These High, Green Hills (50 page)

He called the little yellow house and told Cynthia what he knew.

“The decision has been made, then,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“The burn victim from the Creek—I was praying for a sign, something certain, and this is it. Lace must be taken out of that hell.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I can’t imagine what’s going on, why we haven’t seen her. I’ll call social services and find out if they’ve learned anything. Then I’ll go and sign the papers.”

“Let me know. I’ll be home ... sometime. Probably before dinner. I have the distinct sense I’m to stick here.”

“I’ll bring Louella to see Miss Sadie at eleven, and I’ll fetch Winnie this evening. Against everything that strives to make it otherwise, I shall say it anyway—happy birthday, dearest love.”

“You’re precious to me, Kavanagh.”

His wife gulped and hung up.

He had missed Dave, the computer technician, but Emma had not. She’d been there, alone, for a two-hour session he presumed would put her over the edge.

The least he could do was call. “How was it?” he asked cautiously.

“It was terrific! It was fabulous!”

“It was?” Had his hearing failed utterly?

“Dave brought lunch, it was cheeseburgers all the way and fries with milkshakes. We ate ours and split yours.”

“Glad to be of service.” He dreaded the rest of the conversation.

“Finally, I don’t know how it happened, but I just got ... I don’t know, it started coming together. You won’t believe this ... ”

“Try me.”

“I did the first page of the newsletter.”

“No!”

“All the margins, a bulleted list, your message of the month, and the masthead.”

“Fantastic!”

“Not to mention a border. And not just a bunch of those dumb rule lines, either.”

“Really?”

“Greek keys,” she said with feeling. “Dave brought me a free solitaire program, and you get
Learning the Books of the Bible.”

“I’ll be darned.”

“You won’t have to hire some young thing with her skirt up to here, after all,” she crowed.

“Aha.”

“But you will have to give me a raise.”

“Well ...”

“And I don’t mean maybe!”

He viewed this turn of events as the best birthday present, bar none, since Cynthia Coppersmith accepted his marriage proposal. If Emma Newland would take on the infernal nuisance of the whole thing, including hanging indents, he wouldn’t oppose her raise for all the tea in China.

“By the way,” said Emma, “I found the file folder with the lists in it.”

“Where?”

“Under the seat cushion of Harold’s recliner next to the TV in our sunroom.”

He didn’t inquire, because he didn’t want to know.

Hoppy creaked back in his desk chair, exhausted.

“What’s the worst that can happen?” he asked, exhausted himself.

“Infection. Pneumonia. Setbacks. If we don’t have one or all of these, it will be a minor miracle.”

“Tell me everything.”

“The burns are of mixed depths—some partial, but mostly full-thickness burns. I don’t think there’ll be any grafting to fat, but I won’t know until Cornell Wyatt gets here. He’ll fly in tomorrow with his burn nurse, and we expect to harvest the donor sites the following day.”

“What areas will need new skin?”

“The left side of her face—we’ll probably harvest the graft from behind the ear and neck on the right side. Her neck, shoulder, arm, upper body, and portion of the upper hip will also be recipient sites. It looks like an explosion, maybe the kerosene ignited in front of her and exploded as she turned away.”

“I have a special feeling for this patient.”

“Why?”

“I don’t have a clue,” he said. “Maybe it’s the praying. I think when we pray for others, even total strangers, it bonds us in ways we can’t understand.”

“We’re pulling this thing together by the seat of our pants. I’ve never had serious burn experience. Cornell owes me a big one, and this is a big one. By the way, LM lost her left ear.”

“Blast.”

“We’ll be changing her dressings twice a day until the grafts are done, and no amount of morphine can kill the pain that comes with that. I’d like you to be with her after the dressing changes, whenever you can, around nine in the morning and eight at night. I know you’re busy, this is not your job ...”

“Actually, it is my job.”

“LM,” said Hoppy, abstractedly looking at the wall. “Cornell said if we could call her by her first name, it would help.”

“What’s the best that can happen?”

“With no pneumonia, no infection, no setbacks, she’ll be here two, maybe three weeks, then to Winston-Salem for some very aggressive physical therapy. Best scenario, a long recovery and pronounced scarring.”

“How is the grafting done?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I do want to know.”

“Picture a machine like an electric cheese slicer. You adjust the calibration to the desired thickness and width of the graft you need to harvest. I’ve heard burn patients say the sound of it gave them night-mares for years.

