No Place I'd Rather Be

  The downstairs of the farmhouse is one open room, like the log cabin, lots of windows, with our enormous brick fireplace rising two stories. The walls are all butter yellow. “I sure as heck didn’t want any red walls,” my mother announced. “I’ve got enough blood in my life at work.”

  Books, cookbooks, piles of medical journals, and oversized, unmatched, colorful furniture and quilts fill out the room. The two couches are red and two soft chairs are purple, with embroidered pillows all over. The quilts, two hung on walls, are all gifts from patients.

  There are four bedrooms upstairs—master bedroom for my grandma and second largest bedroom for my mother, at my mother’s insistence. When my grandma moved into our farmhouse after my granddad died, my mother shifted everything out of the master bedroom. “I could not sleep at night unless I gave my mother the best. If I didn’t, God in his infinite wisdom would punish me by making my butt grow to the size of a hippo’s.”

  We commissioned two paintings/collages from our favorite artist, Grenadine Scotch Wild, of both my grandma and granddad’s log home, and of our blue farmhouse, both red doors prominent. They were about five foot by five foot, hanging on a wall in the family room.

  On the log cabin she had added the wagon wheel, the lasso wrapped around the post on the deck, Grandma and Granddad’s cowboy hats, and the sun weather vane. Grenadine even remembered the red geraniums in flower boxes on both houses, the gazebo outside the log cabin, and the collection of bird houses my mother has hanging on the white front porch of our farmhouse.

  Not only had she painted the homes perfectly, at Grenadine’s request we sent her bark from trees off our properties, tiny pinecones, sticks, swatches of our favorite fabrics, and dried flowers, and she incorporated them into the collages.

  “Girls,” my mother said. “Let me tell you about a patient I saw on Wednesday. So, the patient had to have part of a leg amputated because of—”

  At that moment our red front door flew open and banged into the wall, and snowflakes flew in.

  “Mary Beth!” a man in his sixties yelled at my mother. “Mrs. Gisela, help me!” He was gray haired, nose like a turnip. His name is Jeffy Rochs. I’ve known him since I was a kid. He owns five plumbing stores in western Montana. Toilets are lucrative. Jeffy was holding up one of our neighbors, who was bleeding profusely from a wound in his shin. “Terry had a fight with a horse. As you can see, the horse won round one.”

  “Go upstairs,” I told my daughters, giving them a little shove. The girls didn’t move, staring, transfixed.

  “They can stay,” my mother said, moving toward Jeffy. “This isn’t too bad, and I can show them how to sew someone up.”

  The girls squealed in delight. “Oh, good,” Lucy said. “This is gonna be fun.”

  “Finally,” Stephi said with relief. “We can play doctor for real.”

  I shot them a baffled look, then my mother and grandma and I sprang into action. Grandma and I cleared off the kitchen table, and we flipped a plastic covering over it that we keep in a wooden chest. My mother grabbed her black medical bag, which my granddad owned before her, and got her supplies ready. She tossed my grandma and me gloves, and I immediately cut off Terry’s pant leg. We manhandled Terry, moaning and teeth clenched, up onto the table. My grandma grabbed clean cloths we keep in a drawer for this type of thing.

  “Sorry to intrude, Mary Beth, Mrs. Gisela, and hello, Olivia, heard you were back in town.” Terry sucked in air, then groaned. “Heard it from Ruthie. She was up late last night cleaning her gun. She said you were with Jace. Hope you two can get yourselves back together.”

  I tried not to roll my eyes. I rolled them anyhow.

  “Did you know that Ruthie has a boyfriend now?” Terry went on, panting from pain, white around the edges of his face. “He’s younger. Gotta respect that lady. Dang this hurts.” He groaned again, sagged.

  “Close your eyes, Terry, and quit yakking,” my mother ordered as she pulled on gloves. I held him down to keep him from wriggling, as did Jeffy, as my mother put pressure on the wound, a deep one, I could tell.

  Terry stifled a ragged moan as more blood gushed.

  “Hang in there, Terry,” I said. “Now you’ll have a scar and a story to tell.”

  “I don’t need any stories,” Terry groaned. “Hildy says she’s tired of my stories and she’s going to be madder than a hot cat stuck in a box when she sees what I did today, getting myself bashed by a horse.”

