RECOVERING THE OPPOSABLE THUMB by Jake Maynard
The hand is the visible part of the brain.
– Immanuel Kant
Another thumbless baby, birthed into the hands of Dr. Isaiah Bookman, where it wailed and squirmed, flapping its arms like it could swim through the air. It was lively and strong. She was lively and strong, with thick reddish hair and flushed, life-colored skin. Pudgy rolls of her, lacquered with slime, only a little bruised around the head and shoulders. Both parents were healthy, as was the son. There they were – or rather, weren’t. He started at the boneless pink flaps of skin and felt panic, panic, panic pulling a wire through his body, tightening each nerve. This was the third case now, and Bookman was beginning to think that he was the newborn – helpless with the cord wrapped around his neck.
He shielded the baby from the mother with a towel. Her childless older sister, bedside in the low-ceilinged room, stood and tried to peek but Bookman shooed her away. The afterbirth followed immediately, like a beached jellyfish he’d once seen, and the cord’s throbbing slowed. He clamped and cut it and turned away from the mother to study the baby under the flaring lamplight. He’d had a hard time believing the first case but now the problem was understanding. Now, the doctor struggled to catch his own thoughts. He thought he heard them flying past, but it was only the exhausted mother, anxious to see her first baby girl.
“Just a minute,” he said. “Let me polish her up for you.”
He wiped the baby down and tried to call forth the right tone. “I am sorry,” he said. “But she’s beautiful, otherwise.” He presented the baby, the little paw-like hands gnawing the air between them.
“I knew it,” the sister said. “I dreamed it.”
The sister sighed, the mother wept. Bookman cleaned the baby, cleared the passageways of mucus and blood, and checked her eyes and ears. The mother just kept crying. It was clear she wouldn’t stop soon. Below, in the kitchen, there were expectant men drinking. He didn’t want to face them. He couldn’t explain what he didn’t understand. Thirty-five years of work, and I don’t know had never been an answer. In his mind, it could never be. So he did what he could do. He offered a cascade of apologies, forgave all expenses, promised the mother needed no stitches, promised he’d soon have more information, promised lifetime care, promised healthy babies to follow, promised many unmemorable lies, said goodbye, said again he was sorry, sped past the father downstairs, and hit the dark mud road with his bag unstrapped and his coat slung over the bloody cuffs of his shirtsleeves. He pretended not to hear the drunk uncles calling for him from the stoop.
He walked home shaken and at his fine house on High Street he fixed a cup of tea fortified with the expensive English gin he’d ordered from Pittsburgh. It was late. Sandra had gone to her room and the woodstove smoldered. He opened the stove door, thrust the poker around inside, and loaded some wood. Sandra was a light sleeper. He listened, nothing, and drank. Tomorrow would be a shit day. People would be talking, but when weren’t people talking? Last week, two women came to his back door insinuating questions about abortion. He’d explained that thumb aplasia was exceedingly rare, and explained what exceedingly meant, but when one poor woman kept asking, he sent her to Sandra, who knew more about the pills than he did.
At least he had help coming. The cadaver bones were supposed to arrive soon, and a letter from Germany, too. In the meantime, more letters to write, inquiries to surgeons in New York and Boston. If he were younger, he thought, he could work through the night. He could work through every night. But now the time felt stretched thin: scouring books, measuring hands, examining ancestries, diets, hygiene, water, phases of the year. On a huge sheet of butcher paper the doctor had drawn a diagram and labeled it “The Loss of the Opposable Thumb.” Now the circles had started to look lunatical, the words like gibberish.
In his weaker moments, he’d looked past the science, thinking, maybe, God, why God, and thumbing through his father’s gildededge biblical index –
Exodus: The right hand is majestic in power. The right hand shatters the enemy.
And Matthew: If the right hand offends you, cut it off, for it is better for one of your members to perish, and not that the whole body be cast into hell.
And Isaiah, when Jehovah speaks to the city of Jerusalem: Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands; your walls are continually before me.
He told himself this was old age talking. Focus, Doctor, on what you know: the first metacarpal was completely gone, that much was clear. Not even the stub of a bone was left. But he wasn’t sure about the trapezium. It’s a tiny bone – just a shard, really – connecting thumb to index, index to middle. There had to be something there, Bookman thought, something inside holding everything in place. He fell asleep in the wingback in his study, again.
