The Virgin of Small Plains

by Nancy Pickard

  “What’s the problem, Tom?”

  “I can’t tell you. Just bring your doctoring stuff and get out here as fast as you can.”

  Quentin started to snap, “It would help to know whether to bring a portable EKG or a Band-Aid, Tom,” but the judge hung up before he could get the words out. Quentin glanced over at his patient, who still had his scrawny old neck cocked obediently. “You can put your head back on straight now, Ron. Slowly! Don’t go all dizzy and faint on me.” Then, as he glanced out a window at the weather—still clear, in spite of a forecast for what might turn out to be a doozy of a winter storm—he said, “I’m sorry, but I have to leave. Keep taking those antibiotics. Call me if the pain gets worse, or you get a stiff neck, or you develop a fever.”

  “Already got all those, Doc,” the old man said as Quentin headed for the door.

  Quentin turned around to give his patient a last moment of full attention. “I’ll check in on you tomorrow.”

  Quentin Reynolds still made house calls, as he was about to do for Tom Newquist. He didn’t even have to gather any supplies, since he kept a full medical bag in his car at all times, ready to go. All he had to do was let his nursing assistant know he was leaving. It would have been nice, however, to know if he needed any extras of anything, or anything special and unusual. Damn Tom Newquist for being such a goddamn judge sometimes, thinking he could order anybody—even his best friends, even a doctor—around like court reporters.

  Just before he slammed his office door, he heard the old man call out from behind him, “What’s the emergency, Doc?”

  “I wish I knew, Ron.”

  Instead of somebody running out of the farmhouse to meet him as Quentin expected, Tom Newquist came running from the direction of the storm cellar. He was a big man who got precious little exercise—despite the nagging of his friend the general practitioner—and he looked awkward as he ran. But then Tom Newquist had always looked like a huge lumbering bear on the football field, too, even as he was mowing down an opposing line. He wasn’t graceful, but he cleared a path, Tom did, he cleared a path.

  Quentin, shorter, lighter on his feet, though not in much better shape himself now that they were both in their forties, grabbed his medical bag and hurried to meet Tom halfway. Before he was even that far, however, the big man turned, waving Quentin to follow him. When Tom broke into a run again, so did Quentin.

  He was surprised they were headed back toward the storm cellar.

  Its thick wooden door was wide open, revealing light inside.

  Tom disappeared inside it first. When Quentin reached it and stepped in, he nearly recoiled in shock at what he saw there: Nadine, disheveled, bloody, staring toward the doorway with a look of horror that Tom had never seen on her face before. And there was Tom, staring at Quentin with hardly less dismay than his wife was expressing. And, most shocking of all, there was a young woman, a full-term pregnant young woman, writhing on a single bloody bed set up against a wall.

  “What the hell have you done?” he said, but hurried to her side.

  His brain had taken in other startling facts about the cellar that was appointed like an apartment: throw rugs to cover a cement floor, a toilet, a faucet and sink, a stove and oven. He also saw bloody towels that had been tossed to the floor.

  The young woman turned wide, dark, terrified eyes to him.

  He recognized her from somewhere, but couldn’t think where.

  Pleading eyes, Quentin thought, having seen them on women in the throes of nightmare deliveries before.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Sarah,” she whispered.

  As he settled himself at the foot of the single bed, he suspected he already knew what he would find: breech birth, baby stuck in birth canal, mother losing blood, baby losing heartbeat, both of them threatened with losing their lives.

  “Why is she here? Why isn’t she in a hospital? Who’s her doctor?”

  Nobody answered him.

  Quickly he determined the accuracy of his terrible diagnosis. He was going to have to turn the baby, and do it so quickly that there wouldn’t be time to give the poor girl a shot to block the pain. Even as he began to do his delicate, violent work with the baby, within her torn body, he wanted to yell at the two supposedly intelligent people standing by doing nothing more helpful than wringing their goddamn hands. Instead, he talked to the girl, saying over and over, “I’m so sorry. I know this is terrible. We have to do it. I’ll be as quick as I can. Hold on, hold on, hold on…”

  And then he finally did yell, “Nadine, for God’s sake, come hold her hand!”

