by Belva Plain
“Where—Do you know where—” he began, addressing a man whose face he knew. But the man looked blank and hurried past.
People filled the narrow stairway to the basement, going down and struggling back. A fainting woman was being carried up. All about was a murmur of sound, soft crying and low talking.
Enoch pushed his way down. The taste of blood under his tongue was still salty sharp. He put his finger there and drew it out to look at it.
Against the back wall on the floor, the bodies lay in a long double row covered with sheets and blankets. A young man knelt on the floor next to a body from which the sheet had been drawn away. Enoch recognized the dead face. Madeline, he though, Madeline Drury; he felt nothing.
Beginning at the left, he lifted the cover from the faces. Nettie Rogers. The old woman who lived with her—he’d forgotten her name. Jim Fox’s boy Tom, the one who had had infantile paralysis last summer. He moved faster, hurrying down the row.
“Doc! No!” Someone caught his sleeve, pulling hard at him. “Doc! No! Sit down! Reverend Dexter’s been looking for you. He wants—”
“Damn you, leave me!” Enoch cried, wrenching his arm free. And then—
Oh God! Almighty God! His children! Enoch, Susan and May lay side by side in a row. Like dolls they lay, stiff as Christmas dolls, May in the pink scarf, the cotton-candy pink that Jean had knitted, still wound about her chest and secured with a safety pin.
My girls. My little boy. He heard a voice, a mad voice, his own, as if from far away, from another country. He sank to the floor, rocking on his knees.
“Oh my God, my girls, my little boy!”
Strong arms came at last and drew him away.
They had taken Jean and Alice to a house near the church. Reverend Dexter led Enoch there. “Have they told you about Jean?” he asked.
“What?”
“Jean,” the parson said gently. “The shock, you know. But the women knew what to do. They took care of her.”
“The shock?” Of course. Jean was in her seventh month. He hadn’t thought—But he must think. She would need him. And he quickened his steps.
In the kitchen of a strange house Alice was sitting in a high chair while a stout woman spooned cereal into her mouth. She seemed to spend her life in a high chair, being fed.
“She’s in there, sleeping,” the stout woman said, nodding to Enoch.
He knew the woman, as he knew everyone in the village, but again he couldn’t think of the name. He walked to the bedroom door, then turned back, hesitating.
“Did she—did she see them?” he asked.
“Not exactly,” the woman said. “Reverend here, he wouldn’t let her see.”
“I’m grateful to you for that, Reverend,” Enoch told him.
He stood looking at his wife. Her face lay in the crook of her arm. Her dark hair was loosened. He drew the blanket up softly over her shoulder. Currents of rational thought, which in this hour past had been stopped, began to flow again. So tender, a human body, a human life! Nothing more to it than a few pounds of fragile bone and soft tissue. Yes, and years of nurturing and thousands of hours of loving care. Wiped out, gone as if they had never been, like last year’s leaves! And the marvelous years of youth, the dignity of adulthood and learning—all these forfeited, all these now not to be—Oh, my children! A cry caught in his throat.
“Doc?”
The man of the house—Fairbanks, yes, yes of course, that was the name—came to the door.
“Doc, have you got a minute? Me and my brother Harry was over to your place already. You know your pantry ell? Well, the roof is stove in where the maple fell on it. But we was thinking, if you can buy the material, Harry and me’ll fix it Harry owes you a bill, anyway. Did you know the branch breached at Lindsey Run? It flooded out for six miles downstream.”
“Thank you,” Enoch said.
“Think nothing of it, Doc. We all want to do what we can for you. Say, it’s a good thing you had your mare with you. The stable almost got drownded.”
A mare. When my children—Get out! He wanted to cry. Kind fool, get out and leave us!
“I’ll go ask my wife to make some tea when your missus wakes up,” Fairbanks said.
Jean opened her eyes. “I’m not asleep,” she whispered.
Enoch knelt on the floor, laying his face against hers, his cold, wet cheek upon her wet cheek, and stayed there like that.
