by Ron Rash
Ginny hung up the phone. Only then did she realize her left hand was raised, her index finger touching her upper lip.
It was four hours later when she heard a banging on the door. Ginny cued another song and left the booth. She assumed it was Barry, but when she entered the foyer Andrew’s face peered in through the glass. She kept the door latched.
“I’ve come to pick up my prize,” he said, his breath whitened by the cold.
“The station doesn’t open for business until eight thirty,” Ginny said.
“You’re here.”
“I’m doing a program, a program I need to get back to.”
“It’s cold, Ginny. Let me come in.”
She unlatched the door and he followed her to the control booth.
“You can sit over there,” she said, pointing to a plastic chair in the corner.
Andrew watched and listened the next hour as she read cancellations, gave away another ball cap, and played several requests. Tom Freeman came in at 5:40 and Barry a few minutes later.
“This is the Night Hawk,” Ginny said at 5:55, “and it’s time to leave the airways to those birds that fly under the sun. So here’s a song from those day-fliers The Eagles.”
She turned up the volume as the intro to “Already Gone” filled the room.
“OK,” she said to Andrew. “We can get your ball cap now.”
Andrew followed her down the hall and into the station’s reception room. Ginny opened a closet filled with ball caps and T-shirts.
“There,” she said, handing him a cap. “Now you have what you came for.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Andrew said, fitting the cap on his head. “But it is a nice cap.” He pulled the bill down slightly. “How does it look?”
“Perfect fit,” Ginny said.
“I thought we might have breakfast together,” Andrew said.
“Barry’s supposed to take me home.”
“I can take you home after we eat.”
“I don’t like to be around a bunch of strangers,” Ginny said. “I get tired of the stares.”
“We’ll go where there aren’t many people,” Andrew answered. “That ought to be easy today. Everyone’s hunkered down with their white bread and milk.”
When she hesitated, Andrew placed his hand on her forearm.
“Please,” Andrew said, “just breakfast.”
“Let me tell Barry I’m going with you,” Ginny said.
Soon they were driving through the center of town in Andrew’s jeep. Few tire tracks marked the snow the jeep passed over.
“This should fit the bill nicely,” Andrew said, and turned into the Blue Ridge Diner’s parking lot.
The snow had stopped but gray clouds smothered the dawn. The parking lot lights were still on, casting a buttery sheen over the snow. Inside, the waitress and cook stood across the counter from a middle-aged couple who sat in plastic swivel chairs. They were talking about the weather, their voices soft as if also muffled by the snow.
“Let’s sit in a booth,” Ginny said.
The waitress turned from the others at the counter.
“You all want coffee?”
Andrew looked at Ginny and she shook her head.
“Just me,” he said.
Andrew nodded toward the counter where the waitress continued to talk to the cook and the couple as she poured the coffee.
“A scene worthy of your moniker.”
“No, not really,” Ginny said. “Too much interaction.”
Andrew turned his gaze back to her.
“In the painting the man and woman are a couple.”
“I don’t see that,” Ginny said. “They aren’t even looking at each other.”
The waitress brought Andrew’s coffee but no menus. When she saw Ginny’s face up close, her lips pursed to an O before quickly turning to Andrew.
“There’s not much choice as far as food,” the waitress said. “Our deliveryman is running late, so it’s pretty much waffles or jelly and toast.”
“Waffles sound good,” Andrew said.
Ginny nodded.
“Same for me.”
Andrew stirred cream into his coffee. He held the cup but did not lift it to his lips. He leaned to blow across the coffee’s surface, then raised his eyes.
“You’re wrong about that couple in the painting.”
“What do you mean?” Ginny asked.
“They are connected, the man and woman. Their faces may not show it but their arms and hands do.”
“I don’t remember that,” Ginny said.
“Well, I’ll show you then,” Andrew said.
Coatless, he walked outside. Ginny watched through the window as he stepped into the lot, rummaged in the back of the jeep. The waitress brought their waffles.
