Mattie

by Judy Alter

  Eli came to my bed that night. After making love to me gently and long, he said, “I’ll leave tomorrow, you know, lady doctor.”

  I was silent a long time, fighting with my emotions. “I . . . I was afraid that you would soon. You can stay in Benteen, build something else here. I know I heard Ralph Whittaker talking to you about another addition to the store.”

  “Yeah, he did. But no, I can’t stay. Can you leave with me?”

  “You know I can’t.”

  “I know. I just said that so you’d see how impossible either one is. If I stayed here, we couldn’t go on like this forever. And besides, I’m a wanderer. I can’t stay in one place.”

  “I guess I always knew that, but I hoped it would be different.”

  “You know what I guess I hoped? That you’d leave with me. It was like a fantasy I had. Once the sanitarium was built, you’d turn it over to someone else and take to the prairie with me.”

  “I couldn’t. I’ve worked too hard, and Benteen is—”

  “I know. I knew when Tom came to live with you. You do what you have to. And I’ll do what I have to.”

  “Will you come to visit?”

  “In the middle of the night?” he teased, then became serious. “I don’t think so, lady doctor. I think we best just say this was a period in our lives, and now we’ll go on to other things. Both of us. Ain’t no sense looking back nor clinging to what once was.”

  I knew he meant it.

  Tom and I watched him ride away from the sanitarium the next morning. Tom fretted and complained, saying loudly he didn’t see why Eli had to go, until I spoke more harshly than I ever had and he quieted down. Eli gave me no sign of affection beyond a tip of his hat, and then he was gone without looking back. When he had gone a fair distance, I ran into the sanitarium and up to the second floor, where I could follow him until he became a speck on the prairie. Tom found me there, tears running down my face.

  “Are you all right, Mattie?”

  “Yes, Tom, I am. I’m sad and happy.” He looked puzzled, but I knew that once again I had chosen Benteen, and it was the right decision.

  Epilogue

  She sat on the porch, rocking gently and staring beyond the edge of the town toward open farmland. Mid-July heat rose in waves above the crops, like the lines in an imperfect glass window. An occasional white cloud broke the blue of the sky, but the sun was merciless. It was Nebraska at its hottest, and Mattie Armstrong was grateful for the shade of the house, the cool of the tall trees planted near it. She had too often been out on that prairie in the midst of summer, and she knew the ferocity of the summer sun.

  Deliberately, she headed for the stairs, carefully reached for the railing and started down the six small steps. Darned steps were too narrow! If she’d known years ago how she was going to age, she’d have had Eli build them wider.

  Step by painful step, she proceeded off the porch and down the walk to the road, some fifty yards away. There she turned and looked back at the house and the trees she had planted to break the wind and soften the square construction she had insisted on because it spoke of permanence to her. When it was built, it was the finest building in Benteen, and until 1936, when the town built a hospital, it had been her sanitarium, the place where she could watch over her patients. After that, it had been home to countless young people in need of a little help to finish their education, start their lives in the right direction. Tom Redbone had set a precedent, she reflected. Looking again at the house, she told herself that it was still the finest building in town. She turned then to look at the new houses that had sprung up around her. Ranch-style, they called them, small one-story affairs. At least they hadn’t cut her off from the prairie.

  She was halfway back to the house when she heard the car. Tom Redbone, come to pay his daily call. He treated her as a duty, she regarded him as a nuisance, and they both depended on these daily visits.

  Unfolding his long length from the maroon Pontiac, Tom called. “I suppose I’ll have to help you back up those stairs.”

  “You just try,” Mattie replied, grasping the railing and pulling herself up the first step.

  Tom reached the foot of the steps before she gained the porch, but he simply stood and watched. At nearly forty years of age, he was tall, thin and a little stooped. A crooked nose, probably the result of a schoolyard battle long ago, kept him from being handsome, but his eyes were intense and blue, and his manner, warm and friendly. His patients generally adored him. His wife, however, was bored by him.

  “Well,” she said when they were both settled in rockers, “what problem have you brought to worry me today?”

  “Let’s see.” Eyes twinkling, he gazed off into space, touching first one finger and then the next as though counting imaginary problems. “The office caught fire, grasshoppers got my wheat, the head nurse at the clinic quit . . .”

  “Very funny.”

  “I don’t feel funny. I came to tell you I’m leaving Benteen.” The twinkle disappeared from his eye, and he was instantly sober.

  It wasn’t unexpected, but the words went through her like a knife, and she knew he heard her draw her breath in sharply.

  “Mattie, it’s not something you didn’t expect.”

  “I . . . I don’t know whether I expected it or not. It’s Susan, isn’t it?”

  “No!” He stood suddenly and began pacing the length of the porch. “It’s partly Susan . . . but it’s this town, the way I live, the kind of medicine I practice . . . I’m going back to the university, where I can practice medicine, still have a life for myself and be involved in medicine the way I want to. Not bound . . .”

  “Bound by what? Your patients’ needs?”

  “Mattie, don’t try to make me feel guilty. I’ve stayed here fifteen years. I’ve paid my dues.” He stopped and stared at her. “I know, you stayed fifty, and you don’t consider your dues paid yet. But I don’t understand that. I don’t understand the kind of life you’ve led. All I know is that I feel like something is going to explode inside me. I’ve got to do something different.”

