Home Another Way (9 page)
“I need a job. You don’t even have to pay me.”
“An altruist. I’m shocked.”
“I’ll go insane if I don’t have something to kill time through the winter.”
“The diner might be hiring.”
“Heck, no,” I gagged.
“I’m joking. I do have something for you. The winter weather is hard on many of my patients, and I have some who need to be looked in on more frequently than I have the time for. I’ll give you a hundred dollars a week to do it.”
“Do what, exactly? I don’t want to be emptying bedpans.”
“Visit folks. Talk to them for an hour or so. Make sure they’re eating, and that their heat works. That sort of thing.”
“You’re talking companion. Not nurse.”
“Yep. Be here tomorrow at nine, and dress warm.”
I was gone before Patty and her big ears returned.
I pulled in front of Doc’s office at twenty-eight minutes after nine. He was waiting for me in the Jeep, engine on.
“You’re late,” he said.
I yawned. “Sorry.”
“I bet,” Doc said, skidding onto the road. “We’ll go north today. Start with Ben Harrison and his wife, Rabbit.”
“As in bunny?”
“Ben has a diabetic ulcer on his foot and can’t hunt. It’s killing them to depend on someone else. Normally, he hunts year round. She has a vegetable garden in the summer, and jars the surplus for the winter.”
Pine trees packed the woods on each side, crowding the road, which now rose headlong into the sky. Pressure swelled in my ears. I pinched my nose and blew.
“There’s gum in the glove box,” Doc said.
Cramming two sticks of Juicy Fruit in my mouth, I balled the foil wrappers in my palm and flicked them onto the floor with several others. Doc took a left, and another, and then turned right at a junkyard. Weeds, sinewy and taut, lashed hunks of rusted metal to the snow. A school bus tilted drunkenly on two flat tires amidst the scrap heaps.
“I won’t remember how to get here,” I told him.
“I’ll draw you a map.”
The Jeep lurched through the woods. I rested my forehead against the window. Condensation bloomed around my nose and mouth, and I closed my eyes, dozing until Doc nudged my shoulder. We were parked in front of a ramshackle shed; it listed to the right, one wall bowed like a hunchback. The lone window was broken, with several layers of green garbage bags taped over it. The shingles rippled under a moldy nylon tarp. Doc wrapped his scarf over his ears and climbed out of the car.
“Where’s the house?” I asked, briskly rubbing my face to wake up.
“This is it. Grab that bag on the back seat.”
He knocked once and opened the door. I followed, carrying the grocery sack, bracing for some horrible stench or towers of empty cat food cans. Instead, the one-room home was tiny but neat, except for the tangle of blankets on top of a mattress. Two bentwood chairs and a potbellied stove filled the remaining space. The floor was dirt and recently swept, broom bristle lines still visible.
A sun-dried woman sat in one chair, sewing a patch on a corduroy jacket. Her hair hung to her waist in two stringy, uneven horsetails.
“Doc, his foot ain’t no better,” she said.
Barely glancing at me, she crossed the room in four strides, peeling back the pile of blankets to reveal a bearded man. He moaned. “Get off me, woman.”
She slapped the top of his head. “Hush. The doc be here.”
The man propped himself on his elbows. “Oh, Doc, I ain’t going nowhere with you. You can take my leg off right here, but if you tries to get me to a hospital, I’ll shoot you like a stew squirrel.”
“Keep your gun on the wall, Ben,” Doc said. “I’m just here to take a look.”
I peeked over Doc’s shoulder as he unwrapped a bandage, exposing a fist-sized ulcer on the ball of Ben’s foot. Callused skin, putrid and yellow, ringed a meaty crater. “Rabbit, I need that pan,” Doc said.
The woman lugged a cast-iron pan from the shelf above the stove. Doc lined it with a large sterile pad and put Ben’s foot in it. He took a bottle of clear liquid—
saline
, the label read—from his bag and flushed the wound, and then applied a cream. “If you get queasy, Sarah, you shouldn’t watch,” he said, wiping his instruments with alcohol. Using forceps to lift the edge of the dead skin, he sliced off a chunk with a scalpel, continuing until the rotted skin was removed. Then Doc took a blunt metal rod and probed the raw flesh.
