One Year After: A Novel (7 page)
John stood and nodded.
“And please don’t construe this the wrong way. Your daughter’s age?”
“Eighteen, and she is the mother of a fourteen-month-old boy whose father was killed in the fighting with the Posse.” He hesitated, ashamed to mention it as if seeking sympathy, but it spilled from him. “Her younger sister died of diabetes last year, as well. She is all we have left.”
Dale looked at Makala with soulful eyes. “I am sorry about the loss of your daughter, ma’am. I know deferments for draftees with dependent children have been dropped, but—and again, please don’t take this the wrong way—I think you have good grounds for an appeal that I can move forward. Especially if she is serving as your assistant or in some capacity vital to the area’s security beyond that of just simply carrying arms.”
“Elizabeth is my adopted daughter,” Makala replied. “And at the moment, she serves in the local militia, helps with the community farm acreage, and takes care of her son and her grandmother, like so many of the other kids in our community.” She stared straight at him, and his eyes dropped.
“We’ve all lost someone,” he said.
“And you?”
He hesitated. “Strange, but maybe lucky. I had no one special when the Day hit. I was part of the personnel evacuated out of Washington. I had two sisters; we were never close, really. I married some years ago and then divorced and lost track of where my ex was even before the war hit us. And so I just buried myself in work.”
“Such as?” Makala pressed.
There was a look in his eyes, but it passed like a shadow. “Working for the federal government, of course, to try to bring order out of chaos. I was ordered to report up to Bluemont to help with the work of reorganization and then was assigned to the field—meaning here—two months ago. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I really am late for my next meeting. I’ll take care of the thirty-day extension on the draft in your community and will be in touch. I know you’ll clearly see that our district has become safe for law-abiding citizens within a matter of days.”
John looked at him quizzically, but long experience told him that this man was not going to say anything more. He had at least gotten a temporary reprieve for his entire community. Whatever Fredericks’s actions were going to be, he’d have to let him play them out.
Dale stepped out from behind his desk, opened the door to his office, and motioned for Makala, who nodded her thanks as she exited with John following her. Dale shook John’s hand in the hallway and then returned to his office while they headed for the exit and out into the early afternoon heat. John spared a sharp glance for the sergeant who had troubled him earlier, but the man’s gaze was fixed straight ahead as if John didn’t exist. John and Makala walked slowly to where Ed and Grace were leaning against the hood of the Edsel.
“What do you think?” Makala whispered.
“Well, I didn’t expect the extension. I’m highly skeptical that a central government can secure our communities. We understand the nuances and threats better than they ever can. If they had shown up with a million extra rations as a reserve for the winter ahead, some farming equipment, electrical generators, additional communications gear, some tech people to help us get things up and running, or a darn-good, fully stocked field medical unit that can move from community to community, now those would be blessings I’d be overjoyed to see. That’s the kind of help I was hoping for, not this pulling out of those we need the most not just for defense but also for rebuilding.”
“All of those would be great,” Makala replied. “I don’t like the idea of them being plucked from our midst, and six weeks from now, they’re thrown into some godforsaken no-man’s-land fighting Posse groups in New York or the nightmare in Chicago.”
He sighed as they headed to the car where Ed and Grace stood, weapons slung, both of them relieved to see John and Makala out of the building and heading their way.
“If everything he said is true, it is essentially a lawful order of the emergency government. But to go against it?” Makala said.
He shook his head ruefully. “I was a military man once, Makala. I swore an oath to defend the Constitution, and as long as that point held, I followed orders, even when I didn’t like them. I feel caught in the middle with this thing. This is about Elizabeth but also about damn near every other family I feel responsible for.”
“Let’s go home and try to calm things down first. He certainly didn’t volunteer to come with us. And once we get back, you have that postponed appointment with your friendly dentist, Doc Weiderman.”
The mere mention of it reminded him of the damned toothache. The crisis of the moment had diverted him from the pain, but mention of it was a forceful reminder.
