Right of Thirst
Frank Huyler
A Novel
Right of Thirst
From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life.
—Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Contents
Epigraph
Part One
America
Chapter One
She let me lie down beside her. But she didn’t…
Chapter Two
Our home is an old two-story clapboard farmhouse twenty miles…
Chapter Three
When I was just starting out as a cardiologist, I…
Chapter Four
I’d met Rachel three weeks after I’d left home for…
Chapter Five
I’d seen the announcement in the local paper. The lecture…
Chapter Six
It was the most expensive restaurant in town, along the…
Part Two
The Valley
Chapter Seven
The days were blinding and bright and deep. Silent, also,…
Chapter Eight
Sanjit Rai, our liaison officer, was a few inches taller…
Chapter Nine
Early the next morning the men appeared. Eight or nine…
Chapter Ten
I asked Captain Rai to direct me to the pallet…
Chapter Eleven
“What’s wrong?” she asked, and I was in the present…
Chapter Twelve
Elise had gone to bed. We were sipping rum and…
Chapter Thirteen
The next morning the sky was a low steely gray,…
Chapter Fourteen
All night the snow fell, whispering against the sides of…
Chapter Fifteen
So we were back in the dining tent again. Rai…
Chapter Sixteen
The next morning the storm was over, and it was…
Chapter Seventeen
Rai was right. A few days later they asked for…
Chapter Eighteen
Perhaps I should have done it that afternoon. But I…
Chapter Nineteen
Early the next morning, after a few hours of fitful…
Chapter Twenty
Rachel came up the walk from the mailbox with the…
Chapter Twenty-One
General Said’s gift was a tiny mountain lake at the…
Chapter Twenty-Two
She could feel her leg sometimes. It came and went,…
Chapter Twenty-Three
I thought it was thunder. A distant rumble, very far…
Chapter Twenty-Four
Later that night, when there was nothing else to do…
Chapter Twenty-Five
The next morning it was gone, but in the afternoon…
Chapter Twenty-Six
Homa sat alone on her cot in the medical tent.
Part Three
The City
Chapter Twenty-Seven
They came that night. I must have been very deeply…
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Early the next morning, in the dining tent, I finally…
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The soldiers were out on the field. A swarm of…
Chapter Thirty
Late that afternoon, shortly before the sun fell behind the…
Chapter Thirty-One
“Can I stay with you again?” Elise asked, later, as…
Chapter Thirty-Two
The next morning we woke early, just after sunrise, and…
Chapter Thirty-Three
The river was growing larger as we descended, joined by…
Chapter Thirty-Four
Rai, to his credit, took a very long time. It…
Chapter Thirty-Five
Early that afternoon, after we’d dozed fitfully for a few…
Chapter Thirty-Six
I imagined a long wait—a day, or even more. I…
Chapter Thirty-Seven
That night I lay on clean sheets, on the fifteenth…
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The phone rang loudly the next morning. I was already…
Chapter Thirty-Nine
At one end of the lobby, just past the bank…
Chapter Forty
When the time came to meet Rai in the lobby,…
Chapter Forty-One
They sent a small gray Asian sedan with tinted windows.
Chapter Forty-Two
That evening, the bellman flagged a taxi down for us…
Chapter Forty-Three
Later, when Elise had been prevailed upon to help put…
Chapter Forty-Four
“Will he give Homa the money?” Elise asked me, as…
Chapter Forty-Five
The next day, at the airport, I was determined not…
Chapter Forty-Six
A window, near the back. The seats were brown and…
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Frank Huyler
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE
AMERICA
CHAPTER ONE
She let me lie down beside her. But she didn’t want me to touch her, and she didn’t want to talk. I suppose we’d talked enough by then.
She looked up at the ceiling, and blinked. The shades on the bedroom window were open, and it was early in the day. The morning nurse was gone, and it would be hours until the evening nurse arrived.
“How long will it take?” she asked.
I fumbled out of my clothes before getting into bed. For an instant I considered remaining dressed.
“Not long. A few minutes.”
“Please, Charles,” she said, glancing at me, then away. By then I think even her fear had been taken from her. She was calm, and asking for calm.
Her eyes were gray, her hair black where it had grown in again. Despite the hollows of her temples, and the spikes of her cheekbones, it was still her face.
She’d drawn up the bedclothes to her chin—a plain blue quilt, white flannel sheets—as if it were cold outside. Even then she wouldn’t reveal her body, and I had not seen it uncovered for weeks. As I eased in beside her the plastic crackled beneath us, and I felt the cold point of her hip against mine.
