Chapter 4
Charles Aldridge had been a physician for eleven years. In that time he had learned that the surest cure for thinking was work.
He rose at five. It had been five since the winter of eighty-five, when there had stopped being any reason to lie abed.
The stove in the surgery he lit himself because Mrs. Purdy did not come until seven and he could not wait for her.
He boiled his instruments. While the water heated, he wrote up the day before in the daybook.
His hand was so small that Maggie had once said it looked like a row of ants marching.
He let Maggie saying that go by. He wrote.
By six, he was on the path to the mine.
The Pemberton hoist house sat on its scar of rock above the town, and beside it was a shed the company called the dressing station.
Dan Hollis, the foreman, had asked him to come up.
There had been a fall on the night shift, nothing large, a slab off the face of the east drift. It had come down on a man's hand.
The man was sitting on a bench with his arm across his knees and his face the color of tallow. The hand was wrapped in somebody's shirt. Charles unwrapped it.
"You'll keep it," he said, after a while.
"Doc, I can't feel it."
"You will. That's the trouble. You'll feel it a great deal for about a month." He took the splints from his bag. "Hollis, hold his shoulders. Not the arm. The shoulders."
He set three fingers, one after another, while the man screamed into Hollis's coat. He did it well. He did his work well, in the surgery and out of it, because there was nothing else in his life that he did at all.
From the mine, he went down to the cabins along the creek where a child had croup.
From the cabins, he went across to the mercantile where the storekeeper's wife had a boil that wanted lancing.
From the mercantile, he went home, ate what Mrs. Purdy had left under a cloth without tasting it, and went out again to a fever on Silver Street.
He came home at half past eleven.
The house was dark. It was always dark. He liked it that way. There was a quiet to five rooms with one man in them. The daybook, the lamp, the certainty that nobody in the house would ask him anything he could not answer.
He had liked it, he corrected himself, standing in his own hall with his hat still on.
Because there was a light under the door of the small back bedroom, where there had not been a light for three years. When he went to look, there was a child in it. She sat up in the bed with the blanket to her chin and her eyes wide open. Not asleep. Not anything. Only watching the door.
Watching for him. Watching to see what he would do.
He did nothing. "Go to sleep," he said, in the voice he used for patients, and shut the door. Then he went to bed himself, and lay awake until two.
* * *
The typhoid had come to Galena Springs in the last week of January 1885.
It came up the gulch from the mine camp. Two hundred men lived there in bunkhouses with one privy between them, and drank from the creek below it. Charles had told the company that would happen. He had told them in writing. Twice. Then it happened, and there was no more use in telling.
He had gone up to the camp on a Monday.
A day, he had meant to be gone. He was gone nine. There were forty men down by the Wednesday and sixty by the Friday. They lay in rows on the bunkhouse floors because there was nowhere else to put them.
He was the only man in forty miles who knew what to do for them, and what he knew was not much.
Cold water. Clean water. Keep them drinking.
Keep the well ones away from the sick. He did not sleep.
Twice he came down to the house, on the Thursday and again on the Sunday, for instruments or a clean shirt.
Maggie was well on the Thursday. She was pale on the Sunday. She said it was nothing, and sent him back up.
He went back up.
Mrs. Purdy sent a boy for him on the Tuesday. He came down at a run. He found his wife in the bed they had shared for six years. Her hair was dark with sweat on the pillow, and her lips were cracked. The fever was already so high that she did not know him.
She had been sick for four days. Nobody had nursed her but herself. She had not sent for him because he was needed at the camp, and she knew it.
She died a week later, on the Tuesday, at dawn, while the fever broke everywhere else.
He had buried her behind the church, where the earth was still hard. The reverend read over her, and half the camp stood in the snow with their hats off. Then he had gone home, boiled his instruments, and written up the calls of the day before.
He had not stopped since.
That was three winters ago. He had a system for not thinking about it. The system was simple. He was never, at any hour of any day, without a task in his hands that wanted doing.
The system had worked for three years.
Now there was a child in the back bedroom. She had nothing in her hands at all, and she watched.
* * *
Mrs. Purdy fed her.
That much could be said. The housekeeper came at seven, as she always had. She found a girl of eight sitting on the kitchen stool with her carpetbag on her knees. She took in the girl. Then the doctor who was going out of the door with his bag.
"So it's true, then."
"Until spring, Mrs. Purdy. The Society sends two dollars a month. Feed her from it."
