Dorothy Garlock - [Tucker Family] (2 page)

O
AK, ELM, AND EVERGREEN
trees whizzed past the open window of the Ford coupe as it raced wildly down the backcountry road, slipping on the loose dirt and gravel. The road twisted and turned, rose and then fell, but the car hurtled on faster and faster. Occasionally, Christina Tucker glimpsed an old, weathered house or a leaning barn, but she hadn’t time to make out more than the color of paint before it was lost from sight.

She pressed her feet hard into the floorboard in a futile attempt to slow the car from the passenger’s seat, one hand clenched tightly to the door frame, the other pressed flat against the dash. She felt sick to her stomach, certain she was about to meet a fiery end.

“Lord have mercy!” she gasped through clenched teeth.

“If there was one thing that was a given in this world, it was that someday Hugh Simmons was going to burn his house to the ground.”

Dr. Samuel Barlow sat behind the Ford’s wheel completely at ease, driving with one hand draped over the steering wheel, the other in his lap, rising only to shift. Gears ground as they were shifted, arguing loudly before jarring into place, a loud, screeching process. The wind rushing in through the window tousled Barlow’s white, thinning hair. He talked with a slight accent unidentifiable to Christina, and when he wasn’t speaking he had a habit of chewing the inside of his cheek. He was an older man who looked his age: his shoulders slumped slightly beneath his worn, rumpled dark coat, and his belly protruded in an obvious paunch. His eyes appeared large, behind the thick lenses of his glasses, and his face was a bit jowly, not the features of a particularly pleasant man. Still, although Christina found it easy to ignore the doctor’s grumpiness, there was one thing about him that she simply could not ignore.

He was one heck of a poor driver.

“With the way Hugh always has one of those damn cigarettes clutched between his fingers,” Dr. Barlow growled, “you’d think the fool had eleven digits instead of ten! Only a matter of time before he fell asleep, passed out drunk most likely, and burned his place to the ground.”

While he spoke, the car drifted toward the shoulder, its wheels dipping over into the soft earth before he yanked them back to the center. Rocks pounded against the coupe’s undercarriage, a noise made worse by the sirens and clanging bells of the fire truck and sheriff’s cars racing down the road ahead of them. Christina fought the urge to cover her ears.

“Been out here so many times I could make the drive with my eyes closed.” Barlow chuckled.

Christina caught a frantic glimpse of herself in the coupe’s side mirror: wispy strands of her long, black hair swirled this way and that, dancing in front of her emerald green eyes, gliding over the bridge of her delicate nose, wrapping around her clenched jaw, before cascading across her white blouse. Beads of sweat flourished on her forehead. She didn’t like what she saw; she looked ashen.

With his foot firmly planted on the accelerator, Dr. Barlow suddenly rocketed toward the sheriff’s car directly in front of them with such speed that Christina was certain there would be a collision.

“Watch out for the—!” was all she had time to shout before fearfully closing her eyes, turning her head, and bracing herself for impact. Nothing happened. At the last possible moment, Barlow again swerved the car sharply, then braked so hard that the tires locked and skidded, shoving Christina’s stomach into her throat, before again barreling forward. Through it all, he continued to chatter.

“I remember one time down at Marla’s Diner,” Dr. Barlow kept on, completely oblivious to how he was terrifying his passenger. “Hugh must’ve dozed off for a second while he was having breakfast, ’cause all of a sudden he leaped up out of his chair, yelling loud enough to wake the dead. You’ve got to be one hell of an imbecile to drop enough cigarette ash in your lap to burn a hole clean through your britches!”

It was almost impossible for Christina to believe that this was her first day in Longstock. She hadn’t known what to expect on her arrival; on the train she had wondered if there would be a crowd, townspeople gathering to welcome her. She had not expected there to be a band or a parade as there had been when the men had returned from the war. But for there to be only Dr. Barlow, scuffing his shoes against the platform and doing nothing to stifle a yawn, was a bit disheartening.

Still, it hadn’t done much to dim her excitement. This was to be the beginning of her new life, leaving behind her family in Minnesota and striking out on her own. She had long wondered what it would be like to experience such a moment, and no amount of disappointment was going to stand in the way of enjoying its beginning.

