Seven Days Dead Read Online Free

his nurse for the evening, Orrock lowers himself. A difficult descent. His legs provide only wobbly scaffolding. Seated, he bends forward, which strikes the minister as an act of modesty as the pajama shirt flops over his privates. He’s not surprised when the old man retaliates, for this is humiliating to him, and he will not go through it without inflicting damage on his only witness.
    “First, sniff my poop, Simon Lescavage. Then wipe my ass. Don’t forget to flush. Next, fix me a drink. After that, have the decency to hear my confession.”
    Neither man speaks as they listen to the tinkle of urine.
    “I’ll fix that drink now. While I’m waiting.”
    “Sure. Go ahead. Pour a stiff one for yourself. You’re going to need it.”
    Suddenly, Orrock is interrupted by a pain across his belly. He jerks forward and cries out, an involuntarily reflex as he clutches his helper and hangs on.
    “You all right?” Lescavage immediately regrets his words. He expects Orrock to lash back at him for the inane comment. Of course he’s not all right. But the man is in too much agony to ridicule him just yet.
    “Christ, that hurt,” he whispers.
    His skin color seems more pale now, washed out. Lescavage observes him as the man releases his grip and eases back down on the toilet seat. “At least it doesn’t stink so bad,” the minister says.
    Orrock accepts the kindness. “Small mercies, hey. Small mercies.”
    He needs a minute to recover.
    Toilet paper is stacked on a portable stake. People in town would probably say it’s pure silver, but it’s polished aluminum, standard fare. Orrock removes the top roll from the column, then holds it out to his helper. He gazes up at him.
    “Now wipe,” he says.
    The two men have locked eyes. Neither moves.
    “I can’t bend around,” Orrock explains.
    Still, Lescavage stands still. He feels like a man being tested who does not understand the rules of engagement, or the possible outcome or the repercussions.
    “I can’t reach,” the man on his humble throne stipulates.
    Lescavage looks away, across the marble floor, over the spa tub to the window, where the wind and rain fiercely pound, then back at him.
    That peculiar smile appears again, the one for which there is no evidence. He’s not pleading, Alfred Orrock is only being contemptuous, when he adds, “Please.”
    The minister takes the paper roll in hand. Unwinds a section. He has a sudden desire to tell this man that he’s done this before. He suffers a need to share that experience, but at the same moment he knows he won’t, for that would be breaking an unspoken pact, so he stifles the impulse. Still, he wants to explain that he’s not mortified, because once he wiped his own mother’s bottom when she was at a similar stage in her life and the nurse was absent. Like Orrock, she had every speck of her wits about her, but unlike him, she worked to mollify his trepidation.
    “After what I’ve been through, dear,” she said, “with physicians and the nurses—some of them look like mere kids to me—all their awful tests, oh, after those intrusions, these silly indignities don’t matter much anymore.”
    What he wanted to share, and oddly, with Orrock, was that the intimacy of the act, of wiping his mother’s bottom as she had done endlessly for him as a babe, invoked such tenderness in both of them, such a sense of love and sadness, that the act itself didn’t vex him and never stuck with him. He’s forgotten about it until now. In a way, mother and son recognized that these failing bodies did not constitute their lives. The act was a mere trifling, and did not prove to be an indignity for either of them, certainly not a humiliation. Perhaps the contrary. He was not anticipating a similar reaction in this instance, except that in invoking the previous experience he discovered himself inoculated against Orrock’s contempt and his effort to mock him, so that he could deny the pleasure the other man derived from