The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (189 page)

9

W
OODFIELD

Even before the Georgian house on Brattle Street had been restored and furnished to their satisfaction, her marriage to Tom had begun to unravel. When they had found a charming property on a Berkshires mountainside in the township of Woodfield, in western Massachusetts near the Vermont line, they bought it and used the project of a vacation home to try to reinvent their “togetherness.” The small yellow frame house was about eighty-five years old, surviving sturdily next to an old tobacco barn that had begun to sag badly, like their relationship. There were seven acres of fields and thirty-nine acres of tangled old New England woods, and the Catamount, one of Woodfield’s three small mountain rivers, ran through both the forest and the meadow.

Tom had hired a contractor to dig a swim pond out of a wet place in the pasture, and the bulldozer unearthed the small, stubborn remains of an infant child. The connective tissue had long since disappeared. What was left could have been mistaken for chicken bones save for the unmistakably human skull, like a delicate hardened mushroom, in three sections. There was no grave marker and the land was too marshy to be a cemetery. The find had caused a local stir; nobody in the town knew how the fetus had gotten there.

Maybe the buried child had been Indian. The medical examiner said the little bones were old. Not eons, but certainly they had been buried long ago.

Found in the earth above the bones had been a small earthenware
plate. When it was washed, a series of rust-colored letters came into view, now terribly faded. What had been written on the plate couldn’t be read. Most of the letters were gone, but a few remained:
ah
, and
od
. And
o
, and again,
od
. Despite the sifting, a few of the small bones never were recovered. The county medical examiner had pieced together enough of the tiny skeleton to determine that it had been almost but not quite full-term, but the sex was unknown. The coroner took the bones away, but when R.J. asked if she could have the plate, he shrugged and gave it to her. She had kept it ever since in the breakfront in the parlor.

The Massachusetts Turnpike is unexciting over most of its length. It was only when she had left the turnpike near Springfield and driven north on 1-91 that she first saw the low, worn-down mountains and began to feel happy.
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh mine help
. In another half hour she was in the hills, climbing roads that twisted and undulated, passing farms and forest, until she turned onto Laurel Hill Road and then drove down the long and winding driveway to the wood-frame farmhouse, the color of butter, that hugged the fringe of woods at the far end of the meadow.

She and Tom hadn’t used the country house since the previous fall. When she opened the door the air was heavy and slightly bitter. There were droppings on a windowsill in the parlor, like mouse feces only larger, and with a quick return of the bad feeling that had plagued her for days, she told herself there was a rat in the house. But in a corner of the kitchen she found the desiccated remains of a bat. The first job she gave herself was to fetch the dustpan and broom and dispose of bat and droppings. She turned on the refrigerator, threw open the windows to let in fresh air, and carried in her supplies, two cartons of groceries and a cooler with perishables. Hungry but unambitious, she made a supper of a hard and tasteless supermarket tomato, a kaiser roll, two cups of tea and a package of chocolate cookies.

Brushing the crumbs off the table, she realized with a pang that she had forgotten about Elizabeth.

She went outside and brought in the box of ashes from the car,
setting it on the fireplace mantel. She would have to discover the beautiful place Elizabeth had trusted her to find, and bury the ashes. She was drawn outside again and took a few steps into the woods, but they were dark and tangled. There was no way to explore them except by climbing over or under downed trees and bulling through brush and brambles, and something in her wasn’t ready for them, so she beat a hasty retreat and walked down the gravel driveway to Laurel Hill Road. It was an oiled gravel road, almost three miles long, rising and falling in several hills. She was glad to walk. A mile and a quarter down the road, she approached the small white farmhouse and enormous red barn of Hank and Freda Krantz, the farmers who had sold Tom and her their place. She turned around before she reached their door, for the moment not wanting to answer questions about Tom and explain the end of her marriage.

The sun was down when she got back to the house, and the clear air was sharply cold. She closed all the windows but one. There was dry wood in the shed, and she built a small blaze in the fireplace and took away the chill. As dusk fell, the shrill of peepers in the pond spillway came through the open window, and she sat on the couch and drank hot, black coffee that was sweet enough to guarantee weight gain, and watched the fire.

The next morning she slept late, had eggs for brunch, and then indulged in a frenzy of housecleaning. Because she so seldom was required to do housework she enjoyed it, and now she gained satisfaction out of vacuuming, sweeping, dusting. She washed all the pots and pans, but only a few dishes and utensils, just the things she would need.

She knew the Krantzes ate midday farm dinners promptly at noon, so she waited until 1:15 and then walked up the road and knocked on their door.

“Well, look who’s here,” Hank Krantz boomed. “Come in, come in.”

They welcomed her into their kitchen, and Freda Krantz poured her a cup of coffee without asking and cut a wedge from half a white cake that was on the counter.

R.J. didn’t know them that well, really, seeing them only on her infrequent visits, but she saw honest regret in their eyes as she told them about the divorce and asked their advice about the best way to sell the house and land.

Hank Krantz scratched his face. “You could go to a real estate agent in Greenfield or Amherst, of course, but nowadays most folks sell through a fella named Dave Markus, right here in town. He advertises and gets good prices. And he’s a straight shooter. Not a bad sort at all for a fella from New York.”

