“I deserve him back like this,” she said. But he was gone. The dead whistle in summer through fixed teeth, stones are gently raised on riverless cracked banks, and in the mildness of the small town, roped in from the desert, spectators, with boots on teetering rails, stare up and down empty, flickering streets. Whole families wander the surrounding country, hands in pockets, kicking sticks of shale and overturning rare bits of wood.
Ma perspired in the darkness. Ahead she saw Luke’s lister drill, squat, unhitched, tilted against the slope of the dam, seeds mildewing in its coffin box, burned out and black like a piece of armor on a battle hillside. Drawn to equipment, to a wagon loose in a field, to the numberless, lopsided wheelknives of a harrow abandoned by the trickling stream, she touched the rusting metal.
Ma climbed to the worn crosstree — bolt and chain clinked beneath her — and holding to the locked brake handle settled herself to rest on the driver’s seat. Her feet dangled, heels thudded against the hollow wood. She leaned forward, chin in scarred hands, and breathed faintly the odor of horses long since unharnessed from the burden. Miles from the Lampson place, seated quietly in the middle of acres which only Luke dared tread upon in daylight, Ma moaned and nodded as if she had lost him only the day before.
“I’ve let him pass me by tonight.”
But, eyes staring at the flat of her apron, face buried in stiff fingers, she could not hear the quiet footfall, the close deliberate opening of the earth, the parting of the weeds.
She could not see behind her.
o n impulse, throwing off his coat, Cap Leech, in the days when he could shave a cow’s heart thin as glass and determine with one look beneath the sheets the life span of the stricken, dared to extract the secret of a dead woman; on a wintry morning, having arrived according to law too late, he attended the birth of Harry Bohn. The mother, dead but a moment; gave up the still live child in an operation which, hurried and unexpected, was more abortive than life saving and, when the doctor drew back, lapsed into her first faintly rigorous position. The son, fished none too soon from the dark hollow, swayed coldly to and fro between his fingers. Leech left his scalpel stuck midway down the unbleeding thigh, buried the wailing forceps in his shiny bag, stepped outdoors with the infant and disappeared, thereafter, through all his career, barred from the most fruitful of emergencies.
But attendance at the surrounded bedside was not his special pleasure, he was not keen to treat night after night the umbilical cord like a burnt cork. He did not care for the sight of a swelling that decreased and felt no duty to bring relief to a woman lying in a shaft of sunlight. Her only discoloration was for a purpose, and Cap Leech believed in the non-usefulness of burst organs; no good could come of it.
In the days following his clandestine operation upon the corpse, days of smooth cheeks and high collar, he teetered between the whiteness of a hall and the spotted robe tied behind the sufferer’s back. His training had begun with a set of wired bones in a dry box — he had clicked the teeth — and ended with poppy leaves smoldering in a pharmaceutical brass dish. Unguentine on the tip of his finger, reference to the tight page of a textbook, a limb swaddled in lay wrappings of bandage, the count of clear blood cells like constellations; with spectacles and shaved temples he took to searching coal bins for the wounded.
Cap Leech was no more a midwife. A family of one son and one unborn had been abandoned for earaches and faeces smuggled in milk bottles when he set out with a few sticks and powders for thirty years practice among those without chance of recovery, doomed, he felt, to submit. With him went the child whose features he had touched off by a slight grazing of the tongs.