Mercy Express

At a very long red light I idle behind an ambulette with its blinker on for the dialysis center, carrying one passenger who sits facing backwards through the darkened glass. The side of the ambulette says Mercy Express, with a kind of stylized dove arriving at the last letter.

I remember a cold, gray sunrise at a rural hospital in Uganda years ago, when I sat exhausted in the creeping mist of an open-air corridor. For those in care, the only services were medical—no food or laundry—and so camped in a loose ring around the walls were women and children, families providing these other things, who had started early fires for tea and bread. The chaplain began his rounds and walked heavily on the concrete in his robe, with his hands clasped behind his back and his head bowed. Five steps ahead of him, a nun swung a large bell back and forth, and behind him, a child carried a vessel that exhaled a curl of smoke. I’d roused N and she’d padded her muddled way out to the front intake area, with a hospital sheet wrapped around her waist and her hair bunched up on the side of her scrubbed face. Nurses came intermittently to complain about the sheet and she agreed to swap it for a lesser one. For ninety minutes we waited, and dawn pushed a square of light closer to our bench, and the hospital yard filled with patients. People noticed our color, and then the sheet, and N seemed unaware, dozing upright, while I checked the time with slow raises of my arm.

The man who arrived may well have lived three generations in his own skin, and smoked some crack besides.

At the battle of Little Bighorn, General George Custer died alongside both of his brothers, Thomas and Boston. Boston Custer, that is a name, and the widow George left behind was called Libby Bacon. The two together sound like a vaudeville act. George’s nephew and brother-in-law were also lost at Bighorn, though not Custers. Five men in one family, on one field in a single day. A colleague of mine does work related to a period in American history when war veterans could visit the limbs they lost on the battlefield, in a museum dedicated to the collection and preservation of these. Some visited for years, gazing into the cases on a private journey that’s hard to imagine. Some demanded the return of the limb, and were denied. I visited recently with a good friend to whom the last five years have been unkind, as he recuperated, again, in a medical building of few windows. We’d made our way to a sort of gazebo near the entrance and I was introduced to a woman already there, sitting in a wheelchair, with no legs. I am no longer startled by legs missing at the knee, that is not so very rare, but this woman had none at all. They were simply all gone, she ended at her hips. I was taken aback at the clenching in my chest, something almost like fear, and the unwelcome thought of what it means to be a whole person, and how it would be to be her. She greeted me kindly and moved away so that me and my friend might chat privately. She is practiced, by now, at leave-taking.

The stonemason who rebuilt my back stoop was recommended by a neighbor whose family has lived here for three generations. The man who arrived may well have lived three generations in his own skin, and smoked some crack besides. He had few teeth, and was difficult to understand. I met him at a quarry though, to choose two small bluestone slabs. He worked with no power tools that I could see, and very slowly. The topless stoop, open to the rain, waited almost ten days for his return. But return he did, this time in a pickup with a kind of rustic cage of wood and wire obscuring the bed. I stood idly in the yard while he unfurled his soft canvas bag of tools, and as I gazed at the truck, a wrinkled head rose surreally over the boards and slowly rotated to fix me with a flat, beady eye. My chest clenched then, too, as four more naked, craning necks surfaced and swiveled. “Turkeys” the man said. “They were my daughter’s, my Anna. She passed twelve days ago.” I couldn’t bring myself to ask why they were in the truck and hear that they, too, would soon arrive at a sudden end. When next he came, he drove a car. He did good work, he rarely spoke, he took only cash and I can’t remember his name. I do remember the grinding drought of his suffering, and the single iced tea I offered.

Now I’ve found a baby bird, struggling at the edge where lawn meets macadam, eyes still shut and almost naked, its beak grotesquely large, its backbone arched and cavernous. In my hand we’re skin against skin, its fluttering heart the size of four rice grains. The intake form at the sanctuary asks what his name is. The form also asks whether I would like to volunteer as a transporter, which is what I’ve just done, and yes, it’s been very satisfying so far. Two dogs watch me leave, from a stump at a bend in the drive, and I imagine their noses steaming the glass of the tank that will hold the bird as his quills pierce through, and his eyes creak open.