“I’ll pass that along.”
Then he helped the young man help the older man out. The man with the goose egg on his head looked paler, and the goose egg larger, and he signaled for the man’s wife to help him into the office.
“He can make it in on his own,” the woman said.
“Suit yourself,” the doctor said. “If he dies, you know, the sheriff just might charge you with murder for knocking him in the head like that.”
“Wouldn’t be nothing he didn’t deserve,” she muttered as the doctor closed the door to his office behind him. He sat the man down, examined the big bump.
“I’ll have to drain that off, if I can,” he said.
The man said nothing.
“You got a concussion, at best, but I’m worried you got bleeding still going on in there.”
The man still said nothing. Then he said, slowly, “Just tell the sheriff she was lying. I dropped a ax head on myself splitting firewood.” Then he closed his eyes and stopped breathing, still sitting upright in the chair.
“Well, damn,” the doctor said. He checked for a pulse, fingered the carotid.
“You need to come in here,” he said to the woman still sitting on the porch. She looked at him hard for a moment, then got up and followed him in. She looked at her husband sitting dead in the chair.
“Is he gone?” she said.
The doctor nodded.
“He said you were lying and that he dropped an ax on his own head chopping firewood.”
“Well,” the woman said after a long minute. “You don’t need no help around here, do you? Cleaning, what-all? I got a daughter can do it, won’t cost you much.”
The doctor stared at her in near disbelief. Then he said, “Got all the help I need right now. I’ll ask the coroner if he can use anyone.”
“I appreciate it,” the woman said, and left the office, climbed up onto the seat of a buckboard behind a swayback mule. The doctor had the young man, who had not left yet with his ailing father, help him carry the dead man outside and lay him into the back of the woman’s wagon. He unwrapped the reins, traveled them over the mule, handed them to the woman, who looked as if she didn’t know what they were. Then he went back up onto the porch and motioned to the woman with the goiter. Before he closed the door behind them, he said to the rest on the porch, “She was just mad-talking. He dropped an ax on his own head, splitting firewood, by his own admission. You all know how it goes, long married.”
All on the porch nodded and murmured. One said, “Lord, yes.”
“Well, the rest of you figure out the order amongst yourselves.”
He wasn’t tired anymore when he was done with them all, so he went into town and sent a telegraph to his friend from medical school, Ellis Adams, now a urological surgeon at Johns Hopkins. Then waited an hour and called him, long-distance. Described the Chisolm baby from his notes and drawings, asked some -questions. Then went home again. No patients waiting this time, thank God.
His wife, Lett, was in the parlor drinking coffee. He sat down and she brought him a cup, sat with him. She was tall, like him, with long brown hair she kept pinned up nicely. A locket cameo beauty carved from ivory, come miraculously to life. But she looked tired. Beautifully so, but tired. And so was he, now. Exhausted.
“I guess you didn’t sleep much last night, either,” he said.
“No.” She set her coffee cup down and tapped on her wedding ring, a habit she had when bothered. “Ed, have you thought anymore about setting up a clinic in town? Or joining someone? Not everyone makes house calls anymore, you know.”
He sipped his coffee. It entered his blood as what it was, some powerful drug.
“I don’t know what to say, Lett. I’ve told you it seems unethical to abandon a practice, especially this kind.”
“Well, find someone to take it, then. As I have suggested before.”
“And, as I have explained, the youngest doctors—the ones who don’t like house calls—don’t want this kind of practice anymore. And the older ones are already settled.”
“Well. Ed.”
“Yes.”
“If you come home from a late-night call and I’m not here, you can figure I’ve gone to Mother’s for the night. I don’t like being here on the edge of town in this big house by myself when you go out. It didn’t bother me so much for a while, but it’s begun to. I wake up, find you gone, and can’t get back to sleep.”
“How is getting up, getting dressed, and driving or taking a buggy into town, waking up your mother—just how is that going to help you sleep, Lett?”
“It’s not all about not being able to sleep, Ed. It’s feeling left alone.”
He noticed her hands were shaking just the slightest bit. She saw him notice, clasped one over the other, and went to the window, facing out.
“Did you sleep at all last night, Lett?”
He was gazing at her tall slim figure there, her lovely neck exposed and half in shadow of diagonal light, and suddenly he felt a fear for her.
“I’m scarcely ever gone more than a few hours, often less.”
She gestured with one hand, as if helpless against her frustration.
“I could give you something to help you sleep,” he said.
She turned then, looking so on the verge of tears he was startled.
“Laudanum, are you saying? No, thank you.”
“No, Lett. There are herbs.”
“They don’t work for me.” She looked at the floor, shook her head.
“Come along with me, then. At least sometimes.”
She turned back to the window and seemed to stiffen.
“You know I don’t like being around sick people. I’m ashamed of it but it’s true. I guess I shouldn’t have married a doctor,” she said, trying to laugh it off. But her laughter was momentary, false, and he could only gaze at her as tenderly as possible, knowing that her feelings for him had been weakening for some time. Detecting the loss of love from one he’d hoped would always give it.
HE DROVE BACK to the Chisolm place the next afternoon, in his Model T Ford. Went inside the house and examined the child, asked Mrs. Chisolm a few questions, then went out to his car, gathered up a douche apparatus, and went back inside. Ida -Chisolm seemed to recoil from it.
“Do you have one of these?” he said to her. She shook her head, like a horse pestered by a fly. “Well, you can have this one. She must be kept very clean—inside, I mean. You want to try to keep her fecal matter—her poop—from getting into her other parts. It’s all kind of together in there, with this child. Let me show you.” She didn’t move. “Come on over, now. This is important. And when she’s old enough, she must be taught to do it herself, and frequently. Otherwise she will have frequent problems for sure.”
