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ON THE NEUROLOGY wing, the results of the lumbar puncture are back. No Lewy bodies. It’s good news of a sort, but it doesn’t feel like it.

Dad’s going fast. So fast that he can no longer feed himself. It has been painful to watch him try for a while now, his grasping fingers sending a spoon mouthwards as he leans forward and reaches out with his tongue. And when he drinks anything, he’s sputtering badly, coughing shallowly to get the liquid out of his air passage, coughing and coughing.

After more than a week at St. Mary’s, we’re two MRIs and a lumbar puncture to the good, we’re large motor skills, fine motor skills, chewing and swallowing to the bad.

All that’s left is a diagnosis via negativa: Hashimoto’s encephalopathy. The message comes down that they will start the steroids.

I voice my concerns to Carmen, that this feels like a problem with no solution, an inevitability, the abyss. She says, “Well, we’ve got to pray. Do you have anyone praying?”

“Yes,” I half lie.

One afternoon that fall, Dad pushed himself up from rip-snoring sleep, and, bloodshot-eyed and gravel-voiced, said I should follow him. He dug a fat tin can out of a bag in the basement, pulled his .410 from the closet, and grabbed a box of shells. I carried the gun as we walked back behind what was to have been the new freestall barn for his modern dairy, and along the tangled grove of the original homestead to the grove of row trees that Dad had planted to be the new boundary of the farm. A wind bullied us from the northwest, the bare branches wagging their fingers at us. The landscape opened up here, offering us a clear view of Champepadan Creek below and the fields surrounding it.

The creek drew the eye naturally north where it angled around a flat, roughly square field of twenty-five acres or so. In my lifetime, this field had been alfalfa, had been corn, had been oats. Going far enough back to Grampa’s shrewd move, it had been flax.

Now this field, a flat sandy knoll just above the creek, as well as the slopes of hills on either side, were a tangle of brown sweet clover.

Dad instructed me on loading the .410. The lip where the shell was supposed to hook was worn from a lifetime of use, and he showed me how the shell could slip past that lip and create a potentially dangerous situation. I fitted the metal edge of the shell carefully and clicked the gun shut. Then he showed me how to pull the hammer back and how to ease the hammer off again. The hammer, too, was worn. That was another dangerous part he said, because if the hammer slipped, the gun would go off when you weren’t expecting.

“OK, pull your hammer back and aim,” he said. “I’ll throw the can and you follow it and shoot it.”

“What? You want me to—do I aim right at it?”

“Yep, just look down your barrel and the can should set right on top of your bead.”

“On top?”

“Yep, your BB pattern will spread a little bit when you shoot. Ready?”

I wasn’t but nodded. When you’re given a gun by your father and told to shoot it, that’s what you do. The can spun skyward and then quickly back down, gravity’s law and the wind’s urging forcing it in a very specific arc with a list to the right. I didn’t shoot.

“That’s—that’s quick.”

“Yep, you got be ready.”

Dad walked after the can and tossed it up again. I shot quickly this time and missed.

On the third throw I saw the flipping can at the end of my bead, pulled the trigger without thinking. The can shot forward wildly from its regular arc.

“Nice shot!” Dad said, as if he hadn’t actually expected me to hit it, as if I was a lot closer to something than he had reckoned on. I set the gun down and ran to retrieve the can. It was flattened, oblong holes torn in its side where BBs had ripped it open.

Below us, a pheasant flushed from the tangle of sweet clover in the CRP and rode the wind down to the long grasses along the creek bank, its cackle trailing behind it.

I winged my first pheasant while hunting with friends in the CRP on the Vis quarter. That quarter had been sowed in mainly brome, for some reason, not sweet clover, which made it much easier to walk, and when the bird burst cackling out of that light grass and banked left, I tracked it down the length of my single-shot twenty gauge and squeezed the trigger. The bird’s left wing buckled but it held it in place defiantly, drafting enough air to waver down to the plowed ground below but without any real control. It bounced twice, hard, but kept its wits enough to run pell-mell across the plowed rows of shiny-backed dirt in the plowed field below. I chased it for a quarter mile on pure adrenaline, heart beating in my neck and armpits, stopping once to reload my gun and fire at it as it ran but only peppering the soil behind it. The bird headed for the creek where it entered the deep cover of canary reed grass and cattails. I laid my gun down in a place I thought I’d be able to find it again and then started turning over armfuls of grass. I wasn’t a seasoned enough hunter to realize the odds against finding this bird. The God-awful gaudy apparel of a rooster pheasant, the court jester of birds, should be impossible to hide in the tans and browns of fall grasses.