I tried to put my arms around her. I tried to hold her close, and whisper. But she shook her head.
So I lay on my side and faced her, and took her hand, and held it against my chest. I tried to stroke her hair, also, short and brittle and dry, but she shook her head again. I brought her hand up to my cheek, and held it there, which she allowed. The room was full of fresh air, but underneath the sheets there was the faint smell of urine, as her kidneys continued on, in ignorance. That was the line she had drawn. When I can’t get up to the bathroom, she’d said, that’s when.
I don’t know if I can, I’d replied.
Then her last flash of intensity, turning toward me, sitting up—please help me, Charles. Don’t make me do this alone.
Her hand lay easily in mine. It revealed nothing at all, and I held it—neither warm nor cold. Her breathing was steady, and she blinked up at the ceiling. I could smell the apple juice on her breath. If she lay thinking, if she lay gathering herself, I couldn’t see it. For the first few minutes, each time I forgot myself, and started to whisper something, she shook her head. And so I did my best, as I had promised her I would. But I was weak anyway, far weaker than she. I shook and trembled, and she lay as still as a sunbather.
On they went—the minutes, the long s
teady breaths, and we lay there together, and she let me hold her hand against my cheek. I began to wonder whether it had been enough. She continued, minute after minute, breath after breath. I held her hand and waited, my heart pounding, though I tried to empty myself as she did—I tried to follow her, if only for a little while. But I began to sweat beneath the heavy quilt. Soon there were rivulets on my chest and belly, and her hand grew damp in mine. I closed my eyes for a long time. I held her hand as though it could save me, and then I felt it loosen.
Her breathing changed and the gasping began. I had dreaded that gasping for so long, and there it was at last—a steady hiss of inhalation, and then a long, mirror-clouding sigh, and then another, the spaces between growing longer, and then a cluster of breaths, and the beginnings of gray, as my fingers slid to the slow pulse in her wrist.
Six breaths, then four, then none. Her heart continued on, and her face began to change. A light blue, at first, in the lips, but then spreading, like water spilled on a table, darkening to the color of slate. Her heart was strong, but then it too began to go, and I knew exactly what was happening beneath my fingers, the skips and shudders, the pauses and returns, and then, as more minutes passed, nothing at all.
The yellow soap shone on the dish, the grains of dust lit up on the blue tiles below it. I heard the sound of a tractor in the cornfield behind our house. From the corner of my eye I could see my body standing in the mirrors over the bathroom sink—not young, with gray hair on its chest and thickening at the waist—not young, but healthy nonetheless. I tried to clear my head, I leaned my face briefly against the glass door of the shower stall, and then I opened it, and stepped inside, and turned on the water.
All the details that awaited me, the telephone calls, the paperwork, the crunch of tires on the gravel, the prepared explanations—I was in the next room, I came and found her—and finally the bundle carried out, light as a girl—I let all of that dissolve in the steam, as it clouded the door, and encased me.
Only a few days earlier, when she was still able to sit in a chair by the window, she’d told me that she loved me. Her words had caught me by surprise, and as I stood in the shower I tried to cling to them. I hadn’t replied, but I’d put my hands on her shoulders from behind, then bent and kissed her cheek. She was trembling, but soon she stopped and looked out through the window and made a casual comment about the dry state of our trees. It was a warm day, and the industrial sprinklers in the fields were on again. At times, I’d look out at them—the sunlight, the wide curtains of water and the millions of sheaves of green corn—and wonder how it had come for her there, through all of that.
The water fell.
We were on a trip to the Pacific Northwest. We were staying at an inn, high in the forest, a few months after our marriage. The hike was a loop through old-growth trees to an overlook. Round trip took about two hours, and the path was wide and easy, with mossy stones at the sides and split-log bridges over the streams.
It was spring, the off-season. I remember the enormous wooden lobby overlooking the snowcapped peaks in the distance, with its chandeliers of antlers and its crossed skis and snowshoes on the walls and the standing stuffed hides of grizzlies shot seventy or eighty years earlier. Leather furniture, cool in the height of summer. A large fireplace made of stones from a river. A hunting retreat, sold for a hotel when the heirs were gone.
The rest of the patrons seemed old to me then. Mostly retired couples, as I remember. The place was nearly empty.
We set off after breakfast. The hotel sat at the edge of a meadow on top of a hill, and the path descended across the grass into the trees below. The trees closest to the hotel had been logged, and so were close and thick above us, but a half mile into the forest we were in old-growth timber. The change was abrupt and clear, like stepping from a hallway into a large room—the spruce, in their immensity, rising hundreds of feet above us, the long spaces between them full of shades and stillness and cool heavy air. The path wound along across the needles and decaying logs as soft as paper, where mushrooms of all kinds grew—off white, deep yellow. There were patches of snow. We were alone on the path, and the forest absorbed our footsteps entirely.
