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SHORT STORY - Chapter 1 of a Work in Progress

CHICKASAW:

The Good Life and Hard Times of Dr. Christopher Jacques

A Novel by John R. Guthrie

Chapter 1

BOOK I

Lilith McGee

Of Adam’s first wife, Lilith, it is told

(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve)

That, ere, the snake’s, her sweet tongue could deceive

And her enchanted hair was the first gold.

And still she sits, young while the earth is old,

And subtly of herself contemplative,

Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave,

Til heart and body and life are in its hold.

Dante Gabriel Rosetti

On the Matter of the Red-Headed Nurse

Your love is the poltergeist, the ghost

that haunts the keeping room of memory.

The djinn, insistent, raps upon the door,

your voice entreats that you yet burn for me.

Gale swept, the polar ice now shifts and cracks.

A tidal wave; its breakers crash and swirl,

sweep bare beachheads of distant continents.

Your taste, your scent, your speech; red hair cascades

across your carmined breasts; I am lock-stitched

to you by witching hands whose touch I know

too well. Your wraith, now petulant within

the dark and secret counsels of my night,

uncaring, hurls about the treasures there,

leaving but ruin where order once maintained.

John R. Guthrie

Chapter 1: Lilith McGee

Chickasaw County is where the Piedmont hills descend like a green and rumpled blanket from the rounded peaks of the Great Smoky Mountains, the land lowering into the remote northwestern corner of the small state, shaped like a pork chop, that is South Carolina. It is a Jesus-haunted place, held captive yet by the grim and tragic history of slavery, the war, and the dreadfulness that followed in the generations since. The people are more poor than not, and many have had limited opportunities educationally. Beyond the town of Austerity, which is the county seat, aside from the industries that now colonize the hills for the cheap labor and pleasant climate, it is a place of streams, of pastures, of woodlands, of fields, of people, all so lovely and dreadful at once that to tell of them properly is a daunting matter.

This story, which is centered in Chickasaw County in the year following the advent of the new millennium, is mostly about a physician named Christopher Jacques—rhymes with lakes— a family doctor by calling, and Lilith McGee, a red-headed nurse who was lovely and loving beyond the telling and as free-spirited as the breezes of springtime. Of necessity, you must know some portion of the story of some of those whose lives arced across that of Christopher and Lilith for otherwise this tale would be left with gaping voids, like a book with half its pages ripped out and discarded.

Chickasaw County was woven into the center of Dr. Jacques’ being as that complex and peculiar construct of the heart’s devise known as home. Lilith McGee was a newcomer, having come from Los Angeles, a place as distant and remote from the spirit and essence of Chickasaw County as is Oz from Kansas. All considered, the fact that Christopher ever met one such as Lilith McGee in Austerity seems as unlikely as it would be to find fairies dancing on the morning’s dew.

The calculus and cosmology of Dr. Jacques emotional center was further complicated by having experienced a divorce a year and a half before, a divorce that was as contentious as heavyweight wrestling. Even so, Jacques was a resilient sort of person, and considered himself to be pretty much recovered from that unhappy interval. He had, though, resolved never to get overly involved with any woman, not beyond his and hopefully her immediate physical needs, and certainly never to marry again. His work, he reminded himself, a profession which he truly loved, was in itself enough. He was determined to engage in that work with a priestly devotion. And being so resolved, he worked with renewed dedication and resultant success so that he even became a bit self-congratulent though, good Southern Baptist that he was, he knew false pride to be a sin. Yet he couldn’t help but recall that he had, after, all, escaped the red-clay poverty of his Chickasaw County upbringing by virtue of enlistment after high school as a U.S. Marine, an infantry rifleman. That gave him a toehold, a stepping stone, a way out. That also gave him money for education. That got him outside the boundaries of Chickasaw County and into a world whose horizons were more distant. And if the experience of being an enlisted infantry rifleman in the Marine Corps, which is as exacting as the draftsman’s pen and square, and the fact that he had been a raised-right rural Southern Baptist sort of boy, a construction which slides toward a Taliban type conformity, and if the required self-denial, obsessiveness and compulsivity of medical school heaped on top of that had left him as narrow in his outlook as the edge of the surgeon’s scalpel, as rigid, let us say, as a bayonet, well, still, he was possessed of a determinedly honest heart. As best he was given light, he cared a great deal about those about him. Until Lilith. Until that fateful meeting, which occurred when he was three years out of this residency training in Atlanta, firmly established in his own clinic, the mortgage payments for it progressing well on that morning, he had succeeded, pretty much on his own terms. He was a physician, the owner and CEO of his own Professional Sub-Chapter S Corporation, a member of Austerity First Baptist Church which was the establishment church in Austerity. If it weren’t for the fact of that divorce, a fact that was still deeply troubling to him, whether or not he admitted it to himself, failure at anything never having been an option, he would probably have become a deacon someday. But a deacon, the Baptist say, must be the husband of one wife. Like it says in the book of Timothy.

