The Broken Statue

Two

TwoThe walk into Bleaksville took Bridget longer than usual. Even in places where the wind had cleared the road, she refused to hurry. The first flush of mystery and disquiet from her sighting had eased, and she walked through a world lit with beauty. Snow and ice thickened even the smallest nibs on trees, grasses waved icy seed heads, and the fields lay in sprays of crystal.

Dr. Potter, in his mid-eighties, sat behind his desk. He’d been in and out of retirement a couple of times as younger doctors came to Bleaksville but left after a year or two, seeking larger practices in larger towns.

“Top of the morning.” He added something of a nod and a pleasant enough grunt and returned to his task—comparing her ledger notes to those he’d written on a patient’s card. A practice he enjoyed on slow days when no appointments pressed for his time and he’d caught up with his medical journals. He jotted corrections to her observations or expanded on her details in the margins she kept clean for him. More than once, she’d seen him add a notation to his records after reading hers.

She’d come to him the summer before with a stack of her anatomy drawings, hoping to so impress him with her knowledge and determination to get into medical school that he’d take her under his wing. If she proved herself, wouldn’t he then write a recommendation? She’d arrived just as he was crawling into his buggy to visit a family with four little ones and the mother in labor again. He settled on the buggy seat as if every bone in his body protested.

“I’m too old for this,” he said, looking down at her youth. “Get in. We’ll talk on the way.”

Now these months later, she’d yet to miss a day, and he’d come to rely on her. And slowly, so had the town, happy for her willing hands and the aid she gave Dr. Potter.

She hung her coat and hat, remembering Dr. Potter’s reaction when she told him of her probationary acceptance to medical school. His bushy gray brows came together as he took the letter with a frown and rapped the sheet with a thick finger. Then he picked up his pen and circled the word acceptance so many times the ink marked through the word probationary. “Congratulations. This town is going to have a fine doctor.”

The office door burst open. “Doctor!” Timmy Fester smelled of cold and fear. He wore a coat he’d not wasted time buttoning and was hatless. His nose and ears were red, tears streamed down his face. “It’s Ma. She’s hurt bad.”

Dr. Potter rose with a catch in his hip. “Tell her we’re coming.”

Bridget grabbed one of his old gray sweaters from the coat rack, draped it over Timmy’s head, and tied the sleeves under his chin. She reached for her own coat, Dr. Potter’s bag, and hurried after the boy.

“Tell her don’t move,” Dr. Potter called after them. Bridget paused for any further instructions, but he shooed her. “Go on, hurry.”

Catching up to Timmy, she knew her assignment: cover the four blocks to the Fester house as quickly as possible. She could run, keep up with ten-year-old Timmy, stand over Mrs. Fester, and make sure she received no additional injuries before Dr. Potter arrived. When they were called to farmsteads outside of town, she went to his barn, hitched his old nag to his even older buggy, and brought the trap around to the office. The Festers lived close. A distance covered faster on foot.

Mrs. Fester sat slumped on a chair by the stove. She moaned, cradling her arm and rocking in pain.

Bridget knew something of the Festers’ story. Years of failed crops, a tornado that finally sucked away their last bit of hope, taking the house, barn, and windmill. Forcing them into Bleaksville, carrying only the few salvaged items they’d dug out of the mud, and into an abandoned house on the edge of town.

Mr. Fester, a man Bridget had met on another occasion when Timmy came crying for help, hovered close to his wife. His eyes were glassy. “She fell down the stairs. The woman can’t stay on her feet.”

Bridget dropped to Mrs. Fester’s side—a young woman not a full decade older than herself. “Dr. Potter is on his way. He’ll be here soon. I’m not leaving you.” She lifted glowering eyes to Mr. Fester. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Nearly three hours later, Bridget and Dr. Potter made their slow way back over unshoveled streets. Mrs. Fester’s arm had been broken. After being sure the bone lined up correctly, Bridget had helped Dr. Potter wind on strips of plaster-soaked gauze. All the while, Mr. Fester paced.

