Mattie

by Judy Alter

  Eli Able came back to town in the interval between Nora’s announcement and her wedding.

  “Morning, lady doctor,” he drawled as he came through my office door. “Got a load of supplies out there to put in the barn. Don’t want to leave them on the site.”

  “Oh, Eli, I’m glad you’re back. I really am.” I paused self-consciously, not able to tell him what had happened but glad for reasons that I couldn’t define that he would be around the next days and weeks. “But you don’t have to unload in the barn. Nobody will steal anything out there.”

  “Which one of us is building that damn thing?” He was impatient, but there was a hint of laughter in his voice.

  “You are,” I murmured.

  “Thank you. I’ll unload in your barn.” And he stalked away.

  I almost laughed, though I was not certain which one of us I would have been laughing at.

  Eli Able stayed in the kitchen after supper that night. The two of us had eaten alone, Nora being off visiting at the Folsoms, where she apparently had been accepted lovingly as a future daughter-in-law in spite of the situation. I had talked briefly with the Folsoms on one or two occasions and found them neither as horrified as I nor as concerned about the youngsters’ future. Mrs. Folsom, having no daughters, wanted to plan the wedding, and I was letting her have her way, barring my adamant refusal to sanction anything more than a small ceremony for the families. So Nora and Mrs. Folsom were planning a wedding that evening, without me.

  “Something’s bothering you, lady doctor.” He said it quietly, staring at me over his coffee.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Yes it is. Tell me what could possibly have happened that bad in the big town of Benteen in the week or so that I was gone.”

  “How do you know it’s bad?”

  “The look in your eyes.”

  I had thought, as always, that I was managing my crisis so well. Strong Mattie, no one had to worry about her. And yet here sat this man, the opposite of everything I had always thought I sought in men, and he pierced right through to the truth. What’s more, I sensed that he cared. And it nearly undid me.

  With tears that I fought welling up in my eyes, I told him about Nora. He never flickered an eyelash.

  “Not surprised. Only met her once, but I’m not surprised.”

  “Surprise maybe isn’t the word for it, Eli. I’m probably not surprised either. I’ve known for years that Nora had some, uh, traits of which I could not be proud, but I’ve not known how to deal with it. I guess I just gave up in the face of what I didn’t understand, but I never expected this.”

  “Is it the disgrace that bothers you?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said slowly. “I’ve always been able to do what I thought was right without worrying too much about what others said or thought. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have divorced Em. No, I think I’m worried about their future and that of the baby.”

  “Can’t control that.”

  “I know. Jim told me that, too. It’s their problem, but—”

  “Listen to Jim. He’s a good man. But you, you’re feeling like a failure at mothering, aren’t you?”

  He was too perceptive. It took courage for me to answer him. “Yes, I guess I am.”

  He laughed. “We need to be more like animals. Raise them kids till they can take care of themselves, then forget about them. You’ve got her to a point she can take care of herself, pretty good care sounds like, so now go on about your sanitarium and whatever else is important to you.”

  “You can’t just wash kids out of your life! Maybe we should be more like dogs and cats, but we aren’t! You’ve just never had kids.” I was more than a little indignant that he would sit there spouting advice when he hadn’t walked the much-talked-of mile in my moccasins.

  “Yes I did. Long time ago. I don’t want to talk about it.” His face darkened, and in the time I knew him, that’s the most I ever heard Eli Able say about his past family life.

  Nora was married to Clint Folsom on June 10, 1915. That was also the day Eli broke ground for the sanitarium, and the day when he first did something about the currents that were running between us. Of all the days in my life, perhaps that one deserves the bright red circle.

  Nora was a beautiful bride. The ceremony was in the Folsoms’ house, before their grand fireplace imported from I don’t remember where, but most impressive. Their living room, like ours, still boasted the pineapple-carved walnut furniture of the last century, the muted Aubusson rugs that had been so important to Em. Neither house had caught up with current trends, but the Folsoms’ made mine look small and shabby.

