Vytautas Malesh
Hands
The sky shone brilliant winter blue, unwarmed by the sun, made more crystalline by its austere light and white snow crunched under the tires of the black Model T as Doctor Kelly pulled up the driveway, then stepped out of the car and made his way to the front door of the farmhouse.
Inside, Dora Camber sat clutching her bundle tight to her breast, humming softly, cooing to the infant in her arms. In the kitchen, two more women puttered about the smoking stove and the older, Dora’s mother Barbara-Jean, pointed through the window to the doctor as he walked up where he assumed the path to be, though he was ten feet abreast.
“Well, he’s come,” she said.
The other, Dora’s aunt Mabel, nodded once in agreement, just a little bob of her sweat-streaked head spared between presses with the rolling pin.
“Three days but he finally come,” the mother added as she opened the door. She greeted the doctor with perfunctory warmth, shook his extended hand, smothering it in both of hers after wiping flour and butter from her fingers to the apron around her waist. She stood large and earth-ruddy next to the pale and sparse doctor, his spectacles sat back from his hawkish nose under a gleaming bald pate, and a wild ring of persistent gray hair clung about his ears like a low pewter crown.
Aunt Mabel poured coffee and he took it black. He seated himself in a familiar wooden chair at the busy table and studied a whicker basket before him; within sat jars of winter preserves; peaches, raspberry jam, green beans, peas, carrots and corn. The larder door hung half-open, showing him the fruits and vegetables inside, to display the plenty amassed so that he would not feel imposing when taking this basket for pay.
“Sorry it took so long…the roads,” the doctor said with warmth, but not compromise or apology, and shrugged.
“I hadn’t heard,” the Aunt, Mabel, answered. Barbara Jean had turned to the oven to stoke the fire with a brass-knobbed iron.
“Barely got that thing started today but, it went.”
“Oh,” Mabel said.
Dora’s humming lilted through the door which sat shut tight between the kitchen and parlor, a lullaby, but only for the first line. Hush Little Baby became Three Crows and then Three Sisters On The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks Of The Rye-O, and then some tune that none could name for it had never found voice before and the doctor listened, or tried to listen, as Mabel and Barbara Jean bustled about their cooking.
“And how’s Tom?” the doctor asked, his voice a creaking hinge.
“Oh, you know Tom,” Mabel answered though the doctor was looking at Barbara Jean.
“Go on up to Grand Rapids, did he?”
“Yes, yes he did but we figure him back tomorrow.”
The doctor nodded and studied the women as he drank his coffee.
They were hearty, strong, and thick. They had braved impossible snow to call for him from a neighbor’s home three miles distant. They were self-reliant, persistent, thick-wristed and tough, their youthful grace had been consumed by rural necessity. The hands that rolled dough smooth and flat and carefully cracked eggs were the same hands that could birth cows, butcher pigs and gather cords and cords of maple and birch to burn.
“Well I’m sure he can get along faster than I could with that Studebaker of his” the doctor said, and grinned.
Aunt Mabel laughed a thin laugh that cracked against the low ceiling of the kitchen.
“Yes, yes surely, the way he drives that thing,” she said.
“It ain’t his Studebaker,” Barbara Jean said, and the aunt’s smile thinned, her lips pursed because the funny Studebaker didn’t belong to Tom, but it belonged to that other man who was gone and wasn’t going to come back – the man who’d run away so fast he didn’t even take his nice new car. Mabel turned to the sink where a half-bushel of autumn’s last potatoes wanted peeling.
The doctor’s spindly white hands wrapped nervously around his tin cup, and he sipped politely, trying to draw all the warmth he could from the little vessel. They could hear Dora’s humming again, a song with no name at first, but it soon became Mary Hamilton and in spite of himself the doctor found he was nodding to the music, and playing through the words in his mind. At the second verse he stopped and drained the little coffee cup before rising to his feet.
“She’s in the parlor then?” he asked.
