A sample from
Bred on Pike Ridge
RHETT
The saw kicks at a quarter to ten.
I'm bucking the walnut I dropped on the north slope in March, a straight log, twenty inches at the butt, the best tree I've taken off this ridge in five years. I'm working down through the second cut when the bar catches the top of a knot and comes back at me. I get my left arm up. The chain gets the outside of it below the elbow before the brake trips.
I set the saw down on the log. I look at the arm. It's open about four inches and bleeding steady, not pumping. I make a fist. My fingers come down. That's good enough to drive on.
There's a dish towel in the truck from lunch. I wrap it tight and tie it off with my teeth and the other hand, and I drive down Pike Ridge with the arm propped on the window frame so it stays above my heart. The gravel road is dry. The creek is low and clear under the bridge, and the slab is out of the water. I don't have to go the long way.
The clinic is the old bank on the main road. Brick, two stories, a stone step worn down in the middle from a hundred years of people going in to see about their money. Across the road the Kesterson twins are in their rockers on the Mercantile porch. Bea lifts her coffee cup at me. Lou looks at the towel and says something to Bea. I park.
Inside it's cool. The window unit is going. The old teller counter is the front desk now, and there's nobody behind it. There's a bell on the counter and a sign that says ring for the nurse. I don't ring it. The exam room is in the back, through the vault. The steel door has stood open on its hinges since before I was born, a foot thick, and I know the frame is too low for me. I duck it anyway out of habit, and I'm still bent over coming through when I see her.
I'm looking down at the towel. There are walnut chips stuck to it, dark brown, wet with blood, and I'm thinking I've got sawdust in there and somebody's going to have to get it out.
Then I look up, and there she is.
She's standing at the counter along the back wall with a box of gloves in one hand and a clipboard in the other. Navy scrubs that fit her. Honey-blonde hair twisted up off her neck in a clip, thick, a lot of it, coming loose at the back. Fair skin with freckles across her nose and cheeks. Blue eyes. She's short. She's full in the chest and small at the waist and her hips are wide and round under the scrub pants, and her thighs are heavy and her stomach is soft where the top sits on it. A big, soft, good-looking woman.
She looks at me. Boots, jeans, shirt, the towel, my face. Then she looks back down at the towel, and her whole face changes. It goes still and quick at once.
"Sit," she says. "On the table. Now, please."
I sit. The table creaks.
"Dr. Graves isn't here," she says. She's already got the gloves on. "She's at the county seat until tomorrow. I'm the nurse. I'm Neely. Neely Stiles. It's my first day. I'm telling you that so you know I've been here two hours, not so you think I don't know what I'm doing. I've worked an emergency department for six years. Let me see."
"Rhett Ottinger," I say.
"Hi, Rhett. Arm up on the tray. What did this?"
"Chainsaw."
"I got that from the towel. I meant how."
"It kicked."
She looks up from the knot. Her mouth goes crooked at one side. "Okay. Thank you. That's very thorough."
She cuts the towel off with a pair of shears instead of untying it. She pulls it back slow. It's stuck at one end and she wets it with saline from a bottle until it comes free. Then she looks at the arm, and she doesn't say anything for a while. She turns it a little toward the light. She bends over it. Her head is down near my hand and I can see the back of her neck where the hair comes out of the clip. She smells clean. Something with mint in it.
"Okay," she says. "Here's what I see. It's about four inches, it's ragged, it's down through the skin into the fat, and it's full of sawdust and what I'm going to guess is bar oil. The bleeding's slowed. It's on the back of your forearm, and that matters, because right under there are the tendons that open your hand. So before I do anything else, I need to know they're all still attached. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Good. Spread your fingers for me."
I spread them.
"Close them. Now open them again, and keep them open, and don't let me push them down." She puts her gloved hand flat across the backs of my fingers and pushes. I hold. "Good. Bend your wrist back. Up toward the ceiling. Hold it. Don't let me." She pushes on the back of my hand. It's a fair push. She isn't playing. I hold. "Good. Thumb. Hitchhiker. Like you want a ride. Hold it."
I hold my thumb up.
