by Judy Blunt
He had Jeanette's chart in front of him, and I waited for the rustling of paper to stop, already ticking down the list of questions he would ask. Half a dozen books lay facedown on the coffee table, all opened to the chapter on fever. In addition to several standard baby-care books, I owned nursing textbooks, a medical encyclopedia and a prescription-drug desk reference, the last being the only one I had not read cover-to-cover more than once. No, I repeated to every question, no congestion, no cough, no diarrhea, no vomiting, no behavior that would indicate the pain of an ear infection or sore throat. Just the fever.
"She was hospitalized last August. . . ." he began, and I interrupted impatiently. I knew her medical history. It was my job. Steady temp of 104 with diarrhea and vomiting. I'd driven her to the hospital because she was less than a year old, and I was concerned that she would dehydrate. She spiked 103 with her DPT immunizations, 102 with any cold she caught. These were on the chart as notations, reported when I took her in for regular checkups: Fever of Unknown Origin. We joked that she had a faulty thermostat. This late-spring afternoon she had gotten up from her nap with a fever of 101, and in the two hours since, it had spiked to 104, in spite of aspirin. The number worried me less than the speed.
"I should look at her." The words were muffled, and I imagined the doctor hunched over the desk in the tiny cubicle of the nurse's station, rubbing his face with one hand. "Oh, you're ..."
"It's raining." We spoke at the same time. For all his time in the outposts, Ramaiya had a hard time grasping our connection between bad weather and no travel. He hissed under his breath. I wondered if he was thinking about the case in Glasgow a few weeks before, a baby younger than mine diagnosed with meningitis. I had pored over those chapters, memorizing the symptoms, and had watched Jeanette as she slept between tortures. Did her head arch back toward her heels instead of bending forward in the curl of natural sleep? Did her neck seem stiff? Yes, no, maybe. I couldn't tell.
Ramaiya gathered his thoughts and rattled off a series of orders. Ice packs at the base of her skull, cool-water enemas, no clothes, fluids, a cold bath if her temperature rose above 104. In the two-hour lull that followed the phone call, the fever neither rose nor fell. When John came in for supper, he had mud caked to the second buckle of his overshoes. The hired man had quit in the middle of calving, disappearing up the road the first day of spring, the day Jason was born. So far, no one was beating down the door to take his place.
"Jesus!" Jerking his hand from Jeanette's forehead, he looked up at me. "Does she need to go to town?"
"Can we get out?" I jiggled the baby, trying to get him to settle for a pacifier. Jeanette's temperature had shot to 105. The bathwater was running. He rose from the edge of the couch, steadying his daughter as the cushion lifted, then cupped that hand against his chest with the other. "Jesus," he said softly. "I don't know." I followed him into the kitchen, retracing a route I had paced every hour, waiting as he tapped the barometer and shaded the glare of indoor light on the east window to read the outside thermometer. Even a light frost would have helped firm the mud, but it wasn't going to happen. An inch of rain on gumbo softened by snowmelt, and the inch had come slowly, soaking in instead of running off the high spots. A good grass rain.
Turning from the window, John shook his head as if shifting information from one side to the other. Our soil was rich with bentonite, a pale clay that swells to several times its volume when saturated with water. It will stick to anything. It dries hard as flint and can be ground into a fine gray powder, a dirt of many commercial uses, like lining the molds in foundries and sealing the walls of oil wells drilled in porous rock. At a certain stage of drying, the mud would build up on the chickens' feet until they looked like they were wearing shoes. Fat hens would stagger spraddle-legged through the barnyard, heads bobbing to gain momentum against the weight, pausing every few steps for a baffled, head-tilting examination of their own feet. In that same stage, what we called "balling up" occurred, mud gathering on the pickup tires in thick rinds and piling up in the fender wells until the wheels could no longer turn. Roads with the top inch wet were merely "greasy," something that happened with a couple tenths of rain or when the surface began to thaw in spring.
