Gerald M. Spence, father of Gerry Spence, at age ninety-two.

IN WYOMING, ON the endless prairies, the meadowlarks attack the world with song. You can hear the war in every direction, the joyous warbling born of new fife, pounding in high, melodious trills against the thin air of spring, and the warbling back, like great cannons of rapture exploding across the countryside.

   I thought how we had walked together across those blithe lands, my father, and I as a child. We were silent as churchgoers, silent in the presence of the music. Neither my father nor I spoke, for no one would sully the sound of the singing with words. Now in another landscape as cold and brittle as a hospital room the old man lay waiting for the nurses to bring in the gurney. Gumeys haul off the dead, or those about to die. They also transport the desperate to desperate places. Soon the nurses would take my father to the operating room. His lung was cancerous. Had to come out. He was eighty-two, but if he were a meadowlark he would have been singing.

   The family had gathered at his bedside. If you listened to the sounds of the people talking, you would be put in mind of parishioners gathered in the church basement for a covered-dish supper. Tom, my brother, twelve years younger than I, and my father were telling stories about their hunting trips, the "do-you-remember-whens," while Mae, my stepmother, poised and proper and sweet as fresh-picked chrysanthemums, was adding her smallish laugh. My sister Barbara, two years older than Tom, joined in, and Imaging, my wife, sat silently, mostly watching me, a small worried smile on her face.

   I sat back, thinking: The nurses are going to come in here any minute with that gurney, and they're going to haul my father off, and I'm never going to see him again. He'd already had a half-dozen heart attacks of one kind or another. This old man is going to die, I thought, and the last words from his lips are going to be this, this meaningless chatter, like squirrels in the woods "chip-chip-chipping" away about Lord knows what, while the hunter is taking aim on one of them.

   I pulled my chair up close to the old man's bed and held his soft, bony old hand. He squeezed my hand back to say he was still strong. Then he looked at me, smiled, and gave me one of his winks, as if the wink would take care of everything.

   "Dad," I began, "this is a pretty serious operation, as you know, and I've been wondering if there's anything we ought to be talking about before the nurses come."

   "Why, I don't think so. Everything's taken care of. We got our wills and things."

   "Well, just in case things don't come out as we figure they will, have you made-you know-arrangements?"

   "Yes," he said, slightly annoyed. "Mae and I bought one of those prepaid plans a few years back. They take care of everything, come get ya, take ya to the crematory, and deliver back the ashes. It's all fixed up." I remembered how he used to make jokes about the ashes. A person could never be sure whose they were. "Maybe an alley cat's," he'd say, "and the whole family getting all teared up over an old alley cat's ashes." Then that smile of his would spread itself from one big ear to the other, and his ears would move backward with the smile when it had reached its maximum, and his old faded blue eyes would laugh, too. "The way I look at it, ashes are ashes," he said. "It doesn't make a whole lot of difference."

   "Well, Dad, sometimes a man has some unfinished business, and I was wondering if you had any."

   He thought a long time, to make sure. "I guess we do have some unfinished business," he said at last.

   What's that? I asked, mindful of my duty as the eldest child.

   "Well, there's a bunch a skunks under the house. I been trying to trap 'em with that box trap I made. You remember how I made one of those box traps for you when you were a kid? You tie a piece of meat on the trigger and when the old skunk takes a yank on it," he slapped the palm of one hand with the other, "down comes the lid! Well, I'd appreciate it, son, if you got the skunks out from under the house. Mae has lived with a skunk all these years, and after I go she shouldn't have to live with any others. That smile again, the ears moving back with it.

   Now I was making conversation. "What do you do with the skunks that you catch, Dad?"

   "Well, you just throw the trap, skunk and all, into the back of the pickup and haul it down the road about twenty miles, and open up the trap and turn the little fellow loose, careful as to which end of the skunk comes out first. He's too far away to get home again." He thought for a moment. "But once in a blue moon the trap comes down too quick and the lid falls on the skunk, and then you have to get out the old .22 and shoot it-you remember, the old .22 you and I used to shoot rabbits with. You can bury the skunk in the roses.

   "In the roses?"

   "Why, yes," he said. "That way, the skunk comes up in the spring as a rose. Now that's something, isn't it?" His smile again.

   "That is something," I said. "Which brings up the question, where do you want your ashes spread if it should ever come to that?"

   "Well, in that event," he said, his smile coming well ahead of his words, "you can just take the ashes, whosever they are, and bury them in the roses with the skunk."