Deacon or no, though, he saw himself, and in some degree was correct, as being a purveyor of goodness, health and wisdom to the suffering masses. Then, early one morning, while making rounds at Chickasaw Memorial Hospital, he met Lilith McGee, and all his orderly world was upended.

***

He approached the nursing station where she sat alone, working through her charts.

She looked up and spoke. “Good morning, Doctor.”

Chris, disciplined creature that he was, though he kept that neutral and noncommittal face unchanged, caught his breath, then drew back almost imperceptibly as he saw a profuse luxury of red hair streaked with gold like a sunburst, though it was done up primly and pinned in a French twist behind her head. Alabaster skin. A scattering of barely perceptible freckles. Hazel eyes with flecks of gold. Nose finely sculpted and turned up the slightest amount at the tip, ears as lovely and finely spun as seashells. Jesus. This is the loveliest woman I’ve ever seen. Physically that is. Who knows what’s on the inside. As if it made any difference to a born-again bachelor such as myself. And from that moment onward, Doctor Jacques, he who had resolved never to love any woman more than was seemly, that he would never to marry again, though he could not and would not acknowledge it to himself, loved that nurse, even before he knew her name, more than he had ever dreamt he could love any woman.

Once in a lifetime, a few fortunate men meet a woman like that; a stranger so artfully done, so lithe and lovely, that she will haunt his memory forever. Our books of myth and legend, the stories handed down since time began that tell us who we are, are rich with such tales. When Marc Antony first saw Cleopatra, she was, for better and for worse, indelibly inscribed on his memory. Their love was so intense that it led to a common grave. Psyche, whatever her flaws, so affected the young Eros. John Ridd was so seized in this manner by the exquisite Lorna Doone.

“Hi, I’m Christopher Jacques.” Chris considered the woman before him further. A knockout! His caution still was like that of the ancient mariner upon seeing the mermaid’s beauty. Careful, be formal, business-like. Professional. Great beauty is often a snare and a delusion. It can conceal more than it reveals, can distract and mislead. Prudence is a great virtue

“You’re new,” he continued, allowing himself only the most uptight professional and reserved of smiles.

She smiled back at him. “Well, everybody is once, Doctor Jacques. I’m Lilith McGee.”

Smile like the dawning of a summer day.

Then, as if remembering herself, she shut that smile off as quickly as it had illumined the room. Doctor Christopher Jacques, huh? No ring on this finger. He seems nice enough, pleasant enough, especially considering some of the married jerks on the medical staff here that like to hit on the nurses. Though all of that is of no relevance to me. Lilith McGee is interested in and will tolerate only quality encounters of a professional nature.

“I’ll get your charts,” she said, put down her pen and stood, her manner as starchy as her uniform blouse.

Her shoes were boxy and clunky, both designed for comfort and practicality instead of appearance. Still, though, Jacques noted that in addition to that exquisite face, she was an altogether well turned out woman.

“Thanks.” Even if she is of cordial and professional demeanor, being such a knockout, she’s probably stuck on herself.

She gathered the charts that had Dr. Jacques on them and they sat off down the hallway. The smell of disinfectants, of industrial strength cleaning agents, the hum of the air conditioning, the wavy reflections of the newly waxed Vinyl tile floors were familiar, comforting for them both. As they made their way from room to room though, the white stockings she wore swished as she walked. Nylon?Probably. With spandex woven in for fit. The parent within spoke; hey, guy, keep your mind on the business at hand, which is attending to sick people, not speculating on the nature and contents of the nurse’s garments.

She could barely see Christopher as she walked along beside him, arms heaped with charts. He’s not overly talkative. Nice enough guy, though. Doesn’t seem gay. Would be a waste if he was. Divorced, I imagine. But all that’s someone else’s problem.

Jacques remained determinedly silent, even a bit grim perhaps, until they entered the final patient’s room, skimming the chart as they entered.

