T. Boyle: San Miguel

So the whole elaborate lie would unravel, she could see that. But not now. There were still two hours of school to go, which meant history, geography and then, if they were good, a chapter of Black Beauty she’d read aloud to them. All she said was, “Yes, I know.”

It must have been half an hour later — no more than half an hour, she was sure of it, because they were still on history — when Herbie had his accident. He’d gone directly to the barn on getting back, ready to chew out the sailors, but they weren’t there. He’d found Nellie in her stall, but Reg and Freddie were nowhere to be seen. Then he’d gone into the house to see if they were there — and they weren’t, which only made him angrier — and the house was cold and the wood basket empty, so he went out to the woodpile, cursing them, kicking at anything in his path, working himself up. And when he saw the state of it, the larger pieces unsawed and the snarl of roots and driftwood casually dumped in the dirt where any rain could soak it, he flew into a rage. In the next instant he’d snatched up the maul and begun lashing at one piece after another, sweating and cursing, and then he began on the hard twisted roots he’d dug out of the ground, bringing the hatchet to bear now. He might have gotten into the rhythm of it, left hand to balance the wood on the chopping block, right to swing the hatchet and drive it through, the ends falling away and the next root there to replace it, automatic, like clockwork — or he might not have. He might have let the rage carry him into another place altogether, a place where he was blinded, careless, accident-prone. All she knew was that the root slipped. And that he reached out to steady it, brought down the hatchet and missed his mark.

She heard his scream and then the barrage of curses that followed it, and she was out the door of the schoolhouse and running, knowing it was bad — he was howling now, howling like an animal — and when she got there she saw him clutching the mutilated hand to the shirt that was dyed red from his chest to his belt. She saw the chopping block and the way it had gone red too. And she saw the detached fingers, two of them, lying there curled and useless beside the slick blade of the flung-down hatchet.

This time he was gone a month, a full month, even longer than when he’d had his operation all those years ago. Infection had set in and they’d had to dose him with sulfa, to which he’d had a bad reaction. Like the last time, the drug had affected his eyes — and, as she learned from the medical encyclopedia, there was the risk of other side effects too, including depression, anemia and various skin disorders — but there really was no choice. Penicillin was then in its infancy and it would be two years yet before streptomycin came into use, so it was either sulfa or risk losing the hand to gangrene or even dying of septicemia. The fingers — the middle and index fingers of his left hand — were lost. By the time he arrived at the hospital, blanched from loss of blood, they were nothing more than an afterthought.

She didn’t know any of that in the moment. All she knew was that he was hurt, hurt desperately, and the shock of it flared up and burned through her. She was on him in an instant, fighting for his hand, thinking only to pull it away from him and stop the bleeding, to heal him and put everything back the way it was. He wouldn’t have it. He lurched away from her, protecting the hand, stamping and crying out and fending her off with his hips and shoulders. “Stop it! Stop it right this instant!” she commanded, and then she dropped her voice the way she did with Marianne or Betsy when they fell and bumped their heads or took a splinter from the porch in their bare pattering feet: “Let me see, Herbie, let me see. I won’t hurt you.”

She grabbed hold of him and spun him round, surprised at her own strength, and then she tore at his shirt till she had a strip of cotton cloth to wind round his arm just above the elbow. She cinched it tight, then thought to bend to the chopping block and scoop up the dying fingers before heaving her full weight into him and pushing him toward the house, and if that was strange, his fingers clenched in her hand like meat on the bone, she put it out of her mind because her mind was racing and she could think only of getting him inside so she could stop the bleeding. She kept pushing, thumping at him as if she were kneading bread — he was in shock, that was what it was — and he staggered forward and then they were on the porch and through the door, where she sat him down in a chair and bound up the wound as best she could with a bandage cut from one of the bath towels. “Keep it elevated,” she admonished, “over your head. Your head, Herbie, do you hear me?” Then she went to radio for help.

The day was thick, visibility poor, not at all the sort of conditions a pilot would welcome, but the Navy scrambled a plane and the plane was touching down in the sheepcote within the hour. But what an hour it was. If she ever missed ice, it was then. As it was, she wrapped the stiffening fingers in gauze and stuffed them into the pocket of the jacket she helped him work first over his good arm and then up over the bad one, though she knew there was no way to reattach them. The girls, their faces as bloodless as his, insisted on being there with him. She kept trying to reassure them even as she fed him aspirin and whiskey, pouring out one shot after another till his head lolled back and his eyes began to flutter. By the time the pilot arrived, he was groggy, but he was able to walk out to the field and climb into the cockpit unassisted — and then, as the door pulled shut and she and the girls and the dog stood huddled there in a scene Goya might have rendered in ink, he raised his right hand in a thumbs-up, the propeller snatched at the air, the wings shuddered and the plane slammed across the field and vanished into the gray curtain of fog.

He came back a different person. There was no other way to put it. She told herself he’d come around, that it would take time, but he seemed wooden, stripped of emotion, as if he’d never been Herbie at all, as if they’d put somebody else inside of him in some macabre experiment. There had been letters — first from Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara and then the Veterans’ Hospital in Los Angeles, where they’d taken him to recuperate — but the letters were nothing more than notes, really, distracted and disjointed ( I hope you are fine, the children too; The nights are dark here; Jell-O, they feed me Jell-O ). He never said he missed her, never asked how she was getting along without him, never mentioned the ranch at all. Still, it wasn’t till he stepped off the plane that she saw what a toll the whole business had taken on him.

The children rushed for him, but he didn’t swing them in the air the way he normally did, just stood there passively and let them cling to his legs, while the dog, careening toward him in a frenzy of rapturous barking, might have been somebody else’s dog for all the response he showed. He spread open his arms for her and she fell into them but it was wrong, all wrong, and she could feel the alien thing in him beating like an irregular pulse. He was thin. They’d cut his hair too short, she saw that right away. And while she’d expected him to be pale, the bleached-white cotton shirt only made him look paler, as if his skin had been bleached and pressed too. The oddest thing — the thing her eyes jumped to — was the black leather glove on his left hand. He didn’t mention it, didn’t say a word about it, but he wouldn’t take it off, not to eat dinner or even to change his clothes for bed. “I’m mutilated,” he said finally, sitting slumped in the chair in the corner of the bedroom, one sock in his hand, the other still on his foot. “That’s all there is to it.” They went to bed that night like strangers.