She gave him that reassuring nurse smile that usually meant what was coming would not be pleasant. He sighed and nodded.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“About your tooth or Dale?” she asked.
“Dale.”
She took his hand and squeezed it. “I think he’s full of shit.”
“Come on in, John; no more dodging now.”
Richard Weiderman was an old friend from long before the Day—the family dentist who had taken care of his kids and had even belonged to the town’s Civil War Roundtable group. Richard took delight in giving talks on what medicine and dentistry were like back then, and that knowledge had put him into an important position after the Day. Gone were pneumatic-driven, high-speed dental drills and suction tubes, and the mere sight of a Novocain needle always creeped John out.
When John came in for checkups, he used to nervously joke with Richard about a favorite comedy musical that featured an insane dentist who winds up getting fed to a man-eating plant. Everyone had some sort of dark joke about dentists, but on the other hand, all were darn grateful for their existence and took it as an ordinary part of their lives even if it was a few unpleasant hours a year in the chair.
No longer. Richard’s supply of Novocain and other anesthesia had immediately gone into the town’s emergency supply. He had become more than “just a dentist” during the battle with the Posse, helping to patch up facial wounds and repair shattered jaws and agonizing wounds to the mouth. In the year and a half after those dreadful days, he had resumed his practice, using what had been a hobby knowledge of dental history to put himself back into business. In the basement storage room of a long-deceased dentist, he found a foot-powered treadle drill and a variety of dental tools not used in a hundred years. From a hidden reserve in a jewelry store, he snatched up thin sheets of hammered-out gold for fillings. He had moved his office from a posh location in an upscale development at the edge of town into an abandoned jewelry store on Cherry Street, where reluctant patients came for treatment. There was even a hand-lettered sign over the entryway, painted in ornate, nineteenth-century script, complete with the image of a tooth, proclaiming, “Pain-free extraction!”
That at least was no longer just an advertising line. The chemistry teacher at the college had put together a team at Makala’s behest, and they had actually managed to start the production of ether. It had, after all, first been manufactured in the early nineteenth century with supplies and equipment any modern college or even high school chemistry classroom lab could duplicate.
When first discovered in the early nineteenth century and for nearly forty years afterward, ether and nitrous oxide were not used for medical purposes, but instead for what could be called “stoner parties.” The “ether man” traveled from town to town with bottles of ether and tightly woven bags containing the nitrous oxide to be dispensed at two bits a whiff—a favorite form of entertainment. It was finally a dentist in Georgia in the early 1840s who had connected the dots that ether was far more than just entertainment. The Civil War historian in John was always grateful for that realization when he contemplated the agony of the hundreds of thousands of wounded who, if the war had been fought but twenty years earlier, would have gone under the saw and knife wide awake. Ether and chloroform were readily available then, and they were even sent through the lines as a humanitarian gesture if an enemy’s hospital was running short. The tragedy after the Day was that the art of making anesthesia locally had to be relearned, and thus many of the wounded after the war with the Posse had indeed suffered. After that experience, Makala made it a top priority for the college lab to resume manufacturing the precious gas and fumes, along with silver-based antibiotics.
As Richard motioned for John to take a seat in the chair, he looked around the office and felt that it indeed had a Civil War–era look to it. A woodstove in the corner was burning, in spite of the heat of the day, to sterilize instruments in a boiling pot. X-ray readers and a computer screen providing soothing images to divert a patient in the chair were replaced with some old-fashioned charts of the mouth and teeth—gruesome but illustrative when Richard had to point out where a problem was.
John tried to settle back into the chair, Richard gossiping with him for a few minutes about the draft; his oldest daughter was one of those called up. And then the moment came.
“Come on, John, open up; let’s take a look.” Then the dreaded “Ah, I think this is the one.” He tapped the sore tooth with the end of a probe, nearly sending John out of the chair.
Richard sat back, nodding thoughtfully. “In the old days, I’d send you to a specialist for a root canal; I don’t even need an x-ray to tell you this one is bad. I can have it out in two minutes, John.”
