by Molly Gloss
Martha had imagined Tom Kandel to be prostrate on his deathbed, so when he came walking jerkily out from the bedroom she was deeply startled. She hardly recognized him, he was so thin and pale, his face a stiff, wrenched mask. His underwear hanging loosely on his bony frame was dark in patches from sweat. He didn't seem to see his wife or Martha, but circled the room once, closing and unclosing his hands reflexively, and then abruptly he sat on the edge of the sofa and began to hug and rock himself with a low panting sound, a succession of breathless grunts.
Martha looked away in stunned, wordless fear, but Ruth lifted her chin and turned to watch her husband silently. After a while she said, "It was still dark out when I sent Fred for the doctor. What do you suppose is keeping them?"
Martha didn't know if Ruth intended this question for her, or if it was a question at all; but she discovered that she had a cowardly wish to escape back out into the cold morning, which is why she said, "Mrs. Kandel, should I go into Bingham and see what's holding them up?"
Just at that moment they began to hear a car motor and wheels bumping up the lane, and Ruth stood without a word and went out to the porch and waited for the doctor, who drove up to the fence line in a Hudson car with Fred on the seat beside him. When Fred got down from the car to open the gate and let the car through, Ruth called to him, "Fred, you'd better go see to the chickens." Of course Martha had already seen to this work but Ruth didn't remember asking her to do it; what she remembered was that the chicken house had become one of her son's hiding places, one of his refuges from his father's dying. Fred gave her a desperate look of relief and as soon as the car passed by him into the yard he closed the gate and walked off to the chicken house.
The doctor, when he stepped from the running board into the snow, smiled faintly and said to Ruth, "How are you, Mrs. Kandel?" to which she could think of no reply. He came onto the porch and she silently held the door open for him to pass through. He was used to seeing anxious relatives and friends hovering around the edges of sickness, so he barely noted that a girl was standing at the kitchen table, her hands gripping the back of a chair, and he didn't speak to her, but set his hat and bag on the parlor table beside the door and said matter-of-factly to Tom, as if they were merely two people passing the time of day, "Tom, how have things been going for you?" Tom was rocking on the edge of the sofa, his stare fixed on a spot on their little Turkish rug, his eyes pinched nearly closed in his drawn face. The doctor began taking things out of his bag, getting together a hypodermic of morphine and hyoscine, without giving his patient more than a cursory glance.
Ruth watched Dr. McDonough a moment—she hadn't said a word to him—and then went again to sit at the kitchen table. She laid her forehead down on her crossed arms and shut her eyes, which mildly aggravated the doctor. Fred Kandel had been sitting on Dr. McDonough's office stoop when he drove in from an all-night call—thirty miles into Owl Creek Canyon and thirty miles back again, attending to a Hungarian man who had been struck in the forehead by a mule—and they'd set out for the Kandel farm as soon as he refueled the car. The doctor hadn't slept more than two or three hours in the past two days. His chin was stubbled, his mouth sagging with exhaustion. It had been his opinion that Ruth Kandel was a strong-minded woman, even to his way of thinking somewhat too independent and forward. He had expected her to hold up better than this when the first crisis came.
The only sounds in the room were the ticking of a clock and Tom's deep, measured groan. Dr. McDonough went over to him and pulled up the damp undershirt and gave him the morphine and then stood over him, watching in silence for several minutes until Tom's eyes glazed and his moaning ebbed off. The dose was enough to kill a healthy man. It always amazed the doctor, how pain absorbed morphine like a sponge.
"Tom, come on now, let's get you into bed." He helped the man stand and walked with him back to the bedroom. A piss pot sat empty and clean beside the rumpled bed so he held it up and coaxed Tom into passing a little water into it. Then he neatened the quilts and turned them back and helped the man down onto the mattress. Tom turned his head past the doctor and stared off toward a bare corner of the room. His brown hair fell lank against the pillow. He had never been stocky but he was quite thin now, his cheekbones very sharp, his collarbones and the washboard of his ribs visible through the undershirt above the swelling of the tumor. Cancer was rare in those days —Tom Kandel's was only the second case Dr. McDonough had seen in his forty years of treating patients. His other cancer patient had died a terrible slow death, and he expected the same thing for Tom. There was little he knew to do to cut down on the man's suffering, short of killing him with an overdose of morphine.
