“Louis!” Rachel called. “She’s cut herself!”
Eileen had fallen from the tire swing and hit a rock with her knee.
The cut was shallow, but she was screaming like someone who had
just lost a leg, Louis thought (a bit ungenerously). He glanced at the house across the road, where a light burned in the living room.
“All right, Ellie,” he said. “That’s enough. Those people over there will think someone’s being murdered.”
“But it hurrrrts!”
Louis struggled with his temper and went silently back to the wagon. The keys were gone, but the first-aid kit was still in the glove compartment. He got it and came back. When Ellie saw it, she began to scream louder than ever.
“No! Not the stingy stuff I don’t want the stingy stuff Daddy!
No—”
“Eileen, it’s just Mercurochrome, and it doesn’t sting—”
“Be a big girl,” Rachel said. “It’s just—”
“No-no-no-no-no-—”
“You want to stop that or your ass will sting,” Louis said.
“She’s tired, Lou,” Rachel said quietly.
“Yeah, I know the feeling. Hold her leg out.”
Rachel put Gage down and held Eileen’s leg, which Louis painted with Mercurochrome in spite of her increasingly hysterical wails.
“Someone just came out on the porch of that house across the street,” Rachel said. She picked Gage up. He had started to crawl away through the grass.
“Wonderful,” Louis muttered.
“Lou, she’s—”
“Tired, I know.” He capped the Mercurochrome and looked grimly at his daughter. “There. And it really didn’t hurt a bit. Fess up, Ellie.
“it does! It does hurt! It hurrrr—”
His hand itched to slap her and he grabbed his leg hard.
“Did you find the keys?” Rachel asked.
“Not yet,” Louis said, snapping the first-aid kit closed and getting up. “I’ll—”
Gage began to scream. He was not fussing or crying but really screaming, writhing in Rachel’s arms.
“What’s wrong with him?” Rachel cried, thrusting him almost blindly at Louis. It was, he supposed, one of the advantages of having married a doctor—you could shove the kid at your husband whenever the kid seemed to be dying. “Louis! What’s—”
The baby was grabbing frantically at his neck, screaming wildly.
Louis flipped him over and saw an angry white knob rising on the side of Gage’s neck. And there was also something on the. strap of his jumper, something fuzzy, squirming weakly.
Eileen, who had become quieter, began to scream again,
“Bee! Bee! BEEEEEE!” She jumped back, tripped over the same protruding rock on which she had already come a cropper, sat down hard, and began to cry again in mingled pain, surprise, and fear.
I’m going crazy, Louis thought wonderingly. Wheeeeee! “Do something, Louis! Can’t you do something?”
“Got to get the stinger out,” a voice behind them drawled. That’s the ticket. Get the stinger out and put some baking Soda on it. Bump’ll go down.” But the voice was so thick With Down East accent that for a moment Louis’s tired, confused mind refused to translate the dialect: Got t’get the stinga out ‘n put some bakin soda on’t. TI! go daown.
He turned and saw an old man of perhaps seventy—a hale and healthy seventy—standing there on the grass. He wore a biballs over a blue chambray shirt that showed his thickly folded and wrinkled neck. His face was sunburned, and he was smoking an unfiltered cigarette. As Louis looked at him, the old man pinched the cigarette out between his thumb and forefinger and pocketed it neatly. He held out his hands and smiled crookedly . . . a smile Louis liked at once—and he was not a man who “took” to people.
“Not to tell you y’business, Doc,” he said. And that was how Louis met Judson Crandall, the man who should have been his father.
3
He had watched them arrive from across the street and had come across to see if he could help when it seemed they were “in a bit of a tight,” as he put it.
While Louis held the baby on his shoulder, Crandall stepped near, looked at the swelling on Gage’s neck, and reached out with one blocky, twisted hand. Rachel opened her mouth to protest—his hand looked terribly clumsy and almost as big as Gage’s head—
but before she could say a word, the old man’s fingers had made a single decisive movement, as apt and deft as the fingers of a man walking cards across his knuckles or sending coins into conjurer’s limbo. And the stinger lay in his palm.
