The House Girl (39 page)

That summer I slept under the attic eaves of Jack’s house and listened to the swallows clatter on the tin roof in the evenings and to the rooster’s solitary
kaw-kaw
in the mornings. I would rise with the sun to find Dorothea and Jack already busy with the morning chores. My memories of that time are always of Jack in motion, a speeding burst of activity, hands busy, shoulders lifting or hauling or pushing, and his Dorothea beside him, a calm presence, dark haired, lovely, an angel.

Jack was the same serious, upright boy I remembered from our youth. Two years younger but now two inches taller than me, lanky and lean, with a mop of dark curly hair and eyes the color of rich earth. He had few neighbors, and the nearest town was 12 miles of hard riding. The isolation suited them well, Jack told me. He and Dorothea had grown weary of the folk in Lynnhurst and had sought a new beginning, away from the familiar scenes.

As the summer wore on, Dorothea’s waist thickened and her belly pushed out the front of her dress until I could not help but remark that she appeared to be with child. Why yes, she answered, isn’t it wonderful? Dorothea and I were in the kitchen alone when I said this—I had thought such a matter might embarrass my brother if discussed openly. I smiled and congratulated her, and then later that day in the field, I clapped a hand on my brother’s shoulder and smiled my congratulations to him. He understood my gesture and looked abashed at the ground, only the barely upturned corners of his mouth showing me that he smiled as well.

That summer with my brother, my thirst relented. I did not drink spirits, or rather I drank rarely and only with Jack beside me on the creaking wooden chairs of his front porch. There was a physical tiredness in me from the farm work that seemed to slake what had propelled me previously to the bottle. I could not explain it any further then, and cannot now, only that those three months were the driest I had known since leaving home.

I returned to Philadelphia in September and began preparations for my final exams. Back in the city, surrounded by friends and associates, my thirst returned and I fell back into the desultory life of a student. I heard nothing from Jack for many months. That winter, I wrote to inform him of my position with Dr. Coggins and the planned establishment of our clinic within Charlotte County. In truth, the clinic’s proximity to my brother’s farm had induced me at last to accept the post. I had enjoyed my time with Jack and Dorothea far more than I had imagined possible and I fancied a return, to family and familiar sights. I felt my childhood bitterness begin to lift, the memories that I held—barely worth remembering—reshaping into ones that I might tolerate and perhaps even embrace. The agent of this change was Jack. He had not suffered as I had in my parents’ home; he remembered moments and events that seemed drawn from a different childhood altogether, different parents, a different home. While I listened, he told Dorothea of a pie our mother would bake with peaches and cinnamon; a toy train our father made from an old tobacco tin, its track fashioned from wood scraps fit together and sanded thin and smooth; the winter night our father brought me, delirious with fever, to the doctor’s in town. Why did I recall none of this? Did he imagine his stories? Did he invent them for my benefit, or for his own? I cannot answer. But whatever words Jack speaks to you of that time, the stories he tells of our childhood in Lynnhurst, our parents and the lives they led, he speaks the truth.

I wrote to Jack a second, and a third time. I inquired as to conditions on the farm, his first harvest, Dorothea’s health and the coming arrival of their child. Still I heard nothing from him. Perhaps he sent a letter that was lost in the rural post. Perhaps he had been too busy to write. Perhaps, I thought only later, there was an element of retribution in his conduct, a kind of rebuke to me, to my disappearance from our parents’ farm, to all the years he labored alone beside our father. Now the borders of that small warm circle he had made with Dorothea would not part so easily to accommodate me, the prodigal brother, no matter how great my regret or true my love for him. And for this I could not reproach him.

Dr. Coggins and I were occupied throughout the closing weeks of the year 1849 with preparations for the future operations of our clinic. We opened the storefront in Randolph on the second day of January, 1850. In the morning hours we saw patients at the clinic, with the afternoons and evenings reserved for house visits and the like. The weeks passed quickly and I did not dwell on my unanswered letters to Jack. In his own time, I believed, Jack would contact me and we would persist on the course we began that previous summer to become brothers once more.

A month after our clinic’s inauguration, I finally received word from Jack. It came in the form of Langston Knowles, one of Jack’s neighbors, a man whom I had met the summer before. He was unmarried, tall with a long dark beard that he would stroke as he spoke, and the ends of it seemed threadbare and sparse from the handling.

Langston arrived late one night at the clinic door. Finding no one, he called then at the sheriff’s to determine my or Dr. Coggins’s home address. A doctor was needed urgently, Langston said, to attend a medical emergency at Jack’s farm. The sheriff directed Langston to my apartment on the second floor of a boardinghouse in town, and Langston knocked loudly until the owner, Mrs. Bursy, awoke and opened the door.

I did not hear Langston’s knocks because at the time I was sitting stupefied at the end of my bed, my gaze directed at my own pale reflection staring back at me from the glass of the darkened window opposite. I do not know for how long I had remained in this position before Mrs. Bursy entered my room, only that I had drunk nearly all of a bottle of not very good whiskey since arriving home from the tavern, where I doubtless had already consumed my fair share of drink. Having been awakened so urgently by Langston, and not hearing any reply from her at first polite and then louder taps on my door, Mrs. Bursy opened it to find me in this state. She shook me on the shoulder and explained that a grave medical emergency involving my brother required my immediate attention and would I come downstairs quickly?

I had only ever treated my patients in a state of strict sobriety. On that day, the day that Langston called, the practice of medicine was everything to me. It was an arena sacrosanct in my mind, pure and precise, shimmering with all the advances that science had provided, all that she would provide in future and I thanked God every day for bringing me within her careful orbit.

