Random Winds (3 page)

“You mean the ocean was here once?”

“Yes sir, that’s just what I do mean.”

“When the ocean came, what happened to the people? Did they all drown?”

“No, no. That was millions of years before there were any people here.”

At the foot of the hill, making a wide S-curve, lay the river.

“Pa, is that the river that overflowed and drowned Enoch Junior and Susan and May?” Martin knew quite well that it was, yet he always asked.

His father answered patiently, “That’s it.”

“Then I was born, and you had me instead of Enoch
Junior as your boy. Do I look like him?” To that too, he knew the answer.

“No, he was small and sandy, like me. You’re going to be tall, I think, and of course you’re darker, like your mother’s family.”

“Do you like me more than you liked him?”

“The same. A man’s children are the same to him, like his own ten fingers.”

They drew into the Bechtolds’ yard.

“Wait out here, Martin,” Pa said.

“Can’t I come in and watch?”

“I have to change a dressing. It might make you feel bad to see the cut.”

“No it won’t, Pa. Honestly, it won’t.”

What his father didn’t know was that Martin had already seen much blood, having peered many a time through the shutters of a first floor window when he was supposed to be amusing himself outdoors. He had watched Pa set a compound fracture. (The little gray tip of bone pierces the flesh; the ether cone silences the screams.) He had seen the mangled stomach of a man gored by a bull. He had also seen his father wrestle down another man who had been beating his wife, and this last had impressed him most of all, although he had known it would be wise not to mention having seen it.

“All right then, come in.”

A scythe propped carelessly in a dark corner of the barn had sliced Jake Bechtold’s leg to the bone. Pa pulled the nightshirt up. Carefully he unwound the bandage, revealing a long, blood-encrusted gash, black and crisscrossed with stitches. He studied it for a moment.

“It’s doing well. Better than I expected, to tell the truth. No infection, thanks be.”

“We’re grateful to you, Doc.” Mrs. Bechtold wrung her clasped hands. “You always seen us through.”

“Not every time, Mrs. Bechtold,” Pa said seriously.

“Oh, that! That was in God’s hands. There wasn’t nothing you could’ve done more than you did do, Doc.”

When they go back in the buggy, Pa sat in silence for a while. And then he broke out. “Oh, it’s hard, it can be so
hard! Sometimes such awful things happen, you can’t put them out of your mind as long as you live!”

“What awful things, Pa?”

His father paused, as if the telling would be too difficult Then he said, “It was in my second year here, almost into the third. I never go to Bechtold’s without living it all over again the way I did just now.”

“Was it anything you did?”

“No, it was something I didn’t do. I wasn’t able. Jake had the flu. While I was in the bedroom examining him, their little girl, just three years old she was, pulled a wash-tub full of boiling water off the stove while her mother’s back was turned. We laid her on the kitchen table. I can still hear how she screamed. Once in my life I’d ordered a lobster. It was when I first came to this country and stayed those three days in New York City. A lobster is bright red when it’s boiled, you know, and I remember I couldn’t bring myself to eat it The child looked like that. I thought, ‘I don’t know what to do. I’m supposed to know and I don’t.’ A lot of people came running in, wailing and crying. They poured cold water on the child. I didn’t think to tell them not to, although really it wouldn’t have made any difference what they did. The child was sure to die. Finally I found something to do. I got a scissors and began to cut her clothes off.

“Her body was one terrible blister. I couldn’t even look at the face. When I pulled off the stockings, the skin came with them in long strips, like tissue paper. I took some salve out of my bag. It had gone liquid from the hot sun, so I dribbled it all over the child’s body. Everybody was looking at me, just standing there watching, as if there were some magic in the jar of melted salve.

“The child lay moaning on the kitchen table all that afternoon. Someone asked, ‘Why not put her in a bed?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Best not to lift her.’ We put a little pillow under her head. Her pulse was so faint, I don’t think she felt anything. At least I hope not. We waited. Nobody talked. I heard the cows lowing, wanting to be milked. I’ll never forget the sounds they made, they and the child’s moaning. All the neighbor women came. Shortly before dusk the little
girl died. I pulled the cover over her face. I still hadn’t looked at it.”