She runs a fingertip down the back of my hand, between the thumb and the first finger. "Feel that?"
"Yes."
"Same as the other side?" She does my right hand.
"Same."
She pinches the end of my middle finger and lets it go and watches the color come back. She puts two fingers inside my wrist and holds them there and looks at the clock on the wall. I keep still. The clock is old. It came with the bank.
"Okay," she says. "Now squeeze my hand." She takes the glove off her right hand and puts her bare hand in mine. Her hand is small. My hand closes around it and there's a lot of mine left over. "Not to break it. I need that hand. Squeeze like you mean it, though."
I squeeze.
She watches my face and she watches the cut. The edges move when the muscles under it work. Nothing opens up wider. Nothing changes in my grip.
"Okay," she says again. She takes her hand back and shakes it once and puts the glove back on. "That's a real grip. Here's the deal, Rhett. I talked to Dr. Graves on the phone this morning about how she wants things done on the days she isn't here. I can close this. I'm going to call her before I do, and tell her what I've got. But if you couldn't make a fist for me, or if I get in there and see a tendon that's been nicked, I'm not stitching anything. I'm putting a dressing on it and you're going to Harrison to see somebody who fixes hands."
"I've got a log on the ground."
"The log is going to be fine."
"It's walnut."
"Then it's going to be fine walnut." She looks at me. Her eyes are very blue under the light. "Harrison is an hour. I know. I drove in through it. If you need Harrison, you're going. Understood?"
"Understood."
"Okay. Don't move."
She steps out through the vault and I hear her on the phone at the front counter. She talks fast and clear. Ten centimeters, she says. Dorsal forearm. Full extension against resistance. Grip intact. Sensation intact. She says chainsaw and somebody on the other end says something and she laughs once and says, "He says it kicked." Then she says, "Yes. Okay. Thank you. I will."
She comes back with a tray. She sets it on the counter and pulls a rolling stool over with her foot and sits down beside the table. Sitting, her head is about level with my chest. She looks up at me.
"Dr. Graves says hello, and that you should have known better."
"I did know better."
"That's mostly what she said." She picks up a syringe. "When was your last tetanus shot?"
"Six years ago. I put a nail through my hand framing the house."
"Good. Then you don't get another one. Any allergies?"
"No."
"Medicines?"
"No."
"Date of birth?"
I tell her.
She writes it down and does the arithmetic. "Thirty-eight."
"Yes."
She picks up the bigger syringe. "This is going to be cold. I'm going to wash this out until I'm happy with it, and I'm hard to make happy."
"How old are you?"
"Thirty-one," she says, and then she looks up. "That's not on your chart."
"It's on mine."
She opens her mouth and closes it. She goes a little pink across the freckles. She puts her head down and washes the cut.
It's cold. She doesn't hurry. She fills the syringe from a bottle and pushes the saline into the cut hard, and the water runs pink and then clear into a basin she's got under my elbow. A chip of walnut comes out and sticks to the side of the basin. She fills the syringe again. She does it a lot of times. She takes a pair of tweezers and picks out two more chips I can't see, and a black thread of something, and she holds that one up to the light.
"What's that?"
"Bar oil and dirt."
"Delicious." She drops it in the basin. "Okay. Little stick. Then it burns, and then you won't feel a thing."
She puts the numbing in along the edges of the cut. It burns. Then it doesn't.
"You're not a talker," she says.
"No."
"That's fine. I am. I'll do it for both of us. My mother says I'd talk to a fence post." She trims the ragged edge of the cut with small scissors, a little bit, careful. "You can't feel that."
"No."
"Good. Tell me if you do." She opens a suture pack. The needle is small and curved. She holds it in a clamp. "So I'm from Dayton, Ohio. I've been a travel nurse for six years. They send you somewhere for thirteen weeks and you fill a hole, and then you go somewhere else. I've done Tulsa and Albuquerque and a place in Montana I couldn't find again with a map. This one's the summer. First of June to the end of August. Thirteen weeks, and then I'm gone."
"The twenty-ninth," I say.
She looks up. "How do you know that?"
"Della put it on the corkboard at the Mercantile. Nurse starting June first. Thirteen weeks."
