Unwed (Dovetail Cove, 1976) (Dovetail Cove Series)

by Jason McIntyre

“First thing,” Roi said, looking around. “We need a table.”

  He blinked once, behind his fogging glasses. “Oh. And where is our patient?”

  14.

  Someone tried the main doors again. This happened while the two doctors were transporting their supplies out of the crying room. A voice called from behind the big wooden doors. “Hello? Father Frye?”

  No one responded. Bexy looked at Doc. Doc looked at Roi who paused to eye the makeshift barrier created out of flag poles jammed through the door handles. “Don’t worry,” Doc said to him. “It’ll hold. We’ll have you out of here in a jiffy. I don’t think anyone except the priest and the groundskeeper know about that side door. And the groundskeeper’s likely snoring to beat the band.”

  Roi gave a tight smile. He wasn’t perturbed in the least. He went about the business of setting up his O.R.

  They made the hasty decision to clear off the communion table. It was the only raised surface big enough to hold a patient. There was no ramp up to the altar, so the two men hoisted Bexy in her chair and placed her up there. “We’ll need you,” Doc said. “Come on over here, Mary, you did a real good job looking after the Father there. He’s going to be just fine. And it’s all yer doing. It is.”

  Mary smiled. She’d taken her duties seriously. The only other time Bexy had seen Mary as serious was at dinner tonight—when the girl had confided about her ‘husband’.

  I’m scared, Mary had said. I wanted the gift. I did. But now I don’t...It’s too hard.

  “Come ‘ere, sweetie,” Bexy said as a confirmation. “It’s okay. No one’s going to hurt you. This is Roi. He’s a doctor. Just like Doc.”

  Roi stopped what he was doing and held out his hand to Mary. “Go on,” Bexy said. “He’s going to make your tummy all better. He’s going to take your husband’s gift.” Mary took his hand and it reminded Bexy of how the girl had been introduced to Bexy, only a few days ago. How far they’d come since then. She had a real fondness—and a fierce need of protection—for this girl.

  Roi went back to work. He unraveled and threw a large see-through tarp over the communion table, making the words “This do in remembrance of me” blurry on the front face. From one bag he pulled out two giant bottles. “Alcohol,” he said to Bexy who was watching with a mix of nerves and curiosity. At least he didn’t swig from the bottle, she thought, and almost laughed aloud.

  Instead, Roi swabbed down the surface of the plastic sheeting with generous amounts of the liquid from the bottles.

  Doc left them. He took his own black bag and went down the shallow steps from the altar over to the pew where Father Frye lay. Doc got down on one knee as if he intended to propose marriage to the clergyman. But instead he checked his pulse again, his breathing, then dug in his bag. With his back purposefully showing to Mary, he withdrew a syringe and uncapped it. He warmed its tube in his big mitt and then flicked it with a fingernail. He drove it into the Father’s rib near the padding over his wound and injected clear liquid into the priest’s side. He got proper gauze and an ointment and went about doing a proper dressing on the wound. When he looked satisfied, he got up with a groan and a creak of his knees. He returned to the others on the altar with an empty look. “Changed him out. Started him on a round of antibiotics and local antibiotic cream,” he said. To Roi, he said, “Long story.”

  Roi leaned in and said something quietly to Doc, and Bexy couldn’t catch it.

  “Dry?” he said louder to Roi and Roi gave him a nod. The table was ready.

  “Hop up here, little one,” Doc said in Mary’s direction and he patted the table. “Whoops, I guess we’ll have to get your pants off first. Now, sweetie, this is just like when you come to my office at the clinic, right? Mrs. McLeod will be right here with you, every minute, all right? And Doctor Roi, he’s just going to have a little look atcha and we’ll see about this baby in your tummy. M’kay?”

  Mary yawned. “M’kay,” she said in casual agreement. To her, this was no big deal, even if they were doing an inspection of her private parts in the same place where she and the choir sang their hymns. She untied the drawstring on her pyjama bottoms and slid them down. Panties came next. She inched herself up onto the table—which was a bit high for sitting—and her sock feet dangled. Bexy wheeled in beside her.

  “Docta Roi, he take the gift back, Missa Cloud?” Mary asked.

