Eventide (Plainsong #2)(23)

All right, Harold said. Thanks. He shut his eyes and tried to breathe. It’s getting cold, he whispered.

Raymond removed his canvas jacket and spread it over him.

After a while Harold opened his eyes. He shivered and peered around. Raymond?

Yes.

Are you here?

I’m right here, Raymond said. Right next to you.

Harold looked up into his brother’s face and Raymond took hold of his thick calloused hand.

You got to take care of her by yourself now. His voice was just a thin raspy sound. That little girl too. I won’t be here to see how they come out. I was looking forward to it.

You’ll see them, Raymond said. You’re going to come out of this.

No. I’m done here, Harold said. I’m about finished.

He closed his eyes and shivered again, his breaths coming slower and harder. Then he stopped breathing. After a while he breathed once more, a long single rattling suck of air. Then he seemed to settle into the dirt more comfortably. After that he didn’t breathe again. Raymond watched him and his brother’s eyelids fluttered once, that was all, then Raymond began to weep, the tears ran down his face in dirty runnels. He held on to his brother’s hand and looked out through the corral toward the pastures and the blue sandhills beyond. The hills lay far away in the distance on the low horizon. The wind had started up again. He could feel it now. He looked again at his brother and pulled the canvas coat up over his blood-smeared face. He knelt for a long while beside him, not moving, an old man with his old brother scuttled down in the loose dirt of a plank corral under an overcast October sky.





13


IT WAS AN HOUR AND MORE BEFORE RAYMOND ROUSED himself. Then he pulled himself up and limped across the gravel drive to the house and made the call. When the ambulance from Holt drove up in front of the house he told them to go down and collect his brother. The two men in their shiny jackets drove to the corral and gathered Harold up and carried him to the ambulance on a transfer board with a blanket spread over him, and then they drove both McPheron brothers into town to the emergency ward at the hospital. The doctor pronounced Harold dead on arrival.

Raymond lay on the narrow emergency-room bed behind green privacy curtains as the doctor examined him. The nurses had already removed his chore coat and flannel shirt and jeans so he lay now in a thin white cotton gown. The doctor felt his chest, listened to his heart and his lungs and felt tentatively along his leg. Afterward he ordered complete X rays that revealed cracked ribs on the right side of his chest and a broken bone in his lower left leg. They wanted to move him into surgery at once.

Wait now, Raymond told the nurse. Before you run me in there I want to call somebody. I ain’t going to be no good later.

Who do you want to call?

Tom Guthrie and Victoria Roubideaux.

Tom Guthrie, the high school teacher?

Yes.

But I don’t believe school’s let out yet for the day.

For God’s sake, Raymond said.

All right, she said. Never mind. We’ll call and see if we can get him on the phone.

Also I want you to call Fort Collins, Raymond said. Get Victoria Roubideaux for me.

Now who’s she, Mr. McPheron?

A young girl away at college, with her baby. Her name will be amongst the new listings.

But who is she to you? Is she your daughter?

No.

But usually we only make these kind of long-distance calls to relatives.

Just call her on the phone, Raymond said. Can’t you do that?

If she were a relative, a niece, or something like a daughter.

She is like a daughter to me. More than like a daughter. She’s what I’ve got to think of right now.

Well. The nurse looked at him. He was watching her intently, his face washed clean now, the scratches on his cheeks and forehead showing vivid and inflamed. All right, she said. But it’s not the usual procedure. How do you spell it?

Raymond turned away. Good Christ, he said.

Very well, she said. I’ll figure it out. Which one do you want to talk to first?

The girl. She’ll have to know about this.

But you’re sure you feel like talking right now. You must be in a lot of pain.

Just get me the phone once you get connected to her, he said. She’s going to hate this. I’m pretty sure she loved my brother. I sure God know he loved her.

The nurse went out and he lay in the bed with the green curtains drawn around him. They had started an IV already and had strapped a blood pressure cuff to his arm and propped up his leg with a pillow. He lay looking at the white tiled ceiling, then he shut his eyes and despite his best intentions to the otherwise he was weeping again. He reached up out of the bedsheet and wiped his face and waited for the nurse to bring him the phone. He was trying to think how he was ever going to tell Victoria Roubideaux about what had happened.

Then the nurse came in with the phone and he said: Is that her?

Yes. I finally located her. Here, take it.

He held the phone to his ear. Victoria?

What’s wrong? she said. Her voice sounded small and thin. Is something wrong? Has something happened?

Honey, I got something I got to tell you.

Oh no, she said. Oh no. No.

I’m just afraid I do, he said. And then he told her.





14


IN THE LATE AFTERNOON TOM GUTHRIE STOOD IN THE hospital room beside Raymond, who lay in the white bed under the sheet in his hospital gown. They had wheeled him into the room after the surgery and they had started to put him into the bed next to the door but he’d told them he wanted the bed near the window.