She began to welcome and respond to evening ambulance calls, although the rule was that the crews would call on her only if they had a situation they couldn't handle. The last night in March also offered up the last snowstorm of the season. On the highway leading out of Main Street, a drunken driver skidded across to the wrong side of the road in his Buick and met a small Toyota head-on. The man who was driving the Toyota slammed into the steering wheel, fracturing his ribs and making an island of his sternum, a condition known as flail chest. Whenever he breathed he experienced great pain. Worse, the loose chest wall segment didn't move in and out with the rest of his chest when he respirated; in effect, the bellows was broken.

All the EMTs could do for the injured man in the field was to tape a small, flat sandbag over the loose sternum, and then give him oxygen and get him into the medical center. The ambulance people were already doing that when R.J. reached the scene. For a change, too many EMTs had responded, among them Toby. The two of them watched the ambulance crew preparing the man for transport, and then R.J. motioned Toby away from the volunteer firemen who were cleaning gla.s.s and pieces of metal from the road.

They walked down the highway to a place where they could look back at the accident.

"I've been thinking a lot about you," R.J. said.

The night air was chill, and Toby was shivering slightly in her red ambulance jacket. The urgent yellow ambulance light, turning like a beacon viewed from sea, illuminated her features every few seconds. She wrapped her arms about her body and looked at R.J.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. There's a procedure I'd like you to have."

"What kind of procedure?"

"Exploratory. I want somebody to take a good look at what's happening inside your pelvis."

"Surgery? Forget it. Look, R.J., I'm not going to be opened up. Some women ... it just isn't in the cards for them to be mothers."

R.J. grinned mirthlessly. "Tell me about it." She shook her head. "They don't have to open you up anymore. Nowadays they make three tiny little incisions in your abdomen. One through your navel and the other two below, roughly over each ovary. They use a very narrow fiber optics instrument with an incredibly sensitive lens that lets them see everything in sharp detail. If necessary, other special instruments allow them to do corrective procedures, right through those three tiny incisions."

"Would they have to put me out?"

"Yes. You'd have general anesthesia."

"Would you do the ... what do you call it?"

"Laparoscopy. No. I don't do that. I'd send you to Danny Noyes. He's very good."

"No way."

R.J. allowed herself to lose patience. "But why? You so desperately want to have a child."

"Look, R.J. You're so f.u.c.king pious when you preach about women needing to have the right to choose what happens to their own bodies. Well, this is my body. And I choose not to have surgery unless my life or health is threatened, which it doesn't seem to be. So leave me the h.e.l.l alone, understand? And thank you for your concern."

R.J. nodded. "You're welcome," she said sadly.

In March she tried to enter the woods behind the house without skis or snowshoes, and she failed, going thigh-deep into snow that had refused to melt on the shaded trail. When she tried again in April, some snow remained but she was able to walk, if somewhat clumsily. Winter had made the wild place wilder, leaving the trail the worse for wear, with downed branches that had to be cleared. She seemed to feel the djinn of the forest staring down at her. In a patch of snow she saw what looked like the tracks of a barefoot man with fat feet and ten sharp claws. But the big toes were the outer ones, and R.J. knew the marks had been left by a large bear. She puckered up and whistled as loud as she could blow, for some reason choosing as her bear-frightening song "My Old Kentucky Home," although she thought it might put the bear to sleep instead of sending it galloping away.

In three places, trees had fallen across the path. R.J. went back to the barn and got a Swedish bow saw and tried to use it on the blowndown trees, but the saw was inadequate and the work too slow.

There were some things for which she needed a man, she told herself with bitter resignation.

For a few days she pondered whom she might hire to clear the path of debris and perhaps extend the trail along the river. But a few afternoons later, she found herself in her favorite farm supply store, attempting to learn all about chain saws.

They looked lethal, and she knew they could be as deadly as they looked. "They scare the bejeezus out of me," she admitted to the salesman.

