MEDICINE by Edward J. Delaney
She hears the sound through the window, a thundering of horse against wood in the stable. And then the silence, the endless three or four seconds in which you convince yourself that all is well, and then the shriek of pain that tells you that you have only fooled yourself. She drops the dish she’s been drying, and as it hits the floor and shatters she is already shoving open the screen door, running. The barn, down the path, is really an outsized shed that keeps the old horse out of the weather. The otherworldly screeches come through the cracks in the boards as Martha swings open the latch door and tries to see into the dark.
Baby is in the straw, her entire face covered in blood. She is four years old but she is always Baby, the youngest grandchild, her name a foreshortening of “The Baby,” as she had been until past three. She is the most endearing and the most reckless of all of the brood. Baby screams with the vigor that says she’ll live, but that is all I feel sure about. The horse is edged guiltily up against the stable wall, its head lowered, its glance sidewise. Baby has a gouge in her temple that looks an inch deep. Baby’s hands shake as if peeled down to pure unthinking reflex. Baby’s screams fill the barn like shining light.
“Call the doctor!” Martha wails.
Baby came to us when her mother couldn’t resolve the childrearing with the nights in the bars with the beer-can cowboys, and even in our gathering old age we were better to do this. I say “we.” I am the odd fit here, the “boyfriend” of the grandmother, a graying man with a limping shuffle, but Baby has become the substance.
I run, struggling, back into the house. I pick up the phone and when I speak I am almost crying. Martha stumbles up the walk, Baby in her arms, the blood all over everything. Martha is wide-eyed with fear, with rage, with sorrow. She looks at me and bares her teeth.
“Why weren’t you watching her!” she screams.
The drive goes on and on. The doctor is two towns away. Martha is in the back seat with Baby across her lap. Martha shrieks on while Baby thrashes and forever bleeds, still crying wildly, the skin going white, and then gray, under the gelatinous purple sheen of the coagulating blood. My hands feel numb on the steering wheel, and only once do I look through the rear-view and meet Martha’s eyes, which come down on me hard and tell me what I am.
The deliverance is a matter of seconds. The hospital is a squat cinder-block building off the main drag. Through the swinging doors, rushing and shouting, Baby dumped on a gurney and then swept away, nurses chasing. Then the gaunt and sad-eyed GP, stethoscope hung around his neck like a stole, noiselessly trailing. The waiting room is just a bend in a hallway with some flat vinyl benches; the silence feels foreign and ominous and we just stand there. Then Martha sits, and then I, shadowy and uncertain, sit on the opposite edge of that long bench. She will not look at me. The hours and days and years stretch ahead, as they had once stretched behind.
I am searching. I drive the old pickup, which barrels and spits in its smoky death struggle. The engine has needed overhauling for a year, and it will never happen, and in that way it reminds me of myself, banged up but still game. I am searching for Dorothy. The Baby is two and a half, and after nearly two weeks Dorothy has not come back to get her. We just want to know what’s going on. We want to just confirm the obvious.
It was Thursday the third when Dorothy dropped off The Baby. Now it’s Wednesday the sixteenth. Martha has stayed home with The Baby while I’ve made the ambling drive, the customary search, watching the sun die off at the edge of the plains and go cold. We don’t want to change things, we just want to be sure Dorothy is in one piece, and we want the nod that says the deal is done. After two days we had known Baby would go back. After four days we heard from a friend of Martha’s that Dorothy was making a commotion in the bar down off the yards, and didn’t seem to have a worry in the world. Drunk or no, looking me in the eye or no – just a nod. That’s all I have to get. Dorothy was always a bad girl, the way I hear it. Dorothy was always a handful. We don’t want to challenge her into taking The Baby back.
I’ve been four places, the usual haunts, no luck. Dorothy roams. When I left the house, the soft heat of the day beginning to let off, The Baby was bathed and in her pajamas and on Martha’s lap, as Martha watched her Lawrence Welk repeats. Now, bouncing over some rutted sideroads, I wanted to be there, too.
The bar I’m looking for is one I’ve heard about from the drivers down at the co-op – the kind of bar that drivers at the co-op laugh about but don’t actually go to. It’s rough in the way that married men with little houses imagine themselves in it, but to me it’s all familiar territory, whether I’ve been there or not. I’ve heard it’s over in a town called Midway, and that it doesn’t have a sign. I’ll know it by the trucks, is my guess.
