Free Home Another Way by Christa Parrish Page B

shoot you like a stew squirrel.”
    “Keep your gun on the wall, Ben,” Doc said. “I’m just here to take a look.”
    I peeked over Doc’s shoulder as he unwrapped a bandage, exposing a fist-sized ulcer on the ball of Ben’s foot. Callused skin, putrid and yellow, ringed a meaty crater. “Rabbit, I need that pan,” Doc said.
    The woman lugged a cast-iron pan from the shelf above the stove. Doc lined it with a large sterile pad and put Ben’s foot in it. He took a bottle of clear liquid— saline , the label read—from his bag and flushed the wound, and then applied a cream. “If you get queasy, Sarah, you shouldn’t watch,” he said, wiping his instruments with alcohol. Using forceps to lift the edge of the dead skin, he sliced off a chunk with a scalpel, continuing until the rotted skin was removed. Then Doc took a blunt metal rod and probed the raw flesh.
    “You still smoking?” he asked Ben.
    “I tries to quit, but, Doc, you be making me lay here all day. Ain’t nothing else to do.”
    Doc dabbed on another ointment and dressed the wound. He gave the tube to Rabbit. “Apply this twice a day when you change the bandage. And here. This is an antibiotic. Have him take one pill at breakfast and one before bed. Ben, listen to me. No smoking. And no alcohol.”
    “Come on, Doc.”
    “I mean it. Now, this is Sarah Graham. She’ll be checking in on you once a week and bringing your groceries.”
    “Oh, no.” Rabbit shook her head, oily hair slapping against the cabin walls. “I don’t be wanting that girl here, spitting on how we live. You come.”
    “You know I can only get here once a month.”
    “But—”
    “Do you want your husband to lose his foot?”
    Rabbit’s mouth snapped shut. She crouched, twisting her gangly arms around the paper bag. “I have to be putting this meat in the snow,” she said, the flimsy door slamming behind her.
    “Don’t pay Rabbit no mind,” Ben said. “She’s a jealous one. Don’t want no other woman looking at me.” Grinning through thorny whiskers, he added, “It don’t bother me none.”
    Rabbit was nowhere to be seen as we got back into the Jeep.
    “That man should be in a hospital,” I told Doc.
    “And you care?”
    My nostrils flared, and I ground my teeth together, staring straight ahead. He was right. If Ben had his foot lopped off tomorrow, I would continue to eat, drink, and be merry. Well, as merry as I got.
    Doc shook his head. “Most of the people around here, they don’t have insurance. Some of them don’t even have indoor plumbing. They’re like Ben and Rabbit. All they know is this mountain.
    “Yes, Ben should be in a hospital. Can I force him there? Should I? I do what I can, Sarah. I treat my patients with samples given to me by drug reps, with old pharmacy stock and things I pick up from garage sales. Heck, I even pull from my own medicine cabinet.
    “It took me months, years in some cases, to get these people to trust me. They’re proud. And they don’t take handouts. Mostly, I’m paid in venison and jars of apple butter, a handful of loose change now and then. Someone offered me a chicken once. A live one.” Doc laughed a little. “And Hiram Dennison gives me old National Geographic s. I have no idea where he got them, but so far I’ve collected April 1957 to December 1961.”
    “You’re the altruist.”
    “No, not me.”
    “Yeah, right. Why else would you be here, schlepping around in the snow, eating dead deer?”
    Doc seemed to age twenty years with my question, shoulders crumpling as he turned down another rutted path. “We all have skeletons. Do you want to share yours first?”
    I adjusted the heat vent, listening as the birch twigs whipped against the side panels of the Jeep, scratching the paint. Hot air blew into my face. I unzipped my jacket a little, an embarrassed sweat dampening my neck.
    “Where to now?” I asked finally, my voice raspy, unsure.
    “Back to that school bus.”
    “Someone lives