Mattie

by Judy Alter

  I did pause several times during my daily routine to recall Eli’s words about the town reaction to the sanitarium being a tribute to me. If that was so, the years of riding the prairie and having no life of my own, even the sacrifice of Em and Nora and all I had once held dear, began to be in perspective. Not that the sanitarium was worth losing them for, but that somehow there was a balance to life. I had accomplished what I came to Benteen to do. Years later they gave me an appreciation banquet—filled the high school gymnasium with people who made laudatory speeches until I felt foolish—but it raised nothing in me like the emotion that I felt when I realized the town wanted my sanitarium because they believed in me.

  We heard from Nora only occasionally during this period. About two months after she left for Omaha, she wrote to say that her pregnancy had been a false alarm after all, and there would be no early baby. She and Clint, she said, were both relieved and looking forward to building their lives together before the arrival of a child.

  I told only Eli about the letter at first, and he echoed my thoughts.

  “She really tricked him into that marriage, didn’t she? Wasn’t even pregnant.”

  “Probably not,” I agreed. “It’s the most calculating, well . . . I can’t say how I feel about it.”

  “I know,” he said, and I marveled that someone who was supposedly no more than a bed partner could read my mind so closely and be so in touch with what I felt and said. The gulf in our backgrounds and education melted away when we were together, and I found myself thinking in terms of love and permanent relationships. But Eli never spoke of the future.

  I finally had to tell Jim about Nora’s letter, too, or else he would be waiting impatiently for his first great-grandchild. As usual, he was enigmatic.

  “Probably a blessing,” he said, never letting on if he suspected the awful trick that Eli and I did.

  Jim was old now, though I never did know his age. He had finally consented to move into town, if Eli would build him a room adjacent to the new barn at the sanitarium.

  “Build it like a soddie,” he instructed Eli.

  “Hell, old man, build it yourself,” Eli answered, and that’s eventually what Jim did. He moved more slowly, but he was still a competent, careful man. I looked forward to having him close, mostly for his companionship but also so that I could watch his health. Not that he ever complained or brought me a problem, but I detected a shortness of breath in him. I could not envision life without Jim Reeves.

  The closest Eli came to losing patience with me over the sanitarium was the day I announced that I had called Scottsbluff and ordered a thousand elm trees, all three foot high.

  “Good Lord Almighty,” he exploded. “What in tarnation are you going to do with a thousand trees?”

  “I thought you’d plant them in a big square around the sanitarium, block it off from the breeze.”

  “Lady doctor, I ain’t no gardener, remember? Besides, you’re the one that wanted this darn building where you could see the prairie and feel the breeze, and now you block it off with a bunch of trees.” He paused, then grinned. “Course, if they ain’t but three foot high, they probably ain’t gonna grow anymore, and they won’t block anything.”

  “They’ll grow,” I said.

  Late that night, his arms around me, he suddenly asked, “Are you serious? A thousand trees?”

  I collapsed in laughter.

  Grumbling all the while, Eli planted the trees, but it was one of the last things he did when the building was completed.

  Tom Redbone came into my life during the construction of the sanitarium. And somehow that child walked right into my heart, the child of my soul that Nora had never been, may God forgive an unmotherly thought.

  Tom’s mother, a pale, tired woman, brought him to the clinic in a buckboard, his arm fixed in a homemade splint of saplings, his face contorted with pain.

  “Fell off that big horse of his daddy’s, he did. Told him that horse was too big and mean, but you can’t tell a boy of twelve nothing. Leastaways, not this one.” She said all this in a flat, expressionless tone, a colorless, drab woman without a spark of life in her eyes.

  Tom shot her a silent look neither of resentment nor anger, but perhaps resignation, and climbed carefully out of the buckboard. I thought her unfeeling.

  “Here, son,” I said. “Let me help you hold that arm perfectly still while we get inside.”

  He was stoic about the pain of setting the arm properly, or at least as stoic as he could be, and I admired him for it.

  When I told his mother the fee would be three dollars, she said, “I’ll pay what I can when I can. Suppose I have to bring him back all the time, and that will cost me more.”

  “There will be no charge,” I said distantly, “but yes, I would like to check the progress of the arm from time to time, preferably once a week.”

  Tom, meanwhile, had wandered toward my bookcase and stood transfixed, staring at titles on the shelf.

  “Do you like to read, Tom?” I asked.

  Before he could answer, his mother broke in. “That fool child would read all the time if ‘n I’d let him. Wouldn’t do a lick of work, just put his nose in a book.”

  Ignoring her, I went over to the boy, whose eyes told me clearly that he did indeed love to read. “Well, Tom,” I said, “you won’t be able to do much work for a spell now. Why don’t you take a book with you? You can bring it back when I check your arm, and take another one then.”

  “Could I really?”

  “Of course.” I was remembering the first time Dr. Dinsmore let me borrow a book, the excitement and pride I had felt, the new world that had opened up to me. At least I had had Mama, who was equally appreciative of fine books. This poor lad had only this complaining shell of a woman to turn to. I wondered about the father but could ask nothing.

  When they returned the next week, Tom brought back The Last of the Mohicans and traded it for The Virginian.