“God’s will,” she whispered after a long time. “He wanted them home with Him.”
God’s will that their babies should drown? Son of a minister he was, reared on the Bible, but he couldn’t believe that God the Creator, yes! And God the giver of righteous laws; but God who decrees the individual fate of every living creature on the planet and orders the death of a child? That was hogwash. Hogwash! Yet it gave her comfort.
“Yes,” he murmured, “yes,” and with his free hand smoothed her hair.
“I love you,” she said.
I love you, she says, out of her blood and grief. She reached up her arms to draw him near, but they fell back weakly. He understood that she wanted him to kiss her, and he bent down and pressed her lips.
Then he said, “Jean, Jean, my girl, well start again. We’ll have to love each other so—And I’ll take care of you and Alice and me. We’re all that’s left.”
“You’re not forgetting him, the new one?”
“Him?”
“The baby, the boy. You haven’t seen him?”
“But I thought—”
Mrs. Fairbanks, coming with the tea, overheard. “You thought it was a stillbirth? No, no, Doc. Look here.”
She raised the window shade. A sad lavender light slid into the room from the quiet evening sky. On a table near the window lay a box, and in it one of the smallest babies Enoch had ever seen. Scarcely larger than a raw, young rabbit, he thought.
“I bought a new pair of arctics on sale last week. Luckily, I still had the box,” Mrs. Fairbanks said.
And Jean called out, “I want his name to be Martin!”
“Not Thomas, after your father?”
“That’ll be his middle name. I want him to be called Martin.”
“Well, all right.” He looked at the child. Four pounds, if that. Nearer three and a half, he’d guess.
“Poor Jean, poor lamb,” Mrs. Fairbanks whispered.
“Likely she’ll be losing this one, too.”
The baby fluttered. Its toy hands moved, and under the blanket its legs jerked weakly. Then it wailed, the doll’s face crumpling and reddening, the eyes opening as if in protest or alarm.
Mrs. Fairbanks shook her head. “No,” she repeated.
“He can’t live. That’s sure.”
Something welled up in Enoch, and he shook a furious fist at the universe.
“No!” he cried fiercely. “No! Look at those eyes! Look at the life in those eyes! He will live, and he’ll be strong, too. So help me God, he will.”
Book One
THE
ASCENT
Chapter 1
At the top of the long rise, Pa guided the horse toward the shade and drew in the reins. He pulled off his woolen jacket and laid it on the seat next to Martin.
“Professional dignity be darned!” he said. “The next patient will have to look at me in my shirt-sleeves whether he likes it or not.”
The sun was ahead of the season, Ma had remarked that morning. Shadbush was still in bloom, and barn swallows were barely back from the south in time for Decoration Day.
“We’ll just wait a minute here,” Pa said, “and give the mare a rest.”
The sweating animal stamped, slapping her tail. She had been making a strange sound for the last half hour, more like a plaint than a whinny.
“Something’s bothering her, Martin.”
“Black flies, do you think?”
“Don’t see any, do you?” Pa climbed down to examine the mare. He pulled the harness aside and swore. “Damn! Damn, look at this!”
The flesh along t
he horse’s back was rubbed bloody raw in a line as long as three fingers put end to end.
“Laid open with a whip,” Martin said.
“No doubt, and left to suppurate.”
Martin nodded, feeling a twinge deep inside at sight of the wound, feeling also a certain pride at being the only boy in the fourth grade who knew the meaning of words like “suppurate” or who, for that matter, had a father like his.
“Poor little livery stable hack!” Pa cried. “At the mercy of every drunken lout who has the money for its hire. Reach in my bag for the salve, will you?”
The little mare quivered, her muscular back rippling and twitching.
“Now a wad of gauze, a thick one.”
When he was finished, Pa got the water bucket. The mare drank gratefully. Martin gave her an apple. Then the two stood watching, pleased with themselves, while the mare chewed, salivating in a long, thick rope.
“She’s a nice little thing,” Pa said. “Wish I had the money to buy her and give her a decent home.”
