Called Home

by R. R. Irvine

  Traveler winked at Baby Joe, but the boy’s eyes were crossed as they tried to fix on the nipple at hand. The only burning in his bosom was likely to be colic.

  “You haven’t answered my question, Mrs. Beasley,” he called.

  “I’m listening,” she said through the door.

  “To me?”

  “To God.”

  To Mormons, a burning in the bosom augurs an insight straight from the Almighty.

  “What about Doctor Joe?”

  “My husband is cleaning bungalow three. Talk to him.”

  ******

  Nat Beasley had the rumpled, bleary-eyed look of a man caught napping. He stepped across the threshold and closed the door quickly, but not before Traveler saw the unmade bed. Bungalow Three, like his own number six, had knotty-pine walls, a steel-frame bed, and Congoleum on the floor.

  Beasley tapped his forehead in the same location as Traveler’s bruise. “What happened to you?”

  “Is there a doctor in town?”

  “You don’t look that bad.”

  “Doctor Joe?” Traveler clarified.

  “You’ll have to go to Ephraim.”

  “Is that where I can find Doctor Joe?”

  “Follow Highway Eighty-nine and you run right into Ephraim.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “I have work to do.” Beasley backed up until he had the doorknob in hand.

  “I’ll settle for a supermarket,” Traveler said. “Anyplace that sells aspirin.”

  Beasley slammed the door.

  12

  ODELL’S DRUGSTORE had a FOR SALE sign in the window along with a poster advertising a Manti rodeo that had taken place a month ago. The building, two stories of brick trimmed in the town’s ubiquitous rock-faced limestone, shared one wall with the Uinta Hotel. The other side faced on a vacant lot and was covered with fading billboards touting long-gone products: Sonora Phonographs, Studebaker Buggies, and Mail Pouch Tobacco.

  As Traveler entered the store, he wondered how long the FOR SALE sign had been up. Months, judging by the fly-specked looks of it.

  The siren went off again, not in short bursts like the last time, but in one long continuous blast. The sound was loud enough to make his ears ache. He yawned to relieve the pressure and stepped back outside to look up Main Street. The earlier wisps of smoke in the mountains had been replaced by a tornadolike column rising hundreds of feet in the air. It appeared to be moving downhill toward the town.

  Another siren joined in, somewhere from the direction of the sheriff’s office.

  A block up, several people emerged from the dinette, paper napkins fluttering from their collars. At the same time, Eliza McConkie, the bishop’s wife, bustled out of the hotel next door. When Traveler attempted to approach her, she fled up the street.

  In need of aspirin more than ever, he started into the drugstore just as a large man wearing a white pharmacist’s coat rushed out. His fearful eyes widened at the sight of Traveler.

  “My wife’s inside,” he said. “She’ll take care of you.”

  Traveler grabbed his flabby arm. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Don’t you hear the siren? I’m on call.”

  “It’s about Melba Nibley’s prescription.”

  The man jerked free. “The bishop is waiting for me. We have to set up a first aid station. It’s standard procedure.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “Find the bishop and you’ll find me.” With that, he trotted up Main Street toward the fire station. Two others joined him from the crowd around the Main Street Dinette.

  From the doorway a woman said, “You must be the detective.”

  He turned to see a slim, dark-haired woman, with a weathered sixty-year-old face on a much younger body.

  “I’m Cynthia Odell.”

  He took out his wallet and handed her a card.

  “Nobody told me you were named Moroni.” She stepped onto the sidewalk and peered toward the mountains. “The weather forecast calls for temperatures in the nineties. I’m afraid we’re going to need help from the real Angel Moroni before this fire’s out.”

  “If you’re open for business, I’d like to buy some aspirin.”

  “You see that ridge,” she said, pointing to where flames were soaring into the air. “The Dority place is just below there. My husband was alerted an hour ago in case of a wind shift. The poor souls, as if they didn’t have enough trouble already.”

  She read his card one more time before handing it back. “Now what can I do for you, Moroni Traveler?”

