Stephanie Mittman (7 page)

But mostly the table quieted—for a meal with the Mergansers—with compliments on the food and admonishments about table manners to the younger folk becoming the order of the day. And there were so many things to keep a body busy—pulling at ribbons tied to the salt shakers so that no one had to ask or reach, the platters on some sort of wheels so that they didn’t have to be lifted to be passed, a stacking device to slide each plate into so that there would be only one trip to the sink. Obviously Jed had been busy.

“Well, I do admit that Abby’s idea about the health column could be a wonderful one,” Ansel finally said.

“Of course it is,” Emily seconded, smiling brightly at Abby and obviously enjoying the Merganser family dinner much more than her husband was. “Did you expect anything less than brilliance from Abby? I even mentioned it to my father and he thought it made good business sense. He was sure that it would increase circulation tremendously because people would be getting a medical digest along with their paper. Of course, I didn’t tell him it was a woman’s idea until after he’d
admitted how good it was! But he thought women were surely likely to clip and save the column, the way they do with the sewing tips and the gardening ideas, and then they could make themselves a little health book.”

“I don’t think there will be all that many of them,” Seth said, figuring that he’d be leaving Eden’s Grove before too long and he didn’t want Emily getting the wrong idea about this little health column he’d agreed to do for Abby.

“No? But there must be so very many topics,” Emily said, and before he could explain that he wasn’t afraid of running out of topics but of time, he felt Abidance’s hand squeezing his thigh, just above his knee.

He caught his jaw just as it began to drop, and turned his gaze from Emily to Abby. Her head gave the tiniest of shakes, and her eyes sparkled a warning about something, but he wasn’t sure just what. Not that he really cared. With Abby’s hand squeezing his thigh under the table, heading who knew where, it was hard to think about anything else.

“Dr. Hendon?” Clearly someone had asked him a question, but he hadn’t heard it. Naturally not, the drumming of his blood was drowning out even the Merganser family’s noise.

“Why, that’s a wonderful idea, Emily,” Abby said, removing her hand. Seth felt his back straighten and tried to shake off the confusion he was feeling.

Hell, it wasn’t
confusion
he was feeling. It was arousal, plain and simple. Excitement. Abidance’s touch had awakened something better left dormant. At least where she was concerned.

In the last few years he might have had a few good
evenings with a charming widow in Sioux City who was a friend of a friend. But they had been couplings, physical needs being met within the confines of polite society.

“‘Ask the Doctor.’ At first it would be just a short question at the end of the column, but they could lead to whole columns of their own….”

“Oh, it could be just like ‘Dear Miss Winnie’!” Emily said.

“Oh, yes!” Prudence seconded. “Did you read her advice in this week’s paper? I had never thought of family allegiances quite like that.”

“Well, I know when I get married I intend to follow her advice to the letter,” Patience said. “I will think of my husband as my family and shift my allegiance from my parents to him on the day we are wed.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” the reverend said. “Unless I tell you to stop listening to me.”

“Have some bread,” Clarice Merganser said, apparently hoping to fill the reverend’s mouth, though it hadn’t seemed to Seth that eating had put so much as a crimp in Ezra’s talking.

“I think Miss Winnie was absolutely right, don’t you, Emily?” Abby asked. “I mean, once you marry, your husband is your family. And everyone knows that saying about a man not being able to serve two masters … not that I think that a man is the master of a woman. I just mean that—”

“I read her column this morning before church,” Emily said. “And I have to admit that it was on my mind during the sermon.”

“But my sermon was about God’s miracles and how
he manifests them,” the reverend said. “Not that Miss Winnie.”

Emily blushed slightly, and if Seth had harbored any doubt that she was carrying again, the furtive movement of her hand to her belly ended it. “Well, I think that one of God’s miracles is family,” she said.

“Oh, Emily!” Abby gushed, her hands on her face, which was a good thing or her smile might have broken her cheeks. “You’re letting out your waistbands again, aren’t you?”

“You are?” Ansel asked, clearly taken aback by the news. “Emily, are you?”

“It seems so,” she said, almost apologetically, but the moment that should have been a private one between husband and wife was overtaken by the Merganser family’s excitement at its impending expansion.

Everyone spoke at once, all the children shouting questions, the adults hushing them as if they shouldn’t know what was going on or how it had come to be.

And while Abby and the others shrieked and sighed and asked when and what Emily hoped for, Seth watched as if he were stranded on some island, just out of the reach of all of them. Abby was smiling and waving her arms and touching Emily’s belly, completely unaware of how hard he was fighting to put out the tiny spark in his heart which was threatening to ignite.

Which was as it should be. After all, he could not be in love with Abidance Merganser. He didn’t think of her in that way at all. She was, he reminded himself—as if he needed reminding—a child. And nothing could happen between them, so that was that.

But something below his gut wasn’t listening. Not
with Abby next to him, her eyes sparkling so. He watched her shift around so that she was sitting on one leg, leaning over the table, talking with her hands, smiling that smile.

And he tried to hear the conversation going on around him, but the voices in his head drowned them out.

“Oh, he’s doing a column on that,” he finally heard Abby say, and he nodded when she asked him if it wasn’t so. He could only hope he hadn’t just agreed to the column on social diseases.

“I really ought to be going,” he said abruptly, and several of the various Mergansers looked surprised, but Abby’s smile seemed full of relief. “I really am sorry to eat and run like this, but I did want to see the Denton boy this evening and it looks a bit like snow out there and …”

“I was expecting that we’d have a talk,” the reverend said. “Looking forward to it.”

Abby jumped up, banging her knee on the table, and sending glasses splashing, silverware clattering. “I’ll get your coat,” she said, charging to the pegs near the door. “We don’t want to keep you!”

