The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  In the first days after learning Tom would die she had cried and cried and everything she thought of was painful. But she had not cried in recent days, had slipped into an unfeeling state of mind, removed and closed up. She had been dreading what lay ahead, the unimaginable details of Tom's slow dying, almost more than she dreaded being left alone, and lately she had found her mind skipping over the next few weeks and lighting on the details of rearranging her life once Tom was gone, with the same unemotional attention she might have given to spring housecleaning. She had hoped—had even prayed—that if Tom was dying it could happen soon and be over with. When Tom whispered to her one night that he wished he had the courage to take a gun and shoot himself—If I'm dying, I might as well get it over with—she had been startled but had said almost nothing in reply. It was something she herself had thought of, had even wished for, in moments of cold consideration. She was grimly aware this made her a heartless, soulless, unloving wife.

  But now that Tom was suddenly sicker—now that she was sitting in a kitchen chair watching him circle and circle the house in feverish agony—that thin, unemotional husk fell easily away, and behind her breastbone was such fear and pain that she had to gasp for breath in harsh, repeated sighs. She was terrified he might be dying—that this was his last death agony—and she wished madly that he should go on living as long as possible, even if it meant going on suffering as he was this morning. The incredibleness of what was happening, the inevitability of it, the finality of it, came flooding into her body in a physical way, and all the meaning she had found in the world, the shape she had cast on it, began to wash away in the undertow.

  Every little while she looked out through the kitchen window for Dr. McDonough. The sky had begun to clear—Ruth could make out the dust of a few dim stars against the darkness in the west—and she glimpsed against the wolf-gray light a colorless image that was her own reflection in the glass, though at first she took it for Tom's face, thin brows drawn down to the edges of her eyes in a wild grimace.

  The morning went on brightening and lengthening without bringing any sign of Fred or the doctor. Dr. McDonough had always come to the house in a car and Ruth wondered if the snow was too deep for his automobile to get through—if he might have slid off the road into a ditch. It crossed her mind that Fred might have fallen or been bucked off the borrowed horse and might be lying dead in the snow right now, which was an idea too huge and absurd to hold on to. When sometime in the late morning she heard a horse jangling its harness and blowing air right outside the front door, her heart leaped with relief. She went quickly out to the front porch but found it wasn't Fred or the doctor but Martha Lessen. The girl usually would wait at the fence for Ruth to come out and take the mail and the groceries from her, but today Martha had been so startled and alarmed to find the yard bare of chickens that she'd ridden right up to the house, her face stiff with dread. And when Ruth saw who it was, the look that came into her own face was desperate disappointment. She said, "I thought you might be Fred, bringing the doctor," and immediately turned back to the house.

  Martha had been afraid to hear her say, Mr. Kandel has passed away, but there was nothing in Ruth's words to cheer about. She called to her, "Mrs. Kandel, what can I do to help out?" Ruth stopped a moment and leaned her forehead tiredly on the frame of the door. Then she said, "The chickens, I guess," before stepping inside.

  Martha stood down in the slushy snow and led the horse outside the fenced chicken yard and dropped the reins and went back into the yard and across to the chicken house. She opened the coops to let the daylight in, and she found the scratch feed and scattered it on the snow and on the ground inside the coop. The roosters began to make their cautious way out into the cold, and then the hens, though they were all uncannily silent.

  When she'd finished, Martha went up to the house again and knocked and said, "Mrs. Kandel?" and after a moment, not hearing anything from inside, she made up her mind to just open the door and step in without waiting to be asked. The house was cold and dim. Ruth Kandel sat in a kitchen chair with her arms stretched out on the table in front of her. The sleeves of her wrapper were ruched up almost to the elbows, and her forearms lying on the table had a greenish pale cast, the skin stippled with cold. She was staring out the kitchen window but her body seemed pitched toward the sound coming from the bedroom, which was a terrible low grunting, something like the groan a horse makes when it's down on the ground with colic.

  Martha's heart quickened. She didn't want to go on standing there by the door, so she said, "Should I stir up a fire in the stove?" and made a move toward the wood.

