by Noah Gordon
At Eva’s suggestion, R.J. brewed a pot of black currant tea, Eva’s favorite. They sat at the kitchen table and talked about the physical examination R.J. had just completed. “You’re in remarkably good condition for somebody who is marching toward her ninety-third year. Obviously you have very good genes. Do you come from long-lived parents?”
“No, my parents died fairly young. My mother had a ruptured appendix when I was only five. My father might have lived to be old, but he was killed in a farm accident. A load of logs let go and he was crushed. That was when I was nine years old.”
“So who raised you?”
“My brother Norm. I had two brothers. Norm was thirteen years older than I, and Harold was four years younger than Norm. They didn’t get along at all. Not at all. Fought and fought, and Harold up and ran away from the farm—just left it for Norman to worry about. He joined the Coast Guard and never did get home again, never communicated with Norm, although now and again I would get a postcard, and sometimes there was a letter for me and a small amount of money at Christmas.” She sipped her tea. “Harold died of tuberculosis in the Naval Hospital in Maryland about ten years before Norm passed away.”
“You know what boggles my mind?”
Eva smiled at the expression. “What?”
“When you were born, Victoria was England’s queen. Wilhelm II was the last emperor of Germany. Teddy Roosevelt was about to become president of the United States. And Woodfield—what changes you must have seen as they took place in Woodfield.”
“Not so many changes as you might expect,” Eva said. “The automobile, certainly. Now all the main roads are tarred. And electricity is everywhere. I remember when street lamps came to Main Street. I was fourteen years old. I walked six miles from the farm and back, after chores, so I could see the lights turned on. It was another ten or twenty years before the electric wires reached all the houses of the town. We didn’t even have milking machines until I was forty-seven. There was a blessed change!”
She said little about Helen’s dying. R.J. raised the subject, thinking it would be healthy for her to talk about it, but Eva only stared out of tired eyes as deep and fathomless as lakes.
“She was a dear soul, my brother Harold’s only child. Of course I shall miss her. I miss them all, or at least most.
“I’ve lived longer than everybody I once knew,” she said.
25
SETTLING IN
On a mild day in mid-October, R.J. was leaving the hospital in Greenfield when she passed Susan Millet standing in the parking lot talking with a ruddy-faced, balding man. He was large and tall but slightly crooked, as if his spine were made of bent tin, and his left shoulder was lower than his right. Chronic scoliosis, her mind registered.
“R.J., hi! Say, here’s somebody I want you to meet. Dr. Daniel Noyes, this is Dr. Roberta Cole.”
They shook hands. “So you’re Dr. Cole. Seems to me, all I’ve heard lately from the three midwives is your name. You’re some kind of expert on hormones, I’m told.”
“Hardly an expert.” She told him about having worked in the clinic at Lemuel Grace Hospital, and he nodded.
“Don’t contradict. That makes you more of an expert on hormones than we’ve had around here up to now.”
“I’m going to deliver babies, part of a full family practice. I need the cooperation of an ob-gyn who is on staff here.”
“You do, eh?” he said coolly.
“Yes.” They regarded one another.
“Well, are you asking me to work with you?”
He was crusty and cranky, she thought, just as the midwives had described him. “Yes, that’s the idea. I realize you don’t know much about me. Do you happen to be free for lunch?”
“No need to waste money buying me lunch. They’ve told me all about you. Did they tell you I was calling it a career in twelve and a half months?”
“Yes, they did.”
“Well, if you still want me to consult with you for that brief a time, it’s fine with me.”
“That’s great. I mean, I do.”
Now he was smiling. “That’s settled, then. So, how’s about I take you to lunch at the world’s best old-fashioned diner and tell you some war stories about practicing medicine in western Massachusetts?”
He was an old dear, she could see that. “I’d like that very much.”
“I suppose you want to come too,” he said dourly to Susan, who was wearing a satisfied expression.