  “You like adventure, don’t you?” I asked, and he shook his head happily in the affirmative.

  “Can’t do no work, and I can’t be bringing him in here all the time,” grumbled his mother. “Got too much work to do out on the place.”

  Impulsively I suggested that Tom stay with me until his arm healed. “My daughter’s room is empty, and surely he can be some help to me,” I said.

  “How much would it cost?”

  Her attitude made me stiffen in anger, and if I hadn’t instinctively cared about that boy, I’d have told her to get out. But I managed a polite “There will be no charge. I see a future for your son, and I want to do what I can to help him.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” Suspicion lurked in her tone.

  “Because someone once helped me when I needed it, and if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t be a physician today. I know how important it is. And this way, I can do something to repay that debt.”

  “I’ll have to talk to his father. If he says it’s all right, we’ll be back.” She left, almost grabbing poor Tom by the broken arm and never giving me a word of appreciation. But as he was hurried out the door, Tom managed to turn and give me a radiant smile that justified my impulsive action.

  Cautiously, I told Eli that night what I had done.

  “You what? Get rid of your kid, and you take on another one, one you don’t even know? Lady doctor, you are impossible!” But he buried his head in my neck as he said it, and I sensed affection and maybe even a little admiration.

  Suddenly he sat up. “I guess that means the end of my late-night visits.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.” And it was true, I hadn’t.

  “Guess you best think,” he said dryly.

  My heart sank, for giving up Eli was not something I could or would do easily, certainly not for the sake of an unknown youngster and an experiment that might be brief, to say the least.

  “Don’t you think he’ll go to sleep earlier? I intend to be fairly strict with him, just as I was with Nora.”

&
nbsp; “We’ll see, but I don’t want that young one to catch me here.”

  Curious, I asked why not. “Are you afraid the town would find out?”

  “No,” he said slowly, “I just don’t think it would be good for him or your relationship with him. Mind you, I ain’t met that kid yet, but I think you got yourself a long-term boarder.”

  “Maybe so,” I muttered.

  When Tom did meet Eli, it was a case of instant hero worship. Tom’s mother brought him back in three days, and with him, a small sack of shabby clothes.

  “His pa says we’ll see how this works out. And thanks to you for taking care of him.” And she was gone.

  Tom stared after her a moment, and I realized he was virtually being abandoned by a parent. The ease with which his parents gave him to me must have undermined his sense of self-worth, and I briefly condemned myself for not thinking of that sooner.

  Putting an arm around him, I said, “I know they’ll miss you something awful, Tom.”

  “Oh, they will and they won’t,” he said philosophically. “I got two brothers to help them, so they won’t have to work harder just because I’m here. And I won’t miss them, Dr. Armstrong, I really won’t.” He didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t ask why, though I had some strong suspicions.

  That very day I took Tom with me to the sanitarium, now a framed-in building slowly being covered with brick. I introduced Tom to Eli.

  “Howdy, son,” Eli said in his usual terse manner. “Don’t know how much help you can be with that arm, but we’ll find something for you to do.”

  “I’d like that,” Tom said politely, a shade of uncertainty tingeing his voice.

  “Eli’s teasing you, Tom. You don’t have to work on the sanitarium.”

  “No, I want to,” he said deliberately. “I want to do something to help you.”

  “She’s worth helping, ain’t she, son?” Eli said with one of his slight smiles, and I saw then that he had made a friend of Tom.

  Eli became to Tom what Jim had been to Will Henry. Tom dogged his heels so much that I wondered that Eli, never known for his patience, didn’t explode. But he carefully explained things to Tom, told him what he was doing, gave him chores that the boy could manage with his broken arm.

  And Tom came back to me at night, exhausted but happy. “Why doesn’t Eli ever come here for supper?” he asked one night.

  “Oh,” I said evasively, “he does sometimes.”

  “Well, I wish he could come all the time.”

  So do I, I thought, so do I. “Well, Tom, you just make a point of bringing him home tomorrow night. I’ll fix a special supper, maybe stew a hen.”

  And so, because of Tom, Eli came once again to my house on a regular basis in the daytime. There was no open affection between us, only a bantering kind of play, but with the three of us at the kitchen table in the evenings, I felt again a sense of family. And I felt it stronger than when I really had had a family. There was a comfort and acceptance here that I had never found with Em and Nora.

  “Happy, lady doctor?” Eli asked one night as we lay in bed.

  “Very. I feel like you and Tom give me a family again, a better family than I had the first time around.”

  “Don’t get too attached to it,” he said, almost absently, and I felt a finger of fear.

  “Why not?”

  “Oh,” he answered lightly, “it ain’t never good to get attached to something. You never know when fate’s gonna zap you.”

  Fate or a restless builder, I wondered. Eli had been in Benteen almost two years, the sanitarium was nearly finished, and I worried about the future.

  Eli had given me a big, shaggy farm collie named Sheba. Claimed he found her out on the prairie on the way back from one of his flings in Scottsbluff. Sheba was large, enthusiastic and fairly untrained, and inadvertently she led to the lengthening of Tom’s visit to me past the time when school began.

  His arm had healed nicely, and I took the cast off one day in August.

