The Green Ledger

Doc Teague’s insulated coveralls had hung on a peg in the clinic since September, because Nora had not been able to make herself throw them out. They were four inches short in the leg for the man in her barn. His irrigation boots from the tack room fit better.

She handed both over the pen rail and turned her back while he dressed. It took him a long time, and she heard what it cost him, and she did not offer to help. She had known him for fifteen minutes.

“All right,” he said.

He was standing when she turned around, with one hand on the top rail. He was a big man. She had known that, in a way, because she had guessed his weight to the pound. It was different to see it upright. He had dark hair with straw in it and a day of beard, and his face had gone the color of candle wax.

“It’s fifty yards to the clinic,” she said. “Can you do fifty yards?”

“I did six miles.”

“You had four legs. Put your arm over my shoulder.”

He looked at her for a second before he did it. He was careful about it, and he kept most of his weight on his own feet. The cedar smell was all around her then, close and warm. Her shoulders loosened and her breathing slowed, exactly as they had at the pen rail in the night. She set her jaw and walked him out into the snow.

It had stopped falling hard and was coming down fine and steady in the grey before sunrise. The path she had broken last night was gone. She waded through snow above her knees, and he came behind in her track with his hand on her shoulder. Neither of them wasted breath on talk.

The clinic was cold, but the stove still had coals. She built the fire up, put him on the exam table on his left side with a folded towel under his bad hip, and lit two lanterns. She washed her hands in a basin of kettle water. It was all so ordinary that it steadied her.

“I’m going to block this with lidocaine,” she said, drawing it up. “You’ll feel a sting and then pressure.”

“Last night you said little sting.”

“Last night I thought you didn’t speak English.” She unzipped the coveralls to the waist and folded the right side back. “Hold still.”

The six torn stitches were the top six, at the point of the shoulder, where the wound was widest. The nylon had cut out through the skin on one side. The muscle layer underneath had held, and she let out a breath when she saw that. She ran the block in along both edges and watched his face while she did it. He did not flinch, and he did not pretend it was nothing. He just kept breathing.

“I have questions,” she said.

“I figured.”

“Were you born like this, or did something bite you?”

“Born. Nobody gets bitten into it. That’s the movies.”

“Is it the moon?”

“No. We change when we choose to. The full moon’s for pack business, meetings and law. That’s all it’s for.”

She picked out the cut nylon with forceps and dropped it in a steel bowl. “How many of you are there?”

“Twenty-three in the pack. We’re on the Mulvaney ranch, two and a half miles down your road.”

“The woman on the tractor. Tall, with a fair braid.”

“Immy. Yes.”

“She waves at me.”

“She likes you. She’s been saying for two months we ought to call you.”

Nora threaded a needle. Her hands were perfectly steady, which seemed strange to her, because nothing else in her was. “Is that why nobody on that ranch has called me in twelve weeks? Four hundred cows, and not one phone call.”

“Four hundred and twenty. And yes.” He was quiet while she set the first stitch. “A human only gets told if the alpha says so. Ours is Maeve Mulvaney. She hadn’t made up her mind about you.”

“But you’re telling me.”

“You sat up all night with it in your barn. I don’t see what’s left to hide.” His voice stayed flat. “I’ll answer to Maeve for it. That’s mine to do, not yours.”

She tied off and cut. The second stitch went in. She was working four inches from his collarbone, and she could hear his heart as clearly as she had heard the wolf’s. It was the same heart, slow and strong.

“Why did you change back?” she asked. “I’ve been trying to work it out. You were a wolf at one o’clock, and I was right there.”

“Because you knocked me out cold. A wolf that goes all the way under wakes up a man. It takes an hour, sometimes three, and it happens every time. Doc knew that. In forty-one years he never put one of us under.”

Her needle stopped.

“What did he do instead?”

“Something to take the edge off, and then he numbed the place, like you’re doing now. We stayed awake and stayed wolves, and he sewed.”

“He operated on conscious wolves.”

“We knew him. We held still.”

She set the third stitch and the fourth in silence. The skin was easier to close than it should have been. The edges were pinker than they had been at midnight and already tacky, and when she glanced down at the punctures on his hip, where the coveralls gapped, they had the dry, drawn look of bites two days old.