But just as Dr. Barlow was about to show her where she would be staying, the sheriff skidded his car to a halt beside them, its siren wailing, and frantically related what had happened. After Christina and Dr. Barlow had hastily wedged her trunk into the rear of the coupe, they all set off like a shot. Falling in behind the fire truck and sheriff, she and Dr. Barlow began the frenzied race to Hugh Simmons’s home.

For as long as she could remember, all Christina had wanted was to help people. When her sister or friends skinned a knee or bloodied an arm or nose, she had faithfully tended to their wounds. She was fascinated by what it took to make a wrong thing right. Eventually, that interest had blossomed into much more. Encouraged by her parents and grandmother, Christina had enrolled at a small nursing college in St. Paul. Her greatest inspiration had been her sister. When Charlotte Tucker graduated from school, she had moved to Oklahoma to become a teacher. She fell in love, got married, and began raising a family. Christina had worked hard, earned good grades, and thought her life would follow a similar trajectory.

But then the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and her life, along with that of every other American citizen, had been changed forever. Instead of taking a position in a small town in the Midwest as she had long hoped, Christina found herself stationed at Fort Winger in Michigan. As a new member of the Army Nurse Corps, she was responsible for tending to soldiers sent home from the front lines with debilitating injuries. Every day, men arrived with missing limbs, some swathed head to toe in bandages, others burned nearly beyond recognition, all often on the brink of death or desolation. They came from every branch of the service, from all over the country, with backgrounds and accents unlike any she had met before. She cared for them as best she could; with a warm smile, an ear well suited to listening, while doing her best to hide the tears she could never completely seem to banish.

Years passed and the war raged on. When soldiers she knew were sent off to fight on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific, men like Charlotte’s husband, Owen, Christina feverishly prayed that they would not end up in her hospital; every time new soldiers arrived, she fought against the urge to search each of their faces, fearful she would see one who was familiar. Her prayers had been answered. However, she still saw more than her share of men whose lives were shattered, where rebuilding what once was would be painstakingly difficult, if not impossible.

Even after Germany and Japan surrendered, Christina’s duty to those still leaving the battlefields showed no indication of stopping. Summer became fall, which then became winter, and still she worked with no end in sight.

But just as she began to wonder if things were ever going to change, salvation arrived in an unlikely form. One night during dinner, a fellow nurse read aloud a letter she had received from back home in Wisconsin; in it, among the usual recollections and gossip, was the offer of a nursing position. The girl to whom the offer had been made loudly declared she had no intention of returning to the life she had previously led; she wanted to find a job in New York City. Christina then surprised even herself by asking if
she
might inquire about the offer. A couple of letters and a lengthy phone call later, the job was hers.

In the days and weeks after, she’d been so excited she could barely sleep. She would have a chance to use what she had learned, in a happier place, not one filled with the results of the horrors of war. She took great pride in the comfort she had given to soldiers, but now she wanted to soothe children and care for the elderly. She wanted to help bring babies into the world, just as her grandmother and mother, midwives both, had done. She wanted to be a part of a community, to build a life that would take root. Longstock offered her just such an opportunity.

“…taking his life in his own hands, which is just plain foolish!”

“Who’s being foolish?” Christina asked, wondering if it could be possible that the doctor was talking about his own driving.

“Hugh is the fool, of course,” he snorted. “If he had listened to what I’ve been telling him, he wouldn’t be in the mess he’s in today, by God!”

Dr. Barlow drove the car hard up a steep incline that soon veered sharply to the left. Not once did he step off the gas pedal; the engine strained, pressing Christina against the passenger’s door. The coupe’s rear end began to fishtail, shooting bits of gravel off the road and down into the ditch. Every terrifying instant, Christina expected the car to follow, plummeting over the edge and becoming a fiery, twisted mass of charred metal, but somehow they shot down the other bend of the curve in one piece. Still, they managed to clip a mailbox with the front fender, sending the box and splintered remains of the post hurtling over their hood and scattering behind them in the road.

“Shouldn’t put the damn things so close to the road.” Dr. Barlow frowned.

“How much farther is it?” Christina asked, more out of a mounting concern for her own safety.

“Just a short ways,” Dr. Barlow answered. “Just up and down a few more hills and there it’ll be on the river’s side.”

Even before she could see the dark, billowing plume of smoke rising from the burning Simmons home, Christina could smell it: an acrid penetrating odor drifting on the spring breeze, strong enough to make her nose wrinkle. When the black spiraling smoke came into view, it looked angry.