“No, I have an appointment, but you two go ahead,” Susan said. She was laughing to herself as she walked to her car.
R.J. was busy, working long hours, and apt to be tired and unambitious when she had a little time off. The trail through the woods didn’t progress far beyond the beaver ponds. When she wanted to go to the river, she still had to contend with a lot of rough hiking through heavy growth.
Late in the fall she and David had to stay out of the woods, which were full of hunters carrying loaded weapons, their trigger fingers itchy. She winced to see, again and again, white-tailed deer dead and broken, slung over the bumpers of cars and trucks.
A lot of people in the hills hunted. Toby and Jan Smith invited R.J. and David to dinner and served an impressive royal crown roast of venison.
“Got a young buck, a four-pointer, right up on the ridge above the house,” Jan said. “I always go out on opening day with my uncle Carter Smith, been hunting with him ever since I was a boy.”
Whenever he and his uncle got a deer they followed a Smith family tradition, he told them. They cut out the deer’s heart while they were still in the woods, sliced it, and ate it raw. He was pleased to share that detail with them and he told the story well, giving them a sense of the love and kinship between the old man and the young man.
R.J. suppressed her distaste. She couldn’t help imagining that parasitic diseases might have been invited into their bodies with the deer’s heart, but she cast all such thoughts from her mind. She had to admit the venison made a splendid roast, and she ate her fill and sang its praises.
She had inserted herself into a culture that was remarkably unfamiliar to her. At times she had to swallow hard as she adjusted to traditions that were foreign to her experience.
A number of families had been in the town for many generations—Jan Smith’s ancestors had walked all the way to Woodfield from Cape Cod in the final months of the seventeenth century, driving their cows in front of them—and they had intermarried, so everyone seemed to be everyone else’s cousin. Some of those who came from old families in Woodfield were welcoming to newcomers, while others were not. R.J. observed that individuals who were more or less happy with themselves, secure in their own souls, usually opened themselves to new friendships. It was those whose ancestry and native status were their only hopes for distinction who tended to be critical and cold toward “new people.”
Most of the town’s residents were happy about the presence of the doctor. Still, the environment was largely unfamiliar to R.J., and often she got the feeling that she was a pioneer on a new frontier. A country practice was like doing high acrobatic work without a net. At the Lemuel Grace Hospital in Boston, labs and diagnostic technology had been at her fingertips. Here, she was alone. High-tech science was available, but she and her patients had to make an effort to reach it.
She didn’t send patients away from Woodfield unless she had to, preferring to depend on her own skills and capability. But there were times when she contemplated a patient and a silent warning bell rang starkly in her head, and she realized that she needed help; then she referred the patient to Greenfield or Northampton or Pittsfield, or even to the greater specialization and technology in Boston or New Haven or Hanover, New Hampshire.
She was still feeling her way but she had come to know many of her patients intimately, to see into the corners of their lives that affected their health, in a way that was possible to a small-town doctor.
One night at two a.m. she was awakened by a call from Stacia Hinton, Gre
g Hinton’s wife.
“Dr. Cole, our daughter Mary and our two grandchildren are visiting us from New York. The littlest one, Kathy, she’s two years old. She’s an asthmatic, and now she’s come down with a bad, bad cold. She’s having a terrible time trying to breathe. She’s all red in the face, and we’re frightened. We don’t know what to do.”
“Hold her over a steaming kettle and make a little tent around her with a towel. Just keep her there, and I’ll come right over, Mrs. Hinton.”
R.J. made certain a tracheotomy kit was in her bag, but when she got to the Hinton farm she saw it wouldn’t be necessary for her to do a trache. The steam already had done some good. The child had a barking cough, but she was getting air into her lungs, and the redness was gone from her face. R.J. would have liked an X ray to tell her whether it was epiglottitis, but a careful examination indicated to her that the epiglottis wasn’t involved. There was a mucosal inflammation of the lower larynx and trachea. Kathy cried all through the examination, and when it was over R.J. remembered something she had seen her father do with pediatric patients.
