Pilgrims and Other Stories

Contents

Pilgrims

Dr. Hendricks met them at the back door of the clinic. It was deep into January, deep into the stifling cold of a bitter, forbidding winter. Nodding their heads solemnly, as solemnly as deacons at some religious ceremony, some of the older ranchers who were his patients pronounced it as bad a winter as they had weathered in over a decade. Cold front after cold front, purled in upon the valley. With the cold fronts came the storms, and with the storms came the snow. Falling, it fell enveloping the mountains, no less enveloping the valleys. Snow drifted in along the roads and fence lines, while icicles dangled from the telephone wires. To the south of town, snow lay on the frozen river. Those wise enough – or fortunate enough – remained inside their homes, isolated like marooned sailors in some scattered, distant, tropical archipelago far, far away. Crazed along the edges of the windowpanes from ice condensing on the glass, those inside had only a partial picture of the world outside. Between storms, the air was astonishingly clear, but bitterly cold. The air, holding no moisture, held no heat. Looking for lost livestock, ranchers combed their pastures under cold skies luminous with stars. Caught out in the unforgiving cold, the livestock often succumbed from exposure, the snow drifting over their frozen carcasses, covering them by morning light. By mid-winter, Hendricks understood how winters this severe could drive men half mad in the past; how they could fill up the church pews as quickly as they had filled up the bar stools of these small towns lying on the fringes of the slopes of the Rocky Mountains.

Squealing under the tread of his shoes, the keening of the snow as he walked across the parking lot seemed to be the only sound within human habitation. He Cautiously he made his way across the snow-laden parking lot, the snow keening beneath the Vibram soles of his fleece-lined boots.

Since mid-November, snow had collected, accumulating like un-forgiven sin. The snow that had encased the community had also frozen the door, and its lock, to the back of the clinic. Driving into town had been no less treacherous. The snow that caked the highways leading in and out of the community thinned and fanned out at the intersections as soiled, hazy ice that had been half-frozen slush the few times the temperature climbed above freezing.

Standing proud above the frozen river, perched on an old glacial moraine, was the brick house that belonged to Hendricks. As a rite of new ownership, when they had moved to the small town, many years before, his wife posted a plastic thermometer on the outside of the garage window the week they moved in. Though she had long since departed, he still checked the thermometer each winter morning before he left for the hospital and clinic. This morning, the long, slender orange thread, that marked the temperature, barely crept above zero. This morning, backing up, out of the garage, the tires screeched not unlike a surgical dressing being stripped from a wound. Ice fog settled in the sloughs of the river as he drove to work, the crystals sparkling in the harsh, beguiling light of the early morning. Smoke rose from the chimneys of the homes scattered along the highway into town rising for only a few feet before sagging as it bled away in the cold, dense atmosphere.

Huddling against the cold with the Townsends, while he struggled to scrape away the ice from the lock, he tried to ignore the cold that seemed to seep so deeply that it chilled his bones. The lock in the back door was frozen shut. With his Swiss Army knife, he scoured away the ice covering the lock. By the time he was able to open the door, his fingers were stiff with cold, as stiff and as unyielding as the twisted fingers of some of his patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Finally, after a few minutes of digging the ice out of the lock, he was able to turn the knob and open the door. Slapping his hands together to get the circulation going in his hands, he brushed the snow from his shoes and closed the door behind the Townsends as they walked past him into the clinic. Gazing at the clock hanging on the laboratory wall, he saw that it was just half past seven that Monday morning. The rest of the staff would not arrive for another half hour, and, as per his routine, he would not begin seeing patients until nine-thirty, when he normally finished rounds on his patients in the hospital. This morning, rounds would have to wait as he took care of the problems posed by Danny Townsend. There were medical problems; there were legal problems; and, most importantly, there were social problems. They all needed immediate attention. Once inside, after turning on the overhead fluorescent lights he plugged in the coffee pot in the small room that served as the makeshift kitchen and lounge for the clinic staff. He did so silently, the quiet undisturbed by the usual small talk, which he normally began with each visit with a patient, new or old, healthy or infirm.

At the back of the clinic, Hendricks’ private office was spacious if not spare. There was only a desk, two bookshelves, two chairs, and a small sofa with matching end tables on either end. On the wall hung his diplomas and medical certificates. On the main wall, was a Galen Rowell photograph taken in Patagonia, that he’d bought at some photography store in Georgetown, where he’d been a medical student. Galloping off under a Patagonian sky, with the great granite spires of Cerro Torre, Torre Egger and Torre San Exupery towering in the background, was a picture of wild, unbroken horses taken by Galen Rowell. Cluttering his desk were patients’ charts, drug reprints from pharmaceutical detail men, laboratory reports, and, next to the phone, post-it notes for patients to call back. There were always patients to call back. They always needed to be called back and be reassured that they weren’t dying. The diabetics, though, were a different matter, as their lab tests indicated whether they needed to increase or decrease the doses of their insulin.

