There was a sound behind him. He closed his eyes. His forehead furrowed as if he were in pain. His shoulders sagged. His hands hung limp. The poncho dropped to the floor. The sound was a ragged sobbing. Frost shook his head. Grace stuttered “I… I… I…” but could not make a sentence through her crying. Frost bent and picked up the poncho and wearily closed the door. He turned and dropped the poncho again on the couch. He sat.
Grace threw herself onto his lap. She held him tight, in a quivering grip. She pressed her face into his chest. Frost wrapped his arms around her and kissed the top of her grey head. He felt the wet of her tears through his shirt.
“I can’t stand it” she managed to say. “I can’t stand it.” She heaved with sobs.
Frost held her. He rocked her. He said “Shh, shh.”
Soon she was quiet. She said, without looking up “I can’t do it anymore. It’s all I can do to get through the day. You should find someone strong to do this work. I just want to rest. I just want to be taken care of.”
After a minute Frost said “I wish it could be like that. I wish it could be easy. I’ve been wishing that for the last forty years.”
“But you see, I can’t” she said. “I just can’t. It’s that simple.” She lifted her head and looked at him finally. Her grey eyes were as naked and empty as the day from which he had sought shelter. She said “What else?”
Frost waited. A strange flame flickered deep in the pale eyes. Almost a smile.
She said “What else besides flu and pneumonia?”
Her breath was as pure as a child’s.
She said “War.” She started to shake.
Frost eased her off his lap and onto the couch. He took her face in both hands and kissed her forehead. She lay on her side on the couch, with her knees drawn up. He covered her with his poncho. She said “I just can’t.”
Frost rose. “I’ve got some hooch at my place. I think you’d better have some.”
Grace appeared not to have heard him.
As he reached for his poncho Blackie barked once, then again, and scratched at the door. Frost listened. He held Blackie by his leash and opened the door and stepped outside. Blackie set to barking in earnest and strained at the twine. Frost tied him again to the staple. Then he started toward the trail by the foot of bridge, not quite running.
Two people were coming. One of them was a dark-haired girl of about ten. She wore a crude shift of woven wool and was barefoot. The other, a thin, dark-haired woman similarly dressed, walked beside her. The woman hunched forward slightly as she walked, and her eyes were fixed on Frost. Each step seemed to be a separate operation requiring an act of will. Yet she did not walk slowly. Her left hand gripped the left shoulder of the girl, and the girl, with her right arm, held the woman around the waist. The woman’s right arm hung limp. As he came near, Frost saw that two bones, bloody and sharp, were protruding from the forearm. And he heard the moan that was produced with each exhalation of her breath.
Frost looked for a way to assist the woman, but there was none. He let them continue toward the clinic, and walked beside them. Blood dripped slowly but steadily from the ends of the woman’s fingers. Grace appeared briefly in the doorway, then went back inside.
There were other dogs now, first around the clinic, sniffing at Blackie and prancing around him, then barking at the approaching group, then racing toward Frost and the girl and the woman. “Get out of the way, god damn it” said Frost. The woman ignored the animals and walked grimly forward.
At the clinic Frost said “Let your momma walk through the door by herself. It’s not wide enough for you both.” The woman stepped through the door, then the girl, then Frost. The sheet was on the couch again. With a white cloth, Grace was wiping alcohol on the table of two-by-fours, and the smell was strong. She looked at the woman and nodded to her and the girl but said nothing. Frost put a knee on the couch and a hand behind the woman’s back. With her good hand the woman took Frost’s free hand. He eased her onto the couch. But the woman wanted to lean forward so that the damaged arm could hang without touching anything. She sat there moaning.
Frost said “Sit here by your momma. Sit on this side.” The girl did so, and the woman put her good hand again on the girl’s shoulder. Then she bent the girl’s head toward her and turned her own head and kissed the girl’s hair. Then she looked at the table.
Frost said “How’d it happen?”
The woman’s thin dark hair hung in strings. Frost reached and cleared some strands from her face. The face was weathered and dirty. There was a strong nose and thin lips. The small blue eyes were wholly exhausted, and underneath the dirt the skin was drained and white. She closed her eyes and swallowed, and then opened her eyes and said “Fell. Rocks.” Although thin and trembling, the voice was clear, the voice of a young woman. She asked “You can save it can’t you?” Grace looked away from what she was doing only long enough to shake her head.
There was another, wider, shelf, on the end wall, above the table. On this shelf was an upturned orange plastic basin. The two litres of alcohol now stood on the floor. Grace poured some of it onto the rag and wiped the bottle itself and then set the bottle on the table. She took the basin from the shelf and wiped the outside of it with alcohol and set this also on the table. Now revealed on the shelf were the instruments of amputation. There was a length of plastic twine. There was a knife with a blade about eight inches long. Another pair of pliers. A hacksaw. An extra blade for the hacksaw. Grace laid the instruments, except for the spare blade, in the basin.
She came and took the bag of cloth bandaging and a coil of thread from the first shelf. While she sterilized lengths of these, Frost went to the other shelf and took from it a torn page. On the shelf there were several such pages, parts of pages really, brown, stained, ragged and brittle. And there were sections of books, a dozen pages, twenty. At the top of the torn page that Frost held, part of a heading read …vil War. He stood there and read from the page.
“Apply a tourniquet over the brachial artery three fingerbreadths above the internal condyle of the humerus, at the inner edge of the biceps muscle.” He looked up. Grace was pouring alcohol into the basin, over the instruments. She nodded. Frost read “If possible, cut about one third of the way down the forearm. After the amputating knife has been carried around the limb, the skin is to be detached from the fascia, a little way upward. Ligate the radial, ulnar and interosseus arteries.” Grace nodded again. Frost read “The muscles are then to be divided obliquely upward. Then the bones are to be…”
Grace said “I know.”
Frost put the page back and went to the other shelf and took the half-litre bottle of skag-in-water and a clear plastic glass that had been resting there mouth downward.
Grace said, sharply “No.”
He turned and looked at her. She was facing him, with the bottle of alcohol in her hand. There was no expression on her face, just a slight trembling of the chin. She seemed to be working to keep her face blank. Frost looked at the woman and her daughter on the couch. He looked at the half-litre bottle in his hand, two-thirds full. He turned slightly and looked at the plastic bag of dry skag on the shelf. He said “There’s plenty.”
Grace said “We’ve got to save it.”
“For something worse than this? Like what?”
After a moment she said “Just a little, then” and went back to her preparations. There had been something like resentment in her eyes.
“Grace” said Frost, but she did not turn again. He poured a half-inch of liquid into the glass and set the bottle back on the shelf. Then he squatted in front of the woman and held the glass to her lips. He said “Drink it quickly. It’s bitter.” She tilted her head back and Frost cupped his other hand under her chin, and she drank the liquid in two swallows.