  “Aspirin.”

  “You said that already, didn’t you. Come inside and I’ll fix you up.”

  The drugstore had a soda fountain along one wall, complete with a gray marble countertop, metal straw dispensers, and a plastic cake cover protecting a doughnut and two sweet rolls from a lazy fly. Traveler climbed onto one of the metal stools and was overwhelmed by the childhood smells of syrups and sodas and phosphates.

  “I can fix you a Bromo,” she said as soon as she was behind the counter. Her hand caressed a blue plastic dispenser filled with powdered Bromo-Seltzer.

  “Just aspirin and a glass of water, if you don’t mind.”

  She thrust a small Coke glass beneath the faucet and pulled the soda jerk’s handle.

  He watched her image in the mirror behind the counter. “Outside you mentioned something about the Dority place. Is that Louise Dority, Ellis Nibley’s daughter?”

  “Everybody in town is talking about you and why you’re here.”

  He gave up on Mrs. Odell’s reflection to watch her in person. “In my business it’s better to catch people by surprise.”

  Her lined face showed no emotion, but there was a sparkle in her youthful eyes as she slid the glass across the counter. “We’ve never had a detective in town before, only Sheriff Hickman. Louise must be having a fit, you being here stirring up bad memories. I hear you already met her brothers out at the roadhouse.”

  “I hope Mrs. Dority is more friendly than they were.”

  Her lips pursed, fighting a losing battle against a smile. “Those boys have been raising Cain for years. A regular pair of bullies. It’s about time somebody cut them down to size. I wish I’d seen that. I hear they had to drive all the way to Ephraim to get themselves attended to.”

  A fire truck rumbled by, laboring up Main Street toward the mountains.

  “We keep the truck parked down behind McConkie’s Garage,” she said in answer to his questioning look. “There’s not enough room at the courthouse.”

  “Any relation to Bishop McConkie?”

  “The same.”

  “I thought he ran the hotel.”

  “You mean his wife, Eliza, does. Pearl, one of his others, handles the garage for him.”

  “Others,” he figured, was probably a euphemism for polygamous wives.

  “And the fire truck?” he said.

  “She keeps that running, too, though how she does it, I don’t know. The thing must be forty years old.”

  “One truck’s not going to do much good against a forest fire,” he said.

  “Half our volunteers are farmers with tractors. Besides, I hear Chief McConkie’s already called in help from Ephraim and Manti. Mount Pleasant’s on standby.”

  The siren went off again, causing Traveler to grimace.

  “I’m sorry. I forgot your aspirin.” She left the counter for the pharmacy area at the back of the store. When she returned she handed him a small tin containing a dozen aspirin.

  Traveler took two tablets.

  “You ought to have a glass of milk to go with those,” she said. “It settles the stomach.”

  He drained his water glass. “I’m fine. How much do I owe you?”

  “Those aspirin have been around a while. They’re still marked a quarter.”

  He examined the tin, looking for an expiration date. If anything, his headache felt worse.

  “I’m a practitioner here in Wa
satch,” she said. “When it comes to the laying on of hands, there’s only one better, Jessie Sutton. And she’s not seeing anybody these days.”

  “I’m a Gentile,” he reminded her, staring at her large, almost masculine hands.

  “From the beginning, Joe Smith commanded us to seek converts to the true church. Maybe you’re mine.”

  He watched in the mirror as she moved behind him, standing so close he could feel her warm breath on the back of his neck. She raised her hands above her head. Her fingers flexed.

  “ ‘And whoso shall ask it in my name in faith, they shall cast out devils,’ ” she murmured, “ ‘they shall heal the sick.’ ”

  Her large fingers fastened on his skull, gripping tightly. He closed his eyes and remembered a healing session his mother had taken him to as a boy. A child, not much younger than Traveler, had been stricken by polio. Doctors had given up. It was only a matter of time. His mother, along with everybody else at the bedside, had condemned the diagnosis with shaking heads. Traveler had shaken his head, too, not wanting to do anything that might hurt the pale child.

