VIII
In courtship days Kennicott had shown her a photograph of
Nels Erdstrom's baby and log cabin, but she had never seen
the Erdstroms. They had become merely "patients of the
doctor." Kennicott telephoned her on a mid-December afternoon,
"Want to throw your coat on and drive out to Erdstrom's
with me? Fairly warm. Nels got the jaundice."
"Oh yes!" She hastened to put on woolen stockings, high
boots, sweater, muffler, cap, mittens.
The snow was too thick and the ruts frozen too hard for
the motor. They drove out in a clumsy high carriage. Tucked
over them was a blue woolen cover, prickly to her wrists, and
outside of it a buffalo robe, humble and moth-eaten now, used
ever since the bison herds had streaked the prairie a few miles
to the west.
The scattered houses between which they passed in town
were small and desolate in contrast to the expanse of huge
snowy yards and wide street. They crossed the railroad tracks,
and instantly were in the farm country. The big piebald
horses snorted clouds of steam, and started to trot. The
carriage squeaked in rhythm. Kennicott drove with clucks
of "There boy, take it easy!" He was thinking. He paid no
attention to Carol. Yet it was he who commented, "Pretty
nice, over there," as they approached an oak-grove where
shifty winter sunlight quivered in the hollow between two
snow-drifts.
They drove from the natural prairie to a cleared district
which twenty years ago had been forest. The country seemed
to stretch unchanging to the North Pole: low hill,
brush-scraggly bottom, reedy creek, muskrat mound, fields with
frozen brown clods thrust up through the snow.
Her ears and nose were pinched; her breath frosted her
collar; her fingers ached.
"Getting colder," she said.
"Yup."
That was all their conversation for three miles. Yet she
was happy.
They reached Nels Erdstrom's at four, and with a throb
she recognized the courageous venture which had lured her
to Gopher Prairie: the cleared fields, furrows among stumps,
a log cabin chinked with mud and roofed with dry hay. But
Nels had prospered. He used the log cabin as a barn; and
a new house reared up, a proud, unwise, Gopher Prairie house,
the more naked and ungraceful in its glossy white paint and
pink trimmings. Every tree had been cut down. The house
was so unsheltered, so battered by the wind, so bleakly thrust
out into the harsh clearing, that Carol shivered. But they
were welcomed warmly enough in the kitchen, with its crisp
new plaster, its black and nickel range, its cream separator
in a corner.
Mrs. Erdstrom begged her to sit in the parlor, where there
was a phonograph and an oak and leather davenport, the
prairie farmer's proofs of social progress, but she dropped down
by the kitchen stove and insisted, "Please don't mind me."
When Mrs. Erdstrom had followed the doctor out of the room
Carol glanced in a friendly way at the grained pine cupboard,
the framed Lutheran Konfirmations Attest, the traces of fried
eggs and sausages on the dining table against the wall, and a
jewel among calendars, presenting not only a lithographic
young woman with cherry lips, and a Swedish advertisement
of Axel Egge's grocery, but also a thermometer and a
match-holder.
She saw that a boy of four or five was staring at her from
the hall, a boy in gingham shirt and faded corduroy trousers,
but large-eyed, firm-mouthed, wide-browed. He vanished, then
peeped in again, biting his knuckles, turning his shoulder toward
her in shyness.
Didn't she remember—what was it?—Kennicott sitting beside
her at Fort Snelling, urging, "See how scared that baby
is. Needs some woman like you."
Magic had fluttered about her then—magic of sunset and
cool air and the curiosity of lovers. She held out her hands as
much to that sanctity as to the boy.
He edged into the room, doubtfully sucking his thumb.
"Hello," she said. "What's your name?"
"Hee, hee, hee!"
"You're quite right. I agree with you. Silly people like
me always ask children their names."
"Hee, hee, hee!"
"Come here and I'll tell you the story of—well, I don't
know what it will be about, but it will have a slim heroine
and a Prince Charming."
He stood stoically while she spun nonsense. His giggling
ceased. She was winning him. Then the telephone bell—two
long rings, one short.