Martin shivered. Pa’s tales always made him feel he had been there when they happened. He had been in that kitchen with him and the dying girl; he had been on the deck with him when he sailed away from Ulster to America, out past the breakwater and the headlands, out to sea.

“I shouldn’t be telling you this, should I?” Pa asked. “Your mother would be angry. She’d say you’re too young to know how hard life can be.”

“I’m not too young. I’m nine.”

“You’re a lot older than nine in many ways.” His father’s arm, which had been resting on the back of the seat, slipped to Martin’s shoulders. His father’s hand felt warm and firm, making a union between the two of them.

“Pa,” he said, “I want to be a doctor.”

Pa looked at him carefully. “Are you saying so because you think I’d like to hear it? Is that it?”

“No. I really mean it.”

“You may change your mind.”

“I won’t change my mind.”

Pa had a little twist at the corner of his mouth, not a real smile, only the start of one, the way he did when he was pleased about something, or when he and Ma had a secret.

“Well, you’re smart enough,” he said now. “Alice is smarter.”

“Maybe so. But she’s not going to be a doctor, that’s for sure. There were a couple of women in my class at medical school, and they were pretty bright too, but if you ask me, I don’t think it’s decent. There’s man’s work and there’s woman’s work. Doctoring, to my way of thinking, is man’s work.”

“You always say it’s God’s work,” Martin said shyly.

“Well, of course it is that. Take Bechtold’s leg, now. It’s true, we’ve learned a lot about sterilization; twenty years ago you’d thread a needle and stick it in your coat lapel. But even so, you can still have infection. With all our knowledge, we must remember to be humble. Never give
way to pride in your skill. Another time you might not be as lucky.”

The buggy rumbled across the bridge. Martin leaned over the side, where the water was high with springtime flooding. Close to the bottom of the bridge it swirled, jewel-green, beautiful and dreadful. The power of water! Power to drown or to freeze or scald. Yet it could be so soft, closing over you on summer afternoons, all silky cool while you floated and were so gently borne.

Pa said suddenly, “I’m going to buy this mare. He’ll sell her if I offer enough.”

“You said we didn’t need her and we couldn’t afford her.”

“We don’t and we can’t. But I can’t send her back to the livery stable, either.”

Martin smiled. In a way he could not have put into words, he understood that this tenderness toward the animal was connected with the sharp, cruel things they had been talking about.

They circled through Cyprus. Men were putting red, white and blue bunting around the bandstand and all the stores were closed, except for the soda fountain. Martin could anticipate delicious flavors: teaberry, chocolate and Zip’s root beer. Oh, the smells and music, the feel of a holiday!

Now they were trotting down Washington Avenue, from which the side streets led to open country. These were shady streets; iron deer stood on their lawns and porches held stone urns filled with red geraniums. You wondered what lay inside the lofty houses where maids in striped aprons swept the steps and gardeners clipped the hedges.

A woman in a white dress and a light, flowered hat was coming out of a house. Two little girls, all white and lacy like her, walked beside her. They were younger than Martin. One of them looked very queer, he saw. There was something wrong with her shoulders.

Pa halted the buggy and tipped his hat.

“How are you, Mrs. Meig?”

“Very well, Doctor, thank you. And you?”

“The same, thank you.”

“Is this your boy, Doctor?”

“Yes, this is my son, Martin.”

“He’s going to be a handsome man.”

“Handsome is as handsome does.”

The lady laughed. Even her laugh was pretty. She had come quite close to the buggy so that you could smell her perfume. Narrow silver bracelets flashed on her wrists. Martin stared at her, then at the daughter who was just like her, except for the bracelets: the girl had a gold locket lying in the hollow of her throat. He looked at the other girl and quickly looked away; you weren’t supposed to stare at a cripple.

Pa tipped his hat again and clucked to the mare. It had all taken half a minute.

“Who was that?” Martin asked.

“Mrs. Meig. That’s their house.”

He twisted around to look back. The house was strong and dark, built of stone. It had a curlicued iron fence and starry flowers scattered on the grass.