“What kind of problems?”
“What I believe, from what I can tell and what I’ve been told, is that without it she could have frequent infections, and you don’t want me over here every other day having to treat that.”
Warily, the woman approached and watched, listened to what he said. When he looked up at her for a moment, he saw her blinking back tears.
“It will be all right,” he said.
“So you say,” she said.
“All right,” he said after peering at her, trying to figure her state of mind. “Now, listen. I know we normally don’t let infants sleep on their backs, if we can help it. But it would be good if she could sleep with her hips slightly elevated. It might mean checking on her more often, I know. But it will help avoid the possibility of the kind of thing that would lead to infections. And during the day, when she’s in the crib, same thing. And when she’s upright, being held or whatnot, not a problem.”
She said nothing, looking blankly at the child lying there in her crib, at the little diaper the doctor had folded and placed beneath her bottom.
“You understand, Ida?” He said her first name to get her attention.
She only nodded. And he went out.
CHISOLM WAS in the work shed sharpening edges on a disc harrow. He stepped out and the doctor met him there just outside the shed, in the shade of its eave. The doctor removed his hat, ran a hand through his hair, inspected the hat as if for flaws, then put it back on.
“Child seems all right,” he said to Chisolm. “Seems healthy, to me. Doesn’t have everything she ought to have, but there does not appear to be an obstruction and as long as she’s able to eliminate waste and y’all keep her clean, she should be all right.” He looked at the man. “I’ve explained that to your wife.” Chisolm looked back at him curiously. “We’ll see how she comes along in time, but I believe she’ll be all right. She’s nursing well.”
“She, then.”
“Yes.”
Chisolm looked at him a long moment, studying him the way he did, taking the words in.
“Doesn’t need anything special, then?” he said. “No medicine or special food?”
The doctor shook his head.
“I’ll be honest with you, though,” he said.
Chisolm said nothing, waiting.
“The truth of the matter is that if something is going to go wrong, it will likely go wrong in these first weeks or even first few months. If she doesn’t soil her diaper often as any child ought, or especially if she goes even a day without that, as I said, you send for me quick. Keep an eye out for any swelling in her lower tummy. Or something kind of poking the skin out in an odd way. You can expect me to be checking in pretty often for a while. I won’t charge you for it. Let’s just call it a learning experience for everyone, but especially me, as a doctor I mean.”
Chisolm just nodded, his eyes on the doctor’s as if expecting more. Then he looked away.
The doctor yawned and rubbed his face with his hands.
“Blame me if it doesn’t seem I’ve treated half the county in the last few days. I had a passel waiting on me when I got home this morning, then went to town to call a friend who knows more about this kind of business here than I do. Went home hoping for a nap but I’d hardly lain down before a boy rode up hollering his father cut himself bad at the sawmill. Had me a bit of a nap under a sweet gum beside the road between there and here. I thank you for that gift of spiritual aid in that regard.”
Chisolm nodded, managed a grim smile.
“You need another?”
“I’m plenty good for now, thank you. Sir, I believe your product is as good as anything bottled in Kentucky. You are an artist.”
Chisolm almost grinned. “Anytime you’re in the neighborhood, Doc, just help yourself.” Then he said, “I guess I got one question.”
“Shoot.”
“How is it a child comes out like this’n?”
The doctor shrugged his shoulders inside his jacket, like he’d got a chill. He was overtired.
“The way I see it, most everybody’s lucky nothing goes wrong during a pregnancy. I sometimes can’t believe how often nature gets it just right. I’ve seen some things you wouldn’t believe. Most that come out wrong or odd die soon after birth. Sometimes I can be pretty sure, when I come back to check on them, that what happened was not a natural death.”
Chisolm looked at him for a long minute, but the doctor kept looking out over the field.
“Anyhow,” Chisolm said, “you figure this one’s a girl just because, I reckon, it’s clear she ain’t a boy.”
“Best I can tell,” the doctor said, “she’s just a girl who did not fully develop. Something stopped that in the womb, for whatever reason. It happens. No one’s fault. It’s rare, but at this point I do not think it’s life-threatening.” He paused. “There’s many a case of a child being both, to one degree or another, but that’s not the case here. I’m told this is most likely a condition you see only in female children, anyway, and not boys.”
Chisolm looked at him.
“Both, you say.”
The doctor raised his eyebrows and gave a nod, took his hat off to look it over again, brows furrowing down.
“Can’t be a nothing,” he said. “Come out able to be one or the other, and you have to wait and see which one wins out. Sometimes it just stays both.”
Chisolm looked at him, taking that in.
“Well, I reckon if a thing like that can happen to a child, we got damn lucky.”
“All things considered,” the doctor said, “I’d have to agree.”
“And nothing to do about it.”
“I don’t believe so, no. But, in time, who knows? If you can, you might put a little away toward it whenever you can, just in case.”
They stood there another long minute. Then the doctor gave Chisolm a light pat on the shoulder. “She’ll be a little treasure for you and Mrs., I don’t doubt it,” he said.
Chisolm nodded, and went back into his shed and began filing at the disc blade again. The doctor left and made a couple of house calls in the general area. The afternoon grew chilly, late November coming on. When he returned home at last light the house was empty, but a small fire flickered in the hearth, and there was a tin plate on the stove’s warmer, covered by a clean cloth. A note from his wife on the kitchen table. She’d gone into town to visit her mother, might stay overnight, not to worry.
He went into his study, where he’d left the jug from Chisolm, poured himself a measure into an empty coffee cup, lit a small lamp on his desk, and wrote in his journal. A tree frog sang out its loud, long, piercing song just outside the window on the porch, and even its near-deafening note, coming from an inch-long operatic amphibian soprano, somehow brought up a corresponding silent note of melancholy.