by Judy Alter
I made my first house call three weeks after Nora was born, riding out in the buggy, with Nora tucked safely into a basket on the floor. We went to see the Gelsons, partly because I’d heard Lucy was poorly, though nothing urgent, and partly because I was housebound and anxious to be out.
The late spring snow of the night Nora was born was long gone, and the prairie was turning green. It seemed to be blossoming with beginning new life, and I had a lot of dramatic thoughts about spring and new beginnings and Nora. Even the air smelled fresh and new, and I marveled at how wonderful my life was. Omaha seemed far away, and Princeton, thankfully, much farther.
Nora took to the ride without complaint, just as she did everything, and I quieted Em’s fears by telling him that contrary to what everyone thought, fresh air was wonderful for babies. He finally let me go, though with so much advice that I could hardly bear it.
“Yes, Em, I’ll keep her bundled.”
“No, Em, I won’t let the boys hold her.” I might fudge on that one, I thought.
Lucy was poorly, just as Jed had said on his last visit to town. “She, well, she just seems tired all the time,” he’d worried aloud. “Can’t get her strength up to do nothing.”
I’ll bet she is tired, I thought grimly, and Jed’s idea of nothing would probably flatten two stronger women, but I said nothing to him at the time. Jed was an old-fashioned, noncomplaining type who accepted life as it came to him, and he expected the same stoicism of others. Even his appearance indicated his calm steadiness, for he was bigger than most men, with a solid, square face and a generally impassive look in his deep blue eyes. I had seen Jed smile only once or twice, but then, I had never seen him frown.
Lucy oohed and aahed over the baby, as I knew she would, and Nora fixed her with one of her solemn stares, which made Lucy laugh. “Land’s sake, isn’t she a solemn one, Mattie? Can’t you ever tell her any jokes?” She reached a finger toward Nora’s tiny fist.
“You know Em,” I replied. “He jokes with her all the time, and she just stares at him like she’s sizing him up.”
Thirteen-year-old Jake paid little attention to us, kind of adopting that boyish attitude of “Bah, babies!” but the two younger boys danced and clamored around.
“Can’t I hold her?”
“Her hands are so tiny. Can I touch one?”
“Let me see, Jim! You’re in the way!”
Lucy’s smile faded, as though she didn’t want to have to deal with even this good-natured bickering. “Boys, hush, please. For my sake.”
They hushed instantly, staring a moment at their mother, then standing downcast. We were still outside the soddie, and I asked Jake to look after my horses while we went inside.
“I hate to go into that dark, stuffy house these days,” Lucy said. “Spring is so wonderful outdoors.”
“True, Lucy, but I need to set Nora down and let the boys have a good look at her.”
Inside, I guessed why Lucy didn’t want to go into the house. Her usually spotless house was not quite up to her standards—not dirty, but things hadn’t been picked up, and there were cobwebs, an inevitable problem in soddies, in places where Lucy would normally have gotten rid of them.
“I don’t know.” She gestured helplessly. “I just didn’t seem to be able to keep up this winter.”
“Boys,” I said, “you keep an eye on Nora. No, Luther, don’t pick her up, just watch her. Your mother and I are going to talk.”
I pulled the curtain to the bedroom area to give us what privacy I could and then said, “All right, Lucy, how long have you been feeling this way?”
“Most since Christmas,” she muttered. “I don’t think it’s anything. I just . . . Oh, Mattie, I’m so tired!”
“Let’s have a look.” And I gave her what examination I could, listening to her heart, feeling her back, looking closely at her eyes. She sat, apprehensive and quiet.
“I think you’re right, Lucy. It’s nothing, nothing but you’re tired—worn out—and you need to get out of this cabin.”
We talked a great deal, Lucy explaining that she couldn’t work less, there were things that had to get done no matter how she felt, and my countering that the boys could help with most of her chores. I prescribed an hour’s ride on the prairie, alone, every day that it was pleasant.
“You mean just ride out there all by myself?”
“Right.”
“Jed would think I’d gone crazy.”
