In the Field

by Rachel Pastan

  That night her cough got worse and she could not get warm, not even under two quilts. Shadows moved across the ceiling, and outside the window, leaves rustled like ghosts. At last a gray gleam crept in and a few pale fingers of sunlight spilled onto the floor. She dragged herself up out of the ruined sheets. Out the window, the sky was pink and gold. The storm was gone. She should go out and see how her plants were doing, but the very thought seemed to make her dizzy. She sat down hard and shut her eyes. Something twitched inside her and she dragged herself to the bathroom to cough out a tablespoon of yellow gunk. It was as if the storm had made its way inside her, coating her lungs with scum. She ran water into the tub, climbed in. Sometime later, she got out again, leaving a residue of mud. She made coffee, thinking if she behaved as though things were normal, they would be normal. She dragged the sheets off the bed and forced herself to spread new ones, though she could not manage to tuck them in. She got back into bed and lay coughing and dozing as the sun moved across the room.

  The next day, she didn’t feel any better. She thought of the beef tea and soda crackers her mother used to bring her when she was ill, the awful syrupy medicine in the special long spoon. She could hear the sharp voice in her head: You can’t get better if you don’t eat, Kathleen.

  To escape the voice, Kate dragged herself out of bed. She wobbled into the kitchen, supporting herself on the backs of chairs. She ran the tap, filled a glass of water, drank it down. Half a loaf of bread sat on the counter in the center of a pool of crumbs. What was that doing there? It belonged in the bread box. Her eyes snagged on the loaf as though hypnotized: the brown crust, the pale soft flesh, a scrim of something green spreading. Left out on the counter, it had already grown moldy. Had she forgotten cutting herself a slice? A spasm of coughing made her bend over the sink. No, she thought, Paul must have cut into the loaf before he left. He must have left the crumbs on the countertop, left the bread out for the mold to find. Rhizopus stolonifer. With its proclivity for asexual reproduction via spores, mold was actually very interesting. If people could do that, it would save a lot of trouble. She wandered over to the window, looking down at the street, which the rain had washed clean. She was shivering again, but she didn’t want to go back to bed. She sat at the little table she used as a desk and watched the sun glitter in the puddles. The leaves of the tulip poplar tree glowed such bright green she could barely bear to look at it. The world after the storm was too radiant—blazing—as though the light were interlaced with blades. She wondered about Thatch and Cynthia, if they were standing even now beside the roaring Niagara with their arms around each other. If they were talking about the future: about New York and all that awaited them there. She felt a cough begin to stir inside her and she held her breath. Better not to think about all that.

  She picked up a pencil and began doodling on a pad. Certain molds, she had read, had been found to have curative properties. So many wonders, so many unexpected gifts from the natural world if people would only pay attention. She sketched the half-eaten, mold-fuzzed loaf, drew in some oversized spores. Just last spring a botanist named Bernard Dodge had come to Cornell to lecture about Neurospora, which he claimed would be more important to genetics than corn someday!

  But how to tell what was ridiculous from what was true? Wasn’t that one of the essential questions? Paul had said flies were too big. Why not mold, then, she thought idly. Rhizopus, or Neurospora, or something else. Dodge had extoled Neurospora’s qualities as a model organism. She squinted down at her pad and found she had written Paul in clear dark letters. Talk about ridiculous! She raised her pencil to strike the name out, but then, struck by a thought, she moved her hand an inch to the left and wrote “Dear” before the name.

  Dear Paul,

  I have been thinking about your organism question. How about Neurospora? Bernard Dodge says it’s easy to grow and its haploid life cycle makes analysis straightforward.

  If mold isn’t simple enough for you, I throw up my hands.

  Yours,

  Kate

  With a last burst of energy she found an envelope and a stamp, scribbled down his address.

  Someone seemed to have dug a knife into her side, the kind they used for slitting open the sheaths of corn tassels to extract the pollen. She lay splayed out on the sheets, panting between spasms of coughing. How much time had passed since the field? Two days? Four? There was a ringing inside her head, and a distant knocking like a loose shutter rattling. That couldn’t be good. It came and went and came again, and the knocking grew louder and more insistent. The sheets were soaked with sweat, and sweat rolled down her cheeks into her ears. Something rattled—she heard it distinctly—though whether it was inside or outside of herself was hard to know.