  “And Susan?”

  “She’ll stay here, keep the farm. She won’t be lonely long.”

  Mattie grunted. “Why don’t we send Susan away and let you stay here?” She could not put into words her desperate need. She could not tell him what he should have known, that he was the son she never had, the child her own daughter would never be. Nor could she burden him with responsibility for carrying on the clinic she had established. Yet, selfishly, all these things were what she wanted to say.

  “Mattie, don’t joke.”

  “I know. It’s a serious matter, and I’m sorry. I was . . . trying to be clever to hide how seriously I feel about it. I . . . It’s your decision. I’ll support whatever you decide.”

  He looked down at his toes, like an embarrassed child. “I know,” he muttered.

  “I suppose Bella will leave, too.” She said it haltingly, fearing to hear the answer. Her granddaughter frustrated her more than half the time, fussing over her as though she had lost her brains with her physical ability, but Mattie was proud of Bella. Somewhere, in five marriages and a final descent into alcoholism, Nora had done something right in raising that girl, something that she herself had failed to do with Nora. Bella made up for all the failures when she came home to Benteen to work in Tom’s clinic.

  “She’ll stay and manage the clinic for someone else, just as she does for me. I’ve taught her well, if I do say so, and she’s bright and capable.”

  “Bother! I know all that. Will she stay without you?”

  “Why shouldn’t she? She stays because of the clinic, not because of me.”

  “Tom Redbone, if you believe that, you’re more thickheaded than I thought. The girl’s in love with you.” There, she had said it.

  He looked away, embarrassed. “Don’t be silly, Mattie. I’m married, and she’s fifteen years younger than I am.”

  “Makes no difference.” Was Bella part of the
reason he thought of leaving? She decided to take him off the hook and change the subject. “When do you plan to leave?”

  “God, Mattie, I don’t know. I’m not planning to leave.” He threw his hands in the air in a quick, exasperated gesture. “I haven’t really decided to go. I just kind of tried that out on you.”

  “And what did you think of the reaction?” She asked it with wry bitterness. “Was I a good guinea pig?”

  “Disappointing,” he replied. “Here, let me take your blood pressure, and I’ll be on my way.”

  “Fiddlesticks. My blood pressure will be high, and you’ll try to tell me I need more medicine than I do. Just go and leave me be.”

  But he stayed another fifteen minutes, sometimes staring into space, sometimes talking monosyllabically about the weather, the crops, the heat, a new patient or an old one. Mattie responded, letting him set the tone and watching him closely. Then, with another of his sudden, almost nervous gestures, he was gone.

  She stayed on the porch long after he had left. It was selfish, she knew, to want him to stay in Benteen. She’s raised him to be independent, since the day he came to her as a twelve-year-old, and if that independence took him away now, it was only right. Nor could she expect him to feel bound to Benteen, obligated to care for the health of its citizens as she had felt.

  Would he go? She doubted it. If he did, would he be happier? She’d wondered that herself a thousand times, tempted always by practice offers in Omaha, once by a restless love. She had stayed, and now at eighty, she was sure she’d been right. But how could she make Tom understand that? And why did she feel responsible, as though it all came back to her? Tom’s unhappiness, the bitterness of Nora, the betrayal of Em, the husband she had loved and then scorned, even the tragic lives of Sara Dinsmore and her father, now both dead and gone . . . Could she, would she have done it differently?

  Slowly she got up and limped inside, passing through the living room with its dark walnut furniture and small Oriental rugs that Tom swore would kill her one day. Purposefully, she went to the old rolltop desk in the adjoining room—once it had been her office, but now it was a study, a place where she could pay her bills, write letters, read a little, and think back over a half century as the first woman doctor in Nebraska.

  But today she had no time for reverie. Deliberately, she put paper in the typewriter and pulled her chair as close as she could, shifting her weight to ease the pain in her hip.

  Arthritis, she thought, doesn’t kill you, it just makes you wish it would, and it can kill your spirit. I’ve seen it happen before. What if, she wondered uncomfortably, I can’t finish this or can’t finish it as honestly as I want to?

  She stared at the blank paper. How did one begin? “I was born” seemed prosaic. So did a statement such as “My earliest memory . . .” Maybe she should explain about her family. How did you explain that tangle, that strange mixture of fierce love and slight shame with which she had grown up and which ultimately had been so central in shaping the course of her life? She began to type.

  “My mother was an unmarried mother, fallen woman, they called her . . .”

  About the Author

  Judy Alter is an award-winning writer of fiction for adults and young adults. For much of her career, she focused on the experiences of women in the American West, such as Mattie. Her work has been recognized with Spur Awards from Western Writers of America, Western Heritage (Wrangler) Awards from the National Cowboy Museum and Hall of Fame, and the Owen Wister Lifetime Achievement Award from Western Writers America. She was recently inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame. She was named an Outstanding Woman of Fort Worth by the Mayor’s Committee on Women and one of the 100 women, living or dead, who have left their mark on Texas. A past president of the Western Writers of America, she is a member of Sisters in Crime and the Guppies chapter. The single parent of four now-grown children, she has seven grandchildren and lives in Fort Worth, Texas, with her Australian shepherd and a long-haired, elderly cat.

  Find Judy at http://www.judys-stew,blogspot.com; judy@judyalter.com

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Epilogue