I Love My Wife!

???µ? MyWife Ann Darby The spasm supervening on a wound isfatal. —Hippocrates The doctor saw omens everywhere that morning—in the plume of steam trailing behind the locomotive, in the cottonwoods shimmering by the creek, in the red dog silently watching the doctor's carriage drive out Elbart Road. Even the tears the wind brought to the doctor's eyes warned him. So his first sight of the Pine's house—across a cornfield and through the orchard—did not surprise him: it looked abandoned , the front door flung open to wasps and flies and sparrows. The doctor had visited many a home where death preceded him. He recognized its wake, or believed he did. The houses of the ill were astir, but the houses of the recently dead—though cluttered with the same medicaments, the same vials and bottles and pans, the same piles of sweat-soaked sheets and nightclothes—were still. And as Dr. Peary passed from the back porch to the kitchen, he detected that stillness in the Pine's home. He was surprised to find Jack Pine sitting on the parlor floor, a hatching crate facinghim. The boy musthave been sorting his rocks, forpieces of quartz were ranked by one knee, isinglass by the other. He wore overalls but no shirt and took no notice of Dr. Peary. Yet when the man asked where everyone was, the boy said without surprise, "I don't know." "Now, how's that? Didn't your brothers feed you this morning?" The boy held a piece of rose quartz up to the light. "No, sir." "What about your father?" Jack set the quartz gently into the crate. "He didn't feed me either." The doctor knelt. "I mean, do you know where he is?" "Upstairs with Mama. I don't think he's ever coming down." "You don't, do you?" For the boy's sake, Dr. Peary did not take the stairs two at a time. He walked calmly and entered the room cautiously, noticing the light from the uncovered windows and then the stench from the pile of sheets. He 112 Ann Darby turned toward the ell and saw Alma. She lay on bare ticking, under the coverlet. Her hair was tangled on the pillow, and she seemed to stare quizzically toward the foot of the bed, as if she had a question for Dr. Peary: why? why? The pyrexia must have been terrible, he thought, as high as 110. Though he presumed heart failure or a final breath-stopping spasm, reflexively he touched her wrist and placed his palm before her mouth. The paradox was that Alma seemed calm. Not yet rigid from death, her body was no longer rigid from tetanus. Her lips didn't sneer; her fingers didn't clutch the air; and her feet were not flexed, though her back arched slightly, as if she were trying to levitate—or scratch a hardto -reach spot. The position thrust her hips up, and Dr. Peary was embarrassed to find the sight ofher aroused him. Perhaps that's why he turned away and at last saw John Pine sitting dully in the chair by the bed. "John?" The man didn't answer, and in the moment he remained silent, Dr. Peary gathered up the paraphernalia ofpain—the brown bottle and the lisle mask—from John's lap and checked his vitals. Never should have let the man have the chloroform, Dr. Peary swore to himself, never will again. Good way to lose a license. "Doc," John said. "Well, hello. What damn thing have you done here?" John gazed at Alma and then at the doctor. "Nothing." "This is nothing?" Dr. Peary held up the mask and bottle. "Just trying to sleep." "Better ways to do that." "Gave myself funny dreams." The doctor nodded. John's four-day beard was rimed with salt, his mouth weighted under the eaves of his mustache. "They couldn't have been too funny." John thought before he answered, and thinking took time. "They weren't." "Tm sorry," the doctor had to say. "Looks like Alma passed in the night." "Did she?" John regarded his wife again. "Come on, man, stand up." In...