Matters of Choice
It was a time to spend wood on the fire and stay in bed nights. She knew the wild creatures must be suffering. She wanted to leave hay in the woods for the deer, but Jan Smith dissuaded her. “Deliver them from our kindness. They’re best off when we leave them completely alone,” he said, and she tried not to think of the animals and birds during weather when tree trunks cracked open from the cold like pistol shots.
The hospital announced that any doctor with a modem could access a patient’s chart in a few seconds and could give the nurses instructions over the telephone instead of making the long, slippery drive to Greenfield. There were nights when she still had to go to the hospital in person, but she invested in the equipment and was thankful to embrace some of the technology she had left behind in Boston.
The great blazes she built nightly in the fireplaces kept her warm despite the winds that shook the house on the verge. She sat by the fire and went through journal after journal, never quite catching up but making great inroads on her medical reading.
One night she went to the closet and took down David’s manuscript. Seated by the fire, she began to read.
Hours later, suddenly conscious that the room was cold, she stopped to rebuild the fire, to use the bathroom, to make fresh coffee. Then she sat and read again. Sometimes she chuckled; several times, she wept.
The sky outside was bright when she was through. But she wanted to read the rest of the story. It was about farmers who had to change their lives because the world had changed, but who didn’t know how. The characters were alive but the manuscript was unfinished. It left her deeply moved but wishing to scream. She couldn’t imagine David would abandon such a book if he were able to complete it, and she knew he was either gravely ill or dead.
35
HIDDEN MEANINGS
January 20.
Sitting at home, warming the air with music, R.J. struggled with the feeling that tonight was special: a birthday? some kind of anniversary? And then she had it, a message from Keats that she had had to memorize for sophomore English Lit.
St. Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold.
R.J. had no idea how the flocks were doing, but she knew that the creatures who couldn’t be in a barn must be doing miserably. On several mornings a pair of large wild turkeys, females, had moved slowly over the snow-covered fields. Each successive snowfall had frozen with an icy crust, forming a series of impermeable layers. The turkeys and the deer couldn’t dig through them in order to reach the grass and plants they needed for survival. The turkeys made their way across the mowing like a pair of arthritic dowagers.
R.J. wondered if the Gift worked with animals. But she didn’t have to touch them to know the turkeys were close to death. In the orchard they gathered themselves and made weak and unsuccessful efforts to flutter up into the apple trees to get at the frozen buds.
She could stand it no longer. At the farm store in Amherst she bought a large sack of cracked corn and threw handfuls of the feed over the snow in several places where she had seen the turkeys.
Jan Smith was disgusted with her. “Nature managed nicely without human beings for millennia. So long as man doesn’t destroy the animals they do fine without our help. The fittest will survive,” he said. He was even scornful of bird feeders. “All they do is allow a lot of people to see their favorite songbirds up close. If the feeders weren’t there, the birds would have to move their asses a little in order to live, and it would do them good to work harder.”
She didn’t care. She watched with satisfaction as the turkeys and other birds ate her largesse. Doves and pheasants came, and crows and jays, and smaller birds she couldn’t identify from a distance. Whenever they had eaten all the cracked corn, or when it snowed and covered what she had last thrown, she went outside and threw some more.
Cold January became frigid February. People ventured outside wrapped in a variety of protective layers, knit sweaters, down-filled coats, old fleece-lined bomber jackets. R.J. wore heavy long underwear and a woolen stocking cap that she kept pulled over her ears.
The lousy weather brought out the pioneering spirit that had drawn people into the mountains in the first place. One morning during a blizzard R.J. staggered through drifts to make her way into the office, where she stood, covered with white. “What a day,” she gasped.
“I know!” Toby said, her face glowing. “Isn’t it marvelous?”
It was a month for warm and hearty meals shared with friends and neighbors, because winter stayed forever in the hills and cabin fever was ubiquitous. Over bowls of chili at Toby and Jan’s house, R.J. talked about American artifacts with Lucy Gotelli, a curator in the museum at Williams College. Lucy said her lab had the ability to date objects with comfortable accuracy, and R.J. found herself describing the plate found with the baby’s bones in her pasture.
“I’d like to see it,” Lucy said. “There was a Woodfield Pottery here in the eighteen hundreds that turned out serviceable, unglazed dishware. Perhaps they made your piece.”
A few weeks later, R.J. brought the plate to Lucy’s house.
Lucy examined it with a magnifying glass. “Hey, looks to me like a Woodfield Pottery product, all right. Of course, we can’t be certain. They had a distinctive marking, a merged T and R in black paint on the bottom of every piece. If this plate ever had the marking, it’s been worn away.” She looked curiously at the seven surviving rusty letters on the face of the plate—ah and od, and o, and again od, and picked with a fingernail at the h. “Funny color. Is that ink, do you think?”
“I don’t know. It looks like blood,” R.J. ventured, and Lucy grinned.
“Nah. I guarantee it ain’t blood. Look, why not let me take this to work with me and see what I can come up with?”
