This Tender Land (29 page)

“Quite sure,” Sister Eve said.

“On your calf, son?” the doctor said, finally giving his attention to Albert.

“Yes, sir.”

Albert turned his leg so that the doctor could see the two bleeding wounds. Although it hadn’t been long since Lucifer had plunged his fangs into my brother, the skin around the wounded area was already black and swollen, with poison-looking tendrils climbing upward toward his knee and down toward his ankle.

“He needs antivenom,” Sid said.

“Antivenom,” the doctor said in a dead echo. “Mr.—?”

“Calloway. Sid Calloway.”

“Mr. Calloway, we haven’t had a rattlesnake bite in Sioux County in decades. The rattlesnakes, if there ever were any here, were driven out a long time ago. So far as I know, there isn’t any antivenom anywhere in these parts. You’re sure it was a rattlesnake?”

“Believe me, it was a rattlesnake. And how do you know there’s no antivenom?”

“Because a rattlesnake bite around here would be news, and I’d know if someone had proper treatment for it. But I’ll have Sammy make some phone calls.” He turned to the young woman in pants. “Try the De Coster Surgical Hospital in Mankato. See if they can offer any help.” He turned back to examining Albert’s leg. “Maybe we can get some of that poison out,” he finally said.

He went to the stainless-steel table, opened the top drawer, and pulled out a scalpel. From the cabinet, he drew down one of the bottles
of medication and held the scalpel above the sink while he poured the contents of the bottle over the blade. He took a white towel from a stack sitting on the table, folded it in half, and returned to Albert.

“Roll onto your stomach, son.” When my brother had done so, the doctor said, “This is going hurt some, okay?”

“Okay,” Albert said.

Dr. Pfeiffer slid the folded towel under Albert’s leg, then made two incisions that formed a V between the fang marks, and blood ran freely down the skin of my brother’s calf. Pfeiffer went back to the table and from another drawer took out what looked like a syringe without a needle and a small glass bulb with a rubber tube attached. He plugged the syringe device into the end of the tube, set the glass bulb firmly over the incisions he’d made, and began pumping the syringe, which sucked the air from inside the little glass bulb, creating a vacuum. The bulb filled with blood and, we hoped, snake venom, and when the doctor pulled it loose, the dark red mixture gushed down onto the folded towel. The doctor repeated the procedure three times, and in the end, the towel was a soaking, bloody mess.

On completion of the last procedure, as Pfeiffer was treating the wounded area with iodine—which made Albert grit his teeth and groan—the young woman returned. “They’ve got nothing. But they suggested I call the Winona General Hospital. There are still rattlers in the bluff country and they treat snakebites from time to time. So I called and explained our situation. They’re sending someone in a car with antivenom.”

“Winona,” Dr. Pfeiffer said, in a tone that didn’t sound promising. “That’ll take four or five hours. Did they have any suggestions what to do in the meantime?”

“Try suctioning out the poison and keep him calm.”

“That’s it?” He studied Albert’s black, swelling calf, and his eyes behind those thick lenses were huge blue pools of doubt. He taped gauze over the wounds and said, “Get him into the observation room,
Sammy, and make him comfortable. I want to talk to Winona General myself.”

Sid and Mose supported my brother, who could barely walk now, and followed the woman with pants and a man’s name down a short hallway to a room with a bed, where Albert lay down. Despite the summer heat, he was shaking something awful, and Sammy put a light blanket over him.

A few minutes later, Pfeiffer appeared at the doorway and said to Sister Eve, “May I speak with you?”

They stepped into the hallway, and I went and stood near the door so that I could hear what was said.

“The physician at Winona General has advised me that if the poison makes its way to his heart and lungs, the chances of saving him aren’t good, and even if we do, there’s a good chance of permanent damage to his internal organs. They suggested that if we want to be certain of saving the boy, we need to consider amputating that leg before it’s too late.”

“When is too late?”

“I don’t really know. But if I take the leg and it helps, then maybe we’ve saved him. If I take the leg and he dies, what have we lost?”

“Can’t we wait for the antivenom?”

“According to Winona General, in four or five hours, that boy could be dead.”

