A “swing bed” is a designation under Medicare rules that allows rural hospitals to provide and bill for skilled nursing care for the patient who no longer requires hospitalization, but is not well enough to discharge home. The patient remains in the hospital to rehabilitate with the goal of recovering enough function to return home. In vernacular, swing bed has come to be interchangeable with any skilled nursing facility offering post-acute care.

Where's your daddy?

Laid up. 

Laid up hurt? Or laid up sick. Better be hurt because he ain't got time to be sick. 

He's just laid up. He said he's gone lay up and die.

So he's sick then.

He’s not sick.

He was in that bad wreck and it still ails him. 

Well it ain’t ailing him today. Today he come out and said that he's gone lay up and die. He said don't nobody bother him. 

The boy is sawing through the rusted corner of the bottom of a fifty five gallon drum with a hacksaw about as rusty. He is working the bottom free with the saw and flaking away chunks of rusted steel. I don't know what he got on his mind. He needs to quit fooling with that before he cuts his hand open and gets lockjaw but I can tell he’s agitated and trying hard to act like he ain’t.

So I leave him alone. 

But I say, I'm going to see him and don't tell me about he said nobody bother him. I'm his brother and I'll see him when I goddamn please.

Do what you want, the boy says.

I set off toward the house and the boy calls back at me. 

He ain't up at the house. 

Well where the hell he laid up?

In the nanny house. 

What you mean the nanny house?

Nanny's trailer. 

I had forgot how John Mark called mama, his grandmother, nanny. I hated hearing nanny when he was little, always hollering nanny nanny at the top of his lungs, always crying to her, on account of how she pet on him. He sounded like a goat saying nanny nanny and she had started to look like a goat with her stringy whiskers and her eyes that looked like marbles.

I tell the boy, Well it’s the trailer I need to see him about. I talked to a man who wants to come take a look at it but he needs to get the rest of that shit out of there. Has your daddy hit a lick on that yet or not?

I don’t know. I spect not.

I get me a dip of snuff and the boy stops what he’s doing and asks me for a pinch. I tell him get the hell on and he don’t mind me none but goes back to worrying at that fifty five gallon drum.

They live on a public road but it’s a dead end so they treat it like it was a private driveway. For a long time my brother and his boy John Mark lived down there and Uncle Bill and mama on down at the end of the road. Uncle Bill died way back and now mama is in the swing bed. So now it’s just my brother and his boy John Mark and a trailer we can’t do nothing with.

I came by one day couple weeks back to haul some of that mess off from mama's trailer. A lot of it was Uncle Bill's stuff she ain't ever done nothing with since he died. I got no problem hauling it and my brother don’t have a truck noway. But I done told him I ain't going through all that stuff. So when I got out there he hadn’t hit a lick and I wish I could say I was surprised. 

I meant what I said I wasn't gonna lift a finger inside that trailer but I wanted to look and see if it was as bad as my brother said.

It was worse. Mama used to pick trays up from the senior center, the ones with a gummy cutlet and clotted gravy and a short juice carton, and take them to people in the community but at some point she had started just bringing them home and stacking them on every surface. Flies must have been swarming at one time but they were all dead on the floor when I went in. Even they couldn't live too long on the senior trays. 

I looked in the freezer and a stink came out of it that made me regret that but it was a dry rot that mostly cleared out and just contributed to the bad odor of the place without making it a whole lot worse. There was a pile of them senior center orange juice boxes and a bunch of that bulk frozen food she liked to load up on out at the outlet. No telling how old any of it was and it was all mildewed. Half the freezer was ice froze solid and I figured the power must’ve went out long enough for everything to melt and then when it come back on it froze into a solid block in the bottom.

That’s how I left the trailer and I don’t spect my brother hit a lick since but he’s gonna have to catch another gear with this man coming to look at it later. Mama can’t come home to that trailer even if she does get out the swing bed. She’ll have to go stay with my brother because he’s the one out of work and can keep an eye on her. But now he’s wantin to lay up and die. So there’ll be two of them laid up to die and poor little John Mark sawing on a rusty fifty five gallon drum sure to get lockjaw.

I shouldn’t be callous. We all grateful mama got better and it seems like she isn't so much sick as hurt now. Hurting all over. 

All day long in the hospital people was in and out of there asking where it hurt, out of ten how much does it hurt. “Hurts all over” was all she would say, “I can't put a number to it, I never hurt like this before.” She won’t whine for pain medicine, so she made sure to tell the nurse that over and over. 

"I’m a tough old bird, I ain’t one of them drug people. I won't ask you for nothing for pain." I don’t think they knew but that meant they were supposed to offer her some pain medicine. When they didn’t offer she would sull up. 

She started carrying on big with religion since the stroke which the doctor said could happen sometimes. He wasn’t a doctor but some kind of practitioner but he seemed alright. He said he was surprised to hear she never mentioned religion before the stroke. Everyone at the hospital assumed she was always like that, carrying on in Jesus name. The way they explained it, she had a chunk of gristle flick off a blood vessel into her brain which could make you act all kind of ways.

He called it "hyper religiosity" and I said I'm gonna have to use that one. I got some family with that. 

In Jesus name or not she can’t take care of herself at home no matter what she says. She’s supposed to do “rehab” at the swing bed and get stronger and go home. But she ain’t gonna do that. I told them at the hospital she wouldn't and they more or less said I know but she gotta go somewhere. 

I meant and I mean I’m not raising a hand to dig out all that trash on my one day off. But it’s morbid as hell to lay up in that trailer and why down there when he’s got his own place I don’t know. 

All this going through my mind while I watch the boy worry the lid off that drum and he gets it off and studies on it like he don’t know what to do next.

I chunk my snuff can at the boy. He tries to pack it the way you do where your finger snaps on the side but he don’t have the hang of it. He opens it up and sees it’s empty and cusses.

I tell him, You need to quit messing with that, you gonna cut your hand and get lockjaw.

He don’t mind me none.

I set off down the road to see what this is about my brother laying up to die.