Andrew returned with a gray hardback the width and thickness of a family Bible. He pushed his plate and cup to the side and laid the book open on the table.
“There,” he said when he found the painting. “Look at her left arm and hand.”
Ginny leaned over her plate and studied the picture.
“I’m not convinced. Because of the perspective it could go either way, like whether the Mona Lisa is smiling or not.”
“Maybe you just don’t want to admit you’re wrong,” Andrew said, and paused. “Maybe you’re wrong about several things, like not being able to teach again, like you and me… .”
Andrew reached out and laid his palm against the scar on Ginny’s face. She jerked her head sideways as if slapped.
“OK,” he said, slowly lowering his hand. “I made a mistake tonight. It won’t happen again.”
They finished their waffles and coffee in silence, and did not speak until Andrew slowed in front of her apartment.
“Don’t pull into the drive,” Ginny said. “You might get stuck if you do.”
Andrew pulled up to the curb but did not cut the engine.
Ginny got out and trudged across the yard, her black walking shoes disappearing in the white each time she took another step. She did not look back as she opened the front door. Inside, she took off her shoes and socks and brushed the snow off her pants. She looked out the window. Only one set of tracks crossed the yard. The jeep was gone.
Ginny slept as the sky cleared to a high, bright blue. By noon the temperature was in the forties. When her alarm clock went off at three, she lay in bed a few minutes listening to cars slosh through melting snow. She would not need a ride into work. She would drive herself across town, looking through safety glass as she passed the school where she had taught, then the hospital where her face had been stitched back together, the restaurant where she and Andrew had eaten breakfast.
At the radio station she would unlock the door, and soon enough Buddy Harper would end his broadcast and leave. She would say, This is the Night Hawk, and play “After Midnight.” Ginny would speak to people in bedrooms, to clerks drenched in the fluorescent light of convenience stores, to millworkers driving back roads home after graveyard shifts. She would speak to the drunk and sober, the godly and the godless. All the while high above where she sat, the station’s red beacon would pulse like a heart, as if giving bearings to all those in the dark adrift and alone.
Three A.M. and the Stars Were Out
Carson had gone to bed early, so when the cell phone rang he thought it might be his son or daughter calling to check on him, but as he turned to the night table the clock’s green glow read 2:18, too late for a chat, or any kind of good news. He lifted the phone and heard Darnell Coe’s voice. I got trouble with a calf that ain’t of a mind to get born, Darnell told him.
Carson sat up on the mattress, settled his bare feet on the floor. Moments passed before he realized he was waiting for another body to do the same thing, leave the bed and fix him a thermos of coffee. Almost four months and it still happened, not just when he awoke but other times too. He’d read something and lower the newspaper, about to speak to an empty chair, or at the grocery store, reach into a shi
rt pocket for a neatly printed list that wasn’t there.
He dressed and went out to the truck. All that would be needed lay in the pickup’s lockbox or, just as likely, on Darnell’s gun rack. At the edge of town, he stopped at Dobbins’ Handy-Mart, the only store open. Music harsh as the fluorescent lights came from a counter radio. Carson filled the largest Styrofoam cup with coffee and paid Lloyd Dobbin’s grandson. The road to Flag Pond was twenty miles of switchbacks and curves that ended just short of the Tennessee line. A voice on the radio said no rain until midday, so at least he’d not be contending with a slick road.
Carson had closed his office two years ago, referred his clients to Bobby Starnes, a new doc just out of vet school. Bobby had grown up in Madison County, and that helped a lot, but the older farmers, some Carson had known since childhood, kept calling him. Because they know you won’t expect them to pay up front, or at all, Doris had claimed, which was true in some cases, but for others, like Darnell Coe, it wasn’t. We’ve been hitched to the same wagon this long, we’ll pull it the rest of the way together, Darnell had said, reminding Carson that in the 1950s and half a world away they’d made a vow to do so.