While Tom went on looking at something invisible in the middle distance, Dr. McDonough listened to the man's pulse and his heart, then pulled the quilts up and stood watching. Finally Tom released a slight sound, a sigh, and closed his eyes. His eyelids were thin and veined, his lashes casting faint shadows on the bones of his cheeks.
The doctor picked up the pot of dark urine and carried it outside and stepped off the porch to fling it away from the house. There was now a path through the snow to the privy, broken with boot prints, and the ground around the chicken house had been shoveled out and stomped down, but there was no sign of the boy, Fred. The doctor took the chill air into his lungs and tipped his head back a moment to look at the sky, which by now was nearly clear.
Ruth and Martha were sitting at the kitchen table when he came back into the house, and they turned their faces to him in perfect synchrony, which he might have found amusing under other circumstances. He said, not unkindly, "Ruth, how are you holding up?"
Ruth turned from him to the window, seeming to lean slightly toward the sky above the edge of the near hills; her mouth, in the image he glimpsed on the wavery window glass, began to twist until it became an unattractive rictus of grief. "There was nothing I could think to do. He wouldn't let me help him."
"You did the only thing you could do, which was sending the boy."
She put her hands to her face and began rubbing her finger-216 tips up and down the sides of her nose and across her mouth and chin, which was a way of hiding nervousness. "He hasn't been right," she said, the words muffled behind her hands. He knew what she meant. Over the last couple of days he had seen a marked change in Tom—slurring of words, dullness, a vacant expression. Not right in his mind, was what she meant. Not himself, not Tom. She looked at him sidelong, almost a shy look. "Is that from the morphine?"
"Well, it could be the morphine. He's been getting a lot of it, and it does work a change on the brain. Or the disease could be doing it. I've read it affects the mind in some manner, or at least in some cases."
She looked away from him again. "Will he be like this?" she asked him hoarsely. From now on, she meant. Until he dies.
He said bluntly, "Yes, I expect he will." In fact, he knew it would be worse before the end, quite a bit worse, so perhaps the kindness was in not saying so.
She began to sob tiredly, hiding her face behind her hands. Martha, who had been watching all this with a worried frown, immediately teared up too, and put a hand on Ruth's arm. Dr. McDonough didn't know Martha Lessen and had not, until this minute, taken in that the girl was dressed like a man, which he found curious and a provocation. He watched the two of them a moment and then began to pack up his instruments and bottles. By the time he was ready to leave, Ruth Kandel had more or less finished with her crying. She sat with her chin propped on her two hands, the long fingers pressed into her flushed cheeks, and looked out the window. Sunlight glaring off the snow made of the glass an opaque square of brightness. The girl sitting with Ruth had pulled her own hands into her lap and now stared down into them with a look of distress.
Dr. McDonough said, lifting the handles of his bag, "I imagine he'll sleep quite a while now. I'll come back later today and give him another hypodermic. From now on, he'll need two or three every day. I'll have to show you how to do it yourself. I don't know that I'll alw
ays be able to be here when he needs it." Ruth's mouth began to twist with the effort not to resume crying, but she said nothing. The doctor picked up his hat and his bag.
Martha didn't want to go on sitting there with Ruth Kandel—she was desperate to get out of the house and helpless to know how to manage it—and maybe Ruth already knew this. Before the doctor had crossed the porch to his motor, she turned her tired face to the girl and said, "Miss Lessen, I don't know where Fred has gone off to, so I wonder if you'd open the gate for the doctor's car before you go on with your circle ride." Martha gave her a look almost the twin to Fred's—wild with guilty relief.