  “She doesn’t like it when you make her nervous,” Jeffy said, clicking his tongue. “Says it gives her hives. You really gotta keep that in mind, friend.”

  “It does give her hives,” my grandma confirmed, deftly handling the bloody cloths. “I’ve seen them. When you get hurt or sick, she gets hives. Tell her I said to get in a milk and oatmeal bath. You make her worry, Terry. She’s going to be upset with you, honey. You must prepare yourself and sincerely apologize for what you’ve done to yourself here today.”

  “I’ll tell her, Mrs. Gisela. And I feel awful about this. Right awful. My poor Hildy.” Terry teared up. “She’s going to be covered in those darn hives.”

  “You should feel awful,” my mother snapped. “Hildy’s hives spread all over her body. When you got double pneumonia, when you broke your ankle, when you were hospitalized with that heart attack, all of that upset her and she broke out as if an alien had attacked and lay her bare with red spots.”

  “Horrible!” Terry moaned. “It was horrible!”

  “All this blood is making me sick,” Jeffy said, leaning over, hands on his knees.

  “Hold still,” my mother said, perfectly calm, as was my grandma. Nothing rattled those two. Nothing. “Now, girls, watch what we’re doing.” She kept the pressure on. My grandma stood beside her, assisting my mother.

  Lucy and Stephi crammed in close to my mother, two blond heads leaning over a bleeding man.

  “Step back a bit, girls,” I said.

  “It’s all right,” my mother said. “They need to learn by being close up.”

  They were fascinated.

  “Look at all that blood,” Stephi gushed. “Boy! He’s got it all over the place.”

  “Can I sew him up, Grandma Mary Beth?” Lucy asked. “Please! Grandma Annabelle taught me how to sew.”

  “No, me, Grandma Mary Beth!” Stephi said. “I want to.”

  Jeffy stood back up, eyed the damage, then leaned back over, pale. “I’m not gonna faint. Don’t worry, Mrs. Gisela. But if I do, I know you can bring me back around with herbs or something. I’m going to need the healing you do in the natural way.”

  “No sewing today, girls,” my mother said. “You will love medical school, though. You’ll want to be assigned to an inner-city hospital. You’ll get action there.”

  “You have blood coming out all over,” Stephi said, in admiration, to Terry. She had a few of her rocks from her collection in her pocket, and I saw her fiddling with them. Stephi loves her rocks. “This is so cool.”

  “I can see almost all the way down to your bone!” Lucy smiled at Terry and pointed her finger in the air. She likes to point her finger in the air to make her point. “That’s pretty cool.”

  Stephi turned to Lucy. “Mr. Terry is getting all sewn up like Aunt Olivia sews up a turkey. Remember that, Lucy? She used string to tie the turkey’s legs together last Thanksgiving.”

  “Are you going to tie his legs together, too, Grandma Mary Beth?” Lucy asked.

  “No, I’m going to sew this man up like I’d sew a new dress for you two,” my mother said.

  “Are you going to sew us dresses?” Stephi asked.

  My mother snorted. “I have no idea how to sew. It was in reference to other people sewing. Not me.”

  “She never wanted to learn,” my grandma told Terry and Jeffy, who had stood up, then leaned back over once again, rather green around the gills. My grandma shook her head in deep disappointment. “I could barely get Mary Beth to cook. She was always more interested in blood and guts and
diseases, like her father.”

  “I cook,” my mother said. “It’s called takeout food.”

  When the blood slowed a bit, and the numbing agent started to work, my mother cleaned the wound, quite deep I saw, then dug out a surgical suture and sewed him up. In the clinic she used a vacuum-like thing to clean and reheal, but this was good enough for today. She was tight and quick with her stitches. She dug out bandages as my grandma cleaned up around the stitches.

  “Nice job, Mom and Grandma,” I said.

  “Yeah, nice job, Grandma Mary Beth and Grandma Gisela,” Stephi said. “He was in two pieces on his leg and now he’s back to one.”

  “You’re a skin sewer!” Lucy said.

  “A skin sewer,” Jeffy muttered, crouching down now on his heels, hand to head, back against the wall. “Get ready to treat me in the natural way, Mrs. Gisela.”

  “I will, Jeffy,” Grandma called. “Hang on. Head down.”

