by Noah Gordon
“Hey, Toby,” she said.
Nurses were waiting at the ambulance entrance and Freda was taken away. The two EMTs stripped the bloody sheets from the gurney and exchanged them for fresh sheets from the hospital supply room; they disinfected the gurney and made it up again before returning it to the ambulance. Then they sat in the waiting room with R.J. and Hank and the policeman. He said he was Maurice A. McCourtney, the Woodfield police chief. “They call me Mack,” he told R.J. gravely.
The four of them drooped visibly; their job was done and reaction had set in.
Hank Krantz was making all of them party to his remorse. It was coyotes, he said, they had been around his farm for the better part of a week. He had decided to clean his deer gun and shoot a couple of them, to drive the pack away.
“Winchester, ain’t it?” Mack McCourtney asked.
“Yeah, old lever-action Winchester Ninety-four, takes a .30-.30. I’ve owned it, must be eighteen years now, never had an accident with it. I set it down on the table a little hard, and it just banged off.”
“Safety wasn’t on?” Steve Ripley said.
“Well, Jesus, I never keep a round in the chamber. I always empty the damn thing when I finish with it. I must of just forgot this time, the way I forget everything nowadays.” He glared. “And you got some nerve, Ripley, asking me did she have more than one bullet in her. You think I shot my wife?”
“Listen. There she was on the floor, bleeding hard. I just had to know in a hurry if there was more than one wound to worry about.”
Hank’s eyes softened. “Yeah, and I shouldn’t be giving you a bad time. You saved her life, I hope.”
Ripley shook his head. “The real one saved her life is the doctor here. If she hadn’t found the pressure point when she did, we’d be real sad right about now.”
Krantz looked at R.J. “I’m never going to forget it.” He shook his head. “Look what I did to my Freda!”
Toby Smith leaned over and patted his hand, leaving her hand on his. “Listen, Hank, we all screw up. We all make every kind of stupid mistake. All that guilt you’re piling on yourself isn’t going to help Freda one bit.”
The police chief frowned. “You haven’t got a milk herd anymore. You’ve just got some beef steers, right? I wouldn’t think coyotes would go after anything large as a beefer.”
“No, they won’t go for a steer. But I bought four calves last week from Bernstein, that cattle dealer from out Pittsfield way.”
Mack McCourtney nodded. “That explains it, then. They’ll do a hell of a job on a calf, but not on a heifer.”
“Yeah, mostly they’ll leave a heifer alone,” Hank agreed.
McCourtney left, needing to have the police car on patrol in Woodfield. “You’ll need to get back too,” Hank said to Ripley.
“Well, the neighboring towns can cover for us for a little while. We’ll wait. You’ll want to speak to the doctor.”
It was another hour and a half before the surgeon came out of the operating theater. He told Hank he had repaired the artery and placed a metal pin to rejoin the sections of Freda’s broken femur. “She’s going to be just fine. She’ll be here about five days. Five days to a week.”
“Can I see her?”
“She’s in recovery. She’ll be sedated all night. Best for you to go home, get some sleep. You can see her in the morning. You want me to send a report to your family doctor?”
Hank made a face. “Well, at the moment, we don’t have one. Our doctor’s just retired.”
“Who was that, Hugh Marchant, over on High Street?”
“Yes, Dr. Marchant.”
“Well, you get a new doctor, let me know who it is and I’ll send him a report.”
“How come you travel all the way to Greenfield to see a doctor?” R.J. asked Hank on the way home.
“Well, because there isn’t one who is closer. We haven’t had a doctor in Woodfield for twenty years, since the old doctor died.”
“What was his name?”
“Thorndike.”
“Yes. Several people mentioned him when I first started coming here.”
“Craig Thorndike. People loved that man. But after he died, no other doctor came to Woodfield.”
It was close to midnight when the ambulance dropped Hank and R.J. at the Krantzes’ driveway.
“You all right?” R.J. asked Hank.