When they’d finished, they helped her into Timmy’s room and left her in a well-sedated sleep. With Dr. Potter repacking his bag in the kitchen, Bridget stayed in the bedroom to pull the boy from beneath his bed, hold him a moment, and promise his mother would be all right. She helped him make a pallet on the floor where he was to sleep the next week and gave him two grownup jobs. The first was keeping the secret he could only share with his mother: the bottle of pain medicine Dr. Potter was leaving. And the second, very grownup responsibility was to run back to the office if his mother’s arm began to hurt too much. This was his assignment, Bridget told him, because his mother would not think her pain was worth bothering Dr. Potter.

Now as they walked through the snow, Bridget fought down her anger. “It’s awful. That man’s a monster.” Dr. Potter hadn’t asked Mrs. Fester what happened, nor had he threatened Mr. Fester. “He’s got to be stopped.” There were no laws against a man’s treatment of his wife, no matter how callous. And neither the sheriff—absent from town for a month or more—nor the acting sheriff, Mr. Thayer, would involve themselves in the matter. But Dr. Potter? “Someone has to speak up, make that man stop.”

Dr. Potter’s cane left a trail of pecked holes in the crusty surface. “It isn’t time.”

“Last time wasn’t ‘the time’ either. When will it be ‘the time’?”

“I brung that man into the world. Watched him grow up. A good boy.”

When Dr. Potter agreed to let Bridget work as his assistant, she’d made a solemn promise to him: She would not offer any medical opinion in the presence of a patient. However, they were alone now.

“You’re the most respected man in Bleaksville. If you aren’t going to speak up, who will?”

He watched his footing for slick patches. “If I had accused him, what of the next time? Suppose she suffers another broken bone, or worse, and he refuses my help? She needs to know I’ll always come.”

He was scolding her, she felt it, but the tragedy she’d witnessed gripped her. He was a compassionate man. That, she’d never doubt. Still. “You could do something.”

“What do you suggest?”

They covered a full block in silence.

“Anger won’t serve your patients,” he said. “Judging neither. Nearly every case you’ll see is the result of human folly. Diseases because of overindulgence, accidents because of carelessness. Hatred, anger, drunkenness. Take your pick. You plan to curse every patient? Or you plan to try and help?”

The question was rhetorical, and the only answer, silence.

They’d reached Main Street again. Bleaksville looked as idyllic as a snowy-roofed Currier and Ives Christmas card. For the Festers, the reality was vastly different.

Dr. Potter lifted his gaze from the snowy scene to Bridget. “Keep your eye on your medicine.”

A brilliant doctor, he’d never been subtle with her. She admired him and owed him for his strong letter of recommendation and the invaluable medical training she received working with him. That didn’t help Mrs. Fester. The woman needed more than a kindly old doctor. She needed laws. Dr. Potter was aging, growing weak physically and in spirit. When she had her license and the authority that came with it, she’d call out wrongs.

Bridget took the steps to the hayloft. The temperature outside had dropped further with the setting sun and even inside the barn she could see her breath and that of the animals. Still, the solid walls kept out the wind that ripped and tore the air outside. Though she rarely helped with the morning chores, she only missed the evening ones when she worked late with Dr. Potter. After a day of tending wounds and putting mustard packs on wheezing children’s chests, feeding horses and running a hand over their powerful shoulders and haunches was her own hour of church. She pitched hay down into the long trough for Papa Henry’s team, then crossed the mow to use the fork again and throw down for Luna-Blue and Smoke. Chaff fluttered in the lantern light like flakes of gold, but the sight didn’t brighten her mood.

Finishing her task, she came out of the loft and took up the iron curry brush. She couldn’t bathe Smoke—or any horse—in winter, but she brushed him in firm circular motions to loosen dead hair, and then used long strokes to rid it from the coat.

