More Things In Heaven and Earth Read online

  In my head I had been doing the math. It had been over thirty minutes since Nancy had first shaken him. By all the odds, he didn’t have a chance. I needed to think about calling it, but I just couldn’t. My irritation and fury surfaced. I took over doing the compressions and yelled audibly.

  “Come on, dammit. Get a rhythm going.” Sweat poured down my face. Everyone in the room was standing, staring with lost expressions. This ad hoc group had followed my instructions as best they could, but the drama had left them shell-shocked and exhausted. Everyone knew the inevitable was coming. We had given multiple doses of epinephrine and atropine, we’d done continuous compressions, multiple shocks, and yet nothing. No sustained rhythm. I had lost him.

  Finally I stopped and stepped back, heaving deep gasps in and out, trying to catch my breath. I searched the long, somber faces of those in the room, particularly that of Mary Jo, the staff nurse. I was looking for confirmation. It was time to call it. That was when I noticed something that made me feel like an even grander failure.

  It was Wendy, Hoot’s daughter. All the while she had been sitting quietly in the corner of the exam room watching the terrible drama of her father’s last minutes. But something was remarkably odd. Instead of being in a state of panic and tears, she looked placid, curious. She sat and waited patiently for me to break the silence. I needed to call it, but her presence stopped me.

  Hoot was gone. At this point it made no sense to send her away, so I motioned for her to come closer. Her face expressionless, Wendy walked up to her father and with her pudgy hand she squeezed his large, bare foot and spoke in a soft and determined voice.

  “Don’t go yet, Daddy.”

  I exhaled deeply. It was the final straw, an epitaph to my failure.

  And then I heard the beep, a singular heartbeat on the cardiac monitor. The room held its collective breath. The beep was followed by another, then another, then another. We all stood in stunned, shocked silence.

  After ten more beats, Nancy Orman, a devout Baptist who for all of her fifty-three years had lived, walked, and breathed a mile away from the nearest known sin, blurted out in a low, weak voice, “Holy shit!”

  Everyone else was speechless.

  Miraculously, the heartbeat continued.

  About this time the EMTs arrived. We loaded Hoot into the ambulance and I rode along for the forty-five-minute drive to the regional hospital in the next county. It was the closest facility available.

  Hoot’s heart rate remained constant. He even began to regain a drowsy consciousness on the ride over. A few days later he got a pacemaker and within a week he was back on the farm. It was a miraculous turnaround, one for the medical journals. But to the people of Watervalley, it seemed to be no big deal. To their thinking, it was just providential timing and grace.

  For me, it was more complex, a combination of critical elements. Yet still, I couldn’t completely account for it, just like so many other things about Watervalley that in time I would come to realize were simply not explainable.

  Being dead on the exam room table for that long normally impacts mental function. But with Hoot’s loud and happy personality, no one noticed a difference. He was just glad to be back among his cows and with the darling jewel of his life, his daughter, Wendy.

  From then on, every day after school, Wendy would go and sit in the corner of the milk parlor and calmly do her homework while Hoot went about his work. Engrossed in her lessons, she would quietly study, seemingly oblivious to the incredible noise and clamor of the milk machines and baying cows. But every so often she would look up from her book, and sweetly, proudly gaze over at her immense father and, with a face of pure love, smile.

  Hoot’s Code Blue happened on the Thursday of my first week as the new doctor at the Watervalley Clinic, my first job out of med school. I’d like to be able to say that the days leading up to it since my Saturday arrival had not been quite so eventful.

  Unfortunately, that just wouldn’t be true.

  CHAPTER 2

  Arrival

  When I had left Nashville the previous Saturday morning, I was reasonably confident that by most standards I was fairly smart. At least . . . well, something above average. But that day, my first day in Watervalley, proved otherwise.

  It began when I stopped at the country store: a narrow shotgun building of flaking white paint, patchwork tin roof, and sagging concrete blocks fronted by a porch cluttered with rusted soft drink machines. A small cushion of dust stirred as I pulled my worn-out Corolla into the gravel lot. The small, wispy cloud hovered in the stagnant air, covering the faded sign that read COUNTY LINE MARKET AND GENERAL STORE. Given the absence of any other vehicles, it was clear I was the only customer.

