The River Pig

Hein's wife, Elsa, heaved him more upright in the bed, which wasn't so hard now that he was not much more than a shadow of himself; he weighed nearly nothing. She stuffed a heap of pillows behind him, and he collapsed again in a position that resembled sitting up, although he skewed off to the side until Elsa pushed him back to center and propped him on either side with more pillows. He felt as if he were packaged, supported from every direction so that he could neither tumble freely about the bed nor get broken. Elsa tucked and pushed and prodded until only his hands were free to hold a pencil and notebook. Everything else was encased or displayed on the mountains of feather pillows. She even shoved one between his legs and lifted his scrotum, resting his testicles and penis on the pillow as if they, even, were too weak to hang by themselves. She was careful to lay his oxygen tube across the top of the pillows, where it wouldn't get tangled or pinched. Hein closed his eyes and rested.

The pillowing process had exhausted him to the point that he had to sleep like that, like a parcel, before he had strength enough for anything more. Elsa was beside him, stroking his hair, when he fell asleep, lulled by the oxygen tank pumping in the quiet trailer. She was still there when he woke, asleep herself in the big chair by the bed. He looked at her legs stretched out on the footstool, her bare feet poking from beneath the hem of her long skirt. Her head had fallen to the side, nearly resting on the oxygen tank.

He watched her sleep and passed some time trying to imagine what she had looked like when she was young. They had only known each other nine years and were already old when they got married. He loved her long gray hair and her face that was an endless landscape of wrinkles - valleys and hills and rain-washed gullies that he had walked with his fingers and lips for nearly a decade. He knew every path in that land but wondered how they had gotten there and what the terrain of her face had been when it was fresh and new. There were no pictures of Elsa from when she was young because she had been raised an Old Order Mennonite and the church, she had told him, said photos were graven images.

Beyond her chair, Hein could see through the trailer window that it was still overcast. The dark trees and the mountains in the distance cut jagged green peaks and folds in the otherwise never ending expanse of gray sky. The winter fog was hanging low too, obscuring everything so that the landscape was all half-hidden, the trees pushing only part way through the gray, and the fog being pressed into banks and drifts by the mountains. Water dripped from the eaves of the trailer, streaking lines across Hein's small distant view of the outside world. Damn Oregon rain, he thought. He squinted at the streams of water, blurring them into the gray of the sky. Sometimes living in the Coast Range of Oregon was like living on another planet, a gray and green swampy place where the fog clung to the dripping trees, a thick web that cut the mountains off from everything outside.

There had been a time when Hein had appreciated the Oregon winters. They kept him in, writing, revising, or at least pacing up and down in front of the windows, which had its own value in his process. When people asked him how the hell he stood the eight months of damp, he used to say, "We should have more love of the demons that plague us if, in the end, they force us to take our own company." But now he was sick of his own company and Elsa's too, for that matter. He only wanted...