It’s not. This is the miracle. Pheasants that are winged just hunker and run. Or, if you’ve undered the bird, merely split one of its sinewy dinosaur legs, it will just hunker. The odds are perhaps better of finding a hunkering bird over a running bird but they’re still not good. Not without a dog.

I worked back and forth on this side of the Champepadan, first randomly, then, once the adrenaline settled out of my system, system-atically, working toward the creek, where, pushing aside an armful of canary reed that grew right down at the water’s edge, I saw it, sitting in the actual water of the creek. It was a dry year that year, so dry that the creek had stagnated, and my pheasant sat with its auburn shoulders and neck above the surface of the water. It watched me with its unblinking yellow eye, counting on its stillness. I extended my hand slowly, like in cartoons, then snatched it around the neck and swung, spinning the flapping bird and breaking its neck, holding it until the last paroxysms of wing flaps subsided, its eyes squeezed shut and beak opened.

It had been fated, and, once I located my gun, I was a happy conqueror, high on adrenaline, already shaping in my mind the story I would tell about the bird that took refuge in the creek.

It was the fall of 1988 and I had just turned thirteen. I’m not sure if Dad was there or not.

I wasn’t surprised when Mom asked me one night to put the guns upstairs. I knew it was part of the story. The trend was in the news. Farmers were killing themselves left and right; hotlines had been set up. We had been to see the farm crisis movie, Country, where I kept expecting to find the farmer swinging in the barn. It was that central to what was happening. It’s what you did on the prairie, I knew then intuitively.

“Say, How, come here a minute once,” Mom started. “Dad’s really down. I’m sure he wouldn’t do anything but—do you know where the guns are?”

Of course I did.

“OK, well, like I say, I don’t think he would do anything, but I know he wouldn’t if the guns were upstairs, by you. He loves you too much, OK? Is there somewhere you can put them?”

I nodded, moved quickly, padded downstairs on bare feet over the cool cement steps. The first trip I brought up the grooved Winchester .22 pump and Grampa’s 12-gauge: the .22 for crows and flickertails and plunking pheasants out of the air when Uncle Hein missed; the 12-gauge that Dad had smuggled out of the house one Sunday afternoon when he was twelve by sticking it down his pant leg to shoot in the pasture with Don DeBoer—kicked so hard it set him on his ass. On the next trip it was the .410, which he was still a good shot with, and my 20-gauge from Christmas last year. I set them upright on the candy-striped carpet in the corner of my closet, crept back down to the crack of light in the bathroom. I told Mom the thing was done, and she gave me a hug. I went back up to my room where the guns stood with their stories in the closet.

I laid down in bed, a human shield, and said a prayer that wasn’t a prayer but a curse. The tears were hot in my eyes.

I, too, could retreat into silence.

It’s easy for Carmen to say, “We’ve got to pray.” She’s good at it, confident and eloquent, respecting that mysterious boundary that is God’s will, yet still somehow believing she can move him to act.

Because he is loving and she is sincere. In leaving Leota, this is one of the things she left behind: the uber-predestinarianism that leaves you wondering what—if God is infinitely more moves ahead of you in the game—the goal of praying is.

Sure, I’ve been praying for Dad, though I’m not sure what I’m supposed to pray. I default to “be with him,” try for better, “work through the doctors to heal him,” try to get specific, “may they balance his meds to calm his mind.” These are tossed up as I think of them, in passing, and mostly melt into a kind of “please, please, please, Lord, please.”

For other pray-ers, I have told exactly one person, a guy who catches me off guard after church, asks me how it’s going. Maybe because he’s not a local but married into the area, I outline the details of Dad’s situation for him. It’s more than he bargained for, though he’s sympathetic.