The morning was sunny and cold. He walked through town, all mud and scabbed-up houses, and past the fledgling brickworks and the tannery smelling like chemicals and rot and past a few scrubby farms with fields of grain throbbing in the wind. Past that, Bookman saw some workers building a derrick. Money followed oil. The town was growing, boarding houses going up, but now, to see it, the future felt real and within his grasp. It was the first derrick he’d seen in person and more beautiful than he’d imagined. A perfect work of geometry, like the first skeleton he’d witnessed in university. He stood and watched the men working and hoped he could be there when they went through bedrock. He longed to see it gush. Dr. Bookman believed in the future and his biggest fear was that he would die before it arrived.
The Swedenholm twins were the first, four months earlier. They were perfect as pears, except for the thumbs. The fact that they were twins had sent Bookman down the wrong line of inquiry until the Italian boy was born six weeks later. The Swedenholms lived in a little encampment of ten slab cabins on a muddy hillside at the start of the deep timber fields. For water, they used the creek. For sewage, they used the creek. They called the place New Stockholm. The men worked together in the timber fields and the women raised vegetables and kids, always smirking. Bookman found the house and rapped on the door. Karin appeared looking thin and squinting into the sun. Bjorn was away, she explained, driving a float of logs down the Allegheny. He was expected back any day now.
“That is,” she said, “if he does not die. Or run away.” She laughed bitterly and let him in.
She served Bookman a cup of coffee the color of dishwater. He asked about the girls, who were asleep, and she said they sleep and cry and coo. They eat and shit; they’re babies. He asked if they squeezed your fingers and she nodded and added that they wiggle their fingers all the time.
Bookman said, “I can look at them if you like.”
“It is whatever you wish. You’re the doctor.”
He said, “You know, a surgeon in France just replaced someone’s kneecap with ivory.” He’d planned to say this; he planned most of what he said.
She sat down at the edge of the bed and picked pine needles from the blanket. After a while, she said, “They are girls. Girls. Boys could keep books. Boys could study law.”
He thought: your walls are continually before me, and he decided not to tell her about the new one, though he knew she would hear of it. Karin said she had many things to do, so Bookman kept the examination quick. There was nothing to see, anyway, not without a scalpel.
Would she consent to surgery? A few small incisions, just a tiny peek. It wasn’t so much to ask, in the sake of knowledge. But when? It was too soon, that much he knew. He’d brought some things, soaps, pepper, powdered milk and laudanum, which he left on the table in a paper sack.
He hadn’t even met the Italian baby’s mother until the night he was born. It had been below zero degrees when a woman banged on the door near midnight. Bookman couldn’t catch a word of her Italian. Charades ensued. She pointed at her belly. She squatted and grimaced, mimicking a standing birth. Even after he got the point and began dressing, the old woman had kept at it. She swaddled an imaginary baby. Rocked an imaginary baby. She nursed an imaginary baby with one of the doctor’s throw pillows while he readied his kit.
It was a hard birth. A young mother, her first, with failure to progress and weak contractions. The apartment had no clean towels and a carpet that lifted when the wind blew. She’d already been at it for twelve hours when Bookman arrived. Sandra came later, bringing breakfast and a fresh shirt. It took eight more hours before the baby came, thumbless, but with two wrinkled flaps of skin like empty lambskin gloves. The mother didn’t seem too bothered but the father, Giuseppe, flopped prostrate on the floor, crying, “What is this curse?”
“Disease,” Bookman had corrected. “What is this disease?”
The flaps of skin fell off within a month, scarred over, and healed. And now, approaching the door, Bookman hoped they’d already heard of last night’s baby. It felt easier to confirm the rumors than force the news through his lips. His job was to practice medicine, not justify it! Lately, explanations were one of the many facts of life that left him exhausted. Just a few months before he would walk the mud logging roads and outline his memoirs: surgeoning in the war years, treating the loggers and roughnecks, recovering the opposable thumb. He imagined himself visiting universities, lecturing on rural medicine. The theaters and restaurants; the sleeper cars and cigars the size of sausages. But lately, he would snap from a daydream with the sad clarity that none of those things were going to happen. He was always very tired. Sometimes he forgot what he was doing and had to retrace his steps through every room, looking for something to prod his memory. He thought idly about the calls of the birds outside his window. He was an old man, and he had never even seen it coming.