“Sure.” So R.J. left it with Lucy, even though she was curiously reluctant to give up the plate even for a short time.
Despite the cold and the deep snow, there was a scratching at the door early one evening. And another scratching. To R.J.’s relief, when she opened the door, instead of a wolf or a bear, the cat walked in and ambled from room to room.
“I’m sorry, Agunah. They’re not here,” R.J. told her.
Agunah stayed less than an hour, and then she stood before the door until R.J. opened it and let her out.
Twice more that week she came and scratched on the door, searched the house disbelievingly, and then departed without deigning to look at R.J.
It was ten days before Lucy Gotelli telephoned, apologizing for the delay. “I’ve done your plate. Nothing to it, really, but we’ve had one minor crisis after another at the museum, and I wasn’t able to deal with it until day before yesterday.”
“And?”
“It is made by Woodfield Pottery, I detected the latent mark very plainly. And I analyzed a bit of the substance that formed the letters on the top surface. It’s casein paint.”
“All I remember about casein is that it’s a milk component,” R.J. said.
“Right. Casein is the chief protein in milk, the part that curdles when the milk sours. Most of the dairy farmers around here made their own paint in the early days. They had plenty of skimmed milk, and they let the curds dry and ground them between stones. They used the casein as a binder, mixing it with pigment and milk and egg white and a little water. In this case, the pigment used was red lead. The letters are printed in red barn paint. A very bright red, actually. Turned into rust by time and the chemical action of the soil.”
All she’d had to do was place the plate under ultraviolet radiation, Lucy said. The porous clay had absorbed paint, which fluoresced under the ultraviolet, absorbing energy and remitting it right back.
“So … were you able to detect the other letters?”
“Yes, certainly. Got a pencil handy? I’ll read them back to you.”
She spelled t
hem out slowly, and R.J. wrote them on her prescription pad, and when Lucy had finished talking she sat and looked without blinking, almost without breathing, at what she had written:
ISAIAH NORMAN GOODHUE
GO IN INNOCENCE TO GOD
Nov 12, 1915
So Harry Crawford’s family had had nothing to do with the skeletal discovery. R.J. had been barking up the wrong family tree.
She checked the town history to make certain Isaiah Norman Goodhue was indeed the brother Norm with whom Eva had lived alone for most of her life. When she saw that he was, instead of solutions she was left with questions and assumptions, each more disturbing than the last.
Eva would have been a fourteen-year-old girl in 1915, of childbearing age but in important ways still a child. She and her older brother had lived alone in the remote farmhouse on Laurel Hill Road.
If the child had been Eva’s, had Eva been impregnated by some unknown male, or by her brother?
The answer seemed to be implicit in the crude name marker.
Isaiah Norman Goodhue had been thirteen years older than the girl. He never married; he spent his life in isolation, working the farm alone. He would have depended on his sister to cook, to tend the house, to help with the animals and the fields.
And his other needs?
If the brother and sister had been the parents, had Eva been forced? Or had there been an incestuous love affair?
The terror and bewilderment the girl must have felt over the pregnancy!
And afterward. R.J. could imagine Eva—frightened, guiltridden because her infant was buried in unconsecrated earth, pained by the birthing and what must have been crude or nonexistent aftercare.
Clearly, their neighbor’s marshy pasture would have been chosen as burial site because it was wet and worthless and never would be turned over by a plow. Had the brother and sister done the burying together? The clay plate had been buried shallower than the baby. R.J. thought it likely that Eva had marked it to record her dead son’s name and birth date—the only memorial available to her—and then had stolen down to bury it above her infant.
Eva had spent most of her life looking down the hill at that marsh; what must she have felt, seeing Harry Crawford’s cows wading there, adding their piss and manure to the muck?
Dear God, had the child been born alive?
Only Eva would have been able to answer the dark questions, so R.J. would never really know, which was just as well. She no longer wished to display the plate. It spoke to her too loudly of tragedy, too plainly of the unhappiness of a rural girl caught in deep despair, and when she got it back from Lucy, she wrapped it in brown paper and placed it away in the bottom drawer of her breakfront.
36
ON THE TRAIL
Thoughts of the youthful Eva cast a ghostly shadow over R.J. that not even purposeful music making could dispel. Now each day she left her house for the office eagerly, needing the contact with human beings that her practice provided, but even the office was a difficult place, because Toby’s inability to conceive was affecting her ability to deal with the daily tensions. Toby was snappish and short-tempered, and what was worse, R.J. saw that she was aware of her own unsteadiness.
R.J. knew that eventually they would have to discuss it, but Toby had become more than an employee and a patient. They had grown to be close and caring friends, and R.J. was putting off confrontation as long as possible. Despite the added stress, she spent long hours at the office, returning only reluctantly to the quiet house, the lonely silence.
She took consolation from the fact that winter was dying. The mounds of snow at the sides of the road shrank. The warming earth drank the melt, and the maple syrup folks began their yearly labor of tapping the trees to collect sap. Back in December, Frank Sotheby had stuffed a pair of old tennis shoes and some moth-eaten ski pants with rags. Outside his general store, he had stuck what looked like the bottom half of a human being into a snow pile waist-first, along with one ski and a ski pole, as though a skier had taken a header. Now his sight gag melted with the snow. When he removed the sodden garments, R.J. told him it was the surest sign that spring had come.
