Cricket

Ah, Friday. It was the end of a particularly rough week, and I’d made plans to venture outside of the OC for the day to have lunch with a couple of friends and help out in Family Advocacy. I was pretty excited to just step back and take it easy; I’d been feeling slightly burnt out as of late.

As much as I absolutely love my work and my life here, at nine months in I’d be lying if I said that all of it doesn’t catch up with me once in a while. Just the Tuesday before, I’d come home from an exceptionally tiring day and gone straight to bed at 7:30 without saying so much as a “hello” to any of my housemates. Needless to say, in a family of eleven, if one goes to bed before double-digits it really isn’t fair to ask for or to expect silence. Therefore, I stumbled out of my room with my comforter a half-hour later, snuck through a seldom-used back door while the rest of the crew was otherwise occupied in the kitchen, and crawled into my van to rack up some REM points. This started out as a pretty sweet idea until somebody discovered my absence a couple of hours later and the entire house organized itself into a frantic search party, thinking that I’d snapped and embarked on some manic tear through the Appalachian hills as a result of my less-than-stellar day. I awoke in the front seat of my Chevy Uplander to the sound of my name being bellowed by the Jackson House men and echoing all around our hollow. Bless their hearts, but I wound up not quite getting the night’s rest that I so desperately needed.

So, when a housemate held our phone out to me on Friday morning and said that it was Earl’s daughter calling, I couldn’t help cringing. She’d told me the day before that her dad had been flown to Lexington from Kentucky River Hospital, and I’d asked her to keep me posted. Wish granted.

I softened when I heard tears in her voice. “They’re doing surgery,” she said. “My whole family is there and they want me to come. Can you drive me?” I sighed internally as I glanced at the kitchen clock and let thoughts of my low-key Friday vanish. “Give me a couple of hours, okay?”

We drove the two hours from Vincent to Lexington in time to meet the rest of the family after Earl had come out of the operating room. We waited inside a small room for a report from the front lines. Sarah was there, as were another one of her daughters and Earl’s two brothers from Indiana. Earl and Sarah’s two sons and their wives were in town, also, but were out grabbing lunch. I tried to gauge from the mood of the present company how gingerly I should tread.

“So are you one of them liberals from New York?” the smaller brother asked me, his eyes small and hard.

“Actually, I’m part of the red minority in that state,” I answered slowly.

Well, from that point on, we were all the best of friends.

A nurse entered the room and gave us an update. It turns out that the burning Earl had been experiencing for the past few weeks was a two foot-long blood clot in his right leg. Had he not suggested that as a possibility to the doctor in Breathitt County, we’d have been gathered for a very different and much more upsetting circumstance.

I spent the entire day with the whole family waiting for Earl to be wheeled to his recovery room in the ICU. They’re a mixed bag, to be sure, and they certainly made their presence known in the sixth floor’s main waiting area. Earl’s two brothers are complete opposites: Andy is a slight fellow, with his hair neatly parted on the left and a bright green and purple polo shirt tucked into his blue jeans; Ricky’s gray hair was parted straight down the middle, and overalls covered his substantially larger gut. The two sons present were big, beefy men – one is a mechanic, while the other followed in his father’s footsteps to become a truck-driver. The women all remained quiet, dozing on and off throughout the afternoon. Not the men, however.

“Check out how her second toe is bigger’n all the rest of ‘em,” one son whispered theatrically to Andy.
“She’s like a monkey,” Andy concurred.
“Where’s she from again?” another brother asked Laura on the other side of the room.
“New York,” Ricky interrupted.
“Well, how in the hell did she wind up here?”
“Not enough Republicans up there for her.”
“Well, she’s no fool.”
“We should call her Cricket. Sorta sounds like Bridget. And she’s tiny. Like a cricket.”
“Way she snorts, though, makes her sound like a barnyard.”
“You know the way to tell a woman’s from ‘roud here? Barefoot and pregnant.”
“Well, she’s already practically barefoot.”
“Didn’t she date that Jimmy boy a while back?”
Here I interjected. “I did NOT date Jimmy. We got pizza once.”
“Well, we might have her pregnant by May, after all!”

After a while, the brothers took one of Earl’s sons and set out in search of food, weary from an afternoon of merciless teasing. The rest of us continued our vigil. Finally, at long last, a nurse came in to us and said that our guy was able to start receiving visitors two at a time. I smiled at his son and daughters, but Sarah took my hand. “Come on, baby,” she said, standing up stiffly. “Let’s go see Dad.” I hesitated and looked at their kids, but they nodded eagerly, so I walked arm-in-arm with Laura past the nurses’ station and into Earl’s room.

The chaos of the hospital bullpen dissolved in the peace of Earl’s dimly-lit room, and I felt the usual calm associated with this man fill me up. He looked exhausted but comfortable in the hospital bed’s clean sheets, his long white hair swept back across his pillow. His eyes met mine and his eyebrows shot up in pleasant surprise. I felt my eyes prickle with tears as I asked, “How're ya feelin’, Earl?” Flint struck steel somewhere deep in his eyes and that old wry grin flitted faintly across his lips. “Mostly with my fingers.”