It was just a snapshot, but I remembered it with such clarity—Rachel, ahead of me, walking lightly across the forest floor through columns of sunlight from the high canopy, as I hurried to catch her. Just that—her figure, twenty or thirty yards ahead, among the trees and the empty spaces between them, as I followed. There were so many other moments I might have remembered from that time, but that was the one that never washed away—Rachel, pushing on, without waiting, which was very like her. She was young, and she was not afraid, and we did not know each other quite so well, and we had the first of our many years to fill together.
“Please, Charles,” she’d said. That was all.
CHAPTER TWO
Our home is an old two-story clapboard farmhouse twenty miles outside of town. We bought it many years ago, straining our budget at the time. Despite the bad plumbing and the wires, which took years to replace, and the constant work on the grounds, we both loved it, and it’s odd to think that a material thing, a house, would resonate as it did through our lives. It was something we could not have afforded elsewhere, and though there were many times when Rachel wished the town was larger, and the fields were smaller, and that we had family nearby, the house at least was something we could agree upon.
It’s white, with a dark shake roof, and green trim, and flower boxes at the windows, and it sits on eight private acres at the end of a narrow lane. There are trees around it—pines and willows and oaks—and sheets of green grass, and a small stream, and a few winding paths I put in. A wide porch at the back opens to several hundred open acres of cornfields, and though the land around us eventually filled up with equally expensive homes, even now, no other house is visible from the property. I don’t think there’s ever been a time, driving in, pressing the automatic button in my car to close the gate behind me, when I didn’t feel blessed to have it. It was exactly what my mother always dreamed of, and never had, and never let my father forget. It made me feel like a man of substance, that all my efforts had been for something in the end. And yet it was only a house.
But in the days and weeks that followed Rachel’s death, with nothing to do but live there, to wait for the bell of the microwave—ping, you must eat—the house became something else; peaceful and sustaining on the one hand, shadowy and unearthly on the other. It was late spring, with the first of the cicadas beginning to shriek in the trees, and the earliest fireflies opening and closing over the wide lawn stretching out to the white gravel driveway, which shone for long minutes as darkness fell.
When people die, there is work that must be done. There are phone calls to make and to receive, and documents to sign, and there are closets to be emptied and bags to be packed, as if one is moving away. That, at least, I understood. I gathered up her dresses, her shoes and slippers, her coats, her jackets, her underwear, her nightgowns and mittens and jeans, her ice skates and cross-country skis, her bicycle, her lipstick, her gauze and plastic sheeting, her syringes, and every prescription in her name. I did it over one long day, and divided it all in piles on the porch—Goodwill to one side, trash to the other. When I was done only her studio was left.
But then the funeral had been held, the guests had come and gone, the casseroles trickled off, the cards were fewer, and the attention of even our closest friends started to turn away. I was alone with my dog, an elderly Labrador retriever I’ve had since he was six weeks old, who used to run with me and Eric through the fields beside our house when he was young. And though many people were kind to me during that period, he was my single true source of comfort, steady and gentle in the background, heaving himself up onto the bed beside me in the guest room where I slept. In the afternoons, when it rained, he would rise at the first clap of thunder and ease himself under the bed. I’d get on my knees, and stroke him, because even then, or perhaps especially
then, his fear never failed to touch me.
I went to work. I fed us both. I couldn’t read. A few times I tried to exercise on the treadmill in the garage. I went for drives in the countryside. I’d roll the windows down, and let the manure-laden air of the farmland pour in against me for an hour or two, past miles of soybeans and corn and sleek cattle, with tractors in the fields, and during that time I felt like a stranger in a waking dream, as if each day had become an elegy to a world I would never see again. Sometimes there were trains to stop for—boxcars and grain carriers, battered and dignified and identical, their brown iron wheels spinning slowly enough to see. They were going from granary to granary, I suppose, and it was animal feed, mostly, for the stockyards, but they seemed like something more, something stately and wise and redeeming. Then the gates would lift, and I’d drive on.
Eric had left the morning after the funeral. I’d driven him to the airport. We said little to one another, but I’d embraced him before we got into the car, and for a moment, as we drove, I’d reached over and gripped his hand.
“I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me she’d gotten so much worse,” he said, turning to me, his face thin and pale, his green eyes shining. “You said she was going to make it until summer.”