  The healer was an old man, as white-haired as Santa Claus. Hands pressed together in prayer, he had knelt beside the bed. His hands began to shake as if gathering power. Finally, they fell upon the boy.

  “Heal!” the man had commanded. “Heal!”

  “Heal!” Cynthia Odell said in Traveler’s ear.

  He twitched. Her fingers gripped so hard they trembled. In the mirror he could see her sweating. Her eyes were closed. Her breath was coming faster.

  “Heal,” she moaned.

  A rasping sigh emptied her lungs. Her hands fell away.

  He let out a sigh of his own.

  She dragged herself onto the stool beside him and stared at him in the mirror. “How do you feel?”

  He rocked his head experimentally. “Better.” His headache had receded to a distant pinpoint.

  A smile lit up her face. “At heart you’re not a Gentile. You’re a believer.”

  “Did you know Melba Nibley?” he asked.

  She peered down at her hands, which lay motionless on the marble countertop. “If you question God’s will, the pain will return.”

  “I’m trying to help Ellis Nibley.”

  She drew a deep breath. “First Melba, now the fire burning toward the Dority place. I don’t know what to think. Maybe that family is cursed.”

  Traveler concentrated on her image in the mirror. “Do you know any reason why they should be?”

  Her eyes found his for an instant before going into hiding. “A lot of people thought Melba was stuck up. But they didn’t know her. She was shy, that’s all. Especially in high school. Now me, they called Cyn. Spelled with an S, my mother used to say.”

  “We were all shy in high school,” Traveler said.

  “Looking at you, Mr. Traveler, I’d say you were one of those who liked gym class. An athlete. But to some it can be hell. I remember our teacher, Miss Brodie. If you ask me, she never fell off the roof in her life.”

  Traveler was about to ask for an explanation when he remembered his mother using the same expression once or twice, her genteel way of referring to menstruation.

  “When any of us tried using that time of month as an excuse not to dress for gym, she’d say we were imagining things. That or lying to get out of hard work.”

  Her frankness surprised him.

  “I hated her and that damned class,” she went on. “Shirley Colton and I used to write excuse notes for each other, signing our mothers’ names. But Melba didn’t have the nerve. And let me tell you, she went through hell every time she fell off. That and pimples. They plagued her all the way through her junior year. It got so bad she was embarrassed to shower in front of others. Even with me, and I was her closest friend in those days.”

  The woman caught her breath. “Now that we’re talking about it, I remember something else. Another big trauma in our lives. We had to have physical exams every year. It was required to get through high school. They stuck you with needles and took your blood, things like that. And of course, Miss Brodie was always there, shuttling us back and forth to the doctor when he couldn’t come on campus. She’d always say, ‘Don’t be bashful. Your husband’s going to see you like this one day.’ Easy for her to say. She wasn’t married.”

  Mrs. Odell snorted. “She never did get married either. But then she got her thrills watching us girls in the shower if you ask me. Anyway, those physicals were personal, if you know what I mean. For someone as shy as Melba, they were sheer hell. During senior physicals, she stayed home pretending to be sick. The doctor was a man, of course, and she was scared to death of men. But he caught up with her. I remember that Melba’s eyes were red for days from crying.”

  Her hands came up from the countertop to rub her eyes, as if to erase the sight of those high school memories. Her own eyes were pink when she spoke again. “The plain fact is, I don’t remember Melba going on a single date in high school, not until the senior prom with Ellis. If you ask me, he was the only boy she ever went out with.”

  She spun off the stool and retreated behind the soda fountain, where she busied herself washing Traveler’s glass. As she returned it to the shelf below the mirror, he thought that her reflected eyes were more inflamed than rubbing accounted for.

  He changed the subject to calm her. “I saw your For Sale sign in the window.”

  She sighed and turned to face him. “Business is bad.”

  “Is there another drugstore in town?”

  “No.”

