by Dianne Drake
“We all work, Chayton. That’s why we’re put here. And that’s a lesson I’m sure you haven’t forgotten from the old days.”
No escaping it. His grandmother was going to have her way and it was like all the years they’d been separated had vanished and they’d taken up where they’d left off when he’d been twenty-eight, or eighteen, or eight. “I’ve really missed you,” he said, giving her an affectionate kiss on the forehead.
“And you should have,” she said, thrusting her grocery bags at him.
Leaning against the doorframe of the examining room, arms crossed casually over his chest, one leg crossed casually over the other, Chay grinned at Joanna. “OK, I’m all yours for a couple of hours. Where do you want me?”
Joanna was about to remove stitches from an old-timer. Long hair hanging most of the way down his back and a big toothless grin, the man had a zigzag cut up his right forearm. “Gee, Doctor, isn’t that generous of you?” Joanna retorted.
“I thought it was.”
“If I weren’t in desperate need of help, I’d tell you exactly where I’d like you to go, but I’m not in a position to turn down help, even if it’s only yours. So you start right here with Bob Turning Bull. He took a fall, I stitched him up and now it’s time for them to come out. Oh, and he has another more delicate complaint. One he doesn’t want to discuss with a woman. Maybe you can get him to tell you about it.”
She smiled as she hurried out of the room to see who was next in line. “And if you need any help, just give me a shout.”
“I think I can handle stitches, Joanna.”
The way he’d said her name gave her a little chill. His voice was deep and seductive already, but the way Joanna had rolled off his tongue…She shivered again, just thinking about it. OK, pull back here, Joanna. Focus. Avoid the distractions. Not enough time, absolutely not enough energy to do otherwise. More than that, he was a doctor, for heaven’s sake. What in the world was she thinking? She’d had one once and once was definitely enough. “It’s not the stitches I’m worried about. Oh, and Mr Turning Bull is a little hard of hearing.” That was putting it mildly.
Joanna took the next patient into the tiny examining room adjacent to the one where Chayton was about to have a meaningful experience with Bob Turning Bull. Finally, something that would brighten her hectic day. “So what can I do for you, Mrs One Feather?”
“Another headache. I take the pills you give me and the headaches go away, but they always seem to come back.”
“Well, I may have just what you need.” Joanna pulled a glasses case from her pocket. Reading glasses, not prescription. Alice One Feather was a seamstress who did all her tiny detail work by hand. Her headaches always came at the end of her work day, and since there were no other symptoms—no high blood pressure, visual distortion, slurred speech, neurological impairment—to go along with the headaches, the logical assumption seemed to be poor eyesight. Joanna hoped so, anyway, because there was no way Alice would submit to tests other than what was simple and convenient. She’d made that perfectly clear at her first visit to see Joanna. Fix the problem there, or skip it. She’d said it in a polite way, of course, but the response was the same thing she’d heard from a lot of other people on Hawk. Convenience, or nothing. Probably had something to do with the fact that many of the people here were still tottering on the verge of disbelief in Joanna’s kind of medicine.
“I want you to use these when you do any close-up work—sewing, reading, anything to do with your eyes. If it’s simple eye strain, they might help.” So many ifs out here. If it’s eye strain, if it’s simple dermatitis, if it’s a plain old belly ache. In a time when medicine was so advanced, Joanna was working fifty years in the past and keeping her fingers crossed every time she prescribed something.
Alice One Feather scrambled out of the room clutching her glasses, and as soon as she was out the door Joanna plopped herself down on top of the examining table for a couple of minutes just to give her feet and back a little break. Two minutes was all she could afford, then back to work.
“What kind of pain are you experiencing?” Chay said. The rooms had paper-thin walls and anything above a normal tone of voice was fair game for anyone who cared to listen. Luckily, the people still in the waiting room, at least ten of them, were chatting, in effect acting as a privacy barrier to the voice level Chay was going to have to use in order to be heard by Mr Turning Bull. “I said, what kind of pain are you experiencing?” This time his voice was a little louder.