“But we’ve got Star, and she’ll be ready to take out again as soon as her foal’s a month old, won’t she?”
“You’re right. I daresay the man would want thirty dollars for her.” Pa sighed. “Well, might as well start. One more call at Bechtold’s and then home in time for the parade.”
They moved on again. “Just look up there, Martin, at the side of that far mountain! You can gauge the height by the kind of trees you see. At the bottom there’s oak, but oak won’t grow more than twelve or thirteen hundred feet up. After that, you get balsam. Way up top there’s spruce, all that bluish-green stuff.” He leaned over Martin, pointing with outthrust finger. “Those are the oldest mountains in the United States, you know that? See how the tops are rounded? Worn away, that’s why. And I’ll tell you something else.” He pointed to the left. “Down there, all that level land was once buried underwater. Can you believe that?”
“You mean the ocean was here once?”
“Yes sir, that’s just what I do mean.”
“When the ocean came, what happened to the people? Did they all drown?”
“No, no. That was millions of years before there were any people here.”
At the foot of the hill, making a wide S-curve, lay the river.
“Pa, is that the river that overflowed and drowned Enoch Junior and Susan and May?” Martin knew quite well that it was, yet he always asked.
His father answered patiently, “That’s it.”
“Then I was born, and you had me instead of Enoch Junior as your boy. Do I look like him?” To that too, he knew the answer.
“No, he was small and sandy, like me. You’re going to be tall, I think, and of course you’re darker, like your mother’s family.”
“Do you like me more than you liked him?”
“The same. A man’s children are the same to him, like his own ten fingers.”
They drew into the Bechtolds’ yard.
“Wait out here, Martin,” Pa said.
“Can’t I come in and watch?”
“I have to change a dressing. It might make you feel bad to see the cut.”
“No it won’t, Pa. Honestly, it won’t.”
What his father didn’t know was that Martin had already seen much blood, having peered many a time through the shutters of a first floor window when he was supposed to be amusing himself outdoors. He had watched Pa set a compound fracture. (The little gray tip of bone pierces the flesh; the ether cone silences the screams.) He had seen the mangled stomach of a man gored by a bull. He had also seen his father wrestle down another man who had been beating his wife, and this last had impressed him most of all, although he had known it would be wise not to mention having seen it.
“All right then, come in.”
A scythe propped carelessly in a dark corner of the barn had sliced Jake Bechtold’s leg to the bone. Pa pulled the nightshirt up. Carefully he unwound the bandage, revealing a long, blood-encrusted gash, black and crisscrossed with stitches. He studied it for a moment.
“It’s doing well. Better than I expected, to tell the truth. No infection, thanks be.”
“We’re grateful to you, Doc.” Mrs. Bechtold wrung her clasped hands. “You always seen us through.”
“Not every time, Mrs. Bechtold,” Pa said seriously.
“Oh, that! That was in God’s hands. There wasn’t nothing you could’ve done more than you did do, Doc.”
When they go back in the buggy, Pa sat in silence for a while. And then he broke out. “Oh, it’s hard, it can be so hard! Sometimes such awful things happen, you can’t put them out of your mind as long as you live!”
“What awful things, Pa?”
His father paused, as if the telling would be too difficult Then he said, “It was in my second year here, almost into the third. I never go to Bechtold’s without living it all over again the way I did just now.”
“Was it anything you did?”
“No, it was something I didn’t do. I wasn’t able. Jake had the flu. While I was in the bedroom examining him, their little girl, just three years old she was, pulled a wash-tub full of boiling water off the stove while her mother’s back was turned. We laid her on the kitchen table. I can still hear how she screamed. Once in my life I’d ordered a lobster. It was when I first came to this country and stayed those three days in New York City. A lobster is bright red when it’s boiled, you know, and I remember I couldn’t bring myself to eat it The child looked like that. I thought, ‘I don’t know what to do. I’m supposed to know and I don’t.’ A lot of people came running in, wailing and crying. They poured cold water on the child. I didn’t think to tell them not to, although really it wouldn’t have made any difference what they did. The child was sure to die. Finally I found something to do. I got a scissors and began to cut her clothes off.
