I managed to say what it was I needed to say: Charlie had been crushed by an eighteen-hundred-pound horse, and he was in grave if not critical condition. My mind attached to the definition of those words, as if the accuracy of what I was saying was now somehow linked to Charlie’s odds of survival. “Extremely critical,” I said. Someone had the sense to dial 911, but it wasn’t me. Afterward, I read in a Harper’s magazine’s “Findings” that African Americans are more likely to call a friend in a crisis than they are to call emergency services. That was my instinct too, perhaps because growing up I had never known a single person who had been in an ambulance, or really even believed in them. In the countries of my youth—Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia—we rescued ourselves and went to each other’s aid. If you waited for official help, you’d die waiting.
When I got back to him, Charlie was sitting up, supported by one of the mountain bikers. He wasn’t able to talk—pain and shortness of wind prohibited—but he could respond enough for us to know he had remained conscious for the entire ordeal. “It’s going to be okay,” one of the men told me. “He’s all right.” But I had seen the accident, and I knew enough about the overriding effects of adrenaline to feel a discomforting wave of doubt. I took off my sweater and put it over Charlie’s shoulders. “Just keep breathing,” I said. “An ambulance is on the way.”
By the time we got to the hospital, news of the accident had sizzled up and down lines of communication and friends were waiting for us in the emergency room. The doctor arrived and inspected Charlie. He had the cursory bedside manner of a man used to dealing with thrown cowboys, tractor-crushed farmers, and smashed-up bullriders. In the room next door, a man who had turned his four-wheeler onto himself was shouting in distress. The doctor sighed and told us we’d be there for a while.
Charlie phoned his doctor in Wyoming and his parents in Pennsylvania. He told everyone he was sore, but he didn’t think he was in any real danger. He was hoping the doctor would just order him bandaged up and send him on his way. He phoned our son and said he’d be on the plane to D.C. the next day, no matter what. One of our friends went to fetch food, an impromptu summer picnic in an unlikely setting. Someone else made Dilly comfortable in the back of a car. Another friend wondered aloud if anyone other than himself would benefit from the calming effects of a Pabst Blue Ribbon. The mood lifted a little. Everyone kept saying, “It’s going to be okay now, Bobo.”
It was an hour or two before the nurses wheeled Charlie out for an MRI. Then we had to wait for the results. “We don’t read them here,” the doctor said, by way of not much explanation. “They’re interpreted by a person in Australia or India or somewhere.” Another hour or two passed. Charlie got restlessly agitated. He was on the same stretcher the ambulance crew had loaded him onto at the scene of the accident hours earlier and the back of his head hurt where it had been strapped down tightly to the inflexible board. Could they not just loosen the strap a bit? Why couldn’t they just wrap his ribs and let him go home? And he was terribly thirsty, but he was still not allowed to drink. Instead, we could give him rations from a small sponge on a stick dipped into a cup of water. His lips were cracked. We smeared them with Vaseline.
Then the doctor reappeared. “The news isn’t good,” he said. Charlie had a ruptured spleen, it was possible a lung had been punctured, and it looked as if his liver and lower intestine had been perforated. It had been four and a half hours since the accident and we didn’t have time to waste, we needed to get to a level two trauma hospital fast. The man who had turned the four-wheeler over on himself was in the only ambulance being raced to Idaho Falls as we spoke. The doctor would order a life flight out of here.
I went into the corridor outside the emergency room and slid down the wall onto my haunches. I called the kids and told them everything was going to be okay, but we needed to get Daddy to a bigger hospital and I was going with him. I told them they should be brave and cook supper and have their baths. I called Bryan, who has always felt like my one-phone-call friend, the person I’d call from jail, maybe because he was a lawyer and has an analytical mind, or maybe because he’s now an investigative reporter and nothing surprises him. He said, “Do you need me there?” And I thought yes, but I said no.
Then I began to negotiate with everyone I could find. What could we do to make Charlie more comfortable? When would the helicopter be here? And what did I have to do to get on it? The doctor said the helicopter would be here in twenty minutes. And the pilot would have to make the decision about whether or not I could go with Charlie. Air ambulance crews were worried about patients’ wives getting airsick or hysterical, he said. I’d been in some lesser version of this place a time or two before. This was not, as they say, my first rodeo.