  The storekeeper was a tidy little man with neatly combed gray hair, heavy black-framed glasses over a small pinched face, and a white short-sleeved shirt buttoned to the neck. As I entered, he was standing at the cash register talking in a nasal monotone.

  “Come in, stay a while, don’t rush off, awful hot out there. Got a special going on cold drinks, candy bars on this shelf are half priced if you like candy.”

  His barrage was nonstop, leaving me no chance to speak.

  The cluttered store was thick with an old but agreeable aroma of many years. Shelves on the twelve-foot-high walls overflowed with canned goods, fishing lures, brooms, rakes, seeds, hardware bins, hand tools, coveralls, and a pair of winter sleds.

  I smiled and nodded, moving cautiously away toward a drink cooler. He followed, hovering next to me, meekly talking in the general direction of my shoes and only occasionally glancing up with a squinting face of childlike hope.

  “Got some Western shirts in the back at a real good price. If you need any pet supplies, we got them too—you got a dog or anything?”

  The little fellow was my first contact with Watervalley, so despite his troublesome persistence I felt the need to at least pretend interest in his unwanted inquiries. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that I had stopped only to ask directions.

  Although I’d left Nashville five hours earlier, I had traveled only 120 miles and was as lost as last year’s Easter egg. My portable GPS was proving to be of little help. To make matters worse, the air-conditioning in the old Corolla had died months before, making a misery of the hot hours down the ragged two-lane roads.

  I had just graduated from my Vanderbilt residency, and my education had left me two hundred thousand dollars in debt. I’d received several offers at the university for research assistant positions, something I would have loved. But the pay was notoriously low and I had lived off peanut butter and jelly long enough. Small, doctor-deficient towns in Tennessee would pay off your college loans if you set up practice there. I had been part of a small town many years before. It hadn’t ended well. But remote, small-town Watervalley was my only option. It was a three-year commitment.

  So that morning I had left Nashville with its offers of research grants and fellowships and headed, for all practical purposes, to the dropping-off point of God and all creation. I had accepted my departure from civilization and was determined to make the best of it. But for hours I had traveled the narrow back roads into an endless maze of fields, farms, and woodlands. The drive into rural purgatory had left me exasperated. I was lost in more ways than one. It was a tricky balance. My head was looking for a place that my heart didn’t want to find.

  “Wanna hear about the daily special? It’s called the Sandwich Meal Deal, comes with a bologna sandwich, chips, and a Coke. Bologna is fresh cut—got salami if you don’t want bologna. Got lettuce too if you want that.”

  I couldn’t get away. Despite my frustration at spending the entire day off course, I couldn’t help but listen patiently to his lowly but persistent inquiries. Finally I succumbed to buying a six-pack of beer, which evoked a crestfallen look of grateful disappointment. I grabbed a couple of candy bars and tossed them on the counter for good measure. This lifted his mood, but only slightly. While handing me the change, he began a
liturgy of thank-yous in the same droning voice.

  I nodded and made a hasty departure back to the afternoon heat. Two steps out the door I halted and spoke audibly, “Crap, I forgot to ask directions.” I stood for a moment, trying to decide if I was up for another round of Watervalley’s answer to Zig Ziglar. Then the situation resolved itself as a battered pickup truck pulled into the gravel lot. Its driver, a tall, tautly built, middle-aged fellow in work khakis, emerged and began to walk up the steps, oblivious to my presence.

  I blurted an emphatic “Sir.”

  He stopped abruptly, his strong-featured face regarding me with a look of suspicious irritation.

  “Can you tell me how to find Watervalley?”

  He stood for a long moment, appraising me coolly with a calculated sophistication that I hadn’t expected to find this far back in the sticks. Finally he spoke in a relaxed voice of raw disdain.

  “Yeah, sport. Just keep driving down that road there till you start feeling stupid.” He walked away, shaking his head in an expression of permanent contempt.