"Della put my contract dates on a corkboard?"
"She puts everything on it."
"I've been here since Saturday night. I've met her once. I bought coffee." She shakes her head and puts the first stitch in. I watch her do it. She goes in on one side and comes out on the other and lays the knot down and ties it, and cuts it. Her hands are fast and they don't shake. "I rent the cabin behind the store. Did she put that on the board too?"
"No."
"Small mercies."
"Everybody knows it anyway."
"Of course they do." She puts the second stitch in.
I watch her hands. I watch her mouth. She has a little gap between her front teeth, and when she concentrates she bites down on her bottom lip right there. I watch the top of her scrubs pull across her breasts when she leans in, and how the pants fit tight on her thighs where she's sitting on the stool, and the freckles down the side of her neck where it goes into the collar. I don't look away. She knows I'm looking. She doesn't tell me to stop.
Third stitch. Fourth.
"You work up the ridge?" she says.
"I live up there. Pike Ridge. I've got a portable mill. I cut oak, walnut, cedar. I sell it to builders and furniture people."
"By yourself?"
"Yes."
"Up a ridge by yourself with a chainsaw." She puts in the fifth. "You know what we call that in the ER?"
"No."
"Tuesday."
Sixth. She cuts the thread.
"Who would've found you," she says. She doesn't look up. "If it had gone deeper. If you hadn't been able to drive."
"Nobody."
"That's what I thought." She ties the seventh off. "I'm not lecturing. I'm just saying it out loud so you hear it."
"I heard it."
"Good." She takes the needle back through for the eighth. Her knee is against the side of the table, against my leg. She's got her left hand under my wrist holding the arm steady. Her hand is warm through the glove.
I'm going to marry Neely Stiles.
I know it the way I know a tree is going to fall the right way before it goes. There isn't any thinking in it. It's done.
I don't say it. She's got a needle in my arm.
She ties the eighth. She looks up, because I'm not breathing like I was. "You okay? You going to pass out on me? Big guys pass out all the time. It's always the big guys."
"I'm okay."
"You went a funny color."
"I'm okay."
She looks at my face a while longer. Then she puts in the ninth.
"Do you like it?" I say. "Moving every thirteen weeks."
She takes her time with the knot before she answers. "I like knowing when it ends," she says. "You get somewhere, you learn where they keep the gauze, you learn everybody's name, and right when it starts to feel like yours, you hand in your badge. Nobody gets disappointed. It's very tidy. I'm a very tidy person."
"Your hair's coming down."
She reaches up with her wrist and pushes at the clip, and more of it comes loose. "That's not a fair example."
Tenth.
"Is there somebody in Dayton?"
"That's two questions not on the chart." She ties the knot off. "No. There's nobody in Dayton. There's my mother and a storage unit." She looks up. "Is there somebody up Pike Ridge?"
"No."
"Big house?"
"Yes."
"How big?"
"Four bedrooms."
She stops with the needle in her fingers. "For you."
"I built it."
"That's not what I asked." Then she smiles, and it's a big smile, wide, with the gap in it. "It's okay. You don't have to explain your house to me. I'm sure it's a very nice house."
Eleventh. She ties it. She cuts it. She sits back on the stool and looks at the whole line of them down the outside of my arm, eleven black knots, even, close. The edges lie flat together.
"That," she says, "is a nice piece of work."
"It is."
"I meant mine."
"So did I."
She laughs. She puts ointment on it and lays gauze on it and wraps it, around and around, not too tight. She checks my fingers again when she's done. She makes me make a fist. She makes me squeeze her hand once more, with the glove off, and I do. She doesn't pull her hand back right away after.
"Okay," she says. She pulls it back. "Instructions. Keep it dry for two days. After that you can shower, but no soaking it, no creek, no swimming hole. Change the dressing every day. If it gets red, hot, swollen, if anything comes out of it that's yellow or green, if you get a fever, you come in. You come in, Rhett. You don't wait for it to get better on its own up there by yourself. And no saw. Not for a week."
"I'll use the other arm."
"You won't use the other arm."
"I can run a saw with one arm."
End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.