Keith Pilapil Lesmeister

SOAP TO THE ELBOWS

WE DON’T SEE EACH OTHER as often as we used to, but Jud and I have been friends for so long, and it takes both of us forever to get to know and trust someone, so I’m still the one he calls when he needs help on the farm or some big life event happens. Like the times he needed extra hands building a shed or delivering a calf, or the time two–three years ago now when his wife gave birth to a stillborn child. Both of our wives had been pregnant and due within three months of each other. Ours was born healthy, theirs dead. I’m not sure how a person recovers from that. 

Now his wife Jean has given birth to a premature baby boy. 

Jud’s thumbs are too clumsy and calloused to text, so he called to tell me three things: Hospital couch is uncomfortable as hell. Could use some help on the farm. And, “Maybe you might wanna see the baby, small as he is, and he might not even make it.”

I was trying to be there for him. Trying to be a better person. I wanted to be someone who people could rely on, but I had failed up to now. I glanced at the calendar, reminded of the meeting I had with my wife in three days to discuss divorce papers. Dark greasy fingerprints from my working with small engines smudged the edges. 

“Tomorrow afternoon work?” I said to Jud.

“Appreciate it, Cal,” he said. “Meet me at the farm.”

  ✦

The chores were standard: milk the dairy cows and move the electrical fence so the beef cattle could graze fresh grass. We worked without talking, at first. I knew the routine. Then Jud gave me the full report much like he’d report the weather or commodity prices: Jean had had complications; she was now staying at the hospital a few more days; the baby was sixteen weeks premature, not even two pounds; now the baby was lying in a fully covered hard-plastic bassinet with two holes toward the bottom so a person could stick their hands in there and feel the baby. He’d be in the hospital for as long as it takes. “Touch and go” is how Jud described the overall situation. When he said that, I reached into my pocket and rubbed my lucky stone. Masuwerte, my grandmother called it. She was from the Philippines. Superstitious as two pennies stuck inside a shoe. Lately, I kept that stone with me most everywhere. Palmed it hourly. Rubbed it between my thumb and forefinger. I thought I’d try it out for luck. I had nothing to lose. 

In order to keep his sanity, Jud smoked five or six joints each day, and that’s what we did after we moved the cattle. His farm is at the end of a two-mile-long driveway and perched on the tip of an outcropping and around it the land falls away into grassy ravines and down to a creek, and that’s where his cattle graze. Only way to farm this land is cattle. Too steep for row crops or anything else. I’d worked up a good sweat moving the herd and running the electrical fence. Sometimes I forgot how vast it was out there. From where we stood, top of the ridge, the trees bunched together like yet-to-bloom flowers, even in mid-May. He passed me the joint. It was early evening, sun sinking low. 

“Lisa packed a box of goodies for Jean,” I said, and passed it back. Lisa and I were still married for the time being. 

“I’ll be hungry soon.”

“Supposed to be for Jean, dumbass.”

“She’ll never know.”

“Lisa’ll kill me if that food doesn’t get to her.”

“You’ll figure it out.”

We got into the Buick—his highway car—and sped down winding two-lane blacktop roads. He hit a possum and kept on going. 

“Nice of you to help. Been too long.”

“Of course, man.”

“Where’s that box?”

“Back seat.”

“Bring it up here. I told you I was going to be hungry.”

We ate the chips and hummus dip and olives and cheese and we also ate the chocolate-covered almonds, but we left the blueberries. Jud drove with one hand on the wheel and the other inside the box of food that now sat between us. He grabbed something, didn’t matter what, and just chowed down. He never ate during the day. Skinny as a T-post. Tall too. Much taller than me, and I wondered how funny we looked together in public places—tall white skinny, short brown chunky—walking side by side. Me—I’ve never missed a meal. Work a nine-to-five, but it’s my own business. Take long lunches. I used to have two employees. Now I have none. I like it that way. I run a machine shop. This time of year it’s all mowers all the time, mostly riding lawn mowers. But it’s different every day. Some days I take the trailer out and pick up stalled-out John Deeres or Toros, and some days I stay in the shop and tinker with engines. It’s my favorite way to work. Engines don’t talk, and I’m at the point where another human voice is almost bothersome. I’m only thirty-two. My mother asks how I got this way. My dad does too, but he’s a little more understanding. My wife Lisa and I lived together up until two weeks ago, and we still sort of get along, not really, but she slipped me divorce papers a day after I moved into my shop, where I had set up a cot in back. Can’t say I’m surprised. She said I stopped talking to her a year ago. I don’t remember that, but she’s probably not wrong. My son and daughter, five and three, are always flowing past me like river water around a tree stump. My wife said that she and the kids nee­ded more from me; needed me to communicate like I actually cared and wasn’t simply going through the motions. I told her I’d think it over. She tapped me on the forehead. “There’s a lot going on up there, Cal,” she said, “but you don’t know how to communicate—how to process thoughts into an actual verbalization.” That was the word. Verbalization. It clanks around my mind while I work on engines. That’s the farthest I’ve gotten with thinking about it, but I did start drafting a letter to get my thoughts together. I have little to no resolve when it comes to relationships. It’s a flaw, I realize. I don’t have the heart to tell Jud any of this. I guess he’s the only person I would ever talk to about it anyway, but he doesn’t want to hear about my issues. He’s got his own. His kid might not even survive, and as I’m thinking about where those divorce papers might be—did I leave those under the cot?—he asks me, “How’s Lisa doing, anyway?”

