I look old enough to drive? Any other time I’d be flattered. I glance around, hoping a valet will step forward to say, “Here, allow me,” but I am alone.
Willing myself to move, I close all but the driver’s door to the car, and I stand there a long minute looking in at the steering wheel and the dash where instrument lights glow. I can’t drive—it’s illegal. Besides, all I’ve ever driven is Dad’s old tractor. But I can’t leave the car there to block ambulances. I take a deep breath and climb into the driver’s seat. It’s still warm from my mother’s panic. I glance around trying to remember the sequence of events I’ve seen a hundred times watching my parents prepare to drive. It’s different when it’s you doing it.
I reach down with my left hand and pull the handle, releasing the emergency brake—so far, so good. I reach up with my right hand and grip the gearshift on the steering column. I step on the brake, and the car revs. I jump. Wrong pedal. I move my foot to the left and, pressing on the brake this time, I drop the gearshift handle, moving the arrow from “P” to “D.” The transmission catches. With a little gas, the car moves slowly down the driveway toward the street. I stomp the brake, and the car jerks to a stop. Good. I had to make sure.
I don’t know where I’m going, but at the end of the driveway I resolve to turn right. I stop, click up the right turn signal, and wait for traffic to clear. It’s my father’s energy I conjure as I sit behind the wheel. Mom is a nervous driver. Dad drove a delivery truck to pay his way through college, so he is very confident behind the wheel—confident and steady.
When no cars are coming, I press the gas and turn the steering wheel right, easing out onto the street. Out of nowhere, a pickup truck roars up behind me. I’m creeping along, and the beefy, red-faced man I see in my rearview mirror is gesturing and yelling something I can’t hear. I shrink in my seat and increase my speed a little, but the truck roars around me with a loud blast of its horn. I take a breath and calm myself. “Keep it steady,” I whisper. “Keep it steady.”
It’s not a block before I see a sign reading, “Visitor Parking.” I slow to almost a stop and hear more angry horns honking behind me. I turn into the lot, bouncing up on the curb as I go. The lot is nearly full, but I pull to a vacant space and try to turn in. I’m too close. I back up and try again—still too close. After four attempts, another car comes up behind me, so I circle the lot and go to another space.
After three more tries, I am finally able to pull into the empty slot. I shift into “P,” step on the emergency brake, and turn off the engine. For a moment, I put my head on the steering wheel, but then I remove the key from the ignition, squeeze out of the driver’s side, press down the lock, and close the door.
I shove the key into my pocket feeling the arrowhead as I do. I rub the shaped stone for luck, and head across the visitors’ parking lot retracing my path toward the Emergency Department entrance. I don’t want to waste time going around the wall surrounding the ambulance bay, so I climb a grassy bank, squeeze through an opening by a downspout, and hop down about five feet into a clump of shrubbery. They’re holly bushes, and the spiky leaves scratch my arms, but I don’t notice as I walk up to where I last saw my unconscious father.
I push open the glass doors to the Emergency Department and a smell of disinfectant with undertones of body odor hits me. It’s midday on a Saturday, and the waiting room isn’t full, but it’s full enough. I sit and look around, not sure what to do next. Periodically, a nurse appears, calls a name, and one of the waiting people stands and goes with the nurse. I wait twenty minutes for my name to be called, but it doesn’t happen.
Finally, I stand and walk toward a desk where an official-looking woman is seated. As I near, I trip over a broom leaning against a support post. The handle smacks hard against the tiled floor, and people glare at me. I stumble and catch myself on the edge of the desk wishing in that instant I could disappear. To her credit, the woman doesn’t flinch but regards me with a raised eyebrow. I collect myself and croak, “I need to see my Dad.”
The lady examines me closely and says, “I’m sorry, children under 16 aren’t allowed in the patient area.” She doesn’t sound sorry.
I hesitate, and then I blurt, “I’m 16.” I go for broke. “I’m 16 and a half!”
She again raises her eyebrow, purses her lips, and says, “I think not.”
