Counting Crows – Two – Good Luck – 1916 Several weeks passed since the mine accident, and Natan fell back to his daily routine, partly by need and partly by necessity. His life became a watercolour painting of chores and school, - a canvas of daily routines which had been rained upon – all the colours bleeding and blending into each other. Due to the complexity of the fractures sustained in the accident, Doc Morgan transferred Natan’s father to the Drumheller hospital where he remained for the duration of his healing. The doctors in Drumheller had drilled into his shinbone and inserted a metal rod with a traction weight attached to it realign the thighbone. A full-leg cast was plastered up to his umbilicus and held the leg and hip fracture …show more content…
Natan spent days emptying out the sod house with his friend while his grandfather busied himself putting up the beds frames and fixing the small belly stove. The interior walls of the sod house were whitewashed with lime paint by his mother and his grandmother hung new muslin on the ceiling. His sister busied herself by refreshing the beds – the old mattresses received new straw and the pillows stuffed with fresh feathers. With the sod house now in near-perfect living conditions, Stuart moved in by early October. The sod house was one small, undivided room. The stove sat in the centre, and, with plans to occupy the sod house with other boarders for extra income, the room sparsely furnished with four beds, a small table and chairs, and an old dry sink along the wall. Natan tried to negotiate his way into one of the extra beds, justifying that he and Stan needed their own due to their size. On the following evening, unable to hear any more of his sweet-talking nonsense, his grandmother surprised everyone when she returned from the loft, all of Natan’s belongings in a pillowcase, and dumped everything in a chest at the foot of his new bed. “Fine, you big man now.” She raised her two hands in the air to display his height. Then, she turned and gestured toward the house. “Here iz you only eat,” his grandmother articulated in a valiant effort to speaking English in front of