Crucible: McCoy

by David R. George III

  McCoy read signs as he walked, some of them large and plastered above the storefronts, others smaller and hanging at right angles to them: ANDERSON’S SEED AND FEED, JACKSON’S GROCERY, HAYDEN POST OFFICE, SHERIFF’S OFFICE, PALMETTO MUTUAL BANK AND TRUST, WESTERN UNION TELEGRAPH CO., SEAMSTRESS AND MILLINER, DONNER BLACKSMITH, ROBINSON’S GENERAL STORE. Nothing looked open. At the end of the square, on Main Street, the tall, columned edifice there proclaimed itself TOWN HALL. To the left, across the intersection of Mill and Main, sat a gas station, COLTON’S SHELL. And to the right, across the intersection of Carolina and Main, McCoy spotted a sign identifying one of the places for which he’d been looking.

  A low picket fence surrounded the house, and two doors led inside, one in each of the sides facing the street. McCoy traversed the intersection and walked up a stone path to one of the doors, past a simple, neatly carved sign he’d seen sitting atop a post in the front yard. Unsure if he’d find anybody home—much of the town appeared to have turned out for church services—he reached up to knock, but then heard the strains of a piano coming from inside. He waited a few minutes until the music stopped, then rapped on the door.

  McCoy heard footsteps within before he saw movement through the gauzy curtain covering the window in the top half of the door. The knob turned, and Dr. Lyles appeared. Wearing a short-sleeved shirt and no jacket or tie, he looked far less formal and much more relaxed than when he’d worked over McCoy’s injury a week and a half ago. “Well, Mister McCoy,” he said, pushing his black-rimmed eyeglasses back up the bridge of his nose. “I was wondering if I’d see you again. I heard you were still staying with the Dickinsons.”

  “I am,” McCoy said. “I’m helping them around the farm right now, and they’ve offered to let me stay awhile.”

  “That’s mighty neighborly of them,” Lyles noted. “Well, come on in.” He shuffled away down a short hall, turning and going through the first doorway to which he came. McCoy followed, closing the outside door behind him.

  Inside the house, he detected scents not unfamiliar to him: antiseptics, linen, steel. He followed Lyles through the doorway and found himself in an examination room. Cabinets and shelves lined the walls, filled with supplies and equipment, some of which McCoy recognized, some of which he did not. A tall exam table stood near the center of the room, topped by thick, articulated green cushions. A band of paper covered the length of the table.

  “Remove your pants and hop on up,” Lyles told him as he closed the door.

  “Pardon me?” McCoy said. He’d come here to speak with the doctor, not for any sort of medical attention.

  “Hop up, I said.” Lyles thumped the top of the examination table with the flat of his hand, crackling the paper. “You need to lie facedown while I take out your stitches.”

  “Oh,” McCoy said. He’d checked the laceration in his calf this morning, and had seen that it had healed quite well. He hadn’t thought about his injury since, other than when Lynn had asked about it a little while ago. He hadn’t intended to visit Dr. Lyles again to have him remove the stitches, vaguely thinking that he’d simply do so himself.

  “ ‘Oh?’ ” Lyles echoed. “Did you come here for some other reason, Mister McCoy?”

  “Um, yes, actually I did,” McCoy said. As he thought about it now, though, it only made sense that Lyles take out his stitches. Although McCoy remembered it being a relatively uninvolved and benign procedure, the doctor would have the tools and materials to do the job properly. “But you can take them out,” he said.

  “I can?” Lyles asked, his southern accent heavy with sarcasm. “Why thank you. I always enjoy spending my Sundays working over unannounced patients.”

  “I’m sorry, Doctor,” McCoy said, trying to keep his own annoyance out of his voice. “I didn’t mean to trouble you. If you’d prefer, I can make an appointment and come back some other time.”

  Lyles looked at him for a long moment, and McCoy had trouble reading his silence. When the doctor did reply, he did so without contrition for his impatience, but also without further irritation. “Hop on up,” he said, “and let’s get this taken care of.”