Joanna smiled. Not quite there yet, but he was getting closer.
“Where’s your pain, Mr Turning Bull? Where do you hurt?”
Yep, loud enough to be heard this time. Joanna hopped off the table and wandered into Chayton’s exam room. “Need some help?”
“No, I don’t need help,” he snapped. “It’s abdominal pain. I can figure it out.”
“Suit yourself.” She stepped back out, shut the door, and returned to the examining table for another few minutes off her feet, thanks to Bob Turning Bull. He deserved his privacy, and having another patient back in the examining area certainly wouldn’t give him any. Not even through closed doors. So she hopped back up on the table, lay back and closed her eyes. Take the breaks any way you can get them, Joanna. They didn’t happen too often.
Chay poked and probed Bob Turning Bull’s belly for a good five minutes, eliciting absolutely no reaction from him. Except for the fact that his belly was a little rigid and distended, there didn’t seem to be much the matter with him. Still, Chay wasn’t ready to give him a dose of some generic stomach medicine and send him on his way. Not when the thought of bowel obstruction kept popping into his mind. Bowel obstruction. The man was close to eighty. That could easily happen. But what did Chay know about bowel obstructions? He was an orthopedist, for heaven’s sake. He fixed bones, not guts. “Have you been passing any gas?” It seemed like the logical question to ask, he thought.
“What?”
“Gas, Mr Turning Bull. Have you been passing any gas?” he repeated, this time louder.
“What?” Bob Turning Bull’s voice seemed to rise in direct proportion to Chay’s.
“Have you been expelling any gas? Gas. Are you expelling gas?” By now everybody out on the street was probably hearing him. For sure, everybody in the waiting room was privy to Mr Turning Bull’s delicate condition. “Do you have gas, Mr Turning Bull?” he shouted.
Bob Turning Bull drew himself up in an indignant stance and shouted, “No, sir. That certainly wasn’t me! Must have been you expelling gas, Doctor, because I surely did no such thing.”
The waiting room erupted in laughter. So did Joanna, from the hall. Poking her head into the room, she wasn’t even trying to keep a straight face. “Here, have him take this home.” She tossed him a boxed enema.
“You set me up, didn’t you?” Chay said. “I thought you said he wouldn’t talk to you about his complaint.”
“He won’t, Doctor. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know what it is.” Grinning, she backed out and shut the door, leaving Chay there with an old man who was giving him an irate, if not disgusted look.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, young man,” Bob Turning Bull yelled, heading to the door. “People your age should know better.” He shook his head in distaste. “Shame on you.” Then he ambled away, glancing back to give Chay one more disgusted look before he turned the corner into the waiting room.
“Ready for your next one?” Joanna asked, not even trying to hide her grin. She was leaning against the hall wall, arms crossed casually against her chest, one leg crossed casually over the other—mimicking his stance from earlier, grinning for all she was worth.
“No, I’m not ready for the next one.” He noticed that Joanna’s nose wrinkled when she smiled. Cute wrinkle. Cute nose. Too cute to punch, which was what she deserved for pulling that last stunt on him. Actually, rather than punching, he felt more like kissing that nose. Whoa, Chay. Where the hell did that come from?
>
See his dad, get rejected one more time then get the hell out of Rising Sun and off the Hawk Reservation. That was it, and Joanna and her cute little nose didn’t fit into that plan anywhere.
“OK. So maybe it was a little mean of me to stick Mr Turning Bull on you like that, but all I can say is welcome to my world, Chayton.”
“Chay.”
“Chay. Just thought I’d give you the crash course in circuit medicine in the Big Open.”
“Don’t you mean more like crash and burn in the Big Open?” He chuckled. “I think one patient was enough. Not sure I’m up to another one.”
“Well, I’ll take Mrs Bassett, who’s next up, but in case you change your mind, the one after her’s a piece of cake. Sweet lady who has a little gout. She takes an anti-inflammatory for it, and she comes in once a week pretty much for no reason other than some reassurance. Her name’s Ivy Lebeau.”