Other than missing The Baby and Martha and our Saturday night ritual, I don’t mind this part: The driving. The movement. My life has been the constant shift between two states of being: moving and wanting to be still, and being still and wanting movement. Driving toward a tight cluster of lights down across the valley floor, I think of the urge for movement, and whether I can’t shake its pull. There have been times when, gunning the truck out of town, I have felt that familiar nausea.
Dorothy has the itch of her own, which is, as best I can tell, for foamy beer and a warm, stinking body next to her when she regains consciousness under dirty and twisted sheets. Baby, to hear Dorothy tell it, was an immaculate conception – she woke up that morning without even a trace of a man left behind, and she didn’t bother trying to solve the riddle. Whatever man is handy seems good enough, and that spreads her over the better part of four counties.
The Baby didn’t come to us in a way that made Martha think she’d be a born-again parent. Dorothy had gotten comfortable dropping her off for us to mind, and then one day she showed up saying she was “checking in on her.” I stood on the porch looking at the truck down the street, its slumping driver, its muddy anonymity. I heard Dorothy and Martha arguing, the tone hushed enough I couldn’t make out the words, but heated enough I knew exactly what was being said. Then Dorothy came stamping out and the screen door slammed and then she was slamming herself into the truck, gone.
I walked back in and Martha had the look of grief that is particular to people with doomed children. The baby was on the floor playing with some plastic rings.
“There’s just no talking to that woman,” Martha mumbled.
Martha looks over at me. The stress and the fluorescent lights don’t flatter her, and her anger at me binds it all into a new face: This is the first moment I truly see her as an old lady.
“She better not die,” Martha says to me in a voice so steady it’s poison.
“Baby isn’t gonna die,” I say, as if I have any idea.
“She better not,” Martha says, and goes looking in her bag for a cigarette.
Midway is just over a barbwired rise, a gully of a place with flat roofs and scrawny trees and carcasses of cars haunting the yards. I take it down to thirty per, and coast through until I see a long windowless wooden building with pickups nosed up to it like sucklings. I don’t know what she’s traveling in these days, but this place looks the part. I get out of Martha’s truck and chock the wheels just to be safe.
I come into the place slowly, just another coot with a country thirst, staying down by the old cigarette machine near the door. Nobody bothers to look. I see Dorothy instantly, hung over a butt and a tumbler down on the part where the bar curves toward the Gents. A high-traffic location, facing toward the swing door where many a man would emerge lightened and refreshed, again thirsting for what might be had. It’s her way.
I come shuffling down, easy, trying not to spook her. When she catches me in the edge of things, she looks at the end of her cigarette like she’s talking to it and says, “Well, look all what the cat drugged in.” She has the subdued, heavy air of someone carrying a lot of alcohol but used to the load. Up close, her breath is ratty with the liquor and the smokes, her eyes glazed in a way that might be mistaken for indifference, rather than the ability to rise to meet the obvious emotion: Dorothy doesn’t like me, never has; I came along and filled Martha’s need not to pass her days in lonely silence. I came in, and Dorothy began to see that the ranting, screaming and mental torture weren’t going to be as welcome as they had been.
I stand there, making sure not to appear angry.
“Your mama just wanted to make sure you were in one piece,” I say.
“Well, I am,” she says, her voice lofting and then burning out like dud fireworks. It comes out only as a statement, not nearly the anger she’d been trying to heave my way.
Consent is a funny thing. In a way, that’s good enough to tell me what I need to hear, but I need to go another step. I’m not going to rush it, though. The bartender comes floating down, solicitous, and I say, “Well, what’s coldest is best.”
“Oh, hell,” Dorothy says, knowing she’s got some company now.
After an hour, Martha says, “It’s been an hour.”
“Baby’d be taking some pretty good stitches,” I say.
“Her beautiful face!” Martha cries out, and the shoulders are heaving with the grief. “Her perfect little face!”
I sit listening to her cry. Martha is fifty and a grandma six times over. Her two good girls are married to farm boys out in the eastern side of the state; Martha, in their eyes, is shaded over on Dorothy’s end of the equation, with the boyfriend who hasn’t got much to say about where he showed up from. Martha visits those grandkids without me at her side, and I don’t argue it. I spend those hours with Baby, watching her figure out the world from the middle of the outspiraling hooked rug.