Bevels, Blanch H.

84 yo cau fem

Admit Dx, Acute Congestive Heart Failure

Other problems:

Hypertension, controlled

Hyperlipidemia

Osteoarthritis

Hearing impairment

Dr. Jacques recalled those other things he knew of Blanch H. Bevels. She was a widow, lived alone in a small six-room frame house where she and the late Mr. Bevels, once a welder in the Piedmont and Dixie Railroad Repair Shop north of Austerity, had raised their family. The neighborhood, called Shoptown because of the nearby railroad shop, was pleasant enough. If it was a bit shabby, the potted plants, the geraniums and hydrangeas, the rhododendrons and sweet shrub that bloomed in the yards indicated pride of ownership, modest means not withstanding. Her children, the four of the six who had survived childhood illnesses, were in their sixties themselves. Any one of them would have gladly taken her in. She was determined, though, not to accept her children’s’ recurrent invitation to come live with one of them. “Doc,” she’d once confided, “I took good care of those children, and I did it long enough. I’d just end up taking care of them all over again. I’m too busy for that.” Her children, then, had to be satisfied with checking on Mama occasionally in person and by phone. She enjoyed the rhythms, the reflections of her routines, satisfying if simple, that made up her life, and dwelt happily and proudly in the revered and sovereign state called Independence.

As Doctor Jaccques and Lilith entered the room, Jerry Falwell was holding forth at high volume from the TV bracketed against the wall opposite the foot of the bed. Something about AIDS being God’s remedy for immorality.

Doctor Jacques, the open chart still in his hand, looked up and smiled at Mrs. Bevels. “Mrs. Bevels, how are you today?”

She jumped, her reverie interrupted, then smiled. Her gray hair was mussed from the pillow, her dentures were a bit too white. Her color was good, though, unlike the pasty gray it had been when she had crashed into the emergency room, so breathless she couldn’t speak, three days before. He flipped through her chart as she responded.

“Oh, I am so glad to see you, Doctor Jacques! I’ve just been waiting to tell you that I’m feeling so much better. See, I even put a bit of lipstick on this morning. Rouge too. Just in case you send me home today.”

He took her hand and squeezed it. “Mrs. Bevels, you do look even more lovely than usual today. Let’s check a few things before we decide when you’re leaving, though. You want to stay home once you get there. May I look at your legs? They were right swollen when you came in.”

She strained toward him and nodded, a look of expectation and longing on her face, still cupping her ear and straining to hear. Lilith folded back a flap of the lose-weave off-white thermal blanket to reveal Mrs. Bevel’s legs. The doctor pressed with his thumb below her knee to check for any remaining swelling. The skin there was thin, translucent, papery, sagging, mapped with blue veins.

Though it wrinkled and continued to sag where Dr. Jacques thumb had pressed, there was no puffiness, this indicating that her heart was beating more effectively; that her digitalis had slowed and strengthened her heart, that the bed rest, the diuretics, had done what they a were supposed to. The doctor looked up, smiling, and said, “Mrs. Bevels, next time I see you it will be in my office.” He watched for the expected pleased response, but her face sagged in disappointment. She took a deep breath, sighed, and looked as if she might weep, then put on a brave face and smiled. Then she spoke loudly, straining to be heard above Jerry Falwell, “Pizza for breakfast? How nice.”

Dr. Jacques glanced at Lilith, who quickly erased the tiny hint of a smile that played at the corner of that entirely lovely mouth, stepped over, picked up the remote control and muted church TV. Dr. Jacques recalled her smile at the desk, a smile that brought Julia Roberts to his mind. Then she was staring straight ahead, determined not to find humor in Mrs. Bevels’ miscomprehension. Dr. Jacques took the patient’s thin hand, age-spotted and cool, in his again. Shaking his head, smiling at her, Dr. Jacques said, “No, Mrs. Bevels, not pizza. You’re going home.”

She took a deep breath, placed her other hand over his. Looking as pleased as a well-fed tabby, she said, “Doc, that sure is good news. This bed is so hard I might as well have slept on the floor. Of course, I love all you doctors. Nurses too,” she added quickly glancing at Lilith. “You’ve all been just as sweet as you could be. But please, Honey, I’ll even fix both of you a cup of coffee for you if y’all will just come see me at my place from now on.”

“Ms. Bevels, let’s hope I can do that," Jacques replied.

