Calves and babies, babies and calves. Once she’d dreamed she was giving birth to a calf—and in the dream she became the calf, a bull calf. She woke, shrieking, could still see the ax, gleaming, above her head.
In the other room, the chanting had stopped. The group was circling the sick woman, touching her forehead, her cheek, her bare toes, which stuck out from under the drape. Suddenly, the woman opened her eyes and vomited a bloody froth. The onlookers gasped, one cried out, and another ran for a bucket. The leader, Isis, Ruth assumed, remained calm. She instructed two of the women to help the sick woman sit upright. They held a vial to the woman’s nose. But the face turned paler still, greenish yellow in the slant of morning light from the south window.
“That woman needs a doctor,” Ruth cried. “Call an ambulance!”
The sick woman opened her eyes then, pale blue eyes that seemed to swallow up the face. “No,” she said in a high, firm voice. “I won’t have a doctor.”
“Of course you won’t,” said Isis in a flat midwestern accent. “Of course not, dear.” Frowning at Ruth, she said, “Can’t you see this is a sick woman? She wants a spiritual healer, not a doctor. Now please go.”
“No doctor.
Go.
Please.” The sick woman’s eyes, intensely blue now, pleaded with Ruth. Isis carefully wiped her forehead, while a woman with a long black braid scrubbed the floor, on hands and knees, with what smelled like ammonia. Ruth could see the spinal vertebrae through the woman’s thin robe.
As Ruth ran out, feeling light-headed, she heard the chanting start up again, the sound mixed with a light rain; she smelled smoke in the air. Raindrops spattered the swinging sign, making it seem as though the arrows were moving, up into the sky, into whatever was waiting there. Surely the woman would die! She only hoped it wasn’t Kevin’s wife. He’d spoken of a clotting problem, his wife on blood thinners—the medicine she’d left behind in Chicago. One could hemorrhage, bleed to death, Kevin said, from a simple cut.
A thought entered her head as she climbed into the old green pickup: If the woman died, if this
was
his wife, who would inherit the house, the land? The woman in the red robe? Isis—who wouldn’t call a doctor?
Alarmed, she headed down the mountain toward Branbury. She usually loved the drive; the road followed the curve of the river. At each bend, rocky cliffs and waterfalls, bordered with scarlet swamp maples—though they’d lost most of their color now. The tree limbs looked black and sterile in the cold drizzle; the fallen leaves had been raked into crumpled damp piles. There were no children playing in front of the houses. She should have phoned Colm at once, from the country store—he might be on volunteer duty today with Branbury Rescue. She would have, except for the sick woman herself, her own words. “No doctor... Please.” Didn’t Ruth herself get angry with doctors who interfered with living wills, with the desires of sick patients? A woman had the last say over her body, didn’t she? Choice! For life—or death.
Still.. . Was it suicide this woman was committing? Or was it something else? The word
homicide
came to mind. And Ruth felt the rain enter her bones.
She kept on going, too fast, down the mountain, veering north at the main road, toward home. She felt somehow bereft, half a person away from the farm, as though the farm were an island, a self-sufficient yet vulnerable island, at the mercy of the weather, the market—forces beyond her control.
Well, Tim was in control today, although there was enough to do for ten people: hay to mound up into bales, mower in need of repair, tractor with a broken gear shaft. That was the frustration: She could envision where she could take the farm—the new genetics, new machinery, advances in nutrition. But there wasn’t money for it, too little help from the state, and so it seemed she was moving backward into the future.
“Backward into the future,” she said aloud, almost smiling at the oxymoron as she drove right past her own farm, as though the pickup, like a stubborn horse, refused to enter. Spacey Ruth. Well then, she’d go on to the Flint farm. It was probably an unconscious wish. She’d see Kevin. Something had to be done for that woman, something short of a doctor... If, that is, the sick woman was his wife....
Or even if she wasn’t!
* * * *
“You knew him, Dad? Glenna’s husband, Mac? You knew Glenna, too, you said?” Colm Hanna stood in the doorway of the embalming room, where his father was bent over a corpse, aspirating the body—an open-coffin procedure. He was inserting a trocar into the heart’s right atrium. The body was that of an adolescent boy; he’d been in an auto accident, a drunken buddy driving, careening into the wrong lane, showing off. The girlfriend still in the hospital. “The driver was unhurt, of course,” William Hanna said, sounding bitter. “They always seem to get off.”
