It didn’t explain why she’d come west or why she was boarding at the Garrity’s or why a physician’s daughter from Ohio was carrying a farm boy to a frontier doctor’s office, but I didn’t ask. A man learns not to ask too directly out here. People tell you when they’re ready or they don’t tell you at all. She helped me get Tommy settled into the chair.
Knew not to grab the wrong arm, knew to brace from the shoulder, not the wrist. She was gone before I thought to ask her name. I found out from Irene Garrity the next day, who told me with the particular enthusiasm of a woman who has news she considers valuable. Margaret Eames, widow, Ohio. Husband died consumption 18 months ago leaving her with his debts and his house and not much else.
She’d sold the house, paid the debts, and come west for reasons that Irene characterized as mysterious and I characterized as none of my business. “She’s hoping to stay,” Irene told me with a look that was supposed to mean something. “Good country for it,” I said. Irene’s look sharpened. “She’s a fine woman, Joan is.” “I don’t doubt it.
” “You could stand to meet more fine women.” “I’ve met fine women,” I said. “I meet them in a professional capacity regularly.” Irene gave up. She usually did eventually. The sixth toe was county property before Margaret had been in Carver Creek a week. I don’t know who told first. These things always start small, a word in a shop, a remark at the well, and by the time they reach the volume of real gossip, they’ve been amplified past anything resembling accuracy.
What I heard from three different sources on three consecutive days was that Margaret Eames had been born with a sixth toe on her left foot, that this had been surgically corrected when she was eight, and that two different men back in Ohio had called off engagements when they found out because here the story varied depending on the teller.
It was unnatural, or it suggested bad blood, or it was the visible sign of some other abnormality that a man couldn’t afford to take on. One version had her crying in the street, another had her laughing. I didn’t know her well enough yet to know which was true. I suspected neither. What I knew was that by Friday of that week, every eligible man in Carver Creek had found reasons to be somewhere else when Margaret Eames was present.
Pete Langley, who’d been asking after her since the stage arrived, was suddenly very busy. The Colton brothers had a fence emergency. Even old Walt Deering, who was 64 and twice widowed and not known for excessive fastidiousness, found the whole thing somehow disqualifying. I heard about all of this in my office from a stream of visitors who were less interested in their ailments than in making sure I was properly informed.
I listened. I said very little. I thought about a woman born with a small extra bone, who had been reduced to that bone by an entire town of people who’d never once looked at her hands. She came to my office that Friday afternoon. For herself this time. A cut on her palm from a broken jar, shallow, clean, not serious, but in need of proper closing if she didn’t want infection.
She’d wrapped it herself with a strip of cloth from her petticoat, which was neatly done and told me again about her father’s house. I unwrapped it at the examination table, cleaned it. The cut was exactly what she’d said it was. She was quiet while I worked. Not uncomfortable quiet, thinking quiet. Her right hand sat still in mine and she looked at the wall above my head and after a while she said, “You’ve heard.
” “I’ve heard.” I said. “And?” I kept my eyes on the cut, placed the first suture small and even the way my own teacher had shown me 20 years back. “I’ve delivered 142 babies in this county.” I said. “Seen every variation you can imagine. Seen things textbooks don’t have names for yet. The body is a more various thing than people credit.
” She was quiet for another moment. Then, “That’s a doctor talking.” “It’s the only way I know how to talk.” Another suture. The cut was clean enough that three would do it. “The men in this town.” she said and stopped. “The men in this town.” I said, “are looking for a reason.” Most men who are afraid of a thing go looking for a reason, because a reason is tidier than fear.
I tied off the last suture, snipped the thread, set her hand down gently on the table between us. It doesn’t have anything to do with you. She looked at me then, really looked, the kind of look that takes a measurement. “You’re not afraid.” she said. It wasn’t a question. I answered it anyway. “No,” I said, “I’m not.
” There’s a thing that happens sometimes in medicine where you’ve been puzzling at a diagnosis for a while, presenting symptoms that don’t quite fit anyone picture. And then a piece of information arrives, and suddenly the whole thing assembles itself, and you can see it clear and complete and obvious, and you think, “Of course, it was always that.
” That’s what happened to me sitting across from Margaret Eames at my examination table on a Friday afternoon in October with her bandage hand between us. Of course, it was always going to be that. I didn’t say anything foolish. I wasn’t built for foolish things, and she didn’t look like a woman who had patience for them.
I asked her if she was staying in Carver Creek. She said she was thinking about it. I said I had no one to help with my records and that it was a problem I’d been meaning to address. She looked at me over it, the way you look at an argument that is technically true, but is also doing additional work. “I’m a physician’s daughter,” she said, “not a physician.
” “I know what you are,” I said. “I’m asking if you want the work.” She thought about it for exactly as long as she needed to. “Yes,” she said, “I want the work.” That was the beginning of the ordinary part, and I’m going to tell it plainly because there’s nothing to be done with the ordinary part except live it.
She came every day, 6 days a week, 6 in the morning until whenever the last patient left, which was sometimes 8 at night and sometimes later. She learned my system in 2 weeks and improved it in 3. Her handwriting was better than mine. Her memory for names and dosages and the specific complaints of specific patients was extraordinary, not because she’d been trained for it, which she hadn’t, but because she paid a particular quality of attention to people that I recognized as a gift rather than a skill.
Some people are genuinely interested in other people. Margaret was one of those people. In medicine, it is the most valuable quality there is. She was also, it turned out, capable of being very funny. Not in an obvious way, not jokes, not performance. But she had a dry, precise, absolutely deadpan way of describing things that would get at me sometimes when I was least prepared for it.
And I would find myself laughing at my own examination table, which was not a thing I had done with any regularity in 6 years of frontier practice. She never made the work into something more than it was. She was there, she was thorough, she was good at it. She didn’t need me to tell her she was good at it, and I didn’t make a habit of telling her, and I think she appreciated that.
I think she’d had enough of being managed. I made a fool of myself in November. Not in a dramatic way. Just the ordinary kind, standing in my own office after the last patient of the day, the lamp down to a low glow, her coat already on, and me saying something about I don’t even remember how I started it.