The cold bath finished and the baby fed, I stood in the shadows by the living room window, rubbing the last burp from Jason. The top of his head pulsed against my cheek. His sister dozed naked on the couch, a plastic bread sack framing her face. Oui of ice cubes, I had scraped a double handful of frost from the inside of the chest freezer and wrapped it in a wet washcloth. The bath brought her down to 104.5. I hoped it had peaked and would continue to drop. Dr. Ramaiya had gone home, the nurse reported briskly, but she had orders to call him if we showed up at the hospital. The music had stilled. John leaned in the doorway.
Turning away from the window, I laid the baby on the floor in the center of a quilt—dry, warm and full as a tick. Released from my hold, he roused and stretched, lips pursed in a brief dreamy suckling. Beside the quilt squatted a nylon duffel bag I had readied in the late afternoon while the rain sill washed down the hills. Packing, I had felt a twinge of fear, as if preparing for the worst might trigger it. Now the bag seemed solid and essential, something safe to grab. John moved aside as I stepped past him. Calving season was over, but the weeks of long days and broken nights showed in his face, his eyes red-rimmed over a three-day stubble.
"What do you think?" His voice pushed at me. I began to clear the supper dishes, shoving food uncovered into the refrigerator. It was my call. How sick was she? Was she better off here than on the road? How long could we wait? I was tired of thinking, my body already counting hours to the next feeding, and the next. Tonight, the road would not be greasy. Tonight would be tough roads, probably somewhere between damned tough and pretty damned tough, like driving on a twelve-inch layer of cold lard. A trip would mean nearly fifty miles of grinding and sliding, fighting the wheel to keep the side-to-side slew within the narrow range of road top. We stared at each other for a brief moment. Mud didn't shovel like snow. If we slid off the road, we were stuck. No one could be traveling tonight.
When a digital timer beeped from the countertop, less than an hour since her cold bath, thirty minutes since the last dose of aspirin, he followed me back into the living room. I knelt by the couch and shook the thermometer down with rapid snaps of the wrist. She lay on her side facing me, knees tucked up, tufts of honey-brown hair dried askew against one ivory and rose cheek. I worked quietly, reluctant to wake her. She shifted in her* sleep, turning her head. The exposed cheek was the dry, deep color of old brick. Alarmed, I lifted the edge of the blanket and rolled her onto her cool side.
Heat radiated from the flushed skin where she had pressed against the blanket, and like testing a banked fire, I slid a practiced palm down her back, feeling the delicate feather of her ribs, the rapid breathing. She was too hot to be real. I felt my heart begin to pound in my throat. The decision was made, but I waited the full two minutes for confirmation. The thermometer I twisted to the light showed a slim red streak that disappeared under the pinch of two fingers. 106. I leaned forward, trembling with the effort to stand up, and finally spoke from my knees, voice shaking. "Get the pickup."
John jerked like he'd been shot and was out the door in three long strides. By the time I pulled myself up and reached the freezer for more ice, I could hear the bawl of the big Ford pickup churning through the mud to the gas pumps. I diapered Jeanette quickly, then slipped a fresh ice pack behind her neck. She squirmed against the cold, but she did not wake as I bathed her head, white frost melting where it touched, evaporating as it trickled toward her ears. Her hands were drawn up, resting on her chest, the tips of her fingers quivering in a pale imitation of my own.
From the hay yard by the barn, a tractor popped, and I followed its progress with a numb detachment, the slap of giant chains growing louder as they neared the house and swung around at the base of our hill. If we got bogged halfway up, John would have to drag the
pickup over the top with the tractor, a slow, nerve-racking process of inching the tractor around the 4x4, then backing down the steep incline to the nose of the pickup and clawing away mud to hook up the tow chains. The tractor had no headlights, and on the blind crawl up the hill John would steer by feel, guided by the pickup lights that swept on either side of the tractor and marked the shoulders of the narrow road.