“Would you like me to give you a tricycle?”
Kathy nodded, sniffling. R.J. wiped the tears from her cheeks, then she took a clean wooden tongue depressor and drew a tricycle on it with her ballpoint pen. The little girl took it and looked at her with interest.
“Want one with a clown on it?”
Kathy nodded again, and soon she had a clown. “Big Bird.”
“Oh-oh,” R.J. said. Her television memory was weak, but she managed to draw an ostrich with a hat, and the child smiled.
“Will she have to go to the hospital?” Stacia Hinton asked.
“I don’t think so,” R.J. said. She left some pharmaceutical samples and two prescriptions to be filled in the morning, when the drugstore opened in Shelburne Falls.
“You keep her breathing that steam. If she has any more trouble, call me right away,” she said. Then she walked woodenly to her car, drove sleepily home, and fell into her bed.
The next afternoon Greg Hinton came to the office and told Toby he had to speak to the doctor personally. He sat and read a magazine until R.J. was able to see him.
“What do I owe you for last night?”
When she told him, he nodded and wrote out a check. She saw that it covered everything he owed her for his past visits.
“I didn’t see you last night,” she said.
He nodded again. “I thought I’d better stay out of the way. I’ve been a stubborn fool. I guess I didn’t feel comfortable, getting you to my house in the middle of the night after the way I’ve talked to you.”
She smiled. “Don’t worry about that, Mr. Hinton. How’s Kathy doing today?”
“Much better. And we thank you for that. No hard feelings?”
“No hard feelings,” she said, and shook the hand he held out to her.
With his 175-cow herd, Greg Hinton could more than afford to pay for a doctor’s services, but R.J. also took care of Bonnie and Paul Roche, a young couple with two small children, who were struggling to survive with an eighteen-cow dairy farm.
“Every month,” Bonnie Roche told her, “I have a veterinarian come in to give our cows their tests and shots, but we can’t afford medical insurance for ourselves. Until you came, my cows got better medical care than my kids.”
The Roches weren’t an isolated case in America. In November, R.J. went to the old wooden Town Hall and cast a ballot for Bill Clinton as president of the United States. Clinton had promised her patients that he would provide medical insurance to everyone who didn’t have it. Dr. Roberta Cole intended to hold him to that promise, and she cast her vote as if it were a lance she was leveling at the health care system.
26
ABOVE THE SNOW LINE
“Sarah has had sex.”
R.J. waited a beat, and then she said carefully, “How do you know that?”
“She told me.”
“David, it’s absolutely wonderful that she could talk to you about something so intimate. You must have a remarkably good relationship with her.”
“I am devastated,” he said quietly, and she saw it was so. “I wanted her to wait until she was ready. It was easier years ago, when women were supposed to be virgins until their wedding night.”
“She’s seventeen years old, David. Some would say she’s well behind the curve. I’ve treated eleven-year-old children who have had sex. Sarah has a woman’s body, a woman’s hormones. It’s true some women wait for sex until they marry, but they’ve become a rare species. Even in the years when unmarried women were supposed to be virginal, a whole lot of them weren’t.”
He nodded. He had been quiet and morose all evening, but now he began to speak tenderly of his daughter. He said he and Natalie had talked to Sarah about sex before and after she entered puberty, and that he realized he was fortunate she was still willing to talk to him openly.
“Sarah didn’t say who her partner was, but since she’s dating only Bob Henderson, it’s safe to make a supposition. She said it was in the nature of an experiment, that she and the boy are very good friends, and they thought it was time they both got it over with.”
“Would you like me to have a talk with her about birth control, things like that?” R.J. hoped very much he would say yes, but he looked alarmed.
“No, I don’t think it’s necessary. I don’t want her to know I’ve been talking with you about her.”
“Then I think you should talk with her about those things.”