  “Now, Terry,” my mother said, so competent. “Don’t forget to duck if Hildy throws something at you for this. For heaven’s sakes, though, tell her not to aim for this leg. Last time you got yourself in a poorly condition, the hives got on her butt and she was more pissed off than a bear woken up in winter.”

  “You go home and apologize to Hildy, Terry, honey,” my grandma said. “Those hives are awfully hard on her.”

  Terry groaned. “She’ll be in bed for a week with this one.”

  Jeffy said, still pale, “This isn’t going to play out right for you, man.”

  Later, Terry said, “Thank you, Mary Beth, Mrs. Gisela, Olivia.” He leaned heavily on Jeffy and me as we moved him back out to his truck. “You saved me a thousand dollar bill at the emergency room. Send the bill, Mary Beth.”

  My mother would not send a bill. Terry would send her part of a dead deer as a venison gift.

  She thought it a fair exchange.

  Chapter 2

  My mother’s and grandma’s patients, and their downtown Kalulell clinic, are their life. Their practice, which my grandma and granddad launched when they arrived here in Montana after the war, and which my mother was skipping around in as a kid, and working in as a teenager as an assistant, takes up most of their time.

  They have a two-story brick building on Fifth and Mountainside Drive, two blocks from the center of town. In honor of the past, there are three old-fashioned medical bottles painted in black, six feet high, on the side of the building. Inside, the furniture is Montana lodge. Leather couches and chairs, wood tables, fishing poles and skis on the walls for décor, along with cowgirl and cowboy hats, donated by their patients. Coffee and cookies, all the time.

  “People get nervous coming to the doctor, so we want to make them comfortable and settle out their nerves,” my grandma said. “But we do not serve whiskey unless it’s a desperate circumstance. One shot is our limit.”

  “Some people don’t get nervous coming to see us, Mom,” my mother said to Grandma. “They love coming. They like to visit with us and with everyone else there. They come and yak.” That was true. People were known to come two hours ahead of their appointments, have coffee, eat cookies, and chat with their neighbors. “By God. Do I look like I’m running a social hour in there?”

  “No, Fire Breather,” my grandma said. “No one would ever accuse you of being socially friendly.”

  The clinic has four other various doctors, four physician’s assistants, eight nurses, and support staff. People come from all over the state to see my mother and Grandma. My mother is very popular, blunt as she is she gets you fixed up right, but so is Grandma. Patients will often call to make an appointment and say, “I want to see the mother, Mrs. Gisela.” Or, if they’re younger, “I want to see the grandma, Mrs. Gisela.”

  When my grandma tells them what to do to get better that has nothing to do with modern medicine, and everything to do with “natural healing,” and herbs, and old-fashioned wisdom like chicken soup, salted poached eggs, and steak “to build the blood back up,” they jump and do what she says. “You are to drink a full cup of carrot juice a day, Peter. Here. I made you a jar with my juicer this morning to get you started.”

  Or, “Your smoking is killing you, Stanley. Every time you want a cigarette I want you to nibble on these mint leaves I brought for you out of my garden. It’ll work.”

  She extorts the wisdom of papaya, to kill bacteria in the stomach; broccoli, to clean the colon; bananas—“Let me tell you, Sylvia, it will help with your depression if you eat two a day, one dipped in melted chocolate chips”—plenty of water to flush out the system, and garlic cloves, eaten raw, to boost the immune system.

  When my mother tells her patients to do something, for example, taking traditional medicines or treatments, or undergoing an operation, they usually do it, but not always. Many of my mother’s patients, especially the older ones, have looked at my mother with great skepticism when she tells them about the modern treatments they need to abide by. “Have you checked with Mrs. Gisela about this, Mary Beth? What does she think? We’d prefer to do this naturally.”

  My mother will roll her eyes, then call my grandma in. My grandma will tell them to take the medicine, and then she’ll give them her old-fashioned wisdom about the merits of onions because they “kill the germs inside of you,” or Saint-John’s-wort or, dear me, you’re having trouble sleeping? One shot of vodka. One.

  There! Now everyone is happy. Traditional medicine mixed with Mrs. Gisela’s trusted wisdom.

