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He tipped his head back against the headrest, eyes closed and face a ghostly mask of pain. Coal-black hair and thick eyebrows accentuated his pallor. Above a strong, clean-shaven jaw, his nose might have been broken in the past, the bridge quite flattened. I imagined he wasn’t bad-looking on a normal day, with a bit more colour in his cheeks. We were a similar age, although I suspect I felt about fifty years younger, seeing as my shoulders and ribs were all properly aligned. We’d talk again once we were inside, I decided, and had him arranged more comfortably.
“Do you have any painkillers?” Once more, he leaned heavily on me, using me as a crutch.
I fiddled around for my door key. “I’ve got a store of diclofenac in the cowsheds. Might need to drop the dose down, though. You weigh a touch less than an 800-kilo Ayrshire.”
“It feels like I’m putting about that much weight through my fucking ankle.” Blanched with pain, he dragged his useless limb over the doorstep. “Shit, forget painkillers. Shall we skip straight to the horse pistol?”
“I don’t think we’ve reached that point yet. I’m sure I can root out something suitable for a human.” An old packet of codeine was lying around somewhere, from when I did my back in a few years ago. “Failing that, whisky. I reckon we could both do with a tot of something medicinal to warm us up.”
“Yeah. That might hit the spot.”
He collapsed into one of my lumpy armchairs. Literally. Judging by the waxy sheen coating his forehead, he was seconds from blacking out. I hoped he wasn’t about to puke. Grabbing the washing-up bowl from the sink, I placed it on the carpet next to Zeus, who’d decided our unexpected visitor’s feet made a decent headrest.
“You know, in case…”
“Cheers.”
The breakdown team was roughly four hours away. An estimate that doubled when I suggested I could employ my tractor to move the car off the road, then trebled when I admitted the driver was youngish, male, and inside my house, safe from the elements. We agreed on some time in the morning.
After pouring a generous couple of inches of scotch into a mug, I went to check on my patient. He’d peeled off his wet shoes and socks and propped his ankle up on the coffee table. Already, the skin was puffy and swollen an ugly shade of purple. I shuddered, not a fan of bodily injuries. Cows? Yes. People? A big fat no.
“I’m hoping it’s just badly sprained. It somehow got wedged behind the clutch pedal when I hit the tree.”
“Put this underneath it.” I handed him a worn sofa cushion. “Raise it even higher. Are you cold?”
Silly question. He was visibly shivering, a mixture of shock and chill. His lips were pinched white. I was pretty icy myself. “I’ll light the wood burner, and then we need to phone for an ambulance to get you sorted.”
He still cradled his arm awkwardly, holding his neck in a rigid position, as if the slightest movement hurt. “My shoulder’s definitely dislocated.” He gingerly felt up his arm. “We need to put it back. The longer you leave it, the harder it is.”
“Okay, I’ll phone for an ambulance first.” I revised my strategy. “Then I’ll fix the wood burner and try and warm you up.”
He shook his head and winced. “It will take bloody hours for them to get here. If they can at all. And then hours waiting in the Emergency Department. Do you mind having a go at doing it, after you’ve lit the fire?”
“Me?” My guts curdled. Cows? Yes. People? Still a big fat no. I could barely pluck a splinter out of my thumb without gagging. “I’m a dairy farmer, mate. I don’t know how to pull a dislocated shoulder.”
“It’s easy. You just fucking pull. I’ll tell you which direction.” He knocked back the whisky in a gulp and coughed, his eyes watering. “But I’ll have to have another one of these first, though. And those painkillers, if you can find them.”
I’d worked in farming all my life, a gritty, visceral existence. Witnessing Mother Nature at her best, on days when the sun shone and the hedgerow flowers bloomed, but also living through her worst. And her worst could be messy. As a kid, I learned how to wring cockerels’ necks; done it too many times to remember. I’d lambed at all hours of the day and night too, bottle-fed scrawny, desperate buggers in the wee small hours and shed tears over the ones that didn’t make it. I’d been up to my knees shovelling cow shit; I’d most definitely tumbled into cow shit. More than once. I’d dragged out dead calves, already stinking and putrid, then watched the mother die too.
So pulling a bloke’s dislocated shoulder should be a piece of piss, right? Wrong. Human ailments—a drop of blood, vomit, a broken bone, or even sticking a needle for a vaccination—had the walls closing in and me coming over very peculiar.
We both downed another slug of whisky before I started. Waiting for the codeine to kick in, I knelt before the wood burner and soon had it cranking out a fiery heat. If I ignored his ankle, blooming a bold, bright violet, like a new strain of exotic orchid, the evening was almost quite cosy, as if I’d invited an online hook-up over for drinks and sex. Almost, but not quite, as his left shoulder taunted me, hunched into a peculiar, indented shape instead of approximating a right angle.
Oh my god, I was really going to have to do it, wasn’t I? The fire and the whisky were only holding off the inevitable. A fucking ambulance hadn’t a cat's chance in hell of getting here on a night like this. The view from the kitchen window told a tale of snow, snow, and even more bloody snow, lending a spooky glow to the blackness of the countryside. Not a night to be out driving. Temperatures were dropping like a stone, and from the way even my two-tonne truck had skidded on the track earlier, I didn’t fancy my chances of driving him to Allenmouth myself. Not to mention twenty miles of jolting in the cramped cab of a tractor would be downright cruel.
The whisky swirled in my belly. Just because my fear was irrational didn’t make it any less fearful. The stupid thing was I wouldn’t turn a hair if he was a cow or a sheep or a dog.
“Anyone you want to call, let them know where you are? On a night like this, folk will be worried.”
He laughed, almost regretfully. “No. Not really. There’s no one waiting at home for me.”
Poor chap. I knew how that felt. Saddest words in the whole bloody dictionary. We were both silent.
When his weary eyes turned glassy and some of the tension softened from his neck, I reckoned the guy—Evan—was about cooked. I might as well get it over with.
“Ready?” I harboured a vain hope his shoulder might have magically realigned itself. From the face he pulled as he adjusted himself into a reclining position on the sofa, sadly not.
“Yeah. It will be easier if I lie down.”