While the doctor waited for Martha to open the gate and let him out of the yard, he looked at his watch—just past eleven. In earlier days he used to fall asleep behind a team of horses, would wrap the reins around the whip post and then around his wrist so if he dropped the reins they would slide down the post and jerk his wrist and wake him. Now that he had the Hudson he was able to get over the roads more quickly, but he had lost the benefit of sleeping as he drove. Eleven o'clock. The day stretched ahead of him, patients waiting to be seen. It would be hours yet before he could expect to climb into bed.
24
ANOTHER TRICK the old wrangler Roy Barrow had taught Martha Lessen was to put a half-hobble on a front foot, tie a loop in the rope and throw the rope over the horse's back, then draw it up through the loop to pull the front foot up. The horse would generally buck like crazy at that point but shortly he'd get tired and stand still and Martha would tell him what a good horse he was and give him a carrot or a piece of an apple. When he'd been done this way enough times, he wouldn't care if his foot was lifted up and he'd learn to stop whatever he was doing and just stand still when he felt pressure on his legs, so later if he stepped into wire hidden in brush or grass he'd naturally stop before he got tangled. And of course that also took care of any shoeing problems, because a horse done that way would lift his foot and stand for the shoer.
When Martha began to feel she had a little time to spare—the horses giving her less and less trouble—she started in with this foot work. She went after one horse at a time, repeating the lesson four or five days in a row at whatever corral the horse was in, until he got the idea. Some of the horses, having been brought along so far, hardly objected when she lifted their foot, and as soon as she knew they wouldn't give a farrier any inconvenience, she went on to another horse.
In the late part of February she left the Bliss place early in the morning riding Chuck, one of the Varden horses, and when she got to the Romers' she put a half-hobble on him and pulled his foot up. It was the third time he'd been done that way, and when he turned his head toward her and heaved a sigh she said to him, "I guess you've got it figured out," and she lowered his foot again and gave him a carrot. Maude and Big Brownie, both of them the Woodruffs' horses, watched this business with great interest, their heads up and ears pricked. "You'll get a turn," Martha said to them, though she knew they might have been interested only in the carrot.
She was tacking up Maude when Dorothy Romer came down from the house, her face pale and her hair unpinned. When Martha saw the state she was in, she first guessed Mr. Romer had gone into whiskey again and then thought it must be Dorothy who was drunk, her eyelids drooping, her voice slurred as she called in a weak way, "Helen and Clifford are both sick."
Martha said without stopping what she was doing, "I'm sorry to hear it."
Dorothy touched her forehead with trembly fingers and sat down suddenly in the mud, which didn't surprise or alarm Martha, who had experience of serious drinkers. But after a moment of considering, she left the palomino standing in the corral with the cinch not yet tightened, and she went unhurriedly through the rails and over to the woman and squatted down next to her. "Mrs. Romer, are you sick? Do you want me to go for the doctor?" She didn't smell anything on Dorothy's breath except a sickly sourness. She took hold of one of her hands.
"I'm afraid it's the ptomaine poisoning," Dorothy said, and 220 started in with a kind of dry weeping. Her cold hand lay weakly in Martha's. "I don't know where Reuben is. Will you take us to the hospital?"
Martha's heart began to beat loudly in her ears. She said, "I'll have to go and get the wagon." Dorothy swallowed slowly and put her hands down in the mud and pushed to get up; Martha helped her stand again and would have helped her back to the house except Dorothy pulled away and said, "Go on," and made an impatient fluttery gesture toward the pasture where Reuben kept his horses.
She brought in the horses by calling and whistling and holding out a piece of apple, and she harnessed the two who looked to be the most cooperative and hitched them to the Romers' wagon and drove around to the front porch of the house. Dorothy was sitting on the porch steps leaning against an upright, the baby, Alice, lying across her haunches. "I don't know where Reuben is," she said again, with the same tired, tearless, terrible sobbing. Martha was afraid to look too closely at Alice, lying still and pale in the lap of Dorothy's dress.