  McCoy unbuttoned his pants and removed them, dropping them on a chair. He then climbed up onto the examination table, pillowing his head on his hands. He felt the doctor’s touch as he studied the wound and its repair. “Do you feel any pain in the leg?” Lyles asked.

  “No,” McCoy said. The injury had stopped bothering him days ago.

  “Any discomfort whatsoever?”

  “None,” McCoy said, resisting the urge to mention the discomfort he felt with the entire notion of suturing people up.

  “It looks like it’s healed nicely and the stitches can come out,” the doctor said. He padded away from the table, and McCoy turned his head to watch the doctor wash his hands in a basin in the corner. Afterward, he retrieved a set of forceps, a pair of surgical scissors, and several towels from a closed cabinet. From a shelf, he removed a glass bottle three-quarters filled with a clear liquid.

  McCoy could smell the pungent scent of the antiseptic as the doctor cleaned his leg. Neither man said anything as Lyles grasped one suture at a time with the forceps, cut through each with the scissors, and finally used the forceps again to remove them. McCoy felt a slight tug as each stitch pulled free of his flesh. The entire process took less than five minutes.

  When McCoy had gotten down from the examination table and pulled his pants back on, Lyles asked, “So why did you pay a call on me today if not to have your stitches removed?”

  “For this reason,” McCoy said, and he dug into his pants pocket. He pulled out the coins Lynn and Phil had given him and placed them on the exam table. When he saw that he’d retrieved only three of the half-dollar coins, he reached back into his pocket until he found the fourth. “It’s not everything I owe you, but it’s a good portion of it.”

  Lyles looked startled, his thick gray eyebrows lifting above the rim of his eyeglasses. He reached over and spread the coins out, until they each lay flat, none of them overlapping. When he peered up at McCoy, though, his surprise seemed to have given way to suspicion. “Where did you get this?” he asked.

  “You’re welcome, Doctor,” McCoy said, weary of Lyles’s cynical and disrespectful attitude. He started across the room, ready to leave.

  “Did you steal this from the Dickinsons?” the doctor asked. McCoy stopped with his hand on the doorknob and turned back to address Lyles.

  “Is this what you call ‘southern hospitality?’” McCoy asked. “Because I’m from Georgia myself and I’m not familiar with this approach of yours.”

  “I’m just watching out for the people of Hayden,” Lyles said.

  “I’m sure you think you are,” McCoy said. “I’m just not sure how you think insulting me or insulting Lynn and Phil is going to accomplish that.”

  “I didn’t insult Lynn and Phil,” Lyles said, clearly outraged by the idea.

  “You didn’t?” McCoy asked, moving back toward the center of the room. “They’ve taken me into their home, gotten me a doctor’s care, given me clothes and food, and allowed me to help out by working around the farm for them, and you’re suggesting that they’ve done all of that for a thief.”

  “They might not know…” Lyles began, though he did not finish the thought.

  “They might not know,” McCoy agreed. “But I’ve spent almost two weeks at their house now. Don’t you think they’re in a better position than you are to see what kind of a person I am?”

  The doctor’s jaw set, and McCoy couldn’t tell whether he’d grown furious at the challenge to his authority, or mortified by the ring of truth.

  “And what kind of a person are you?” Lyles asked in a measured tone.

  “Not perfect,” McCoy conceded, “but honest.” He started once more to go, but then decided to say more. “Look, I can understand being leery of people you don’t know, especially in a small town where you probably do know everybody. But I’ve done nothing to you, and no
thing to Lynn and Phil, or to anybody else in Hayden, so why don’t you consider giving me the benefit of the doubt?” He crossed back to the door and opened it. Before leaving, he looked back at Lyles a final time. “I didn’t steal any money from Lynn and Phil,” he said, and then he left.

  Outside, McCoy walked back down the stone path to the picket fence, and then out to the street. He hoped that his confrontation with the old doctor wouldn’t cause any problems for Lynn and Phil. Maybe he should tell them what had happened.

