BULLHEAD

by

Glenn A. Osborn

There's a little creek that runs behind my Dad's house with bass and bullheads in the deep pools where I used to swim when I was a kid. Sometimes Dad would jump in too and we'd skip flat rocks across the water or play keep-away with a football. Now he sits on his deck and watches the glassy darkness all afternoon, waiting for a ripple where a fish breaks the surface. When they jump, he slaps the arm of his chair.

He doesn't say anything or shout, but he'd like to. He can't make a sound, except to wheeze. A stroke disabled his speech and gave a left-leaning cant to his walk. When Mom died it seemed he could hardly take care of himself and things got worse. He lost weight and if he ate at all, he ate junk.

We put him in an assisted-living home for a while, but some kid came into his room to change the sheets who Dad thought was a thief out to steal his baseball card collection. The cards were the only thing he wanted to take to the nursing home. He has two autographed Mickey Mantle's and a Bob Feller that Bob himself signed for Dad outside Cleveland stadium one day in 1940. When he thought the kid was stealing them, pow! Kicked the poor bastard right across the room. And that was it for the home.

So now I drop in on him every day and my wife fixes him a dinner for me to take over. I sit and talk about work or watch TV with him while he eats. Sometimes my grandkids go with me and toss rocks into the creek while Dad and I visit. Sometimes, in the winter, the children come in and play cards with us.

Last Monday when I got to his house, he was nowhere to be found. I went out on the deck and called for him, but I knew that wouldn't do any good. He couldn't answer me if he wanted to. I was pretty nervous by the time I walked down to the creek and started looking up and down the banks. Then I walked the path along the creek that leads back to the fence between his property and the farm behind his house. There he was, stretched out in the water, clinging to the fence that runs over the creek. But he wasn't struggling. Didn't seem to be in any danger at all.

I waded into the cattails up to my waist, and when he saw me getting close he pulled on the bottom wire and pushed himself under the fence and a few feet downstream. He took a couple of back strokes but by then he was out of the deep water and he just sat up in the middle of the stream, dripping. And smiling.

I said, Dad, it's time for dinner, and he pulled himself up, crawled to the bank and stood up. He looked out at the water for a minute, then, gradually, a broad grin came over his face and his body began to shake in laughter. That made him start to wheeze and I thought he might pass out, but soon he got over it. He sniffed three or four times and then made a guttural sound, a loud one, and I knew he had spoken. I heard it distinctly: "Damn!"

I climbed over the fence and took his arm, but he shrugged me off and started walking for the gate that would let him back onto his own property. Down in the creek, the surface was roiling where the fish were biting.

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Glenn Osborn is a freelance writer, designer and photographer living in Perrysburg, Ohio.

He is a founder of Scrawl: The Writers Asylum, and has been managing editor and designer of The Story Garden, a literary ezine.

He operates HandsOnWebsites.com, a site design firm and recently has developed a successful photography business selling prints of his digital photographs of flowers.

Glenn writes the monthly PhotoFiction story column for PixiPort.com, an international photography website. His fiction also has appeared in Writer Online and The Story Garden.

He can be reached via email at:gosborn@accesstoledo.com.

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