Please Remember This (7 page)

“Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, Matthew.” She was looking at him straight on. “And you’re making it sound like I didn’t have the right to say no. Am I morally obligated to come in and teach simply because the School Board refuses to fire that stupid Spanish teacher and hire someone who can teach more than one language?”

That stupid Spanish teacher was a great basketball coach, and it was true there was no way that the School Board would ever fire him. Matt sighed. He
never stayed angry for long. “No, you weren’t obligated to, but it would have done a lot of good.”

Why did she keep calling him Matthew? No one called him Matthew. He drained his tea, suddenly noticing a clear, clean taste rising up through the sweetness. “I can’t figure out what motivates you, Sierra. I know it’s not money; that much I do believe about you. But if you really mean what you say about growing and changing, you’ll do this. I’m not saying that you owe the town anything, but don’t you owe something to yourself? You used to make sense. You were wrong, but you made sense.”

“Why are you bringing that up? Are you saying I owe you?’

“I’m not saying anything like that, and anyway, it’s not me. It’s the town.” He was not going to let her personalize this, to make it a Matt-and-Sierra kind of thing. “We’d like you to open a retail establishment and do your best to make a go of it.”

“It’s been almost twenty-five years. I’d be out of jail by now.”

Matt shut his eyes. That had nothing to do with this.

He hadn’t wanted to come out here. He knew that the conversation would end up like this. “You wouldn’t have gone to jail.”

“You might not have been able to stop it.”

“I’m the doctor. I sign the death certificates.”

It had all been so long ago.

Matt had grown up in Fleur-de-lis, but if things had gone according to plan, he wouldn’t have settled there. He wouldn’t have gone into a private medical
practice. He had been full of ideals; he had wanted to change the world. During the final year of his residency, he had been talking both to the Peace Corps and to Doctors Without Walls, a French organization. His older brother, Phillip, would stay home and take care of the problems in Fleur-de-lis. Matt would save the rest of the world.

And there were problems in Fleur-de-lis. It was the latter part of the 1970s, and family farmers, faced with rising energy costs and nearly punitive interest rates, were losing their land at a pace not seen since the Great Depression. Big agro-businesses, based across the river in Missouri, were buying up Kansas farmland.

The Ravenal family had never been farmers. They had been doctors, lawyers, and businessmen, but there had been Ravenals in Fleur-de-lis since the riverboat had sunk. They cared about the town. So Phillip had taken the County Extension agent job, determined to help the small farmer. With the energy and enthusiam that his older son would bring to the problems of the downtown twenty-five years later, Phillip was trying to negotiate better loans and to set up energy-purchasing co-ops. Everyone liked him. He was outgoing and personable with a pretty wife and two little boys.

Then Matt had gotten a phone call. Phillip, the outgoing, personable Phillip, and Polly, his pretty wife Polly, were dead, killed in the crash of a small airplane.

Matt couldn’t imagine the world without his older brother. The sun had gone behind a cloud. The whole town felt that way. No one could believe that Phillip
was gone. Phillip had been the town’s best hope. He was going to make everything right again.

Matt went home for the funeral, knowing that this was his future now. He was the boys’ guardian. He was responsible for a five-year-old and a baby.

“We’ll take care of them for as long as you need us to,” his parents said immediately.

But he knew that wasn’t a permanent solution. When Phillip and Polly had been making out their wills, everyone had said that children shouldn’t be raised by grandparents if there were any younger relatives who could do it.

So he finished his residency and returned home to start practicing with old Doc Bailey.

He was twenty-eight. His own friends from high school, the smart kids, were long gone. One was in San Francisco, a road manager for a rock band. Another was in England, studying at the London School of Economics. The rest were in Kansas City, building lives for themselves there. That was what happened in Kansas—too many of the smart, ambitious kids left. The people Matt’s age who had stayed in town were the ones who hadn’t gone to college, the ones settling down to work the farms, pump gas, and repair cars. By now many were already divorced with eight-, nine-, even ten-year-old kids. They were good people, but Matt had little in common with them.