“Big ‘un,” he remarked. “No prize-winner, but it’d do for a ribbon, I guess.” Louis burst out laughing.
Crandall regarded him with that crooked smile and said, “Ayuh, corker, ain’t she?”
“What did he say, Mommy?” Eileen asked, and then Rachel burst out laughing too. Of course it was terribly impolite, but somehow it was okay. Crandall pulled out a deck of Chesterfield Kings, poked one into the seamed corner of his
mouth, nodded at them pleasantly as they laughed— even Gage was chortling now, in spite of the swelling of the bee sting—and popped a wooden match alight with his thumbnail. The old have their tricks, Louis thought. Small ones, but some of them are good ones.
He stopped laughing and held out the hand that wasn’t supporting Gage’s bottom—Gage’s decidedly damp bottom. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr.—”
“Jud Crandall,” he said and shook. “You’re the doc, I guess.”
“Yes. Louis Creed. This is my wife Rachel, my daughter Ellie, and the kid with the bee sting is Gage.”
“Nice to know all of you.”
“I didn’t mean to laugh . . . that is, we didn’t mean to laugh . . . it’s just that we’re . . . a little tired.”
That—the understatement of it—caused him to giggle again. He felt totally exhausted.
Crandall nodded. “Course you are,” he said, which came out: Coss you aaa. He glanced at Rachel. “Why don’t you take your little boy and your daughter over to the house for a minute, Missus Creed?
We can put some bakin soda on a washrag and cool that off some.
My wife would like to say hello too. She don’t get out too much.
Arthritis got bad the last two or three years.”
Rachel glanced at Louis, who nodded.
“That would be very kind of you, Mr. Crandall.”
“Oh, I just answer to Jud,” he said.
There was a sudden loud honk, a motor winding down, and then the big blue moving van was turning—lumbering—into the driveway.
“Oh Christ, and I don’t know where the keys are,” Louis said.
“That’s okay,” Crandall said. “I got a set. Mr. and Mrs.
Cleveland…they that lived here before you—gave me a set, oh, must have been fourteen, fifteen years ago. They lived here a long time. Joan Cleveland was my wife’s best friend. She died two years ago. Bill went to that old folks’ apartment complex over in Orrington. I’ll bring em back over. They belong to you now, anyway.”
“You’re very kind, Mr. Crandall,” Rachel said.
“Not at all,” he said. “Lookin forward to having young ‘uns around again.” Except that the sound of this, as exotic to their Midwestern ears as a foreign language, was yowwuns “You just want to watch em around the road, Missus Creed Lots of big trucks on that road.”
Now there was the sound of slamming doors as the moving men hopped out of the cab and came toward them.
Ellie had wandered away a little, and now she said, “Daddy what’s this?”
Louis, who had started to meet the moving men, glanced back. At the edge of the field, where the lawn stopped and high summer grass took over, a path about four feet wide had been cut, smooth and close. It wound up the hill, curved through a low stand of bushes and a copse of birches, and out of sight.
“Looks like a path of some kind,” Louis said.
“Oh, ayuh,” Crandall said, smiling. “Tell you about it sometime, missy. You want to come over and we’ll fix your baby brother up?”
“Sure,” Ellie said and then added with a certain hopefulness “Does baking soda sting?”
4
Crandall brought back the keys, but by then Louis found his set.
There was a space at the top of the glove compartment and the small envelope had slipped down into the wiring. He fished it out and let the movers in. Crandall gave him the extra set. They were on an old, tarnished fob. Louis thanked him and slipped them absently into his pocket, watching the movers take in boxes and dressers and bureaus and all the other things they had collected over the ten years of their
marriage. Seeing them this way, out of their accustomed places, diminished them. Just a bunch of stuff in boxes, he thought, and suddenly he felt sad and depressed—he guessed he was feeling what people called homesickness.
“Uprooted and transplanted,” Crandall said, suddenly beside him, and Louis jumped a little.