"Well, they should. They'll cut off your limb as easily as they'll cut off a tree's," he said cheerfully. "But so long as you stay scared, they're perfectly safe. The people who get hurt are the ones who get comfortable enough to handle them carelessly."

The saws came in several brands and a number of different weights and lengths. The salesman showed her the smallest, lightest model. "A lot of women favor this one." But when she told him she wanted to clear a trail through woods, he shook his head and offered her another saw. "This one is medium-heavy. Your arms will tire quicker, and you'll have to rest more frequently than with the small saw, but you'll get a lot more accomplished."

She made him show her half a dozen times how to start it, how to stop it, how the automatic brake should be set so the whirling chain wouldn't cut her head open if the saw caught on something and kicked back.

By the time she brought it home, along with a supply of oil and a filled gasoline can, she had second thoughts. After supper she read the instruction manual carefully and knew the purchase had been a folly. The saw was too complicated, too wickedly capable of destruction, and she would never have the courage to go into the woods alone and use the dangerous tool. She set everything in a corner of the barn and did her best to forget all about it.

Two afternoons later, she came home from work and, as usual, she took the mail out of the mailbox by the road and carried it down the long driveway to the house. Seated at the kitchen table, she separated it into several piles: Things to be dealt with later, consisting of bills, catalogs she wanted to read, and magazines; letters; and junk mail to be thrown away.

The envelope was square, medium-sized, light blue. The moment she saw the handwriting the air in the room became heavy and warm and harder to breathe.

She didn't rush to tear it open. Instead, she treated it as if it were a letter bomb, examining it carefully on both sides. There was no return address. It was postmarked three days before, and it had been mailed from Akron, Ohio.

She picked up her letter opener and slit the envelope neatly across the top.

It was a greeting card: "Wishing You a Happy Easter."

Inside, there was David's cramped, slanted handwriting.

My Dear R.J., I scarcely know what to say, how to start.

I suppose I must begin by saying that I am mortally sorry if I have caused you unnecessary anxiety.

I want you to know I'm alive and healthy. I've been sober for some time, and I'm working hard to stay that way.

I'm in a safe place, surrounded by good people. I am coming to terms with life.

I hope you may find it in your heart to think kindly of me, as I think of you.

Yours sincerely, David Think kindly of me?

Wishing You a Happy Easter?

She threw the card and the envelope onto the mantel. Gripped by an icy, disgusted fury, she wandered through the house and finally went outside and into the barn. She picked up the new chain saw and strode down the wood road until she came to the first fallen tree.

She did as she had been instructed by the salesman and the manual: knelt; placed her right foot on the bottom of the rear handle, pinning the saw to the ground; set the hand guard; fixed the choke and turned on the ignition switch; held the front handle bar down firmly with her left hand and pulled the starter handle with her right hand. Nothing happened after several pulls, and she was preparing to give up when she pulled again, and the saw started with a cough and a sputter.

She pulled the trigger, and gave it gas, and it roared. She turned to the fallen tree, pulled the trigger again, and placed the blade against the trunk. The chain whipped around, its teeth biting into the wood, and went down through the trunk easily, quickly. The noise was music.

The power! she thought. The power!

In a very short time, the tree was in pieces small enough for her to move them off the trail. She stood with the roaring saw in her hand as dusk fell, reluctant to shut it off, drunk with success, ready to cut away all of her problems. She no longer was trembling. She didn't fear the bear. She knew the bear would flee from the sound of her vibrating, ripping teeth. She could do this, she thought exultantly. The spirits of the woods were witnesses to the fact that a woman could do anything.

37.

ONE MORE BRIDGE TO CROSS.

Two afternoons in a row, she took her chain saw into the forest and vanquished the other pair of fallen trees. Then on Thursday, her day off, she entered the woods early, while the silent, druidlike trees were still wet and cold, and commenced to extend the trail. There was only a short distance to go before the lane reached the Catamount, and she attained the river just before breaking for lunch. It was a thrill to turn the corner and begin to work downstream, along the bank.

