Rot

My grandmother kept the orchard the way other people keep a graveyard: carefully, and with a list. Each tree had a tag nailed at the roots, hand-painted, and she would not let anyone pick from a tree whose tag had gone soft with rain. When a tag was lost she grafted a new branch onto the stump and let nothing grow there for a year. People thought this was superstition. People were invited to think that. The summer I turned eleven I found the ledger under the sink, wrapped in a dish towel the color of old teeth. It was not a record of yields. It was a record of names, and beside each name a date, and beside most of the dates a single word: bore, bore, bore. She found me reading it and did not take the book away. She handed me a knife and told me to help her with the trees that had gone quiet. We worked until dark. She never once told me whose names were in the ground, only that the orchard keeps what it is given, and that a debt paid with interest is still called a payment. The orchard is still standing. The tags are fresh each spring. I have started adding names, and the trees that take them bear fruit so heavy the branches bend to the fence like something leaning in to listen.

At 3 a.m. the ward sounds like a church built out of plumbing. The ventilator keeps time. The monitor keeps score. Between them the corridors do their slow walk, and the night nurse does her slow walk inside the corridors, and neither of us looks at Room 9 any more than we have to. Room 9 has a man in it whose family stopped coming on a Tuesday. We do not say stopped. We say his visitors have finished. I have taken his vitals forty-one times. Forty-one times the numbers have been polite. Forty-one times he has opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling above my shoulder, and I have written the numbers down as if the ceiling owed us something. On the forty-second round I bring the chair, because policy says nothing about a chair, and I sit, and I do not look at the ceiling, and after a while he says a word I do not catch. I say again. He says it again, and this time it is my name, and I understand that he has been saying it for forty-one rounds and I have been writing it down as a number. The machines hum hymns no one taught them. I stay until six. When I stand, the monitor changes its tune, and I do not look up, because I already know what polite sounds like now.