As the town’s last streetlight slid off the rearview mirror, Carson turned the radio off. It was something he often did on late-night calls, making driving the good part, because what usually awaited him in a barn or pasture would not be good, a cow dying of milk fever or a horse with a gangrenous leg—things easily cured if a man hadn’t wagered a vet fee against a roll of barbed wire or a salt lick. There had been times when Carson had told men to their faces they were stupid to wait so long. But even a smart farmer did stupid things when he’d been poor too long. He’d figure after a drought had withered his cornstalks, or maybe a hailstorm had beaten the life out of his tobacco allotment, that he was owed a bit of good luck, so he’d skimp on a calcium shot or pour turpentine on an infected limb. Waiting it out until he’d waited too late, then calling Carson when a rifle was the only remedy.
So driving had to be the good part, and it was. Carson had always been comfortable with solitude. As a boy, he’d loved to roam the woods, loved how quiet the woods could be. If deep enough in them, he wouldn’t even hear the wind. But the best was afternoons in the barn. He’d climb up in the loft and lean back against a hay bale, then watch the sunlight begin to lean through the loft window, brightening the spilled straw. When the light was at its apex, the loft shimmered as though coated with a golden foil. Dust motes speckled the air like midges. The only sound would be underneath, a calf restless in a stall, a horse eating from a feed bag. Carson had always felt an aloneness in those moments, but never in a sad way.
Through the years, the same feeling had come back to him on late nights as he drove out of town. Doris would be back in bed and the children asleep as he left the house. Night would gather around him, the only light his truck’s twin beams probing the road ahead. He would pass darkened farmhouses and barns as he made his way toward the glow of lamp or porch light. On the way back was the better time, though. He’d savor the solitude, knowing that later when he opened the children’s doors, he could watch them a few moments as they slept, then lie down himself as Doris turned or shifted so that some part of their bodies touched.
The road forked and Carson went right, passing a long-abandoned gas station. The cell phone lay on the passenger seat. Sometimes a farmer called and told Carson he might as well turn around, but this far from town the phone didn’t work. The road snaked upward, nothing on the sides now but drop-offs and trees, an occasional white cross and a vase of wilted flowers. Teenage boys for the most part, Carson knew, too young to think it could happen to them. It was that way in war as well, until you watched enough boys your own age being zipped up in body bags.
Carson had been drafted by the army three months after Darnell joined the marines. They had not seen each other until the Seventh Infantry supported the First Marine at Chosin Reservoir, crossing paths in a Red Cross soup line. It was late afternoon and the temperature already below zero. The Chinese, some men claimed a million of them, were pouring in over the Korean border, and no amount of casualties looked to stop them. Let’s make a vow to God and them Chinese too that if they let us get back to North Carolina alive we’ll stay put and grow old together, Darnell had said. He’d held out his hand and Carson had taken it.
The road curved a final time, and the battered mailbox labeled COE appeared. Carson turned off the blacktop and bumped up the drive, wheels crunching over the chert rock. The porch light was on, from the barn mouth a lantern’s lesser glow. Carson parked next to the unlatched pasture gate, got the medicine bag and canvas tool kit from the truck box. He shouldered the gate open and pushed it back. This far from town the stars were brighter, the sky wider, deeper. As on other such nights, Carson paused to take it in. A small consolation.
The lantern hung just inside the barn mouth, offering a thin apron of light to help Carson make his way. He took slow careful steps so as not to trip on old milking traces. At his age, he’d seen how one fall could end any sort of life worth living. Inside, it took a few moments to adjust to the barn’s starless dark. Near the back stall, the cow lay on the straw floor. Darnell kneeled beside her, one hand stroking her flank. A stainless-steel bucket was close by, already filled with water, beside it rags and a frayed bedsheet. Darnell’s shotgun, not his rifle, leaned across a stall door.
“How long?” Carson asked.
“Three hours.”
Carson set the bags down and checked the cow’s gums, then placed the stethoscope’s silver bell against the flank before pulling on a shoulder glove.
“I think it’s breeched,” Darnell said.
