Work Text:
1932
His mother is always in bed now. Lying in the bedroom with the shades drawn, while the glorious Maine summer comes to an end outside. Every evening his father brings him in to see her, but although she has her eyes open she has already begun the journey away from them.
The leaves are just changing colour when she finally leaves.
* * *
1946
It’s a simple procedure, but for some reason the middle-aged patient doesn’t pick up in post-operative care the way he should. Residency hours are brutal but off-duty Hawkeye stays awake when he should be sleeping, reading up every text he can find. The patient gets penicillin and intensive nursing: the infection subsides, but he still seems slow recovering. One morning Hawkeye comes on shift and finds the bed empty and stripped.
“That’s just the way it goes sometimes.” The senior consultant who supervised the surgery shrugs. “Some patients just persist in dying.”
He probably means to be encouraging. The next session Hawkeye’s standing in OR with a scalpel in his hand, it’s like the first time he ever operated. Except that now he knows surgeons can only perform miracles if God allows it.
* * *
1947
One day they are there, together, in their apartment with its scuffed green walls. The next, Carlye is standing in the doorway holding a suitcase with everything she needs, and there is no room for him.
“Don’t go. Please.”
She switches the suitcase to her other hand, frowning under its weight. “I was the only one who was ever really here.”
The closing door opens a silence he thinks will never be filled.
* * *
October 1950
There are two days of leave before he flies out to Korea, and there is no question of where he will spend them.
The last morning he comes down to breakfast dressed in his captain’s uniform. It’s half a joke and half not; and when he sees his father’s face he knows for the first time that he is going to a place where humour will not save him.
“Take care of yourself.” His father’s arms hold him for a long moment at the bus station, before he steps back.
* * *
December 1950
Ninety-seven percent survive. This boy with a blonde fuzz of crewcut and dog tags that read Robbins, Joseph M., US 25738923 is not going to be one of them.
“Dark.” Robbins’ lips are grey-white, his pupils dilated like a beautiful woman’s. “Is it… dark here?”
“Easy.” Hawkeye replaces the dressing, then the sheet over the ruination that starts at the bottom of the rib cage. He reaches for the pulse, which stutters against his fingertips like a trapped moth’s wings. He doesn’t want to meet those eyes again, but where else is there to look?
“Easy,” he says again, and it is the only prayer he can offer to this boy now.
* * *
April 1951
The OR is busy and the floor is already starting to get slippery, so it takes a few seconds for him to register something that is shouting for his attention.
Tommy looks up at him from under the sheet and says, “I’d give you a kiss but I can’t move my head.”
Hawkeye nods at Ugly John at the gas and makes Tommy’s face go away, so he can get started on the business of saving him. Precisely two minutes and a hundred years later Ugly John’s voice breaks through his focus. “I’ve lost the pulse.”
Hawkeye has a scalpel in his hand and is reaching for the chest when Henry tells him to go help Trapper with another patient.
The next thing he remembers is finding himself standing crying in a doorway. Henry tries to help, but all Hawkeye can latch onto is the anger. It gets him as far as saving one other young man from another pointless death.
Afterwards, back in the Swamp, he tries to feel glad for the life he has saved, but all he can hear is Tommy saying, Want to hear a funny one? I heard the bullet coming.
He wonders if you would still hear it if it came from very close to you. Close enough so that you could be sure you wouldn’t miss.
* * *
July 1951
Margaret begins to sob, quietly. Someone somewhere drops an instrument onto the floor. Father Mulcahy’s eyes stare over his mask and his hand goes to the crucifix lying against his heart.
Hawkeye and Trapper both have their hands inside a kid’s abdominal cavity. The quiet urgency of the blood beneath their fingers trumps any thought of going after Radar, who has left after making the announcement about Henry’s plane that silenced the room. Radar will have to bleed inside with no-one to help him. It’s the first rule of triage: help the ones that can be saved.
When Hawkeye looks down again at their patient, all he can see for a moment is dark waves rolling. There were no survivors.
Here either.
* * *
September 1951
The plip plip of water dripping in the shower sounds very loud. Radar’s eyes are full of apprehension.
It's all a bad practical joke. Any moment now Trapper will rise out of the neighbouring shower cubicle with his usual Hey, hey! and ear-to-ear grin, having a good laugh at Hawkeye’s hungover expense.
But what happens instead is that one fumbled secondhand kiss. A reckless drive to Kimpo. Seeing Trapper’s name on the departures manifest and stumbling back outside into the muggy Korean sunlight.
He is within an inch of screaming when Radar appears with the new doctor in tow. A handshake and some necessary civility pull him back down to earth enough that he can manage to rant in more-or-less coherent sentences.
It takes two stiff drinks and BJ’s persistent attempts at humour to anchor him back in the here and now. And later on, when BJ is retching on all fours after getting his first taste of combat medicine, the vulnerable feeling of another suffering human being under the palm of his hand connects Hawkeye briefly, agonisingly, with everything he hates about this place.
* * *
January 1952
He would laugh if being declared dead was just yet another an army screw-up, another way in which the military has consistently fucked him over. But the knowledge that back in Maine his father is in mourning strips any humour away. When that prissy Captain Pratt makes his wisecrack about Hawkeye being an ‘un-person’, and follows it with a merry little chuckle, Hawkeye is glad Potter is in the room. Without his steadying presence, Pratt would be requiring medical attention and Hawkeye would be facing a court-martial.
When BJ comes and finds him on the morgue wagon, it’s almost too much trouble to speak. With his arm over his eyes Hawkeye can play the game he played when he was a boy, where you counted and your friends hid. Only this time he is doing the hiding. Maybe if he keeps his arm there long enough, the war will go away.