  I retreated to the Corolla and tossed my purchases into the passenger seat. As I pulled onto the blacktop, it occurred to me that I’d arrived at feeling stupid three exits ago. I was miles past that.

  After a long run down a deeply wooded lane, the road made a sharp bend and opened up to a spectacular view of the valley below. The trees continued up the steep slope to the right, but to my left was a wide overlook offering a complete vista that stretched for miles. I stopped the Corolla to take it all in.

  I had stepped into a different world. A broad floor of velvet green rolled toward tall hills in the distance. Along the wide plane were small dots of houses that grew closer and closer together as they progressed toward the town. In the far distance was a lake and in between stood Watervalley, outlined with the prominent points of church steeples.

  A sweet, warm breeze swept up from the valley and rustled the high leaves of the nearby trees. The air was filled with an incredible clarity and an amazingly unfamiliar silence. The common cacophony of the city was distinctly far behind me.

  So this is Watervalley, I thought, curious. Admittedly, the view was captivating, almost mesmerizing. The shoulders of the distant hills framed the stunning panorama before me, the wide sweep of the incredible Tennessee Valley. I stood at the precipice of my new life as a small-town doctor. And I felt in that instant, if only for a second, that something in the wind and sun, the endless roll of green fields and meadows, and the magnificent blue of the vast sky held an unspeakable enchantment for me. The scene was beautiful beyond words. For a brief moment, my regrets were forgotten.

  But despite its splendor, I didn’t want to be here. My dream was to do research, lead groundbreaking studies, find miracle cures, make a name for myself. Instead, I was about to drive into a Terry Redlin painting. I sighed, climbed back into the Corolla, and began the five miles of hairpin turns down into town.

  The scorching July wind breathing past me provided little relief from the heat. With no air-conditioning, the old Corolla was like an oven with wheels attached. Glancing at my watch, I noticed it was still a couple of hours before my informal meeting with the mayor. The day was hot as hell, and I felt that I was barreling headlong into it.

  I was parched. I had downed my last bottle of water some miles back and had forgotten to grab a few more when I stopped at the market. Tempted, I looked over at the cold beer and thought, well, why not? So I popped one of them open.

  In hindsight, I believe that as I descended farther and farther into the valley, my IQ was the only thing dropping faster than the elevation.

  CHAPTER 3

  First Impressions

  Winding down that last stretch of road, I was blissfully unaware that my coming to Watervalley was a matter of significant anticipation. The town had been without a local doctor for three years and everyone was eagerly awaiting my arrival. Having learned the make of my car, Warren Thurman, the sheriff, was parked on the outskirts of town along with two of his cruisers, ready to meet me with a police escort. He wanted it to be a big surprise. It was.

  Right after I threw back the first swallow of beer the three patrol cars with their blues flashing popped out on the road in front of me and drew me to an instant halt. I was shocked, paralyzed with disbelief. Admittedly, I was stretching the law, but how could they be on to me that quickly, and after only one swallow?

  I had to slam on the breaks to keep from hitting the sheriff’s cruiser. In my panic, the bottle slipped from my hand and beer shot out, completely drenching my shirt and pants. The sheriff, a giant of a fellow with a spontaneous smile, emerged from his car and strolled up to the Corolla.

  He spoke in an amiable, drawling voice. “Hi there. I’m Sheriff Thurman. You Dr. Luke Bradford?”

  I looked slowly up from my soaked shirt and pants, the unmistakable aroma of spilled beer wafting through the open window. His smile faded.

  “Are you drinking a beer?”

  “Yes—well, actually, no, sir, Officer. I think I’m mostly wearing it.”

  “You are Dr. Bradford, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, yes, I am,” I responded.

  “How many of those you had to drink, Doc?”

  “Well, I only opened one and after that sudden stop I pretty much just took a bath in it.”

  Sheriff Thurman looked at the six-pack with the single missing bottle, and at the thoroughness of my drenching.