They told her how to get to Markus’s house. She drove first to the state highway and then off it and down a series of very bumpy gravel roads that didn’t do her car any good. In a clover field a lovely Morgan horse, brown with a white face blaze, ran alongside her car on the inside of the fence and then passed her, tail and mane streaming. There was a real estate sign outside a handsome log house looking out on a splendid view. A second sign made her smile:

I’M-IN-LOVE-WITH-YOU
HONEY

Jars of amber honey were stacked in two old bookcases on the porch. Inside, radio rock music blared: The Who. A teenaged girl with long black hair came to the door. Freckled, heavy-breasted, angel-faced behind thick glasses, she was dabbing a cotton ball against a bloody pimple on her pointed chin.

“Hi, I’m Sarah, my father’s away. He’ll be back tonight.” She scribbled R.J.’s name and telephone number and promised her father would call. While R.J. bought a jar of honey, the horse whinnied behind the fence.

“He’s such a damned busybody,” the girl said. “Want to give him his sugar?”

“Sure.”

Sarah Markus got two cubes of sugar and gave them to her, and they walked to the fence together. R.J. presented the cubes timidly, but the big square horse teeth missed the flesh of her palm, and the lapping rough tongue made her smile. “What’s his name?”

“Chaim. He’s Jewish. My father named him for a writer.”

R.J. was beginning to relax as she waved good-bye to the girl and the horse and drove back down the road lined with tall trees and old stone walls.

Main Street in Woodfield contained the post office and four businesses—Hazel’s, an establishment that couldn’t make up its mind if it was a hardware store or a gift shop; Buell’s Expert Auto Repair; Sotheby’s General Market (Est. 1842); and Terry’s, a modern convenience store with a couple of gas pumps out front. R.J. was partial to the funky general store. Frank Sotheby always had a wheel of sharp aged cheddar that made her mouth water. He sold maple syrup, cut his own meat, and made his own sausage, sweet and hot.

There was no lunch counter. “Would you make me a sandwich, cheddar on a roll?”

“Why not?” the storekeeper said. He charged her a dollar, and fifty cents for an Orange Crush. She had her lunch sitting on the bench on the store porch, watching the village go by. Then she went back into the store and recklessly cast aside her usual low-cholesterol approach to food, buying a sirloin steak, sweet sausage, and a wedge of the good cheese.

That afternoon she put on her oldest clothes and some boots and braved the woods. Just a few feet in, it was another world, cooler, dark, quiet with only the wind through billions of leaves, a gentle accumulated rustle that sometimes became as loud as surf and made her feel holy, and also a little scared. She was counting on the supposition that large animals and monsters would be frightened off by the disturbance she was making without trying, stepping on branches that snapped and generally moving clumsily through the close-grown forest. Now and again she came to a tiny clearing that gave respite, but there was no inviting place to rest.

She followed a brook to the Catamount River. She estimated she was close to the midpoint of her property, and she traced the river downstream. The bank was as overgrown as the woods and the going was hard; despite the spring coolness she found that she was sweating and exhausted, and when she came to a large granite rock that projected from the bank into the water, she sat on it. She
studied the pool and could see small trout hovering at mid-depth in the shelter of the rock, sometimes moving in unison like a squadron of fighter planes. The water at the tail of the pool was rushing and high with snowmelt, and she lay full-length on the warm rock in the hot sun and watched the fish. Once in a while she felt a spray like a whisper of ice on her cheek.

She stayed out late until she was exhausted, then she struggled back through the woods, flopped on the couch and napped for two hours. When she woke up she fried potatoes and onions and peppers, and pan-fried the steak medium rare, and gobbled everything in sight, finishing with honey-sweetened tea. Just as the last light was squeezed out of the sky outside she was settling down for coffee before the fire and listening to another peepers concert, when the telephone rang.

“Dr. Cole, God, it’s Hank. Freda’s shot, my rifle went off—”

“Where was she hit?”

“The upper leg, under the hip. She’s bleeding something fierce, it’s just pumping out.”

“Get a clean towel and press it against the wound, hard. I’m coming.”

10

N
EIGHBORS

She was on vacation, she had no medical bag. Her car wheels scattered gravel, the high beams battling crazy shadows as the BMW sped up the road and turned into the drive, the left tires wounding the lawn Hank Krantz maintained so neatly. She drove up to the front door and went into the house without knocking. The errant rifle was on the newspaper-covered kitchen table, along with rag patches, a ramrod, and a small can of gun oil.

Freda, white-faced, lay on her left side in blood. Her eyes were closed, but she opened them and looked at R.J. Hank had half removed her jeans. He was kneeling, holding a saturated towel against her lower thigh. His hands and sleeves were smeared. “My God. God in heaven, look what I did to her.”

He was in misery, but he was keeping a tight rein on himself. “I called the town ambulance,” he said.

“Good. Take a fresh towel. Just put it on top of the soaked one and continue to bear down.” She knelt and with her fingers palpated the flesh where the thigh met the torso, next to the black pubic hair that showed through Freda’s cotton underpants. When she felt the pulsations of the femoral artery she placed the heel of her palm over the spot and pressed. Freda was a large and heavy woman, and years of farm work had made her muscular. R.J. had to bear down hard to try to compress the artery, and Freda opened her mouth to scream, but only a low moan came out.