  Or maybe I should just move on, McCoy thought. He certainly hadn’t intended to stop in Hayden, South Carolina, on his way to Atlanta; hell, he’d never even heard of the place until he’d been sitting in Lynn and Phil’s parlor. But circumstances had brought him here, and the Dickinsons had treated him with great kindness. For now, he felt an obligation to repay that—as well as their two dollars—as best he could, by working on their farm and helping them however else they needed.

  It’s more than that though, McCoy thought. He genuinely liked Lynn and Phil. And although he’d cared a great deal for Edith, he’d never felt completely comfortable at the 21st Street Mission or in New York City. Much of that had been caused by the situation, of course, and his desire to return to the twenty-third century. But although he’d only been in Hayden for less than two weeks and had just come into the town proper for the first time today, this seemed like something of a new beginning for him. He hadn’t placed an ad in a newspaper since he’d left New York and hadn’t even thought much about being stranded in the past. Instead, he’d begun thinking about finding a place, here and now, that he could call home.

  McCoy crossed Carolina Street and walked along Main, passing in front of Town Hall. He walked up the steps and tried to open the large front doors, but found them locked. Holding his hands up around his eyes to shield them from the sun, he peered through the windows in the doors. Inside, a low wooden wall separated a small lobby from an area with some rows of chairs and, beyond those, several desks or tables. He saw no people.

  Continuing along Main Street to Mill Road, McCoy looked down both streets as they led away from the commons. Tree lined and heavily shaded, Main Street ran past a number of houses, while Mill passed between the gas station and the town hall, then disappeared as it curved to the left. He also saw another sign that interested him: HAYDEN MILL 2.

  If I do stay here, he thought, I’m going to have to find a job. According to Phil, the mill didn’t operate on Sundays—it didn’t seem to McCoy like much of anything did—so there didn’t seem to be any point in going out there today. But maybe he would make the trip tomorrow.

  McCoy turned back toward the commons and crossed to the plank sidewalk that ran along Mill Road. With everything apparently closed, he decided to walk back down to the church, where he could meet Lynn and Phil when the services ended. Maybe he could also meet some of their friends and neighbors. If Dr. Lyles’s suspicions and attitudes typified those of the people of Hayden, it might take quite an effort for McCoy ever to become accepted here. But he had to start somewhere.

  His boots clacking along the sidewalk, he headed back down Mill Road.

  Twenty

  2268

  Natira gazed at the images of her parents, gone for so long now. She still thought of them often, and though the pain did not come with the same frequency now as it once had, it did come with the same intensity. She would miss them always.

  And yet as she reclined into the soft, overstuffed pillows at the head of her bed, her collection of remembrances held in her hands, she smiled. Even after all this time without them, her mother and father gave her gifts still. Natira touched a button on the edge of the shallow octagonal prism, and the three-dimensional projection above it changed, to a moment captured shortly after her parents had wed, when the two had peered lovingly into each other’s eyes. Natira looked at their shining faces, at the love they had taught her, that had brought her to this time in her life, and she marveled at the wonder of this day.

  “McCoy,” she said aloud, and she delighted in the sound of his name. He had come to her unexpectedly, as though from nowhere, but thanks to her mother and father, she had been prepared in both mind and heart. As high priestess herself, Shalira had been permitted to choose her mate, and she had taken a long time in so doing. Given such a privilege, she had told Natira, she had not wished to squander it in haste. She had gladly brooked loneliness in the hope of finding, not the learned love wrought by the prescribed couplings of the people, but existent love, real love, true love.

  And one day, Natira recalled her mother saying, true love found her. Zhontu had come into her life later than others would have, had she selected another, but from the moment he’d arrived, nothing could be measured against his presence in her life. Others wed as dictated by the Oracle, and then grew into their love, but Shalira had eschewed such a joining. She had believed that she would find her true love if she waited, and that she would know him without doubt as soon as she laid eyes upon him.

  So it had been. When Shalira and Zhontu had looked into each other’s eyes for the first time, they had both known, at that moment and with full certainty. They had wed at once, and had lived the remainder of their lives together in bliss.