“Mrs Lebeau?” Ivy Swiftbird Lebeau had been his grade school teacher. He’d endured six years in a one-room school that took in a mixture of grade levels, and Mrs Lebeau was an extraordinary teacher under the worst of circumstances.
Joanna nodded. “And since you’re an orthopod, maybe that’s a little closer to what you do.”
“What does she take?”
“Ibuprofen.”
“Any dietary adjustments?” Gout, unlike other forms of arthritis, is often triggered by dietary habits—not necessarily poor dietary habits but excesses in foods like red meat, and especially the organ meats. If there was one thing in abundance on Hawk, it was red meat. Gout’s worst enemy in many cases.
“She gave up shellfish.” Joanna grinned. “Although I don’t think she’s ever eaten it. But she was willing to give it up.”
“Let me see what I can do. She’s not hard of hearing, is she?”
“Sharp as a tack with perfect hearing.”
Joanna went to greet her next patient while Chay hesitated outside the examination room in which Mrs Lebeau was waiting. Admittedly, he was a little nervous. This was not the impersonal situation he was used to. Inside was a person who’d made a tremendous difference in his life and he didn’t know what to expect from her. “Hello, Mrs Lebeau,” he said, finally stepping in.
“Macawi told me you were back,” she snorted. “It’s about time, running off the way you did, Chayton!”
Joanna had called her sweet? Chay smiled patiently. Apparently, Mrs Lebeau was another of the many who weren’t too happy to see him. He was disappointed by her reaction, but he could deal with it. “I understand you have a little gout.”
“Not a little, Chayton. If you understood all the details of gout, and I’m assuming that you do since you are an orthopedic specialist, then you’d know that there’s no such thing as a little gout. I should have thought they would teach you better in medical school.”
Same old Mrs Lebeau. Tiny, barely five feet and ninety pounds and exacting, abrasive, no-nonsense. And probably the reason he was a doctor today, although he’d never tell her that. Like everybody else, her plans had been for him to go to community college, get that degree in agriculture, then come back to the reservation. “What I know is that you’re still eating red meat. Probably beans too, and lentils and peas.”
She held up her right foot to show him her inflamed big toe. Red skin, warm to the touch. “I’ve cut my portions back and given up the organ meats, except kidney. I do like a good kidney stew every once in a while.”
“Are you drinking more water? Water washes out the acids that cause gout—”
“Of course I’m drinking more water. I’m not an idiot, young man, and I don’t appreciate you taking that attitude with me. I understand what the water does and I drink as much as Dr Killian told me to do. And I’m staying off my feet more. Your father came to see me last week and told me to walk with a cane, so I’m doing that, too.”
His father. The healer. Even Mrs Lebeau, who was educated, still clung to some of the old ways, and that wasn’t going to change. “Would you consider taking a different drug?”
“No.”
“An injection in your toe?”
“Absolutely not, Chayton. And don’t even suggest such a thing to me again.”
His patience was beginning to wear thin. She came for treatment, but refused it. “Will you limit kidney stew to once a month?”
“Yes, I’m willing to do that.”
Now he was getting somewhere. “Cut out the beans.”
“Beans once a week, and that’s not negotiable.”
Beans were an inexpensive and easy staple. Cutting them out entirely would probably be a financial hardship to Mrs Lebeau. “I can live with that,” he said, chuckling. This was the first time in his medical career that a patient’s treatment had boiled down to roll-up-the-sleeves negotiation. “But you’ve got to cut your red meat consumption in half and eat more chicken or turkey. That’s the only way I’ll accept any beans.”
Teetering on the edge of the examining table, with her feet resting on the pull-out footrest, Ivy Lebeau crooked her finger at Chayton. “Come here,” she said.
He remembered that finger, that summons. Sometimes it had been good, most often it had been the invitation to go stand in the corner. He obliged, then bent down to her as she motioned him to do so.
“You’re a good boy, Chayton. It’s nice that you finally came home.” Then she patted him on the cheek. “I’ll eat chicken and turkey if that makes you happy.”