“But he’ll have to live with the guilt,” Colm said, thinking of the myriad horror scenes he’d witnessed as a volunteer with Branbury Rescue. He grimly watched the trocar plunge in and out of the body, like a knitting needle into wool—breaking up organs and intestines, vacuuming out the blood, replacing it with a preservative. When Colm went, he wanted his body
burned.
His father said, “Guilt, huh. You bet he will.”
Glenna, too, Colm thought, if she really was guilty, as people said. What mental hell, he wondered, had she gone through? Or had she simply blocked it out? He’d heard of people doing that: blocking out what happened to them— abuse; what they did to others—murder? That rumor about the hole Mac had dug for the horse. How true was it? Was it motive for killing the man?
“Painted tin,” his father said, the aspiration complete. He removed a silver ring from the boy’s finger, held it up to the window glass, squinting, the horn-rimmed glasses down on his nose, the skin white and puffy under his Irish eyes. In spite of the work he did, there was a humorous glint in his eyes. Like he’d rather be at the local pub with the boys than aspirating a cadaver. “Five-and-dime. The girlfriend gave it to him, I suppose.”
“And he cherished it.” Colm pictured the ring Ruth had given him in high school. It, too, was a five-and-dime ring. Impulsively, she’d stuck it on his finger one night, after they embraced. He didn’t take a shower for days, afraid the gold would wash off. The thrill of it.
But here he was, in a room of death. “What was he like, Dad—Mac? Crotchety, like Glenna says? Mean-spirited? Sharp-tongued?” He didn’t know why he had to know— except that Ruth was concerned. Glenna was a neighbor; Mac had been. Colm had never married himself, not after Ruth gave him the final no sophomore year in college; he could only know relationships secondhand. It made him feel inferior, as if he were anomalous, because he lived alone. Though he knew what they said: “When his dad goes, all that responsibility, then he’ll marry.” And maybe he would. When Pete left with that actress, he’d silently celebrated—a shot of his favorite Guckenheimer whiskey. Then kicked himself, knowing the hurt for Ruth. Christ but we’re self-centered animals, he thought.
And now there was this Crowningshield fellow, insinuating himself into her life, slurping up her cider. Why, the guy had a wife! Though Ruth still had a husband—he had to remember that. The split wasn’t official yet. He and Pete were on the same side for once: both hoping for a divorce.
“All that, I guess,” his father was saying about Mac, motioning Colm to help lay out the body in the satin-lined coffin. “I only saw him once or twice. Your mother was alive then; we met them in the diner. Your mother just plunked herself down in their booth—she knew Glenna from some planning commission they were both on, liked the woman. But uninvited. Oh, she was always doing that, Roseanne— your mother. Impulsive-like. Not thinking of the reception we might get.”
It was painful to look at the boy after they laid him there. Colm’s father had to be more inured to death than Colm was. The boy’s face was a rosy color from the pink embalming fluid; any minute, it seemed, he’d get up and hit a home run.
“I guess! Walk in a restaurant, your mother’d know everybody’s business before we’d leave. Me, I’d cringe.” William draped a white sheet over the body. “He’ll hold for now, poor kid, till the makeup lady gets here. Get me a cuppa coffee, huh? These kids, they do me in.”
“Decaf, Dad. You know what the doctor says. That high blood pressure—I saw your chart. And that disk problem, in your back. Doing anything about it?”
“Hell, they dis-counted that,” his father said, and Colm laughed—though the pun was probably unintentional.
“How many miles you walked this week?”
“Hundred times around the house. Inside. When I’m dead, then I’ll worry about it.”
“Sure, Dad.” Although not a churchgoer—he did catch the “early show” now and then at St. Mary’s—his father still believed in an afterlife. The priests got to them early; hard to break old habits, old beliefs. Colm would tell him it was this life that counted—the only sure thing—but the words floated past his father’s ear. Nice, really. He wished he could believe, too.
In the kitchen, he put a spoonful of decaf into a flowered cup. It was thin bone china, cracked on the handle, probably the last of a set that had belonged to his grandmother. He stirred in a spoonful of sugar, though his dad liked two. He put two in his own cup, though—what the hell. He had thirty or more years yet to go. Knock on wood.
“So, Dad, tell about that diner encounter. What did you talk about?”
