Midwest mission, part 2

As we are driving I get another call saying that a nurse is able to come last minute to the house so we go back there instead. Uncle Bob uses napkins from the diner to stem the tide of blood. The nurse arrives and she puts on new bandages. Then she puts on another bandage and waits, and then she puts on another bandage and some gauze tape to apply some pressure. She leaves and we finally start to talk a little about family history.

After a while he produces this packet of pictures, that the instant he pulls it out just blows me away. Written in pencil on the envelope it says, “Dad’s moose hunting trip, 1921” and is full of 5x7 negatives, about 40 of them with prints of my great grandfather Robert Graves Warfield on a hunting trip in Gaspe Bay, Canada. These pictures are just incredible and looking through them, seeing my great-grandfather with a rifle and standing outside a tent with the antlers hanging from the the top of it and then gutting a moose with the guides and in a tent with mugs of something warm and a pipe in his mouth and leather boots laced all the up to his knees with jodpurs coming out of them, I really feel I am finally seeing this man. I ask Uncle Bob if I can take this packet with me.

It was getting pretty late and every time I look at his face I realize that the blood is not stopping. I warm up his plate of macaroni and cheese from the diner that he never ate and as he starts to take a couple of bites, I think the movement of his jaw aggravates the cut on his face and blood now starts to drip out of the bandage. I realize that I can’t fix this. I have never met Uncle Bob before. I can’t fix that no one is really taking care of them. We talk a bit more and I say to him that the cut is still bleeding, but he has another nurse coming the next day and he should go lie down and take it easy. I think I have been largely cured of my insatiable desire for family history.