At the Scent of Water

by Linda Nichols

  For a moment Sam wished there really were some little cove or hollow here that time had forgotten, a place to which he could go to turn the clock back. He wished passionately that there were some geographic location at which it was still ten years prior. He would go there and stay, watch the hand on his watch sweep in a dizzying swirl leftward, travel back through weeks and months to a time before everything had gone so horribly wrong.

  He drove into town and parked his car in front of the building Carl Dalton and his own father had turned into a clinic, the place where his brother still practiced, though Carl had added a building to his house that served as an office instead of taking official retirement.

  “I’m an old dog,” he had told Sam. “I like practicing medicine the old way. Y’all can have your computers. I like to keep things simple.” And keep them simple, he did. He answered his own phone, made his own appointments when his part-time receptionist wasn’t there, and collected the fees whenever the spirit moved him. His father-in-law was not a wealthy man, by any means. Carl had always been more like a clearinghouse than a savings bank. But half the population of Haywood County had a Carl Dalton story to tell. He put my son through college. He paid for my mother’s hospital stay. He gave me money to have my electricity turned back on. And over and over again, He treated me for free. Sam felt a lurch of gratitude when he thought how Carl had mentored him and Ricky, even when their father was alive. John Truelove had modeled dedication and commitment, but he was a silent man, morose and taciturn. Sam had admired him and feared him all at the same time. Not so with jovial Carl. He was generous with words and time and money. Needless to say, collecting for his own services was not one of Carl’s top priorities, and God seemed to reward him. Though many of the younger residents of Gilead Springs took their families to Waynesville, Sylva, or even Asheville for medical services, somehow Carl’s appointment book always stayed full. He was nearly seventy but showed no sign of retiring. Besides, even when he quit his practice, he would still be a gentleman farmer. He and Diane had quite a spread up in the hills.

  Sam thought again of how differently Carl and Ricky practiced medicine than he did. The two of them were always busy, but Carl always seemed to find time to go fishing or to jaw for a half hour or so at the Waffle House with his cronies, and Ricky went white-water rafting nearly every weekend, at least he had until his children had come along and the drought had dried up the river. For a moment Sam’s mind went back to his own practice, and something like panic gripped him. He had an awful feeling that he was remiss, that he was neglecting his duty and lives would pay. He got a grip on himself and shook it off. He had no practice. He had no patients. But he still had a horrible feeling of doom, a certainty that he ought to be somewhere else. He focused his mind on what was in front of him and walked toward the building.

  Ricky’s office, like the rest of downtown Gilead Springs, was red brick and shaded with magnolias and oaks. Sam stepped inside the double doorway, and once inside, the illusion that he had stepped into the past was strong. The entry hall was high-ceilinged, the walls plastered, and portraits of the town’s founding fathers lined them at regular intervals. You could almost smell the past in here, that dusty fragrance of the years.

  His brother practiced with a pediatrician. Sam opened the door to their shared waiting room. It was empty, as Sam had known it would be. It was one o’clock and still the lunch hour, sacred in this small-town private practice. The office would be a no-man’s-land from noon to one-thirty. He knew his brother went home for lunch every day. He passed the empty reception area and went into his brother’s office.

  If rooms could talk, this one would chatter. The walls were covered with photographs—school pictures and baby pictures and pictures of Ricky holding newborns of every size, shape, and color. There were handmade cards signed with childish scrawls, and formal thank-yous from parents, and the ubiquitous newborn photographs in which the infants always had a vaguely insectlike appearance. Ricky’s Bible was on the credenza, opened to a page in the Psalms. Beside it was a half-empty cup of coffee, the cream settled into a ring in the middle. Sam’s eyes fell onto an underlined phrase. Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice. So Ricky had been reading Psalm 51. David’s cry of contrition. Sam had memorized it, had prayed it so often he knew it by heart. Obviously to no avail.

  He turned and examined the walls. They were lined with familiar lithographs and paintings, most of which had belonged to him at one time. He had left them here when he accepted the job in Tennessee. Somehow they seemed to belong to this world, the one he was leaving, rather than the one he was going to. He examined one of his favorites, an old black-and-white daguerreotype of a horse-drawn ambulance caught in midflight, the grainy dots of the horse’s mane blurring with movement. Annie had found it in an antique shop in Charleston on their honeymoon and had bought it for him.

  Beside it was an old framed cover from a 1948 Life magazine. His mother had given it to him when he graduated from medical school. It pictured a country doctor, a thin, burdened-looking fellow walking through a field, armed with nothing but his black bag and his two hands. Sam could almost feel the urgency nipping at his heels, the weight of responsibility sagging his shoulders as he hurried to the next call.

  There beside it was a photograph that had belonged to his father. His mother had given each of them a copy of it after Daddy’s death. It was a black-and-white photo of Sam’s grandfather, another Dr. Truelove, taken beside his horse-drawn wagon, circa 1920. He was holding his black bag. He would probably receive a few chickens or a side of bacon for his services.

