Homestead Nursing Home

Homestead Nursing Home is the setting for a brief but revealing episode in which menial night work and intimate care occupy the same institutional space. Allen’s job brings the inner group into contact with the routines of an elderly-care facility, while Arthur’s conduct there turns the nursing home into a place where his sense of vocation is expressed through practical service and attentive listening. The position lasts only three weeks: once administrators discover that William Stanley Milligan is sixteen, they discharge him from the night shift.

Setting and Daily Work

The nursing home stands on the east end of Lancaster, Ohio, in a modern, low brick building. Its wide, glass-fronted lobby is continually occupied by elderly residents in wheelchairs, wearing bibs. This visible arrangement introduces the home as a place organized around residents who require care and assistance, rather than as a conventional workplace detached from its occupants.

Allen gets hired as an orderly for the night shift. The job consists largely of routine physical tasks: sweeping and mopping floors, changing bed linens, and emptying bedpans. The narrative shows Mark performing this work without complaint, including scrubbing the floor on his knees in a room after someone has been taken away. The detail makes the labor concrete and repetitive, and places the workers’ ordinary duties alongside the residents’ illness, dependency, and death.

Allen, Mark, and Arthur at Work

The account distinguishes the hiring of Allen from the subsequent depiction of Mark doing the orderly’s labor. Arthur, meanwhile, is drawn less to the job’s routine than to its medical and caregiving dimensions. When he finds nurses or attendants playing cards, reading, or dozing instead of working, he makes rounds himself. He attends to sick residents, listens to their complaints, and cleans infected bedsores. His conduct is a contrast not simply between strenuous and easy work, but between a task completed mechanically and care that requires attention to a person.

Arthur regards the position as connected to what he considers his destined profession. He criticizes Mark’s floor-scrubbing as labor that could consume a life, calling it slave work and suggesting that the work wastes a mind with intelligence. Mark answers with a distinction between devising plans and carrying them out: control of one’s destiny, he observes, takes a mastermind, while execution takes a fool. Arthur is surprised by the insight and regards it as further evidence that Mark’s intelligence is being spent on work he considers mindless. The exchange gives the nursing home a second role: it is a workplace where the characters’ different judgments of labor and ability become audible.

Mr. Torvald’s Death

Among the residents, Arthur devotes particular attention to Mr. Torvald, whom he knows is dying. For a week, Arthur has visited the old man each night and sat beside his bed. Mr. Torvald speaks about his youth in the old country, his arrival in America, and settling on the land in Ohio. When he worries that he talks too much, Arthur tells him that older people’s accumulated experience deserves to be heard and passed on, including knowledge that cannot be found in books. Mr. Torvald responds by calling him a good boy.

Arthur also speaks to Mr. Torvald about the dignity with which he is dying and says he would have been proud to have him for a father. When the old man points to his empty water pitcher, Arthur leaves to fill it. On returning, he finds Mr. Torvald staring blankly upward. Arthur stands silently, brushes the hair from his eyes, and closes them. The scene moves from conversation and ordinary service to the moment of death without separating one from the other: listening, offering water, and attending to the body all belong to the same relationship of care.

Arthur then whispers for Allen to call the nurses and report that Mr. Torvald is deceased. Allen takes the spot and presses the button above the bed. Arthur steps back and identifies this as proper procedure. Allen thinks Arthur’s voice sounds husky with emotion, though he knows that cannot be; before he can question him, Arthur is gone. The nursing home’s formal response to a death is therefore set against Arthur’s personal attentiveness, while the handoff to Allen gives the scene its procedural close.

Short Tenure and Narrative Significance

The job ends after three weeks. When the administration office discovers that William Stanley Milligan is only sixteen, it informs him that he is too young to work the night shift and discharges him. The departure is imposed by the home’s age restriction, not presented as a choice to leave or as a consequence of his work. That limit makes the episode a short-lived encounter with adult employment and institutional care.

Within that brief period, Homestead Nursing Home gathers several distinct forms of labor: routine cleaning, medical attention, and the quiet companionship of a person nearing death. Its elderly residents and the work required to care for them give Arthur’s ambitions a practical setting, while the contrast between inattentive staff and his own rounds clarifies what he believes the profession should entail. Mr. Torvald’s death gives the episode its emotional center; the three-week dismissal, by contrast, closes the workplace abruptly, before the position can become a lasting part of Milligan’s life.