  “Kate?” a voice said. Then again: “Kate? Kate?” A single up-rising syllable like the call of an osprey.

  She opened her eyes. The light hurt. A man’s face bent over her, drawn and familiar, which she could not place. Not her father, though, because there wasn’t any moustache.

  “Lie still,” said the moustacheless mouth.

  Oh! It was Whitaker!

  “I’m going to lift you up now,” the Great Man said. And he did: as easily, almost, as if she’d been a child.

  CHAPTER 18

  She was sitting in a patch of sunlight on a rug woven with flowers, watching dust motes float and spin, blown upward by no breath that she could see.

  She was standing on a path between banks of snow higher than her head, more snow spilling ecstatically out of the sky. She could hear her father’s voice saying, “The flakes are so large because the air is getting warmer.” He was always interested in weather.

  She was crawling on hands and knees to the dog’s dish to see how the dog food tasted. Her mother slapped her—sharp and sudden as lightning: “We are not animals!”

  But why was one slapped for wanting to know?

  She was looking up into the white face of a woman dressed in white who said gravely, “There now.”

  Kate struggled through a veil of mist. Those must have been dreams. Dreams of her childhood, and then another dream, too, of someone in white speaking in a voice like a bell. A great weight, like a gored ox, pinned her down. Then suddenly, like a towering and icy wave, came the realization that she had failed to fertilize her plants; she had overslept—she’d been sleeping forever, it seemed!—while the pollen ripened on tassels which she hadn’t even bagged. She blinked hard and pushed herself up, and a knife blade sliced through her chest, and everything went queer and fuzzy. A voice, very clear and loud, spoke from somewhere to her left.

  “You really must stop trying to get out of the bed. Where is it you think you’re trying to go?”

  “The field.” Kate’s head buzzed, and she let herself sink back down. “The pollen is only viable for a few hours …” She’d just rest a minute, and then she’d get up.

  “You’d better forget about that,” the voice advised.

  Slowly Kate’s vision cleared. She was lying in a strange bed in an unfamiliar room with ugly brown curtains and a high white ceiling with a tea-colored stain in one corner. A woman stood in the doorway, dressed all in white: white lab coat, white slacks, white shoes. Not a nurse—no winged cap—and not an angel either (no wings). Her black hair was pulled back in a chignon revealing long white ear lobes.

  “What happened?” Kate asked. Her body was beginning to come back to her. Her bones ached, and her flesh felt like jelly. Every time she breathed, the knife in her side leapt and stabbed.

  “You’ve had pneumonia. You were very ill, but you’re getting better now.” The tall woman leaned over the bed and pressed her fingers to Kate’s neck, moved them down, probing gently. She produced a stethoscope from somewhere and listened to her chest, then helped her turn over so she could listen to her back. Kate’s breathing loosened. Her woeful body, that old enemy, slowly unruffled its feathers. She slept.
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br />   When she opened her eyes again, someone was giving her a bath, right in the bed, with a basin and a sponge and a small rough hand. The water sloshed and splashed. It dribbled down Kate’s back and the sponge moved back and forth, efficiently and smoothly. She searched out the face, but it wasn’t the one from before. This face was red and round with two small pebble eyes.

  “I’m just cleaning you up before the doctor comes,” it said.

  “The doctor?” Was that her voice, sounding like a rusted gate?

  “Dr. Sonnenfeld. She’s the one who was here when you were brought in. It ought to have been Dr. Winkler, only he couldn’t get to the hospital because of the floods.”

  The floods! Against the blank scrim of her mind, rivers of water flowed down rows of plants, the long leaves swimming in the current, skimming over the cold heavy mud. It hurt to think about it—or something hurt.

  “I need to get up,” she croaked urgently, turning her head back and forth. She needed to get to the field.

  “Hold your horses! Here’s the bedpan, right here.”

