Little Bluestem: Stories from Rural America

He awoke and it was speaking to him, swearing at him really, the voice clotted with fury—its language red and purple. It leaned down on him with a pure, seething anger. And there was nowhere to get away. He could turn in the bed, but only manage inches. He tried to reach and brush the voice aside and later to strike it with his fist, but they had thought of that and had tied him down.

  Who were they? Were they the voice? They came and went, white specks and white blobs of human appearance which he looked at through the red-clotted voice suffused with anger. No, he decided, they were not the voice.

  “It’s the screws of the metal plate, Mr. Johnson.”

  One of them had said this in a way that he finally could remember. Somehow his mind had become his hand for just a moment and he had reached through the red angry flowing of the voice and had grasped it.

  “We have to keep you alert to make sure that there’s no swelling.”

  Then the white blob moved, and he knew that what he was holding onto somehow came from there. The words that he held had an even steel-grey color in contrast to the red of the voice. They stuck. The voice raged purple and red and swore at him and at his head and laughed when he tried to raise his hands. But the other stuff stuck. And that’s how he knew where he was. And that he had hurt his head.

  He remembered the first time he actually could see more clearly. This moment came just after the restraints were removed. Robert pulled back the covers when no one was looking and through the red veil of pain he had looked down at the bandages swathing the middle portion of the calf and the ankle below now cased in plaster. There was no pain down there. No yet. The voice was all that he needed for pain. As he looked through the torrent of the voice at his own leg, he realized that somehow he still was himself, strangely intact and yet different. And the he found his place in time.