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Peggy
HUDSON VALLEY, NEW YORK
JUNE 1946
“I know it looks hopeless,” I told Jimmy Barnett’s father. “But we can’t give up until Jimmy is better. Until he’s home again.” We stood side by side on Blue Fence Farms that summer afternoon, watching one of their brand-new thoroughbred colts get the feel of his legs. Mr. Barnett and I were comfortable with each other and never needed to say much when we were together. He looked at me and nodded, and the sadness I saw in his eyes made me feel like someone had stuck a knife in my chest. Mr.B. took me on his veterinary rounds sometimes, even though I was just the gal who lived across the road from his clinic in the apartment above the auto-repair garage. He said I had a way with animals and they calmed right down when they were around me. But Jimmy was the one who should have been helping his father now that the war was finally over. They should have been driving around the countryside together to all the dairy farms and horse breeders, treating cows with mastitis and horses with colic. Jimmy had been studying to be a veterinarian like his dad before that awful December day when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
“We can’t let Jimmy give up on living,” I said.
Mr. Barnett didn’t reply right away. The new foal pranced around on the other side of the fence, his long, racehorse legs as thin as matchsticks. It made me smile to watch him. But Mr.B. wasn’t looking at the colt. He was gazing into the distance, where the sun lit up the mountain’s chalky cliffs. I thought of the psalm that says, “I look up to the mountains—does my help come from there? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth!” and I silently begged God to help us.
Mr.B. finally spoke. “Jim has to want our help, Peg. But he doesn’t.” He squinted his eyes as if the sun was shining in them, then added, “He doesn’t even want to live.” He turned and started walking back to his truck. His shoulders sagged, and I thought for the first time that he looked like an old man. He had always seemed so sturdy and strong to me, with a broad chest and arms that were brawny enough to wrestle a horse into a stall or hoist a baby calf into its pen. Yet he had a gentle smile and an easy laugh that made all of the lines in his face smile, too. How it must hurt Mr. and Mrs. Barnett to know that their only child tried to kill himself. Jimmy arrived home from the war more than a month ago, and in all that time he barely spoke to them. He wouldn’t talk to anyone. He just sat in his room and stared at nothing, like he was sleeping with his eyes open. When I visited him, he looked right through me without seeing me. I ran home in tears because for as long as I had known him, Jimmy was one of the very few people who really saw me.
Mr.B. climbed into his truck, an old 1938 Ford that he’d been driving around on all sorts of back roads and across cow pastures since before the war. Nobody was making new trucks during the war, but he’d planned to go down to the Ford dealership with Jimmy and buy a new one as soon as he arrived home from the Army. Jimmy came home but he wouldn’t go with his father. He wouldn’t leave his room, not even to buy a brand-new truck.
I yanked open the door on the passenger side and climbed in. It closed with a rusty-sounding creak. We were supposed to head back to the veterinary clinic, but Mr.B. just sat there with his door open and one leg still hanging out. He was gazing at the mountains again, where cloud shadows moved across the slope below the cliffs.
“Mr.B.?” I said. “I’m sure Jimmy will get better again. He just needs more time.”
“I hope so,” he said with a sigh.
“He must have seen some horrible things during the war, and it will probably take him a while to get over them. But you fought in the first war, right? And you were okay afterwards.” There was a picture of a much-younger Mr. Barnett on the mantel in their living room, wearing an Army uniform. They put Jimmy’s picture beside it after he enlisted. Mr. Barnett had been a veterinarian in the Great War, back when they still used horses in the cavalry. Jimmy was a medic in this war and took care of soldiers, not horses. But I guessed he and his father witnessed many of the same things.
“Yes, some of the men I knew suffered from shell shock,” Mr.B. said. “They call it battle fatigue now. We were all told to go home and put the war behind us.”
“And you did that, right?”
“Jimmy and I are very different. He always did have a tender heart. Remember how he was with that dog of yours?”
“Yeah, I remember.” The bedraggled stray showed up out of nowhere nine years ago when I was eleven, barely a week after Mama’s funeral. It kept hanging around Pop’s auto-repair garage, rummaging through our garbage every night. Pop waved a tire iron at him and shouted, “Hey! Get out of there, buster!” So I started calling him Buster. If you could have seen that dog back then, you wouldn’t wonder why everyone in town chased away his mangy hide. But I cleaned him up, took care of him, and fed him, and he turned out to be a real nice dog, with short beige fur, oversize pointy ears that stick up, and a long tail that wagged with happiness whenever he saw me. Buster and I became best friends. He was all I had, really, in the way of friends. I liked to think Mama was looking down at me from heaven and that she sent Buster to me.
One terrible day, Buster chased after a rabbit and ran right out into the middle of the road. Mrs. Franklin couldn’t stop her car in time and hit him. I saw it all happen, and I raced into the road where Buster was yelping and whining and trying to drag himself out of the way. I scooped him up, blood and crushed bones and all, and just kept running with him, straight across the street to the veterinary clinic. There were people in the waiting room with their pedigreed dogs and fancy cats, but I ran in, covered with Buster’s blood, crying and hollering, “Help! Help! Somebody help my dog! Please!”
It was summertime, and Jimmy was working at the clinic, and it’s a good thing he was, too, because Mr.B. took one look at Buster and said, “He’ll need to be put down.” At first I thought he meant I should put him down on the floor, but Mr.B. shook his head and said, “The dog won’t live. He’s suffering.”
“No, no, please! Can’t you do something? Can’t you operate on him?”
“I don’t think there’s much I can do. I’m sorry.”
“You have to try! Buster is my best friend!”
“Even if I did work on him, there’s not much chance your dog will survive the surgery. He may have internal injuries.”
I heard what he said but I couldn’t stop crying and begging. Then Jimmy spoke up. “Can’t we give it a try, Dad? I’ve seen how that dog follows her everywhere.”
“The leg can’t be saved. It’s too badly mangled.”
“Then he’ll hobble around on three legs,” Jimmy said. “It’ll be good experience for me to see you do surgery like that.” I saw Mr.B. shake his head as if he didn’t want to do it, and I started losing hope. But Jimmy leaned close to him and said, “The girl just lost her mother, remember?” I held my breath, waiting to see what would happen. Jimmy took Buster from my arms. “What’s his name?”
“Buster.”
“And what’s your name?”
“Peggy. Peggy Ann Serrano. Please try to save him! Please!”
“Okay, Peggety. Now I can’t promise you that Buster will live through the operation, but I can promise that we’ll try to save him. I won’t give up on Buster until we’ve done everything we can possibly do.” I still remembered Jimmy’s words and how he said he wasn’t going to give up. He always saw hope in places where there wasn’t any.