After Christopher and Lilith left Mrs. Bevel’s room and continued down the hall, Dr. Jacques murmured in Mrs. Bevel’s high voice, still looking straight ahead, “Pizza for breakfast. How nice.” He saw Lilith glance at him sternly from the corner of his eye. Then she smiled, chuckled a little in spite of her determined somberness, but quickly added, “Hey Doc, she’s a sweet woman. Hearing impairment is not a joke.”

Dr. Jacques looked at her. She was serious, but again a smile played at the corners of her mouth anyway.

“Right on both counts,” he replied. “But it’s a charming concept, really, breakfast pizza. You a pizza fan?”

“Not really,” she replied. “More like, maybe, tofu. Tofu quesadillas.”

Doctor Jacques responded with mock concern. “How very strange. Where are you from?”

He looked at her; eyes azure, specks of turquoise.

Now he’s really sorta cute. Any other time, this would be great, but not now. Not with the other crap I’ve got to deal with. To Dr. Jacques’ dismay, Lilith McGee, R.N., B.S.N., was unsmiling again and dreadfully professional. Her gaze was direct, betraying nothing. “California. L.A.” She replied evenly. “You?”

“I was born here. Actually out in the county, up closer to the mountains. Swore I’d never come back, but after residency, for a lot of reasons, I did. You like it here?”

She hesitated then replied, “in some ways. It’s not California, though.”

Dr. Jacques smiled at this. “No, it sure isn’t California, is it? We’re still struggling to accommodate the concept of tofu as well as lots of other things here. Haven’t even thought about tofu quesadillas yet. Austerity has its own charm, though.”

Lilith and Christopher continued to chat as they completed patient rounds. Once back at the nurse’s station, they began entering notes in the patient’s charts. Doctor Jacques finished writing, and looked over at Lilith. She was still busy, intent on the nursing notes she was entering in her precise and clear penmanship on a patient chart. with her nursing notes. Placing his pen in the vest pocket of his clinic coat, he stood to leave, his chair sliding back on the floor as he did so. She glanced up briefly, “Have a good day, Doctor Jacques,” and returned quickly to her charting. He hesitated, looked at her. I shouldn’t do this, this is the wrong time to do this, but I’m going to do this, because she is one exceptional woman and she’s probably just waiting for me to ask anyway.

So against his better judgment, Dr. Jacques heard himself saying, “I don’t know any place that serves tofu quesadillas, but I bet we could find something worth eating if you’d care to do dinner sometime.”

She quit writing for a moment, still looking at her chart, just long enough for Dr. Jacques to feel like fidgeting, then looked up at him and said, “Doctor Jacques, I’ve enjoyed talking with you, and I appreciate your offer. Your patients obviously like you a lot too. But I’m taking some courses at the university for my M.S.N. I have to study. Also, please, it’s nothing personal, but I really try to keep my personal and my professional life separate. I’m glad to help you on rounds any time, though, of course.”

“Oh well, too bad,” he said, trying to keep it light and show how much this was as nothing to him. “Have a good day.”

Yet even as he spoke, his inner voice said something else completely; What a fucking ice queen. She’s probably got more social life than she can handle anyway. I should have known, just by looking at her. She’s too much of a knockout. A prima donna. Then maybe I just screwed it up. Seemed too eager. Should’ve waited a while.

But even so, he heard himself saying aloud in that pleasant baritone of his, in the most courteous way, “Well, I’d better be going,” smiling all the while. Raising his hand in a sort of half salute, he turned to leave, walking down the corridor that led to the parking lot. Yet his inner scold continued; not surprising, with her good looks, that she really is stuck on herself. I should be glad I found that out right away. So what? There are plenty of fish in the sea. Not that all of the fish that good looking. But looks aren’t everything. And he consoled himself further by considering Lilith McGee’s character. silently, Anyway, I don’t know anything about her character. That’s what counts in a person. Character! But if I’d waited a while, she probably would’ve accepted.

Once in his car, before backing out of the parking space, he wrenched the rearview mirror down so that he was staring back at himself, searching for some previously undetected flaw. He saw himself staring back, mid-thirties, brown hair, tending toward blond on top. Not thinning much at all, really. Plenty of nose, no deficiency there. Broad face, a bit flat because of the Scottish input to his French Huguenot ancestry. A scar beneath his lower lip from a Marine Corps bayonet drill when he was barely 18. A face with character. Character certainly trumps movie-star good looks, no matter the gender. To bad the Lilith McGees of this world don’t realize that! He readjusted the mirror, backed out, and headed for his clinic. But what a smile that Lilith McGee had.