Of course, south of town were “the hippies”—at least that was what Fleur-de-lis called them. Matt knew they weren’t hippies; the day of the hippie had already come and gone. But they had chosen a counterculture lifestyle; they were artists and writers. Well
read, alert, and full of laughter, they were interesting people. Matt hungered to know them.

But they had come to Kansas determined not to be Matt Ravenal. Matt had obligations, responsibilities to the boys and his patients. He wore a tie and had a payroll to meet. He was the Establishment.

None of them came to him for health care, even though several of the women were pregnant. He assumed that they were going over to the free clinic in the next county. Time passed, and he saw one of them at the post office. She had a newborn with her.

He could tell that she was proud of her baby. She was gazing at the other people to see if they were looking at the child. They had been, but as soon as she tried to make eye contact, they looked away. After all, she was one of the long-haired hippie freaks.

So he spoke. “That’s a sweet-looking baby. Is it a boy or a girl?” The baby’s little T-shirt was tie-dyed in shades of red and purple.

“A boy. His name is Freedom.”

That was going to be a real hit on the playground when the kid was in third grade. “Is he doing well? Is he an easy baby?”

“He’s a dream. I’m convinced that the hospital environment is so hard on babies, all that light and those noises. It’s too stressful for them.”

Matt had to agree with her. Healthy babies didn’t need the harsh lights and humming equipment, but the technology had to be there for the babies who weren’t healthy, and you could never know ahead of time which baby was going to be healthy. So the healthy babies had to put up with it for the sake of the sick ones.

“Did you go to the birthing center in Kansas City?” That was the closest alternative facility.

“Oh, no. I had him here. Duke and Nina have set aside a room in their house.”

Matt had been stroking the baby’s little foot. His hand froze. “You had him at home?” He and Bailey were the only doctors in town, and there was no trained midwife. “Who delivered him?”

“Sierra, of course. Sierra Celandine. She’s wonderful. She takes care of us all. She can treat anything. She has these herbs that you’ve never heard of, and they really do work. You don’t know her? You’ll have to meet her.”

Matt had to force himself to keep his voice level. “I’ll have to do that.”

“Is this any of my business?” he asked his father when he stopped by that night. The boys were still living with his parents, but Matt visited them twice a day.

“How are you going to feel if something happens to one of the babies or if someone dies from a routine strep throat? Will you feel that you should have made it your business?”

That made it easy.

He went over to his mother’s kitchen phone. Fred Hobart owned a lot of the houses these people were renting, and so he called Fred’s wife. Mrs. Hobart flipped through her rental agreements. Sierra Celandine had a month-to-month lease on the little tenant house across from Fred’s grandparents’ place, the one that was rented to that writer Nina Lane.

Matt knew where it was. He kissed little Ned’s
sweet-smelling head, gave Phil a sticky high five, and walked home to get his car.

The place was run-down. The front porch must have recently been torn off; the outer walls had pale outlines of the supports that attached it to the house. The door was weathered, and a couple of cinder blocks were serving as front steps.

A girl with long hair and big glasses came around from the back of the house.

“Hi.” Her greeting was full of life. “I don’t know you, do I?” She was petite and barefoot and wore a flower in her hair.

“I’m Matt Ravenal.” And though he always felt like a pompous jerk when he said it, he added, “Dr. Matt Ravenal.”

“What kind of doctor?’ She spoke teasingly. “Are you a poet with a Ph.D.? Or a psychologist who feels inferior because you aren’t a psychiatrist? No, I know. You’re the high school principal and you’ve got one of those night-school Ed.D.’s because you wanted to get your salary up.”

In another context he might have enjoyed this. “Actually, I’m an M.D. I have a practice in town.”

“Oh,” she said. “And you make house calls?” She wagged her finger at him. “I’m telling the A.M.A. on you. They won’t like that. They’ll revoke your membership.”

“Are you Sierra Celandine?”

“That’s not what’s on my birth certificate, but yes, it’s my name.”

Matt wasn’t sure what point she was trying to make. “I’ve heard that you are out here practicing medicine without a license.”