Dorothy is down to the last cigarette in the pack, and she looks like she’s trying to hold off on it. Then she sighs and taps it out and lights up, still looking into her drink, still angled away from me.
“Well, you can tell my mama you found me in one piece,” she says. “That’s what you needed, right?”
“Pretty much,” I say.
“Okay, then,” she says.
That’s it, the nod I was looking for, but I can’t let this one go.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “Baby’s fine.”
She takes this one like a slap, and whatever satisfaction I have from getting a reaction fades into the realization that I just picked a fight I didn’t need to.
“What all is that supposed to mean?” Dorothy says.
“It means what it means,” I say. “She’s fine. She’s in good hands, and you needn’t worry.”
Dorothy just stares me down.
“I’m a good mother,” she says.
I can’t give her that one, even though I know where it will all go now.
“I was letting you all have some time with her!” Dorothy shouts. “You don’t appreciate that?”
I just stare at her. This was not what I was sent to do.
“I’ll be there in the morning,” Dorothy says, and she nods for another drink for herself. “Have her ready for me to take her.”
Martha, sitting down at the end of the bench in the waiting area, finally says, “How long could it take to find out what’s going on?”
“I’m sure they’re taking good care,” I say.
We sit looking at the checkerboard tiles. When someone appears in the hallway, we look up expectantly, then drop our gazes when it turns out not to be who we’re waiting for.
Martha sits looking at her hands and then lets off a long sigh.
“Well, I’m getting coffee. You want me to bring you some coffee?” Martha says.
“Yeah.”
She gets up and straightens her clothes. She has pressed jeans on, and her cream-colored lady’s boots, and a long blue blouse that was always her favorite. The blood on it has dried into something that almost looks like it’s part of the fabric. Martha pats my shoulder and goes looking for a machine.
Dorothy shows up two days later, pulling herself unsteadily out of a rattling old El Camino. The driver doesn’t turn his head toward the house to see what’s going on – it’s clear he’s a ride, and a reluctant one at that.
“Well I’m here then,” Dorothy yells hoarsely through the screen door. I come through from the kitchen, looking at the time. It’s past one in the afternoon, but Dorothy has the almond eyes that speak of hangover and fragments of thoughts.
“Baby’s not here,” I say evenly.
“Well, where the damned hell is she?” Dorothy says.
“Your mama took her out for air,” I say.
“I said I was coming to get her!”
“You said you were coming Thursday morning. Today is not Thursday. Today is Saturday afternoon. Your mama took The Baby out while she went on her errands. The Baby was ready Thursday, like you said.”
Dorothy’s eyes flutter with agitation and dilemma. But I see it now, the half-heartedness of it. “Well,” she says, “what am I supposed to do now?”
I look at her blankly, a man with absolutely no ideas. She looks back at the El Camino. The man sits slumped behind the wheel, smoking.
“Well we can’t sit around waiting forever,” Dorothy says.
My hand moves around to my back pocket, and I bring the wallet out real slow. I look through it and find a faded twenty.
“Here’s something for his gas,” I say. “So he won’t be troubled by the effort.”
Dorothy takes the bill. Living is cheap out here; I’ve just bought her a weekend that will likely wind her up with another man in another county, far from The Baby.
“Well,” she says, “I tried. Nobody can say I didn’t try.”
I nod, and she nods back, finally. She slouches back to the El Camino. The car door groans from the rust as she pulls it open. I wait by the door until the car is just a dust devil out on the far edge of the world.
Then I turn. I walk to the back of the house and into the bedroom. Baby is on the bedspread, playing with some tin cowboys from a yard-sale outfit. Martha lies on her side, expressionless.
“Gone,” I say.
Martha comes back empty-handed. She’s been gone for a while and she’s begun to pull herself together, the hair brushed, the make-up reapplied. But the eyes are still old, brightness dimmed with the agony of the day, the lines furrowed with new knowledge.
The doctor comes tentatively, like a man who knows he is an imposter, a man who doesn’t believe the diplomas hanging on his sheetrock office wall.
“We tried to save the eye,” he says, a vessel of apology. He endears himself to us by turning the culpability on himself. I had been trying to fix the damned toaster when Baby wandered from my attention.
The Baby crawls across the woven rug, then stands against the chair, then pushes out into the room, unexpected and suddenly. On the couch, watching her, I realize something important has happened.
“Martha!” I shout. “Come quick!”