  My mother and Grandma are both talented at treating the whole person. As my mother said, “I can diagnose an illness or injury by observation, by feel, by blood test, by MRI, but I have to treat the whole person, not simply the sickness or no one gets better and they droop around until they die like dead ducks.”

  Some of their patients have been with them forever, since my grandparents started their clinic. My grandma has a number of patients whom she has known since they were babies, and they have adult children of their own who have children.

  The Martindale Clinic treats whole families . . . and their grandchildren.

  There are many people who are treated who can hardly pay my mother because they’re sick or disabled. She treats them anyhow. They pay her in homemade goods. She’s also been the recipient of an intricately hand-carved bow and arrow. Dead rabbits for rabbit stew. A gun from World War I. Baskets of cookies and treats. A kitten. A painting, twenty years ago, by a broke and unknown artist named Cleever Daniels, who was suffering from gastroenteritis, who is now famous and the painting is worth about $250,000. It hangs in the waiting room.

  What is difficult for my mother and grandma to manage sometimes is the huge amount of invitations they get to baptisms, weddings, and birthday parties. If they don’t go, their patients come in hurt. Sometimes they have three events on one Saturday. They are flying.

  And now and then the patients end up on our kitchen table in the blue farmhouse, exactly as patients sometimes ended up on my grandma and granddad’s dining room table in their log cabin. Good thing my granddad knew how to make an unbreakable table. When you can get 350-pound Alphy Knickerbocker on that table and it doesn’t snap in half, you know it’s built to last.

  * * *

  Alphonse D’Ellieni, who owned D’Ellieni’s Tow Truck Services, brought all of my and the girls’ suitcases, boxes, and my purse to my home. Interestingly, our suitcases and boxes in the trunk weren’t soaked as the car was nose down in the river, the back leaning against the embankment. My purse was soaked, phone shot. I shivered. The thought of what almost happened was snatching my sleep away like a snake snatches a bite out of your belly.

  “Got your car out of the river, Olivia,” Alphonse said, “but it’s blitzed. Totaled. Smashed. Kerplopped. Left it at the shop.” He shook his head. “Man, you are lucky that Jace came along. Hey! You two getting back together? Ruthie said she was cleaning her gun and saw him driving you home. You know that gal’s got a boyfriend? He’s younger.”

  I washed and dried my
clothes. I’m a skirt sort of woman. If I can wear one, I do. When it’s snowing in Montana, I’m in jeans and my cowgirl boots. But if it’s only moderately freezing, I’ll pull on a warm skirt, and a couple of pairs of leggings. I also like wearing things from my travels around the world. Dangling gold earrings from Thailand, silk scarves from Cambodia, embroidered shirts from street vendors in Mexico, bangle bracelets from China. All so cheap, but I love ’em.

  I like to wear the world.

  * * *

  On Sunday it rained. It was unexpected. It shouldn’t have rained; it was supposed to snow. My grandma and mother had taken the girls to the clinic to “further their medical educations.” I knew my mother was going to show the girls all of her equipment and what it was used for and, probably, videos of surgeries. Hopefully they would not have nightmares.

  I was making tomato bisque soup and homemade croutons when I heard water dripping. I looked up and couldn’t see a leak, but I know a leak when I hear it. I went to the loft, the girls’ bedroom, and my granddad’s den and couldn’t see anything. I opened the door to the attic. The attic was small with one window and one lightbulb in the center.

  My grandparents were both very organized people, as is my mother. You’ve heard of hoarders? We’re the opposite. We’re throwers. So the attic wasn’t crammed, only a few old cardboard boxes piled up on one side near the window in the corner. I looked up and found the leak right above one of the boxes.

  “Dang.” I moved the box, then ran downstairs and out to the barn and got a huge metal pan we used to feed animals when we had them. I ran back up and put it under the dripping water. I could see straight up through a hole in the roof. My granddad would not be happy. He was kind, efficient, and liked everything in working order.

  I knew I had to fix the roof, or our log cabin would be swimming in water. I ran back out to the barn to a shelf labeled ROOFING MATERIALS. I put on my granddad’s spiked roofing shoes and the tool belt, and I climbed up on the ladder with extra shingles tucked into the belt. Luckily the leak was close to the edge. I knew I’d have to make several trips up and down the ladder. I nailed down a small piece of plywood first to cover the hole, added the roofing felt, then used the nail gun on the new shingles.