Carson lubed the glove and slid his hand and forearm inside, felt a bent leg, then a shoulder, another leg, and, finally, the head. He slipped a finger inside the mouth and felt a suckle. Life stubbornly held on. Maybe he wouldn’t have to pull the calf out one piece at a time. At least a chance.
“Not a full breech then,” Darnell said when Carson pulled off the glove.
“Afraid it isn’t.”
Carson spread the tarp on the barn floor, set out what he’d need while Darnell retrieved the lantern and set it beside Carson. Inside the lantern’s low light, the world shrank to a circle of straw, within it two old men, a cow, and, though curtained, a calf. Carson did a quick swab and pushed in the needle, waited for the lidocaine to ease the contractions. Darnell still stroked the cow’s flank. As a young vet, Carson had quickly learned there were some men and women, good people otherwise, who’d let a lame calf linger days, not bothering to end its misery. They’d do the same with a sheep with blackleg. Never Darnell though. Because he’d witnessed enough suffering in Korea not to wish it on man or animal was what some folks would think, but Carson knew it to be as much Darnell’s innate decency.
“Why the shotgun?” Carson asked.
“Coyotes. I’ve not heard any of late, but this is the sort of thing to draw them.” Darnell nodded at the calf jack. “Figure you’ll have to use it?”
“I’m going to try not to.”
The cow’s abdomen relaxed and the round eyes calmed. Somewhere in the loft a swallow stirred. Then the barn was silent and the lantern’s light seemed to soften. The calf waited in its deeper darkness for Carson to birth it whole and alive or dead and in pieces. Carson’s hands suddenly felt heavy, shackled. He looked down at them, the liver spots and stark blue veins, knuckles puffy with arthritis. He remembered another misaligned calf, not nearly as bad as this one. He was just months into his practice and had torn the cow’s uterine wall, killing both cow and calf. Doris had been pregnant with their first child, and when she’d asked Carson if the calf and cow were okay, Carson had lied.
Darnell touched his shoulder.
“You all right?”
“Yeah.”
Carson lubed his hand, no glove now, and slid it inside, pushed the calf as far back as he could, making space. Sweat trickled down his forehead, his eyes clos
ed now to better imagine the calf’s body. He found the snout, tugged it forward a bit, then back, and then to one side, and then another. Carson’s heart banged his panting chest like a quickening hammer. The muscles in his neck and shoulder burned. He stopped for a minute, his arm still inside as he caught his breath.
“What do you think?” Darnell asked.
“Maybe,” Carson answered.
Half an hour passed before he got the head aligned. Darnell gave him a wet hand cloth and Carson wiped the sweat off his face and neck. He rested a while longer before nodding at the tarp.
“Okay, let’s get that leg.”
Darnell hooked the OB chain to the handle and gave the other end to Carson, who looped the chain around a front leg. Darnell gripped the handle, and dug his boot heels into the barn floor.
“Okay,” Carson said, his hand on the calf’s leg.
The chain slowly tightened. Carson bent the foreleg to ensure the hoof didn’t rake the uterine wall. Darnell did the hard work now, grunting as his muscles strained. They spoke little, Carson nodding left or right when needed. Minutes passed as the leg gave and caught. Like cracking a safe, that’s how Carson thought of it, finding the combination that made the last tumbler fall into place. It felt like that, the womb swinging open and the calf withdrawn. There were times he could almost hear the click.
“Home free,” Darnell gasped when the leg finally aligned.
Come morning, liniment would grease their lower backs and shoulders. They would move gingerly, new twinges and aches added to others gained over eight decades.
“Lord help us if our kids knew what we were up to tonight,” Darnell said as he rubbed a shoulder. “They’d likely fix you and me up with those electronic ankle bracelets, keep us under house arrest.”
“Which would show they’ve got more sense than we have,” Carson replied.
The second leg took less than a minute and the calf slipped into a wider world. Carson cleared mucus from the snout, placed a finger inside the mouth and felt a tug.
“Much as we’ve done this, you’d think it might get a tad bit easier,” Darnell said, “but that’s not the way of it.”