He opened the stairwell door to find Giuseppe sitting at the top of the stairs, whittling a ladle.
“Giuseppe,” Bookman said, “how are things?”
“They just are, Doctor.”
“And the oil work?”
He shrugged.
“I have come to check on your boy. I think we’re making real progress.”
Giuseppe stood. “Now is not a good time.”
“It’ll only be a minute.”
Giuseppe peeked at the door. “Five dollars,” he whispered. He had a pouch of swollen blood under his left eye the size and shape of a baby mouse. Bookman reached for his face and Giuseppe swatted his hand away.
Bookman said, “You know I would never charge you for care.”
“No. You pay to see my son.”
“I think you are mistaken. I only want to help.”
“Do you know the story of Adoni-Bezek?” Giuseppe asked. He dusted some wood shavings from his trousers and Bookman watched a spiral shaving tumble down Giuseppe’s thick legs into the cuff of his pants. He thought of the improbability of it, from tree to shard. He knew it’d end up on the floor and, eventually, probably, stuck in the foot of one of Guiseppe’s kids. It was easier to predict what could happen than discern what had happened, which depressed him.
Giuseppe said, “You probably think I know nothing, Doctor. But I know things. I know that Adoni-Bezek cut off the thumbs of seventy kings.”
Bookman said he believed Giuseppe knew many things, just not medicine.
“You have been a doctor your whole life?”
“Forty years.” (Bookman believed in rounding up.)
“The thumbs were removed so the kings could no longer draw swords. But it could just as well have been so workers could never swing hammers.”
He took Giuseppe for drunk and tried to scoot past him in the narrow stairwell. But Giuseppe’s arm crossed the hall like a gate, the dirty hair rubbing against Dr. Bookman’s fresh-shaven throat.
“Bye now,” Giuseppe said. Bookman descended the stairs, and at the bottom, he said, “Stop by anytime if you want to discuss things. We can talk privately. I can show you my research.”
“You are no man,” Giuseppe said. “You are more like a woman.”
“I can assure you that I am a man,” Bookman said. He reached down and squeezed his package.
Giuseppe shrugged, saying, “Then you are some kind of other thing. Like a name written on paper, maybe.”
“You’re going to regret this. You’re going to regret this when you need my help.”
That night, after his gin, Bookman threw on his coat and took a walk around Mt. Hill. He avoided Main Street’s mud and walked all nine streets in twilight hazy with coal smoke. A shiny penny moon was rising and below, in the ditches, little patches of bloodroot were starting to flower. Bloodroot – sanguinarine, with bulbs the color of open sores. Snap the stem and it bleeds. Once, he’d treated a woman who’d slathered bloodroot onto her boils, only for the mixture to eat quartersized holes into her arms. One was nearly bone deep. It was the medieval Doctrine of Signatures, the idea that God had designed plants to resemble the body part that they could heal. The idiocy of these people! The desperation! He imagined feeding the afflicted children small carrots, little sausages. Or, if bones were the issue, were they to eat bones? If only he could take a little look. Just a peek. A one-inch incision could tell him so much. If only one of them would take sick and die! He knew a man, a man he’d rather not know, who might dig up a baby for the right price. The difference between Bookman and these people, he thought, was that he could see outside of himself. He could see the larger forces at work.
He returned home to find Giuseppe lying on the front porch, so drunk he could barely string together sentences. An empty bottle laid next to him. This was small town medicine, he thought. Always on the job.
“Fix it,” the man stammered. “You know you can just fix it.”
The doctor kneeled to him and put his hand on the man’s knee. “There’s nothing that I would like more. But think about it. How could I just make your baby grow thumbs?” He shook his head.
“You caused this.”
Dr. Bookman wiped vomit from the corner of the man’s mouth with the back of his hand and ran his thumb gently across Giuseppe’s injured face. “You know that’s not the truth. I’m worried you have a broken cheek here, my friend.”