  Sam paused longest at the last, an old oil painting, another relic from his father’s office, and he had no idea where it had come from originally. It also had been his own and actually had been part of the reason he had decided to go to medical school to begin with. He stepped close and examined it again. It was a simple scene, the setting a small room in a roughhewn house. The mother, head on her bent arm, wept at the table. The father stood stoic beside her, his hand on her shoulder, but absently, all his attention focused on the doctor in the foreground. The doctor’s suit was rumpled, his posture tensed. He leaned forward, his sober, weary, careworn face showing worry mixed with hope as he watched his small patient. She was a child with reddish brown curls, and she lay prostrate on a makeshift bed of pillows and blankets stretched across two kitchen chairs. In the past when he had looked at the painting, Sam had fast-forwarded in his mind to the next day when the child was up and playing, the parents grateful and happy. The doctor the hero of the tableau. I want to do that, he had decided, and he had been headed for general pediatrics. He could imagine what his life would have been like working in Asheville or here in the office with his brother. Breakfasts and lunches with his wife. Suppers at home each night. He would have been respected and had a fulfilling career. But then he had discovered the gift and everything had changed.

  His hours grew longer. He was at home little, if at all. He broke his promise to Annie to relocate to Asheville after his training was finished and instead made the grueling commute to Knoxville, over an hour each way. More and more frequently he didn’t make the drive, sleeping in the doctors’ lounge in the few hours between the late nights and early mornings.

  Sam looked at the picture again, at the pale still face of the child, the despair in the doctor’s eyes, and a different scenario presented itself. The obvious one. It gave him a hollow, hopeless feeling.

  The bell on the door jingled, and Sam came to himself again. He went back out to the waiting room. It was the receptionist, back from lunch, and she was greeting a young woman who looked as if she might deliver twins or triplets right there in the waiting room.

  “Dr. Truelove!” The receptionist’s eyes widened as she saw him, and her face looked surprised. “Good to see you.” She met his eyes briefly, then her own darted away.

  So she knew. Well, that was to be expected. He supposed everyone knew. It didn�
��t matter. He had no face left to save. It was Kelly Bright he thought of, still lying in her bed, hungry, thirsty, dying.

  “I was just leaving,” he said.

  “Your brother should be back any minute.”

  Sam vacillated, the urge to run away still strong. A coward’s way, he realized, and besides, what had he been thinking? The moment he drove into town someone would have spotted him. Mama probably already knew he was here. There would be no slinking away.

  “Would you care to wait for him?” the receptionist offered.

  Sam shook his head. He took a piece of paper from his wallet and scribbled Ricky a note. Tell Mama I’ll be home for supper. Sam.

  The telephone rang. The receptionist took the paper from him, gave him a nod, and spoke into the receiver. Another patient came in, and Sam went outside and took a deep breath of the warm fresh air. He supposed he could have told Mama he was coming himself, but he wasn’t ready to talk to her. Not yet. Her own sorrow tore at his heart, but he had no words to give her any more than he had to give Annie. He looked around the square and took but a moment to make up his mind as to what he would do. It was what he had always done as a boy when he’d had a problem. It had cleared his mind, and though he knew there was no simplistic solution to what ailed him now, at least it would be better than his alternative of facing distraught family members.

  He walked across the square to the small hardware store, purchased a cheap rod and reel and a dozen night crawlers. He got back into his car and headed up the mountain, making one more stop at the grocery store/gas station on the edge of town where he bought two ham biscuits, a cup of coffee, a bottle of water, and a magazine. He opened the water while he waited for his change, took two aspirin for the dull headache that throbbed behind his eyes, then headed for Parson’s Creek.

  * * *

  Sam drove to the turnoff. He rolled down the window and felt the warm air on his face, heard the gravel popping under his tires.

  He parked the car under a giant hemlock by the bank and got out. He glanced down and saw his perfectly creased suit pants and leather shoes being covered with a fine layer of red dust. Rolling up the sleeves of his shirt, he went to the trunk, popped it open, and took out the new fishing pole. How many years had it been since he’d used one? He could barely remember. He found himself a spot on the bank, baited, and cast his line. His magazine sat unread beside him, along with the uneaten food.

  Sam thought of his patients in the hospital. He had no patients, he corrected himself. He thought of his practice, of sweet-faced Izzy. Izzy would be fine. He should face the fact. He was no longer needed. The thought jarred him. There was no one who needed him today. No lives that needed saving. At least not by him.

  He fished determinedly, as focused on those trout as if he intended to perform surgery on them, avoiding the prospect of the rest of the day. Coming here had seemed like the obvious thing to do. Now that he was here, he felt that he had made a mistake, but really, he had nowhere else to go.

  Staring at the deep water of the creek, he remembered. He had always fished with his father. Ricky had gone off with Carl, and Sam would hear them from yards down the bank, laughing and hooting and calling things out when they got a big one on the hook. Not so with Daddy. John Truelove had fished with the same concentration and perfectionistic intensity that he did everything else, and for a moment Sam could see his father as he had looked as a young man. Tall, thin, the sharp bones of his face planed into lines of concentration. Dark in demeanor and coloring, his brow always furrowed, his gait always long and hasty. Sam remembered being sent to take supper to his father and finding him in the kitchen of the small clinic in Gilead Springs. He had been called in to do an emergency appendectomy on a patient too far gone to travel to Asheville, and Sam had found him still wearing the surgical whites, smoking, eyes staring hollowly. It was as if his father had fought a one-man battle against all the pain in the world. He understood it now. He hadn’t then.