I thought about what life would be like for Albert if he had only one leg. I remembered seeing a man in Joplin once, when I was on the road with Albert and my father. The man wore an old army uniform. He had only one leg and was supporting himself with a crutch. As we passed, he held out a hat to us and said, “Lost my leg fighting for America in the Great War. Could you help me out?” My father gave him the change in his pocket, and we walked on. In my mind’s eye, all I could see was Albert on a street corner somewhere, holding out his hat for the charity of spare change.

I stepped into the hallway and said, “No.”

Pfeiffer scowled at me.

“His brother,” Sister Eve explained. “Odie, it may be the only chance we have to save his life.”

“He wouldn’t want a life with one leg,” I said and fought back tears. “He’d rather be dead. Wouldn’t you?”

Pfeiffer looked to Sister Eve. “The boy has no parents to make this decision?”

“We’re orphans,” I said.

“We should ask Albert what he wants,” Sister Eve suggested.

“I’m not sure the boy’s in any condition to make that kind of decision,” Pfeiffer replied.

“Why don’t we see?”

She returned to Albert’s bedside and knelt as if she were about to pray. She took Albert’s hand in hers. “Listen to me, Albert.”

He rolled his head on the pillow so that he could see her face.

“The doctor thinks he might be able to save your life if he amputates your leg.”

Albert was slow to respond, but he finally said, “I’ll die if he doesn’t?”

“That’s a possibility.”

“But he’s not sure?”

Sister Eve lifted her eyes to Pfeiffer, who gave a shrug.

“He’s not sure.”

“I want my leg,” Albert said, his voice trembling.

“All right.” Sister Eve leaned and kissed Albert on the forehead. She stood up and turned to Pfeiffer. “You heard.”

Pfeiffer said, “I have other patients to see to, but I’ll continue to check in. Keep him as calm and comfortable as you can. I’ll come if you need me.” He and Sammy left, and the rest of us were alone with Albert and the poison that was climbing toward my brother’s heart.

THROUGH THE LONG
afternoon of that hot day in the summer of 1932, while we waited for the arrival of the antivenom we hoped would save my brother’s life, the creep of time was pure torture.

Albert grew worse as the hours passed. The black inched up his leg, which ballooned in a frightening swell of flesh. Sweat streamed from every pore in his body, soaking his clothes and the bedding beneath him, and because of the pain, he groaned miserably and constantly. Near sunset, he began to labor in his breathing as well.

Another doctor had arrived, Pfeiffer’s son, Julius, returning from home visits. Pfeiffer called him Julie. Sammy, it turned out, was his wife. If I hadn’t been so eaten up with worry over Albert, I’d have found it amusing that the man was called by a woman’s name and the woman by a man’s. But it was clear they were devoted to each other, and it was clear as well that the young Dr. Pfeiffer had no better idea what to do about Albert’s snakebite than his father did. He suggested wrapping Albert’s leg in ice in an attempt to reduce the swelling, which he and Sammy did together, but it seemed not to help at all. Albert was in such misery that the young doctor finally suggested morphine for the pain, which worked to a degree but left Albert groggy.

There were three chairs in the small room where Albert lay dying. As my brother grew worse, the two Dr. Pfeiffers and Sammy took turns sitting in one of them, and the rest of us—all except Sid, who’d gone back to the tent village to post notices of cancellation for that night—sat in the other chairs in shifts. The room felt stifling despite the open window, and the scent of the roses from the backyard garden did nothing to dull the hovering sense of doom. To this day, I cannot smell a rose without thinking immediately of that deathwatch in
New Bremen. When we weren’t with Albert, we sat in the waiting area alongside the other patients who came seeking treatment. A woman with a boy whose cough was a persistent bark. A man with a great goiter ballooning from the side of his neck. A young mother and father, hardly more than teenagers, with a baby not far removed from newborn. A man with his wife, who had a dish towel full of ice pressed against her eye because, he explained gruffly to Sammy, she was “stupid in the kitchen.” Sister Eve was sitting with me when the man said this, and her comment to him was “When you kick your dog, do you also blame him for the bruise?”

I had to get out of that house, and as the man glared at Sister Eve, I stood and left through the front door. On the porch, a swing hung from chains, and I sat there. The sun was low in the west, floating on a sea of dark clouds gathering along the horizon.