“Liar,” he said. “Faggot.” He flopped his head back onto the porch with a clunk.
Bookman stood and stepped over the man, his temper flaring. “That’s enough!” he said. “I am going to go inside and fix you some coffee, then you’ll be on your way.”
Fishing his keys from his pocket, Bookman felt the tug of hands on the hem of his pants. Bookman turned toward him again and looked down at the hardscrabble man. His pride was gone. His coat torn at the collar. He was unshaven, his hair shot off in all directions. Dirt was chinked into his wrinkles, as if he’d fallen down drunk and tried to brush himself off. How sad. Bookman needed to put together some sort of fund for the children, for special training or maybe some special gloves. But there was no time, just not enough time.
“Listen, friend,” Bookman started to say, but he was interrupted.
“I do anything,” the man hollered. He pulled himself to his knees and flung himself at Bookman’s waist until he was hugging him around the hips. Bookman stroked his head. Some types of pain are hard to imagine and so he fixed the man’s disheveled hair.
“There, there now,” he said, “It will be fine. You need to be strong for your family.”
The doctor prided himself on his bedside manner. A long, awkward minute passed. He stroked the drunk man’s head. “There, there.” He caught himself scratching Giuseppe behind the ears, like a puppy. He thought it was working. He could feel the man calming. It had been so long since he had touched another person like this.
Giuseppe sighed, then spoke. “Fine, fine,” he said through snorting sobs. He threw his forearms against Bookman’s thighs, pushing him backward into the closed door, and, pinning the doctor there with his sharp elbows, he dug at the doctor’s belt.
“I do it. I do anything you want for my son,” the man cried.
Bookman raised a knee and caught Giuseppe square at the bottom of the jaw, toppling him backward. “Go home, damn it. If you expect any cent from me you best go home this minute.” Bookman dug into his pocket, pulled a handful of small bills from his money clip, and tossed them on the porch. He unlocked the door and, opening it only slightly, contorted himself inside.
With the door bolted and chained and Giuseppe stumbling down the brick path to the street, Bookman leaned against the huge mahogany door and almost cried. His belt was unlatched, his trousers pulled crooked. Confusion swept over him, the feeling he hated most. He remembered without wanting to Sporting Hill. Sixty-two, or was it sixty-three? The guns didn’t know it was just a skirmish. Most of the battalion was back at camp by the time they brought in the boy with grapeshot lodged deep in his groin. For maybe the only time, he remembered idle hands – extra nurses standing around, doing nothing.
It was summer, and when he cut the boy’s trousers off the smell socked him straight in the face. The ball had lodged in the muscle overtop the inguinal ligament, just missing the boy’s monstrous pecker. It truly was grotesque, a sideshow appendage, and he couldn’t even shoo away the nurses and soldiers who were all vying for a glance. The boy had been chewing opium gum and bleeding hard and now his head rolled back off the table and he began to sing or possibly pray. He couldn’t even grow a beard. It probably took all his masculine energy for that hog, the doctor thought. He probably had none to spare.
The doctor readied his tools and strapped the boy down and when he entered the tattered wound with the forceps, the strange thing happened. The worst thing. The gigantic cock flopped to life and stood at arms. It was resting against the doctor’s thin forearm as he worked the forceps. The boy was writhing now; the ball rotated against the ligament where it was lodged. It slipped against the forceps’ weak teeth. At least the ball hadn’t passed beyond to the organs. And it felt intact, not broken to shrapnel.
“Get this penis away from me!” the doctor said. He heard the panic in his own voice and the swell of laughter when the onlookers heard it, too. The boy kept writhing and the cock writhed with it, slapping against the doctor’s arm, which he was using to keep the thing from his face, and then even the nurses were laughing now, scandalized with their hands on their knees. He didn’t find it funny! Not any of it!
He said, “Hold him. Shoot him. I don’t care.”
A soldier on crutches and a nurse in a bloody smock put their hands on the boy’s chest, pinning him. It was hot in the tent, unbearable hot, and the doctor’s wool jacket felt like a hairshirt, like it was stuffed with iron filings and hay, but he was unrepentant, and his focus was failing, and now more cock-and-ball jokes.
“He likes it!”
“Which one, you mean?”
