Changes of Heart

by Paige Lee Elliston

  “As you said earlier—we walk back here,” Tessa said. “Slowly, breathing through our noses.”

  “But Sarah will be here alone,” Maggie said.

  “We brought in enough wood for a full day and a half—maybe two days,” Ian said. “Sarah would be in no more danger alone than if all of us were here.”

  All eyes swung to Sarah. Maggie noticed fear in her friend’s eyes for the first time since the whole horrid episode had begun.

  Sarah sighed. “Go get dressed, honey. Grab a couple of my sweaters and a pair of my jeans to go over yours. Grab one of those big mittens of mine with the fur inside. And please, honey...”

  “I’ll be careful, Mom. We all will. I promise.” Tessa turned to leave the kitchen, but Ian’s voice stopped her.

  “We forgot something,” he said. He looked from face to face. “Let’s pray.”

  They stood outside the back door in a knot for a long moment, easing the transition from warmth and safety to a desolate and hostile tundra. They stood close to one another through instinct, like young children huddling together in the face of danger. The wind swept about them, jagged-edged and biting, flapping loose ends of scarves, finding and numbing exposed flesh.

  Maggie’s truck, now a mound of snow, stood a couple of feet behind the back of Danny’s truck, another mound. The separate garage that housed Sarah’s Rolls was covered by a towering wave of snow. Ian’s compact car looked enough like a Hostess Sno Ball that the image appeared in each of their minds. “Makes me want a glass of milk,” Ian observed.

  They moved forward, snow squeaking under their boots as if they were stepping on very vocal mice. The depth varied according to the whimsy of the wind and the storm—in places a yard deep and tightly packed, in others a foot of softly granular accumulation that offered almost no resistance to their strides.

  Maggie’s truck, doorless on the driver’s side, was solidly packed with snow.

  “How are you going to get out, Danny?” Tessa asked. “There’s no room to maneuver.”

  “I’ll push Maggie’s rig out of the way—it should move fairly easily on the snow.”

  “If your truck starts,” Ian worried aloud.

  “It better. I paid a hundred and twenty dollars for a heavy-duty battery. Let’s clear my windows as well as we can. Remember—work and move slowly.”

  Danny pressed a small red button on his key case. The chirp and click of the doors unlocking was all but lost to the weather. “Electronic entry,” he said, smiling. “Guaranteed not to freeze.”

  “Is this a General Motors infomercial?” Maggie asked.

  “Order up some hot chocolate from your onboard Snack Facility, Danny,” Ian suggested. “Then let’s see what’s on TV in your optional GMC Family Recreation Center.”

  “I want to spend a little time in the available-at-extracost-from-your-dealer Teen Fun Arcade. Wanna play some video games, Maggie?” Tessa said, tucking her head close to her friend’s to be heard.

  Maggie laughed, just as her three friends did. But the laughter had an artificial quality to it, one that pulled a phrase her father often used into her mind: whistling in the graveyard at midnight.

  Danny opened the driver’s door, and Ian stood in front of it, using his body weight to keep it from being wrenched off by the wind. The veterinarian tried to slide the key into the ignition and then eased the key back out and put it into his mouth. “Moisture frozen in the cylinder,” he said. After an interminable few minutes, he tried the fit again, this time exerting more pressure. The key mated. He turned it. The starter motor complained for several seconds, sounding ready to surrender to the cold—and then the big V-8 fired, stuttered for a heartbeat, and boomed into life.

  Danny sat tensely at the wheel, his toe playing with the gas pedal, teasing the engine until the idle found its rhythm and became smooth. He attempted to engage the four-wheel-drive lever and found that the shift lever felt like it was encased in cement. “Let’s finish getting the snow off the windows,” Danny said. “The truck has to run awhile and warm the gear lubricant before I can do anything with it.”

  The engine chugged on, like a strong horse carrying a beloved rider where it was necessary to go. Danny had the defrost fan blasting at its highest speed, and it began erasing the thick crust of ice from the windshield. After a dozen or so minutes, fingers of actual heat began to blow through the vents, stroking the stinging faces of the four people who’d clambered into the vehicle.

  Danny tried the floor-mounted shift lever. There was a slight clash from under the rig as he found reverse. He moved the stick back to neutral. “Few more minutes is all,” he said. “No sense jamming gears when a little time will let them work like they should.”