“You heal fast,” she said.

“About twice as fast as you’d expect. Changing pulls on a wound, though. That’s what tore these.”

“And you weigh two hundred pounds.”

“Yes.”

“As a wolf, too?”

“Same either way.”

“I guessed that across the pen by headlamp,” Nora said, and she felt a small, foolish satisfaction. She tied the fifth. “I dosed you like a very large dog. I worked it out on the back of an invoice.”

“I’m still here.”

“That was luck. I don’t like luck.” The sixth stitch went in just where the last one had gone in the night. She tied it and cut it. “Forty-three again. Don’t lift that arm above your shoulder. Who did this to you?”

For the first time he took a while to answer.

“Three wolves from another pack. They were up on our boundary, where they had no business. That’s pack business, and Maeve has to hear it before anybody does. I’m not putting you off. It’s hers first.”

She thought about that while she taped a dressing over the top of the wound. It was a plain answer, and he had told her exactly where it stopped. She found she could live with it for now.

“You won’t find the right doses in any book,” he said. “Doc wrote them down. He wrote all of us down. It’s in the bottom drawer of that desk, on the right.”

“That drawer’s locked. He lost the key.”

“He didn’t lose it. It’s on a nail inside the lid of the grain bin in your barn. He kept it there so it wasn’t in the same building as the drawer.”

Nora looked at him. Then she zipped the coveralls up to his chin, as she would have done for anyone on her table, and put her coat on.

“Stay there,” she said. “I mean it differently this time.”

The grain bin was a galvanized box with a hinged lid, and she had lifted that lid twice a day for twelve weeks to feed the cat. She lifted it now and turned her headlamp up at the underside. There was a nail in the wooden brace, and a small brass key hung on it from a loop of baling twine. It had been eight inches above her hand every morning since September.

Bolus watched from the haystack.

“You knew, too,” she said to him. “Everybody knew.”

The key turned in the brass lock without a catch. The drawer held one thing, a tall ledger bound in green cloth, with the spine mended in black tape. She carried it to the lantern on the desk. Rhys had sat up on the table and was holding his side, and he said nothing.

Inside the front cover, in Doc Teague’s square capitals, were three lines.

LIGHT SEDATION AND A LOCAL BLOCK. NEVER ALL THE WAY UNDER UNLESS YOU WANT A MAN ON YOUR TABLE.

“Well, I didn’t have a table,” Nora said. Her voice came out thin.

The first entry was dated August 1985. Wolf, male, adult, 180 lb. Wire cut, left hind. Cleaned, 14 sutures. Under it were the drugs and the amounts, in milligrams, and a note on how long each had lasted. The next entry was the same, and so was the one after. The columns ran down every page: date, name, age, weight, complaint, treatment, dose, paid. There were broken legs and whelping troubles and a wolf with a fish hook through its lip. There were weights from eleven pounds to two hundred and twenty. It was forty-one years of patients in the same patient hand, and every one of them was a case she would have given a year of her life to see.

She turned pages faster. She knew some of the surnames from mailboxes. Mulvaney came up again and again, and Doyle, and Brannock.

She stopped in October of 2001.

“‘Brannock, R.,’” she read aloud. “‘Age nine. Porcupine quills, muzzle and both forepaws, thirty-one removed. Paid: one lollipop owed.’”

She looked up. The man on her table had gone a little red along the cheekbones.

“I thought I could take it,” he said.

Nora laughed. It burst out of her before she could stop it, loud in the cold room, and it went on longer than the joke deserved. She had to put a hand on the desk. He watched her, and one corner of his mouth went up.

“He never did pay,” he said. “That’s twenty-five years. I’ve quit expecting it.”

“Thirty-one quills.”

“It felt like more.”

She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist and looked down at the page again, at the neat doses and the neat weights. The laughing stopped as suddenly as it had started.

“I paid three hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars for this practice,” she said.

He waited.