“It’s like he’s got a spare leg.”
The doctor closed his eyes. It helped to imagine the forceps as his own fingers, the musket ball like a slippery grape he was picking from a plate. You can’t pinch too hard, lest it slip and shoot off. Delicately, rotating the ball in the forceps, he hovered over the boy’s wet torso with his thick glasses fogging and the boy screaming and maybe a hundred eyes on him like the great lecture hall in Baltimore where he had once watched doctors dissect the dead. He gripped the ball just so, and pulled it slickly from the wound – it made a faint sucking sound as it exited – and at that exact moment, the boy spasmed and shot a huge wad laced with blood down the doctor’s hairless arm. Then the boy threw up, and fainted.
The crowd began cheering, and for a second the doctor thought it was in appreciation of him.
At home he downed a gin and then another, and as he climbed the steps to his study, he swore he could still hear the cackling of those nurses chasing him through the halls. His bedroom was on the first floor and his study bordered one small wing of the house that had in effect belonged to Sandra the last five years. Some days it felt more her house than his, and he liked it that way. He could spend all day without leaving his study but as he entered all he could see in the low light was the butcher’s paper with its problems to be solved. Where had his joy gone?
Through the wall he could hear Sandra snoring. She had to know the jokes the men made about them. The fact that she wasn’t scandalized just showed how ridiculous she thought it must be. But it wasn’t – she wasn’t that young, and he wasn’t that old. He’d show her, and Giuseppe, and all those gawking soldiers with their muskets. He wasn’t yet dead and then his belt clanged against the wooden floor. He went at himself like a boy who’d just discovered it, or maybe even invented it, which is what he had thought his first time, the body’s first genius, and Sandra through the wall snoring heavy and rhythmic like a timberman’s saw, and he squeezed harder, the old capable thumb, and his mind was empty, and his hand tried to wring whatever fresh thing was left out of him. But his calf cramped, another wire tightening inside him, and he collapsed onto his desk just in time to hear the crash of broken glass downstairs.
Sandra beat him to the parlor where a single brick, stamped MT. HILL 1892, was laying harmlessly in the center of his prized Turkish rug. Cold seeped in from the broken bay window, where the glass shards wiggled in their frames like the milk teeth of a puppy waiting to fall.
“Aww shit,” Sandra said. “Shit, shit, shit.” She was kneeling on the rug with her flannel nightgown open at the chest, and when Bookman looked down at her he wondered, for the first time, if maybe he couldn’t have her after all. He’d always just assumed it, and for him the knowledge was enough.
“Sandra,” he said. “What if we were married?”
“Yes, Doctor,” she said, laughing. “And then we’ll fill this house up with babies! That’s all we need, a bunch of little babies to roll around in this glass.”
He stood and watched her clean and hoped maybe he would just die in his sleep, like his father had done.
“Should I go for the police?” she asked after a while.
“No,” he said. “Superstition is like a fire. Let’s starve it.”
He went to bed.
Half of the town must have noticed the broken window in the three days before he could have the glass delivered and replaced. But no one, not even at the bank or the barbershop, asked him about it. This bothered him the most. He lay awake at night wondering what it meant that they couldn’t even say it, that they had all agreed, implicitly or otherwise, to say nothing. The silence felt like the aplasia, like skin grown over the truth, hiding it from him. How dare the grocer just smile and nod? How dare the barber just apologize for nicking his throat below the ear? Didn’t the barber ever think about the inside of the throat? Just a peek into the flesh! Just a whisper of appreciation! The doctor’s hair left floating in the basin, and for this? Burgeoning wilderness town with doctor needed. No one else had answered the call. No one else had treated the loggers’ syphilis and broken bones for pennies and old bread!
The obvious answer is that Giuseppe had thrown the brick, maybe out of some misguided anger about his own homosexuality, or maybe just a drunken rage. But he’d seemed so defeated. What if it had been someone else? A goddamned smile! A smirking nod! Even Sandra was avoiding him. He studied her trips to the grocer, the way she brought him his tea, her movement when they passed in the hall. Was she sharing his secrets all over town? He wanted to grab her and cry, “You too, Brutus?” Instead he met her withdrawals with his own. He took his meals in the study, penning notes while rifling through every medical reference he could find. His letters to old colleagues were worthless – most physicians didn’t even respond.