“Oh, no.” She shook her head. “I’m not practicing medicine. You’re practicing medicine. I’m healing people.”

“But you’re attending at births.”

“Two gorgeous baby boys.” She mocked a Yiddish accent. “The cutest little shmekels you’d ever want to see.”

People around here didn’t affect Yiddish accents; they hardly knew what they sounded like. “That’s not legal.”

“What, having a shmekel? I have been completely wrong about this country. What a great place it is, to outlaw penises. What do we get to do with all the suspects?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t.” She was suddenly serious. “It’s illegal for a woman to give birth at home? You can be
arrested
if you don’t go to the hospital? What if the baby comes too fast, and you end up having it in the car on the Kansas Turnpike? Is that illegal?”

“I was referring to your role.”

“My role? I’m the woman’s friend. Is friendship illegal?”

In truth, Matt was not sure exactly what the law was. It never occurred to him to look it up.

But what had he been expecting? That he would show up and his “I’m Dr. Ravenal” would make her cower?

“Follow me,” she ordered and pulled open the door.

The room inside was dim. There wasn’t much furniture, but board-and-brick bookshelves covered one wall. She bent down and pushed a plug into a wall socket. An overhead light bulb flicked on.

She took a book off the shelf. “You read German, don’t you? Here, look at this.”

She thrust it at him. Matt did not read German, but clearly she did. The volume was dog-eared, and she was pointing to a passage highlighted with yellow marker. She held the book open and after a moment, when it was obvious he wasn’t going to respond, she flipped it shut.

The paper cover was a table of contents and most of the authors’ names had strings of initials following them. This was a medical journal. She was reading medical journals in German.

He knew that the Germans were working to establish whether or not traditional folk medicines had any efficacy that could be clinically proven. He knew almost nothing about the research, but these books of hers represented serious, respectable scholarship. This wasn’t witchcraft. If she had absorbed a third of what was on her shelves, she would be very knowledgeable. “Do you have any formal medical training?”

“No. I don’t want to know what they teach in American medical schools.” She wasn’t joking anymore. “I want to learn what they don’t teach you there. I want to show people that you can be well without all those wires and testing and invasive techniques.”

“And you want to do this from eastern Kansas?” He could hear the sarcasm in his voice.

“Yes, I do. You have Native Americans here, or didn’t you know that? I want to study their healing methods.”

Matt did know that there were Indians in Kansas. Once a month he drove for two hours to staff a clinic
for the people who didn’t live on the reservations, and whatever healing methods they had sure weren’t doing a very good job of controlling the diabetes and hypertension in that population.

“Okay,” he acknowledged, “you may know a lot about some kinds of illness and even basic first aid.” He could see an array of Red Cross manuals. “But this childbirth has got to stop.”

She bristled and he sensed that she was about to attack. He had already heard all the arguments—
fetal monitors cause more problems than they detect … childbirth is natural
… But her mocking smile returned. “I don’t see how we can stop childbirth. I think a lot of pregnant women would really object to that, to say nothing of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Can you imagine what that would do to their incomes?”

He wished she’d be serious. “When things go wrong at a birth, they go wrong fast, and they go wrong nasty.”

“Nothing’s going to go wrong.”

“You don’t know that, and the legal consequences for you will be enormous if they do. You aren’t assisting at these births as a friend. You know you aren’t. You’re acting as the midwife, and if something goes wrong, you’ll be held criminally liable.”

“Nothing’s going to go wrong.”

“Do you have any idea what a local jury would do to you? You aren’t going to get any sympathy.”

“I don’t want anyone’s sympathy. What I’m doing is right. You don’t need sympathy when you are right.”

There was no reaching her.

There was also no getting her out of his mind. She had been so full of life. He was aging too fast; he had too many responsibilities.

When they would run into each other, she would tease him and flirt with him, and he had to admit that he liked that. If it was hot outside, she would have her hair twisted up and the outline of her breasts would be visible beneath her T-shirt.

He was like a kid with a crush. He went to unusual places at odd times, hoping she’d be there. He never asked her out in any conventional sort of way. What would be the point? They disagreed about too much.