“In any case, it generally gives you a nice sheet of skin from the buttocks, which can be used for trunk and arm injuries. Bottom line, grafting is a big slice of hell for everybody—doctors, staff, and patient alike.”

“I wouldn’t have your job, pal.”

“I wouldn’t have yours.”

“So, it’s a wash,” said the rector, managing a smile. “I’m going in to talk with LM a few minutes, then I’ll step down the hall to Miss Sadie. How is she?”

Hoppy ran his fingers through his graying hair. He started to speak, then changed his mind.

If Hoppy was short on burn experience, so was he. They were all flying by the seat of their pants.

He stood by her bed and held the rail, and watched the random flickering of the lid over her closed eye. Sleeping, perhaps, or lost in the mist produced by morphine. The air in the tube that formed her breath sounded harsh against the constant hiss and gurgle of the IV drips.

He prayed aloud, but kept his voice quiet. “Our Father, thank You for being with us, for we can’t bear this alone. Cool and soothe, heal and restore, love and protect. Comfort and unite those who’re concerned for her, and keep them in Your care. We’re asking for Your best here, Lord, we’re expecting it. In Jesus’ name.”

She opened her eye after a moment and he looked into the deep well of it, feeling a strangely familiar connection.

“Hey, there,” he said, smiling foolishly.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

SADIE ELEANOR BAXTER died peacefully in her sleep on June 30, in the early hours of the morning.

When the rector of Lord’s Chapel received the phone call, he went at once to the hospital room, where he took Miss Sadie’s cold hand and knelt and prayed by her bedside.

He then drove to the church, climbed the stairs to the attic, and tolled the death bell twenty times. The mournful notes pealed out on the light summer air, waking the villagers to confusion, alarm, or a certain knowing.

“It’s old Sadie Baxter,” said Coot Hendrick’s mother, sitting up in bed in a stocking cap. Coot, who was feeding a boxful of biddies he had bought to raise for fryers, called from the kitchen, “Lay back down, Mama!”

Mule Skinner turned over and listened, but didn’t wake Fancy, who could have slept through the bombing of London. “There went Miss Baxter,” he whispered to the darkened room.

J. C. Hogan heard the bells in his sleep and worked them into a dream of someone hammering spikes on a railroad being laid to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Bong, bong, bong, John Henry was a steel drivin‘ man ...

Cynthia Kavanagh got up and prayed for her husband, whose pain she felt as if it were her own, and went to the kitchen and made coffee, and sat at the table in her robe, waiting until a reasonable hour to call Meadowgate Farm and all the others who’d want to know.

Winnie Ivey, awake since four-thirty, stopped in the middle of the kitchen on Lilac Road, where a dim light burned in the hood of the stove, and prayed, thanking God for the life of one who had cared about people and stood for something, and who, as far as she was concerned, would never be forgotten.

Louella Baxter Marshall had not been asleep when she heard the bells toll; she had been praying on and off throughout the night, and weeping and talking aloud to Miss Sadie and the Lord. When the tolling came, she sat up, and, without meaning to, exactly, exclaimed, “Thank you, Jesus! Thank you for takin‘ her home!”

Lew Boyd heard the bells and woke up and looked at his watch, which he never took off except in the shower, and saw the long line of automobiles snaking up to his gas pumps and buying his candy and cigarettes and canned drinks. Sadie Baxter’s funeral would draw a crowd, he could count on it. He sighed and went back to sleep until his watch beeped.

Jena Ivey, who was up and entering figures in her ledger for Mitford Blossoms, shivered. She would have to hire on help to do the wreaths and sprays for this one. This would be bigger than old Parrish Guthrie’s had ever hoped to be, the old so-and-so, and so what if Miss Sadie had never bought so much as a gloxinia from Mitford Blossoms, Sadie Baxter had been a lady and she had loved this town and done more for it than anybody else ever would, God rest her soul in peace.

Esther Bolick punched Gene and woke him up.

“Sadie Baxter’s gone,” she said.

“How d‘you know?”

“The bells are tolling.”

“Maybe it’s th‘ president or somebody like that,” said Gene, who remembered the hoopla over Roosevelt’s passing.

“I don’t think so,” said his wife. “I saw the president on TV yesterday and he looked fit as a fiddle.”

Percy Mosely was leaving his house at the edge of town when he heard the first tolling. He removed his hat and placed it over his heart and was surprised to feel a tear coursing down his cheek for someone he’d hardly ever exchanged five words with in his life, but whose presence above the town, at the crest of the steep fern bank, had been a consolation for as long as he could remember.