“No. I’ll tell him.” Nobody thought much about time for yourself in those days, yet I knew that Lucy needed a little time to be Lucy and not a mother or a wife or a chore girl on a hardscrabble farm. I did talk to Jed, and I could see he thought it was crazy, but he liked me and generally accepted what I said, so he agreed.
The boys, meanwhile, had sat as requested, staring at Nora, who returned their looks with equal solemnity and occasionally waved a hand in their direction.
“She doesn’t talk,” Luther complained.
“Of course not, dummy,” his brother crowed. “You didn’t either when you were a baby.”
“I didn’t?”
Nora and I took the midday meal with the Gelsons and then headed back across the prairie. I drove the horses slowly, enjoying the ride and, truthfully, the solitude. I guess I knew the reception that was waiting for us.
“You’ve been gone four hours.” Em was angrier than I had seen him but one or two times.
“It usually takes me almost that long to go out there.”
“This isn’t usually. You had Nora with you!” He looked about to burst, and I wondered if he’d thought about how he looked to anyone who might pass by. But as always, a part of me was afraid of Em, and I tried to mollify him.
“She’s fine, Em, really she is. Enjoyed the ride, I think.” I hated the pleading tone that crept into my voice.
Nora even smiled a little, as though to reassure her father, but he was enjoying his anger and the power it gave him.
“Well, I didn’t like it,” he raved. “I was damn scared that the horses had run away or stepped in a hole . . .” He waved a fist in the air furiously.
“Lucy needed me, Em. That’s why I went, or at least partly why I went. Now, can we go inside and stop standing out here arguing in front of God and everybody.”
He grabbed the harness to lead the horses to the barn but flung over his shoulder, “I don’t care who hears that you’re an inconsiderate and careless mother!”
Dinner was silent that night. It was the first blemish in our happiness since Nora was born, and I was both dismayed and puzzled. I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong. In fact, I don’t think I’d have done anything different, couldn’t have. So it was unfair that Em was treating me like I was the one at fault when truly he was at fault with his temper. But the most unfair part of it was that I couldn’t defend myself, couldn’t lash back as he lashed out at me and tell him the things I thought about his being overprotective, unjustly angry and, to be blunt, childish in his anger. I bottled all that up inside me and walked tiptoe around him all evening. He played some with Nora, then stormed out of the house without a word and had not come home when I put Nora down and went to sleep myself.
Nora had been sleeping through the night lately, even at that young age, but this night she wakened, and I nursed her. Em was asleep in a big chair in the living room, and I left him there.
The next morning, he was loving and apologetic. “I just lost my mind,” he said. “It won’t happen again. I love you so much . . . well, there’s no explanation. But I apologize.” He drew me tightly to him, and I held on, wanting to believe that it would all be all right.
But I knew, even then, that a pattern was developing. Em would flare in anger over something that amounted to nothing, make a big and ugly scene out of it, then, when he calmed down, he’d be contrite and promise it would never happen again. But it always did.
I heard from the Dinsmores when Nora was a little over a month old. Dr. Dinsmore wrote a formal and stiff congr
atulatory note and sent a money order for Nora. Sara, by contrast, wrote an effusive letter asking all the details about the baby and hoping that Nora’s arrival had made her an aunt. She had, she said, secured permission from her father to spend the summer with us, but no longer, and would expect to arrive in early June. She would, she promised, be a big help in taking care of Nora while I worked, and also in the kitchen because, she boasted, she had become quite a cook in the years since I’d left Omaha.
“I don’t want an outsider in the house,” Em said flatly.
“She’s not an outsider. She’s family to me.” I said it calmly, certain as always that in the long run I would get my way, because my way was right. That was an irritating habit of mine, I’m sure, that tendency to think I always knew the right way something should be done.
“You know what I mean!” he fumed, but I simply walked away. Sara had her train ticket, and though Em would be angry, I knew he would do nothing.
As it turned out, Em decided to turn on the charm for Sara. From the moment she stepped off the train, a dazzling beauty at twenty, Em was chivalry and courtesy come to life.