Aunt Mabel dropped her knife in the sink; Barbara Jean to tensed up when she heard the clatter. She said yes, that that was where she was.
“This shouldn’t take but a minute” doctor Kelly said, and pushed the door open.
The parlor dry and hot, its nervous attendants had fed wood wastefully into the potbelly in the center of the back wall, shoving big logs in with lots of kindling, making sure they burned and would burn for a long time so that they would not have to be replaced too often. He smelled the smoke of the burning wood, smoke which did not all go up the chimney and instead filled the top half of the room with a gray haze. His eyes stung. His mouth was dry.
Dora, in the corner, leaned just barely towards the stove to feel the full of the stove’s lively heat on her bare face and hands. She sat in a homemade rocker, built by her grandfather and older than this house. The doctor could see through the rear window to the wooden cellar door leading down, covered with a sparse patter of hoarfrost, the snow having been swept away by winter’s wind. He wanted that cold, the cleanness of it, to blow away the damnable heat and woodsmoke of this room, or to pick him up and blow him away. The room was thick with unclean smells.
The doctor approached the stove, keeping it between himself and Dora. He warmed himself by it and studied the minutiae of what was meant to be a mantle, itself nothing more than a shelf screwed to the wall where a fireplace ought to be. He saw a clock, its hands stuck at 5:17, a Winchester rifle, and a long and dusty Union Army knife. A davenport filled the wall opposite the stove, a fat quilt crumpled in one corner. If he were to strike either of those, with his fist or the flat of his hand, a cloud of dust would blast up and out, and take hours to settle down.
No sound came from the kitchen, no sound from the bedroom beyond the sitting room and no sound from the frozen winter outside. Only the crackle of the fire and Dora’s humming, humming that had been so consistent since the doctor’s arrival that when she spoke, it was jarring and bold.
“Momma’s precious little baby,” she said, and the doctor started and stumbled back.
“Good…good morning Dora,” he said when he regained his calm.
“Momma’s got a good baby, doesn’t she?”
Dora’s face was hidden by her curly, sandy-blonde hair, curly but matted with sweat.
“Dora, doc has to see your baby, alright now?” he asked timidly as he stepped lightly over the first of the long few feet between he and the girl, the heat from the stove stabbing through his cotton shirt and feeling very much like a sunburn.
Dora raised a red and chaffed hand, and parted a bit of blanket.
“Peek-a-boo!” she gasped “Peek-a-boo!”
The doctor took another step.
“Dora?”
Dora snuggled close to her baby and cooed. She clucked her tongue and smiled, shaking her head and long hair.
The doctor took another step, and he could see the blanket wrapped around her knees, red and ruined with birthing blood, and he knew that she must have come straight to this chair from the room behind that closed door, the bedroom wherein this child may had been conceived and surely was delivered.
The doctor reached into his bag for a thin steel case, the hasp gleamed in the window light but the rest was well-worn and dull.
“Dora, can I hold your baby?” he asked.
Dora blew puckery kisses at her baby’s face.
“Are you momma’s angel?” she asked.
The doctor knelt beside Dora and gingerly plucked a needle from the metal case.
“Dora, this is going to make you sleep. You will feel…” and then he stopped talking so as to get on with his work, drawing a watery fluid up into the syringe and knocking the bubbles out.
He reached for Dora’s arm, the one which fondled the infant’s nose and cheeks, but drew back his hand, instead firmly grasping her calf and here, too, was blood – speckled and brown. With a practiced eye he found his mark, and jabbed the needle in, easing the plunger down with professional grace. He pulled the needle out and watched Dora’s eyes as he held a cotton ball to her skin.
“He won’t suck,” she said to Doctor Kelly.
“I know, honey,” he said.
“Why won’t he suck?” she asked.
“He’s not hungry, I don’t think,” he answered.
Satisfied, she turned her face from him, drawing the baby tight and her own blanket close. The fire cracked softly as she stared out the window, beyond the open lawn and barren trees, and she drifted into dreamless sleep.