  Ruth looked over at her and said, her voice rough and cracking from tiredness or strain, "He's burning hot, I don't want to heat up the house, I'm afraid it'll make him worse." Her eyes drifted past Martha and fixed on the shelf of books hanging on the wall behind her. She said, "He's in terrible pain," and tightened her mouth in a bad likeness of a smile. Her hair had been done up in a night braid but by now was straggling loose from it. She turned back to the window and after a moment opened her mouth and took in a loud, labored breath, a sigh.

  Martha came immediately to the edge of tears. She said, "I'm so sorry, Mrs. Kandel," which she knew was no comfort at all and she wasn't surprised when Ruth went on looking out the window without bothering to answer.

  It wasn't clear to Martha how she could be any help to the Kandels, either of them, but she didn't feel it would be right to leave. She stood a moment trying to think what else she could offer to do, and when her mind failed her she said, "I'll just sit down with you, if that's all right, until the doctor gets here." She didn't wait for Ruth to tell her if it was all right or not, but went over and sat down on a kitchen chair; she took off her hat and placed it carefully on the floor next to her. There wasn't a single thing she could think of to say, and Ruth went on staring out the window in silence, which wasn't silence, not with that low animal moaning carrying on in the bedroom. After a while, Martha became aware that some of the Kandels' roosters had begun to crow, probably had been crowing for minutes. She began to think about the horse she'd left ground-tied outside the fence, a black horse named Sherman that belonged to the Rocker V, and to wonder whether he'd still be standing where she'd left him when she took up the circle again. Cows had begun calving in the past week and she had been riding through snow littered with silvery discarded placentas; she didn't know why she thought of that now, and of the dead mother cow she had come upon earlier in the morning, undelivered of its crosswise calf.

  Martha had imagined Tom Kandel to be prostrate on his deathbed, so when he came walking jerkily out from the bedroom she was deeply startled. She hardly recognized him, he was so thin and pale, his face a stiff, wrenched mask. His underwear hanging loosely on his bony frame was dark in patches from sweat. He didn't seem to see his wife or Martha, but circled the room once, closing and unclosing his hands reflexively, and then abruptly he sat on the edge of the sofa and began to hug and rock himself with a low panting sound, a succession of breathless grunts.

  Martha looked away in stunned, wordless fear, but Ruth lifted her chin and turned to watch her husband silently. After a while she said, "It was still dark out when I sent Fred for the doctor. What do you suppose is keeping them?"

  Martha didn't know if Ruth intended this question for her, or if it was a question at all; but she discovered that she had a cowardly wish to escape back out into the cold morning, which is why she said, "Mrs. Kandel, should I go into Bingham and see what's holding them up?"

  Just at that moment they began to hear a car motor and wheels bumping up the lane, and Ruth stood without a word and went out to the porch and waited for the doctor, who drove up to the fence line in a Hudson car with Fred on the seat beside him. When Fred got down from the car to open the gate and let the car through, Ruth called to him, "Fred, you'd better go see to the chickens." Of course Martha had already seen to this work but Ruth didn't remember asking her to do it; what she remembered was that the
chicken house had become one of her son's hiding places, one of his refuges from his father's dying. Fred gave her a desperate look of relief and as soon as the car passed by him into the yard he closed the gate and walked off to the chicken house.

  The doctor, when he stepped from the running board into the snow, smiled faintly and said to Ruth, "How are you, Mrs. Kandel?" to which she could think of no reply. He came onto the porch and she silently held the door open for him to pass through. He was used to seeing anxious relatives and friends hovering around the edges of sickness, so he barely noted that a girl was standing at the kitchen table, her hands gripping the back of a chair, and he didn't speak to her, but set his hat and bag on the parlor table beside the door and said matter-of-factly to Tom, as if they were merely two people passing the time of day, "Tom, how have things been going for you?" Tom was rocking on the edge of the sofa, his stare fixed on a spot on their little Turkish rug, his eyes pinched nearly closed in his drawn face. The doctor began taking things out of his bag, getting together a hypodermic of morphine and hyoscine, without giving his patient more than a cursory glance.

