Love and Sleep Read Free Page B

disestablished itself, divided among two doctors who had elected to remain at their necessary work rather than enlist as Sam had done. In the same medical journal where he had once found the ad wanting Public Health doctors in Kentucky, Sam saw that a small Catholic mission hospital in the town of Bondieu, Breshy County (a town he could not remember ever having passed through), was offering a good salary for a chief physician, more by quite a bit than he ever seemed likely to make among the potato farmers and oystermen; and some ten years after he and Opal Boyd had left the Cumberlands they came back, with four children, not to stay forever but only long enough to build a little capital for starting over elsewhere.
    "I suppose it was a sudden decision, and I suppose it wasn't a very smart one,” he wrote to his daughter Hildy a long time after, in the last months of his life. Hildy was the child he could talk to most easily, but even she was surprised when she began getting letters from him, and she started laying plans to get home quickly. “I'm sorry that I never made much money, or accumulated much of an estate to leave you and the others. Doctors now are assumed to be well off, and I guess I should be ashamed I'm not; but you know in the years when I went to medical school we really didn't expect to make a lot of money. Most of us did in the end—things changed in medicine—but we didn't expect it, like the med students now do. So I don't feel so much like a failure that I didn't. Only I am sorry for this damned impulsiveness I've always had, that I never thought through the big decisions. I think maybe I've passed that on, with the no money that goes with it. Any talent for good sense you'll have to thank your mother for."
    Opal hadn't liked Long Island; she thought maybe it was the salt fogs that brought on her headaches. Sam believed, though he didn't say, that she brought on her headaches herself: and though he knew himself to be a good doctor, and knew also not to charge himself with failure if he'd done all that his knowledge and skill could do, he was sorry ever after that he had thought so. They had just set up house in Bondieu—in the largest house in town, the old Hazelton place, bought for them by the hospital—when Opal's tumor was discovered.
    Pierce, who had been eight years old that year, always remembered—perhaps because it was the first time he had ever seen her weeping openly—coming upon his mother, Sam's sister, with Sam's letter crushed in her hand, in the kitchen of their Brooklyn apartment. Ailanthus grew so close to the windows of that kitchen that sometimes it came right in, as though to look. “Poor Sam,” his mother was saying, her eyes squeezed shut and fist pressed against her brow. “Poor Sam. Poor, poor children.” And even after long acquaintance with Sam and with his children, all tough nuts and not always friends of his, the memory of Winnie's tears for them could raise a lump of awful pity in Pierce's throat.
    * * * *
    One year later, Winnie put Pierce aboard a bus and took him with her to Pikeville, Kentucky, the town nearest to Bondieu for which she could get a ticket. There Sam picked them up in his huge Nash bought not long before for the big trip South, and brought them to Bondieu, and Winnie settled in to be his housekeeper and stepmother to his four children. She had always loved, even worshipped, her older brother, and she did deeply grieve for the children: but those weren't her reasons for leaving her husband in Brooklyn forever. And despite the abiding antipathy she felt for Bondieu, her never-shaken sense of the unlikelihood of her being there for good, she had not regretted her decision: she had had nowhere else to go.
    "It wasn't like now, then,” Winnie said to Pierce in Florida. Pierce sat with his feet up on the rail of the deck, a can of soda warming in his hands. “Now you'd have so many ways to proceed, ways to feel about it. So many. Then you only had a