"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. 'T'll 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.
"You sound like you know the feeling," he said.
"No, actually I don't." Crandall lit a cigarette--pop! went the match, flaring brightly in the first early evening shadows. "My dad built that house across the way. Brought his wife there, and she was taken with child there, and that child was me, born in the very year 1900."
"That makes you--"
"Eighty-three," Crandall said, and Louis was mildly relieved that he didn't add years young, a phrase he cordially detested.
"You look a lot younger than that."
Crandall shrugged. "Anyway, I've always lived there. I joined up when we fought the Great War, but the closest I got to Europe was Bayonne, New Jersey. Nasty place. Even in 1917 it was a nasty place. I was just as glad to come back here. Got married to my Norma, put in my time on the railroad, and here we still are. But I've seen a lot of life right here in Ludlow. I sure have."
The moving men stopped by the shed entrance, holding the box spring that went under the big double bed he and Rachel shared. "Where do you want this, Mr. Creed?"
"Upstairs . . . just a minute, I'll show you." He started toward them, then paused for a moment and glanced back at Crandall.
"You go on," Crandall said, smiling. "I'll see how y' folks're makin out. Send em back over and get out of your way. But movin in's mighty thirsty work. I usually sit out on my porch about nine and have a couple of beers. In warm weather I like to watch the night come on. Sometimes Norma joins me. You come over, if you're a mind."
"Well, maybe I will," Louis said, not intending to at all. The next thing would be an informal (and free) diagnosis of Norma's arthritis on the porch. He liked Crandall, liked his crooked grin, his offhand way of talking, his Yankee accent, which was not hard-edged at all but so soft it was almost a drawl. A good man, Louis thought, but doctors became leery of people fast. It was unfortunate, but sooner or later even your best friends wanted medical advice. And with old people there was no end to it. "But don't look for me, or stay up--we've had a hell of a day."
"Just so long as you know you don't need no engraved invitation," Crandall said--and there was something in the man's crooked grin that made Louis feel that Crandall knew exactly what Louis was thinking.
He watched the old guy for a moment before joining the movers. Crandall walked straight and easily, like a man of sixty instead of over eighty. Louis felt that first faint tug of affection.
5
By nine o'clock the movers were gone. Ellie and Gage, both exhausted, were sleeping in their new rooms, Gage in his crib, Ellie on a mattress on the floor surrounded by a foothill of boxes--her billions of Crayolas, whole, broken, and blunted; her Sesame Street posters; her picture books; her clothes; heaven knew what else. And of course Church was with her, also sleeping and growling rustily in the back of his throat. That rusty growl seemed the closest the big tom could come to purring.
Rachel had prowled the house restlessly with Gage in her arms earlier, second-guessing the places where Louis had told the movers to leave things, getting them to rearrange, change, or restack. Louis had not lost their check; it was still in his breast pocket, along with the five ten-dollar bills he had put aside for a tip. When the van was finally emptied, he handed both the check and the cash over, nodded at their thanks, signed the bill of receipt, and stood on the porch, watching them head back to their big truck. He supposed they would probably stop over in Bangor and have a few beers to lay the dust. A couple of beers would go down well right now. That made him think of Jud Crandall again.
He and Rachel sat at the kitchen table, and he saw the circles under her eyes. "You," he said, "go to bed."
"Doctor's orders?" she asked, smiling a little.
"Yeah."
"Okay," she said, standing. "I'm beat. And Gage is apt to be up in the night. You coming?"
He hesitated. "I don't think so, just yet. That old fella across the street--"
"Road. You call it a road, out in the country. Or if you're Judson Crandall, I guess you call it a rud."
"Okay, across the rud. He invited me over for a beer. I think I'm going to take him up on it. I'm tired, but I'm too jived-up to sleep."
Rachel smiled. "You'll end up getting Norma Crandall to tell you where it hurts and what kind of mattress she sleeps on."
Louis laughed, thinking how funny--funny and scary--it was, the way wives could read their husbands' minds after a while.
"He was here when we needed him," he said. "I can do him a favor, I guess."
"Barter system?"
He shrugged, unwilling and unsure how to tell her that he had taken a liking to Crandall on short notice. "How's his wife?"
"Very sweet," Rachel said. "Gage sat on her lap. I was surprised because he's had a hard day, and you know he doesn't take very well to new people on short notice under the best of circumstances. And she had a dolly she let Eileen play with."
"How bad would you say her arthritis is?"
"Quite bad."
"In a wheelchair?"