“Well, I bet it’s your worst horse wreck,” he said, as if he took personal pride in the probability.
“Hands down,” I agreed.
When I was ten, I had been scraped off my bolting horse and smashed into the dry-season earth about a mile from the house. As I lay on the ground, breathless and in pain, the horse came back, as horses are supposed not to do, and stomped on my back and kicked me in the head. Then for a long time after that, I lay facedown in the pasture first waiting for air to come back into my lungs, and then for some help to arrive. Finally, a farm worker on his way back to the compound from his morning shift at the barn was made curious by my thin cries and walked over to where I lay. I recognized the man from the workshop.
“Help,” I said. Mr. Chagonda seemed embarrassed by my condition. He stood over me, waiting for me to help myself. “I can’t walk,” I explained. So he hauled me up from my armpits unintentionally roughly, and a pain of such awfulness tore through my neck and back that my vision went into black pools and my ears started hearing screams. And after that I could not make any sense of my body. “Please,” I told Mr. Chagonda, barely able to make the word. “Please.”
When Mum saw me cradled limply in Mr. Chagonda’s arms, she had him put me on her bed. She shone a flashlight in my eyes and pricked my feet with needles and said, “You need to buck up, Bobo.” Then she sent a runner with a message to the top of the farm where Dad was vaccinating cattle. After that, I drifted around on Mum and Dad’s bedspread in a sea of agony until Dad came into the room smelling of cattle dip, manure, and cigarettes. He put a steadying hand on my forehead and said, “Dismounting without permission. Against regulations, you know.” Then he radioed the police station and asked for an army escort into town.
We drove at speed, not because of the condition I was in, but because of the condition the country was in. We were at war, and slow-moving vehicles were easy targets. Still, from my perspective, the risk of getting ambushed seemed a worth-it trade-off. Going around corners fast made pain wash to the places where my spine had been crushed. I screamed and I shouted and I begged for help. I cried for the car to slow down. Then I began to vomit and Dad said, “Hold on tight, Chookies.”
At the hospital the orthopedic surgeon was furious with Mum, as if the accident had been her fault. “Don’t you know we’ve got a bloody war on?” he shouted. And he gestured to the bays outside the hospital entrance where Rhodesian government army trucks pulled in several times every day carrying wounded soldiers from the front, their limbs and bodies shattered by mortars and bullets and land mines. “And you bring me this! A horse riding accident? Where do you think we are? The bloody English home counties?”
I spent some lonely time stationary in a hospital bed in the children’s ward with its faded murals of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and Goofy. The pain was terrible, and no one wanted to waste precious morphine on someone who still had all their limbs, but eventually the shock of the accident wore off and I could move my arms and legs. Then I was released and told to take it easy, although that advice seemed redundant, since for a year or so afterward I couldn’t do much more than walk, and if I lifted my hands above my head, pain shot through the center of whatever was holding m
e up. Also, much of the time it felt like armies of ants in tiny fiery boots were marching up and down my legs through my spine and into my neck.
“All things are relative,” Dad said whenever I complained. “It could be worse.” And it was true. We knew scores of southern Africans who had been convulsed with malaria, trampled by wildlife, bitten by snakes, shot, burned, assaulted. The stories of their misadventures reverberated around bars and campfires for a time until someone else’s disaster eclipsed theirs, usually in short order. But there were never sirens in these stories, and often hospitals didn’t feature, although sometimes funerals did.
This was going to be different though. This was now, and here. Soon we were going to be in a helicopter carrying us swiftly to a reasonably sized, properly equipped, state-of-the-art hospital. I had been wrong to think things looked worse than they were. Charlie was in good hands and he wasn’t going to die. He wasn’t even going to be uncomfortable for much longer. I thought, “You’ve gotten soft living here. There’s no need to panic as if this were Africa. This is the States. The end can be delayed and delayed and delayed.” Of course Charlie wasn’t going to die. People here had accidents and survived. Then they spent the rest of their lives showing off their scars and making dinner conversation more tedious.
