The Infirmary

Not Right

57 n o t r i G h t What did I know, what did I know, of love’s austere and lonely offices. —robert hayden it was the mother, after the viewing, who said he wasn’t right. “his hair’s wrong and his face, so terribly gray.” The youngest daughter gathered her scissors and combs and things and most of what she knew of love to carry back to him. mr. hughes was in as he was always in. When she showed him the brushes in her hand and asked for the permission he turned away from her, as if she might hurt him somehow. “certainly,” he said to her, “you know the way.” she laid them out: the cosmetic brush, a smaller softer one, her scissors and combs, compacts and blushes, and because it seemed to her there was no other place for them, on the breast of the boy, beside a row of ribbons where beneath the military green the bullet may have very well gone in. how blonde he had become. too much sun she thought, and from above the ear she drew a length of hair between two fingers, held the strands away from the face, so as not to smudge his cheek or temple with the back of her hand and trimmed the very ends and then again, bits of blonde fluttering about the casket, the thinning scissors all the while making its clickety-clicks. she did the other side and leaned across the open hatch to look at him, to see the sides were right and started on the top, carefully, because she knew the hair was still alive. she lifted his head from the satin pillow to tuck the hair behind. satin. all his life 58 he’d slept on cotton, pillows lined with stripes—the penitentiary kind—and never could he keep the pillowcase on, the way he flopped about, dreaming his boy dreams. she dabbed at his face with a kleenex and a color came away, an awful rose. When she rubbed a bit of cream into his cheek with the tips of her fingers, it made a little cloud, a kind of weather for his cheek that she worked in to make the circle widen, then did the nose, the chin, the forehead, and, gently, the lids of the eyes. she might have been a priest or lover. What was the last thing that came to him before the blackout? half circles of hair had settled on his cheeks, the khaki shirt, the uniform that held him in. she blew across his face and leaned close to him so she might whisper it: “There is nothing more for me to do.” ...