by Davis Bunn
“So did I.” But Connie was far more concerned about how the clinic itself appeared. The fresh paint lay on the old structure like a new coat on a cadaver. “This place looks plain awful.”
“We should have had it rebuilt long ago.”
“Where were we supposed to find the money?” It was a litany so often expressed she didn’t even have to think the words. They just came. Lack of funding defined her every action for the town she loved. “Don’t worry, Brian. This doctor knows about our situation. We didn’t paint him a rosy picture. No chance of that and be honest over why we haven’t had a live-in doctor for almost three years.”
It was not just the loss of their town’s only doctor that caused hardship these days. But the problem typified what Connie and the rest of Hillsboro faced. Down below, the world had entered modern times. People worked at jobs that meant something. If they didn’t like what they did, they walked out and went somewhere else and found another job. Flatland life was like that. But a good-paying job that gave a fellow a feeling of worth was often out of reach in the hills.
And it was not just work that separated them. Down below, the world was changing at a pace the hillfolk could hardly believe. People didn’t just have more money in the flatlands, they had more things to buy. Televisions had appeared in most homes, if word could be believed. Up in the hills, those who had TV sets didn’t watch them much because the snowy reception hurt their eyes and they could hardly hear what was being said.
Apparently the flatland world stopped dead in its tracks for shows like Rawhide, The Ed Sullivan Show, and American Bandstand. The newspapers were full of things that were little more than words on the page, like how a wall was being built down the middle of Berlin. And just this summer, President Kennedy himself had declared the goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. People would talk of such things and just shake their heads. It didn’t hardly seem as though they were living in the same world any more.
Hillfolk liked to brag about going down the mountains and seeing such changes for themselves. When they returned home more often than not they declared stoutly that it didn’t mean nothing but trouble to come. As though pessimism were the only defense the hillfolk had against hardship and isolation.
As Connie climbed down from the truck, she tugged at the front edges of her jacket, pretending to clear away the creases but in truth wishing she had worn something that did not make her look so thick. There were days when she could look in the mirror and see a woman who had retained her youthful energy and grace. Today, however, she had applied her makeup without really looking, fearing she would inspect herself and come up with a word like hefty. She hated mirrors on mornings like this.
Together with Brian she started across the unkempt lawn and listened for some sign of life. The clinic’s front door was open, but the only sound came from the river chuckling from the ravine across the road. Brian asked, “Is my tie straight?”
“You look just fine.” She gave him as reassuring a smile as she could manage. “I’m sure—”
From inside the clinic came the noise of a slamming door. A muffled voice said something, only to be answered with a shout of rage. Brian’s nervous features creased with genuine worry. “That doesn’t sound at all good.”
“Maybe we’d better go lend Fuller a hand.”
They climbed the concrete block stairs and entered the Hillsboro Clinic’s reception area. The place had once been a mill worker’s cottage, given to the state in lieu of unpaid taxes when the mill went bankrupt. That was back when the hill farmers stopped bringing their corn by horse cart to have it ground at the water-powered mill.
Not long afterward, a local fellow who had made it to medical school and then survived the First World War decided to return home. With the town’s blessing he had turned the old mill house into a much-needed medical clinic.
But the local fellow had died three years earlier, after doctoring the mountain folk for almost forty years. By then, even the few friends who had managed to outlive him were admitting that the old man was long past his prime.
Even so, a doddering old curmudgeon a half-century away from medical school was far better than no doctor at all. As the town had come to know at its own cruel cost.
Connie and Brian entered the open door to find Mayor Fuller Allen standing in the middle of the front room. A sheen of perspiration turned his bald pate to a polished dome. “Doctor Reynolds, I’d be the first to admit the clinic is lacking a few things. But if you’d just—”
“A few things!” The dark-haired stranger swept an angry hand at the door leading to the examining rooms. “I’ve seen better-equipped high school labs!”
“But Doctor Reynolds—”
“And outhouses with a higher standard of cleanliness!” The doctor’s gaze turned their way, and Connie found herself staring at gray eyes smoky with rage. “Are you my nurse?”
“Me?” She took an involuntary step back. “Goodness, no.”
“Ida May called in sick,” Fuller said miserably. “Of all days.”
The angry gaze turned back to the mayor. “My nurse’s name is Ida May?”
“She’s very highly thought of,” Connie said. Nervousness tumbled the words like they were caught in a wringer washer. “She runs the county health service, knows almost every family within thirty miles.”
“How thrilling.” The man was watching her as he would a rodent discovered in his operating theater. “Who are you?”
“This is Connie Wilkes,” Fuller supplied. His normal bonhomie had been deflated like a punctured balloon. “Hillsboro’s assistant mayor.”
“My abject sympathies,” he snapped. “Are you the one responsible for this nightmare of a clinic?”
“I guess I am.” Connie drew herself up as well as she could. She had not expected this. Nothing like this.
It wasn’t the man’s anger that caught her so off guard. It was his looks. The doctor was more than simply handsome. He had the sharply defined authority of a very successful and intelligent man. His features were cut with surgical precision. A wide intellectual brow descended to the most penetrating gaze she had ever seen.