“You still smoking?” he asked Ben.
“I tries to quit, but, Doc, you be making me lay here all day. Ain’t nothing else to do.”
Doc dabbed on another ointment and dressed the wound. He gave the tube to Rabbit. “Apply this twice a day when you change the bandage. And here. This is an antibiotic. Have him take one pill at breakfast and one before bed. Ben, listen to me. No smoking. And no alcohol.”
“Come on, Doc.”
“I mean it. Now, this is Sarah Graham. She’ll be checking in on you once a week and bringing your groceries.”
“Oh, no.” Rabbit shook her head, oily hair slapping against the cabin walls. “I don’t be wanting that girl here, spitting on how we live. You come.”
“You know I can only get here once a month.”
“But—”
“Do you want your husband to lose his foot?”
Rabbit’s mouth snapped shut. She crouched, twisting her gangly arms around the paper bag. “I have to be putting this meat in the snow,” she said, the flimsy door slamming behind her.
“Don’t pay Rabbit no mind,” Ben said. “She’s a jealous one. Don’t want no other woman looking at me.” Grinning through thorny whiskers, he added, “It don’t bother me none.”
Rabbit was nowhere to be seen as we got back into the Jeep.
“That man should be in a hospital,” I told Doc.
“And you care?”
My nostrils flared, and I ground my teeth together, staring straight ahead. He was right. If Ben had his foot lopped off tomorrow, I would continue to eat, drink, and be merry. Well, as merry as I got.
Doc shook his head. “Most of the people around here, they don’t have insurance. Some of them don’t even have indoor plumbing. They’re like Ben and Rabbit. All they know is this mountain.
“Yes, Ben should be in a hospital. Can I force him there? Should I? I do what I can, Sarah. I treat my patients with samples given to me by drug reps, with old pharmacy stock and things I pick up from garage sales. Heck, I even pull from my own medicine cabinet.
“It took me months, years in some cases, to get these people to trust me. They’re proud. And they don’t take handouts. Mostly, I’m paid in venison and jars of apple butter, a handful of loose change now and then. Someone offered me a chicken once. A live one.” Doc laughed a little. “And Hiram Dennison gives me old
National Geographic
s. I have no idea where he got them, but so far I’ve collected April 1957 to December 1961.”
“You’re the altruist.”
“No, not me.”
“Yeah, right. Why else would you be here, schlepping around in the snow, eating dead deer?”
Doc seemed to age twenty years with my question, shoulders crumpling as he turned down another rutted path. “We all have skeletons. Do you want to share yours first?”
I adjusted the heat vent, listening as the birch twigs whipped against the side panels of the Jeep, scratching the paint. Hot air blew into my face. I unzipped my jacket a little, an embarrassed sweat dampening my neck.
“Where to now?” I asked finally, my voice raspy, unsure.
“Back to that school bus.”
“Someone lives there?”
“Welcome to the mountain, Sarah.”
Someone did, indeed, live in the school bus, though it had been converted to a house. Sort of. Hiram Dennison had a refrigerator, heater, and electric lights that ran off a generator he had built from junk parts. A coarse-furred mutt slept on a mound of magazines.
After that, Doc took me to four other homes, giving a brief history before each visit. Like Hiram, these patients were poor and brittle, their faces etched with mountain living. I went back to the cabin that night feeling like a wet cardboard box stored too long in a cellar, drooping and smelly. Before falling onto the couch, I set my alarm. I had another appointment with Doc, to meet the rest of his geriatrics ward.
Arriving five minutes early the next morning, I hauled my aching body into Doc’s Jeep, sore from yesterday’s back-road adventure. He handed me a covered mug of coffee.
“This is disgusting.” I coughed the liquid back into the cup. “What’d you do, scrape it from the bottom of the pot?”
“You’re welcome,” he said, taking a sip of his own drink.
We kept to the towns, visiting two winter-eaten trailers in Jonah, a cinderblock building in Deer Lake, a garage apartment in Greeley, and a huge, crumbling farmhouse on the outskirts of Bethel with Volkswagen-sized holes in the floor and rats that scampered in the ceiling.
Finally, Doc announced the last stop.