“Yeah. I won’t be able to sleep, I know that. I guess I’ll just clean up that mess in the kitchen.”
“Let me help you.”
“No, I wouldn’t hear of it,” he said firmly, and suddenly she was glad of that, because she was very tired.
He hesitated. “I thank you. Lord only knows what would have happened if you hadn’t been here.”
“I’m glad I was here. You get some rest, now.”
There were large, white stars. The night held the memory of ice, a spring chill, but she was warmed as she drove back down the road.
11
THE CALLING
The next morning she awoke early and lay in bed reviewing the events of the previous evening. She guessed that the coyote pack Hank had wanted to drive away had moved off on its own to hunt elsewhere, because through the bedroom window she could see three white-tailed deer feeding in the meadow, their tails waggling as they cropped the clover. A car came down the road and the tails went up, showing their white flags of alarm. When the car passed, the tails dropped and waggled again, and the deer went back to feeding.
Ten minutes later a boy roared by on a motorcycle, and the deer broke for the woods with long, fearful bounds that were at the same time powerful and delicate.
When she got out of bed and called the hospital, she learned that Freda’s condition was stable.
It was Sunday. After breakfast R.J. drove slowly to Sotheby’s, where she bought the New York Times and the Boston Globe. As she was leaving the general store she met Toby Smith and exchanged good-mornings.
“Well, you’re looking rested after working late last night,” Toby said.
“I’m afraid I’m accustomed to late nights. Do you have a minute or two to talk, Toby?”
“I surely do.”
The other woman led the way to the bench on the store porch, and they sat. “Tell me about the ambulance service.”
“Well … history. It was started just after World War II. A couple of people who had served in the armed forces as medics came home, and they bought a surplus army ambulance and began to serve the town. After a while the state began to test and certify Emergency Medical Technicians, and a whole system of continuing education evolved. EMTs have to keep up with developments in emergency medicine and recertify every year. Here in town, we have fourteen registered emergency technicians, all volunteers. It’s a free service to everyone who lives in Woodfield. We wear pagers and cover the town for medical emergencies around the clock. Ideally we like to have three people in the crew on every run, one behind the wheel, two riding in back with the patient. But much of the time we have only two, like last night.”
“Why is it a free service?” R.J. said. “Why don’t you bill insurance companies for transporting their clients to the hospital?”
Toby stared at her quizzically. “We don’t have big employers here in the hilltowns. Lots of our people are self-employed and just scraping by—loggers, carpenters, farmers, folks who do crafts. A big hunk of our population hasn’t got health insurance. I wouldn’t have it myself if my husband didn’t have a federal job as a fish and game officer. I do bookkeeping on a freelance basis, and I simply couldn’t afford to pay the premiums.”
R.J. nodded and sighed. “I guess things aren’t very different here than they are in the city, as far as medical coverage is concerned.”
“A whole lot of people gamble they won’t get sick or be hurt. It scares the dickens out of a person to do that, but a lot of them have to do it anyway.” The ambulance service played an important role in the town, Toby said. “Folks really appreciate that we’re around. Closest
doctor to the east is all the way into Greenfield. To the west, there’s a general practitioner named Newly thirty-two miles away, just outside of Dalton on Route Nine.” Toby looked at her and smiled. “Why don’t you come here to live year-round and be our doc?”
R.J. smiled back. “Not likely,” she said.
Still, when she got back home she took out a map of the region and studied it. There were eleven small towns and villages in the area that Toby Smith said didn’t have a resident doctor.
That afternoon she bought a houseplant—an African violet in plump blue blossom—and brought it to Freda in the hospital. Freda was still post-op and not talking much, but Hank Krantz was warmed by R.J.’s presence.
“I’ve been wanting to ask you. What do I owe you for last night?”
R.J. shook her head. “I was there as a neighbor more than as a physician,” she said, and Freda looked at her and smiled.
R.J. drove back to Woodfield slowly, relishing the sights of farms and wooded hills.
Just as the sun was setting, her telephone rang.