  “That’s right,” Bexy said, holding her tears from leaking. “He’s going to take the gift back. That’s still what you want, is it, honey?”

  “Yes, Missa Cloud,” Mary said with a solemnity that belied her.

  Roi and Doc each poured copiously from one of the big bottles. They let the excess splash to the plastic sheeting on the floor. They rubbed and then waved their hands a little to let a breeze evaporate the alcohol.

  The doc gestured for Mary to lay down. She shivered. “It’s so cold,” she said.

  “I know, honey,” Bexy said. “Just a few minutes and we can get you dressed and take you home.”

  Roi draped a white sheet over her. He touched her knees to show her how he wanted her legs spread apart. No stirrups on a communion table, Bexy thought. She wasn’t about to laugh, but it was still an absurd notion.

  Mary’s knees made two points to the big white tent. Her lower half was swallowed by it. Bexy was about to ask what the sheet was for—modesty, cleanliness—but then she saw the glint of steel and glass in the light. No words, only a pinched face from Mary.

  “Missa Cloud!” she said through gritted teeth.

  From over Roi’s shoulder at the shroud covering Mary’s propped legs, Doc said, “Lorazepam?”

  Roi nodded.

  “It’s okay,” Bexy said. “Just a little pinch, right?”

  With her eyes squeezed tight, Mary nodded quickly. Bexy took her hand and squeezed it but she could see the startle—and the pain—already subsiding. From the angle she had, she also saw Roi’s dark brown wrist working. Roi gave her more shots and, finally, he put the long steel and glass needle down on a pan of other items. Bexy didn’t let her eyes linger too long on them. Many of them looked like the pieces Doc had used at the clinic’s back exam room on Sunday after Mass. But many of them didn’t. Doc stood over Roi and adjusted one of the light stands Roi had brought with him. It shone down into the tent of the girl’s legs under the white cloth.

  Both men used the drape as a privacy shield—not just for Mary, but for their own doings. They leaned forward and began the process of pulling blue rubber gloves onto their hands, snapping and pulling and fitting them around their fingers. When Roi was satisfied with the state of his own, he spoke to Doc, in a voice so quiet, Bexy wasn’t entirely certain he’d said English words at all.

  Doc relayed the message to Bexy but he did it without words. He gingerly placed one hand at Mary’s ankle. He did it slowly and deliberately and then Bexy saw the blood fade from his hand, making it white. Doc was holding her ankle tight. From that, Bexy looked up at Doc’s face. Doc eyed her and then pointed with his eyes at the girl’s other ankle. She was supposed to firmly hold it.

  She used her other hand to awkwardly reach out and try to duplicate the light-to-tight touch the doc had used. Mary didn’t flinch, didn’t even seem to notice. Bexy exhaled with some relief.

  Roi spoke to Doc again, his voice still low. This was going to be his norm, she supposed—just loud enough for Doc, not loud enough to spook anyone.

  “Speculum,” was the word this time, though. Bexy knew that one.

  The glint of steel as the doc handed him the duckbill-shaped device. It rattled, and Roi took it and hid it from Mary and Bexy behind the drape. Mary squeezed Bexy’s hand as that shiny speculum found its deep place. The hand-squeeze died off—just, Bexy imagined, as the discomfort went from awful to bearable.

  But then, she heard the turning of the speculum’s thumb screw. It would be widening the speculum, making room for fingers, for light, and for more objects to do their work. Mary’s fingers squeezed Bexy’s tighter a
nd tighter. Then the thumb screw noise stopped. Mary’s hand squeeze wore off again too.

  “Single tooth tenaculum,” Roi said. Again, he used a low voice, nearly inaudible. This specialist was cool, calm, and collected. Doc reached for a pair of long, pointed scissors. Only, they weren’t scissors. Instead of blades, they had long thin tips with points at each end that curved like small, hooked teeth. Those went under the drape.

  “Hold it here,” Roi said after a moment of finesse with the tenaculum. Doc stepped forward and wordlessly reached in to steady the instrument.

  Bexy looked away from the drape and up at Mary’s face. The girl wore beads of sweat on her pink cheeks and forehead. She cringed and rolled her head on her neck at Bexy.