  He remembered contrasting jovial, laughing Carl with his father and wondering which of them was wrong. He remembered something else. Every so often he and Ricky and Laurie would spend the night with their grandmother Truelove, gone on home years ago now. He remembered seeing her vibrant faith and wondering why she wasn’t in despair, or why his father didn’t rejoice, as she did, that his name was written in heaven. And he remembered wondering why his grandmother grieved over her son. It seemed very odd to him, even as a child, because by all rights John Truelove was a success. He had followed the family march down out of the mountains, to college and then medical school, had taken his best friend, Carl Dalton, with him, and made certain each of his sons followed in the firmly laid out footsteps. Yet Sam remembered his grandmother’s earnest prayers for his father. They had totally confused him as a boy, for his father was the biggest figure in his landscape. They confused him less now but brought with them a heaviness, a sagging realization that the proverbial apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree. He stared at the surface of the water rippling gently over the rocky bottom and waited for a fish to bite, his mind whirring so fast from point to point he was surprised the leaves weren’t stirring on the tree beside him.

  After an unfruitful hour he rose up to leave. The fish weren’t biting. He’d known they wouldn’t be, for it was midafternoon, and the sun and the water were warm. Besides, the drought had probably dried up the blue holes, those places where the springs fed the creek where the trout liked to congregate. He pulled in his line and made his way toward the road. He paused at the fork in the trail and hesitated just a moment before tucking his paraphernalia down in the brush and heading up the path. He climbed for twenty minutes or so, through the lush foliage.

  His breath came in short puffs, his lungs and legs burning. He slowed down to catch his breath, taking the opportunity to look at the flowering bushes and clumps of wild flowers. He wouldn’t be surprised if this was the most beautiful place on earth. He glanced to the side. There was an old cabin over there under the pines. It was rickety, falling down, hard to tell from the landscape around it. He and Ricky used to come up here when they were kids. They’d scrounged around and found a few things. A wagon wheel, a rusted spade, an old iron kettle turned to rust. It made him sad now to think that something once so proud and beautiful had been reduced to dust and ruin.

  He pushed on. There used to be a spot up here just past the swimming hole where the creek widened out. The church had held baptisms here, his grandmother had said, before they built the indoor baptistry.

  There it was. He approached the bank and stood for a moment surveying the wide pool behind the natural dam and the short splashing falls beneath it. The water was very low, and he could barely imagine it as it had been. He stared and tried to anyway, seeing past it to the scene as it would have looked a hundred years ago, the banks covered with clean white sheets and covered dishes.

  The women would have been up before dawn, cooking, the men doing their chores. The children would have been loaded into the back of a wagon, most likely, for these were poor people and few had automobiles. Once they arrived here, there would have been singing and laughing, and he could almost hear the hymns and gospel songs he’d grown up with as background music: “Kneel at the Cross,” “The Wayfaring Pilgrim,” “Are You Washed in the Blood?” He looked around him at the stand of pines and could imagine them there having their dinner on the ground, clumped in groups talking, murmuring, children running between them, and then he could picture them making their way to the banks, one or two who had made a decision stepping down into the cold clean water and coming up pure and faultless. He felt a surge of longing. He turned away, and the scene disappeared.

  Fifteen

  By the time they landed in Asheville, Annie was beginning to realize the rashness of her actions. What was she doing here? she asked herself as she shuffled off with her oversized purse slung over her shoulder. She walked slowly to the baggage claim and stood silently. Elijah retrieved her suitcase for her and carried it
with his own to the car rental counter.

  “There you go,” he said, setting it down beside her. “It’s been a real pleasure meeting you.”

  “Thank you,” she replied. She shook his hand. “I enjoyed meeting you, as well.”

  “I’m sure our paths will cross again.” Elijah gave her a slight smile, then with a final courtly nod he walked away.

  She noticed he had a slight limp, a hitch in his walk. He looked alone and somehow a little forsaken, and she realized she had been too absorbed in herself to wonder about him. How had he received that injury? What had he actually done in Africa? What was he going to do here? Where, exactly, was he going, and how was he going to get there? She didn’t know because she hadn’t asked. She watched him merge into the crowd of travelers and felt a pang of regret. She knew she would not be seeing him again, no matter what he had said. He was a nice man, someone who could have been a friend in another life, but then that was just the way things were. People came. And they went.

  “I can help the next person in line.”

  She turned back to the counter at the sound of the voice, dug out her credit card, and rented a car. She followed the rental agent’s instructions, found her small Geo Metro, and followed the signs to exit the airport, but as she passed by the drop-off area, she saw a familiar form. It was Elijah, standing beside the Greyhound bus stop. She was just going to pull to the curb to offer him a ride when a car pulled in before her. Elijah greeted the driver, put his suitcase in the trunk, and climbed into the passenger side. She watched them for a moment, but they were soon lost in the surging stream of traffic.