“Dr. Cole? This is David Markus. My daughter tells me you came to our place yesterday. Sorry I wasn’t home.”
“Yes, Mr. Markus … I wanted to talk with you about selling my house and land….”
“We can surely talk. When would be a good time for me to come by?”
“Well, the thing is … I still might want to sell, but suddenly I’m not all that certain. I have to do some deciding.”
“Well, you take your time. Think it all out.”
He had a nice, warm voice, she thought. “But I’d like to talk to you about something else.”
“I see,” he said, although clearly he didn’t.
“By the way, you make wonderful honey.”
She could feel his smile over the phone. “Thank you, I’ll tell the bees. They love to hear things like that, although it drives them crazy when I get all the credit.”
Monday morning was overcast, but she had a responsibility that was very much on her mind. She bulled her way back into the woods, getting a thorn scratch on the neck and several small gouges on the backs of her hands. When she reached the river, she traced it downstream as close as she could get to the banks, which sometimes were blocked to her by wild roses and raspberries and other brambles. She followed the river the length of her land and considered several sites carefully, finally choosing a sunny, grassy place where a thick white birch arched over a small waterfall that made a lively plashing. She made another torturous trip through the woods and came back carrying the spade that had hung from a nail in the barn, and the box containing Elizabeth Sullivan’s ashes.
She dug a deep hole between two thick roots of the tree and poured the ashes from the box. They were just fragments of bone, really. In the hungry blast of the crematorium, Betts Sullivan’s fleshy self had vaporized and disappeared, flying off somewhere just as R.J. had always imagined the departing soul flew free of the world, when she had been a child.
She covered the ashes with earth, trod it down tenderly. Then, worried lest some animal dig them up, she found a round, current-washed rock in the river, almost but not quite too large for her to move, and in a series of lifts and drops, moved it onto the dug earth. Now Betts was part of this land. The strange thing was, increasingly R.J. had the feeling that in many ways she was part of it too.
She spent the next couple of days investigating, gathering information, making lots of notes, scribbling figures and estimates. David Markus turned out to be a large, quiet man in his late forties, with rugged, somewhat battered features that were interesting in a Lincolnesque way (how could they have called Lincoln homely? she asked herself). He had a large face, a prominent, slightly crooked nose, a scar in the left corner of his upper lip, and gentle, easily amused brown eyes. His business suit was faded Levis and a New England Patriots jacket, and he wore his thick, graying brown hair in an improbable ponytail.
She went to Town Hall and talked to a selectwoman named Janet Cantwell, a bony, aging woman with tired eyes who wore ragged jeans, shabbier than Markus’s, and a man’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. R.J. walked Main Street from one end to the other, and studied the houses and the people she met along the way, and the flow of traffic. She went to the medical center in Greenfield and talked with the hospital director, and sat in the cafeteria and spoke with several doctors as they ate their lunch.
Then she packed her bag and got into the car and drove toward Boston. The farther she got from Woodfield, the more she felt she had to return there. Whenever she had heard of someone who had received a “calling,” she had assumed the expression was a romantic euphemism. But now she saw that it was possible to be captivated by a compulsion so powerful that it couldn’t be denied.
Better than that—this thing she was obsessing about made excellent, practical sense to her in terms of the rest of her life.
She still had several days of her vacation left, and she used them to make lists of things she must do. And to formulate plans.
Finally, she telephoned her father and asked him to meet her for dinner.
12
A BRUSH WITH THE LAW
She had contended with her father from the time of her earliest memory until she became an adult. Then something sweet and good had happened, a simultaneous mellowing and blossoming of feeling. On his part there was a different kind of pride in her, a reevaluation of why he loved her. For her there was a realization that, even in the years when she had fumed at him, he had always been steadfast in his support of her.
Dr. Robert Jameson Cole was the Regensberg Professor of Immunology at the Boston University School of Medicine. The chair he occupied was endowed by his own distant relatives. R.J. never had seen him embarrassed when that fact was mentioned by anyone. The original endowment had been made when he was a boy, and Professor Cole was so celebrated in his field that it would never occur to anyone that his appointment had come because of anything but his own accomplishments. He was a strong-willed achiever.
