One Shenandoah Winter (6 page)

Brian glanced behind him. There was not a free seat. And two men stood in the far corners, talking in low tones to their seated wives. “Certainly does look busy.”

“A lot of these folks have been storing up their ailments for quite a while. Since nobody knows how long he's here for, they're getting in while the getting's good.” Hattie rose to her feet. “Let me go see if Doctor Reynolds'll take a couple of minutes and speak with you.”

Brian made his way around the room, greeting each person in turn. He had long since come to know most of the residents in the Hillsboro region, even those traveling in from neighboring valleys and distant highland farms. He talked weather and crops and relatives, just letting them know he was there and caring.

“Brian?” When he turned, he found Hattie's smile had become even more forced. “He'll see you now.”

When he passed her, she pointed to the far corner door and murmured, “You might want to make it brief.”

Brian followed her directions, knocked on the open door, and said, “Afternoon, Nathan.”

The doctor did not look up from his desk. He snapped at the paper he was writing on. “I can't believe I'm expected to write out my own records. Haven't you people ever heard of electric typewriters and secretaries who take shorthand?”

“Yes.” Brian walked over and seated himself. And waited. He was good at that. He had met and disarmed a lot of anger simply by accepting whatever came.

Finally the doctor raised his gaze. “You feeling ill?”

“No, I'm fine, thank you.”

“Sadie all right? The baby?”

“They're both doing well. I can't thank you enough—”

“Then don't even start.” Nathan Reynolds bent back over his desk, his face hidden behind strands of dark hair going prematurely gray.

Brian sat where he was. There were a few moments in his life when he felt the Spirit move in a most intimate fashion. There was no sense of voices or words or a hand guiding him. Instead there sometimes came a silent sensation of a door opening, an unseen opportunity. A tiny crack through which he could insert a word. If only he were very careful, very watchful, very alert.

So he sat where he was, and he examined this antagonistic man before him. And he waited.

Eventually the pen stopped scratching, and the eyes peered in hostile closure. “You still here?”

“Yes. Still right here.” That was another fact of such times. Nothing said or done could faze him. Perhaps it was because he was too concerned with hearing what was inaudible, just beyond his earthly reach. “I was just wondering . . .”

“I've got a thousand things more important than your wonderings.” The voice was flat, final. “Stop wasting my time.”

“Don't you ever need anybody?” Brian had no idea where the words came from. But he couldn't take them back, so there was no need to try. “Don't you ever—”

“Look.” Angrily the doctor slapped the file closed. “I know where this is headed, and it's not going to work.”

Amazing. The miracle was happening again. “Where am I headed, Nathan?”

“To God. Am I right? You're going to sit there and you're going to lay the God jabber on me.”

“Only if you want me to.”

“Well, I don't.” The doctor slammed another file open before him. “So back off.”

The barrier against Nathan's ire remained complete. “What's got you so angry?”

“Death.” The word was a bark. The sound punched out. “That clear enough for you?”

“Yes. I hate it too.”

“Fine. So the subject is closed, all right?” The head dropped back down again. But not before Brian saw Nathan's face age to a mask of ancient fatigue. The man carried a burden that made Brian's heart ache and his mind wonder.

The pen scratched, the silence lingered, until the muttered words emerged, “You're just waiting to pounce, aren't you? Trying to find some way of telling me that everything's just fine. That there's nothing wrong with death since we're all headed for heaven or glory or some utter nonsense.”

“I wasn't going to say anything like that.”

He might as well not have spoken. “Let me ask you one thing, preacher man. What would you say if it wasn't some stranger off the street who was doing the dying, but your own little girl? You think you could sit there and be so rational, tell me how great it is because she's not suffering any more?”

“No.” Brian did not feel the anger, nor the attack, nor the stabbing fury behind the words. The same words that left the doctor's hand shaking so hard he held the pen poised over the file, unable to write any longer. Here at this moment he was even protected from the keening memory of their first stillborn baby. His voice laced with a calm not his own, Brian said, “No, I wouldn't think that at all.”

“What do you know. An honest preacher.” The words were laced with bitter ridicule. “Wish you'd been around where I used to work.”

“Tell me about your work, Nathan.”

“No.” Another bark. The pen was tossed aside. “This isn't one of your confessional hours. I didn't sign on for counseling.”

“All right.” Brian rose to his feet. Strange how he could feel satisfied when he had accomplished nothing but to irritate the man who was saving his daughter's life. “You know, I'd be honored to talk with you sometime. It isn't often I have the chance to lock horns with a man of your intelligence.”

The face lifted once more. The voice remained bitter, but Nathan's gaze took on a look of wounded ire. “Yeah? Think some of your fancy words might change my mind about death?”

“No, I wasn't going to talk about death at all.” He smiled down at the man, knowing the love he was feeling was not his own. “I was thinking maybe you might like to talk about life.”

Nathan Reynolds stormed through the remainder of his day, vowing that it would be his last in this forsaken hole of a town. Yet the faces and the unspoken pleas refused to let his heart agree with what his mind kept repeating.

He left the clinic and walked back to the house given to him by the town. On the way, he started a mental list of everything he needed to do to get himself ready to return to the city and his work.
Real
work.

All afternoon he had struggled to hold on to the ire raised by the pastor. Anger was the perfect fuel to get him out of town. Rage had been his best defense against the assaults of the past two years. When all else had deserted him—friends and energy and time and reason—his fury had still been there. He had fought his way through the pain and the misery, and he had survived. But now, in the face of these strange people and their even stranger ways, his anger was somehow not working as it should. He could not even stay irritated at the pastor. And that rankled most of all.