She went into the house and found Helen and Clifford in a single bed, their limbs flaccid on the tangled sheets. Their eyes followed Martha with a desperate, half-lidded concentration but they didn't lift their hands up to her or speak to her. They were breathing shallowly through open mouths. She carried them out one at a time and laid them down in the back of the wagon, wrapped in the blankets she had stripped from the bed. Then she helped Dorothy climb into the back and lie down with her children. She found a tarp and put it over them all like a tent in case it began to rain, and she drove out of the yard and down the rutted farm lane. At the outskirts of Shelby she stopped a man to ask where the hospital was and he told her there was just one hospital in the valley and it was in Bingham, so she drove on the five more miles. She drove carefully, not to bump their heads on the floorboards. It began to rain lightly, ticking against the tarp and against her hat.
She passed W.G. Boyd's little place at the edge of town and shortly after that she came on his grandson, Joey, on his way home from town. Joey had lately been spending his afternoons and Saturdays ranging the hills collecting the shed antlers of bull elk and buck deer, which brought a few cents a pound from Graham Ellis at the hardware store, and he was walking back from the store and jingling the money in his pocket when Martha saw him. He ran up to the wagon and ran alongside, grinning and splashing his galoshes in the puddles, and he called to her, "Hey, Martha, whose wagon are you driving?"
"Joey, where is the hospital?" she said, and at once he became grave and frightened and told her where it was and then stopped and stood in the road, watching the wagon go away from him.
The Bingham Hospital occupied a brick building that had been the Bingham High School before a bigger school was built closer to the center of town. It was a private hospital owned by Dr. McDonough and Dr. Kelly and an investor who also owned an automobile parts and supply store. The staff kept cows and chickens in a field behind the hospital and had to interrupt their nursing duties to go into the basement and stoke the furnace, but ptomaine poisoning from poorly canned food was a serious matter they were familiar with, and the man Martha had asked for directions in Shelby had telephoned ahead; several hospital people came out and down the wet stone steps as soon as she pulled up in front, and they carried the Romer children inside and walked Dorothy up the steps between two minders, and no one paid a bit of attention to Martha.
It was unclear to her what she ought to do next. She got down and led the horses out of the driveway and unhitched them from the wagon. They had not even broken a sweat but she hunted up a gunnysack and wiped them down thoroughly and walked them back and forth as if they had run hell-for-leather every mile of the way from the Romers' to Bingham. Then she turned them out on the weeds and grass of the vacant lot next door and sat down on the tailgate of the wagon and waited. The rain quit and then started again and then quit.
She was glad to see W.G. Boyd walking up the hill from town. W.G., from the first she met him, had reminded her of Ro
y Barrow, the L Bar L wrangler who had got her started with breaking horses; it was not only his arthritic limp but the touch he had with animals, which was a natural gift but also a learned kindness. Martha held W.G. very dear and envied Joey his childhood in company with the old man.
She walked down to meet him, and he called up to her, "What's happened, child?" Walking to the hospital, he had prepared himself to hear that it was Tom Kandel, dead of cancer—that Martha had been a witness to Tom's terrible last suffering.
"It might be ptomaine poisoning," she said, and fought not to begin crying. W.G. frowned and shook his head without understanding what she had said, and then she realized she had not said who was sick. "It's Mrs. Romer and her children."
He didn't know them, which was a relief to him. He took Martha by the hand and said, "Joe was pretty worried," and they walked back up the hill and sat down together on the tailgate. She swung her boots nervously, which set her stiff leather chaps creaking.
"Have you been breaking one of their horses?" he asked her.
"Yes sir. It's the one called Mata Hari."
He nodded as if this cleared up matters for him. After a few minutes, he said, "I'll just go inside and ask how things are going," and she gave him a grateful look.
He was gone half an hour or better. When he came out again he patted Martha's arm and said, "I'm afraid the baby is gone."