R.J. remembered her mother remarking to a friend that the first time her daughter had defied Professor Cole was when she had been born a female. He had counted on a boy. For centuries, Cole firstborn sons had been named Robert, with middle names that began with the letter J. Dr. Cole had given the matter serious thought and had picked out a name for his son—Robert Jenner Cole, the middle name to honor Edward Jenner, the discoverer of vaccination. When the baby turned out to be a girl, and when it became clear that his wife, Bernadette Valerie Cole, never could bear another child, Dr. Cole insisted their daughter would be named Roberta Jenner Cole and would be called Rob J. for short. It was another Cole family tradition; somehow, to claim the child as a new Rob J. was to declare that yet another future Cole physician had been born.
Bernadette Cole had submitted to his plan except for the middle name. Not for her daughter a male name! So she had reached into her origins in northern France and the girl was christened Roberta Jeanne D’Arc Cole. Eventually Dr. Cole’s attempt to call his daughter Rob J. also failed. To her mother, and then to everyone who came to know her, she was soon R.J., although her father stubbornly clung to calling her Rob J. in tender moments.
R.J. grew up in a comfortable second-floor apartment in a converted brownstone house on Beacon Street, with giant antique magnolia bushes in the front yard. Dr. Cole liked it because it was a few doors down from the brownstone where the physician Oliver Wendell Holmes had lived. His wife liked it because it was rent-controlled and therefore manageable on a faculty salary. But after her death from pneumonia, three days after her daughter’s eleventh birthday, the apartment began to feel too large.
R.J. had attended public schools, but with her mother gone, her father felt she needed more control and structure in her life than he was able to provide, and he enrolled her in a day school in Cambridge, to which she traveled by bus. She had studied piano from the time she was seven, but when she was twelve she began taking lessons in classical guita
r at school, and within a couple of years she was hanging around Harvard Square, playing and singing with other street musicians. She played very well; she didn’t have a great voice, but it was good enough. When she was fifteen, she lied about her age and became a singing waitress at the same second-story club where Joan Baez, who also was the daughter of a Boston University professor, had gotten her start. That September R.J. had sex for the first time, in the loft of the MIT boathouse, with the stroke of the MIT crew. It was messy and painful, and the experience turned her off from sex, but not permanently. And not for long.
* * *
R.J. always thought the middle name her mother had chosen had done a great deal to shape her life. From childhood she was ever ready to do battle for a cause. And although she loved her father desperately, often it was Dr. Cole with whom she contended. His yearning for a Rob J. who would follow in his medical footsteps was a constant pressure to his only child. Perhaps if it hadn’t been there, her path would have been different. In the afternoons when she returned alone to the quiet apartment on Beacon Street, sometimes she went into his study and took down his books. In them she memorized the sexual parts of men and women, often looking up the acts about which her contemporaries whispered and sniggered. But she moved on to a nonprurient contemplation of anatomy and physiology; the way some of her contemporaries became interested in the names of dinosaurs, R.J. memorized the bones of the human body. On the desk in her father’s study, in a small glass-and-oak box, was an old surgical scalpel of beaten blue steel. Family legend said that many hundreds of years ago the scalpel had belonged to one of R.J.’s ancestors, a great surgeon. Sometimes it seemed to her that helping people as a doctor would be a good way to spend her life, but her father was too insistent, and when the time came he drove her to a declaration that she would take a pre-law course in college. As the daughter of a professor, she could have attended Boston University with a tuition waiver. Instead, she escaped the long centuries of medical Coles by winning a three-quarters scholarship to Tufts University, busing tables in a student dining room and working two evenings a week at the club in Harvard Square. She did go to law school at Boston University. By that time she had her own apartment on Beacon Hill, behind the State House. She saw her father regularly, but already she was living her own life.