  “No,” she said, and tried to explain—but actually it seemed she did need the bedpan. Hot urine soaked into the sheets, immediately turning cold. The round face pursed disapprovingly. Drenched in shame, Kate shut her eyes and let the fog take her.

  A rustling, soft footsteps, a clean, astringent smell. A hand touched her cheek, moved to her throat, encircled her wrist. Not the rough touch of the nurse but dispassionate, cool as a leaf. Kate opened her eyes again, cautiously. Above her stood the tall woman from her dream with the dark hair and the white coat.

  “Hello, Dr. Croft,” the person said. “How are you feeling?”

  “All right,” Kate said, or tried to say. Her voice was scratchy and phlegmy, air moving unevenly through her throat.

  “Would you like some water?”

  Kate nodded.

  The woman held out a white cup. She was long and lean as a lynx with dark eyes and dark arched brows. Water trickled into Kate’s parched mouth. “I’m supposed to be hiking in the Laurentians,” the lynx woman said. “But the roads were all flooded, so I came to work. Something always gets in the way of my holidays.”

  Kate tried to follow this. The pain had ebbed, but her mind seemed to drift just outside of her skull like a swarm of gnats. The cup went away and something smooth slid between her lips, probed its way under her tongue. The doctor frowned at her big wristwatch. She retrieved the thermometer and held it up to the light. “Ninety-nine point five. Excellent.”

  Kate flushed with pleasure as though it had been a compliment.

  Thatch appeared: his worried face, his sandy-colored hair standing up, the way it got when he ran his hands through it when it was wet. “There you are,” he said. His voice sounded thin and high as though carried on the wind from far away.

  “Where?” she said. Everything was fuzzy, everything was soft-edged, bleeding into everything else: Thatch into the white wall behind him, a pale hand with blue veins (her hand?) into the sheet.

  “In the hospital,” he answered gravely.

  “You’re supposed to be on your honeymoon,” she said, remembering.

  “I was.”

  So a lot of time must have passed. Then she remembered. “I had pneumonia! Is that right? Someone told me that.” The face floated back to her: pale with that knot of dark hair. She noticed that her ribs hurt.

  “That’s right. Lucky Professor Whitaker went looking for you. He was worried. Because you never miss work.”

  Whitaker saying, They asked me to recommend someone. Saying, You still have your instructorship.

  “How was Niagara?” she asked hoarsely.

  “We couldn’t get there. There was so much rain, the roads were washed out. We ended up at a motel in Canandaigua.”

  Canandaigua! Poor Thatch. Not the wedding night he had anticipated. She began drifting away. Something about what he said made her almost remember something, but she couldn’t think what. She couldn’t think, really, at all.

  “Cynthia sends her love,” Thatch said. “She would have liked to come and see you, but she’s feeling under the weather.”

  Then she did remember: the floods. “My field,” she said.

  “Hush,” Thatch said.

  “I need you to go check.” A whining was starting up in her head like a great mosquito. She remembered the coldness of the mud, the places where the plants were missing like candles that had been blown out.

  Thatch’s face drew in. He looked tired, his lashes clotted and sticky. “You need to concentrate on getting better,” he said.

  With a great effort, she reached a hand toward him. It didn’t look like her hand, but she supposed it had to be. Hands were so odd, if you thought about it—strange waving appendages, that you used to mediate between yourself and the world. “Please go check,” she said. She spoke urgently but slowly, pushing out one word at a time.

  Thatch put his other hand over hers and squeezed. “You rest,” he said. “I’ll come back later.”

  She made one more effort, raising her head, straining her neck, feeling the blade knifing through her. “Please,” she said.

  Behind Thatch the door swung open, and a tall broad-shouldered nurse came in with some instruments on a metal tray. “Lie back down, please, Kathleen. Your beau can come back another time.”

  Kate tried to catch Thatch’s eye as the nurse stuck a thermometer in her mouth. She couldn’t speak, but she could see he understood.

  “Everyone’s fields were flooded,” he said quietly.

  “Sir, the patient needs to rest now.”

  Kate’s eyes widened.