The saw was heavy. She had to stop from time to time, and she used the intervals to gather the branches and small trees she had severed and drag them off the path, piling them so they would be nesting places for rabbits and other small creatures. There was snow here and there along the banks but the water ran like liquid crystal, fast and full. Just beyond where skunk cabbages pushed through the snow, she saw a blue cordiform stone in the shallow current. When she pushed up the sleeve of her sweater and plunged her hand into the water, her arm seemed to crystallize too, the shock of the cold telegraphing all the way to her toes. The stone was well shaped, and she wiped it dry tenderly with her handkerchief and dropped it into her pocket. All afternoon as she pushed the trail forward, she felt the magic of the heartrock giving her strength and power.

At night she was serenaded by the soprano yipping of coyotes and the baritone roar of the swollen river. Mornings, eating breakfast in the kitchen, making the bed, straightening up the living room, she saw from her windows a porcupine, hawks, an owl, buzzards, the great Northern ravens that had taken over her land as if on a long-term lease. There were lots of rabbits and several deer, but there was no sign of the two turkeys she had fed in the winter, and she feared for them.

Now every day she rushed home from the office, changed her clothes, and took the chain saw from the barn. She worked hard, with satisfaction that was almost a quiet glee, pushing the great circuit of trail back in the direction of her house.

There was a new softness in the air. Each day darkness fell later, and suddenly the back roads had become goo. She had learned about her environment and knew now when to park the Explorer and slog in on foot to make a house call, and she didn't use the come-along or need to have her car towed out of the mud.

The muscles of her arms and back and thighs tightened from the work in the woods and were so sore that she grunted when she walked, and then her body hardened and adjusted to the steady labor. Pushing the saw into branches to get the blade close to the tree trunks, she sustained numerous scratches and shallow gouges in her hands and arms. She tried wearing long sleeves and gloves, but the sleeves snagged and the gloves didn't allow her to grip the saw tightly enough, so she disinfected the wounds carefully each night after her bath and wore the scabs like service stripes.

Sometimes an emergency kept her from working on the trail, a house call or the need to drive to the hospital to see a patient. She became miserly about her spare time, spending every moment in the woods. It was a long hike to the end of the trail, growing longer every time she found a few hours to work. She learned to leave her cans of gasoline and oil in the woods, in well-secured plastic bags. Sometimes she saw signs in the woods that disturbed her. In a place where she had worked only the previous afternoon, she found the scattered long feathers and soft inner down of a turkey that had been taken by something during the night, and she hoped foolishly that it hadn't been one of "her" birds. And one morning when she walked out, she found an enormous pile of bear droppings like a special delivery letter. She knew that the black bears slept off and on all winter without eating or defecating; in the spring they gorged until they had an enormous bowel movement that expelled a hard, thick fecal plug. She had read of the plug and now examined it, and she noted the wide caliber of the droppings, indicating a very large animal, probably the bear whose paw marks she had seen in the snow. It was as if the bear had shat on her trail to serve notice that it was his territory and not hers, and she grew anxious again about working in the woods.

All through April she pushed the trail home, attaining now a few difficult feet, now an easier advance. Eventually she came to the last major challenge, a brook to be bridged. Over a very long time the brook had eaten deeply into the forest floor, draining the wet pasture into the river. David had made three wooden bridges where they had been needed in other places; she didn't know if she could make the fourth-perhaps it would take more strength and construction experience than she possessed.

One day after she came home from work she studied the high banks and then visited the bridges David had made, a.n.a.lyzing what she would need to do. She could see that the job would require at least a full day, so it would have to wait for her day off, and she turned away and declared a holiday with whatever light remained of the afternoon. The river was swollen and fast, still too high for fishing, but she went home and got her spinning rod and dug half a dozen worms next to the compost pile. She cast out into the largest of the beaver ponds and alternately watched the little bobber and admired the work of the beavers, which had built up the dam and thinned an impressive number of trees. Before the bobber moved at all, a kingfisher came and mocked her with its cry, and it dove into the pond and flew away bearing a fish. R.J. felt inferior to the bird, but eventually she caught two beautiful small brook trout, which she had for supper with a mess of steamed fiddleheads, tasting the season in the wild greens.

