Passing Through Midnight (19 page)

"Till it's all done. Another week maybe."

"It must be hard on a family whether they come along or
not."

"It's a hard life."

She nodded. "I love this life," she said, leaning against
the side of the house, speaking more to herself than to Gil. "It's nice
to be able to take the time to watch the seasons change. To watch the
crops grow. I used to think the land was indifferent to the people who
worked it, but it's not, is it? It knows. And it gives as much as it
takes, doesn't it?"

"Pretty much," he said, looking out across his land. A lot
of work went into maintaining two twelve-hundred-acre farms, but she
was right. There was always time to see the beauty and the purpose in
it. He looked back at Dorie.

She hadn't talked about staying or going back to Chicago
in a while, and he refused to bring the subject up. He didn't want to
know for sure, one way or the other. He wanted everything to stay
exactly as it was between them. But he had only to look out at the land
once more to be reminded that change was a constant thing. The wheat in
the field across the road had been tall and ripe the week before. In
September or early October, he'd plow that field and start all over
again.

He sighed, deep in thought. How many times had he had to
start over? New crops. New wives. New herds. New dreams. New bank
payments. New winter coats for the boys. It would be nice to have
something other than the land and Matthew as a constant in his life.
Something he could count on. Something that would stay new and fresh
and alive and still be the same all the time.

"You're a lucky man, Gil," she said softly, scarcely
disturbing the easy quiet between them. He looked at her. "I envy you
the peace in your life."

His life was peaceful. Not perfect, but peaceful and good.
His one true complaint before Dorie arrived was the loneliness in his
heart, and she… Well, she'd moved in, rearranged the
furniture, hung new pictures on the walls, and made his heart her home.
She was a fun and interesting friend, an attentive companion, an
exciting lover. She filled his gaps and made him feel whole and
balanced. But in his heart, he could feel her anxious pacing, her
confusion, her discontent.

"I'd offer to share it; I'd give it to you as a gift if I
could, but…"

"But I have to find my own. Right?"

" 'Fraid so," he said, his smile and his eyes expressing
his deep caring. He set his empty coffee mug on the porch behind them,
then palmed the back of her neck and gave it a brief, reassuring
squeeze. "You'll find yours, too, Dorie. It might be here with me, or
it might be back in Chicago waiting for you, but it's out there and
it's yours. You'll find it."

Nodding, she watched him walk off to meet the boys at the
gate.

It might be here with me
. It was the
first time he'd verbally hinted to having thoughts about a future
together. He'd been so careful not to express too many of his feelings
out loud, and she knew he was being cautious not to influence any of
her decisions. That old adage about not being able to buy or sell love,
about love being something you couldn't explain or find under any old
rock in the garden—but you knew it when you felt
it—was true. Dorie felt it and so did Gil.

It was there when they looked at each other, when they
touched. She could hear it in his voice; feel it in his kiss; sense it
in his body language toward her. He loved her. Somewhere along the way,
he'd gotten over his fear of giving his heart to another woman. But he
wouldn't say it out loud to her until she'd made a decision about her
life, and he'd
never
say it if she decided to
leave.

It was always sort of a strange phenomenon to Dorie, that
the choices she worried and fretted about the most were usually taken
out of her hands in the end, and she would be left to cope with
whatever destiny decided was the best option in any given situation.
The most frightening part of these incidents was the sudden and often
violent way the Fates had of letting her know what they had decided.

The fifth of July was a bright, hot, blue-skied day. There
was more sky in Kansas than anywhere she'd ever been before—she
didn't think she'd ever get used to it.

She hadn't seen many of the harvesters at the fireworks
display in town the night before, but she imagined that they, too, had
celebrated—they were, after all, in the heartland of America.
Still feeling unusually patriotic and full of goodwill toward her
fellow Americans —and bored out of her mind—Dorie
filled a cooler full of ice and soft drinks and paid a visit to the
workers.