  “Yours, mine, Whitaker’s. Yours survived the best. But that’s not saying much. A few plants in each row.”

  So it was for nothing—all that effort! All that planning and scheming, weeks and months of preparation, midnights worrying. Plowing the field herself because otherwise the ground wasn’t even enough, organizing the seeds in their brown paper packets so she always had the right one to hand, marching back and forth all day in the heat with the hand planter blistering her palms, dragging out the sprinklers every day at dawn. Her final drenching vigil in the rain. Which had landed her here.

  “I’m sorry,” Thatch said.

  “I don’t want to have to ask you again,” the nurse said.

  Gradually Kate’s strength began to come back to her. She could stay awake for an hour at a time, she could drink a cup of broth. She could sit up and look out the window, where the sky showed, over the course of long days, every shade of blue. She’d read about a Swiss meteorologist who had invented a device to measure the color of the sky. She wished she had one, but it was a slight wish, transparent and feather-light. Lying in this drab room day after day, nothing seemed to matter very much. Thoughts drifted into her head and out again like clouds. Even the thoughts of her plants—washed away!—hardly stirred her now.

  There seemed to be two worlds, the world of before with its pressures and demands—data to be collected, slides to be prepared, images analyzed, papers written—and this new slow crepuscular one, bounded by four white walls. Now the clockless days were marked not by hours or by tasks but by a nurse spooning soup into her mouth and by the taking of her temperature and the administration of various foul medicines, the names and purposes of which she couldn’t be bothered to inquire. All of it drifted by, piercing or muffled depending on the state of her head. Everything was a jumble, pain coming and going for no reason she could discern, exhaustion overtaking her like a summer thunderstorm, then wakefulness returning—chaotically, confusingly—so that she opened her eyes to check whether it was day or night. The only thing she anticipated with any kind of feeling was the appearance, once a day, or occasionally twice, of the doctor.

  Dr. Sonnenfeld was nothing like Kate’s father. He had been jovial with patients, treating them
like naughty children who would, nonetheless, be given sweets. Dr. Sonnenfeld was cool, reserved, faintly acerbic. She liked to work in silence, which was fine with Kate. Her hands, careful and sure, probed here, then here, so gently, while the white face, frowning slightly in concentration, stared at nothing. She worked quickly but methodically: throat, tongue, chest, belly, back. The silence washed over Kate like a balm as she gave herself over to that confident, unhesitating touch. You could feel her competence—her intelligence and skill—in the light, listening pressure of her long cool fingers. “You’re doing very well,” she said one day, when she was done, standing back as though Kate were a piece of work to be proud of. “Heart strong. Breathing clearer. No temp.” She took a pair of spectacles from her pocket and made some notations on a paper.

  It was restful to be nothing but a collection of data. “Can I see?” Kate asked.

  “See what?”

  “What you’re writing.”

  A glimmer of amusement crossed the doctor’s face as she held out the clipboard.

  Kate’s eyes skated over the inky marks, which might have been either letters or numbers. It was not unlike looking at markings on an ear of corn: there was a pattern there, if only one could figure out what it meant. Somewhere in that constellation of scribbles, Kate’s essence was hidden.

  Various visitors came and went: Thatch; her landlady; Miss Floris, bearing chocolates. Whitaker came twice, once bringing hothouse flowers Kate suspected Miss Floris of having both suggested and procured, and congratulating himself for having saved her life. “I expect some extra good work from you after this,” he said, waving his unlit pipe in the air, handing the flowers to a nurse to put in water. “The minute you’re out of this bed, I expect to see you in the lab.”

  Well, where else would she be?

  Yet, with the whole season lost, it was hard to think about the lab with anything but dread.

  As Kate got a little stronger, Dr. Sonnenfeld would stay and talk after her examination. “As a scientist, I thought you’d like to know that you’re a bit of an experiment yourself,” she said one morning as Kate leaned against the pillows. “We gave you a new kind of drug, a sulfonamide. Prontosil. It’s said to be very effective against pneumonia. And so it’s proved to be, in your case, anyway.”