   Then the nurses came with the gurney, and he lifted himself up and on it like a condemned man happy to get it over, and when he saw the worried look on my face he said. "Well now, son, don't you worry. There's a lot worse ways of dyin' than on the operating table." Then he added quickly, "I'll be back."

   I reached down and kissed him on the lips. Spence men kiss each other. Then he gave me that wink again, which meant that the subject was closed, and everything would be all right, and the nurses wheeled him away.

   We walked fast alongside the gurney, keeping up with the nurses, and when they pushed him through the door, we all said, "See you soon, Dad," and, "Love you." Nobody said, "Good luck," because nobody wanted to admit there might be bad luck, and nobody said, "Good-bye," because nobody wanted to believe that this might be the last good-bye.

   Suddenly I felt the same feeling of fear and the same shame of my fear that I had felt many times when, as a boy hunting with my father, he had left me alone deep in the Big Horn Mountains.

   "There's nothing to be afraid of here, son," he'd say. But I was afraid, nothing or not. "Good tracking snow today. I'm just going to keep on this old elk's trail for a while, see where he's goin', see if he's gonna stop somewhere for a breather, long enough to get us a little elk steak."

   "I want to go with you," I'd say.

   "You can't keep up in this deep snow, sonny. You just stay right there. I'll be back. And remember: There's nothing to hurt you out here. Only thing a man ever needs to be afraid of in the woods is another man. Bad men never come up here. Only good men love the mountains."

   "What happens if you don't come back?" I wanted to say. And I wanted to cry. But a ten-year-old boy wasn't going to let his father know he was afraid. I wanted to ask, "What would happen to me if I got lost up here?" But I knew. He'd told me many times. You go down. Always go downstream and you'll finally hit civilization.

   Probably never make it down. Probably perish in the wilderness, freeze to death. Besides, if he didn't come by dark I would go looking for him. Maybe he'd be struggling in the snow, his leg broken, or maybe I'd find him under a huge boulder that had fallen on him. But one thing I instinctively knew. My father never got lost. Not my father, the hunter.

   After the door on the operating room closed, we all walked back to my father's room and sat down to wait. He'd never failed to keep his promise. "I'll be back," he said, grinning up from the gurney. I looked at Mae with that stoic smile on her face, her hair, cotton white, her hands folded across her lap. She'd be alone in this world without my father. She must have known the terror I felt as a child. I looked at my brother and sister. They would lose a man who had been both father and mother to them if he didn't come back from that cold, bright-lighted place where masked men told jokes to each other while an old heart struggled against the assaults of scalpels and saws. Yet neither Mae nor my brother nor my sister wept nor trembled nor said they were afraid.

   As I waited for the nurses to return our father, either his bony corpse or a gasping, racked old body with but a single lung, I thought how we are still too afraid of fear to speak of it. What if I began to weep in front of my sister and my brother? What if I began to cry out like a child lost in the woods? Even as a child I knew I could not survive the sound of my own terror cutting through the silence of the forest. We are not brave. We are too frightened of fear to give in to it. Oh, I wished then, as I have always wished, as I wish even now, that I could be fearless like my father.

   When they brought the old man out of the operating room he was as still as death, and gray. His cheeks were sunken and the bones of his skull were plain to see. His lips were purple, his eyes half open. But not seeing. He looked worse than death, for those we see in death have been remade, fluffed up, puffed up, stuffed into pretty, silk-lined caskets. But my father was breathing. He had tubes in his nose, and his mouth was open and the drool of the unconscious collected at the corners. I wiped his mouth with a piece of tissue by the side of the bed and then we waited.

   Pretty soon he stirred. Then he looked at me as if he didn't see me. His old blue eyes, like glassy blue marbles hidden deep inside the lids, held no expression. He made no sound except the sound of labored breathing. Then I heard him call my name in a far-off whisper, like a wraith crying from the firmament.

   "Gerry."

   "I'm here, Dad."

   "Bring me a glass of water." Of course. The old man was thirsty. He had lost a lot of blood and a whole lung. I saw the fluids dripping down the long plastic tube into his arm. But he needed more. I stepped over to the sink, quickly filled a glass and brought it to him. He took it in his left hand, and before I could stop him he reached up with his right hand, pulled the oxygen tube out of his nose and stuck it into the glass of water. Then seeing that bubbles were being made, confirming that a flow of oxygen was being maintained, he nodded his approval, stuck the tube back into his nose and dozed off.

   Within a few weeks he was out in the garden tending to the roses. He got rid of the skunks himself.