Connie struggled to gather herself, then said, “I told you in my letter how tough things have been for our community.”
“Certainly. But this—” Another angry gesture at the back rooms. “This is an absolute farce!”
“You’re right.” There was nothing to be gained from glossing over the truth, she saw that now. “It’s just horrible.”
Her quiet agreement halted his ire, at least momentarily. Connie went on hurriedly, “The doctor whose place you’re taking should have retired years ago. He got to the stage where he wouldn’t let anyone touch a thing. After he died, we found records marked active for people who had died twenty years ago.”
“But why—”
“Because there wasn’t anybody else.” It was Brian who spoke up. “We’re desperate, Doctor Reynolds. I don’t know how else to describe our situation. We’re a proud people, and it costs us to have to admit it. But if we don’t get a doctor in here soon, well, I just don’t know what we’ll do.”
Nathan Reynolds eased back another notch. “And you are?”
“Brian Blackstone. I’m pastor of the local church.”
“All right.” The doctor had the ability to dominate a room by doing nothing more than crossing his arms. “I’m listening.”
Brian took a breath. “The nearest hospital is sixty-four miles away, much of it over winding mountain roads. Our closest doctor is in Jonestown, that’s thirty-eight miles. We’re in the heart of the Appalachians here, and both towns are nightmare drives when the weather is bad. A lot of these local people simply won’t make the journey. They don’t trust doctors they don’t know, and they have an inbred terror of hospitals. So they just lie in their beds and suffer. And then they die.”
Connie found herself swallowing on sudden grief. The pain of Brian’s role as pastor was there for all to see. She
found herself adding, “Brian knows the road to Jonestown all too well. His baby’s in a bad way.”
A change came over the doctor. One so sudden it caught them all off guard. The arms uncrossed, the tone switched from rage to intense concern. “What’s the problem?”
Brian glanced at Connie, uncertain what to say. “She’s suffering in her stomach. She eats but can’t keep anything down. And she seems to be in terrible pain.”
Connie felt the same anxiety she always did when thinking of Brian and Sadie. She could not look at Brian or his wife, or watch him preach, or hear his name spoken, without thinking of the little child. The baby vomited convulsively and screamed constantly. She looked so weak and helpless and tired and pained that Connie could not stand to be near her, for fear of staring young death in the face.
The doctor gave a fraction of a nod. “Her age?”
“F-four months.”
“You’re sure it’s not just an allergy?”
“She’s allergic to her mother’s milk, yes, but—”
“Does she spasm when she vomits?”
“Like her whole little body is twisting with pain,” the pastor confirmed, aching with the words. “She can’t keep anything down.”
“You’ve tried different diets?”
“We went through a hard time finding a formula she could hold in even for a few minutes. The Jonestown doctor says she’s allergic to almost everything.”
Another sharp nod, like the firing pin coming down on an armed gun. “That happens with some infants. They probably put her on paregoric.”
“Why, yes.” Brian glanced Connie’s way. “But it took the Jonestown doctor almost a month to come up with that one.”
“And I suppose she went through a stable phase, except she was sleeping too much.”
“We had to shake her hard just to keep her awake to eat.”
“Then started regurgitating again?”
“Exactly.” Brian swiped at his face. “She’s gotten back to how she was before, and it’s driving my wife crazy. We haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in six weeks. The baby just cries and—”
“Any secondary infections?”
“I don’t . . . She keeps rubbing at her ears.”
“That’s normal.” The words were cut and set with the precision of a machine running at blinding speed. “The child’s resistance is low because she’s not eating enough. Ears are a common center for viral infections in such cases.”
Brian let his terror show through. “The Jonestown doctor says there’s not much else we can do.”
Connie could not help but add, “Brian’s wife, Sadie, had a stillborn child three years ago, and since then they’ve had trouble conceiving. This has been harder on her than you can imagine.”
The piercing gray gaze turned her way. The doctor studied her a long moment, then switched back to Brian. “Let me go see what I can find in this museum.”
He turned and walked into the back. Connie felt as though a steel band had suddenly been released from around her chest.
Fuller Allen plucked a handkerchief from his back pocket. Owner of the town’s only car dealership, he was a big florid man perfectly at home with chairing town meetings and glad-handing voters and kissing babies. Dealing with enraged doctors was another thing entirely. Quietly he asked Connie, “What do you know about this man?”
“Nothing more than what I’ve already told you.” She could not get over the doctor’s sheer intensity. “Up until about two years ago, he was assigned to a top hospital in Baltimore. Did his training in New York and someplace out west. Wrote a couple of articles on something, I couldn’t even figure out the titles they sent me.”
Connie looked from one man to the other, wondering if they felt the same way. As though they had been confronted with someone functioning on an entirely different level from themselves. “I called the last place he worked, a hospital in Baltimore. Spoke to some stuffy administrator. She basically said he was willing to come to Hillsboro and I’d be a fool not to take him. Acted like I didn’t have any business asking more than that.”