  The minister asked God’s blessing on this couple as they began life’s adventure together, and I thought wryly God would need to do more than bless them. I was struck by guilt for my unmotherly attitude toward my own daughter, but I looked with pity on Clint, fresh-faced and eager as he was. I knew he didn’t have the stuff it would take to be a success, let alone to live with Nora. Whether he was just naturally weak or his indulgent upbringing was responsible, I didn’t know, but Clint Folsom was on the way to being a weak man.

  Nora’s leave-taking, perhaps because it was public, was effusive. Both Jim and I got large, teary hugs, great protestations about how much she would miss us, promises of daily letters. She did pull me aside briefly to say, with eyes lowered, “I know how you feel, but I want you to know it will be all right. I may not do things your way, but I’ll try never to disgrace you.”

  I reached out to her. “And, Nora, never hurt others, even though you’ve been hurt.” Neither of us had mentioned Em’s conspicuous absence from the wedding, but she knew my reference.

  “I know.” She said it with some sadness.

  Jim, Will Henry, Sue and I stood by Mrs. Folsom as her husband drove the couple off to Fort Sidney and the train. Their luggage would follow, and they would rent furnished quarters, so moving was for them not the chore it had been for me years earlier. Besides, they were going toward civilization, whereas I’d been running from it. In retrospect, the difference in direction suited both Nora and me.

  After the ceremony, Jim and I took the buggy to the sanitarium. Eli was there, marking it off with pegs and string, but he stopped work when we approached.

  “How was the wedding?”

  “Fine. She was pretty.”

  “I’m sure she was. She’s a pretty girl.” That was all he said about what had been, to me, such a momentous occasion.

  “Okay, lady doctor, you want to turn the first shovel of dirt?”

  “Me?”

  “Who else? It’s your sanitarium.”

  He handed me a well-used, dirt-encrusted shovel, with a slight “Sorry,” and I skimmed off my white gloves to grasp it.

  “Where?”

  “Don’t matter,” he laughed. “It’s going to be a big building. You just dig anywhere you got a mind to.”

  Though it was June, and we’d had some rain, the ground was still hard, and I had to struggle more than I thought to get a good full shovel of dirt. Eli and Jim both watched with amusement, though they managed not to laugh. When I threw the dirt high in the air, in what I thought was a gesture of celebration, I showered all of us with it. Then they laughed.

  “Reeves, can you do better than that?” Eli demanded.

  “If not, you can take me out and shoot me,” Jim answered.

  In the end, we all shoveled dirt, then declared it time for a celebration and went back to the house.

  Eli sat in my kitchen again late that night. “You feel okay about today?”

  “I guess.”

  “Don’t sound very positive to me.”

  “Oh, I think I’m coming to grips with it, but I guess Nora will always be one of my big disappointments . . .”

  “More than her daddy?”

  “Much more, because I feel like I could have done something different. I don’t know what, but . . .”

  I fell lost in thought, wondering just what I could have don
e that might somehow have turned Nora out differently. Maybe it was genetic. I remembered that tiny fist hitting the stuffed bear and wondered if the seeds of Nora’s personality might not have been set the night she was conceived, the night Em and I had quarreled so strongly, then made up as violently.

  I didn’t notice that Eli had risen and come to stand beside me until he gently reached down to take both my elbows and pull me to my feet.

  “I know a cure for you, lady doctor.” And he leaned to kiss me, a hard and demanding kiss, pressing my body against his. As I started to pull away, he said, “No, don’t,” and I obeyed automatically.

  “Put out the light,” he said softly, and again I obeyed.

  Without a word he lifted me and carried me to the bedroom, where, with gentleness surprising in view of his huge size, he gently removed my clothes, murmuring soft reassurances all the while. It seemed to me as though a totally new being had occupied Eli Able’s body. Gone was that direct, piercing stare, that harsh, terse way of speaking, that impersonal lack of concern over my great tragedies.