“Oh, she’s good, I guess. Wishes you and Jean the best.” 

“Have to have the four of you out to the house soon as Jean and the baby come home.”

I admired his optimism. I guess there was no other way to think about it. “Long as you don’t cook,” I said. 

“Long as you don’t get limp-dick drunk and crash into the milk house.”

“You still sore about that?”

  ✦

At the hospital, Jud texted his wife who was on a different floor than the baby, and told her that we were headed straight for the NICU and would meet her and her parents in the cafeteria.

“Wait till you try the burgers,” he said with his head bent toward his phone, strolling across the lot. It was almost fully dark and the air was spring fresh and there were people walking out of the automatic doors looking dour and concerned. I stared at them, hoping they wouldn’t make eye contact, but I couldn’t stop staring because I could feel their emotions radiating off them like heat waves on asphalt under a July sun. “You aren’t very talkative,” Jud said.

“I’m stoned. Just taking it all in.”

“Shit we forgot the food. Wait here. Actually, follow me.”

We got back in the car and he drove to the edge of the lot, next to a dumpster and a row of arborvitaes, where we finally parked. We hotboxed the Buick. 

“Only blueberries left,” I said.

“Wait till you see this,” he said. “Gonna blow your fucking mind.”

“See what?”

“The baby, man. That’s why you’re here, right? That and the cheeseburgers.”

I was here to help Jud, support him somehow, and I figured I better see the baby, even though this kind of thing made my legs doughy. “He’s in special care, right?”

“We can still go in. Gotta soap and scrub the hell out of your hands and arms. Soap to the elbows, my friend.”

“I’ll just go visit with your wife and in-laws.”

“Suit yourself. But man, this is like nothing you’ve ever seen. It’s just amazing how they keep these babies alive with technology and damn good nurses. However many years in the past, I’d be a childless man. Still could be, I guess. Don’t wanna think about that.”

“Well, maybe I could go see him.”

“You ought to. You’ve never seen a human so small. Size of a full-grown chipmunk, maybe a little bigger. And everything is there, man. Just microscopic. You ready?”

“I don’t know. I’m feeling heavy. My legs aren’t working well.”

He slapped my chest and it stung. “Wake up, man. Stop acting high.” Jud laughed.

I rubbed my chest. “That hurt,” I said, but it felt good to feel something. 

 ✦

A week before this, while I was in the middle of drafting a letter to my wife, one in which I wrote three sentences in thirty minutes, she texted me and said, “If you could do anything for me, Cal, I want it to be signing those papers. PLEASE. We don’t need this to be drawn out and ugly.”

I didn’t text back because I was trying to focus my energy on writing the letter.

She texted again an hour later, after I’d written three more sentences. “Are you gonna reply? Give me something here.” 

“I’m working on it,” I texted back. 

She gave the thumbs-up response, and I went back to drafting a letter in which I outlined all the reasons I’d like us to be together—a solid partnership, mutual respect—and I tried coming up with examples to illustrate how those ideals shaped our marriage. But it felt a little bit like bringing a garden hose to a forest fire. I think she’d made up her mind. Still, I kept writing, only taking a break now and again to look at the framed picture on my work desk of the four of us on the sidewalk outside the ice cream parlor, licking mounds of chocolate to keep it from dripping all over.

Jud and I stood in the transitional room between the lobby and the NICU while this nurse who radiated pure competence held protective materials we’d need to put on before entering. Jud and I pulled our shoes off and slipped into cloth booties. Then Jud hovered over the stainless wash basin big enough for a toddler to bathe in and rolled up his sleeves and soaped to the elbows, just like he’d said. The sign above the sink said wash for three minutes, and those three minutes felt like forever with the nurse hovering there like a hawk scanning for field mice. I tried to shield her from my stoned-red eyes. I tried to think of something to say to Jud, but nothing came, so I simply waited until it was my turn. After we had each washed thoroughly, the nurse gave us latex gloves and hospital gowns. 