  Ruth watched Dr. McDonough a moment—she hadn't said a word to him—and then went again to sit at the kitchen table. She laid her forehead down on her crossed arms and shut her eyes, which mildly aggravated the doctor. Fred Kandel had been sitting on Dr. McDonough's office stoop when he drove in from an all-night call—thirty miles into Owl Creek Canyon and thirty miles back again, attending to a Hungarian man who had been struck in the forehead by a mule—and they'd set out for the Kandel farm as soon as he refueled the car. The doctor hadn't slept more than two or three hours in the past two days. His chin was stubbled, his mouth sagging with exhaustion. It had been his opinion that Ruth Kandel was a strong-minded woman, even to his way of thinking somewhat too independent and forward. He had expected her to hold up better than this when the first crisis came.

  The only sounds in the room were the ticking of a clock and Tom's deep, measured groan. Dr. McDonough went over to him and pulled up the damp undershirt and gave him the morphine and then stood over him, watching in silence for several minutes until Tom's eyes glazed and his moaning ebbed off. The dose was enough to kill a healthy man. It always amazed the doctor, how pain absorbed morphine like a sponge.

  "Tom, come on now, let's get you into bed." He helped the man stand and walked with him back to the bedroom. A piss pot sat empty and clean beside the rumpled bed so he held it up and coaxed Tom into passing a little water into it. Then he neatened the quilts and turned them back and helped the man down onto the mattress. Tom turned his head past the doctor and stared off toward a bare corner of the room. His brown hair fell lank against the pillow. He had never been stocky but he was quite thin now, his cheekbones very sharp, his collarbones and the washboard of his ribs visible through the undershirt above the swelling of the tumor. Cancer was rare in those days —Tom Kandel's was only the second case Dr. McDonough had seen in his forty years of treating patients. His other cancer patient had died a terrible slow death, and he expected the same thing for Tom. There was little he knew to do to cut down on the man's suffering, short of killing him with an overdose of morphine.

  While Tom went on looking at something invisible in the middle distance, Dr. McDonough listened to the man's pulse and his heart, then pulled the quilts up and stood watching. Finally Tom released a slight sound, a sigh, and closed his eyes. His eyelids were thin and veined, his lashes casting faint shadows on the bones of his cheeks.

  The doctor picked up the pot of dark urine and carried it outside and stepped off the porch to fling it away from the house. There was now a path through the snow to the privy, broken with boot prints, and the ground around the chicken house had been shoveled out and stomped down, but there was no sign of the boy, Fred. The doctor took the chill air into his lungs and tipped his head back a moment to look at the sky, which by now was nearly clear.

  Ruth and Martha were sitting at the kitchen table when he came back into the house, and they turned their faces to him in perfect synchrony, which he might have found amusing under other circumstances. He said, not unkindly, "Ruth, how are you holding up?"

  Ruth turned from him to the window, seeming to lean slightly toward the sky above the edge of the near hills; her mouth, in the image he glimpsed on the wavery window glass, began to twist until it became an unattractive rictus of grief. "There was nothing I could think to do. He wouldn't let me help him."

  "You did the only thing you could do, which was sending the boy."

  She put her hands to her face and began rubbing her finger-216 tips up and down the sides of her nose and across her mouth and chin, which was a way of hiding nervousness. "He hasn't been right," she said, the words muffled behind her hands. He knew what she meant. Over the last couple of days he had seen a marked change in Tom—slurring of words, dullness, a vacant expression. Not right in his mind, was what she meant. Not himself, not Tom. She looked at him sidelong, almost a shy look. "Is that from the morphine?"

  "Well, it could be the morphine. He's been getting a lot of it, and it does work a change on the brain. Or the disease could be doing it. I've read it affects the mind in some manner, or at least in some cases."

  She looked away from him again. "Will he be like this?" she asked him hoarsely. From now on, she meant. Until he dies.

  He said bluntly, "Yes, I expect he will." In fact, he knew it would be worse before the end, quite a bit worse, so perhaps the kindness was in not saying so.