Mrs. Erdstrom galloped into the room, shrieked into the
transmitter, "Vell? Yes, yes, dis is Erdstrom's place! Heh?
Oh, you vant de doctor?"
Kennicott appeared, growled into the telephone:
"Well, what do you want? Oh, hello Dave; what do you
want? Which Morgenroth's? Adolph's? All right.
Amputation? Yuh, I see. Say, Dave, get Gus to harness up and
take my surgical kit down there—and have him take some
chloroform. I'll go straight down from here. May not get
home tonight. You can get me at Adolph's. Huh? No, Carrie
can give the anesthetic, I guess. G'-by. Huh? No; tell me
about that tomorrow—too damn many people always listening
in on this farmers' line."
He turned to Carol. "Adolph Morgenroth, farmer ten miles
southwest of town, got his arm crushed-fixing his cow-shed
and a post caved in on him—smashed him up pretty bad—
may have to amputate, Dave Dyer says. Afraid we'll have
to go right from here. Darn sorry to drag you clear down
there with me—"
"Please do. Don't mind me a bit."
"Think you could give the anesthetic? Usually have my
driver do it."
"If you'll tell me how."
"All right. Say, did you hear me putting one over on these
goats that are always rubbering in on party-wires? I hope
they heard me! Well. . . . Now, Bessie, don't you worry
about Nels. He's getting along all right. Tomorrow you or
one of the neighbors drive in and get this prescription filled
at Dyer's. Give him a teaspoonful every four hours.
Good-by. Hel-lo! Here's the little fellow! My Lord, Bessie, it
ain't possible this is the fellow that used to be so sickly? Why,
say, he's a great big strapping Svenska now—going to be bigger
'n his daddy!"
Kennicott's bluffness made the child squirm with a delight
which Carol could not evoke. It was a humble wife who
followed the busy doctor out to the carriage, and her ambition
was not to play Rachmaninoff better, nor to build town halls,
but to chuckle at babies.
The sunset was merely a flush of rose on a dome of silver,
with oak twigs and thin poplar branches against it, but a silo
on the horizon changed from a red tank to a tower of violet
misted over with gray. The purple road vanished, and without
lights, in the darkness of a world destroyed, they swayed on—
toward nothing.
It was a bumpy cold way to the Morgenroth farm, and
she was asleep when they arrived.
Here was no glaring new house with a proud phonograph,
but a low whitewashed kitchen smelling of cream and cabbage.
Adolph Morgenroth was lying on a couch in the rarely used
dining-room. His heavy work-scarred wife was shaking her
hands in anxiety.
Carol felt that Kennicott would do something magnificent
and startling. But he was casual. He greeted the man, "Well,
well, Adolph, have to fix you up, eh?" Quietly, to the wife,
"Hat die drug store my schwartze bag hier geschickt?
So—
schön. Wie viel Uhr ist 's? Sieben? Nun, lassen uns ein
wenig supper
zuerst haben. Got any of that good beer left—
giebt 's noch Bier?"
He had supped in four minutes. His coat off, his sleeves
rolled up, he was scrubbing his hands in a tin basin in the
sink, using the bar of yellow kitchen soap.
Carol had not dared to look into the farther room while
she labored over the supper of beer, rye bread, moist cornbeef
and cabbage, set on the kitchen table. The man in there
was groaning. In her one glance she had seen that his blue
flannel shirt was open at a corded tobacco-brown neck, the
hollows of which were sprinkled with thin black and gray hairs.
He was covered with a sheet, like a corpse, and outside the
sheet was his right arm, wrapped in towels stained with blood.
But Kennicott strode into the other room gaily, and she
followed him. With surprising delicacy in his large fingers
he unwrapped the towels and revealed an arm which, below
the elbow, was a mass of blood and raw flesh. The man bellowed.
The room grew thick about her; she was very seasick;
she fled to a chair in the kitchen. Through the haze of nausea
she heard Kennicott grumbling, "Afraid it will have to come
off, Adolph. What did you do? Fall on a reaper blade?
We'll fix it right up. Carrie! Carol!"