  A new being must have occupied my body, too, for what I did and what I allowed him to do were totally foreign to me. But each time I started to protest, however feebly, he quieted me with a kiss, sometimes a gentle, enticing one and sometimes hard and urgent. I soon gave myself up to the moment.

  Eli was a totally different lover than Em. Whereas Em had taught me the rewards of passion, Eli taught me the joys of slow lovemaking. There was no urgency, no hurry, but rather a deliberate slowness that drew our lovemaking out far into the night and brought me to the brink of pleasure many times. He was a silent lover, with none of Em’s verbal seduction, and I was equally silent, as much at a loss for words as I was filled with enjoyment.

  At last when we lay fulfilled and content in each other’s arms, he spoke. “Feel better, lady doctor?”

  I answered truthfully. “I don’t know. In lots of ways, yes, but I’m scared, afraid . . . I don’t believe I’m here.”

  This time he laughed softly. “You are, and you will be again.”

  I couldn’t decide if it was a threat or a promise, but I liked the idea.

  Toward dawn, I fell into a sound sleep, waking only briefly to be aware that Eli was kissing me and leaving with a gentle “See you at the site in the morning.” I reached for him but he was gone.

  It was bright daylight, much past my usual hour to get up, when I awoke, and it took me a moment to come to my senses and remember all that had happened. When I did, I was filled with a wild mixture of feelings, ranging from elation to guilt, from delight to fear about how to react when I saw Eli that day.

  I needed no fear. He greeted me with his usual “Hey, lady doctor,” and went right on working, while I stood awkwardly at the outer wall of the sanitarium-to-be and wondered what to say.

  “Ain’t got no report this morning,” he finally said. “Got off to a kind of slow start today.” And then, only then, did he wink at me conspiratorially.

  I stood and watched him dig for a while, then left to try to put my whirling mind to the practice of medicine.

  Eli came to my kitchen again that night but not to my bedroom. “We need to talk,” he said.

  Primly, thinking he did not want me to read permanence into a one-night affair, I answered, “There’s no need.”

  Laughing, he reached over to rub my cheek. “Yes, there is, lady doctor. We got to straighten some things out. I ain’t gonna eat here anymore, unless, of course, that old Reeves fellow comes along.”

  “What’s he got to do with it?”

  “Don’t want to compromise your reputation, as the fancy folk say. You’re a lady living alone now, and it wouldn’t look right for me to take supper with you every night and sleep in your barn.”

  “I don’t care how it looks. I thought we settled that issue when we talked about Nora.”

  “I care, for you. Don’t matter none to me, but you don’t want to become the target of town gossip, do you?”

  Eli had never heard the story of Ma and Princeton, so he had no way of knowing how close to home he’d hit. Granted, I’d flown in the face of tradition, divorcing Em, and now my daughter had been equally unconcerned for traditional values, but was I ready to become the scarlet lady of Benteen? No, Eli was right. I couldn’t bear that reputation, not in a town where I was trying so hard to do right, to do what was needed, to be a substantial citizen. Yet did that mean never having Eli in my bed?

  He read my thoughts. “We don’t have to give each other up, ma’am.” His emphasis on the last word was deliberate and mocking. “But we have to be some careful. I’m moving out to the site, me, my horse and my bedroll. You start sleeping with your door unlocked. You’ll be safe enough.”

  And so began a wonderful but frustrating period of my life. I never knew when and if Eli would come, but I slept with my door unlocked, many nights to be awakened by that amazingly gentle touch, once in a while by a rougher, more demanding need that cried out of what pain I didn’t know. Our nights were a mixture of strong need and gentle caring, and I welcomed both. What I came to dread were the nights when I was left wondering whether or not he would come, for Eli was very much his own man and would go a week or more without coming to me in the night. I found myself like the addlepated schoolgirl who can think of nothing more than her love, and it was with effort that I concentrated on my patients and my daily routine.