Nathan's heart and half his mind remained held by the faces of the patients he had seen that day. Their quiet acceptance of pains and illnesses baffled him. And their gratitude, that was another mystery. He found himself searching for a way to describe the manner with which they met his ire and his harshness. When he fastened upon the word, it stopped him there in the middle of the street. They treated him with
homage
. They
honored
him.

He forced his feet to move on. The Shenandoah River ran alongside the road he walked back to his home. His temporary home, he corrected himself, as he tried to shake off the thoughts and focus on getting ready to leave. But the river seemed to be chuckling at him and his attempts to stay angry. Mocking him and his plans and his rage.

Just as he started down his drive, the sound of a roaring engine and squealing tires brought him back around. A truck took the turning into River Road on two wheels. He could see the driver scramble the wheel around and aim straight for where Nathan was standing.

The truck skidded to a halt. Through the windshield Nathan spotted two smaller figures seated beside the driver. Both of the children were wailing.

Nathan was about to shout at the driver for having scared the children with his driving, when the man leaped clear of the truck and called hoarsely, “You the doc?”

“Nathan Reynolds. What—”

“Praise the Lord.” The man scrambled around the truck on worn rubber galoshes. He looked like a scrawny throwback to frontier days, with a long dark beard and hair tumbling all over his shoulders. Yet this particular man wore a sopping wet nightshirt and a torn hunting jacket. As he drew closer Nathan realized the man still had soap suds in his hair. “Name's Will Green. I farm a piece over Humbolt Mountain way.”

Nathan found his arm gripped by a hand as tight as an iron vise. “You mind letting—”

“It's my wife, Doc. She ain't breathing right.”

He found himself running through the standard ops list as the man marched him toward the truck. “She have a history of asthma?”

“Naw, she's allus been right healthy.”

“Chest infections? Sudden pains?”

The man pulled him around the side. Suddenly a sound of choking became audible. “You can ask her yourself, Doc. I done flung a mattress in the back and carted her down.”

Seven

F
riday Connie drove to the clinic in a foul mood. Word had come down from Richmond of new budget cuts. Small mountain towns were the first to be hit when times got hard, since they lacked the political clout to protect themselves. Connie had spent five hours pleading and cajoling to keep their meager city-works budget intact, and still felt uncertain as to meeting their future needs.

To make matters worse, over Thanksgiving dinner Poppa Joe had again pestered her to bring the doctor up for a visit. In his quiet, stubborn way he had finally worn her down. As much as she despised having anything further to do with the doctor, she had agreed to extend Nathan Reynolds one final invitation.

Ever since the doctor's arrival six weeks earlier, she had been hearing reports. Her own two visits had been brief and explosive, his reaction to her earlier invitations acerbic. She thus took quiet satisfaction from how the townspeople used Nathan Reynolds but otherwise steered clear of his cantankerous ways. All but Hattie; for some unexplained reason, she had continued with the duties of receptionist. Hattie claimed it was because they needed the money. But Connie felt her oldest friend was telling only half the truth, and she could not understand why.

As Connie pulled up in front of the clinic, she spotted a familiar face. Will Green dropped the box he was carrying in the back of his truck and waved in her direction. The Greens' homestead was one of the valley's fringe farmlands. Connie waved back at Will and recalled hearing how the doctor had recently saved his wife's life with an emergency operation. Something about her breathing.

Connie climbed from her car and walked over, but she did not offer her hand. Many of the traditional mountain folk didn't take to shaking a single woman's hand, unless it was on a hoedown floor. “How are you, Will?”

“Howdy, Miss Connie. Doing just fine, thankee.”

“And your wife?”

“She's makin' steady progress, thanks to the Lord and Doc Reynolds.” He tossed a glance over his shoulder. “You heard anything 'bout whether the doc'll be staying?”

“Not yet.” She studied his truck, which was crammed full of boxes and strange metal apparatus. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, me and some of the boys, we said we'd help him with—”

“Will!” The clinic's door slammed back on its hinges. “I thought I told you to get those boxes and the rest of that junk out of the front two rooms!”

“Just gettin' on it, Doc.”

“Well, it doesn't look like it to me!” Nathan Reynolds stomped down the three concrete steps. “The place is still packed to the gills, and you're standing around here yapping! And what about those friends of yours?”

Will Green was the kind of man who had never made a passing acquaintance with fury. Connie knew a number of such strong gentle men from hillside families, and it rankled mightily to watch the farmer peel the hat from his head and begin spinning it nervously with work-scarred hands. “They'll be here directly, Doc. They promised soon as they were done up to—”

“Soon is not good enough,” the man raged. He turned at the sound of footsteps scraping over the newly regraded gravel parking area. Hattie scurried over and gave him a decidedly nervous smile. He lashed out, “And you are twenty minutes late!”

She cringed under his blazing ire. “Sorry, Doctor Reynolds, we had a late delivery at the store and Chad—”

“I don't want excuses, I want some discipline around this place! We've got a full waiting room and I'm in there by myself!” He wheeled back to the cowed farmer and shouted, “You and your lazy good-for-nothing—”

Connie felt something snap in her head. “Now you just hold off that man!”

In the sudden silence she stomped over to stand directly between Nathan Reynolds and his two victims. “Who do you think you are, laying into Will Green like that?”