Jud secured his flannel sleeves around his elbows. We walked like silent assassins over the cold tile floor, just gliding with those booties on. Dim lighting created a cave-like effect, and every ten feet or so was a hard-plastic bassinet with a preemie inside sleeping or squirming around, attached to wires. And each one of those wires, I could sense now, contributed mightily to the miracle of life we currently witnessed. I almost broke down right there. All these babies—they all looked the size of a chipmunk, maybe a small gray squirrel, just like Jud had said.

“There he is.” Jud stood before the bassinet, looking like a four-year-old meeting Santa for the first time. He kept saying, “Fucking unbelievable, isn’t it?” He dropped to his knees. I backed up a few feet to give him privacy. He stuck his arms through the two holes just big enough for his forearms, and he touched the baby’s head and legs and feet, and whispered affections to him the entire time with the same voice I used to use on my own babies. “Amazing, isn’t it?” He glanced over, laughed and then for a while he didn’t talk, just knelt there, cradling the baby with his hands. A grin plastered to his face.

That’s when it all registered—the constant beeping and whirring of the machines and monitors. It took me a minute to catch up—to process all this. But once I’d locked onto the frightening prevalence of such noises, I couldn’t refocus my thoughts anywhere else. And then something happened. A dinging. An alarm. I glanced at Jud’s son. Jud looked around, as if waiting for someone to come help. It was a quick succession of intermittent beeps along with the red, white, and green lights everywhere and all at once. I stayed still, paralyzed by fear, and I tried like hell to focus on something very soothing, something like that trip to the ice cream parlor. I focused on chocolate ice cream and kids’ smiles and the hot sun melting everything too quickly. Then I thought about freshly washed sheets that Lisa liked to hang on the line, and I thought about the smell of those sheets after an afternoon in the sun and breeze. My heart rate might’ve evened out.

A couple of nurses rushed over to the bassinet closest to us, and they worked frantically for a few minutes, and then things settled back down again. Fresh sheets, I told myself, and then I realized that the sounds and lights weren’t for Jud’s baby. 

“Something happen over there?” Jud stood up, and his presence, now that he was fully upright, felt imposing. My eyes had finally adjusted to the low light. 

“Nurses took care of it.”

“Look at him,” he said, glancing back at his own kid. “Absolutely perfect. I’m desperate not to have another bad thing happen to one of my children, you know. I’m kind of scared shitless about it.”

“I can tell he’s a tough one. Look at him.”

He strolled to the exit while I studied the baby a while longer—its purple skin and disproportionately sized hands and feet and the long legs. I knew the baby would be tall like Jud, just from looking at him, and then I said a small prayer to accompany the technology and competent nurses keeping all these babies alive, because I remembered when Lisa and I were at Jud and Jean’s house one summer day a few years ago when they had a twenty-person memorial service for his stillborn son. Jud and Jean brought him home and dressed him in a blue onesie and set him in a crib and took pictures, and they got those pictures framed and set them up at the service for everyone to see. Social workers had told them that bringing him home was part of the healing process, and I remember Jud bawling his head off out in the pasture while he was moving his electric fence that afternoon after the service. I helped him with the chores. He cried nonstop out in the field and didn’t even bother to wipe his face—looking all torn up and disheveled. Now, in the NICU, I rested the good luck stone, masuwerte, on top of the bassinet and whispered a phrase I’d heard my grandmother use, “Pagpalarin ka sana.” I had no idea what it meant, but, like I said earlier, I had nothing to lose, and I thought the same of this baby. 

And then I remembered I’d tucked the letter into my breast pocket, the one I’d been writing to Lisa, and I pulled it out and started to read it out loud. 

“What do you think, kid?” I said to the baby. 

The letter was all about my trying to communicate how much Lisa and the kids meant to me, and if that meant she needed time and space away from me, then I was going to rise to the occasion and be that person for her. I wasn’t even sure if I had articulated all that I needed to, but saying it out loud to the baby as it lay there fighting for life—and knowing how quickly things can change—made me determined to find a rightful place in my family, even if it was off to the side.

“Didn’t peg you for the poetry type,” Jud said. He stood behind me now, and I realized I was on my knees eye-level with the baby, holding my script.

“I’m not. I’m just watching,” I said. “Maybe praying a little.” 

“Didn’t take you for the praying type either.”

“Can’t say I’m much of that.”

“Hell, we’ll take anything we can get,” he said.

I ignored him and kept watching the baby. A nurse shuffled past. Jud might’ve been humming a tune to himself or his son. I couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like a lullaby.