  The girl was screaming, screaming. Her blood was oozing all around them, around the baby, mother, and doctor. Over in a corner, Nadine Newquist didn’t move, nor did her husband, who was now pacing like an expectant father.

  When the baby finally turned, the mother screamed and did the one thing Quentin was praying she wouldn’t. She fell unconscious.

  “Wake her up!” he yelled. “She has to push!”

  Neither of the Newquists moved to do his bidding.

  “Goddamn useless!” he muttered. They might as well have dropped off unconscious themselves. Feeling nearly as panicked as they looked, he realized he was going to have to pull the baby from her body, like pulling a calf from a heifer, only harder, more dangerous, and less likely to end happily.

  But then, finally, Nadine sprang to some kind of life.

  Suddenly she was at the girl’s side, shaking her, screaming at her to wake up.

  “Jesus, Nadine, I said wake her up, I didn’t say kill her!” Quentin roared at her.

  But it was working well enough to rouse the girl. When he saw her eyes flutter, Quentin didn’t wait, but yelled, “Push, you’ve got to push! Push, Sarah! Nadine, tell her to push, push, push!”

  Unbelievably, the girl did, though Quentin couldn’t imagine how she managed it, as much agony as she was in and as weak as she was from loss of blood. From somewhere inside her, the girl found the strength to push until the baby’s head emerged, and then its shoulders, until Quentin could finish the job of bringing it—a boy—into the world of its bizarre, cramped, delivery room.

  And then, with the baby born, the girl passed out again.

  He hadn’t even had time to tell her she’d had a boy.

  Quentin cut the cord, wiped the baby’s eyes, slapped breath into its chest, and barked furiously for somebody to hand him some towels, which he wrapped it in. Then, holding the now-bawling infant in one arm, he snapped his other hand around Nadine’s wrist like a vise, pinning her to where she stood, tall, thin, sharp-faced, bloody, and big-eyed in a way nobody would ever have dreamed Nadine Newquist could look.

  “Who is she?” Quentin demanded. “What the bloody hell have you done?”

  Nadine tried to pull away from him, but he wouldn’t let her go.

  Tom walked over. “Is the baby all right?”

  “Probably,” Quentin snapped at him. “Infants are tough little buggers, and this one has a tough little mother, to boot. Answer my questions. Who is she? What the hell is she doing delivering her baby here, and what do you two have to do with it?”

  The girl moaned, and Quentin temporarily forgot his questions.

  “Here,” he said, handing the wrapped infant over to Tom. “Take him.”

  Tom tried to back away.

  Quentin pointed to the girl on the bed, and said, “If you won’t take the baby, then can you take care of her?”

  “No…”

  “Then take the baby, goddammit.” Quentin handed the child over, and then began to examine the girl’s pelvic area. Incredibly, there didn’t seem to be any arterial flow. Nothing vital had been severed, as far as Quentin could determine. It had been rough, horribly rough, but she was probably going to survive…

  “I want her in a hospital,” he said, turning to look at the Newquists.

  But Nadine turned to point out the open doorway, and suddenly Quentin became aware of two things that also shocked
him. Cold air was pouring through the open doorway, and there was snow coming down outside, a fall so thick and heavy it looked as if it had always been coming down and would be falling forever.

  The forecast storm had come. They had to leave soon, or they might not get out.

  “Get moving,” he instructed them. “You hold the baby, Nadine. Tom, you drive. We’ll lay the girl down in my backseat, and I’ll follow you to Manhattan…”

  “No,” Tom said, speaking for only the second time since leading Quentin there.

  “What the hell do you mean, no?” Quentin demanded.

  And then Tom told him why they could not take the girl and her baby to the hospital in Manhattan, or to a hospital anywhere.

  “It’s my child, Quentin.”

  “Your—?”