“Zuriel Washington. She’s almost a hundred and near blind, but her mind is sharp.”
The home, a cluster of ill-matched additions, squatted in a copse of blue juniper. Threads of smoke dribbled from the stone chimney.
“Careful. The second step is rotted through. Zuriel,” Doc called as we stepped into a sparsely furnished sitting area. One vintage brocade chair faced the room’s single window, and beside it, a lacquered dark-wood table with carved lion’s feet. Billie Holiday’s moody croon drifted from the back of the house.
I heard squeaks and clunks, and a woman appeared in the doorway. She clutched a metal walker. “Doc, you’ve brought someone,” she said.
She looked older than her one hundred years, if that was possible. Her skin, the color of cinnamon sticks, hung loosely over her skull, as if she borrowed it from someone much larger, or bought it off a clearance rack. Age spots clung to her cheeks like leeches. Filmy, sightless eyes peered out from between rheum-caked eyelids, and her earlobes hung nearly to her chin.
But her voice was a lullaby of fireflies and snickerdoodles. My tense muscles relaxed under her words.
“This is Sarah. She’ll be stopping by once a week.”
“It is a pleasure, my dear,” Zuriel said. “But you know I don’t need to be checked in on, Doc. Someone from my church brings over a hot meal every night.”
“Yes, but do they read to you?” Doc asked.
The old woman’s right hand flittered to her throat and rubbed at a gold cross pendant dangling there. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“Are there any particular books you’d like Sarah to bring next week?”
“Oh, anything is just fine.” Zuriel said. “What day can I expect you, my dear?”
“Tuesday,” I said.
Oddly enough, I was looking forward to it.
A dusky figure stood against the cabin door when I returned from Zuriel’s. I thought it was Jack at first, hoped it was. I jammed my forearm against my stomach to stop the cartwheels.
I wasn’t even wearing mascara.
But the twilight fooled me, as it’s prone to do. My headlights deflated the shadow. It was Beth. She waved at me as I parked.
“Sarah, hi. I don’t want to bother you or anything, but I know you don’t have a phone. Do you have a minute?”
I groaned inwardly, wanting only to change to warm pajamas, burrow into my sleeping bag, and snooze until Tuesday. But even I had a problem saying no to a cripple. “Come on in,” I told her.
I hung my coat on the hook by the door. Beth kept hers on. “I have something to ask you,” she said, gingerly removing her hat. “A favor.”
“Uh-huh?”
“The church is having this Christmas Eve service, and I’m going to sing. Jack told me you play the violin.” She hesitated. “Would you accompany me?”
“I don’t know . . .”
“You don’t have to if you don’t want. But to be honest, I’m really nervous about it. I haven’t sung in front of people in a few years, and I thought that, if you played, everyone would be paying attention to you and, maybe, they wouldn’t notice me so much. Jack said you’re wonderful.”
“He exaggerates.”
“My brother doesn’t know how to exaggerate.”
My eyes drifted over her face. The upper rim of her left ear was missing. Pity rose in my mouth—a salty flood of saliva—and for a moment I was thankful my own wounds were well concealed, on the inside and away from scrutiny. I, at least, could pretend I was whole.
Darn that cripple thing.
“Okay,” I said.
Beth sprung forward and hugged me. “Really? Oh, thanks so much, Sarah.”
I twisted away from her and went to the woodstove, chucking in another log, flames nipping my fingers. The air quivered feverishly against my cheeks. I was six inches and a dizzy spell from looking like a napalmed marshmallow. From looking like Beth. “Do you have your song picked out?”
She pulled a hardcover from her pocket, gave it to me. “Hymn 171.”
Most of the pages were no longer sewn into the binding. I shuffled through, the aged paper shedding corners and edges, and a few printed words here and there. I found it—“It Is Well With My Soul.” I hauled Luke’s violin from the closet, opened the latches in three curt pops. “Are you ready?”
“You want me to sing now?”
I raised an eyebrow. Just one. I had practiced this for hours as a child, sitting in front of a mirror, holding my left brow still while twitching my right up and down. “That’s what you came for.” I snuggled into the chinrest, my body responding to the cool wood, the scent of rosin.