“So this is Sara! Mattie, you told me to expect a young girl. How could you have misled me so?”
Sara blushed and I laughed. “She was a young girl when I last saw her, Em. Welcome to the prairie, Sara. You do look lovely.”
“Oh, Mattie, it’s so good to see you!” Forgetting all her twenty-year-old poise, she threw her arms around me, and though I was generally not a very demonstrative person, I was delighted. “I’ve missed you something fierce,” she whispered.
“I’ve missed you, too,” I told her, and it was the truth. Of all the people who were dear to me—Em, Nora, Will Henry and Jim—Sara had a special place on the list. “We’ll have a good long talk later,” I told her, “but first come, let’s get you to Benteen and have you meet Nora.”
Nora was duly rescued from Sally Whittaker, in whose care I had left her while we made the trip to Fort Sidney to meet Sara’s train. Sara had been awed and surprised by the prairie, gasping at how far she could see, wondering how people ever lived in its bare open spaces, and Em was avuncular—that was then and is now the only word I could think of for his attitude. He was the indulgent, slightly patronizing uncle-figure, and each time she said, “No, really?” he preened a little and said, with all the wisdom of a born frontiersman, “God’s honest truth, Sara.” I was amused to see Em so beguiled by this charming slip of a girl. Jealousy never occurred to me.
“Mattie, I wish you still lived in a soddie. I wanted to see one.”
“Our soddie is still there, empty right now. But Em can drive you out one day to see it. Sometimes I miss that house, Sara.” It was true. Our new house was fine and grand, much easier to keep clean and much more convenient, but the soddie had been the start of a new life for me, and it held special significance. I had privately vowed that it would remain standing forever, even if Em had to plow around it, but I wasn’t so sure I could convince him to go along with my private vow.
“Sure thing, Sara. I’ll take you out to the claim. But wait till you see the house in town I’ve built for Mattie. It’s really something special.”
“I’m sure it is, Em. Mattie described it to me, and I can hardly wait to see it and meet Nora.” She looked admiringly at him, with those big blue eyes, and Em sat a little taller.
I blessed her for tact, because our house in Benteen was small potatoes compared to her home in Omaha, and Benteen would, I knew, be a revelation to her.
“There it is,” Em said, pointing a finger in the distance. “The town of Benteen, Nebraska.”
Sara squinched her eyes and shielded them with a hand in order to stare at the buildings that rose from the prairie. “Is that all of it? I mean, I thought it was larger.”
“No, dear,” I told her. “That’s Benteen. Just a few families, a store and a schoolhouse and church. Actually, four new families have moved to town within the last year. We’re almost a boomtown.”
Sara looked puzzled, but Em picked up the thread of my talk. “Going to be a big place someday. I mean, look at this river location and all. Can’t hardly beat it for perfect places on the prairie.”
“I’m sure,” Sara said weakly, and I wondered what she would write to her father about Benteen, or Em, or me for that matter. I looked at my hands, rough from riding the prairie, and knew that my face was equally rough. Dr. Dinsmore would no longer consider me the perfect hostess for his smart dinner parties. A flicker of sadness took me from the joy of that day, and for a brief moment I longed for the past, for Omaha and my beloved Dr. Dinsmore.
Nora seemed to take to Sara, smiling at her occasionally and being most cooperative when she tried to feed her a little gruel. Sara, for her part, adored Nora, sang to her, carried her everywhere, rocked her to sleep and seldom left her for a minute.
“Sara,” I protested, “I’ll have the most spoiled child in all of western Nebraska.”
“Oh, Mattie, love can’t hurt babies. It must be good for them.”
Neither Sara nor I had benefited from that uncompromising, undemanding love as infants, and I guessed she was right. We had both missed love, though Sara had a doting father. And me? I had found it where I could, and I had grave doubts now about the wisdom of my choice. It would be good for Nora to have all the love she could. I’ve changed a lot of my ideas on child-rearing over the years, due to experiences good and bad, but I have never changed that one. The little ones need lots of love, and the big ones do, too.