The Baby looks at me curiously then plops down on her ass. Martha comes through the doorway from the hall, looking.
“The Baby just got up and walked!” I say.
Martha looks at me but it’s not exactly happy. She looks at The Baby sitting on the floor, then looks at me, then back at The Baby.
“The Baby walked,” I say again.
Martha stands there like I’m the problem. The moment is clearly over and Martha wasn’t there. Ever since that night I came back from finding Dorothy, Martha seems insistent on doing everything Dorothy should be doing. Baby sits staring, no movement toward trying to walk again.
“Are you joking with me?” Martha says.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m just joking.”
“Well that’s a little cruel, don’t you think?”
“I guess.”
“It is,” she says. “Why do you need to go and be so cruel?”
Three weeks later, when The Baby walks in Martha’s presence, Martha seems to be watching me more than The Baby. I catch the glint of hard glare without looking at her directly; I look instead at The Baby, who looks at me with what I swear, I swear, is guilt, and therefore complicity.
Martha is in the ladies’ room when the doctor comes shuffling out, looking more grave and self-flagellating than before.
“Are you the grandpa?” he says.
“No,” I say. I look down the hall to see if Martha’s on her way back. “I’m not anybody – you know, in the family.”
“I’ve got to get back in there,” the doctor says. “Can I ask you to give the grandmother a message?”
“She’ll be right on back.”
“Can’t I just tell you?” he says. “See, I have to, really, get back . . . ”
His voice trails off and he looks trapped in an awkward moment, and I turn and head down the hall, mumbling something about please waiting two seconds. At the ladies’ room door, I swing it open and call inside: “Martha? Doctor needs to talk to you . . . ”
“What?” Her voice is clear, keening out from the stall. I hear her fumbling with things and I recede to wait with the doctor. In the hallway, she looks at me in exaggerated disbelief and then turns her attention to the doctor.
“Well, there’ll be quite a scar,” he begins.
The day after The Baby walks “for the first time,” Martha decides Dorothy should be made aware of this, to emphasize what a bad mother she’s being.
“Maybe it will shock her into straightening up, knowing what all is passing her by,” Martha says. “Maybe it will be a good slap across that face.”
So I go, looking. I rumble through the soft night marveling at the sky, like a glowing tower of colors, and listening to sweet songs whistling through the AM. I go to all the familiar places, searching. To tell Dorothy she didn’t see The Baby walk for the very first time.
And in the familiar places I see all the familiar faces, grizzled men leaning over their beer, part of the fraternity of men who might be The Baby’s father, but wouldn’t have any idea anyway.
“Seen Dorothy?”
“No, sir.”
“Any you boys seen Dorothy?”
“Not so recent that she’d still be there.”
I nod and ponder. “Any you boys know where she’s staying these days?”
All down the bar, Dorothy’s men shake their heads.
Baby isn’t coming home tonight. The stitching is done but there’s likely a concussion, and the doctor nervously describes how they’ll look after her.
“She’s as well as you can expect, after something like that,” the doctor says. “You folks might as well get on home and rest. Wouldn’t be comfortable, trying to spend the night.”
It’s a quarter to eleven. Martha walks across the parking lot to the truck with me following ten feet behind. I drive; she stares ahead. When we come through the kitchen door, into the dark house, the shards of broken dish crunch under my boots. I snap the overhead light on, get out the broom and the dustpan, and get to work. The lights are off in the living room. I can hear Martha, sitting on the couch crying.
There’s a shack behind a bigger house out on a ranch that hasn’t been worked in years. I lean into the iced gusts while I open the gated barbed-wire, then jump back into the truck and rumble across the cattle grate and up the hill toward the hard place where the land edges to dishwater sky. Over the rise I see the house and the smaller house, long since shifted out of square by the prevailing winds, which can make a man forget what it feels like to stand up straight. Remote country, fallow and neglected. I’ve heard this was family property and that the owner, through inheritance, lives in a city and is just sitting on it until someone is ready to make a foolish offer. The shack, out fifty paces from the mudroom of the house, looks like nothing more than a tool shed, but this is where I’ve heard Dorothy is, a squatter on a far-flung ranch. She has no vehicle, and probably no money; her men keep her supplied, is what I’ve heard. Her men slip her money while they tuck in their shirts. Still.