“When we get there, grab my bag out of the back and follow close behind,” Dr. Barlow explained. “Only the Good Lord knows how bad a mess that buffoon has made of things, so I don’t know what I’ll need and I don’t want to be searching for my things or wondering where you might be.”

“I understand.”

“Then we’ll get along just fine.”

Now if we can only make it there in one piece.

The Ford coupe bumped and thudded over every pothole in Hugh Simmons’s drive as it followed the fire truck and sheriff’s car toward the house. Frustrated, Dr. Barlow whipped the car down into the tall grass and weeds of the lawn; the motion turned Christina’s stomach while giving her a first glimpse of the fire’s devastation.

The two-story house couldn’t have been much to look at before the fire; items littered the yard and spilled over onto the drive. Christina spotted a cast-iron stove, an icebox missing two of its legs, a pair of sawhorses that had themselves been sawed in half, and an antique phonograph player, its megaphone in tatters, rotted completely through. Rusted, empty food cans, bound stacks of newspapers, and discarded clothing filled in every available space, it resembled a garbage dump. A mangy old dog sat at the edge of the disaster, idly scratching at its ear.

Looming over it all was the house. Tongues of hungry red, orange, and yellow flames licked up and over every surface. Black smoke billowed from every broken window and doorway, pushed through gaping holes in the ramshackle roof, and soared skyward. Beams cracked and glass popped. The inside was undoubtedly packed full of refuse, more fuel to stoke the fire’s insatiable hunger. Waves of intense heat washed over them, sucking the air from their lungs. Much of the house had already been consumed; it didn’t look like it would be much longer before the whole thing collapsed.

“It was only a matter of time ’fore this happened.” Dr. Barlow shook his head before setting the coupe’s hand brake. He groaned as he got out of the car, then began striding toward the house. Christina grabbed his medical bag and hurried to follow.

All around them, men rushed to fight the fire. Members of the volunteer fire department pumped furiously at the well, feverishly filling buckets and passing them forward to douse the flames. Others soaked blankets beneath the pump faucet before flinging them, again and again, at the smoldering grass and bushes. One man took an axe off the side of the fire truck, its sharp blade gleaming in the sunlight, and began chopping at tree limbs that hung close to the side of the house, to prevent the fire from spreading. Over all the turmoil, the sheriff’s voice could be heard, ordering the firefighters first one way and then another, all of them trying to do what they could so that the Simmonses didn’t suffer a complete loss.

The Simmons family wasn’t hard to find; Hugh, his wife, and their four children were sitting in the yard beside a gnarled elm tree in front of the house where a suspended tire twisted and turned in the scant breeze. They all appeared shocked and were streaked with soot and grime. One of the boys hacked with a persistent cough while the mother’s tears cleared trails down her dirty face. Amazingly, Hugh Simmons held a lit cigarette between trembling fingers. He puffed on it furiously.

“This isn’t the time for smoking,” Dr. Barlow admonished, plucking the cigarette from Hugh’s hand and grinding it out beneath his shoe.

Hugh gave no answer, staring silently into the fire and the rapidly diminishing sum of his life.

“We’re…we’re gonna lose everythin’, ain’t we?” his wife asked.

“Least you didn’t lose your life,” the doctor soothed.

Diligently, Dr. Barlow examined each member of the family for signs of injury. Hugh appeared to have suffered the worst of it; angry red burns ran up and down the lengths of his forearms and covered his hands; the first blisters had already appeared. Only small tufts of dark hair remained on his skin; the rest had been singed off; even his eyebrows and the hair at the crown of his head had vanished. Wrapping a cool, damp cloth around his head, the doctor carefully applied bandages to hold the cloth in place. Every time he asked for something, Christina gave it to him as quickly as she could. He was thorough, exact, and precise, never wasting any unnecessary sentiment on his patients, but not heartless; he reminded Christina of the military doctors she had served beside, men who were never rattled, as they dealt with the most horrific of wounds. Even with Hugh, whom Dr. Barlow had reproached for being a fool with his cigarettes, he cared for the man with both compassion and concern, although he never answered the doctor’s questions. Through it all, Hugh didn’t so much as wince, his eyes fixed on the blaze.