It would be her way of saying good-bye to them. Gil had
told her that morning they'd be moving on the next day. There hadn't
been time, or the opportunity for that matter, to get to know many of
them. They were nice enough people, but there was always the underlying
we-don't-want-to-be-here-long-so-let's-get-it-done-and-move-on-to-the-next-place-and-get-home
attitude. However, they had provided her with some excitement and a new
fondness for the smell of cut wheat, and for that alone she wanted to
pay her respects.

Gil apparently had had a similar notion as his big black
and silver truck was drawn up in the field next to three combines and
two of the big dump trucks that were shut down for a break. It was
immediately clear that he knew the true lay of the land—he
was passing out beers. She grimaced as she pulled her car over to the
side of the road. After beer, her soft drinks were going to seem
very… soft to a bunch of hot harvesters.

He waved her over when he saw her, said something to
Fletcher and Baxter who were with him, and went back to his
conversation with one of the workers. Dorie, having filled the cooler
in town, hadn't realized how heavy it would be once she got it to the
field. She speculated briefly on the odds of driving her car out there
without getting it stuck and sending the whole town into another fit of
laughter at her expense, then decided to try and carry it.

She'd long ago lost the limp in her left leg and seldom
had any pain in it, but she was aware that she favored it still and
almost unconsciously protected it from further injury. With every bump
of the cooler against it as she walked toward the combines, she
envisioned reshattering it, banging the weakened bone fragments until
they fell apart again and she lay helpless and unable to move in the
stubbled wheat.

She set the cooler down to rest her leg, then bent to pick
it up again, calling herself a short list of names for not calling out
for help. So silly. She was healthy and strong and could lug it across
the field—then, too, any number of those men would be
delighted to come to her rescue, wouldn't they? She'd always wondered
if men really enjoyed being called upon by a woman to do something that
the woman found backbreaking. It was like saying, here, break your back
doing this because I don't want to break mine.

That thought got her another fifteen feet before she set
the cooler down again.

"Gil," she called with a compromise. "Come help me with
this."

He turned, saw her dilemma, and started to slow-jog toward
her. He kept his arms bent and had a sort of natural athletic grace
when he ran that she couldn't help but admire—which was what
she was doing when it happened.

Neither of them saw
how
it happened,
but Dorie, the odd motion catching her gaze over Gil's head and left
shoulder, saw that it
was happening
. Too late,
she cried out a warning, then screamed in horror as a young man, maybe
a year or two older than Fletcher, began to wave his arms in the air
for balance, reached out frantically for something to hold on to, then
fell backward into the long, sharp blades of the combine. He screamed,
and the blades shifted a bit under his weight.

Though he hadn't the distance to cover that she had, Dorie
was only steps behind Gil when they
reached
the boy. One of the women workers pushed her way out of the crowd,
crying incoherently. Several other workers had blood on their hands and
clothes, she noted as she pushed her way past them to get closer to the
boy. With her adrenaline levels shooting heavenward, her practiced eye
took in the scene with one sweep, and she began to calmly give orders
to the first face she recognized.

"Fletcher, go get my cooler. Bring it here. Gil? Gil, call
an ambulance. Then call the emergency room at the hospital and tell
them to call the nearest life-flight operation and get a helicopter out
here stat."

As she spoke she was reaching out for the cleanest piece
of clothing she could see, which happened to be Baxter's blue, red, and
yellow striped T-shirt. He was wide-eyed and openmouthed with shock.
She peeled it off his back, then quickly and tightly wrapped it around
the greatest source of bleeding, the stump of the boy's left wrist. His
hand had been severed.

"Back away, please," she said, her voice amazingly
collected, and firm and authoritative. "I need a little more room here.
Can you keep him still?" She glanced up from the boy's erratic but deep
respirations to a somewhat dazed man near the boy's head. He nodded.
"Are you his father?" Again he nodded. "Good. What's his name?"

"Joseph."

"Okay, Joseph," she said quietly, feeling for the pulse in
his neck as she leaned toward the boy's ear. "I'm Dr. Devries. I know
you're hurting and I know you're scared, but you're going to be fine.
Do you hear me? You're going to be fine, but I need your help. I need you to try to be calm and stop moving around. Can you
do that? You need to relax as much as you can."