I roll the truck down to the head of the dirt double-track, where it blooms into what is understood to be a parking area of hard dirt cut with tire tracks. I slip the truck out of gear and gun the engine so it sounds like the Second Coming. Anyone in that house is going to come out cursing, but no one does. I don’t much feel like getting out of the overheated cab, and the cold outside my frosted windshield is only part of it.
I sit listening to the radio for a long time. The music is old-time, all the heartbroken pining less the electrical instruments. The singer puts his destitution into cascading words, so good you wouldn’t take him for a man long rich on his music. Some people just have the hurt inside them, regardless of the facts. Dorothy never had it harder than anybody else, but that wouldn’t be her version of the story.
I reluctantly get out of the truck and cough loudly, which can’t compete with the wind. I know I’ll end up knocking but I shout “Hello!” three times so I can say I did. Nothing. The shed has a loose brass knob and when I touch it the sensation is like shaking hands with an ice cube, but then the door gives and I swing it in. The inside doesn’t give itself away by its temperature; inside is only less windy.
“Dorothy?” I shout.
I let the eyes adjust. I can see the wood-burning stove, gone cold with the fire tools laid out on the floor in front of it. There’s not so much as a glow, even with a good pile of quarter-split wood next to it; if I wonder, it’s cut short when I see Dorothy.
She’s on the couch, the eyes looking at me even though the skin is as cold and dolorous as the sky at my back. I know if I touch her she’ll be frozen, or close. She’s in a bathrobe and her hair is bundled in a towel. There’s a bowl on the floor next to the couch, the scoured lines of the last bits of her meal rimming the inside. A tattered woman’s magazine, probably out of a waiting room, is across her abdomen. On the table over her shoulder, a candle is on a chipped dish, burned down to a stub. She must have died in a warm room that couldn’t go on like that without her. Whatever got her was from inside, and my guess is the drugs more than the drinking.
I pull the door shut, and outside that little shack, I twist and yank at the knob until it gives, leaving only the square spindle sticking out of the hole. Out on the main road, I wait until I’m far off, my wheels rolling out too many miles for anyone to make a connection. I toss out the knob, which skitters and bounces until it jumps into the high grass down in a deep gully. There is no guilt in this at all. I’ve learned how not to be noticed, how to make myself an ignored man. Keeping my mouth shut is the only way to keep on living the way I do. In that way, I can convince myself it’s the right thing to do. The Baby needs me. Somebody else can just as well find her, someone who can make the call without having to think about it.
Now, home from the hospital, I don’t turn on the lights. I seat myself on the couch next to Martha as she uses tissue to wipe the clumped mascara from around her tear-wet eyes.
“Baby will pretty much be okay,” I say.
“Scarred,” Martha says. “With a mother who couldn’t give a damn either way.”
Nobody’s seen Dorothy in more than a year. Martha had taken a sick day and gone asking around, after I’d failed to turn anything up; one of Dorothy’s men thought she might have headed for Houston. Martha, returning that night, had shaken her head in rueful but mild disgust that in one day she had turned up facts that I hadn’t been able to determine in days of searching. The matter seemed closed, but I’ve spent this long stretch of time waiting for someone to surprise me with the news I already know. Every day for a few weeks after I stepped from that shed, I sat at the edge of every moment; then, for weeks, it seemed something would give. Finally, I left myself to the thought that maybe no one would venture out there for a long time. The more it went on, the more I heard Martha telling people how her no-account daughter had busted out to Houston with a baby in her dust, the more I thought of how bad it would be when it would have to be taken back. But yet, it hasn’t happened.
I sit on the couch in the dark, listening to Martha sniffle and settle. The sleep will come on her like a surprise, and that’s the only reprieve I can be sure I’ve got. Baby will live a life defined by the deep crescent wedge across her domed forehead; that will be the way I remember how I had let Baby wander, and it will be a connection that triangulates us in ways I probably don’t want to think about. I don’t have anywhere to go, and I am old now.
“Well,” Martha finally says. “We should get to bed. Baby will be a terror when she gets home.”
“I guess.”
“She’ll be trying to pull off that bandage, sure as hell.”
“I know.”
“We’ll need to keep a closer eye on her,” Martha says.
“Damn right we will.”
“The damned toaster didn’t matter,” she says quietly.
“I’ll learn,” I say.
Edward J. Delaney is the author of the short story collection The Drowning & Other Stories and the novel, Warp & Weft. His work has appeared frequently in The Atlantic Monthly and has appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories anthologies.