"No . . . but she walks very slowly, and her fingers . . ." Rachel held her own slim fingers up and hooked them into claws to demonstrate. Louis nodded. "Anyway, don't be late, Lou. I get the creeps in strange houses."
"It won't be strange for long," Louis said and kissed her.
6
Louis came back later feeling small. No one asked him to examine Norma Crandall; when he crossed the street (rud, he reminded himself, smiling), the lady had already retired for the night. Jud was a vague silhouette behind the screens of the enclosed porch. There was the comfortable squeak of a rocker on old linoleum. Louis knocked on the screen door, which rattled companionably against its frame. Crandall's cigarette glowed like a large, peaceable firefly in the summer darkness. From a radio, low, came the voice of a Red Sox game, and all of it gave Louis Creed the oddest feeling of coming home.
"Doc," Crandall said. "I thought that was you."
"Hope you meant it about the beer," Louis said, coming in.
"Oh, about beer I never lie," Crandall said. "A man who lies about beer makes enemies. Sit down, Doc. I put an extra couple on ice, just in case."
The porch was long and narrow, furnished with rattan chairs and sofas. Louis sank into one and was surprised at how comfortable it was. At his left hand was a tin pail filled with ice cubes and a few cans of Black Label. He took one.
"Thank you," he said and opened it. The first two swallows hit his throat like a blessing.
"More'n welcome," Crandall said. "I hope your time here will be a happy one, Doc."
"Amen," Louis said.
"Say! If you want crackers or somethin, I could get some. I got a wedge of rat that's just about ripe."
"A wedge of what?"
"Rat cheese." Crandall sounded faintly amused.
"Thanks, but just the beer will do me."
"Well then, we'll just let her go." Crandall belched contentedly.
"Your wife gone to bed?" Louis asked, wondering why he was opening the door like this.
"Ayuh. Sometimes she stays up. Sometimes she don't."
"Her arthritis is quite painful, isn't it?"
"You ever see a case that wasn't?" Crandall asked.
Louis shook his head.
"I guess it's tolerable," Crandall said. "She don't complain much. She's a good old girl, my Norma." There was a great and simple weight of affection in his voice. Out on Route 15, a tanker truck droned by, one so big and long that for a moment Louis couldn't see his house across the road. Written on the side, just visible in the last light, was the word ORINCO.
"One hell of a big truck," Louis commented.
"Orinco's near Orrington," Crandall said. "Chemical fertilizer fact'ry. They come and go, all right. And the oil tankers, and the dump trucks, and the people who go to work in Bangor or Brewer and come home at night." He shook his head. "That's the one thing about Ludlow I don't like anymore. That frigging road. No peace from it. They go all day and all n
ight. Wake Norma up sometimes. Hell, wake me up sometimes, and I sleep like a goddam log."
Louis, who thought this strange Maine landscape almost eerily quiet after the constant roar of Chicago, only nodded his head.
"One day soon the Arabs will pull the plug, and they'll be able to grow African violets right down the yellow line," Crandall said.
"You might be right." Louis tilted his can back and was surprised to find it empty.
Crandall laughed. "You just grab yourself one to grow on, Doc."
Louis hesitated and then said, "All right, but just one more. I have to be getting back."
"Sure you do. Ain't moving a bitch?"
"It is," Louis agreed, and then for a time they were silent. The silence was a comfortable one, as if they had known each other for a long time. This was a feeling about which Louis had read in books, but which he had never experienced until now. He felt ashamed of his casual thoughts about free medical advice earlier.
On the road a semi roared by, its running lights twinkling like earthstars.
"That's one mean road, all right," Crandall repeated thoughtfully, almost vaguely, and then turned to Louis. There was a peculiar little smile on his seamed mouth. He poked a Chesterfield into one corner of the smile and popped a match with his thumbnail. "You remember the path there that your little girl commented on?"
For a moment Louis didn't; Ellie had commented on a whole catalogue of things before finally collapsing for the night. Then he did remember. That wide mown patch winding up through the copse of trees and over the hill.
"Yes, I do. You promised to tell her about it sometime."
"I did, and I will," Crandall said. "That path goes up into the woods about a mile and a half. The local kids around Route 15 and Middle Drive keep it nice because they use it. Kids come and go . . . there's a lot more moving around than there used to be when I was a boy; then you picked a place out and stuck to it. But they seem to tell each other, and every spring a bunch of them mows that path. They keep it nice all the summer long. Not all of the adults in town know it's there--a lot of them do, of course, but not all, not by a long chalk--but all of the kids do. I'd bet on it."
"Know what's there?"
"The pet cemetery," Crandall said.