The work was the only way out, and the most obvious commonality was poverty. So this was the direction he took. He developed vague theories: one was that something essential in sustenance was missing from the mothers during pregnancy. But what kinds of sustenance were needed? More meat, more vegetables? What could he possibly tell the pregnant women of town? Eat more of everything? To make matters worse, his bones had been lost – or stolen?! – in the mail.
A week passed this way. People bent to tie their shoelaces when he passed them. Horses bucked when he approached. The stress of it caused rheumatism to flare in his hands and his knuckles swelled and ceased bending. He sent Sandra to hire a scribe from the school, but nobody came.
On Sunday, after a long week of study and no answers, the doctor cleaned up and went to church. He always thought of it as a kind of anthropology, getting to know the ways of the folks, but the day took the shape of a personal quest. He wanted to lock eyes with the people who were avoiding him, most of whom were Lutherans. Their church was the biggest in town, stark white and octagonal, creating, as they said, no corners for devils to hide in. Bookman took his seat and the service began. The pastor read from Matthew – wasn’t it always Matthew? – but the doctor felt feverish, as if he was swelling so large that he filled all the space in the church. He wanted to run, to just run like hell out of there. But no, no, he thought, he should stick it out. What would it say to leave? He straightened his back and laced his fingers. He thought of a boy he knew once, then he thought briefly of Sandra, her kindness.
He’d always liked the Lutherans’ open communion. But what would it say now to take it? He regretted nothing. But not taking it? Would that be worse? He thought that maybe he should just get baptized as a Lutheran. It was the largest church in town, it couldn’t hurt. He’d schedule it right away, right after church. The line was slow. People paused to chat with the pastor and old folks labored to climb to the pulpit. The sun streamed in through the high windows, so bright it hurt. No one spoke to him. Usually, he was accosted by all the old Swedish women showing him their scabs and strange lumps.
By the time he reached his turn in line and lifted his cupped hands to the pastor, his mind was in the town meeting he’d suddenly dreamed up. He was standing at the pulpit with his charts and cadaver bones, the babies all lined up at his feet, smiling. He was in control, compiling research, collaborating with specialists. He had started a fund for the afflicted, covering their bills and education. He was the pastor now, the mayor, the maker. He fixed the aplasia at conception’s spark.
Doctor.
The pastor held the wafer a few inches above Bookman’s outstretched hands. They locked eyes. There was something in the pastor’s face that Bookman couldn’t read. He remembered that look from somewhere. The soldier on crutches? The bleeding boy on the table? He could smell the rotten wounds again, sulphury smoke and sweaty wool. The sick paste of wafer and sour wine and then Bookman was lying on the church floor studying the red light streaming in and no one would dare touch him.
They need him!
They needed him!
They needed him!
Everyone stumbles. He had forgotten his breakfast. He just needed some air and by the time he reached his porch he had a plan. First, he would sit Sandra down and ask her to be his wife. He would tell her he was serious. It needn’t be romantic. Then, right afterwards, he would take some silverware and some cash and a promise of more to come to Giuseppe. Fine things could be sent to the Swedish camp, and more to the Danielson family in town. Then the town meeting. All of this he could do, and more. More letters to experts, demanding they come, offering money. And more meat, more vegetables, more of everything. He had the money, he had the time, he had the knowledge, the knowledge, the knowledge, what they most needed from him, his upper hand in this whole mess. He understood things. He had bought the ability to understand things years ago. He had sawed off the parts of men who knew less than him, who knew less and subsequently had less. He had looked straight in their dirty faces and told them lies. The last thing a human hears is usually a lie. It was the secret truth of medicine that he had never spoken out loud, and never would. At home, a note tacked to the door. “Blomquist girl in labor. I took your bag. S.”
He’d seen too many of these. The parents hadn’t known – or at least claimed they hadn’t known – and the girl said the same. She was a tiny thing, fifteen or so, with a face as round as a pumpkin. The girl’s irate father had been kicked out of the cabin and now paced the yard scraping away dirt like a chicken. The way his hands shook, his eyes darted. Bookman knew.