  “We paid her to keep quiet.”

  “You had an affair with this girl?”

  “You could call it that,” Nadine said with deep bitterness. “Or you could call it rape.”

  Her husband’s head snapped around. “It was consensual, goddammit, Nadine. I never raped anybody.”

  Quentin stared at his oldest friend, feeling the horror that had been on Tom’s and Nadine’s faces when he first walked in, although the horror he was feeling was of a different kind. He knew that they were horrified of the blood, and of getting into more trouble than even they could get out of. He was horrified by them. It wasn’t the first time Tom Newquist had ever been accused of forcing sex on a girl, but the accusations had always been just gossip and his friends had always chosen never to believe it, they had always chosen to believe Tom, even though deep down inside they knew he was arrogant enough, felt privileged enough…Those other girls flashed through Quentin’s mind as he looked back at the sleeping girl on the bed who had just suffered through so much.

  And again, one more time, it would be Tom’s word against hers.

  A judge against a girl who cleaned houses, for Quentin had remembered how he knew her.

  “We paid her to keep quiet and to have the baby,” Nadine said with a vicious glance for her husband. “I want that child around for the rest of its life to remind Tom what a fool he is.”

  An hour later, after staying with the girl until she came to consciousness again and began to try to nurse the baby, and then remaining until he felt as sure as he could that both mother and son could get along without extraordinary medical intervention, Quentin realized there was nothing more he could do for them.

  He washed his hands and arms in the sink and then washed them again.

  Then he turned around to face his oldest friends. He had known both of them forever. Nobody could have claimed that he didn’t know Nadine could be cruel or that Tom was arrogant beyond bearing sometimes. But they were smart, Nadine had wit, and they’d known him forever, too.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Quentin told them, feeling appalled to his core.

  “There’s no need to do anything,” Tom said. “It’s done.”

  “We’re making the best of a bad situation,” Nadine claimed.

  “But if you raped her, Tom…”

  “It wasn’t like that, Quentin. Maybe she thought it was, but it wasn’t. I know what I did, and I know it wasn’t rape. And even if it was, what good would it do anybody for me to go to jail for it? Think what it would do to our children.” He pointed to the newborn. “To that child. This way he’ll have a home, he’ll have parents, he’ll have a brother.”

  “And a rapist for a father.”

  “It was a mistake.”

  Quentin’s rage exploded. “I’ll say it was!”

  “I mean,” Tom said, “I thought she wanted me to, I thought it was mutual, I didn’t know she thought it was rape until after it was done.”

  “You didn’t know she thought…” Quentin trailed off. He wouldn’t have believed it of almost any other man he knew. But Tom, Tom was just that arrogant to assume that a young girl wanted his advances.

  The three of them argued about it while the snow fell outside the cellar.

  In the end, he went along with it, but only because of the girl.

  He heard her make a sound and hurried back to her bed to see what she needed. “Please,” she whispered to him, “they’ll give him a life I never can. I’ll make a new start someplace far away.”

  “But he raped you…”

  “Please,” she murmured and then she closed her eyes again. He was the only one of them who heard her say one more thing. “I’ll come back for him someday.”

  Quentin stood up, feeling undone by all of it.

  “I’m going to try to drive back to town before this gets worse.” He gave both of his friends a hard, penetrating stare. “You’ll take care of them?”

  “Of course,” Nadine told him.

  He believed them. God help him—as he told Nathan later, when it was all over and nothing could be taken back—he believed them.

  He didn’t know what a contributing, negligent, murdering fool he had been until the second devastating call came through, this time from his other oldest friend, Nathan Shellenberger.

  “Quentin, we’ve found a body in the snow.”

  “Whose?”

  He didn’t connect it immediately, wasn’t expecting the blow when it came.

  “A girl. That girl who used to work for Nadine and Tom.”

  “What do you mean you found her in the snow?”

  “We found her in the snow! Naked. Dead. Dead, Quentin.”

