no clocks.”
A shrug. “We’ve had coffee together at six thirty just about every day since we met. I just know, now.”
“Oh.”
We drink our coffee together, in what is now our cabin.
And I wonder, do we ever have to leave? Or can we just…stay here? Can this be life?
I look at Nathan, and I know the answer.
The Art To Living
“Mr. Crenshaw, please—it’s for your own good. You won’t even feel a thing, I promise. Just sit still.”
“How in th’damn-hell is you gonna know what’s best for me, little girl? I ain’t had a shot or a pill or a stitch in m’whole damn life, and I ain’t about-ta start now.”
“I know that you stepped on a rusty nail, barefoot, never saw anyone for it, and that you’ve never, by your own admission, had a tetanus shot.”
“So? I’m fine.”
I sigh. “You have a fever of a hundred and one—”
“I worked through worse fevers than this afore.”
“You are having trouble swallowing, I can tell, and I’d render a guess that, even if you’d never admit to it, you’re experiencing jaw pain. You have elevated blood pressure and heart rate. Soon, you’ll be experiencing seizures, or at least, involuntary spasming or jerking.” I speak over his protestations of so what. “This is what we in the medical profession call lockjaw, Mr. Crenshaw, and it is, if left untreated, lethal.”
That quiets him.
“And by lethal, I do not mean quickly or painlessly. I mean, you will experience spasms that could fracture your spine and leave you paralyzed. You could experience lasting brain damage. Your jaw, as the name suggests, will lock up and render you unable to eat, which means you’ll survive on a feeding tube, for as long as you do survive, which won’t be long. With a tetanus shot and antibiotics—meaning allowing me to treat you—we can mitigate quite a lot of this. There is no cure for tetanus, but we can manage the symptoms.”
Mr. Crenshaw, clad in dirty denim overalls, bare chested under them, with a filthy, ragged red International Harvester hat on his graying, thinning hair, barefoot, burly and overweight and recalcitrant and tougher than shoe leather and roofing nails, lets out a gusty sigh. “Fine. I’d rather die than have a feedin’ tube shoved down my throat, let alone be paralyzed and have to have my ornery old wife wipe my ass. But if it wasn’t life or death, I wouldn’t be here.”
“You wouldn’t be here at all if you’d gotten a tetanus shot. This is entirely preventable.” I say this as I swab his arm, prepare the shot.
He snorts. “Don’t you start in on the vaccination rant, lady. I done heard it all.”
I snort back at him. “Well, next time you come in with an entirely preventable illness, I’ll remind you of that.”
“Took me an hour to get here,” he says, grumbling. “And this is the closest place to my land where there’s anything like doctors. And you ain’t even a doctor.”
“I’m a physician’s assistant, which as far as your needs are concerned, they are the same thing.” I stick the needle in while he’s formulating his response, slowly plunging the medicine into him. “If someone were to come to you, would you get vaccinated?”
He sighs. “Mebbe. But what, you’re gonna get in your little red city slicker car and drive out to my homestead? I’m fifteen minutes in a four-by-four to the closest electrical grid. Your little car wouldn’t make it a quarter of the way to where I am, lady.”
My car being the only one outside the clinic, it’s obvious it’s mine, I suppose. And for someone like Mr. Crenshaw, it says everything he thinks he needs to know about me.
“You’d be surprised the kinds of roads my little Audi can handle. It has world-class all-wheel drive, as a matter of fact.”
A snort. “There’s ruts your car could disappear into, and that’s just my driveway.”
“My husband has a pickup, if you must know.” I smile at him. “I already have a handful of clients for whom I do house calls. Once a quarter, meaning every three months, I will come to where you live with antibiotics and vaccines and painkillers—a veritable pharmacy, as well as a whole medical kit. And I’ll treat you, and your whole family.”
“And charge a mint for it too, I bet.”
“I’ve been known to accept value in trade.” I widen my grin. “Eggs, sides of ham, quarters of beef, bushels of fruit and vegetables, things like that.”
He blinks. “Bullshit.”
“Not a word of it, Mr.