“Her body was one terrible blister. I couldn’t even look at the face. When I pulled off the stockings, the skin came with them in long strips, like tissue paper. I took some salve out of my bag. It had gone liquid from the hot sun, so I dribbled it all over the child’s body. Everybody was looking at me, just standing there watching, as if there were some magic in the jar of melted salve.
“The child lay moaning on the kitchen table all that afternoon. Someone asked, ‘Why not put her in a bed?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Best not to lift her.’ We put a little pillow under her head. Her pulse was so faint, I don’t think she felt anything. At least I hope not. We waited. Nobody talked. I heard the cows lowing, wanting to be milked. I’ll never forget the sounds they made, they and the child’s moaning. All the neighbor women came. Shortly before dusk the little girl died. I pulled the cover over her face. I still hadn’t looked at it.”
Martin shivered. Pa’s tales always made him feel he had been there when they happened. He had been in that kitchen with him and the dying girl; he had been on the deck with him when he sailed away from Ulster to America, out past the breakwater and the headlands, out to sea.
“I shouldn’t be telling you this, should I?” Pa asked. “Your mother would be angry. She’d say you’re too young to know how hard life can be.”
“I’m not too young. I’m nine.”
“You’re a lot older than nine in many ways.” His father’s arm, which had been resting on the back of the seat, slipped to Martin’s shoulders. His father’s hand felt warm and firm, making a union between the two of them.
“Pa,” he said, “I want to be a doctor.”
Pa looked at him carefully. “Are you saying so because you think I’d like to hear it? Is that it?”
“No. I really mean it.”
“You may change your mind.”
“I won’t change my mind.”
Pa had a little twist at the corner of his mouth, not a real smile, only the start of one, the way he did when he was pleased about something, or when he and Ma had a secret.
“Well, you’re smart enough,” he said now. “Alice is smarter.”
“Maybe
so. But she’s not going to be a doctor, that’s for sure. There were a couple of women in my class at medical school, and they were pretty bright too, but if you ask me, I don’t think it’s decent. There’s man’s work and there’s woman’s work. Doctoring, to my way of thinking, is man’s work.”
“You always say it’s God’s work,” Martin said shyly.
“Well, of course it is that. Take Bechtold’s leg, now. It’s true, we’ve learned a lot about sterilization; twenty years ago you’d thread a needle and stick it in your coat lapel. But even so, you can still have infection. With all our knowledge, we must remember to be humble. Never give way to pride in your skill. Another time you might not be as lucky.”
The buggy rumbled across the bridge. Martin leaned over the side, where the water was high with springtime flooding. Close to the bottom of the bridge it swirled, jewel-green, beautiful and dreadful. The power of water! Power to drown or to freeze or scald. Yet it could be so soft, closing over you on summer afternoons, all silky cool while you floated and were so gently borne.
Pa said suddenly, “I’m going to buy this mare. He’ll sell her if I offer enough.”
“You said we didn’t need her and we couldn’t afford her.”
“We don’t and we can’t. But I can’t send her back to the livery stable, either.”
Martin smiled. In a way he could not have put into words, he understood that this tenderness toward the animal was connected with the sharp, cruel things they had been talking about.
They circled through Cyprus. Men were putting red, white and blue bunting around the bandstand and all the stores were closed, except for the soda fountain. Martin could anticipate delicious flavors: teaberry, chocolate and Zip’s root beer. Oh, the smells and music, the feel of a holiday!
Now they were trotting down Washington Avenue, from which the side streets led to open country. These were shady streets; iron deer stood on their lawns and porches held stone urns filled with red geraniums. You wondered what lay inside the lofty houses where maids in striped aprons swept the steps and gardeners clipped the hedges.
A woman in a white dress and a light, flowered hat was coming out of a house. Two little girls, all white and lacy like her, walked beside her. They were younger than Martin. One of them looked very queer, he saw. There was something wrong with her shoulders.