  “Just a little longer,” Bexy said. But she knew it would be more than that. This was just beginning. At the door behind them, the door that led down to the activity room, someone pounded hard with a fist. “Hello? Father Frye? Are you in there?”

  Bexy looked over at Father Frye and his makeshift bandages. His chest rose and fell as he lay there, perhaps blissful in his oblivion. If he woke up, there would be hell to pay.

  “Why’s the door locked?” the voice said from behind the door.

  Bexy wasn’t sure, but it sounded like Gladys Troyer.

  15.

  Bexy went away for a little while. She didn’t leave the church, didn’t let go of Mary’s hand or wheel away from her splayed on the communion table with that white sheet draped over her tented legs. But still. She went away for a while.

  She first imagined Father Frye coming awake—despite whatever Doc had injected in him as he lay on the short wooden church pew. He would come awake and stalk right up to this immoral act—occurring right here on the altar of his sacred house of The Lord. He would stand and he would wag his finger. He would tower over Bexy McLeod and he would holler, “For shame! For shame!”

  And then, somehow, even though it was physically impossible, Gladys Troyer with her sprained foot would barge through the door from the back half of the church. She would push Bexy over in her wheelchair and she would shove the illegal immigrant specialist aside. In her self-righteous, holier than-thou terms of speech she’d do her own admonishing of what was happening here. She’d pick Mary up from the communion table with superhuman strength before marching out of here and taking the young woman home with her.

  Bexy had a fleeting thought.

  She could be the one to stop this. She could be the superhuman one.

  But someone had done this to Mary. Done it to her. This hadn’t been her choice. This was a gift that Mary didn’t want, and she’d said so. And, even bigger perhaps, something wasn’t right here. Bexy believed that. Something was wrong with the baby and it was—she didn’t know exactly—doing something to Mary. She pictured that stray cat clawing at her bedsheets. What had it been doing? Sniffing out those rotten teeth falling out of Mary’s mouth?

  Mary squeezed Bexy’s hand again. Bexy squeezed back. Just like Bexy had done with her own nervous daughter a million years before.

  From behind the drape, Roi said, “Dilator.”

  But with his heavy accent, it sounded like he said, “Die Later.”

  “Size?” Doc said.

  “Mm,” Roi said, considering. “Number 2 and then have number 4 and number 6 ready right afterwards.”

  Doc handed a steel dilator to Roi, still crouched and focused on the world inside that makeshift tent.

  On the pew, Father Frye stirred. He mumbled something and rolled his head around on the wood seat of the bench.

  From outside, Gladys Troyer called out again. “Bexy McLeod, are you in there? Did you lock us out?”

  Unperturbed, Roi kept working. Bexy wanted to shout, “Leave us in peace, you cow!” but she didn’t. She bit back against saying anything at all. Piping up now would make things worse, might even serve to drive that Gladys bitch in here. Somehow, even though it didn’t seem possible for her to break down that door. Instead of escalating things, Bexy sat quietly, her fingers laced with Mary’s. Sweat dribbled down her own face now. Again, she wanted to speak. She wanted to say to the doctors, “Hurry up. Let’s just get this done,” but she knew better than that. She knew better than to add to their stress. They might not be showing it—they couldn’t show it—but they were feeling it. Maybe even more than Bexy.

  Instead of piping up, Bexy did what she’d been forced to do her entire life, what she’d hardly ever been successful at. She waited.

  Roi went through a series of dilators. Mary made a series of faces as he did so. And still, Doc’s hand and Bexy’s hand both stayed at Mary’s ankles.

  Bexy started whispering in the girl’s ear. “Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow...” That seemed to help, but Bexy couldn’t tell if it was calming her or Mary more. She kept reciting it. And when she got to the end, she started over again.

  “Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow...”

  Roi spoke. “Turn on suction. Attach curette number...”

  “...And everywhere that Mary went...”

  “Mm. Second thought, give me the biggest one...”

  “...That lamb was sure to go...”

  “The biggest?” Doc said.

  “Yeah, you said less than fourteen weeks,” Roi said. “It’s looking more like eighteen, nineteen.”

  “...It followed her to school one day which was against the rule...”