Charlie’s stretcher was lifted into place and I was strapped into a jump seat next to him. Then the helicopter shuddered to life and floated upward into the night sky. I put my hand on Charlie’s arm and looked out the window. The moon was waxing gibbous and by its burning silver light I could trace our passage over the Big Hole Mountains, into Swan Valley, and along the South Fork of the Snake River to the farmlands south of Idaho Falls. Then we were coasting above the ponderous porcelain-white arms of energy-generating windmills on the outskirts of the city. It was surreal and serene and coordinated. “What an amazing country,” I thought. “God bless America.”
Our helicopter landed, and before the rotor blades had even calmed to a stop, a team of medics swarmed out of the emergency room and whisked Charlie into the hospital for another X-ray, an MRI, a CT scan. Meantime, I told the team of attending physicians the story of what had happened: the horse going down, the painful but mercifully short ambulance ride, the helicopter flight, the fact that Charlie had not lost consciousness for a moment, the suspicion that he’d sustained numerous internal injuries and had definitely broken several ribs.
“A rough day,” one of the nurses said.
“Pretty rotten,” I agreed.
Then I called Charlie’s parents to give them an update. Charlie’s father had gone to bed, but his mother was waiting up. “It’s late there,” I said. “Why don’t you try to get some sleep? I’ll let you know how he’s getting on tomorrow.” But I was thinking, “What can go wrong?” If anything, it seemed like overkill to me. “He’s got an army taking care of him,” I said. Charlie would be attended by a surgeon, a doctor, an anesthesiologist, a few nurses. Half a dozen people, it looked like to me.
Nothing like Zambia: in recent memory, Mum had had an emergency abdominal operation and they’d chopped her open without knocking her out properly. She was awake enough to feel and know what was going on, but paralyzed and unable to complain about her situation. “It was a Congolese doctor, and a Rwandan assistant—they were very good if you don’t count the bit where they didn’t give me enough anesthesia—and they were jabbering away to each other in French the whole time. Very uncomfortable and I couldn’t even understand what they were saying.” She gave me a dark look. “Schoolgirl French will only get you so far, and these central Africans have quite difficult accents, you know.”
It was nearly eleven by the time Charlie was taken into surgery, roughly seven hours after Big Boy had reversed the natural order of the world and fallen backward onto him. I was shown to a lonely waiting room, beige with the indifferent anonymity of sad public spaces, whirring with the accumulated energy of other people’s anxiety, grief, and hope. I had been told the operation would take sixty minutes, so I stationed myself in front of the clock and looked at its hands nudge time slowly beyond now, and now, and now. An hour passed, and then another. And then it had been three hours.
I phoned friends, waking them up. I said, “Do you think something’s gone wrong?” My friends made reassuring noises. I told them I thought it was what I had said before the ride—“I don’t want to be married to you”—that had brought the horse down. Bryan said, “Look, sunshine, it was an accident.” But he knew me, and he knew too well the old broken place in me where responsibility settled and festered into self-blame and guilt. “It was an accident,” he said again.
At last the surgeon came down to the waiting room. He told me everything was going to be fine, better than expected, in fact. In spite of what we’d been told in Driggs, Charlie’s lungs, liver, and stomach were uninjured. True, the spleen was beyond repair and the surgeon had been forced to remove it, but this was cowboy country and plenty of people burst their spleens one way or the other and got along just fine without one. Also, there was nothing anyone could do about the broken ribs except wait, but that was pretty common too. “You can have your husband back home by Wednesday,” the surgeon said. “Thursday at the latest.”
Then I was shown up to a room where Charlie lay groggily in a bed with pipes and tubes running in and out of him. There were beeping monitors, the breathing sound of the blood pressure cuff, the occasional alarmed-bird chirp of the morphine IV kicking in. “There you are,” I said.
“I think so,” Charlie said.
“Dismounting without permission,” I said.
