Eventide (Plainsong #2)(70)

Mary Wells was driving the car. Ten minutes earlier she had seen Bob Jeter standing at the refrigerated meat case in the Highway 34 Grocery Store beside a blonde woman, and Bob Jeter had had his arm wrapped around the woman’s waist.

Her older daughter, sitting in the passenger seat beside her, saw the pickup coming toward them and shouted: Mama! Look out!

The man from St. Francis did what he could to stop, but he had all that weight behind him and the pickup crashed into the side of the car and drove it skidding across the highway into a light pole that broke in half and fell over, dragging the wires down.

The younger girl, Emma, sitting in the backseat behind her mother, was thrown against the back door and knocked unconscious. Mary Wells’s head was slammed against the driver’s-side window and when her head cleared she discovered she could not move her left arm. It had already begun to throb. Next to her, Dena had been hurled forward and sideways, and a piece of the windshield had made a long deep gash through her right eyebrow and cheek. When the car rocked to a stop she cupped at her face with her hands. And then her hands filled with blood and she began to scream.

Honey, Mary Wells cried. Oh my God. She brushed the girl’s hair away from her face. Look at me, she said. Let me see. Oh Jesus. Blood was streaming down her cheek onto her shirt, and her mother wiped at it, trying to stop it.

Across the street a man in the parking lot ran back into the grocery store and called for an ambulance, and it came roaring up within minutes and the attendants jumped out and pried open the doors on the one side of the car and lifted Mary Wells and the two girls into the ambulance and raced them to the emergency room at Holt County Memorial Hospital on Main Street, just a few blocks away.



THE PICKUP, THE STOCK TRAILER, AND THE CAR WERE still blocking traffic, and the five tan-and-white bulls had stumbled out of the trailer when the tailgate had crashed open. Men from other cars and pickups were trying to herd them into a makeshift pen of vehicles at the edge of the road, but one of the bulls was lurching about, slipping on the blacktop, bellowing, its left hind leg severed almost in two at the joint, with the lower half flopping and dragging behind. The bull kept stumbling, trying to put his back foot down, while the blood pumped steadily out onto the pavement. The man from St. Francis kept following the bull, shouting: Somebody shoot him. Goddamn it, somebody shoot him. But no one would. Finally a man produced a rifle from the rack in the cab of his pickup and handed the rifle to him. Here, he said. You better do it yourself.

A patrolman who was directing traffic saw the rifle and came running over. What do you think you’re doing? You can’t fire off a gun out here.

By God, I’m going to, the man from St. Francis said. You want to let him suffer like that? I’ve seen all the suffering I’m going to see for a while.

You’re not going to shoot off that gun.

You watch me. Get out of the way.

He walked up to the bull, shouldered the rifle and shoved the end of the barrel point-blank at the bull’s head, then pulled the trigger. The bull dropped all at once to the pavement, rolled over on its side and quivered and finally lay still, its black eyes staring at the streetlamp. The man from St. Francis stood looking down at the dead bull. He handed the rifle back to the man who owned it, then turned to the patrolman. Now go ahead and arrest me, goddamn it.

The officer looked at him sideways. I ain’t going to arrest you. How am I going to arrest you? I’d have a goddamn riot on my hands. But you never should of done that. Not in town.

What would you of done?

I don’t know. Probably the same damn thing you just did. But that don’t make it right. By God, there’s a law against shooting a gun off inside city limits.



AT THE HOSPITAL THE DOCTOR SEDATED THE OLDER GIRL and put seventeen stitches in her face while Mary Wells waited outside in the emergency room with her limp arm hanging painfully, supported in the palm of her hand. She cried quietly and wouldn’t let anyone attend to her arm until they had completed the surgery on her daughter. In the bed near the wall the younger girl was now coming awake. She had a severe headache and there were abrasions on her arm and a blue knob forming on her forehead. Though they would have to watch her through the night, it appeared she would recover well enough.

The doctor finished sewing up the older girl’s face and they wheeled her out and brought her into the emergency room. She was still asleep and her face was bruised and yellow where it wasn’t bandaged. Mary Wells stood looking down at her.

That will all heal, the doctor said. It was a clean cut. She’s fortunate it didn’t involve the eye.

Will it scar? Mary Wells said.

He looked at her. He seemed surprised. Well yes, he said. It usually does.

How much?

We can’t tell that yet. Sometimes it turns out better than we think. She’ll probably want to have a series of treatments with a cosmetic surgeon. That would take some time.

So she’ll have to go through life until then, looking like this?

Yes. The doctor looked down at the girl. I can’t predict how long that will take. She’ll have to heal completely before they can do anything more.

Oh God, what a fool I am, Mary Wells said. What a stupid little fool. She began to cry again and she took up her daughter’s hand and held it to her wet cheek.



THEY KEPT ALL THREE OF THEM IN THE HOSPITAL overnight for observation. In the evening one of the police who had been out on the highway came to the hospital and left a traffic ticket, for reckless driving and the endangerment of life, and he informed Mary Wells that her car had been towed away.