  “Gosh, am I glad to get that off! Sure was hot these days.”

  “I’ll bet,” I murmured sympathetically, examining the arm carefully and finding it straight. “All right, you may go outside, but you must remember, Tom, this arm is not as strong yet as it should be. Take care with it.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he promised obediently, heading for the door.

  It wasn’t ten minutes before I heard his howl of pain. Rushing to the door, I saw him standing in the yard, holding that arm and fighting back tears. Beside him, Sheba stood whimpering and staring at him.

  “Tom! What happened?”

  “She knocked me down,” he managed to mutter between clenched teeth.

  And she had rebroken the arm. I had to set it again, and Tom had to begin the whole healing process over again. I sent word out to his parents, who had been to visit the boy only twice briefly, and they sent back that they would be in to see about him when they could.

  I never asked Tom about them, and he talked only infrequently, but I gathered they were not bad people, just like so many other dirt-poor farmers beaten down by poverty and hard work until there was no love and laughter in their lives. They didn’t mean to be cruel or uncaring with their children, but they knew no other way. Tom, meanwhile, flourished under my care. Even Eli commented that “the sprout” had grown two inches in as many months, it seemed.

  “You know, Mattie,” Tom said one evening, “I think I want to be a doctor when I grow up.” He had, with my blessing, begun to call me Mattie on the theory that Mother would be inappropriate and Dr. Armstrong was awfully formal.

  I was delighted with his statement but tried to hide my enthusiasm. “Are you sure, Tom, or is it just that that’s the example you see right now?”

  He could be a solemn and thoughtful child, and right then he seemed to ponder the question. “You could be right. I like watching you work and helping when I can. But I’ve never known much about other kinds of work. Maybe I’d like them, too. I’ll tell you, though, I won’t ever farm like Pa.”

  Amen, I thought. “Well, that’s the whole purpose of going to college, Tom. You learn about a lot of things and find out which one you like best. Then, if you decide to go to medical school, you have to go longer and work pretty hard.”

  “I know,” he said, “but I don’t see how I’ll ever even get to college. Ma would have a fit.”

  Yes, I thought, she probably would. But that’s one bridge I won’t cross until I come to it. “Have you been going to school, Tom?”

  “Some. Enough to be able to teach myself reading and stuff.”

  “Would you like to start school here next month?”

  “Ma would never hear of it.”

  “Would you like it?” I repeated.

  “Yes, but—”

  “Fine. I’ll talk to your mother about it when she comes in.”

  I suspect the Redbone family was grateful to have one child taken off their hands. They may even have been grateful that he was being given opportunities, but they hesitated not a minute before agreeing that he could attend school in Benteen and stay with me during the school year.

  So there I was, a middle-aged doctor with a twelve-year-old protégé, and having an affair with an unlettered builder. I thought my cup runneth over.

  The sanitarium was completed in October of 1917, just in time for me to make the move before winter hit. It was a grand building, standing straight and tall, the windows even and regular as I had wanted them, the roof pitched high to shed snow. Upstairs were two large rooms, each with separate private facilities. Downstairs there was the huge kitchen, two small bedrooms, a living area and an office for me. Throughout, it had hardwood floors that gleamed and dark oak baseboards and woodwork, imported with some difficulty. The furniture that had once been Em’s pride and joy, now worn and shabby, even seemed to brighten in its new surroundings, and it was a good thing, for I had put every penny I had into that building. New furniture was out of the question beyond the cheap beds with wh
ich I filled the upstairs rooms.

  “You like it, lady doctor?” Eli and I stood outside, staring at the building early one evening as the sun faded.

  “It’s what I dreamed of, Eli. It looks just like I thought it should. Are you pleased?”

  “Got to say I’m more proud of this than most anything else I’ve done,” he acknowledged.

  “Is it finished enough to have a dedication?”

  “Dedication? What in the heck do you mean?”

  “I want to have a ceremony, ask the new minister to bless the building for the use for which it was intended. Then maybe have punch and cookies and invite people to go through it before I move in.”

  “You do what you want,” he said, obviously disinterested in my dedication ceremony.

  “You must be there,” I said blindly. “It’s your building, too, and you need to share in the celebration.”

  “Hey, lady doctor, don’t you know by now I don’t have to do anything? But for you, if it’s important, I’ll be there.”

  We set the dedication for the following Sunday afternoon.

  Eli was there, awkwardly stuffed into a suit he must have purchased from Whittaker’s. I kept referring people to Mr. Able when they wanted to comment on the strength and solidity of the building, and he accepted their congratulations sincerely but solemnly, looking out of place all the while.

  When the minister invoked God’s blessing on the building and the work that would be done there, Eli bowed his head reverently, then snuck a look at me that nearly caused me to disgrace myself.

  The dedication was a success. Everyone in town turned out, and they inspected every inch and corner of the sanitarium, ate almost ten dozen cookies, six batches of brownies and five angel food cakes, and drank gallons of fruit punch.

  Tom was ecstatic, running through the crowd, explaining to people how he’d helped with this or that and where his room would be, until, at the end of the day, he drooped visibly. His first night’s sleep in our new home began early and was sound.