  Outwardly, Eli and I tolerated each other, a great gulf in personalities separating us. On the building site, we appeared to become familiar as coworkers, but the possibility of friendship seemed remote. He persisted in addressing me as “lady doctor,” and I tried always to be formally correct with him.

  If anybody suspected, it was Jim Reeves with his acute eye for human behavior, his fond but close knowledge of me and his frequent visits to the site. But he said nothing beyond, “It was a good thing when you hired him, Mattie.”

  “I know,” I replied, avoiding Jim’s stare. But he gave me an affectionate pat into which I read a sanction of whatever my relationship to Eli might be.

  Eli had told me he would work the site alone until he needed help, and then, only then, he would contact some men he knew. It was his way of keeping expenses down and, as he later confessed, of drawing the work out. We broke ground in June 1915, and it was the next spring before he felt compelled to hire help. He meanwhile worked for minimal wages, had some meals at my house and an occasional fling in Scottsbluff, which devastated me. I wondered sometimes if we would be attracted to each other if we were to be public about our affection, but it was a moot point, for Eli had no wish for the world to know his private business.

  Eli never talked beyond the present moment, and I, who crossed my bridges miles before I got to them, learned not to anticipate but simply to enjoy.

  “What,” I asked once, “will you do when the sanitarium is finished?”

  “Hush. That’s a long way off.” He was skilled at silencing me, and I melted in his arms.

  He did become accepted in the community, though without any relation to me. Eli would attend church socials, though he shied away from the literary debating society, and he was a regular in the informal discussion group that solved the world’s problems regularly in Whittaker’s store, by now an expanded and modernized version of the old store that had welcomed me when I moved to Benteen.

  Some folks thought he was unusual, to say the least, and mentioned it to me. “Sure is a strange duck you got doing your work for you,” Charles Folsom said one day in passing.

  “He is different, isn’t he?” I agreed. “But he seems to know what he’s doing, and he’s saving me money.”

  “That’s important,” Mr. Folsom agreed. We had hardly strengthened our distant relationship since the marriage of our children, and I found him pompous and overbearing. I had no wish to become close to Nora’s in-laws.

  Other people were impressed by Eli. Jed Gelson spent a long morning at the site, talking and watching, and came away to
tell me, “You got yourself a rare man there, Mattie, a rare man.”

  I almost blushed, thinking of the other ways in which he was a rare man, beyond his building talents.

  In the fall, when Eli had the foundation laid and was ready to frame in the building, he and I both found that most of the townspeople not only had confidence in my project and his building ability, but they saw the sanitarium as a community project. Men turned out to donate half a day here or a day there to help Eli put up the frame of this two-story giant. It was not to be the first two-story building in Benteen, but it surely would be the largest. They helped, though, because they saw it as a building for the town, where people could go for help, not simply as a fulfillment of my dream.

  “Lady doctor, you know all this help I’m getting is a way for them to say what they think of you.”

  “Maybe,” I murmured, lost in his arms, “but they wouldn’t help if they didn’t think you knew what you’re doing.”

  He laughed softly. “We make a heck of a team, don’t we?”

  I nodded, puzzling, though, at how far the teamship went. I found these days that progress on the sanitarium left me with mixed emotions. I was anxious beyond belief for it to be a completed reality, but the prospect of finishing it brought a turning point in my relationship with Eli. What would happen then?

  Outwardly I was the busy physician, treating now mostly the nonacute ills of the townspeople. The days of dire threats such as cholera and diphtheria were gone, though we still had pneumonia, farming accidents and a host of things that could snuff out a life before I knew it. I still occasionally lost a newborn infant, and once, a mother in childbirth, leaving behind a family of four other children and a bewildered, grieving father. But I felt that my skills were pushed to their limit less often, and I was able to form my days into a routine. Without Em, without Nora, I could at last devote myself to medicine. And during the day, I did wholeheartedly just that.