They had her set up on a low bed in a two-room cabin at the end of a corduroy road. She shimmered with sweat, reflecting the lamp light like a Christmas ornament. If only he could box her up, store her away until better times. The baby was breeched, Sandra told him. And inside such a small girl. Her fever was high. Sandra had already laid down clean sheets, boiled some water, and given the girl a tincture of cohosh to ease the pains. He cleaned himself to the elbows in nearboiling water, scrubbing his skin pink as a newborn. He was afraid like he’d never been, not even in war.
An hour passed. The girl pushed and wailed and gritted her teeth. They gave her a leather strop to bite. The doctor checked, checked, checked again. He reached inside – it always gave him a strange joy, the entering – and found, finally, a tiny foot. Breeched, just as Sandra had thought. The girl had lost continence, her contractions spasmodic. Her eyes were cloudy. The doctor noted heavy bleeding. He readied the forceps and the speculum and started some light tugging. It was too late to flip the baby.
With time, the lower half of a body emerged – a boy, more purple than pink. The poor girl was torn and screaming and the doctor ordered Sandra to give her more morphine. At the shoulders, the baby froze with arms turned up, still inside. Bookman wished the baby could just stay there, lodged deep, invisible, inside the secret warmth.
But still, the girl pushed. Sandra pumped her abdomen. The doctor tugged with the forceps, harder than he probably should have, and out came a gray-blue boy with a head no bigger than an apple. One hand was missing a thumb, the other ended at the wrist in a raw protrusion of milk-white bone.
“Holy shit,” Bookman said. “Holy Christ.”
The cord was wrapped. He freed it and clamped it off but the baby was limp, bluish, nothing. Just some warmed thing in his hands. He heard Sandra call his name. Two, maybe three times. She was screaming for the baby. The grandmother was screaming for the baby. What baby? Where? Everything had ended. He knew there would be no future. Why couldn’t they see? In one swoop Sandra snatched the baby with a towel and put her mouth over the purple face. She sucked hard and spit onto the floor. Again, sucking, spitting, smacking, breath. A chameleon, then. An animal changing color, grey to pink, a thing becoming human. Triumphant cries of life. Bookman did nothing, had done nothing. Sandra handed the boy to his grandmother and ran from the cabin covered in blood and shit.
He treated the girl the best he could and when she showed improvement, he left. On the walk home, everything seemed to flow into him like a vein had been opened. A dog passed in front of him, nose lowered, tail curled up in a perfect circle. The peepers called in the woods in perfect synchronicity with the dog’s gait. The mud was drying. Bark spilt off the logs on the corduroy road. He needed new bootlaces. The sky looked tiny when reflected in still puddles. The buds on the trees had grown since yesterday. The air smelled like rain again. His back hurt all along the lower five vertebrae. It would soon be dark. The shadows were growing. The doctor had no idea what any of this meant. He wondered if he had had some sort of episode. A stroke perhaps, he couldn’t say.
She must have packed with amazing speed. Except for a few garments left on the line, it was as if she had never lived there. She had even stripped the bedding. He washed up, poured himself a bowl of peanuts and a cup of gin, followed by another. A feeling rolled over him as he drank. It was as if he’d awakened at dusk after a long nap. Was it too late or too early and how did he arrive here in the first place, only minutes ago he was reading and he must have simply nodded off again and began some sort of dream –– She’d left no note, but the letter from Germany had arrived.
Hello, Mr. Bookman.
What strange afflictions you have described in this long and imaginative letter to me. And the time it must have taken, to speak nothing of the cost of sending post clear to Berlin! I do remember the lyceum in New York of which you write, but as to our meeting, I have no such memory. Being as I was the keynote lecturer, discussed in newspapers across America, I would have to take this for an elaborate ruse. While I appreciate the creativity here, “Doctor,” I found your anatomical sketches to be laughably hackish.
Maybe someday, when I retire from medicine, I will have time to return to these types of games.
The men arrived at nine, waking Bookman from where he had fallen asleep on his fine Oriental rug. Most were unarmed. Giuseppe carried a sucker rod from an oil rig, three feet of tar-soaked oak. A couple of the men had farm tools and one carried a poorly tied noose. This was not literal, Bookman knew. He could tell from the moment he stepped onto the porch to confront them. If they intended to kill him, he reasoned, they’d look like they had more of a purpose. There were maybe fifteen, mostly men he knew by name.