  Natira had been born of that bliss, had grown into womanhood hearing the tale and believing in its power. Today, finally, that power had visited her. As she had watched the guards battle the three outworlders, she had not at first really seen McCoy. But then he had stood up, facing her, and their eyes had met, like that long-ago moment between Shalira and Zhontu, and fulfilling the promise that their love had given Natira. McCoy had stopped as though unable to move, and her heart had bloomed.

  Touching a second control on the remembrance prism, Natira watched as the device cycled through a series of images of her parents together through their lives, each simulacra fading after a few moments to be replaced by another. She reveled in their special and abiding love, always evident, always present. Today, at last, such love had arrived for her.

  A chime rang through Natira’s chambers, and it seemed to reverberate through the core of her being. The time had come. The outworlders would have regained consciousness by now. McCoy would be awake. It had pained her to see him feel the warning of the Oracle, but she’d understood the necessity of it: he would better understand life on Yonada now, would be closer to becoming one of the people, and therefore closer to his life with her.

  Natira looked forward to what would be with anticipation she could barely contain. After deactivating the prism, she set it down on her bed and marched across and out of her chambers, ready to meet her destiny. By the time she had made her way through the labyrinth of passages to the quarters where the outworlders had been carried, Jonsa and Lai had already arrived there, the two older women carrying food and drink as earlier commanded. The Oracle, after meting out its cautionary sentence, had decreed that the strangers subsequently be welcomed as honored guests. Now, as high priestess, Natira would so greet them.

  She pushed open the door and entered the strangers’ chambers, Jonsa and Lai following behind her. Padding through the vestibule, she saw two of the men standing in the middle of the main room, and the third—McCoy—crouching before them. She saw too that McCoy tended to a gray-haired figure lying unmoving on the floor.

  “What happened?” she asked, halting in her tracks.

  “We don’t know,” said the leader of the strangers, Kirk, as McCoy stood up beside him. “He just suddenly screamed in pain and died.”

  Died, she thought, and she immediately felt anguish at losing one of the people. Suspicion of Kirk rose in her mind, but then she recognized the old man: Jorromlen. She’d seen him earlier, she realized, in his red and pink patterned tunic, observing as she and the guards had first brought the strangers to see the Oracle. That he now lay dead before her, before the strangers, suddenly came as no surprise. Jorromlen had a long history of heretical beliefs and of relating those beliefs to others. He had been punished
by the Oracle on numerous occasions, and she could easily surmise that he had attempted one time too many to spread his sacrilege, this time to the outworlders.

  Natira looked to Jonsa, who had stopped beside her, and who now peered at the body of Jorromlen with sorrow. “Fetch the guard,” Natira told her. Jonsa nodded and moved to do so.

  Though she did not wish to carry out before the strangers the rite required upon the death of one of the people, she knew that she must offer up some of it right now, at least in abbreviated form. She stepped forward and kneeled down before Jorromlen, placing the fingers of her left hand in those of her right. Closing her eyes and envisioning the starburst that represented the Oracle, she recited a small portion of the appropriate litany. “Forgive him, for he was an old man,” she said, “and old men are sometimes foolish. But it is written that those of the people who sin or speak evil shall be punished.” She bowed her head, sad that Jorromlen’s life had ended this way.

  Looking up at the strangers, at McCoy, she wondered what they thought—what he thought. They had been here only a short time and had witnessed only the harsh authority of the Oracle, and not the loving wisdom it mostly bestowed upon the people. Concerned, she stood up and approached the three men. “He served well for many years,” she told them, and then she saw that Jonsa had returned with two guards. “Take him away, gently,” she ordered.

  She watched as they carried him from the room, but noted with some concern that McCoy walked away from her. After she motioned for Jonsa and Lai to prepare the refreshments for the strangers, she followed him across the room to where he’d sat down on a purple-cushioned bed, his head down, a hand rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “You do not seem well,” Natira said to McCoy. “It is distressing to me.”