  “Then you have a monopoly.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But the general store sells Band-Aids and toothpaste and things like that.”

  “What about prescription drugs like tranquilizers?”

  “I know what you’re getting at, Mr. Traveler. You’ll have to talk to my husband, Enos, about anything like that. You saw him leaving for the fire department.”

  “How long have you been trying to sell?” he asked.

  “You might as well know it. Enos and I are being shunned.”

  He hadn’t heard that term in years. But then Salt Lake, as the state capital, was less homogeneous and therefore more sophisticated than the rest of rural Utah, where the church accounted for ninety percent of the population.

  “It’s a religious matter,” she added, “something an outsider wouldn’t understand.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  She went on without missing a beat. “Of course, if someone gets sick in the middle of the night and needs medicine, that’s a different matter. They’re on the phone to Enos no matter what the time, begging him to come into the store and fill their prescription.” Her lips trembled. “But if it’s not an emergency, off they go to the drugstore in Ephraim or Manti.”

  Traveler wondered if he’d get out of a warm bed to help people who treated him like that. “Why don’t you and your husband go on a long vacation and see how folks around here like being without a druggist?”

  “Enos wouldn’t do that. He’s too conscientious. By the way, how’s your headache?”

  Tentatively, he turned his head from side to side. “I feel fine.”

  She flexed her fingers. “It’s good to know I haven’t lost my touch.”

  “Are they shunning your healing, too?”

  “Those that come to me sneak in the back way at night. But if I meet them on the street in broad daylight, they look the other way.”

  “And you still treat them?”

  “It’s God’s gift to give, not mine.” She nodded at the tin of aspirin on the counter. “There’s no need for you to buy those.”

  He handed her a dollar. “It’s nice to have painkillers around in case of an emergency.”

  “You could have got them at Ellis Nibley’s General Store.”

  He smiled. “Not for a quarter.”

  Her face softened. “Melba used to say the same thing. That we ought to keep up with the times and raise our prices.�
��

  “You liked her, didn’t you?”

  “When I heard she died, part of me died too. At the funeral I couldn’t look Ellis in the face. I guess I figured he was to blame one way or another. But the last time I saw him—he came in here despite the shunning to thank me for a casserole I’d sent over the day after she died—my heart melted. He’d aged ten years. On top of that, he hired you, too, didn’t he? That counts for something. He must be in the dark as much as the rest of us.” Her mouth opened wide as if she were stretching her jaw muscles. “Enos thinks otherwise. He says you being here is Ellis’s way of paying conscience money.”

  She walked away from Traveler to stare out the front window. “Look how dark the town is.”

  “It’s the smoke blotting out the sun.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Traveler.”

  13

  THE SKY grew darker, the smoke thicker as Traveler drove up Main Street toward the fire. At Taylor Road, he turned south in the direction of the old quarry where much of the county’s oolite limestone had been mined. A block shy of the open pits, he swung east on Grant Avenue, and was again heading into the Wasatch Mountains. Cynthia Odell’s directions were exact in every detail, even down to the spot where the pavement ran out. At that point, the avenue had changed its name to Dority Canyon Road.

  He stopped the car and got out. Smoke had settled over the area like a fog. Visibility was down to fifty yards. For all he knew, flames could be just beyond the edge of sight.

  He shook his head at the vista before him. From now on the road narrowed to a single, rutted lane. Waist-high weeds, tinder-dry and waiting for combustion, grew on either side. It was questionable whether or not he’d be able to turn around in case of an emergency.

  Taking a deep breath was like smoking half a dozen unfiltered cigarettes at once. The temperature, ninety-six degrees when he’d left town, felt on the verge of spontaneous combustion.

  He climbed back into the Jeep wagon, his father’s car actually, switched the air conditioner to high, and drove forward. As the interior cooled, the engine temperature rose. It was nearing the red line when he broke free of the underbrush and entered a clearing. The smell of smoke changed to something worse. Burning turkey feathers came to mind.