“Did you see all those wild flowers, Pa?”

“Those are daffodils, and they aren’t growing wild, only made to look that way. It’s what they call ‘naturalizing,’ ” his father explained. He knew everything.

Suddenly Martin knew what was exciting him. The house looked like a castle in a book about knights! It was smaller, of course, but it was secretive like that. It made you want to know what went on inside.

“Have you ever been inside, Pa?”

“Yes, once. The parlor maid was sick and they couldn’t get Dr. Pierce. That’s how Mrs. Meig came to recognize me.” Pa grinned. “It was a miserable, wet night, I recall, and I guess Dr. Pierce didn’t want to go out just for a maid.”

“What’s a maid for, Pa?”

“Why, when you have a big place like that you need people to take care of it. The Meigs own the Websterware factory down by the canal where they make pots and pans, you know. I guess half the men in Cyprus work there.”

But Martin was thinking of something else. “What was wrong with that other little girl?”

“She can’t help the way she looks. She has a curvature of the spine.”

“What’s that?”

“Her spine wasn’t made right before she was born. You can be thankful it didn’t happen to you.”

True. It would be terrible. The kids would make fun of you in school. He shuddered.

Ma and Alice were already waiting on the porch when they drove into the yard. They had summer dresses on and white shoes. Alice wore a broad blue sash and bow.

“Don’t they look pretty, standing there?” Pa asked.

“That lady was prettier than Ma. And the little girl was a whole lot prettier than Alice.”

Pa rebuked him. “Don’t you ever say that, Martin, you hear me?”

“I only meant Ma and Alice haven’t got big white hats like those.” It was not what he had meant, however. “I wish they did, don’t you?”

“It’s not important,” his father replied.

His mother was in the mood of the holiday. She ruffled Martin’s hair, grazing his cheek with the harsh skin of her fingertips.

“Hurry up, you two!” she cried gaily. “You’ve ten minutes to wash and change.”

Ordinarily, passing his sister as he went into the house, Martin would have pulled open her sash. Just because she was a year and a half older, she needn’t think she was queen of the roost! Now, though, some sudden tenderness kept him from spoiling Alice’s careful bow. He could not have explained what it was that he saw in his mother and sister just then: something vulnerable and wanting, perhaps, although they were smiling at this moment and happy. He only felt the dim confusion of contrast: that startling glimpse, just a few seconds’ worth, of a house, of a fragrant, slender woman and a flowery girl-child; then this house and these two whom he knew so dearly. Something stirred in his heart, a kind of longing, a kind of pain.

Some days are marked for recollection, days which, on the surface, are not very different from all the other thousands in the chain of years. But seeds have been sown
which will lie hidden quietly until their time, until a commanding shaft of light breaks through; then all the concentrated life in the seeds will stir and rise. Perhaps it was unusual for a boy only nine years old to make a resolution and have a revelation all in one day; perhaps more unusual still for him to know, as they were happening, that he would remember them. Yet it was so.

Long before sunrise Martin awoke with instant awareness that this morning was different He was leaving home. The college years close by at Hamilton had been little more than an extension of home, but this, he knew, would be a final departure. After four years at Cornell Medical College, after four years of New York City, the life of this house would be unfamiliar and he would be someone other than he now was.

The suitcases stood near the door, black shapes in the graying dawn. When they had been fastened shut and taken away, what would be left in this old room to which he had been brought on the day of his birth? The bed, with its loopy crocheted spread, the ink-stained desk and the maple dresser on which his toilet things had been placed in parallel lines, equidistant from the edge. Like his mother, he was compelled toward neatness and precision. He could never think constructively until everything was in order, notes arranged alphabetically in the notebook and papers in their folders. A neurotic trait! But one couldn’t help the way one was made.

Guilty and melancholy thoughts crossed his mind sometimes. If it had not been for the deaths of those other three, especially of the brother, he would not have been going away to become a doctor. Oh, then, what would he have become? Death and survival! One life thrives on the destruction of another! He had been thinking more often lately about those three. Perhaps it was because they lay in the graveyard not half a mile down the road, and would be lying there this morning when he passed to meet the train that was taking him away.