After supper, bringing out her garbage, she came upon a small black heartrock where she had dug the worms, and she pounced on it as if it could scuttle away. She brought it inside and washed it and rubbed it to bring out its sheen, and placed it on top of the television set.

Once the earth was bared of snow, it was as if R.J. somehow had been singled out to inherit Sarah Markus's serendipitous ability to discover heart-shaped stones. Everywhere she went, her eyes fell upon them as if directed by Sarah's spirit. They came in all shapes-stones with the heart's upper cheeks curvy as a pear and deeply indented as a perfect fundament, stones with angular but balanced cheeks, stones with lower points that were sharp as fate or shaped like the shallow arc of a kindergarten swing.

She discovered a stone that was as tiny as a smooth, brown birthmark, in a plastic bag of purchased plant soil. She found one the size of a fist at the base of the crumbling stone wall on the western boundary of her property. She came upon them while working in the woods, while walking on Laurel Hill Road, while doing errands on Main Street.

Very quickly, people in Woodfield observed the doctor's preoccupation with cardioid stones and began finding them for her, dropping them off with pleased smiles at her home and her office, helping her with her hobby. She became accustomed, on coming home, to emptying her pockets of stones, or taking stones from her purse or from paper bags. She washed and dried them and spent anxious moments wondering where to put them. The collection quickly outgrew the guest room. Soon the heartrocks were displayed all over the living room as well, on the wall mantels and above the fireplace. And on end tables and the coffee table. And on the kitchen counter, and in the bathroom upstairs, and on her bedroom bureaus, and on the toilet tank in the lavatory on the ground floor.

The stones spoke to her, a sad, wordless message reminding her of Sarah and David. She didn't want to hear it, but still she collected them compulsively. She bought a geology manual and began to identify the stones, taking pleasure in the knowledge that this one was basalt from the lower Jura.s.sic era, when monster creatures had roamed the valley; that that one was solidified magma that had poured, liquid and boiling, up from the molten core a million years ago when the earth had hiccupped fiery vomit; that this stone of fused sand and gravel came from a time when ocean depths covered these now-inland hills; that that piece of glittering gneiss most likely had been a drab rock before colliding continents had transformed it in the pressure cooker of metamorphism.

One afternoon in Northampton, R.J. walked past the site of a sewer line replacement on King Street. The excavation was a trench perhaps five feet deep, cordoned off from the public by wooden sawhorses, metal barriers, and yellow plastic rope. In the corner of the hole was something that made her eyes widen-a reddish, well-shaped stone about fifteen inches long and eighteen inches wide.

The petrified heart of a vanished giant.

The work site was abandoned. The laborers had finished work for the day and were gone, or she would have asked someone to get it for her. Too bad, R.J. thought and pa.s.sed it by. But she hadn't taken five steps before she turned and went back. She sat in the dirt on the lip of the trench with her feet dangling, never mind her new slacks, and ducked her head inside the rope; then she pushed off with her hands and dropped into the hole.

The rock was fully as good as it had looked from above. But it was heavy, very difficult for her to lift, and she had to raise it the height of her neck in order to push it out of the trench. She accomplished the feat on the second try, as an act of desperation.

"Lady, what the h.e.l.l?"

He was a police officer, glaring down at her in disbelief from the side of the trench that faced the road.

"Do you mind giving me a pull up?" she asked, holding up her hands. He was not a large officer. But in a moment he had hauled her out, exhibiting as much strain as she had shown when she lifted the stone.

Breathing hard, he stared at her, seeing the dirt smudge on her right cheek, the black slacks streaked with gray clay, and the mud on her shoes. "What were you doing down there?"