Her lethargy, the tremors I saw in Jeanette's hands, were symptoms, facts I reported to the hospital switchboard clearly and precisely, hanging up on the overly patient voice that suggested I just stay calm and try a different thermometer. Seconds after I hung up the phone, a thin, bleating cry rose and wavered, raising the hair on my arms, a cry designed to erase a mother's sanity and send her flying at the beast that threatens her child. In a way, the textbooks had prepared me too well. I had memorized definitions, descriptions and treatments. I knew about epileptiform, tetanic and hysteroidal convulsions, how they were characterized and the difference between colonic and tonic contractions. Nothing prepared me for the child to be mine, the clawlike curl of her fingers, the eyes rolled, bulging white against the clenched blue skin, blood-streaked foam bubbling between her bared teeth, the jerky paddling of limbs, like a clumsy dog caught dreaming. I heard the sounds, the choking and grunting of something wild snared by the throat, at another level of reality, and for a single heartbeat, instinct won. I saw the beast. And I caught myself in mid-reach, ready to yank her off the couch and shake her with my bare hands.
Something solid gathered and took hold as I found my breath, something colder and more practical than anger. The pickup idled out front. I drew myself up at the sound of John's footsteps, bracing for the questions he would ask. Jeanette's thrashing had slowed to jerks and quivers, but at the sight of her, his face would grow helpless and still. When calves convulse they are dying, that's all he would know—all he had ever needed to know. He had no other reference, no doctor's voice or nurse's handbook telling him that fever convulsions weren't, in and of themselves, fatal. He would look to me for answers I didn't have, strength I wasn't sure I could spare.
My parents' ranch lay fifteen miles up the road, the fifteen worst miles for mud. John was on the phone to them, calling ahead as I changed clothes and made a final pass through the house, checking lights, pitching the cat out the door. I shoved the checkbook in the duffel bag, cocooned the baby in his quilt and strapped him into the car seat, moving both in one trip to the kitchen where John could grab them from the door. Jeanette lay rigid, her body straining against touch as I folded the blanket around her and lifted her gently against my chest to carry her out. When the pickup door slammed behind us, she arched backward and stopped breathing. I let her head fall back on my arm to open her airway, pulling the blanket to one side as she caught a ragged breath, and her legs began their ethereal gallop.
John eased the pickup toward the barn, then gunned the engine and swung in a wide circle facing the hill. We had a fifty-yard running start. I braced my feet against the floorboards, my right elbow cushioning Jeanette's head from a sideways jolt against the window. Without slowing, he slammed the gearshift into second, and fed it gas. The big Ford twisted through the barnyard, gaining speed like a sidewinder, and we hit the hill with the engine wound tight, mud thundering against the floor, the front wheels throwing clots higher than the cab roof. As the pitch tilted us back, our headlights searched the sky in slim arcs, fishtails tapering off to a slow wag as we passed the halfway point, shuddering as we hit the final stretch. Toward the top, the road angled up like a greased chute with steep shale banks on either side. When the engine lugged, John finessed the gears, a smooth clutch-shift into compound, and the truck settled to a dull grind, straining, wallowing by inches up the slope, to the very top, and over.
On level ground, we stopped for a moment, both of us breathing fast. John turned loose of the steering wheel, wiggling his fingers, and sat back against the seat. I forced my legs to relax their rigid push against the floorboards. Jason slept unperturbed, and I loosened his wraps with one hand, trying not to jiggle his sister. With the window rolled down a few inches, I opened her blanket to let the damp chill fan the heat from her face as we pulled away, lurching in steady mud-slinging rhythm to the right, to the left, to the right. Cornering from our lane onto the raised county road, the tires growled against the fender wells, kicking out boulders of packed gumbo. Dried in the sun, they could tear out an oil pan. I leaned my face against the door, into the breeze that smelled of wet roots and sweet grass, of spring. Stars snapped in the wide arch of sky, and the hills crouched over the coulees in the clear night, bristling with new-growth sage. Jackrabbits flinched and bounced from the barrow pit, bounding madly alongside the pickup.
John never wavered, his face serious and steady, his hands lifting and gripping, passing each other on the wheel as he corrected the slides. I looked at Jeanette's face, quieter now as the breeze cooled her, the moon a thin blue glow in the whites of her eyes. How many close calls would it take, I thought, before we could no longer justify the choice we made to live where we lived, the quarrel we took up with the land and passed along to this baby who tightened like a claw with every bump and sway. In the side mirror, the road closed grudgingly behind us, plowed into bloody furrows in the taillights, fading into bruise-colored shadows as we fought our way north. Ahead, as far as I could see, the road lay swollen, smooth as wet concrete.