  She began to sob tiredly, hiding her face behind her hands. Martha, who had been watching all this with a worried frown, immediately teared up too, and put a hand on Ruth's arm. Dr. McDonough didn't know Martha Lessen and had not, until this minute, taken in that the girl was dressed like a man, which he found curious and a provocation. He watched the two of them a moment and then began to pack up his instruments and bottles. By the time he was ready to leave, Ruth Kandel had more or less finished with her crying. She sat with her chin propped on her two hands, the long fingers pressed into her flushed cheeks, and looked out the window. Sunlight glaring off the snow made of the glass an opaque square of brightness. The girl sitting with Ruth had pulled her own hands into her lap and now stared down into them with a look of distress.

  Dr. McDonough said, lifting the handles of his bag, "I imagine he'll sleep quite a while now. I'll come back later today and give him another hypodermic. From now on, he'll need two or three every day. I'll have to show you how to do it yourself. I don't know that I'll always be able to be here when he needs it." Ruth's mouth began to twist with the effort not to resume crying, but she said nothing. The doctor picked up his hat and his bag.

  Martha didn't want to go on sitting there with Ruth Kandel—she was desperate to get out of the house and helpless to know how to manage it—and maybe Ruth already knew this. Before the doctor had crossed the porch to his motor, she turned her tired face to the girl and said, "Miss Lessen, I don't know where Fred has gone off to, so I wonder if you'd open the gate for the doctor's car before you go on with your circle ride." Martha gave her a look almost the twin to Fred's—wild with guilty relief.

  While the doctor waited for Martha to open the gate and let him out of the yard, he looked at his watch—just past eleven. In earlier days he used to fall asleep behind a team of horses, would wrap the reins around the whip post and then around his wrist so if he dropped the reins they would slide down the post and jerk his wrist and wake him. Now that he had the Hudson he was able to get over the roads more quickly, but he had lost the benefit of sleeping as he drove. Eleven o'clock. The day stretched ahead of him, patients waiting to be seen. It would be hours yet before he could expect to climb into bed.

  24

  ANOTHER TRICK the old wrangler Roy Barrow had taught Martha Lessen was to put a half-hobble on a front foot, tie a loop in the rope and throw the rope over the horse's back, then draw it up through the loop to pull the front foot up. The horse would generally buck like crazy at that po
int but shortly he'd get tired and stand still and Martha would tell him what a good horse he was and give him a carrot or a piece of an apple. When he'd been done this way enough times, he wouldn't care if his foot was lifted up and he'd learn to stop whatever he was doing and just stand still when he felt pressure on his legs, so later if he stepped into wire hidden in brush or grass he'd naturally stop before he got tangled. And of course that also took care of any shoeing problems, because a horse done that way would lift his foot and stand for the shoer.

  When Martha began to feel she had a little time to spare—the horses giving her less and less trouble—she started in with this foot work. She went after one horse at a time, repeating the lesson four or five days in a row at whatever corral the horse was in, until he got the idea. Some of the horses, having been brought along so far, hardly objected when she lifted their foot, and as soon as she knew they wouldn't give a farrier any inconvenience, she went on to another horse.

  In the late part of February she left the Bliss place early in the morning riding Chuck, one of the Varden horses, and when she got to the Romers' she put a half-hobble on him and pulled his foot up. It was the third time he'd been done that way, and when he turned his head toward her and heaved a sigh she said to him, "I guess you've got it figured out," and she lowered his foot again and gave him a carrot. Maude and Big Brownie, both of them the Woodruffs' horses, watched this business with great interest, their heads up and ears pricked. "You'll get a turn," Martha said to them, though she knew they might have been interested only in the carrot.

  She was tacking up Maude when Dorothy Romer came down from the house, her face pale and her hair unpinned. When Martha saw the state she was in, she first guessed Mr. Romer had gone into whiskey again and then thought it must be Dorothy who was drunk, her eyelids drooping, her voice slurred as she called in a weak way, "Helen and Clifford are both sick."