A muffled shout came through the open back door, followed by a crashing drawer and an enraged harangue. Fuller glanced over nervously, drew the handkerchief over his features a second time, and asked Connie, “How much do we have left in the town’s discretionary fund?”
“Not a lot.”
“Give him whatever he wants,” Fuller said. “Within reason.”
“What if—”
Connie halted at the sound of staccato footsteps coming back down the hallway. Nathan Reynolds stormed into the reception area and shouted at no one in particular, “This isn’t a clinic, it’s a gallery for medical nightmares!”
Brian stepped forward, and said one word. “Please.”
Again there was that transformation, a shift from rage to fierce intensity. “All right. My car is packed to the gills, so you take another car. I need to take mine in case I need some instruments. I certainly didn’t find anything of use back there!”
“I’ll hang around and close up here,” the mayor offered, relieved to have an excuse not to come.
The doctor was across the reception area and out the door before any of them had moved. Connie was next through the door, but in her haste she collided with him on the top step. “Oh, I’m sorry—”
He had been pushed down a step by her intrusion but kept his gaze on her truck. “That’s a thirty-four Terraplane Pickup Express.”
“Nineteen thirty-six, actually.” She knew because her uncle had often used the truck’s purchase date as a calendar. These days Poppa Joe felt like he was doing well to remember the right year. “But how do you—”
“Hudson didn’t make that body style in nineteen thirty-six.”
She found herself glad for a reason to contradict this superior attitude. “I’m sorry, but you’re wrong.”
“American trucks were my hobby as a kid. I know every model ever made.” The doctor turned eyes of gray ice toward her, a gaze as cold as his voice. “That truck is a thirty-four model, not a thirty-six.”
Then he was down and across the lot, almost sprinting for his car. “Don’t just stand there! Let’s go!”
Three
Connie fumed her way to Reverend Brian Blackstone’s house, coming up with a dozen or so smart things to put the doctor in his place. Then she noticed the pastor smiling at her. “What’re you grinning at?”
“You’ve got your face all screwed up.” He made a parody of somebody mouthing off in silence. “I haven’t seen you do that since you were a kid and mad at Poppa Joe.”
“That’s the silliest thing I ever heard.”
“Sister, every time you returned from a visit to his place you’d steam up the school bus windows with your rage. You’d sit there and argue with the old coot the entire way into town. We used to have competitions out in the schoolyard, seeing who could come closest to your crazy faces.”
“I never understood why some churches moved their preachers around every few years,” Connie retorted hotly. “Until just this minute.”
His grin broadened another notch. “The doc got under your skin back there, didn’t he?”
“It’s not gonna be long before somebody carves their initials in the belt of Doctor Fancy-Pants,” she predicted.
“I don’t know if you’re right about that. These hills are full of people bent on walking God’s road their own ornery way.” He waited until she had swung wide around the church and started down the road leading to his home. “You mark my words. A lot of our folk will put more weight on his being the kind of man who’s rushing to see my baby after driving hundreds of miles, even before he’s unpacked his car.”
Brian glanced around to make sure the doctor’s car was still stuck to their tail, then turned his smile back to her and went on. “You think people around here are going to mind that he’s got the personality of an angry porcupine?”
But Connie wasn’t ready to let go of her perfectly good m
ad just yet. “I hope he doctors as good as he barks, is all I’m saying.”
The doctor was out of his car and fumbling in the back seat before they had climbed from the truck. He pulled out what looked like a case of medical samples and started rummaging. Soon the ground around his car was littered with vials and prospectuses and brochures. Angrily he kicked the box aside, dived back in the car, pulled out a second case, and continued searching. Finally he rose, one hand full of little boxes. “All right, let’s go.”
The mountain preacher said, “I can’t thank you enough—”
“Save it.” Nathan Reynolds shut the door and went around to the passenger seat. He pulled out the battered black bag that had belonged to the old doctor. Seeing the dusty satchel brought to Connie a pang of memories. But it only seemed to enrage the doctor further. He slammed the door and snapped at her, “I’ll be giving you a list of medical supplies I expect you to buy tonight, even if it means driving all the way to Richmond!”
She had a lifetime’s experience of dealing with bad tempers. “You do, and I’ll roll it up and stick it straight in your eye!”
Brian’s expression turned worried. “Connie, please.”
Before the doctor could snap out a response, the pastor’s front door opened, and a woman’s voice said, “You’re going to have to take your quarrels somewhere else. I’ve just gotten the baby to sleep.”
An instantly contrite Connie turned from the confrontation and walked over to the front porch. “Hello, Sadie. I’m sorry. How are you?”
“Tired.” She did not look tired. She looked exhausted. She was a small-boned woman, ten years younger than the pastor, and normally full of life and determination. But the past four months had aged her.
Sadie looked over Connie’s shoulder, took in the cases and the leather bag, and surmised, “Are you the doctor?”
He gave a nod as sharp as his tone. “Nathan Reynolds.”
“Well, praise the Lord,” she said, though there was little energy there for thanks. “Come in. Please.”