“But I got cigars,” Jed said, pulling them from his pocket and holding them aloft.

“He’s got to go,” Abby said, opening the door before he had even got his arms into his coat, and stepping out onto the porch so that he had little choice but to follow her.

“Some other time,” he called back into the house, thanking Clarice Merganser as Abby all but yanked him through the open doorway.

“It’s cold out here,” he warned her.

“I’m all right,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest and tucking her hands up into her armpits.

“You’re freezing,” he said. “Go on inside now.”

“I’m sorry about them,” she said softly, gesturing with her head toward her house while her shoulders sagged.

“They aren’t the problem,” he said, tipping her chin up with one finger so that her eyes would meet his. “This isn’t to be, young lady.” He said the words, but he couldn’t seem to let go of her chin, let his hand fall, walk away.

“Who are you telling?” she asked him, pulling her head back just enough to break the spell and taking hold of the doorknob before adding, “Me, or yourself?”

S
ETH LEANED OVER
J
AMES
L
EROY
D
ENTON’S LITTLE
body, shielding it from his mama as if she didn’t know just how skinny her baby was getting. Just how much skinnier he was than the last time Seth had been out to their farm.

“He won’t …” Caroline Denton began, looking down at herself shyly, as if it were somehow her fault that the boy was failing to thrive. “At first I was hurting some, but I’m afraid now that I might be drying up, Dr. Hendon, and soon there won’t be anything for him to take.”

There were tears in her voice and he put his stethoscope to the boy’s chest, praying to hear something, anything that he might be able to treat, to put a name to, to cure. The boy was just fading away, failing to thrive. He lay in his little cradle like an old man, just waiting for death without putting up a fight.

“Will he take the sugar water?” Seth asked. His hope was to enrich the water, add cow’s milk to it if Caroline ceased to produce. He could—

“Hardly any.”

“Well, at least his breathing seems good. That’s a good sign. He needs plenty of fresh air, but with the weather so cold, I wouldn’t recommend taking him outside. Just keep the window open a bit for good ventilation.”

She nodded, hanging on his every word, as if opening the window would save her son.

“No drafts on him, of course,” he added.

“Of course,” she repeated like the amen of a prayer.

“We’re going to have to try to peptonize some modified cow’s milk for him if he doesn’t turn around in the next day or two,” he said.

“Peptonize,” she agreed, as if the word had any meaning to her, as if hydrolizing milk was something she did every day.

“I’m also going to stop by Mrs. Jenkin’s place,” he said. “Her Thomas is about weaned and she might be able to give James here some nourishment.”

“I still do have milk,” Caroline said, her hand between her breasts, rubbing unconsciously at the pain in her heart.

“Sometimes another woman’s milk helps,” he said, making sure not to imply that there was anything wrong with Caroline Denton’s milk, that it wasn’t her fault that the baby was wasting. “They call it marasmus,” he told her. “A failure to thrive.”

“Marasmus,” she repeated. “Can you cure him?”

He shook his head. “I’ll do what I can, but there’s no organic disease to fight. And he’s so very little.”

She nodded, accepting. They were always accepting, it seemed to Seth. While he railed and shook his fist at the heavens, they lost their sons and daughters and
husbands and wives and accepted it because he told them there was nothing else to do.

He washed his hands at the Denton’s sink and took the towel that Caroline offered him. “Where’s Mr. Denton?” he asked, not wanting to leave this poor young mother alone with her ailing baby.

If Seth had had a sick child he would want to be there with the child and for his wife, not off somewhere.

Now, there was a strange and errant thought—Seth Hendon with a wife and a son. A chill ran through him. He’d had sickness in his family. He’d had death. He’d buried his parents. He’d buried Sarrie. He’d attended the funerals of every patient that hadn’t made it. That was more than enough, thank you. He was done.

“Horse threw a shoe and Jimmy had to take him in to town,” Caroline said. They smiled sad smiles at each other, an acknowledgment that life had a way of going on.

Caroline took back the towel and poured them each a cup of tea. When she set the cups out on the table she seemed unnaturally calm.

Seth knew what was coming, wanted to race out of the house before she could ask it, wanted to jump into his buggy and be halfway to town before she could get the words out so that he wouldn’t have to hear them, wouldn’t have to answer them.

But instead he pulled out the chair and sat. And as he knew she would, she asked. Her eyes were clear and dry and except for the grip on her teacup between her hands, one would have thought the question had no
more import than whether or not it was going to snow. “Is he gonna die?”

“A baby needs to eat,” Seth answered. “An adult can go without for a while, but a baby has fewer reserves….”

She closed her eyes tightly and sat as still as the prairie before a storm.

“His appetite might pick up,” Seth said, though from all he’d read it didn’t seem likely.

“I just don’t understand,” the woman said, fighting against tears now and barely winning. “He doesn’t have so much as a sniffle. He’s not warm to the touch, his tongue ain’t dry. He just don’t seem sick, and yet he’s dying.”

“He’s
failing
” Seth corrected. “He’s not flourishing as he should be—”

“Doc!” He heard the call at the same time he heard the buckboard come rattling up to the house. “Doc! You there?”

Seth squeezed Caroline Denton’s shoulder as he stood up. “That was mighty good tea, Caroline,” he said softly before going to the door and opening it enough to see that it was Jedediah Merganser shouting for him.

Panic seized his throat so that all he could do was nod, take his bag, and grab for his coat, which Caroline held out to him.

“Follow me,” Jed said, bringing around the buck-board while Seth climbed up into his own buggy, released the brake, and gave the horses their head. Seth called after him, his voice lost to the clatter of the
buckboard, the thump of horses’ hooves, and the wind itself.