  Maggie, in the front passenger bucket, watched Danny’s face closely as he watched his dashboard gauges, unaware of her scrutiny. He touched the shift lever again with his fingertips, moved it the slightest bit, and then withdrew his hand.

  He’s even kind to machines. It’s not that he’s afraid it’ll stall now—he simply doesn’t want to ask too much from it, to hurt it.

  Danny revved the engine and slid the gearshift into reverse. He released the clutch in increments, easing his foot upward very slowly. The knobby tires chewed snow for a few seconds and then found purchase. There was a light thud as the rear bumper tagged the front bumper of Maggie’s truck. Then Danny’s vehicle began to move backward, with Maggie’s truck sliding over the ice and snow like a sled. Danny flipped on the emergency rack lights over the cab and swung away from Maggie’s Ford like a majestic cruise ship leaving behind a tugboat.

  “Wow,” Tessa breathed.

  “You betcha, girl,” Danny said with a grin.

  The truck crept forward at a couple of miles per hour. The tires argued for traction every so often, and the chunky treads bit through inches of ice and smoked for moments until they hit the concrete of the driveway and then caught, hurling the truck forward, parting drifts higher than the vehicle itself.

  “This thing is amazing,” Ian admitted.

  Danny didn’t respond. He squinted through the curtains of snow, tense, at times biting his lower lip. His left hand had a death grip on the steering wheel; his right hovered over the console of shift levers next to him. “There’s a wire down here,” he said. “See it, there to the right? I don’t know which way the pole fell. We don’t want to get hung up on it if it’s across the road.”

  The truck stopped so suddenly that all of the passengers slammed into their shoulder harnesses. “There’s that pole,” Danny said. He shifted to reverse, backed a few feet, and fed gas to the engine. The tires squealed as the truck rammed forward—and then they felt another impact, and the truck stopped, just as suddenly as it had a moment before.

  Danny touched a toggle switch set into the dash near the shift levers. “This is kinda illegal,” he said. “It cuts out the entire exhaust and catalytic converter systems and gives me a bunch more horsepower. Remember the old Corvettes with the outside pipes? It’s the same idea. Hold on.”

  The engine escalated from its grumble to a feral roar, and the truck surged ahead, tires screaming. Danny wrestled the steering wheel when the impact took place, and then they were over the downed pole, again plowing through huge drifts of snow.

  Maggie reached over to Danny and put her mittened hand on his arm. “Whadda guy,” she said, and she wasn’t at all sure that she was joking.

  The power poles were the only reference points they had as to orientation on the road. On all sides of them was an endless, pale tableau that was frightening in its utter sameness, its lack of landmarks or detail. The truck crunched, plowed, and forced its way ahead at little better than walking speed. The heater began to channel more warmth, and the crusted ice began to melt on the inside of the windows.

  “There’s Sheila Ingram’s farm,” Maggie said. “That means we’re a bit more than halfway to my place.” A surge of excitement—of anticipation—struck her. “We’re going to make it—we’re really g
oing to make it!” Her optimism spread to the others as infectiously as a giggle in a kindergarten class. Danny grinned with his friends.

  Ian leaned toward Maggie from the seat directly behind her. “This is all going to work out fine, Maggie. I know it is.”

  Danny shifted into second gear and applied power. “Maggie’s farm comin’ up,” he shouted. For the briefest bit of a second the wind parted the snow like a curtain, and Maggie’s house appeared a quarter mile ahead, standing forlornly in a desert of white. Danny powered around a drift that was much taller than his truck and shifted back into first gear. The curtain closed as quickly as it had opened, but the peek at one of their goals filled the truck with urgency.

  Maggie’s driveway was impassable. A long, seemingly meandering shelf of snow perhaps nine or ten feet high ran most of its length. Danny wheeled toward the front lawn, the rain gully between the road and the grass giving the truck a brief battle. He swung wide of the house, the side of which was banked with snow to the second-story windows. The barn hulked ahead, but very little of it was visible from the front; the accumulated snow was easily ten feet high at the large front door.

  “Back door, Danny—it’s out of the wind. Or you can leave the truck here.”