We made it to the bench lands, out of the Breaks, when I saw the first light. Word had gotten out. Off to the right, a mile, two miles from the road, headlights bucked over the sod to the top of a rise where the driver could see us coming and watch us pass. The lights blinked once, like a nod. Good luck. Safe journey. Past the little school it was dark again, but over the next hill my father's mailbox was braced with a pair of battered four-wheel-drives, the road torn where the men turned to wait. They stood silhouetted, one in front of each pickup. John's mud-spattered window squealed down, grit against glass, as he pulled up. Dad's shadow stepped away from the truck and moved toward us. On my side, Fred Veseth hesitated. I slid my window down a little farther and he came forward, a tenderhearted man whose boys were nearly grown.
"How's it going?" he said quietly, almost whispering, as though the small blue child in my arms was sleeping.
"So far okay," I replied. "I guess."
He gazed at Jeanette's face, the blank eyes, rictus grin, and turned away to look at the ground, his hands sliding into the pockets of his jeans. Dad had called ahead. "Watch Lonesome Coulee, less rain the farther you go. Beaver is flooding but the Midale road is still better than the Regina road, still the way to go." Dad peered in through the open window for a second, then slapped the hood and turned back to his own. At the sound, Jeanette jerked in my arms, one leg drawn up, quivering. When we pulled out, spinning, finding our footing, two pickups fell in behind us, watching our back all the way to the highway.
I remember the hours of that trip with more clarity than the days my babies and I spent in the Malta Hospital, Jason in one crib, Jeanette in another, my fold-out cot in the aisle between. We pulled onto the highway two hours after we took off, and as John jumped out to turn the hubs, it was easy to imagine the pickup blowing and trembling like a winded horse. Twenty miles of highway we took in fifteen minutes, bombing the pavement with clods of mud that tore loose from the undercarriage and rolled for a hundred feet behind us. John dropped us off at the hospital and turned for home.
The nurse who checked us in wrote down the temperature I gave her and the word "convulsions," both with question marks in the margins. Within minutes, Jeanette vindicated me with another strong seizure as she lay in the glare of fluorescent lights, and again the next night when her fever spiked to 106.1. Dr. Ramaiya appeared at the hospital and stayed, pulling a chair to her bedside and watching her closely through many of the miserable hours she spent encased in ice packs. Jason remained healthy, protected by breast milk and newborn resilience. The nurses carried him around like a doll and l
et me sleep sometimes. On the third day a fine red rash all over her body suggested a diagnosis of roseola, and she had recovered enough to climb my leg like a squirrel whenever she saw a white coat. Dr. Ramaiya waited until her appetite and energy level returned to normal, then let us go. I called the ranch. The roads were drying. John came for us on the fourth day.
"You're not taking her back out there?" Our bags were piled on a bench in the waiting room, ready to load in the pickup. In them, I had packed her new seizure medication, new thermometers, aspirin suppositories. At the sound of the head nurse's voice, Jeanette straight-armed her brother to one side and clambered on my lap, burying her face against my neck. The nurse squinted her eyes in disbelief, as if searching me for some glimmer of maternal instinct. It was not the last hospital campout the kids and I took, not the longest we would endure, but it was one of the hardest, and I remember the physical effort it took to gather strength, to pull up one more answer to one more well-meaning question.
When I close my eyes and try to call back the dark of that night, mostly what I see are the lights. We're crossing from the breaks to the flatlands, churning sideways up a hill, and at the top, the night comes alive with lights, pickups waiting by mailboxes, lights like stars in the distance, moving across the prairie toward the road, zigzagging like penlights held in shaky hands, neighbors fighting slowly up their lanes toward the county road, every one of them called from bed, come to see us safely by. And I remember thinking we wouldn't dare ask people to do this. And I remember believing it was enough, knowing that they would come, tired ranchmen already turning back as we pass, a flash of lights handing us ten miles down the fence line to the next set of lights facing south, watching. What could we ever give our children except uncertainty and a place to belong, the quiet strength of a community that would see them by?
I was waiting to go home when the nurse asked her question. And I answered her the only way I could, juggling my babies on either arm, offering her my grandmother's even-handed shrug, weighing the odds.