Of course, I haven’t brought Dad as a prayer request to my minister that the church might pray. Too embarrassing. This, too, is a symptom of mental illness. Then again, manic depressive is not a label you want attached to yourself or your family, a boundary you don’t want to lay down.

No, the people I have praying are my prayer mercenaries, my children.

When I get back home with the diagnosis, Hashimoto’s encephalopathy, I kneel down at my daughter Sommer’s bed.

“How’s Grandpa Milt doing?” she asks.

I’ve forgotten by now, twenty-five years later, Dad’s tendencies as he prayed, his speech patterns, the familiar ruts his language fell into. I think he typically announced “Shall we pray” beforehand, and already in that introduction his voice shifted into a lower register with a timbre that I will always associate with the sacred. I’ve also forgotten what he prayed about most, whether people in hospitals or missionaries, whether he “theed and thoud” or used “grant us what we stand in need of” or “keep us in thy tender care.” I think he was a formal pray-er, the formality appropriate for the dependency of sinners upon the grace of God.

It’s not that he hasn’t prayed publicly since then, but it’s not the same as it once was. His prayers are more self-conscious and wavering.

He got out of practice, out of the rut, and never got back in. But the timbre is still there; I feel it like an ache when he does pray.

“The same. He couldn’t walk and could barely swallow because of inflammation in his brain. Now they’re going to give him medicine that could make him agitated and aggressive.”

“Oh. So what do we pray for?”

“Just . . . pray that the doctors will be able to balance his medicines.”

“Dear Lord, thank you for this day,” she begins. She thanks God for the recent rains to bless the crops, though it’s been predominantly rainy and we could really use sun. She thanks God that her dance recital is coming up and for all the talents he’s blessed her with.

Well, at least she’s not self-deprecating. Yet.

“Please forgive me when I pout and don’t listen to my parents.” Oh man.

“Please be with Grandpa. Help the doctors to balance his meds so that he’s not so aggressive. Lord, please just give him peace.”

Yes, Lord, please just give him peace. Peace above all.

I know it’s a mistake to think that prayer can be new and authentic every time; I know it’s a mistake to think that beautiful words shaped into lyrical praise or effective arguments move God more than other kinds of prayer; I know from experience that often it’s the practice of prayer itself, the timbre you get used to hearing in another’s voice, that matters; I confess that my own personal prayer life is almost nil, that I’ve been putting needs and words into the mouths of my own children and having them pray for me, but as Sommer prays for Dad’s peace on this night, she also grants me mercy.

This, too, is the grace of God.

One night that first fall of the CRP, a few of us got together to hunt the Vis quarter: my neighbors Shane and Clark and me and Chad, maybe others I’ve forgotten. We drove out there on Clark’s farm permit, like anyone would be checking licenses on the backroads of Moulton Township. We made plenty of racket shutting doors and the end gate, loading 12-gauge pumps and 20-gauge single shots. We went in at twilight, split up to take in the two waterways that wrapped their arms around the three-acre plot where Dad used to grow sweet corn. Those two waterways met in a bounty of dense, raspy canary reed grass that should have been wet underneath except the weather had been bone dry since August. Beyond that was a stand of giant reed with strong, hollow stalks whose plumes eight feet up had gone all silky in the fall air, and then where the grasses weren’t seeded right stood a crop of brown thistles that shaded gradually into the tan brome that dominated that stand of the CRP.

It was dusk and calm, evening coming on in measurable moments, ticking off perceptibly as the sun slid down the horizon. It was at the brown thistle patch that the first bird got up, a hen, then, across the way, a rooster and another rooster far up ahead, hens and roosters shooting off pell-mell like fireworks.

Not like fireworks. A group of pheasants as they fly is called a bouquet—it was a bouquet of pheasants, separate blooms crossed amongst each other, the roses of roosters mixed with the plain browns of hens, all woven together and ascending above the dozens of shades of tans and yellows and browns of the CRP, a fall bouquet of the prairie.

We shot some birds that night, dressed them out later in the basement. I don’t remember how many. What I remember is that bouquet of pheasants, ascending like prayers from the CRP, prayers that Dad had sowed in silence.

Content taken from “Prayer Bouquet,” a chapter in Howard Schaap’s memoir , published by Slant Books.