![]() She had seen her father perform countless exceptional procedures – setting badly broken bones, draining pustulous head wounds, and once he made an incision into a man’s bladder to extract a stone the size of a fig – but she had never seen him restart a stopped heart. The human heart, with its auricles and ventricles and valves, its precise oscillation, was, to her, a miracle of engineering. ‘Nonsense.’ Her father began massaging the man’s chest. ‘Or blow tobacco smoke into his mouth,’ suggested the other man – the coach driver? – who was small and freckled with wiry red hair. ‘Get a hot poker, set it against his head, that’ll shock him awake,’ Tillings said. Two uneven streams ran down either side of his beard. ‘To encourage the swallowing reflex.’ But the man didn’t swallow. Holding the bottle by the neck, he pushed back the man’s head and poured a glug down his throat. He told Tillings to prop the fellow up while he opened a bottle of whiskey. Then he placed two fingers against his wrist. He sat down on the stool next to the sofa and put his ear to the man’s mouth. It’s important to keep the extremities warm, her father always said. Was he breathing? Vita, who had seen many an injured man brought into their house, stared at his chest but couldn’t make out a rise and fall. The man’s face – closed eyes, open mouth – had a waxy tinge, like skin on hot milk. ![]() You see where his forehead is swelling? Cracked the rail when he fell.’ Tillings went on, lowering the man onto the green velvet upholstery. Her father directed them to the long sofa against the windows in his office, where the light was best. ‘He collapsed on the porch, didn’t say a word. ‘We was just changing horses for the Boston coach,’ Mr. Sherman Tillings, who owned the saddlery and the public stable and had a wife named Thankful, was at the injured man’s head Vita didn’t recognize the other man. Her father opened his door and stood in the doorway, unshaven and wearing the same gray waistcoat he’d been wearing for three weeks straight. Like her brother and sister, Vita always called her father Dar and her mother Mitty – her older brother Freddy’s attempt at saying their names, Arthur and Marie, when he was a baby. Maneuvering, the men knocked over the little oak table with its double-wick lamp. As Vita stood up, Sweetie flew off her shoulder to the fixed safety of the newel post. She was about to give up her vigil when she heard the sound of carriage wheels on the gravel drive, and then a man shouting:Ī minute later the front door banged open and two men came into the house carrying a third man by the armpits and ankles. But her neck was getting sore, and the light from the landing window dropped to almost nothing whenever a cloud passed over the sun. In one hand Vita wielded a silver letter opener like a surgeon’s knife, slicing the crisp, cream-colored pages to reveal row after row of dark print like so many ants marching from one idea to the next. The book’s pages were mostly uncut since it had only arrived yesterday, from England everything was still slow because of the war. Triangular fossa, scapha, auricular lobule, Vita recited to herself. Sweetie repositioned her claws and butted her soft pale head against Vita’s ear – the triangular fossa. ‘What does he do in there all day?’ Vita asked Sweetie, her brother’s parakeet, perched on her shoulder. She knew he was in there although for the last thirty minutes – she squinted at the watch pinned upside down to the shoulder of her dress – she’d heard nothing, not even the shush of a newspaper page turning. Her mother and sister had gone to visit Aunt Norbert in town, and Vita was waiting for her father to emerge from his office, which was directly across from the staircase. ![]() VITA WAS SITTING ON THE front stairs in a shaft of sunlight reading On Diseases Peculiar to Women when they carried the Boston man into her house. ‘Hysteria is often excited in women by indigestion.’
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