There was a chair next to the bed. I sat on it and took Charlie’s hand, stroking the chapped knuckles, the bitten nails, the tennis-racket calluses. Just before dawn, Charlie’s breathing finally settled down and I could tell he was asleep. I put some blankets on the floor next to the bed, curled up, and tried to sleep myself. But when I closed my eyes the vision of Charlie trapped under Big Boy’s enormous, upturned body came vividly back to me and I had to open them again and stare at the yellow glow of the night lights on the wall.
Eventually I got up, pulled the blinds back from the window, and watched the sun break over town. The panic and fear of the long, waiting night drained out of me. I thought if Dad were here he would have brought me a cup of tea and a cigarette by now. Or better yet, his more drastic remedy of a medicinal quantity of brandy. If Mum were here, she would have brought me a calming pill. But my parents were beyond reach in some little hotel near the Sacré-Coeur on their last tango to Paris. “Mum and I are going to misspend my youth,” Dad reminded me the last time I phoned home. “It’s going to be a full-time job from now on.” And I could hear Mum in the background warbling tunelessly, “Non, je ne regrette rien!”
Then the morning nurse came in. She woke up Charlie and the business of morphine and antinausea medication and checking the dressing began. Charlie’s incision from the splenectomy was nearly a foot long, all the way up his belly, held together with large steel staples. A slab of contusions covered the skin over the contours of his broken ribs. His groin was a mottled black apron of insulted flesh. The nurse asked him where his pain was on a scale from one to ten and Charlie said, “Six.”
I said, “That’s about a twenty-six for most people.”
Then Charlie started to vomit—agonized unproductive heaves—and it was late morning before he was able to rest comfortably again, eyes closed, morphine raining into his veins. He looked disappointed, and a little angry, in repose. A dry frost of salt-and-pepper stubble covered his chin and cheeks and upper lip; the insistent process of his body’s regeneration didn’t seem to understand priorities. “Fix his injuries first,” I silently instructed it. I thought of corpses, whose hair and nails are supposed to continue growing after death. How poorly we communicate, even the most drastic messages, even to ourselves.
I perched next to Charlie and stroked his forehead. When he got sick or hurt as
a kid, Charlie had once told me, his father had done this. In turn, we did it for our children or, more and more rarely, for one another. Then, when Charlie appeared to be sleeping, I closed my eyes and rested my forehead on the corner of his pillow.
I wanted to take back everything I had ever said to hurt Charlie, to spool the pointless words from the air and ravel them back into my mouth. I wanted to press my lips over his, to feel the warm rush of relief of his lips pressing back on mine. I wanted that unreliable, occasional anesthesia of feeling as if we belonged together. I lifted my head. “I’m so sorry,” I told my sleeping husband. And I thought, “What is wrong with me? I should have been quicker with the gate. I should have let cattle run riot. We shouldn’t have been on horses.”
Incredibly, by late afternoon Charlie was ready to try walking a bit. So I helped him out of bed and he shuffled down the corridor, pushing his IV pole, his hand on my shoulder. He wanted to see mountains, he said. We found a window and looked out at the city, and at the spread of farmland to the north. In the distance we could see the rim of the snow-peaked Centennial Mountains, a light cloud sinking off its shoulders.
“I wonder if I’ll ever get on a horse again,” Charlie said.
“Of course you will,” I said. “Don’t be silly.”
Then Charlie said he would like to wash. So we slowly walked back to the room and I undressed him, peeling away the hospital gown, stripping off his shorts, removing his tangle of tubes. Then he stood up in the shower and I sponged him gingerly with warm water. I knew this body better than I knew my own. The long, perfectly muscled legs; the broad back with the scar halfway down the spine; the slight paunch of his belly with the fresh, livid slice down its middle; the ribs rising like whale bones below the chest; arms still powerful from years of rowing a boat.
I had the nurse change Charlie’s sheets and then both of us climbed into the bed. The nurse reattached the IVs and replaced the monitors. I found a position where I wouldn’t hurt Charlie’s ribs or squash any tubes, and he put his arm around me. We turned on the television and watched a Wimbledon rerun on the tennis channel; Björn Borg versus John McEnroe. The early eighties looked a simpler time—the big hair, the little shorts, the silly shirt lapels. The game ended and I switched off the television. Then we lay together in silence, with the huffing and beeping of the medical equipment.