She couldn't—she couldn't get up. Then she was up, her
knees like water, her stomach revolving a thousand times a
second, her eyes filmed, her ears full of roaring. She couldn't
reach the dining-room. She was going to faint. Then she
was in the dining-room, leaning against the wall, trying to
smile, flushing hot and cold along her chest and sides, while
Kennicott mumbled, "Say, help Mrs. Morgenroth and me
carry him in on the kitchen table. No, first go out and shove
those two tables together, and put a blanket on them and a
clean sheet."
It was salvation to push the heavy tables, to scrub them,
to be exact in placing the sheet. Her head cleared; she was
able to look calmly in at her husband and the farmwife while
they undressed the wailing man, got him into a clean nightgown,
and washed his arm. Kennicott came to lay out his instruments.
She realized that, with no hospital facilities, yet with
no worry about it, her husband—her husband—was
going to
perform a surgical operation, that miraculous boldness of which
one read in stories about famous surgeons.
She helped them to move Adolph into the kitchen. The
man was in such a funk that he would not use his legs. He
was heavy, and smelled of sweat and the stable. But she put
her arm about his waist, her sleek head by his chest; she
tugged at him; she clicked her tongue in imitation of Kennicott's
cheerful noises.
When Adolph was on the table Kennicott laid a hemispheric
steel and cotton frame on his face; suggested to Carol, "Now
you sit here at his head and keep the ether dripping—about
this fast, see? I'll watch his breathing. Look who's here!
Real anesthetist! Ochsner hasn't got a better one! Class,
eh? . . . Now, now, Adolph, take it easy. This won't hurt
you a bit. Put you all nice and asleep and it won't hurt a
bit. Schweig' mal! Bald schlaft man grat wie ein Kind. So!
So! Bald geht's besser!"
As she let the ether drip, nervously trying to keep the
rhythm that Kennicott had indicated, Carol stared at her husband
with the abandon of hero-worship.
He shook his head. "Bad light—bad light. Here, Mrs.
Morgenroth, you stand right here and hold this lamp. Hier,
und dieses—dieses lamp halten—so!"
By that streaky glimmer he worked, swiftly, at ease. The
room was still. Carol tried to look at him, yet not look at the
seeping blood, the crimson slash, the vicious scalpel. The
ether fumes were sweet, choking. Her head seemed to be
floating away from her body. Her arm was feeble.
It was not the blood but the grating of the surgical saw on
the living bone that broke her, and she knew that she had
been fighting off nausea, that she was beaten. She was lost
in dizziness. She heard Kennicott's voice
"Sick? Trot outdoors couple minutes. Adolph will stay
under now."
She was fumbling at a door-knob which whirled in insulting
circles; she was on the stoop, gasping, forcing air into her
chest, her head clearing. As she returned she caught the scene
as a whole: the cavernous kitchen, two milk-cans a leaden
patch by the wall, hams dangling from a beam, bats of light
at the stove door, and in the center, illuminated by a small
glass lamp held by a frightened stout woman, Dr. Kennicott
bending over a body which was humped under a sheet—the
surgeon, his bare arms daubed with blood, his hands, in
pale-yellow rubber gloves, loosening the tourniquet, his face without
emotion save when he threw up his head and clucked at the
farmwife, "Hold that light steady just a second more—
noch
blos esn wenig."
"He speaks a vulgar, common, incorrect German of life
and death and birth and the soil. I read the French and
German of sentimental lovers and Christmas garlands. And
I thought that it was I who had the culture!" she worshiped
as she returned to her place.
After a time he snapped, "That's enough. Don't give him
any more ether." He was concentrated on tying an artery.
His gruffness seemed heroic to her.
As he shaped the flap of flesh she murmured, "Oh, you
are
wonderful!"
He was surprised. "Why, this is a cinch. Now if it had
been like last week— Get me some more water. Now last
week I had a case with an ooze in the peritoneal cavity, and
by golly if it wasn't a stomach ulcer that I hadn't suspected
and— There. Say, I certainly am sleepy. Let's turn in
here. Too late to drive home. And tastes to me like a storm
coming."