“I read every book he had. I read ten years of invoices. I read the vaccine logs and the controlled-drug register, and I counted the bottles in that cabinet against it. I asked him who his big accounts were, and he gave me a list, and the biggest ranch on the creek wasn’t on it. I thought that was odd. I thought maybe they’d fallen out.” She shut the ledger. Her hands were not steady now. “He stood in this room in April and watched me pick out a cow with a bad quarter by the smell of her, and he smiled into his moustache and told me I’d do fine. He sold me half a practice and locked the other half in a drawer.”

“He wasn’t free to tell you.”

“Then he wasn’t free to sell it to me.” She heard how loud that was and did not care. “Do you know what I did last night? I guessed. I had an animal bleeding out in my barn that wasn’t in any textbook, and I guessed at his weight and guessed at his dose and put him under as deep as I could get him, because that’s what you do. The right answer was eight inches over my head in a grain bin the whole time. If I’d guessed wrong, I’d have killed you. I’d have buried a wolf this morning and never known I had killed a man.”

“You didn’t guess wrong.”

“That isn’t the point.”

“No,” Rhys said. “It isn’t. He should have told you. I said so in the barn, and I’ll say it to him.”

She had been ready for him to defend the old man, and he had not done it. The anger had nowhere to go. It stayed in her chest, hot and heavy, and she turned away and picked up the telephone on the desk to give her hands something to do.

There was no dial tone. She pressed the cradle twice and listened to nothing.

“The line’s down.”

“It’ll be the cottonwoods at Pettibone’s corner. They come down on it every big storm.”

She went to the door and opened it. Day had come while she was reading, flat and white. Doc’s old yardstick was nailed to the porch post, and the snow stood against it at twenty inches and was still coming. Where the road should have been there was a smooth trough between the fence lines, without a track in it.

“Twenty inches,” she said. “The county won’t plow past the highway until it stops.”

“I need to get word to the ranch.”

“About what happened to you?”

“Yes.”

She turned around. He had gotten his feet to the floor and was standing, with his good hand flat on the table.

“Can you turn into the wolf and go?” It was the strangest sentence she had ever said, and she said it in the voice she used for discussing a lame horse.

“No. It would open that side from one end to the other.”

“Can you walk two and a half miles in twenty inches of snow on that hip, in rubber boots, with the blood you lost last night?”

His jaw worked. She could see how badly he wanted to say yes. He was a man with a job to do, and she understood that, because she was the same. She did not tell him he couldn’t. She waited for him to work it out.

“No,” he said at last.

“Will they come looking for you?”

“They’ll look on the ridge first. The snow’s had all night to cover my trail. Somebody will think of this barn by and by, but they can’t get a truck up here either.”

“Then you’re my patient until the road opens,” Nora said. “I’m angry at Doc Teague, and I’m not done being angry. I’m not angry at you. Come in the house.”

She took the ledger with her under her coat.

He stopped just inside the kitchen door to get his breath. His eyes went to the buckle on its nail, and they stayed there a moment longer than most people’s did.

“My father’s,” she said. “I never met him.”

He nodded, and asked nothing, and she liked him for it.

The couch stood along the wall by the wood stove. It was six inches too short for him. She brought a pillow and two quilts and put a mug of coffee where his left hand could reach it, and by the time she had fed the stove he was lying down with his boots off and his eyes half shut. Bolus sat on the arm of the couch above his feet, keeping guard.

Nora sat at the kitchen table and opened the green ledger to the first empty line. The entry above it was from August, in Doc’s hand. She uncapped her pen. She wrote the date, Tuesday night’s date, because that was when the patient had come in.

Wolf, male, 200 lb. Bite wounds, right side and left haunch. Full anesthesia (see dose). 43 sutures.

She came to the next column and stopped.

“Who do I put for owner?”

“There’s no owner,” he said, without opening his eyes. “There’s a grandmother. She’d tell you it’s the same thing.”

“I haven’t met her.”

“You will.”

She wrote Owner unknown. In the last column, under Paid, she left a blank.

When she looked up he was asleep. The stove ticked, and the quilt rose and fell. The cedar smell had already begun to settle into the room, and her shoulders had come down again without her leave. Outside the window the snow was thickening. She had a wolf on her couch and no road and no telephone, and nobody on earth knew where either of them was.
***