Chay was helping Mrs Lebeau to the door when Joanna rushed in, breathless. “I have a patient out in Steele. He’s been laid up with a fractured femur. Hairline, not serious at the time of diagnosis. His mother just called and she thinks Michael has re-broken his leg. He’s eight. She says it’s swelling up pretty badly, a lot worse than it did the first time, and this time he’s having trouble breathing!”
Immediately Chay jumped way ahead of Joanna’s information to the possibilities. Blood loss from the bone, blood-vessel damage, nerve damage. Amputation. “How long will it take me to get there?”
CHAPTER FOUR
THE drive to Steele was normally half an hour for Joanna when she was taking her time, but she could cut ten minutes off of that if she had to—another five if the emergency was life-threatening. Michael Red Elk’s emergency lay somewhere in the realm where ten to fifteen minutes chopped off was mandatory. “I saw him yesterday, gave him permission to resume some activity.”
“Follow-up X-ray?” Chay asked.
“I was lucky to get the diagnostic X-ray when he broke his leg. Follow-ups of any sort don’t usually happen out here.” No one was on the road. Good thing, with her speed exceeding the limit by half as much again. One of the good things about living in the Big Open was that it was just that. Big and open. There was no one else around, no one to get in her way in times such as this. “I always ask, but most of the time I get turned down.”
“Do you have your own X-ray machine?”
Joanna laughed. “You’re kidding me, right? You saw what I have, and there’s no X-ray machine there.”
“I thought maybe one of your other clinics—”
“My other clinics are the buildings du jour that I can grab. Yesterday it was Mrs Begay’s living room. Last week it was the sidewalk. No clinics, Chay. Rising Sun is as modern as medicine gets out here.” Although she’d become the queen of scrounging, always begging at the hospital door for anything they were going to toss into the trash. She had a twenty-years-outdated EKG machine, and it still worked well enough. Plus a defibrillator. All fit for the big city hospital trash piles, but in her clinic they were welcome additions. And, yes, she had the word out at hospitals all over Montana that she was looking for X-ray equipment. Even an old portable would be good. So far, though, no luck.
“I guess I never realized how bad it is.” He slid down into the passenger’s seat next to Joanna and stared off to the side of the road. “When you’re a kid it is what it is. Not good, not bad. Just what it is.”
“So why’d you leav
e?”
“A lot of reasons. Living out in the world gave me more perspectives than I realized any one man was allowed to have here. For the first time in my life I was free—no restrictions, no expectations, no obligations. Growing up as the son of one of the tribal leaders, there are always a lot of expectations. The ones everybody had for me didn’t fit with the ones I had for myself, so when I left, I left.”
“Did you ever look back?”
“All the time. Everything Hawk is, and isn’t, is a part of me. Only thing is, I could look, but I couldn’t come back. It had to be all or nothing. So, why did you strand yourself out here? By choice, or did someone banish you from somewhere?” He chuckled. “Any deep, dark secrets you want to reveal?”
She glanced over at him. He was so casual, such a good fit out here. Not like her, always trying to fit in someplace…any place. “Not deep, not dark and definitely not a secret. I just got divorced. He took the practice, I hit the road.” Simple enough. No need to mention differing expectations and needs and outlooks. Those were a year in her past now and, like Chay, sometimes she looked back, but she wouldn’t go back.
“And so you ended up here, at the end of the road.”
“Or the beginning, depending on what you want.”
They were sailing by the cattle ranch and she noticed Chay deliberately turn his head away. She knew the story. At least the cursory details of it. Everybody did. The good son gone bad. Or, in Chay’s case, gone away, never to return, which was the same thing as gone bad. Pity. Leonard Ducheneaux was a nice man. He had his stubborn ways, but he was a decent, hard worker who apparently had an iron resolve when it came to his son. No son, he would say.
Sadly, he meant it.
“Have you seen my father lately?” Chay asked.
That surprised her a little. Somehow she’d assumed Chay would be as stubborn as his father. No father. “In passing. Why?”
“Not as a patient?”
“If I had…”