Free Please Remember This by Kathleen Gilles Seidel Page A

lawyers, and businessmen, but there had been Ravenals in Fleur-de-lis since the riverboat had sunk. They cared about the town. So Phillip had taken the County Extension agent job, determined to help the small farmer. With the energy and enthusiam that his older son would bring to the problems of the downtown twenty-five years later, Phillip was trying to negotiate better loans and to set up energy-purchasing co-ops. Everyone liked him. He was outgoing and personable with a pretty wife and two little boys.
    Then Matt had gotten a phone call. Phillip, the outgoing, personable Phillip, and Polly, his pretty wife Polly, were dead, killed in the crash of a small airplane.
    Matt couldn’t imagine the world without his older brother. The sun had gone behind a cloud. The whole town felt that way. No one could believe that Phillipwas gone. Phillip had been the town’s best hope. He was going to make everything right again.
    Matt went home for the funeral, knowing that this was his future now. He was the boys’ guardian. He was responsible for a five-year-old and a baby.
    “We’ll take care of them for as long as you need us to,” his parents said immediately.
    But he knew that wasn’t a permanent solution. When Phillip and Polly had been making out their wills, everyone had said that children shouldn’t be raised by grandparents if there were any younger relatives who could do it.
    So he finished his residency and returned home to start practicing with old Doc Bailey.
    He was twenty-eight. His own friends from high school, the smart kids, were long gone. One was in San Francisco, a road manager for a rock band. Another was in England, studying at the London School of Economics. The rest were in Kansas City, building lives for themselves there. That was what happened in Kansas—too many of the smart, ambitious kids left. The people Matt’s age who had stayed in town were the ones who hadn’t gone to college, the ones settling down to work the farms, pump gas, and repair cars. By now many were already divorced with eight-, nine-, even ten-year-old kids. They were good people, but Matt had little in common with them.
    Of course, south of town were “the hippies”—at least that was what Fleur-de-lis called them. Matt knew they weren’t hippies; the day of the hippie had already come and gone. But they had chosen a counterculture lifestyle; they were artists and writers. Wellread, alert, and full of laughter, they were interesting people. Matt hungered to know them.
    But they had come to Kansas determined not to be Matt Ravenal. Matt had obligations, responsibilities to the boys and his patients. He wore a tie and had a payroll to meet. He was the Establishment.
    None of them came to him for health care, even though several of the women were pregnant. He assumed that they were going over to the free clinic in the next county. Time passed, and he saw one of them at the post office. She had a newborn with her.
    He could tell that she was proud of her baby. She was gazing at the other people to see if they were looking at the child. They had been, but as soon as she tried to make eye contact, they looked away. After all, she was one of the long-haired hippie freaks.
    So he spoke. “That’s a sweet-looking baby. Is it a boy or a girl?” The baby’s little T-shirt was tie-dyed in shades of red and purple.
    “A boy. His name is Freedom.”
    That was going to be a real hit on the playground when the kid was in third grade. “Is he doing well? Is he an easy baby?”
    “He’s a dream. I’m convinced that the hospital environment is so hard on babies, all that light and those noises. It’s too stressful for them.”
    Matt had to agree with her. Healthy babies didn’t need the harsh lights and humming equipment, but the technology had to be there for the babies who weren’t healthy, and you could never know ahead of time which baby was going to be healthy. So the healthy babies had to put up with it for the sake of the sick