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.

Midwest mission, part 1

I have a photograph in my house that I inherited when my grandfather Donald Warfield Sr. passed away two years ago and it is his father Robert Graves Warfield when he was in the air force in World War One.

I started to ask my father a lot of questions about this man since he died in 1933 when he was 40. My father said, you should call my uncle Bob in Indiana, my grandfathers older brother, who is 94, and would be the only one left who could really answer some questions. I called Uncle Bob, and for 94, he is a remarkable man. He has his memory and does not suffer from dementia or Alzheimer's. I decided I should drive out and see this Mr. Bob, because he is 94 and although he insists on his 100th birthday he will be jumping out of a plane with a parachute strapped to his back he could die any day.

I wake up in Greenfield, Indiana and drive down the little strip that carries every restaurant that is available because in small town America there are no individually owned businesses anymore. You can expect to find a Long John Silvers, a Bob Evans, a Qdoba Grill and on and on in almost every town in America, so I knew there would be a Starbucks and I found it. I got a coffee and as I am leaving my phone rings and it is Uncle Bob saying, “Where are you? Where are you?” I said, “What? I am on my way now.” He said, “My wound..I need to go to the hospital...I am bleeding like a stuck pig!”

I hung up the phone and really quickly realized that this day might not play out the way I was hoping, where I would do a little family history research and take some pictures. Nope. I arrive at Bob Warfield’s two story house in Fortville, Indiana at 9:15am. It is a green house that he had built 39 years ago. The top floor has not been used or visited in about five years. Bob and his grandson, Bobby, who is severally mentally disabled are waiting outside for me. Bob is bleeding from his cheek through a bandage due to a routine procedure to remove a growth and there is quite a lot of blood. He is holding napkins to it and we get him in the car and we drive to the emergency room.

They try to stop the wound for three hours using various methods and eventually bandage it up and send us on our way. We go to a diner back in Fortville. Everyone in the diner knows Bob and Bobby. I start to notice that the white bandage on Bob’s face is slowly growing more and more red. It is making me sick to my stomach. He is struggling to be the same person that he has been all his life even when his body starts to not want to cooperate. It is obvious that it is pretty well saturated and it will soon drip down onto his blood splattered sweater. I tell the waitress that we are going to need to take this food to go. My visions of a walk down memory lane are starting to wash away and I call the hospital and they tell me to call his main doctor and I call the doctor and they have to call me back and they are all talking to me as if I am the caretaker, and as if I will be the one who will be attending to Mr. Warfield in the future. Each phone call is more heartbreaking than the one before.