"Doctor, I don't hold with it. I'll say so now and have done. That hair's not natural, and the whole camp knows what she brought down on that Nebraska barn. I've a nephew on the night shift."
"Then feed her from the two dollars and don't hold with it. I'll be at the mine."
He was at the mine. He was at the mine most of the daylight hours that week. When he came home, Mrs. Purdy had gone. The child had been fed because there was a plate in the basin, and she was somewhere in the house.
That was the trouble. She was always somewhere.
He would come into the parlor and find her in the corner by the bookcase. On the floor, with her knees drawn up and her arms around them. So small and so still that he had walked past her twice before he saw her.
He would go into the surgery for a bottle and find her sitting on the bottom step of the stairs outside it, not touching anything. Only sitting, folded down into the least space a body could take. If he spoke, she looked at him. If he did not, she looked at the floor.
He had seen it before. He had seen it in the mine camp, in the winter of the typhoid.
Men who had been told there was no room for them in the bunkhouse, who did not know where they were to be put.
They sat exactly like that. They made themselves small, so that when the sending-on came, it would be easier to carry them.
She was waiting to be sent somewhere worse.
He knew it. What to do about it, he had no idea. So he did what he knew, which was to go out to the next call.
* * *
On the ninth night, he came home to find the lamp lit in his surgery.
He stopped in the hall. The lamp had not been lit when he left.
It never was. He went to the door with his coat still on, his hand out for the knob, and then he stopped again.
Through the crack of the door he could see the desk, with the lamp turned low on it.
Across the blotter lay the great brown atlas, open, with a small red head bent over it.
His anatomy atlas. His own copy, from Philadelphia, with his notes in the margins.
She was reading it.
He watched her for a full minute before she knew he was there.
She had the book open at the plate of the hand, the one with every bone named in Latin down the side.
With one finger she followed the lines from the drawing to the word and back again.
Her lips moved. Not in the way of a child sounding out letters.
In the way of a person committing a lesson to memory.
Metacarpus. Phalanges. Os magnum.
She was not afraid of it. That was what stopped him where he stood.
He had known grown men turn white at that plate.
He had known a nurse in Philadelphia who would not have the book in the ward.
And here was a child of eight, alone in a stranger's surgery at midnight with the wind at the window.
She was studying the bones of a hand as if they were the most interesting picture she had ever seen.
Perhaps they were. Perhaps, after the fire, there was nothing left in the world that could frighten her but a stove door.
She looked up.
Her eyes were gray-green in the lamplight, and they did not drop. They had dropped every other time. This time she held his look for the space of two breaths, with her finger still on the page. Something in her face was so hungry, so grave, and so quick, that he found he had nothing to say to it.
If she had cried, he would have known what to do. Tears, he knew what to do with.
He did not know what to do with this.
"That's the hand," he said at last. His voice came out rougher than he intended. "Twenty-seven bones. The man I set this morning broke three of them."
She looked down at the plate. She found the three. She looked up again.
"Go to bed, Antonia."
She closed the book carefully, with both hands, and went. At the door she stopped and looked back. Not at him. At the book, as if to be certain it would still be there.
Then she was gone, and he was alone in his surgery with the lamp. For the first time in three years the quiet in the house was not a comfort to him at all.
* * *
Reverend Bowen came on the Sunday after the service and stood in the hall with his hat in his hands.
"I've not come to preach at you, Charles."
"You've come to ask how long."
"I've come to ask how long."
Charles looked past him, through the parlor door. The child was in her corner. She had the atlas on her knees. He had not given it to her. Nor had he told her she could not have it. She had taken that for permission, and he had let her.
"Until spring," he said. "The agent comes back with the thaw and takes her on to Denver. That was the paper, Josiah. That was what I signed."
"I know what you signed."
"Then you know how long. Until spring. Only until spring."
He heard it the way he sometimes heard his own voice telling a patient that the pain would pass.
And knew, as he said it, that it would not.
Only until spring. It was what the Society had said to her in New York.
The family in Nebraska had said it too, near enough, with the pen already in their hand.
Every door on that long line had said it, one after another, all the way from the fire to his own front step.
Just until. Only until. Not a day past.
The reverend was watching him. Charles found that he had put his hand on the doorframe, and that he was holding it.
"Spring," Josiah Bowen said mildly. "Well. It's a long way off in this country."
And he put on his hat and went down the steps into the snow.