As she’s judging me and finding me wanting, in my peripheral vision I notice hospital personnel pushing through a pair of swinging doors down a hallway. I start to stammer out a protest or a supplication or another lie bigger than the first (in for a penny, in for a pound as Dad often says), but a sweating man with an unruly, black beard holding a bloody rag over his right bicep lurches to the desk and loudly demands to be seen right away. He’s tired of waiting. The woman cuts her icy stare in his direction and simultaneously gestures to an overweight security guard picking his teeth by the entrance. The guard swings into action, moving toward the injured man
“Hey, buddy,” the guard says, “You need to step away and go back to your seat.” The man rounds on the guard and sways a bit, unsteady and wild-eyed. Like a gangster in a movie, the man bares his teeth in a grimace or a grin, raises his big fist, and yells, “Why don’t you make me, Fat Boy!” Blood drips down his injured arm and splashes onto the floor.
The guard, surprised to have a real security threat intrude upon his daydreams, unhooks the strap on the truncheon he wears on his belt. He tries to remove the weapon, but it snags, giving the wild-eyed man time to lunge. The man gets both hands on the stick, and he and the guard are frozen in an inept struggle, neither one capable in their current condition to break the stalemate.
As I back away from the desk, I step on the broom handle I stumbled on earlier. Instinctively, I pick it up. It feels familiar.
I’m not a violent guy. I’ve never even been in a fight, but without thinking, I swing the handle high and chop down hard across the wild-eyed man’s forearms. He curses and slumps to the floor, pain and alcohol getting the better of him. He releases the club allowing the panting guard to gain the upper hand.
You’d think such a scuffle would incite panic in the waiting room, but no one so much as glances up from their year-old People and Sports Illustrated magazines. The woman at the desk gets on the phone to call for backup, and she’s looking at me while she talks. Our eyes lock and she holds up a finger for me to wait. I throw down the broom, bolt down the hall, and push through the swinging doors.
Before me is a swarm of activity with various healthcare workers buzzing in and out of sections of a large room partitioned by white curtains. They call to each other with urgent words. I sidle over to a corner where I can catch my breath, let my racing heart slow, and get the lay of the land. It’s not long before I realize that I could walk down the middle of the room playing a trombone, and no one would look twice. They are all consumed with the various crises going on simultaneously.
I slip over to the first curtain, pull back a corner, and look around it, hoping to find my mother and father. Instead, I see a doctor shoving a tube down a girl’s throat. I gulp, drop the curtain, and move on.
Frenzied activity vibrates the next curtain. I peek and see a large orderly holding down a man in the bed having a violent seizure. The man’s eyes are rolled back, and a nurse is trying to stick an IV needle in his arm while a doctor keeps his airway clear.
The man on the bed is not my father, but now I’m scared. I want to go outside, find the car, curl up in the backseat, and sleep. I get a cold feeling in my chest that my father is dead. My father is dead, my mother has gone somewhere, and I’ll never find her.
A couple of healthcare workers are looking at me now, so I try to act nonchalant even though my heart is pounding again. Did Front Desk Woman rat me out? When they look away, I spot a metal folding chair off to the side behind another curtain, dart over to it, and plop down, face in hands. I slow my breathing, trying not to throw up. A voice says, “Benny?”
I look up. It’s my mother. She’s sitting in a chair next to an empty bed “Mom? Mom!” I jump up and go to her. She stands and pulls me in.
“Oh, Benny,” she says. I didn’t mean to leave you. Are you OK?”
“I’m OK,” I say, and it’s mostly true. “Is Dad OK? Where is he? Is he…?” Tears well up.
She looks puzzled, but then understands my unspoken question. “Oh, honey, no,” she coos, hugging me to her again. She pulls back and says, “He…well… they say he had a heart attack.” When she sees my face she hastens to add, “But they gave him medicine right away and he’s OK. Well, he’s better, anyway. They say he’s conscious now and the pain isn’t so bad. They just called. We can go up to see him.”
I’m having a hard time believing my father had a heart attack. He’s so strong. “I didn’t know,” I say, not sure what I didn’t know other than I didn’t know my father is a mortal human being who can die any second.
“Honey, I know, none of us did. I’m just glad you were there with him in the garden.” Her voice quavers.
Mom then takes me by the shoulders and looks into my eyes. “Are you really OK?”
I nod.
She reaches up and touches my forehead, wiping it with her thumb. “Is that blood?” she asks, alarm in her voice.
I remember the wild-eyed man with the bloody bicep and how I took him down with a single chop. “It could be.”
David Cameron catches stories and poems from scraps of conversations or dreams half-remembered. His works have appeared or will soon appear in Rural Fiction Magazine, As You Were: The Military Review, The Avalon Review, and Literary Heist among others. After a career as a Presbyterian minister, he is now on loan to the trails of Western NC where he lives with his spouse and son.