All she could do was give him a beatific smile and thank him for his help. "I'm a collector," she said.

Three Thursdays came and went before she had an opportunity to spend the day building her bridge. She knew what she had to do. She had walked the trail to the brook half a dozen times to study the site, and again and again she had gone over in her mind how it might be done.

She had to cut two matching trees whose trunks would provide the main bridge supports. The trimmed logs had to be heavy enough to hold weight and endure, yet light enough for her to be able to move them into position.

She had already chosen the trees and went right to them, the growl and whine of the saw a comfort, and she felt expert now as she cut the boles and trimmed them. The logs were deceptively slender. They were very heavy, but she discovered she was able to move each one a few feet at a time by lifting and heaving first one end and then the other. The thud each time a log dropped seemed to shake the earth and made her feel she was an Amazon, except that she was tiring very quickly.

With a pick and a shovel she dug four shallow sockets, two on each bank, into which the log ends needed to nest to give them stability.

Slowly but surely, she moved the logs into place, ultimately getting into the brook and lifting the logs on her shoulder to maneuver each end into its prepared slot. When she was finally done, it was lunchtime, and the black flies and mosquitoes had begun feeding on her, so she beat a retreat.

She was too excited to spend time preparing much of a meal, eating peanut b.u.t.ter smeared hastily on sliced bread, and a cup of tea. She longed to soak in a hot bath, but she knew she wouldn't finish the bridge if she did, and she could smell victory. So, freshly sprayed with repellent, she went back outside.

She had bought a truckload of black locust slabs from Hank Krantz-they were piled in the backyard-and she measured and cut four-foot lengths of slab, trying to select pieces that were more or less uniformly thick. Then she carried them, three or four at a time, to the bridge site. By this time she was really tired, and she stopped for more tea. But she knew that what remained to be done was clearly within her range of capabilities, and the knowledge drove her as she placed the slabs one by one and drove in the long nails, the sound of her hammer blows daring any wild critter to challenge her in her territory.

Finally, as the late afternoon shadows darkened the woods, she finished. The bridge was strong. It lacked only elegant white birch rails that she would install another day. It was springier than it would have been if she had been able to handle thicker logs, she admitted to herself. But it was a good job, and it would serve her well.

She stood in the middle of it and danced a triumphant little tarantella.

And on the east side of the brook, the right-hand corner of the bridge moved slightly.

When she went closer and jumped up and down, the corner sank. She jumped several times, cursing, and the corner went down quite a bit more. Her tape measure told her the bridge ended up fourteen inches lower on that side than on the other.

R.J. had set the stage for the problem by neglecting to firm the soil under the log on that side, and the weight of the bridge had done the rest. She saw that it would have been wise to have placed a flat rock under each log end, as well.

She went back into the brook and tried to lift the bridge on the low end but it was impossible for her to move it, and she surveyed the slanting structure bitterly. It would be possible to cross it gingerly, if it didn't drop any more. But it would be folly to try to get across it while carrying a heavy load, or while pushing a laden wheelbarrow.

She collected her tools and made her slow way home, bone weary and terribly disappointed. It would no longer be easy or pleasurable to boast to herself that she could do anything, if she had to add a qualifier: "... almost."

38.

THE REUNION.

George Palmer came to R.J.'s office one day when every seat was taken in the waiting room and Nordahl Peterson was sitting outside on the front steps. Still, when she had finished talking with George Palmer about his bursitis, explaining why she wasn't going to give him any more cortisone, he nodded and thanked her but showed no sign of leaving.

"My youngest child is Harold. My baby," he said sardonically. "Now forty-two years old. Harold Wellington Palmer."

R.J. smiled and nodded.

"Accountant. Lives in Boston. That is, he has been living there, past twelve years. Now he's going to be living with me again. He's coming back to Woodfield."

"Oh? That should be nice for you, George," she said cautiously, having no way to know whether or not it would be nice until he came to the point.