THE HOUSE ON THE VERGE
Slowly she and Peg and Toby worked the kinks out of the office routine. Slowly, too, R.J. learned the rhythms of the town and grew familiar with its pace. She sensed that people she met liked to nod and say “Hello, Doctor!”, felt their pride in the fact that the town had a physician again. She began making house calls, seeking out the homes of the bedridden, traveling to patients who found it difficult or impossible to get to medical care. When she had the time and they offered a piece of pie and a cup of coffee she sat with them at their kitchen tables and talked about town politics and the weather, and copied recipes into her prescription pad.
Woodfield sprawled over forty-two square miles of rugged country, and sometimes she was called into neighboring townships as well. Summoned by a boy who hiked three and a half miles to get to a phone, she went to a cabin on top of Houghton’s Mountain and strapped a sprained ankle for Lewis Magoun, a sheep farmer. When she came down the mountain and drove back to the office, she found Toby harried and anxious. “Seth Rushton has had a heart attack. They called you first thing, but when I couldn’t reach you, I telephoned the ambulance.”
R.J. drove to the Rushton farm to find that the ambulance had already left for Greenfield. Rushton was treated and was resting comfortably, but it was a valuable lesson. The following morning R.J. drove to Greenfield and bought a cellular bag phone. She kept it in the car, and she was never out of touch with her office again.
Now and then, as she made her way about the town, she passed Sarah Markus. She always sounded the horn and waved. Sometimes Sarah waved back.
Whenever David brought R.J. to the log house while Sarah was home, she could feel Sarah’s watchful eyes as the girl analyzed everything that was said.
Driving home from the office one afternoon, R.J. passed Sarah galloping Chaim the other way. She admired how well the girl sat the horse, how effortlessly she posted, her dark hair streaming behind her. R.J. didn’t toot a greeting, for fear of spooking the animal.
A few days later, sitting in her living room, R.J. glanced out of the window and saw, through the gaps between the apple trees, that Sarah Markus was walking her horse along Laurel Hill Road very slowly while she studied R.J.’s house.
R.J. was interested in Sarah in part because of the girl’s father, but also because of Sarah herself, and perhaps for another reason. Somewhere in the back of her mind was an amorphous picture, a possibility she didn’t dare to consider yet—the concept of the three of them together, she, David, and this girl as her daughter.
A few minutes later, horse and rider came back down Laurel Hill Road the other way, the girl still taking in the house and the land with her eyes. Then, when they had reached the end of the property, Sarah kicked her heels and Chaim began to trot.
For the first time in a long while, R.J. allowed herself to think of the pregnancy that had miscarried after Charlie Harris died. If that baby had been born, she would be thirteen years old, three years younger than Sarah.
She waited by the window, hoping Sarah would turn the horse and ride past again.
One day when she came home from the office at dusk, R.J. found that a heart-shaped rock, as large as her hand, had been left on her porch by the front door.
It was a beautiful heartrock composed of two outer layers of dark gray stone and an inner layer of lighter rock that sparkled with mica.
She knew who had left it. But was it a gift of approval? A signal of truce? It was too pretty to be a declaration of war, R.J. felt certain.
She was happy to get it, and she took it inside and set it on the living room mantel next to her mother’s brass candlesticks, a place of honor.
Frank Sotheby stood on the porch of his general store and cleared his throat. “I think they should both of them see a nurse, mebbe, Dr. Cole? The two of them live all by themselves with a bunch of cats in that apartment above the hardware store. The smell. Whew.”
“You mean right down the street? How come I’ve never seen them?”
“Well, because they don’t ever come out, hardly. One of ’em, Miss Eva Goodhue, is old as sin, and the other one, Miz Helen Phillips, that’s Eva’s niece, is lots younger but more’n a little dotty. They take care of each other after a fashion.” He hesitated. “Eva calls me Fridays with her grocery list. I carry ’em an order every week. Well … her last check was refused by the bank. Insufficient funds.”
The dark, narrow stairway had no light bulb. At the top of the stairs R.J. knocked, and after she had stood there for a long time, she knocked harder. Again and again.
She heard no footsteps, but she sensed slight movement behind the door. “Hello?”
