Walking in His Boots by Janice K.

She was in bed when she heard the car door slamming and his heavy boots plodding. The blankets pressed down her feet and as she peeked at the back of her sister lying in bed across the room, she saw the flinch, the dread and then the resignation. Sighing she knew that it, the mummification, was going to start all over again this fine summer day. Her feet touched the cold floor.

He had been watching his own feet since early morning. It had started when he woke and saw his wife’s face grimacing as her head lay on the pillow, shoulders hunched up around her ears, listening for him to move, ready to pounce on his decision to go out and see the little girl.

As he sat over the edge of the bed she said, “Why are you going out to see her again?”
He couldn’t look at her so he bent over to put on his boots and that is when he noticed how old they had become. He wore them every day. They had bought them together at the Fleet farm. She was there and had encouraged him to get sensible shoes for walking out on those farms, the mud, the manure—you want something that can be cleaned and scrubbed she had said. They were leather and came up over the top of his anklebones. Like always she had scrubbed them last night before going to bed and placed them on his side of the bed. Just in case he had a call in the night.

Bending down, his hand rubbed over the spots where the leather had been scrubbed away, imagining that she had had some joy in this act of loving support before her anger spilled over into his side of the bed.

“She’s a little girl, a sick little girl. She is scared and itchy and she will be for a long time. Besides the most important thing is that we prevent infection—she could die from an infection.”

“You not me” was all she said as she got out of bed to answer the call of their own little girl peeking into their bedroom, whispering, “I’m hungry, mum? ”

And now he walked up to the cottage and he could see his feet, his worn boots and it struck him that it took so much energy to care for his patients. It was like walking in wet mud, heavy and sticky slopping through and onward, left than right forever.

That next summer my sister and mom and I sat at the kitchen table and watched his old car drive by. You could see his head tilting from side to side like he was whistling or singing.   He didn’t stop; he didn’t need to. We were eating the bluest blueberries my mom and I had picked the day before.  My older sister was eating them too, but I didn’t mind that she hadn’t helped to pick them.

“Blah, blah,blah, Iris.” my mom said.

Only the name Iris sifted through my memories of finding a hillside full of blueberries. We waded through the bush with fingers grabbing and plucking and plopping the blue gold into our pail. The hot sun, the hard work of bending and picking ratcheted up my excitement as to how they would taste the next morning. My mom always made us keep the berries in the fridge overnight so that they would be cool and sweet, our breakfast treat.

“BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, poison ivy!” my mom had warned me again and again about the three leaves that would make you itch for days and days and days while blisters grew and grew and grew until they leaked golden clear fluids that were as hot as a sunbeam.

And almost as if she had forgotten I had been there she would remind me that the year before my sister had gotten poison ivy from picking blueberries.  That summer I watched as my mom waited for the doctor every morning. He came early before he saw other patients and carefully unwrapped, washed and then wrapped my sister with white gauze. The unwrappings were slow as he talked to distract her from the ripping away of the sticky dead skin. My sister’s deep brown eyes never cried, they just looked bigger and deeper reaching into the solitude of being the only one who is sick, gritty and determined, counting the seconds when it would be all over.  It took up most of last summer, before it was all over.

“Whose Iris?”  my sister said as she leaned into her bowl of blueberries, for another scoop with just the right amount of milk.

“It’s a flower, it comes from a Greek word that means rainbow.” You gals haven’t been listening have you?” my mom sighed as she put down her spoon. “ Iris’s can be almost any color. My favorite is blue, as blue as your tongues from eating all those blueberries.”

We stopped with spoons halfway to our mouths and scrambled over to the bathroom mirror, standing on tiptoes, we stuck out our tongues. Blue taste buds light and smooth at the edge, darker and grainy in the center curled upwards as we screeched with laughter. Then our tongues flattened as we examined the tip, a soft blue pad of childhood joy.

My mom, alone in the kitchen saw his car coming back into town.  She heard the car cough and stutter at about the same time as she heard our laughter and she wondered, if he knew just how much joy was in this house, how grateful she was for all those morning visits, how she could have never unwrapped the gauze, how she would rather let the infection set in then to cause her daughter pain with her own hands.

She never hesitated in imaging that his family was as joyful as hers.  She knew about caring—you could see it in his boots, old soles, clean leather uppers, laces worn by plucking and tying, taking off and putting on his boots—careful to keep the dirt from spreading.                                 Copyright © Janice P Kehler LLC,  All rights reserved.