Fletcher arrived with the cooler, looking pale and
frightened.

"Are your hands pretty clean?" she asked him. He looked to
make sure, then nodded. "Take out all the cans, Fletch. Leave the ice."

She had her hand fisted around the stump, blood had soaked
the shirt and was oozing between her fingers.

"Joseph? Does your neck hurt when I do this?" she asked,
carefully examining as many of his cervical vertebrae as she could get
to with one hand. When he was unable to indicate any additional pain at
her touch, she moved on. "Can you feel me touch you here, Joseph? How
about here on your arm? If I push on your stomach like this, does it
hurt more or about the same?"

"The ambulance is on the way." Gil had returned from using
the phone in his truck and was leaning over her shoulder breathlessly.
"The nurse at the medical center said she'd need a doctor's order
before she could call in a helicopter."

Dorie growled under her breath. Policies and procedures.
She hated them.

"Call her back. Tell her there's a doctor on the scene.
Give her my name and tell her I'll take full responsibility."

"I did. She wasn't impressed."

Her face was ferocious when she turned to glare at him.

"Talk to any doctor in the house. Explain things. Get him
to give the order."

"There's one on call, and they've called him already.
He'll meet the ambulance at the emergency room."

"Dammit, Gil, we don't have time to take him all the way
into town to stabilize him and then ship him out. I can stabilize him
when the ambulance gets here. The faster we get him to a plastic
surgeon, the better the chance we'll have of saving his hand."

"I'll try again," he said, already stepping away.

"Gil." He turned back. "You tell them to get a chopper
here stat or… or, I'm not sure what I'll do… You
just tell them to get it here."

He nodded, the concern for her obvious distress clear in
his eyes.

"Joseph? You're doing fine. I need to look at your back
for a minute. I think you're bleeding there too," she said, looking at
the blood-streaked wheat stalks on the right side of his body. "I'm
going to tip you to the side a bit. Yes, that's good. Hang on. A couple
cuts, not too bad. They've already stopped bleeding, I think. You did
fine. Oh! Hear that? The ambulance."

"Dorie? The ice." It was Fletcher, dragging the cooler
closer to her.

"Thanks, Fletch. Would you take Baxter over to the truck
now, please?"

Waiting long enough to see them turn away, Dorie bent low
to the ground, stretching her arm carefully past the sharp blades, a
little farther and a little farther until she could reach the boy's
lifeless hand. Holding it like a piece of fragile glass, she lifted it
into the cooler and gently buried it in the ice.

"Hear that, Joseph?" she asked, closing the lid of the
cooler with her free hand. The young man was crying and trying to pull
his pain close to his heart, to protect his wound. She pushed his good
hand away repeatedly. "Can you hear the ambulance? They can give you
something for the pain when they get here. Are you allergic to
anything? Is he allergic? Has he ever had a reaction to a medication?"
she asked, looking to the father for a clear answer. He shook his head.
"Good. We'll start him on antibiotics right away to ward off infection.
And by then the helicopter should be here," she said, ending on an
upbeat note.

Her white tank top and the front of her blue jeans were
soaked with blood. She kept a constant pressure on the boy's extremity,
thought about a tourniquet, and then decided against it. It was best to
keep the wound as fresh as possible, if he didn't bleed much more and
his vital signs stayed stable.

"Gil?" she called, her question all in the way she said
his name.

He was there, a few steps behind her. "The nurse said
she'd do what she could."

"Can you see… ?"

"Yes. They're almost here."

"I need more…" She was about to ask for his
shirt, but looked up in time to see the ambulance cross the drainage
ditch as if it weren't there and come racing across the field toward
them.

She bent over her patient to protect his eyes and mouth
and wound from the dust and anything that might fly through the air as
the ambulance came to a stop beside them. The harvesters backed away
slowly when two men in their mid-thirties and a young woman exited the
van and efficiently started pulling equipment from the rear of the
ambulance.