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Homer gave his patient her first dose of digitalis; he would repeat this periodically
until he could see its effects on the woman's heartbeat. While he waited with the woman for her next seizure, he asked her if she had decided to put her baby up for adoption, or if she had come to St. Cloud's only because it was the nearest hospital--in short, was this a baby she very much wanted, or one she didn't want?
"You mean it's going to die?" the woman asked.
He gave her Dr. Larch's best "Of course not!" kind of smile; but what he thought was that it was likely the baby would die if he didn't deliver it soon, and likely the woman would die if he rushed the delivery.
The woman said she had hitchhiked to St. Cloud's because there was no one in her life to bring her, and that she didn't want to keep the baby--but that she wanted it, very much, to live.
"Right," Homer said, as if this decision would have been his own.
"You seem kinda young," the woman said. "I'm not going to die, am I?" she asked.
"That's right, you're not," said Homer Wells, using Dr. Larch's smile again; it at least made him look older.
But in twelve hours, when Dr. Larch had not returned and when the woman was arching her body on the operating table, suffering what was her seventh seizure, Homer Wells could not remember the exact expression that produced the reassuring smile.
He looked at Nurse Angela, who was trying to help him hold the woman, and he said, "I'm going to start her labor. I'm going to rupture the bag of waters."
"I'm sure you know what's best, Homer," Nurse Angela said, but her own imitation of Dr. Larch's confidence-inspiring smile was very poor.
In twelve more hours the patient's uterine contractions commenced; Homer Wells would never remember the exact number of convulsions the woman experienced in that time. He was beginning to worry more about Dr. Larch than about the woman, and he had to fight down his fear of something happening to Dr. Larch in order to concentrate on his job.
Another ten hours after the onset of the woman's contractions, she delivered herself of a boy--four pounds, eleven ounces, in good condition. The mother's improvement was rapid--as Homer had expected. There were no more convulsions, her blood pressure returned to normal, the traces of albumin in her urine were minimal.
In the evening of the day after the morning when he had gone to the station to retrieve the body that the stationmaster would neither keep nor relinquish, Wilbur Larch--together with the rescued cadaver soon to be called Clara--returned tired and triumphant to St. Cloud's. He had followed the body to Three Mile Falls, but the stationmaster there had registered such horror that the body was never unloaded from the train; it had traveled on, and Larch had traveled after it, arriving at the next, and at the next station, always a train behind. No one wanted Clara, except to put her in the ground, and it was thought that this should not be the responsibility of a stationmaster--who would surely not accept, at his station, a body that no one came forward for. Clara was a body clearly not intended for the ground. The unearthly sloshing sound of the embalming fluid, the leathery skin, the outer-space colors of the occasionally exposed arteries and veins--"Whatever that is, I don't want it here," said the stationmaster in Three Mile Falls.
And so Clara went from Three Mile Falls to Misery Gore, to Moxie Gore, to East Moxie--on and on. Larch got in a terrible row with the stationmaster in Harmony, Maine, where Clara had stopped for a few minutes--giving the railroad personnel the fright of their lives--before she'd been sent on.
"That was my body!" Larch screamed. "It had my name on it, it is intended for the instruction of a student of medicine who is training with me in my hospital in Saint Cloud's. It's mine!" Larch yelled. "Why are you sending it in the wrong direction? Why are you sending it away from me?"
"It came here, didn't it?" the stationmaster said. "It didn't get taken at Saint Cloud's, it appears to me."
"The stationmaster in Saint Cloud's is crazy!" Larch hollered; he gave a little hop--a little jump, which made him appear a little crazy, too.
"Maybe he is, maybe he isn't," said the stationmaster in Harmony. "All I know is, the body come here and I sent it on."
"For Christ's sake, it's not haunted!" Larch said with a wail.
"Didn't say it was," said the stationmaster. "Maybe it is, maybe it isn't--wasn't here long enough to tell."
"Idiots!" Larch shouted, and took the train. In Cornville (where the train didn't stop), Wilbur Larch screamed out the window at a couple of potato farmers who were waving at the train. "Maine is full of morons!" he yelled, riding on.
In Skowhegan, he asked the stationmaster just where in Hell he thought the damn body was going. "Bath, I suppose," the Skowhegan stationmaster said. "That's where it came from, and if nobody wants it at the other end, that's where it's going back to."
"Somebody does want it at the other end!" screamed Wilbur Larch. "I want it."
The body had been sent to the hospital in St. Cloud's from the hospital in Bath; a woman who was a willing body-donor had died, and the pathologist at Bath Memorial Hospital knew that Wilbur Larch was looking for a fresh female.
Dr. Larch caught up with Clara in Augusta; Augusta was very sophisticated, for Maine, and the stationmaster simply saw that the body was going the wrong way. "Of course it's going the wrong way!" Wilbur Larch cried.
"Damndest thing," the stationmaster said. "Don't they speak English up in your parts?"
"They don't hear English!" Larch yelled. "I'd like to send a cadaver to every damn one of those towns--one a day!"
"That sure would rile up a bunch of folks," the stationmaster said dryly, wondering how "riled up" Dr. Larch was going to get.
On the long ride back to St. Cloud's with Clara, Dr. Larch didn't calm down. In each of the towns that offended him--in Harmony, especially, but in East Moxie and in Moxie Gore, and in all the rest of them, too--he offered his opinions to the respective stationmasters while the train paused at the stations. "Moronville," he told the stationmaster in Harmony. "Tell me one thing that's harmonious here--one thing!"