  Danny’s response was to step on the gas pedal. The GMC’s tires churned and the rig lumbered ahead, hugging the side of the barn. When he shut down the engine, the whining of the wind was almost quiet by contrast. Everyone was out in a moment, with their scarves tugged over their faces as they scrambled to the barn. The slight grade leading to the rear door for drainage had become an apron of glare ice covered by a couple of feet of snow. Maggie was the first down when her boots found no purchase on the ice. Since she was protected by layers of clothing and the soft texture of the snow, the impact felt much like falling onto a featherbed. Tessa’s feet flipped out in front of her, and she landed on her seat, whooshing snow into the air as she laughed. Danny did his best to drag Tessa back to her feet, but he crashed down next to her.

  A long, raspy squeal—a sound that conveyed excruciating pain—stopped each of them. Maggie lurched to her feet, half falling again, and slammed into the sliding door. She jammed her shoulder against the door to break it loose from the ice in its track. In a heartbeat Danny and Ian were beside her, and then Tessa. They heaved against the door, and it begrudgingly began to slide open.

  The murky light in the barn presented a spectacle that made Maggie’s heart stop and her mind cease to function. Dusty and Dakota stood with their heads down, eating high-protein sweet feed from a fifty-gallon drum on its side toward the front of the barn. The drum’s safety lid was creased and battered and sitting against a wall. Maggie could see that it had been torn off by the repeated kicks of shod hooves. A couple of bales of hay Maggie had brought down from the second level three days before were scattered about, as if shaken violently by a giant hand. Dakota’s stall door, its center splintered and sagging loosely on its hinges, gaped like an open cave. Happy stood facing Dancer’s stall, her eyes pleading, her muzzle spattered with blood. Turnip’s stall gate was smashed open as well—Maggie gasped as she saw the battered and broken boards, a crushed and twisted grain trough, and grotesque splatters of frozen blood appearing as black as India ink about the stall.

  But none of that clutched at Maggie’s heart like the spindly hind leg of a colt protruding through a jagged hole in the stall from which the horrible cry of pain was keening. The leg was twisted and cut by the splintered wood, and the hoof hung at an impossible angle. Blood dripped steadily from a shard of the cannon bone—the longest bone in the hind leg of a horse—where it had pierced Dancer’s skin.

  Danny shoved past Maggie and shouted over his shoulder, “Ian, Tessa, somebody! Get my bag—hurry! Maggie, we don’t have time for you to stand there. Move! Come on, I need your help!”

  Maggie broke from her semi-trance like a swimmer emerging from a deep dive, dazed for a second but already in motion.

  Danny crouched at Dancer’s stall and tore away the scraps and spearlike projections of broken wood that held the colt’s lower leg trapped. Ian thumped the medical bag down next to Danny. Maggie reached over and opened the latches.

  “Ian, see what I’m doing here?” Danny said. “I’m going to move back for a minute, but I want you to keep easing this leg free. Tessa, if there’s room, you slide in next to Ian. And look, folks—no matter what you do, you’re going to hurt Dancer. There’s no way around it. We don’t have much time to play with here. Get that leg free.”

  Dancer, still on the other side of the stall gate from the humans, squealed as Ian peeled part of a board from under the damaged leg. Tessa drew in a breath sharply but made no other sound as she slid a jagged sliver out of the young horse’s flesh.

  “I’m going to do some suturing, Maggie,” Danny said, his hands filling a large hypodermic, “and I need you to swab and watch for bleeders. The cannon bone is snapped, and as soon as we get the area clean, we’ll splint it and then I’ll go to my place—I’ve got a Fiberglas casting kit there.”

  “Almost clear,” Ian said. “There!”

  Tessa climbed over the gate and into the stall and held Dancer’s leg as Ian eased the gate open. Danny was there with his hypodermic, sliding the tip skillfully into a vein. Dancer, eyes ringed in white, chest frothy with frozen sweat, snorted loudly and began to cry out again. Then his head slumped to the hay-littered floor and he was still.

  “Oh no!” Tessa shrieked. “Dancer...”

  “He isn’t dead,” Danny grunted. “The anesthetic dropped him. He’s out of pain now. You get those horses away from the sweet feed, Tessa. Whack ’em if you have to, but get them away from there. And cross-tie Dusty in a stall. She’s driving me nuts dancing around here.” He met Maggie’s eyes. “Set yourself up next to me, Maggie. Wash your hands with the bottle of alcohol from my bag—it’s the best we can do right now. Leave enough for me.”