  “Oh.” His broad smile returned. “You’re okay to drive, then. I thought I might have to put one of the boys behind your wheel and have you ride with me. Looks like you’ll be all right. Just follow me, Doc. Lots of folks wanting to meet you.”

  As he ambled away it occurred to me that maybe I should turn the car around and head back out of town. But obediently I pulled the Corolla in behind the sheriff, who led the way with blue lights flashing and an occasional blip of the siren. The two other cruisers fell in behind me, barring any chance of escape. My relief at not being handcuffed and hauled off to jail was followed by the panic of being in beer-soaked clothes and on my way to meet the mayor.

  The sheriff had also said something about folks wanting to meet me. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but decided to make a quick change at the next stoplight. I reached over and grabbed a clean shirt and pants from my duffel bag. After spending many seasons playing varsity sports, I considered myself pretty agile. But my six-foot, two-inch frame didn’t allow for easy maneuvering inside the small Corolla. That’s when the blurry bad dream began.

  I had just struggled out of my soaked pants when I realized that even though Watervalley did have two stoplights, the sheriff had posted officers at each one to usher the welcoming convoy through to the courthouse steps. Furthermore, the pants-changing maneuver made for rather sporadic handling of the steering wheel, causing me to weave considerably on my approach down Main Street.

  I was in the process of trying to get the clean khakis up from my ankles when the sheriff stopped abruptly in front of me and I darn near hit him again. But the real panic came when I noticed that to my left was a crowd of about twenty people standing on the steps of the courthouse, waving hand-painted signs reading WATERVALLEY WELCOMES DR. BRADFORD.

  Someone had a boom box with a recording of “Rocky Top” playing loudly in the background. In the next instant the mayor, Walt Hickman, jerked open the car door and extended a big smile and an eager handshake toward me.

  A low gasp rose from the crowd, which understandably had expected their first view of me to include pants. It didn’t help that the now empty beer bottle rolled from the car floor and clanged loudly onto the street.

  The mayor, a portly gray-haired fellow in his fifties, retrieved his hand, shut the door, and turned his back to the car in a spontaneous effort to shield me from general view. He had a shocked look on his face. As I would later learn, it was one of the few times since infancy that Walt Hickman was at a loss for words.

  Some agonizing moments passed while I m
anaged to get my pants on and tuck the beer-soaked part of my shirt into them. I tapped lightly on the window, now with the mayor’s backside pressed to it, letting him know I was ready to get out.

  Walt peered cautiously at me over his shoulder. Having regained his composure, he turned around, opened the car door, and with his large, pudgy-fingered hand extended said, “Welcome to Watervalley, Doc,” as if the previous two minutes had been erased from history.

  Sporting my wet shirt, khakis, and flip-flops, I got out of the car to what was now a rather halfhearted round of applause. After nodding awkwardly to the crowd, I sheepishly raised a hand in a gesture that was part wave and part self-defense. Immediately I was plunged into a battery of introductions.

  I smiled and did my best to make conversation, all the while thinking about the picture they were getting of this beer-stained, underdressed new doctor in whom they would be entrusting their health and the health of their children. It was something short of an ideal first impression.

  The reception dwindled quickly and afterward Sheriff Thurman led the way to my provided housing, a quaint white cottage several blocks away in a well-groomed older neighborhood. My new home at 205 Fleming Street had been completely renovated and furnished. Inside it was fresh and clean and comfortable, with shiny hardwood floors and soft couches and chairs. The living and dining rooms and eat-in kitchen were on the main floor, with two cozy bedrooms in the gabled upstairs. I had to admit, it was delightful. For the past seven years during med school and residency, I had lived in dumps and dives and in a hollow tree with the Keebler Elves. Watervalley had given me a place to call my own. Yet still, I met the whole business with a certain reluctance.

  Sheriff Thurman helped me unload my few possessions from my car and casually followed as I made the tour of my new residence. With his ready smile and patient, easy manner, he had an accommodating way about him. He made me relax, let down my guard. But very quickly I came to realize that the first thing Warren Thurman wanted you to do was underestimate him. Hiding behind that huge smile was a very observant mind.