John looked at him wide eyed. “I’ll skip it for now, Rich,” he replied hoarsely. “Maybe in a couple of days after things settle down. I got a couple of meetings to attend to later today.”
“Come on, John, I even got ether now. Have you under, tooth out, and you’re on your way an hour from now.”
John shook his head. “I gotta be clear headed—too much going on at the moment.”
“I think you’re begging off, John,” Richard replied with a knowing smile.
“Yeah, well, maybe I am.”
“Open your mouth again.”
“Why?”
“I thought I saw something else. Promise I won’t touch the sore tooth, but John, you and I know that kind of thing actually used to kill people two hundred years ago. It’s an upper molar—gets infected, gets into your sinuses, and then you got real agony that could eventually kill you. Come on; let’s get it taken care of.”
John kept his mouth closed and shook his head, willing himself to think that it really didn’t hurt all that bad and could wait.
“Well, at least let me take a quick look-see at something else. Promise I’ll leave that bad boy alone.”
John reluctantly complied. Richard leaned in, tapping John’s lower-left canine, and John winced a bit.
“Yeah, thought so,” Richard announced while still peering into John’s mouth. “Start of a cavity that could go nasty there.”
All John could do was mutter a strangled “Damn it.”
“I can take care of that nice and quick,” Richard continued, sitting back up and rubbing his hands on his apron. Gone were the days of latex gloves and masks, the few in the town’s supply reserved for major surgeries only. “Drill that sucker out in five minutes and pack a filling into it.”
John looked at him wide eyed.
“Compromise with ya, John. Let me fill that before it goes bad, and you get off free until tomorrow with the bad one. Otherwise, I go to Makala, and she lays some mandatory treatment order on you as the public health official.”
John glared angrily at Richard for pulling that trump card and finally nodded a reluctant agreement.
Richard smiled, and whistling, he went over to the boiling pot, tossed in the instrument he had been using to probe John, and pulled out several others with tongs. John tried to look the other way as Richard pushed the foot-powered drill up alongside the chair and clamped a drill bit in.
It was yet another reason why, before the Day, John would shake his head when folks waxed too enthusiastically about the alleged beauty of living in the nineteenth century. They never thought about medicine and sanitation, let alone dentistry.
Richard pulled out a rubberized bag from under a counter. It looked like an oversized balloon with a nozzle on the end.
“I’ll open the tap on this,” Richard said with a grin. “You take a good deep breath in. Nitrous will chill you out for a few minutes.”
Richard stuck the nozzle into John’s mouth and then opened the valve.
“Go for it,” Richard said, and he did have a bit of a maniacal grin as John breathed in deeply.
Within seconds, it hit, and John actually did feel mellowed out, even giddy, as Richard closed the valve, put the bag down, swung the old-fashioned drill around in front of John, and started to pedal furiously. There was a low humming as the oiled cables spun in their sprockets, the drill bit spinning. Richard moved quickly, prying John’s mouth open and pushing the drill bit down on to the cavity.
John felt like his entire head was vibrating, the sound of the drill bit flashing him back to early childhood, a dreaded dentist who had yet to go high tech and used an old-fashioned cable-driven drill, but at least that one was electrically powered.
For the first minute or so, it really didn’t bother him; in fact, he was tempted to crack a joke. There was pain within seconds, but for a blessed moment, he really didn’t care. It was strange how nitrous allowed one to feel pain but not care about it.
And then it hit. The gulp of nitrous was wearing off, the treadle-powered drill was setting up an awful racket, he felt like his mouth was vibrating apart, and the pain was building.
He started to gasp, waving his arm for Richard to stop.
“Hang in there, John, just another minute—almost got it all.”
Gone was the electrical-powered suction tube. John’s mouth was filling up with saliva and drilled-out bits of tooth, and it smelled like something was burning. He began to gag, waving frantically for Richard to back off.
Richard pulled the drill out and held up an old-fashioned spittoon, John gagging, spitting, and cursing.