An urgent medical emergency,
Mrs. Bursy said. There at the foot of the bed I sat and looked into her rheumy eyes, weeping at the corners just enough to wet her upper cheeks. I had regained sufficient sobriety to know that the effect of drink still remained within me, and a great terror gripped me. Not a terror for my beloved brother or his wife. No, I feared only for myself. I feared the coming together of my two selves—the nighttime wanderer and drunk, the dedicated daytime physician. Would this bring a debasement beyond repair? For the good Dr. Caleb Harper to look himself in the eye, to truly look and recognize the darkness within, would this render the entire construction unsustainable? Yes. The construction of my self would come crumbling down.

Perhaps Mrs. Bursy recognized my terror. I do not know. I never saw her again after that night. I remember her blinking rapidly, wringing her hands in great agitation. She repeated the words.
A medical emergency
.

The situation did not allow for hesitation. I knew that had Dr. Coggins been called, he would have acted swiftly, and I strove to do the same, asking to speak at once to Mr. Knowles. I pulled up my suspenders (I still wore my clothes from that day) and followed Mrs. Bursy downstairs to where Langston waited, standing outside on the porch before the still-open front door.

My good doctor, Langston said, please come quickly. It is your brother’s child, it is coming now and something is not right with Jack’s Dorothea, she has been laboring too long. Please come, I have brought a horse.

Tied to the porch rail were two horses, their breath clouding the cold night air. I steadied myself against the door frame and turned to fetch my black leather medical bag, a recent gift from Dr. Coggins. The contents of the bag—glass vials of liquid held upright by steel casters, white paper sachets of powders, rubber-tipped hammers, gleaming scalpels—were still mostly unknown to me. Here is your future, Dr. Coggins had said when he passed the bag to me. Guard it well.

I took down the medical bag from the shelf in my closet, pulled on a jacket and my riding boots, and joined Langston outside where he waited, already astride his horse. We rode through the dark streets of Randolph and westward towards my brother’s farm. We did not stop and slowed only once, as the horses started from the sudden sound of coyotes, their howls low and insistent in the starless night.

Langston and I arrived at Jack’s farm and despite the dark, I could see it was much changed from my time there just 6 months previous. The small gray house now had a mended roof and yellow curtains; the front door was painted a cheerful red and festooned with branches of holly heavy with berries. The barn, the chicken coop, the outbuildings, all bore signs of Jack’s handiwork and Dorothea’s craft, patches and fixes and simple homey touches. The fields stretched beyond the house in darkened shadow, the full smell of turned earth lying fallow for winter.

The ride had done much to rid me of drink, the cool wind and night air seeming to purify my blood and clear my head. This is the truth. I willed myself to sobriety and felt my faculties return.

I dismounted and hitched my horse to the post. There was no sound, not an owl’s hoot or dog’s bark, only the jangle of the horses as they shifted in place and my own labored breath coming fast from the hard ride. I blinked sharply to clear my vision. Light burned in nearly all the windows of the farmhouse, making it look at first to my wind-scoured eyes like the house was aflame. Jack, having heard the noise of our arrival, rushed outside to meet us.

She is bad, he said, and his eyes were wide and white. Dried blood smeared his forehead and I could see it on his hands. The midwife has come and gone, he told me. She said there was nothing to be done.

I gripped firmly the curved leather handle of my bag and followed Jack inside. I heard Langston depart again in a full gallop but I knew not where he went.

Dorothea was upstairs, spread on the marital bed in a nightdress whose color was now obscured by her sweat and blood. Her eyes were closed, her breath raspy and distinct, and her bulging stomach bloomed like a rose from the bed.

You were right to call for me, I said to Jack. The fear that had gripped me at the guesthouse was far from me now. My eyes saw with a grim clarity the danger to Dorothea and her unborn child. My head was clear, as though I had slept a full night, as though no drop of alcohol had ever passed my lips.

I examined Dorothea in the methodical way I had been taught at the medical college, from top to bottom and left to right. Jack stood anxiously at my elbow, his breath loud in my ear.

She stopped pushing, Jack said. She screamed at the last and stopped pushing, I don’t know why.

I put my hands on Dorothea’s stomach and felt for the outline of the baby inside. When I could determine nothing, I pushed down on her stomach harder, then reached between Dorothea’s legs. She turned her head and moaned faintly as I probed.

I realized then that the position was such that Dorothea could not deliver the child, no matter how great her strength. The baby lay head to toe across her stomach, perpendicular to the point of exit, transverse and lodged against her rib cage, perhaps dying, perhaps dead already. This knowledge came to me plainly, as though printed before me in a medical textbook set on the bed, and I knew there was nothing I nor any doctor could do now to improve upon the prognosis. Dorothea, having labored so long and hard, was doomed from the very first contraction, likely had been doomed some months before, when the fetus first turned its head away from her heart, stretched its legs long across her abdomen, and pointed its stomach down towards the earth that it would never meet.

I looked at Jack, who studied my face, and I did not say a word but he read my thoughts in the thin line of my lips and a rapid blink that had overcome me, now unable to meet his gaze.

Can you save them? he asked. Please. Please save them.

Dorothea’s chest still rose and her eyes twitched beneath their lids, rapid skittering movements. There were few options available to me but as I gazed at Dorothea, at her face so beloved, a single path opened before me that offered an outcome most satisfying, most fortunate.
Save them,
Jack had said. Dorothea was alive, but