One evening she opened the door to a now-familiar scratching, and the cat entered the house and made her usual ambling inspection.
“Oh, Agunah, stay with me this time,” she said, reduced to begging for an animal’s company, but Agunah soon returned to the front door and demanded her freedom, and slipped out and left R.J. alone.
She began to welcome and respond to evening ambulance calls, although the rule was that the crews would call on her only if they had a situation they couldn’t handle. The last night in March also offered up the last snowstorm of the season. On the highway leading out of Main Street, a drunken driver skidded across to the wrong side of the road in his Buick and met a small Toyota head-on. The man who was driving the Toyota slammed into the steering wheel, fracturing his ribs and making an island of his sternum, a condition known as flail chest. Whenever he breathed he experienced great pain. Worse, the loose chest wall segment didn’t move in and out with the rest of his chest when he respirated; in effect, the bellows was broken.
All the EMTs could do for the injured man in the field was to tape a small, flat sandbag over the loose sternum, and then give him oxygen and get him into the medical center. The ambulance people were already doing that when R.J. reached the scene. For a change, too many EMTs had responded, among them Toby. The two of them watched the ambulance crew preparing the man for transport, and then R.J. motioned Toby away from the volunteer firemen who were cleaning glass and pieces of metal from the road.
They walked down the highway to a place where they could look back at the accident.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about you,” R.J. said.
The night air was chill, and Toby was shivering slightly in her red ambulance jacket. The urgent yellow ambulance light, turning like a beacon viewed from sea, illuminated her features every few seconds. She wrapped her arms about her body and looked at R.J.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. There’s a procedure I’d like you to have.”
“What kind of procedure?”
“Exploratory. I want somebody to take a good look at what’s happening inside your pelvis.”
“Surgery? Forget it. Look, R.J., I’m not going to be opened up. Some women … it just isn’t in the cards for them to be mothers.”
R.J. grinned mirthlessly. “Tell me about it.” She shook her head. “They don’t have to open you up anymore. Nowadays they make three tiny little incisions in your abdomen. One through your navel and the other two below, roughly over each ovary. They use a very narrow fiber optics instrument with an incredibly sensitive lens that lets them see everything in sharp detail. If necessary, other special instruments allow them to do corrective procedures, right through those three tiny incisions.”
“Would they have to put me out?”
“Yes. You’d have general anesthesia.”
“Would you do the … what do you call it?”
“Laparoscopy. No. I don’t do that. I’d send you to Danny Noyes. He’s very good.”
“No way.”
R.J. allowed herself to lose patience. “But why? You so desperately want to have a child.”
“Look, R.J. You’re so fucking pious when you preach about women needing to have the right to choose what happens to their own bodies. Well, this is my body. And I choose not to have surgery unless my life or health is threatened, which it doesn’t seem to be. So leave me the hell alone, understand? And thank you for your concern.”
R.J. nodded. “You’re welcome,” she said sadly.
In March she tried to enter the woods behind the house without skis or snowshoes, and she failed, going thigh-deep into snow that had refused to melt on the shaded trail. When she tried again in April, some snow remained but she was able to walk, if somewhat clumsily. Winter had made the wild place wilder, leaving the trail the worse for wear, with downed branches that had t
o be cleared. She seemed to feel the djinn of the forest staring down at her. In a patch of snow she saw what looked like the tracks of a barefoot man with fat feet and ten sharp claws. But the big toes were the outer ones, and R.J. knew the marks had been left by a large bear. She puckered up and whistled as loud as she could blow, for some reason choosing as her bear-frightening song “My Old Kentucky Home,” although she thought it might put the bear to sleep instead of sending it galloping away.
In three places, trees had fallen across the path. R.J. went back to the barn and got a Swedish bow saw and tried to use it on the blowndown trees, but the saw was inadequate and the work too slow.
There were some things for which she needed a man, she told herself with bitter resignation.
For a few days she pondered whom she might hire to clear the path of debris and perhaps extend the trail along the river. But a few afternoons later, she found herself in her favorite farm supply store, attempting to learn all about chain saws.
They looked lethal, and she knew they could be as deadly as they looked. “They scare the bejeezus out of me,” she admitted to the salesman.
“Well, they should. They’ll cut off your limb as easily as they’ll cut off a tree’s,” he said cheerfully. “But so long as you stay scared, they’re perfectly safe. The people who get hurt are the ones who get comfortable enough to handle them carelessly.”
The saws came in several brands and a number of different weights and lengths. The salesman showed her the smallest, lightest model. “A lot of women favor this one.” But when she told him she wanted to clear a trail through woods, he shook his head and offered her another saw. “This one is medium-heavy. Your arms will tire quicker, and you’ll have to rest more frequently than with the small saw, but you’ll get a lot more accomplished.”