Across the barn, Papa Henry sat perched on his milking stool, his two braids swaying as he worked. He gave her sidelong glances but left her to her fretting. He knew she’d returned from Dr. Potter’s troubled, and he knew she was sworn never to discuss patients outside of the office.

Mrs. Fester is in so much pain, Bridget wanted to say. It’s wrong. She finished Smoke’s grooming and laid the brush along the top railing of his stall. She held his cheeks and stared into his large, dark eyes. He blinked, his long lashes going down and up. His breath was rhythmic, wheaty, and warm. Deepening and steadying her own.

“There was a woman today,” she told him, loud enough for Papa Henry to hear. Even omitting Mrs. Fester’s name, she knew she crossed a line. “A broken arm. Her pain was awful. Her husband was at least partially responsible. She did everything she could to keep from screaming. Her little boy was there, watching.”

With the cow securely in its stanchion, Papa Henry’s hands worked two teats, a rhythmic spurt-spurt as milk gushed into his pail, froth rising. A line of cats stood close, waiting for the moment he’d turn a cow’s n****e and squirt warm milk into each mouth.

“Once again, nothing will be done.” Bridget choked back emotion. “Her eyes were empty. Like she looked into the future and saw only more hopelessness.”

“Dr. Potter?” he asked.

“He thinks I’m too emotional. Too impatient.”

“A warrior must learn patience. He must grow the power to let an enemy he cannot defeat pass. He must learn to wait, let the buffalo come close and the hunters get in place before he shoots.”

“Oh, Papa.” She gave Smoke a final pat and stepped out of the horse’s stall. “You should have been raised on the prairie with Indian chiefs instead of on this farm.”

“I read books, and my mother taught me about her people. I know a young warrior without patience must stay in camp until he is wise. Until he does not desire fame but that his people eat through the winter.”

“You and Dr. Potter. When I’m a doctor …”

When I’m a doctor had become her mantra, the final thought on any discussion that ended without resolution. The phrase pleased Papa Henry as much as it did her, and pride passed over his eyes every time she said it.

Later, Papa Henry closed his journal and readied for bed, adding logs to the kitchen stove and to the hearth in their sitting room where Bridget studied. He dropped a hand on her shoulder, kept it there, brown and strong. “You get a good night’s sleep. No need to push yourself so hard.”

She patted his hand. “You worry too much. Only a couple of hours more.”

She watched him climb the stairs, Wire on his heels. Having Papa Henry for a father made her rich. The farmhouse was old, and their clothes were rough—shirts and dungarees with patched elbows and knees—but thick and warm. Their table had plenty of good food, planted and harvested by them. They had stories and dreams and love for each other. Though only seven years had passed since she’d said goodbye to dying Grandma Teegan and boarded a train with other orphans, or half-orphans, those younger years of starving in New York felt a lifetime ago.

She returned to her reading and note taking. This ledger Dr. Potter would never see. She consulted a diagram in the anatomy book he’d loaned her and copied it, changing the drawing to match how she imagined the bone in Mrs. Fester’s arm had looked. A thin arm, blotches of purple bruising, and a break across the humerus. She finished by writing detailed notes on Dr. Potter’s process for setting the break.

She dipped her pen, touched the rim of her inkbottle to remove the excess. In the morning, she’d go, with or without Dr. Potter, and check on Mrs. Fester. Give her a woman’s company. Until then, she and Timmy would hopefully have a comfortable night. Dr. Potter had left enough laudanum for pain.

An hour passed, two. Her head sagged, and she woke with a jerk. She turned out the kerosene lamp and climbed the stairs. When Papa Henry walked past her bedroom door a few minutes later, she’d changed into her nightclothes and crawled into bed with her eyes already closing.

“Where are you going?” she managed.

He stopped, looked into the dark room. “Horses are pacing.”

“In the barn?” Even speaking took effort. Wire stood at his side, and she was glad to see the dog there. “You sure?”

“Old men are light sleepers. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Her eyes closed. She thought to say, “Dress warm, be sure to grab your hat,” but she lacked the energy.