“Jeez, Colm, it was a quarter of a century ago. Well, I don’t know—his work mostly, I suppose. Mac was a talker. That New York accent, you know, like a certain rep we got up here in Vermont—though damn, I voted for the guy. It was thick Brooklyn. You’d think he wrote the whole
New York Times.
He had an opinion about everything.”
“He was a proofreader, Ruth says.”
“Never know it from him. Wanted something more, awful bad, I don’t know what. Not a contented type, you know? One of those questers? Hey, you really going down there, Colm? To that crazy city? They tell me the taxi drivers don’t speak English anymore. You got to point out where you’re going on a map. Look, kid, the guy’s nothin’ but bones now. What’s the use?”
“It might not be Mac, those bones. For one thing, the forensics people thought the guy was a younger man than Mac. Well, anyway, I want to know Mac better. Anyone who’d marry Glenna, move back to Vermont with her, he must have some kind of guts. What do you suppose he saw in her?”
“The farm? Land? A listening ear? I don’t know. Well, suit yourself. Just stay out of the subways, okay? They got kooks just waiting around to shove you down in the tracks.”
“Dad, there are kooks everywhere. Up here, too.” He finished his coffee; he needed the caffeine. He’d take Amtrak, he guessed. Didn’t want to have to drive into the city. “You gonna wheel that boy into the showroom?”
His father frowned; he didn’t always like Colm’s kidding around. Colm took the initiative anyway, pushed the coffin in on its gurney. They’d bought the gurney a year ago, along with a small elevator to get down to the cremation chamber, a kind of dumbwaiter (an ironic name, he thought). No more lifting for his father. It had cost a fortune, but Colm had helped out. His father was growing frail—osteoporosis, it looked like, the way the shoulders hunched forward, the back a humpy curve between.
William heaved himself up out of a chair with a grunt and followed Colm into the parlor.
“Family coming this afternoon for the wake. That’s the hard part. I need you here, son, not in any damn city. But if you gotta go, don’t stay long. They’re talking about freezing rain again tomorrow. You never know who’ll crack up, way they speed around here. I can’t do it alone, Colm.”
“I’ve told you that, Dad. You need to hire someone.”
“Well, I’m telling you, Colm,” William replied, a non sequitur.
There was no use pursuing that subject again. Anyway, his beeper was sounding off. And he was on duty. Jeez. He hoped it wasn’t another crazy kid.
* * * *
Kevin Crowningshield called Ruth at her barn. He said he’d been seeing a lawyer, was sorry he’d missed her when she stopped by. When she blurted out her story—what she’d seen at the Healing House—he panicked, said “Angie,” told her to wait out front, that he was calling Branbury Rescue. He told her she had to come. Would it bring Colm Hanna? Ruth wondered.
She felt swept away; she was, literally. Yanked into Kevin’s car after he whirled up to her barn. In seconds, it seemed, they were speeding up the mountain road. Kevin pulled over momentarily to let the ambulance scream past, then shoved his foot all the way down on the accelerator. He didn’t speak; his mouth was an inverted U.
Desperate—
that was the word. Ruth felt a wave of nausea welling up in her throat. What kind of reception would an ambulance find? She kept hearing that woman’s voice: “No doctors.... Please.” Now Ruth was interfering, in the worst way.
Colm was already inside when they arrived. He glanced at her, then at Kevin. Why did she feel guilty for being here? A second medic, in overalls and boots, was jumping out the back of the ambulance: Tom LeDuc, a farmer. When did he have time for this? Ruth wanted to shrink into the woodwork, but Kevin motioned her onward; she was committed.
But it seemed the residents had been waiting for outside help; the house was in pandemonium, ten women talking, all at once: They weren’t wearing robes now, just ordinary clothing: T-shirts, jeans, sneakers.
“She was only paring apples.... For lunch... to make us a strudel—she was always doing extra for people....”
“Why did she do that?... Mother told her not to....”
“Cut herself. Such a tiny cut and then ...”
“Oh, look, is she dying? Please help!... It’s Angie... In there….”
It was a fight between Kevin and the medics to carry Angie out and into the ambulance. She was alive. Ruth saw the blue eyes open, unfocused, the vomit coming again and again, blood streaming from the finger cut. “Internal bleeding, as well,” Colm said, though Ruth didn’t know how he’d know. It seemed a sea of blood; even the walls had a bloody tint from the late sun, though it was still raining a little. Would there be a rainbow? Incongruous thought. Ruth could smell, taste the blood.