  The suction drive on the biggest device started up. Powered from an extension cord, it helped make the church look more like a construction zone—and most assuredly not an operating room.

  “...And so the teacher turned it out, but still it lingered near...”

  “Go ahead and hand me that,” Roi said. “The suction curette.”

  “...And waited patiently about, til Mary did appear...”

  “Curette,” Doc said, handing it over. “The big one.”

  “…‘Why does the lamb love Mary so?’ the eager children cry...”

  The vacuuming suction began: a large roar that sounded just like Bexy’s Hoover at home. She would get a woman in twice a month to help with chores like windows and vacuuming. Bexy had to nearly shout to finish off the last line of the rhyme.

  “…‘Why, Mary loves the lamb, you know,’ the teacher did reply...”

  16.

  The screaming and the flexing started at the same time. Mary’s legs were like snakes, slithering away from both Doc’s grip and Bexy’s. And her mouth opened wide to let out the guts of a shriek that wound into Bexy’s brain and made the white snowy gush from earlier seem like static on a bad TV station.

  Ground in against the sound coming from her lungs was the awful charge of the suction machine. The look on Roi’s face matched it. Both were shocked and unable to handle what was happening.

  Doc kept a grip on Mary’s one ankle. Bexy lost hers.

  But she regained it in a moment, despite the girl’s skin soaked with sweat. Her back arched and she struggled to get up.

  Doc let go of the tenaculum and reached out to settle her.

  And still that suction howled. Then it gurgled and chunked. There was the noise of suctioning liquid. Bexy couldn’t see but she imagined the amount of blood and ooze that would need to be present for that kind of gurgling noise. It sounded like the Banatynes’ dishwasher.

  Roi blasted back from the tent of the girl’s legs. His mouth opened but no sound came out. If it did, it was drowned out by the girl’s screaming and the madness of the machine.

  Gurgle-slurp-churn. And then an expletive from the normally quiet specialist. He pulled back. An elongated set of tight-knit crunches, like tree branches going through the municipal wood chipper in autumn.

  And when Roi pulled back, the clear plastic curette peeked up from behind Mary’s knees and Bexy got a good, long look at it.

  It was chunks of black, some pale, almost like bits of skin. But it was all swimming in a stark swirl of shocking red. Roi’s blue gloves were g
one, replaced with the slick red of the girl’s internal fluids. Bexy didn’t know if she was looking at placenta, pieces of fetus or birth fluid—or all of those things.

  But then she saw the plastic curette throbbing. Something inside wanted out. It was a red and dark mass, swirling in there, making the thick hard plastic swell and recede. Then a tearing noise, not unlike the sound Bexy woke to last night when that feral cat was clawing at the bedsheets.

  Only this time, it was mixed with what sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard. All three cringed. Mary kept wailing. And the curette split apart like it was a paper towel tube. As though it had taken a vicious bite from an animal, the plastic flopped open like two uneven peels from a banana.

  Roi finally yelled out. And the mass, just a misshapen blob a little smaller than Bexy’s open hand minus fingers, it jutted out and slithered down the handle of the curette. The tube trailing out from Roi’s gloved hand shuddered. All of Roi did too. Blink-blink. Bexy saw a little black eye do that. It made no sense, but that’s what it looked like.

  Then the thing changed shape and formed itself around Roi’s hand. Snikt. A sound that made Bexy think of sharp knives as they slid into the Banatynes’ kitchen knife block.

  Then Roi really let out a holler. He shook his arm like he’d been bitten by a dog and was desperate to loose the beast from its clamp on his appendage.

  Finally, the thing swung away, arcing and throwing droplets of its bloody self into the air.

  Ftt—ftt—fttt.

  Three long tendrils of the specialist’s blood darted up into the air. He stood, knocking his chair away in a clatter. His finger’s gouge was so deep and so fine—like a scalpel’s—that the blood was just a thin thread up in the air. Roi watched it for a second as a third heartbeat and a fourth sent out their pumps of red thread. He reacted. Grabbing gauze, he packed his hand quickly and decisively, cutting off the airborne flow.

  Mary still screamed. Bexy still didn’t let her go. She kicked free of Doc and just kept fighting against Bexy’s rigid hold.