Em continued to prance and preen for Sara, and I thought it was so much better than having him angry that I was pleased and paid them no mind. Sara did take much of the responsibility of Nora off my shoulders, and I was busy with my practice. Besides, I never was one to look for problems that didn’t come up and hit me square in the face. So I went blissfully and blindly on.
I had a steady stream of patients that summer—cholera and diphtheria only occasionally, minor aches and complaints all too often. Much as I could, I encouraged people to come to see me in town, but I still rode the prairie whenever I was needed. That was the summer of one of my most dramatic cases, one that I’m still proud of today.
I was in the kitchen, doing dishes while Em played with Nora, when a young man I’d never seen rode into the yard, his horse lathered from a long, hard ride. He was calling frantically as he reined to a stop.
“Doc! Doc! Hurry! Quick!”
I’d learned to react quickly to these rare but terrifying riders, their haste backed by emergency. Still drying my hands on the dish towel, I tried to calm him down. “Now, tell me exactly what’s the matter.”
“It’s Weatherby; he done knocked a hole in his skull.”
“A hole in his skull?” I repeated somewhat stupidly.
“Yes, ma’am. Bucket handle hit him in the head. He’s alive, least was when I left there, and we need you bad.”
Em had come out the door and sized up the situation right away. “I’ll hitch the horses,” he volunteered.
“No, I’ll ride, Em. Get my small bag, please.”
Within minutes, this strange young man and I were off across the prairie at a good clip, riding the horses hard as long as we dared, then slowing them briefly for a rest. During those rest periods, he told me what little of the story remained untold. A group of men had been digging a well, and Weatherby had been turning the windlass, hauling up yet another heavy load of dirt, when somehow—no one knew yet how it had happened—his hand slipped off the handle, and the windlass turned wildly and hit him in the head, sort of above and forward from his ear, according to my escort, who turned out to be named Scovill. He and Weatherby were neighbors of the man who owned the well.
We reached the soddie where Weatherby was in good time for a long prairie ride, and I rushed inside. By this time, Weatherby’s young wife had been brought, and she stood silently weeping in one corner, while one or two women tried to comfort her. The men in the party stood around looking mise
rable, and one motioned toward the bed with his head.
Weatherby was young and big and strong, and if anybody ever had a chance for recovery, he did. His head had been loosely bandaged, to stop the bleeding, I supposed, and if you could overlook that rag, with its one bloody spot, you might have thought he was sleeping peacefully. Even his color, far as I could tell in that dark soddie, didn’t look too bad, and his breathing seemed regular and fine.
I was very careful, believe me, when I peeled that rag bandage away, and I was glad all those folks in the room didn’t know how hard my own heart was beating. The wound I saw amazed and scared me—that windlass handle had just knocked a piece of his skull clean out. With a damp rag, one of the clean ones I kept in my bag, I wiped away the clotted blood and could see pale gray brain tissue gently pulsing beneath the gaping hole. Well, it wasn’t all that big, no bigger than a half-dollar, but it seemed quite a gaping hole at the time. I knew right away that the problem was to cover the hole and protect the brain from injury and infection. It was remarkable, I guess now, that the brain hadn’t been injured in the original accident, but there was never any sign of swelling or anything. Just that hole in his head.
I talked gently with the people in the cabin, explaining that I thought he’d be fine if I could find something to cover the hole with. They suggested almost everything in the soddie, and I rejected each suggestion just as quickly. Leather and wood were too full of loose material and would cause infection. It had to be metal. No, bits from a bridle could never be smooth and thin enough. I don’t call it luck or anything that made me remember I had a silver dollar in my purse. Em had given it to me some time ago, and I’d hung on to it, carrying it with me as a good-luck piece rather than salting it away in my private hoard as would have been my custom.
One of the men pounded that metal as flat and thin as possible, and we used an auger to pound holes in it. Then I had the ladies boil it hard to sterilize it; then, of course, I had to wait for it to cool. All of this seemed to take forever, and I could feel the people getting more and more tense, the young wife still weeping, the men muttering.