The doctor hollered from the porch that he would be out in a minute. Strangely, the men quieted down. The diagram and notes – he considered bringing them outside. But what was the use? Some people just can’t be reasoned with. Instead the doctor grabbed his bottle and pipe. He tugged on his boots and drew the laces up tight. The right lace snapped. How funny, how fitting. How horrible it is to be right. He turned down the gas lamps, walked onto the porch, locked the front door behind him and pitched the key into the mountain laurel flanking the house.
The men formed a clumsy circle in the front yard and Bookman found his way into the center. Their insults rose slowly, awkwardly – charlatan, quack, devil, pervert, monster, bastard, bugger. Doctor Bookman couldn’t make much sense of it all. Did they think he was evil, or just plain inept? He felt strangely calm. Something inside of him looked forward to fighting back, to taking a swing. He’d gone his whole life without hitting another man.
Giuseppe met him eye-to-eye in the ring of men. The moon sagged behind him.
“Stop lying,” Bookman said.
He grabbed the doctor by the wrists, held his hands out in front of him, and spit hot mucus onto the doctor’s palms. From behind someone kicked the doctor square in the back and he fell hard into the cold grass. They closed in around him, heavy punches, light kicks, and they picked him up and marched him through town. The doctor was spat upon, pushed into the mud and horseshit. He was jabbed in the ribs with sticks and smacked on the back of the head. His hat was lost. They boxed his ears until a ringing filled his head. All of this happened in silence. Nothing else was said. Not even at the edge of the big woods leading down off the ridge. Would they loot his house, burn it down? He hoped they saved his research materials. He still believed in their value.
They sent the doctor into the pines at the edge of town with a final shove and he fumbled through the brooding darkness. Hemlock boughs reached to scratch him. Hardwood sticks tried to poke him in the eyes. Mud rose up to suck at his boots and in this way he walked for what he thought to be hours, stopping to drink his gin and hoping he could make his way to a timber camp where he would be known. He’d never been in the woods at night. Under normal circumstances this would have scared the doctor – he’d heard stories of big cats and Indians – but this didn’t bother him. All of this was one big misunderstanding. He’d simply return with a team of doctors and a cure, he decided. Goddamn them, yes, he’d be back with an answer and he would find his library intact and Sandra waiting. I’m not going to die alone in these woods, he said. No, he was not that old, not that defeated. He was going to live to be old and slow. He would retire and write his memoirs and brush up on the piano. He would let the mysteries melt like snowflakes on his tongue.
It was a bright night after all, blue with refracted moon. Bookman collected twigs and made a sad, smoldering fire in a bed of moss. Around him grew new spring trillium, petals the color of old blood. He dried his waistcoat until it scorched at the fringes and worked to re-tie his broken bootlace. Overhead, clouds rushed in. A spring snow fell. His hands were like ice. He hovered in front of the low fire and in the orange, shadowed light he looked hard at his hands.
Hands, the cause of all his troubles. Their cracks, their scars, their hidden suggestions of bone. He thought about the nicks they had endured. He thought of the men they had treated years before – the bullets and scrap pulled, the bones mended, wounds stitched, and worse. He thought about all of the dogs his hands had petted. The groins his hands had rubbed, the pencils they’d sharpened, the letters they’d written, the sweet locks of hair they had twirled. The things caught and thrown, given and taken. Each finger itself and somehow not independent, rendered meaningless without the others.
And the creases of the palm. Look hard at those creases, leatherworn, undeniably yours. The way they form letters that change, somehow, when the fingers are moved. Letters disappear, new letters are formed. Sometimes they make an M. Sometimes, a V. Way back when, you traced them with pencils at school desks. That tickling sensation, like love, like childhood, like the first secrets you found inside yourself. If you look hard enough at those hands you can find anything. Stare and stare, and you can spell anything you want.
Jake Maynard is the author of the novel Slime Line, forthcoming from West Virginia University Press in 2024. His stories and essays have appeared in Guernica, Gulf Coast, Slate, The New Republic, and The New York Times.