John and Shirley Townsend sat down in the aged brown vinyl sofa, where some of the more gaping, offensive holes were covered with duct tape. The tape matched the color of the leather, and he found the state of the couch inoffensive enough not to consider replacing it for another year or two, if it lasted that long. For years, his wife had been after him to replace the couch, but he had grown fond of it. He had grown found of it in spite of her. It was a difficult task not to be sentimentally attached to the ancient piece of furniture when he had addressed so many patients – some with good news; some with bad – as they sat in the hollows of its cushions.

Before he sat down in the chair opposite his desk from the Townsends, he went back to the nurses’ lounge and poured himself a cup of coffee. John, want a cup? It’s fresh. For years, John Townsend had been a patient of Hendricks, and the doctor knew him well enough to know that in certain matters of the Church, John was considered a lost cause. When it came to coffee and caffeine, John Townsend was considered a lapsed member of the Church. While the bishop might give him problems about his caffeine consumption, while the Church elders might wring their hands over it, Hendricks never would. Each and every time he saw him in clinic, he offered him a cup. A lapsed Catholic, life in the valley of the Chosen had driven him even further away from religion, especially organized religion. There was no more organized religion on the face of the earth than that of the LDS. This, though he considered himself something of a spiritual man. Spiritual in ways he was reluctant to further elaborate on when someone asked. To Matthew Hendricks, to be a good doctor meant to be a man of some spiritual belief, religious or otherwise.

If you’re offering? replied Townsend. Then, I’ll take some. I didn’t get much sleep last night. Just make it black, like you usually do. No sugar. No milk.

I remember how you take it, John.

Danny Townsend, their twenty-seven year old son, sprawled on the wingback leather chair next to the sofa, one leg straddling the armrest, the other leg soundly planted on the floor. Though Jack and Shirley were meticulous in their own dress, Danny wore dirty Wrangler jeans, the fly half-zipped, and a grimy wool shirt worn at the elbows. Despite the snow outside and the chilly temperature that would not budge, he wore tennis shoes and white athletic socks with blue stripes. An equally threadbare Carhardt jacket kept him from the cold. A tall, skinny young man, he was a couple of inches taller than his father, who was just under six feet in height. Unlike his father, he didn’t have the stout, muscular shoulders that a lifetime of hard, outdoor work would have hewn. Instead he was as thin as a fencepost. His dark, shoulder-length hair was greasy and full of dandruff. He had a thin, wispy beard, the facial hair as threadbare as a patch of well-worn grass at one of the local parks, in places where the children ran free and frequently in more clement weather. Beneath the thin facial hair were acne scars, and in a few places small, red, angry nodules of active lesions. Like his mother, he had grayish-blue eyes that seemed as vacant as the local softball fields this time of year. They were the eyes of the fanatical faithful, the terminally ill, or the forever demented. They were pools of wonder; they were pools of misconception. The impassive eyes wandered all about: first they were on objects covering Hendricks’s desk; then they took in his diploma and medical certificates hanging on the wall and the medical textbooks that sat upon the bookshelves. They seemed mesmerized by the picture of the horses on the Patagonian piedmont.

So how are Jack and Agnes doing? enquired Hendricks. Among the first patients whom he attended when he opened his practice a little over a decade ago were Jack and Agnes Ericson. I imagine Jack is swearing at the cold. It can’t be too good for his arthritis. A decade of practicing in the small community had left him with a remarkable recall of his patients’ medical problems and the medications they were taking for them. This indelible recall resulted in his seldom having to open the chart to remember just what medications he had written for them during their previous visit. This almost eidetic imagery had served him well, first as a medical student, then as a resident, and finally as an attending physician in his own private practice.

You know Jack, said Shirley. There’s not too much he doesn’t complain about. Shirley emitted a short laugh as she said this, and Hendricks smiled and slowly nodded his head, nodding his head as though he were another elder in the Church full of sagacious wisdom.

They’re getting on in years, replied Hendricks. Getting old is not for the faint of heart. With their arthritis, they must hate this cold.

Winter won’t be over soon enough, said John. Soon enough for them or for anyone else.

Amen, added his wife. Amen.

I don’t hear the skiers complaining, said Hendricks. Grand Targhee, what the community citizens regarded as the local ski area, was just an hour away, clinging to the backside of the Tetons.

They can have it, responded Shirley.

Hendricks leaned back in his swivel chair. A tall man, Hendricks’ body had never caught up to the rest of him as he developed into adulthood. It gave him a look of not quite connectedness that’s present in many a second string college basketball player. And Dixon, still leasing their land along the river?

Yeah, John said. "He’s planting it with potatoes in the