  He was a man who thought he could handle anything, but he found he couldn’t remain standing and hear these words. Quentin sank down into the closest chair. He bent his forehead into his free hand and crouched over the telephone like a wounded animal. But before he could even say anything, Nathan blurted out words that made Quentin shut his own mouth. “Quentin, I’m scared as hell that Patrick had something to do with it. I heard him and Rex arguing about her, just in the last few days. From what I overheard, I think Patrick has been seeing her, Quentin. Rex was riding him about something to do with her, and Patrick was furious about it, like he was jealous. And he’s not acting right, not since we found her. He hasn’t even said he knows her. He acts like he doesn’t care that she’s dead! My son, Quentin! You know how he is, you know what people think of him. If they find out he had anything to do with her, they’ll blame him. And if there’s any evidence to tie him to her…I’m the sheriff! I can’t turn my own boy into a suspect in a murder!”

  “Murder! How do you know she was murdered?”

  “Jesus, God, Quentin, are you even listening to me? We found her naked and bloody in the middle of a blizzard. What do you think, that she decided to take a naked walk in the snow? Of course it’s murder, or if not murder then some kind of manslaughter, and what the hell am I going to do?”

  “Bring her to me.”

  “I’m afraid to ask Patrick anything.”

  “Then don’t. We’ll figure this out. Bring her here, Nathan.”

  He didn’t tell his old friend what had transpired earlier.

  He allowed Nathan to believe that Patrick might have done it.

  When they brought her into his examining room he made sure no one could ever identify her and bring all of their lives tumbling down around them. He said nothing while Tom and Nadine arranged an adoption of Tom’s own biological child. He and Nathan both let Verna and Rex worry for years that Patrick might have done it, let other people wonder if Mitch was the guilty one.

  And they let Jeffrey Newquist grow up without knowing the truth of his birth or the true nature of the people he believed had adopted him from strangers. In the years that followed, Quentin mentioned it only one time to Tom and once to Nadine.

  To Tom, he said, “What did you do to her after I left?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” the big man had said indignantly.

  “Then what did Nadine do to her?”

  Tom’s eyes had narrowed, as if he was annoyed at his wife. “I went into the house to rest. I left Nadine in the storm
cellar to watch them. When I woke up and came back out the girl was gone. Nadine said she had fallen asleep and the girl had wandered out into the snowstorm. We couldn’t look for her, not in that weather, you know how bad it was. We couldn’t even move the car.”

  Had Nadine fallen asleep and the girl just wandered away?

  Escaped was more like it, Quentin thought.

  Or had Nadine put her out into the storm to freeze to death?

  Quentin could see that Tom didn’t know the answer to that, either.

  Either way, they had killed her.

  To Nadine, Quentin said, “You locked her in that storm cellar! For God’s sake!”

  “She wasn’t there the whole time, Quentin,” Nadine had said, as if he were being unreasonable. “For most of her pregnancy we gave her the house to live in. We provided her with everything she needed! More than she had ever had before in her life, I’m sure. We only had to put her in the storm cellar when we found out that she’d had visitors. We couldn’t allow that, so we put her in there for her own good so that she couldn’t ruin our bargain with her. It was all to her benefit, after all.” Nadine had smiled her cold smile, the one that chilled even her oldest friends. “I don’t know what you’re so upset about, Quentin. She was only in there for three months, and we made sure she had everything she needed there, too. She was only there until the baby was born.”

  “Did she escape, Nadine, or did you put her out?”

  Nadine had given him a look with venom at the back of it, a look that told him all he needed to know about how Sarah Francis came to be found naked in a blizzard after wandering lost, weak, and bleeding from childbirth. And he also understood from that murderous look that Tom and Nadine would do anything, harm anyone, who ever divulged any of their horrible secrets.

  Quentin told one person the rest of the story: Nathan.

  Together they looked at the damage that had already been done, the damage that could still be done, and they came to the decision to let it be. The families involved were already broken up; telling the truth would only harm them further. The child Jeffrey was being raised by his real father.