“Who is it?”
“It’s Roberta Cole. I’m the doctor.”
“From Dr. Thorndike?”
Oh, baby. “Dr. Thorndike has been … gone … a good while. I’m the doctor now. Please … am I speaking to Miss Goodhue or Mrs. Phillips?”
“Eva Goodhue. What do you want?”
“Well, I’d like to meet you, Miss Goodhue, to say hello. Will you kindly open the door and invite me in?”
There was silence behind the door. The moment stretched and stretched. The silence thickened.
“Miss Goodhue?”
At last R.J. sighed. “I’ve got a new office right down the street from you. Just down Main Street, first floor at Sally Howland’s house. If you should ever need a doctor, either one of you, just telephone or send somebody to fetch me, okay?” She took one of her cards and slipped it under the door. “Okay, Miss Goodhue?”
But there was no answer, and she went back down the stairs.
When she and Tom had made their infrequent trips to the country, sometimes they had seen an occasional glimpse of wildlife, rabbits and squirrels, chipmunks who nested in the overhang woodshed. But now that she lived in the house every day, she witnessed through the windows a variety of wild neighbors she hadn’t met before. She learned to keep her binoculars at close hand.
From the kitchen window, one gray dawn, she saw a bobcat amble insolently across the meadow. From her home office overlooking the wet pasture, she saw four otter, up from the river to hunt in the marsh, running in a single undulating file so close to one another they appeared to be the curves of a serpent, a Loch Ness monster in her wet pasture. She saw turtles and snakes, a fat old woodchuck who ate the clover in the meadow every day, and a porcupine that waddled out of the woods to munch the early drop of tiny pale-green apples under the trees. The thickets and trees were full of songbirds and raptors. Without trying she saw a great blue heron and several varieties of hawk. From her front porch she witnessed a horned owl come down, fast as doom and soft as a whisper, and take a running vole from the meadow. Up, out, and away.
She described what she had seen to Janet Cantwell. The town selectwoman taught biology at the university in Amherst. “It’s because your house is on a verge, a meeting of several different environments. Wet pasture, dry meadow, deep woods containing ponds, the good river running through the whole thing. Creatures find wonderful hunting.”
As R.J. traveled the countryside she saw properties with names. Some signs were self-acknowledgments: SCHROEDER’S TEN ACRES, RANSOME’S TREE FARM, PETERSON’S REWARD. Others were droll: DUNROVIN and IT’S OUR PLACE; or descriptive: TEN OAKS, WINDCREST, WALNUT HILL. Some of the names were too precious. She’d have enjoyed calling her place Catamount River Farm, but for many years that name had been on a house a mile upstream; besides, it would have been presumptuous to call her property a farm nowadays.
David, that man of many facets, had a basement full of power tools and had offered to make it possible for the new doctor to hang out a shingle.
She mentioned it to Hank Krantz, who came roaring and clattering up her driveway one morning on his big John Deere tractor, pulling his manure spreader. “Get in,” he said, “and we’ll get you a log for your signpost.” So she clambered into the big metal spreader, providentially empty but redolent of cow shit, and held on in disbelief while he jarred and bumped her—a country woman at last—all the way to the river.
Hank chose a healthy, mature black locust tree in a stand on the riverbank and felled it with his chain saw, trimming the log and putting it in the manure spreader to keep her company on the way back.
David fashioned a stout, square-cut signpost from the log, approving Hank’s choice. “Black locust is just about rot-proof,” he said, and set it three feet into the earth. An arm extended from it, with two eyebolts on the bottom surface from which the sign would be suspended. “You want something besides your name? You want to call the place anything special?”
“No,” she said. Then she made up her mind, and she smiled. “Yes, I do.”
She thought it was beautiful when it was done, painted the same yellow as the house, with the lettering in black.
THE HOUSE
ON THE VERGE
R.J. COLE, M.D.
The sign puzzled people. On the verge of what? they asked her.
Depending on her mood she pleased herself by telling them the house was on the verge of solvency, on the verge of despair, on the verge of collapse, on the verge of answering the cosmic riddle of life. Pretty soon either they grew bored by her oddness or accustomed to the sign, and they stopped asking.