  “I’m going for the cast kit and Sunday,” Ian said. Maggie looked up at him. “But you don’t—”

  “I watched every move Danny made from Sarah’s house to here. I can drive the truck. OK, Dan?”

  “Go,” the veterinarian said, clattering surgical instruments into a small metal pan and waiting for Maggie to hand him the alcohol bottle. “There are a couple of good flashlights in the mudroom cupboard. Bring those. You can’t miss the casting kit—it’s in the same cupboard and it’s the size of a suitcase and says Equi-Cast on the front of it. I just got it a few days ago—I haven’t even unpacked it.”

  “Tess,” Maggie said, “get the flashlight from the shelf by the saddles. This light is awful.”

  The growl of Danny’s truck sounded from outside. After a moment of idling, the tires whined and engine racket built up as Ian tickled the accelerator and began rolling—hard and fast. “He’ll make it,” Danny said.

  Danny worked quietly, his lips moving silently every so often as he debrided the break and maneuvered the lengths of bone together. Tessa held the light on Dancer’s extended right rear limb as steadily as a beacon.

  “Maggie,” Danny said after a long forty-five minutes, “the plastic box with the stainless steel screws in it in my bag—open it and hold it in front of me. It’s the—”

  “I’ve got it, Danny. There’s a seal—”

  “Yeah. It’s sterile. Pull the tape all the way around the container and—”

  “Here, Danny.”

  “Good.”

  The first screw—the big one—went in easily. As Danny turned the setting tool, the trimmed and prepared lengths of bone drew together as if pulled by a gentle and benign magnet. The second screw—the one to mate the fracture closer to the hoof—began to slip. “Push against what I’m doing for a second, Maggie. All I need is the slightest bit of grab here. Easy, honey—there... good. Real good.”

  It was finished.

  The tagging of flesh together with sutures was a first-year vet school exercise. Danny fell back from the hunched position he’d held for t
he last hour and more and blinked rapidly, his eyes as fatigued as his hands. “Whew,” he grunted.

  Maggie leaned over Danny, her hand, now trembling, moving a sweaty hank of hair from his forehead. She kissed him, her lips barely touching his; the sweet contact was almost frightening in its intensity. She moved her mouth a part of an inch from his. “Thank you, Danny,” she breathed. “Thank you for what you’ve done for Dancer and for who you are.”

  “Whoa,” Tessa murmured as she led Dakota and Turnip on short lines past Dancer’s stall.

  Maggie and Danny blushed instantaneously and in perfect unison said, “Tessa...”

  “I know, I know,” the girl said. “I didn’t see a thing, but even if I had, I’d never tell anyone. OK?” She turned the two horses and led them toward the front of the barn.

  The reverberation of Danny’s truck and, a moment later, a series of frantic barking broke the moment. Suddenly, Sunday was running full-tilt at Danny, throwing himself at his friend, now whining rather than barking, his tail whipping, his tongue lapping at Danny’s face. Danny hugged the big dog to him like he would a beloved child.

  Ian set the casting kit on the floor and lowered a twenty-five-pound bag of Gravy Train dog food next to it. “I didn’t want to take the time to feed Sunday, so I brought his grub with me.” He grinned. “If all those I visit at their homes were as happy to see me as Sunday was, I could help save the entire world.”

  Tessa and Ian built a fire in the house as Maggie and Danny worked at the delicate process of layering strips of fiber tape the length of Dancer’s left hind leg and applying the fixing and setting chemicals to the tape. The vet’s heavy-duty electric lanterns provided harsh but more than adequate light. Happy, Dakota, Turnip, and Dusty looked on from their stalls, where they were haltered and secured with lead ropes. Thus far, none had shown signs of founder or stomach distress. When Tessa righted the breached barrel she found that only a few pounds of the protein-rich feed had been consumed—the animals had gotten to the grain not long before their rescuers arrived. The nicks, scrapes, and cuts were relatively minor; Tessa quite competently treated them with a disinfectant wash and a layer of pasty bovine bag balm, referred to by horsemen as the “universal cure for horsehide.”