“Yes, I will.” He looked more cheerful. “Anyway, she told me the experiment is over. They value their friendship too much to spoil it, and they’ve decided to go back to just being best buddies.”
R.J. nodded doubtfully. She didn’t tell him she had observed that once young people had sex, they almost invariably repeated the experience again and again.
She had Thanksgiving dinner at the Markus cabin. David had roasted the turkey and made re-stuffed baked potatoes, and Sarah had candied a panful of yams with maple syrup and made threeberry applesauce from their own berries and fruit. R.J. brought pumpkin pies and apple pies with crusts she bought frozen at the supermarket and fillings she had prepared from scratch at three o’clock in the morning.
It was a quiet, very satisfying Thanksgiving dinner. R.J. was glad that neither David nor Sarah had invited anyone else. They ate the good dinner, drank mulled cider, and popped corn over the open fire. To complete her picture of what Thanksgiving would be if it were perfect, the overcast sky turned almost black at dusk and produced fat white flakes.
“Surely it’s too early for snow!”
“Not up here,” David said.
By the time she went home, several inches of snow had accumulated on the road. The windshield wipers kept the glass free, and the defroster worked, but she drove slowly and carefully because she hadn’t had the snow tires put on the car.
During all her winters in Boston, R.J. had loved the brief, mystical time when things were quiet and white during and immediately after a snowfall, but almost at once plows and trucks and cars and buses would begin to roar and snort, and the white world quickly became a dirty, dreary mess.
Here it was different. When she got to the house on Laurel Hill Road she built a fire and then turned off the lights and sat close to the flames in the darkened living room. Through the windows she saw that all around her house an accumulating blue whiteness had taken over the woods and the fields.
She thought of wild animals hunkered down in their holes in the blanketed ground, in the small marble caves on the ridges, in the hollow trees, and she wished them survival.
She wished the same thing for herself. She had survived the easy first months as physician to Woodfield, the springtime and summer. Now nature in the mountains was showing teeth, and R.J. hoped she would be equal to the challenge.
Once the snow came to the high land it didn’t go away. The snow line ended about two thirds of the way down the long descent local resid
ents called Woodfield Mountain, so that when R.J. drove down into the Pioneer Valley to go to the hospital or to a movie or a restaurant, she found a snowless landscape that for a few moments seemed as foreign as the far side of the moon. It would be the week following New Year’s Day before the valley received a snowfall heavy enough to remain on the ground.
She enjoyed leaving the snowlessness and re-entering the white world of the hills. Although dairy farms were dwindling in number, the town was accustomed to an old tradition that said all roads must be kept open so tank trucks could collect the milk, and she had little trouble reaching her patients for house calls.
One night in early December, she had gone to bed early but was awakened at 11:20 by the telephone’s ring.
“Dr. Cole? This is Letty Gates, over on Pony Road, and I’m hurt.” The woman was crying, breathing raggedly as she spoke.
“Hurt how, Mrs. Gates?”
“My arm may be broken. I don’t know, my ribs … It gives me pain to breathe. He did me bad.”
“He? Your husband?”
“Yes, him. Phil Gates.”
“Is he there?”
“No, he’s gone off for more drinking.”
“Pony Road is up on the side of Henry’s Mountain, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, okay. I’ll be right along.”
First she telephoned the police chief. Giselle McCourtney, the chief’s wife, answered the telephone. “Why, I’m sorry, Dr. Cole, but Mack isn’t here. A big twelve-wheeler went off the highway on that icy stretch just past the town dump, and he’s been down there since nine o’clock, directing traffic. He should be back any time, I expect.”
R.J. told her why her husband was needed. “So will you send him up to the Gateses’ farm as soon as he’s free?”
“I surely will, Dr. Cole. I’ll try to raise him on the radio.”
She didn’t have to place the car in four-wheel drive until she started up Pony Road. After that the rise was steep, but the hardpacked snow made a smoother ride than the dirt road would have offered in the summertime.