We lingered there a few more minutes before Jud finally said, “Tough to turn away from a miracle in progress. This is the kind of shit that’ll change a person’s worldview. I might even go to church again.” He jostled my shoulder. “Nah, I’m not—who am I kidding?” 

 ✦

The hospital cafeteria was bright by comparison to the NICU, and there were gobs of people stuffing their faces, and the smell of grease caught my nose right away. Even though I wasn’t hungry, I was looking forward to eating. Jud stood in line and ordered four cheeseburgers and a large order of fries for us to split, along with two chocolate milkshakes. 

“I got an appetite,” he said. 

We were on to the milkshakes by the time Jean arrived. She sat with us at the round table where we had eaten entirely in silence. Jean was looking smiley and happy to be out of the hospital room, but she had to stay a few more days on account of the emergency procedures they’d had to do, which she wouldn’t talk about because she remembered I have a weak stomach when it comes to those things, and I thanked her, and then after a minute she said, “How’s Lisa? How’re the kids?”

I set my milkshake down. “Well, to be honest, we’re going through one of those rough patches. I’ve been sleeping at the shop, but I’m going to meet her for lunch on Monday. Talk about the future, I suppose.”

“First I’m hearing of it,” Jud said to me, then looked at Jean. He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. 

“Yeah, guess I haven’t talked about it much. Maybe not at all.”

“There’s a surprise,” Jean said. 

Jud laughed, and I kind of did too. They didn’t ask for details, and I didn’t offer up any additional information. I didn’t mention, for instance, that at our lunch in a few days, Lisa would probably convince me, finally, to sign those papers. But for now, it was nice to be in the presence of people who knew me well enough—who wouldn’t ask too many questions.

But Jean did say this: “I’d like to offer you some advice, some help, anything, Cal, but you were always so goddang hardheaded.” 

Jud giggled. 

“That’s okay, Jean,” I said. “I’m just glad you didn’t say ‘everything works out in the end’ or some bullshit like that.”

“I wouldn’t insult you, Cal. Besides, aren’t we well past ‘everything works out’?”

“You want a sip of this before I finish it?” Jud held the milkshake out to Jean, and she accepted it.

“I was glad to see the baby,” I said. “He’s a tough one. I can tell.”

“He is a tough one,” Jean repeated. Then she folded her hands together and rested them on the table. 

A family of five sat down next to us. Their smiles suggested their visit to the hospital wasn’t all too urgent. Then an older couple, hunched over and silent, shuffled past. I realized I was still an hour and a half from home, and it was almost fully dark by now. 

Then I remembered the box of food I was supposed to deliver to Jean. “Lisa packed some blueberries for you,” I said. “But I think we left them in the car.”

“That’s okay,” Jean said. “Jud’ll eat them. Won’t you, honey?”

“Shouldn’t be a problem.” Jud nudged me and started to giggle. He couldn’t stop, but when he finally caught his breath, he added, “Full of antioxidants.” Then he started cracking up again. 

Jean shook her head and said, “I don’t know about you two.” Then, slowly, she started to laugh. Pretty soon all three of us were in stitches. And Jud just kept repeating “antioxidants” over and over. 

At some point in the parking lot, Jud said to me, “Glad you could meet him.”

“I think Lisa will be stopping by this weekend.”

“That’ll be good,” he said. “And about that earlier. You know I’m around if you need to talk or anything.”

I thanked him.

“I know you’ll get your shit figured out,” Jud said. “You always do.”

I stopped and he stopped. 

“I’m not a failure, am I, Jud?”

“You’re a pretty smart son of a bitch,” he said. “You always were. Best machine man I know.”

“I’m not talking about that.”

“Maybe just talk to her, you know. A short cut to all of this is to say the thing on your mind at the moment.”

“Not sure about that—that kind of thing has gotten me in trouble before.”

I felt the stone in my pocket and dug it out and held it up for us to look at.

“I can’t take your lucky stone, man.”

“I’m not giving it to you.”

“You fucker.” He shoved me and laughed. 

“After my grandma set this on top of the slot machine I was pulling, I won a hundred bucks. Maybe this thing’ll work after all.”

“Sounds foolproof.” He patted me on the back. “Sounds like we need to stop at the casino boat on the way home.”

“Maybe next time.”

“Yeah, maybe next time.”

I paused again, looked out over the dark asphalt lot. The scattered rows of vehicles in perfect order.

KEITH PILAPIL LESMEISTER is the author of the fiction chapbook Mississippi River Museum and the story collection We Could’ve Been Happy Here (EastOver Press, 2023). He's editor of Cutleaf and was a 2023-25 Rural Regenerator Fellow through Springboard for the Arts.