Chastity, a soggy tissue crumpled in both hands now as she sat on the end of the exam table, concluded. “So, Doc, I told Randy and he left the next morning, and didn’t tell anybody where he was going. Some say he joined the army. Some say he went to Texas ‘cause he had folks there, but nobody knew much about them, and some say that he went back to Tennessee where he went to college before he came here. And Doc, everybody’s so mad now. Really, major, big time mad.”

“I guess so, after what happened, and him abandoning you and the congregation, too. They should be angry at him.”

“No, Doc, you don’t understand. It’s me they’re mad at. Mama is too. She’s said, more than once since I got…since all this happened, ‘I oughtta run you off.’ She’s so mean now.” It occurred to Dr. Jacques as the tear-streaked and desolate young woman before him spoke that her Mama never had been all that good to her.

“Now she hardly speaks,” Chastity continued, “unless it’s to call me a little fool or a Jezebel or worse. The Board of Deacons called me in to meet with them last Saturday. They said a good preacher was hard to get out in the country, and that they had a perfectly good little preacher boy until I started fooling with him. They read to me, right from the Bible, where it says that a whore is a deep ditch; a strange woman is a narrow pit. They said I can’t come back to church until I come down in front of the congregation and ask them all for forgiveness. Then they’d vote and see about letting me come back.”

Doctor Jacques, brow wrinkled now, spoke, “Chas, what did your mom say when she found out all this?”

“She’s the one that took me over there for them to talk to in the first place. She was standing right there, nodding and a-mening up a storm. That’s when she first told me she oughtta run me off, Doc, right there in front of the board of deacons. None of the deacons said a thing to that. They looked like they thought it might be a good idea.”

Nurse Jolley was biting her lower lip, eyes brimming, a worried look on her face. Dr. Jacques took a deep breath and let it out before saying, “So what’d you say to all that, Chastity?”

“Doc, I apologize for saying this in front of you, but I pretty much quit crying then, and I got my breath. And then I told them they could kiss my sinful little ass.”

Dr. Jacques frowned ever so slightly, biting his lower lip, for being disrespectful toward a a diaconate, even one that was small of heart and mean-spirited, even one from a small and remote Baptist church, even under these circumstances, was not in his repertoire. Nurse Jolley though, broke into a grin and held up her hands as if to applaud, but glanced at Doctor Jacques, thought better of it and clasped them in front of her. Chastity concluded, “Mama drew back like she was going to slap me, which is one of her favorite things to do anyway, but she wasn’t quick enough. I turned around and left real quick, them all red in the face and puffed up like toad frogs. Soon as we got home, Mama made me get down on my knees and pray for forgiveness.” Shaking her head, she continued, “Then she kept saying she oughta throw me out. Doc, if she does, if she runs me off, I don’t have no place to go.”

***

Christopher went back to his office in the corner of the clinic to gather up the paperwork that was going home with him. He sat at his desk, checking the appointment sheet for the next day. That done, he leaned back, crossed his arms over his chest and looked up at the picture on the wall opposite his desk. It was a limited edition print of the evening parade at Headquarters Marine Corps at 8^th and I Streets in Washington, DC. He studied the Marines, standing tall in their dress blues, their shadows long in the evening sun, scarlet and gold company flags they carried dipped in salute as an unseen bugler played retreat. Most of them about Chastity’s age. They dissolved as he peered at them, replaced by Chastity, her slender back bent, her thin shoulders hunched over, her trembling and weeping; sobbing, pregnant and alone. She’d done wrong, that Jacques was certain of, but she’d been abandoned and cast out emotionally by the very ones who should have loved her most of all, uncertain of even a roof over her head as she came to term, for that was the way of her church and her people. He took a deep breath, bade her depart his mind’s eye, and concentrated on the Zen-like oblivion, seeking respite in the absence of all concern and desire. But still, memories encroached unbidden; not just Chastity’s plight, the red-headed nurse with whom he had made doubtless looked so foolish to, the payroll next week, the fact that Anna Jolley, his good right hand and near irreplaceable, was retiring soon. When I was 18, a Marine like those in the picture, I could pack everything I owned in that canvas sea bag and go anywhere they sent me. The right thing to do was whatever the sergeant said to do, simple as that. Sighing, he stood, threw the stack of journals and papers before him into the briefcase, stood, and hoisted it up. He switched off the lights and locked the back door as he left.