Sister Eve came and sat beside me on the swing. She pushed gently with her feet, and the swing rocked easily back and forth, and she said, “You haven’t asked me, Odie.”

“Asked you what?”

“To heal Albert.”

“Because you’re a fake.” Hours before, I would have thrown that accusation at her like a rock, but the fire of my anger was long dead, and all that remained was ash.

“Because of what you saw with Sid and the others?”

“I suppose I knew all along. Albert warned me that I’d find out something about you stinks to high heaven. You can’t heal people.”

“I told you before, Odie, that I’ve never claimed to heal people. I’ve always said God does the healing.”

“But nobody’s really healed.” Although I’d thought my anger had died away, I felt an ember still burning.

“Those people you saw with Sid, they were healed of exactly the afflictions they claimed. Just not in that particular moment. Jed and his son Mickey, the Lord healed them in Cairo, Illinois. Lois had her stutter taken away in Springfield, Missouri. Gooch—he’s the man with
the crutches—the strength returned to his legs in Ada, Oklahoma. There are others you haven’t seen.”

“I don’t understand.”

“In the crusade service, you saw a re-creation of what actually happened for them. It was Sid’s idea. He believes we need to, as he puts it, ‘prime the pump,’ when we first arrive in a new town. To a degree, he’s probably right.”

It was true that since the first night I’d sat in the big tent and seen what purported to be healing, attendance had swelled. Every bench inside was packed every night now, and people were forced to stand along the edges. There’d been more healings, and at the end of a service when Sister Eve invited the crowd to eat soup and bread together, even those who’d experienced no healing themselves left with an undeniable glow on their faces.

“Sometimes, Odie,” Sister Eve went on, “in order for people to reach up and embrace their most profound belief in God, they need to stand on the shoulders of others. That’s what Jed and Mickey and Lois and Gooch do. Their experiences are the shoulders for others to climb on. And, Odie, it works. People come forward and I take their hands and I can feel how powerful their faith is, and that’s what heals them. Not me. Their faith in a great, divine power.”

She used the toes of her shoes to keep the swing rocking, and I felt myself being lulled by the motion and by the hypnotic flow of her voice.

“Jed, Mickey, Lois, Gooch, these are also people who have no work, no home, no way to provide for themselves. Traveling with the crusade ensures their livelihood. But that’s no excuse, I suppose, for the fact that what they do for me now is, in fact, a fraud. I’ve argued with Sid over this, and I’ve always given in. Maybe it’s time to stop.”

“You take their hands,” I said, remembering how she’d taken mine, “and you see things?”

“That’s it in a nutshell, Odie. I can see where they’ve been and where they are now. I can see what they’ve lost and what they seek.
I can see the holes so many believe their souls have dropped into, and sometimes that helps me lift them back up to a place of faith.”

“How?” I eyed the scar half-hidden by the long sweep of her fox-colored hair. “Something to do with your baptism?”

“In a way.” She ran her finger down the length of the scar. “My father gave me this, when I was fifteen. We lived on a farm, or what passed for a farm in the sandhills of Nebraska, crops scratched from soil never meant to grow corn. He was a bitter, disappointed man with the Devil always at his back. One day, that Devil stepped in front of him. He beat my mother, and when I tried to intervene, he beat me, broke a jug of corn liquor across the side of my face, knocked me unconscious. When I woke up, I found myself lying in our half-filled horse trough, my mother dead on the ground beside it. My father I found hanging from a rope he’d thrown over a beam in our barn. I walked away from that, a long walk, Odie, but I discovered that what my father had done changed me forever, gave me something unique, this ability to see into the minds and lives of others. He took from me, yes, but without having any idea of what he was doing, he also gave.”

“And you can really heal?”

“How many times do I need to tell you it’s not me? It’s faith that heals. Sometimes when I see into a person’s heart, I understand that their faith will never be strong enough, and what I try to give them is a measure of peace, maybe insight to help them on their way.”

“Like the man who killed his wife?”

“Yes, Odie, like him.”

I stopped the swing and turned to her eagerly. “If Albert believes, really believes, can you heal him?”

She smiled beautifully. “Not me.”

“God then.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“I want to. I really want to. If you heal Albert—if God heals Albert—I will, I swear. I’ll believe everything.”