It was nearly dark, the streetlights flickering on. The parking lot was cold enough that the breeze chilled and rouged his cheeks, urging him to walk briskly to the purple-red, amaranth the color was called, Jaguar Vanden Plas with the initials C. M. J. on the license plate. He got in, started the engine, switched the radio on and rolled toward home. The announcer read the weather then segued into a honeyed and urgent appeal for donations. Dr. Jacques felt a flicker of irritation. He was too tired for anyone, even the genial disembodied voice of the Public Radio host, to ask him for anything more on this long day. He reached over and pressed the CD button, then PLAY as the car pulled into the street. Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, the Bach powerhouse for organ, a favorite, thundered from the speakers. He quickly punched the reject button, and taking a Willie Nelson disc from behind the car’s windshield visor, he shoved it in the slot, then backed off on the volume. Willie revved up in a shower of mellow guitar licks and crooned in a voice as honest and plaintive as the nightingale’s cry something about a king in a cold and lonely castle.

He thought of the red-headed nurse again, reminded himself that she was a lost cause And what do I care? He turned his thoughts to Chastity, seeing her again in his mind’s eye, pathos personified, sitting on the end of the exam table. What was she thinking, to get involved with her Preacher? What was the young preacher thinking? Of course, what did they know? Good Baptist that he wanted to be, it was still troubling to Chris that sex, at least in any realistic detail, was pretty much a forbidden topic here in the schools and elsewhere. As if you just don’t talk about it, it’ll just go away. Kids are told in Sunday school and elsewhere “just say no” and everything will be OK. Yet “just say no,” didn’t work in the Garden of Eden or hardly any time since. Everything in the libidinally charged and hormonally hyped bodies of the young, though, was commanding “just say YES,” for that is Mother Nature’s way of continuing the species. So the Palmetto State has one of the highest rates of venereal disease and pregnancy out of wedlock in the nation.

It took him eight minutes of slow driving to reach the tri-level ranch on a hillside in a development that local wags termed Pill Hill because of the number of physicians that resided there. Disembarking from his car, he twisted the key in the kitchen door and stepped inside.

Theophilus “Theo” Messinger, the Doc’s houseman, was there, putting away the last few dishes from the dishwasher. He stepped over and took the Doc’s briefcase as he greeted him and turned to the kitchen counter, picked up the Austerity newspaper that had been thrown in the driveway that morning and handed it to Christopher. Doc noted the nodules on his finger joints, the stigmata of Theo’s arthritis. He had first met Theo in the emergency room on one of Doc’s on-call days. Chris had looked him over, a graying, seventyish black man of compact build and great dignity holding his right wrist with his left hand.

“Hello Theophilus Messinger. I’m Dr. Christopher Jacques. What brings you to the emergency room today?”

“Doc, I didn’t sleep a bit all night with the misery that’s set up in this wrist. Never had nothing like it before.”

“I looks like it hurts,” Chris had replied. “Anyone in your family, your blood kin have gout?”

“Sure enough my daddy did. He was a farmer. Called it the ‘goutch,’ Doc. Mama’d try to get him to say gout, ‘cause she was a school teacher and said everything just so. Daddy finally said, call it what you want Miss Messinger. It still hurts like hades.” Theo smiled at the recollection as he continued to massaged his wrist.

Fluid from the red and swollen wrist joint, viewed through a microscope with a polarizing filter revealed the tell-tale crystals of uric acid that signified gout. Jacques injected the joint with an anti-inflammatory, wrote him two prescriptions and told Theophilus he’d get immense relief by morning. “You need to follow up with your regular doctor,” he added. Theophilus adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses on the bridge of his nose, then said, “Don’t have one. Hadn’t ever much needed one until now. You taking on new patients Doc?”

“I’d be delighted,” Jacques said,

She’d fired the housekeeper before she left. “But why?”he’d implored in one of the last epochal verbal combats of that ill-fated marriage. “Because, asshole,” she’d hissed back at him, “you have time for everybody but me.”

Christopher had expected the usual when he placed the ad for “housekeeper, live in or live out;” a middle-aged woman from Austerity County, probably black, though white was fine too.

--End, Chapter 1, Chickasaw--

The Chickasaw Plum - Volume II - Number 10 - October 2005

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