It’s the sound of the choppers that pulls him back. As he shoulders his duffel and lopes back down the muddy track to the 4077, he almost regrets his decision. There are some advantages to being dead.
* * *
October 1952
His father is undergoing potentially life-threatening surgery while he sits here in Korea, defeated by army communications and 10,000 miles of static. He listens to what Charles is telling him about sons and fathers and tries to stay in the room, while the ten year-old he was comes so close to the surface he can feel it.
Even when he finally gets through and hears his father’s voice, that childhood terror doesn’t disperse for a while. After hanging up he’s full of thankfulness, but underneath it there’s an awareness of how much he’s got, how much he will one day lose lose.
* * *
Early May 1953
The silence is as unbearable as the noise that preceded it. The whole bus full of people holds its breath, holds its breath, in sympathy.
Afterwards BJ corners him in the Swamp, halfway through his ninth gin and gin. “Hawk.”
Hawkeye focuses on the glass, on the beautiful blurry shimmers of light the gin makes as he tilts it slightly, one way, then the other. Not on BJ’s worried blue eyes.
“Hawk.”
The gin helps but he’s made an art of this by now: making whatever it is go away. He knows that he’s only still here because of this acquired talent. And practice makes perfect.
* * *
Mid May 1953
The only thing he could still do, they have taken away from him. Something about arguing with the anaesthetist. It doesn’t make sense, nothing makes sense when he’s not standing under the bright lights with the clean silver instruments in his hand, dismantling the war one body at a time.
There was something too about driving a jeep into the Officers’ Club. He has no recollection of this, though it seems unlikely. For starters, the doorway is too small.
Sidney clears his throat gently, to remind Hawkeye that he is still there. Hawkeye drags his gaze away from the smeary window with the metal mesh over it and looks into those terrifyingly patient eyes.
“So tell me about the picnic.”
* * *
July 1953
It’s an orgy of saying goodbye that goes on far too long and is over far too abruptly. He clings on as BJ drives him up to the chopper pad on that crazy death trap of a motorbike, and is half expecting BJ to drop him off, wave and disappear in a cloud of dust. Back to Peg and Erin and Mill Valley and happy ever after.
When instead BJ stands there and lets Hawkeye tell him everything that’s spilling out of his heart; when he offers up his own affirmation that they were each other’s keepers in this little corner of hell: Hawkeye knows suddenly, achingly, how far California will seem from Maine. When the chopper rises and he sees BJ’s farewell note spelled out with carefully-placed stones he has to smile but soon they are over the mountains and it’s just a memory.
* * *
September 1953
Everything keeps him awake. Night time noises. Night time quiet. The softness and spaciousness of his bed, which fills him with panic because he doesn’t know where he is when he wakes from the dreams that have followed him home.
His father doesn’t remark on the late mornings, the hangovers at first. After a few weeks he starts cautiously encouraging conversations about the advisability of getting back into the saddle. And finds ways to give gentle reminders about the family propensity for an unhealthy affinity with alcohol. Hawkeye manages to cut back the drinking and start doctoring, but sleep begins to elude him entirely.
One a.m. is the worst time. Followed closely by two a.m. He was never this tired, even when he was a resident. Even when he was doing ten, twenty, thirty hours’ surgery at the 4077, when he did get off and return to the Swamp there was the still and BJ or Trapper and however many nightmares there were there was someone sharing them with him.
General practice in a back country district gives less opportunities for making mistakes than thoracic surgery, but even so he begins to dread the day he’ll sleepwalk into disaster. He tries sleeping pills but they just make the daytime thick and shrouded.
His father says less but watches him more. Once he suggests that maybe Hawkeye could call someone. BJ, maybe. Or Potter. Catch up with the old gang. Hawkeye agrees and doesn’t make the call.
Sitting one morning hollow-eyed on the back porch watching the sun rise, Hawkeye recognises that the magic is gone: Crabapple Cove is no longer the talisman it used to be. He shivers in the cold dawn and wonders what happens now.
* * *
October 1953
Leaves change colour and pumpkins glow in backyards. He considers his options, again and again. Trick or treat. Once he played Superman and BJ acted the clown. The neighbourhood children shriek and whoop as they seek the shadows and gather candy that will be eaten by morning.
Life is a series of departures. And now, just one time, he wants to be the one that leaves.
* * *
Late November 1953
Influenza season starts early this year. Winter is knocking on the door but has not yet let itself in: the ground is thick with fallen leaves.
A week before Thanksgiving he goes on his rounds after morning surgery. By late afternoon the light has almost bled out of the sky. He makes his last call of the day and changes a dressing on a young woodsman named Harry Tucker with an axe wound in his left foot. The wound is healing cleanly, although next summer Tucker will leave a footprint with only four toes. It’s the first amputation Hawkeye’s seen since Korea, and for once he didn’t inflict it.
Tucker, clearly restive at being confined at home by his injury, seems to want to talk and Hawkeye lets him, nodding along from time to time and making sounds of agreement about the weather, the price of timber, the fine white-tailed deer buck Tucker’s buddy bagged two days back.
“Just my luck to be stuck with this damn foot during hunting season,” Tucker grouses. “You shoot any, doc?”
“Not so much.” Hawkeye has heard the guns in the woods. Sometimes afterwards he catches himself listening for choppers.
“More of a fishing man, huh? Well, you can’t beat a good rifle. My old man left me a Winchester 94. It’s a beaut. Take a look.”
Tucker can hobble well enough to reach his gun cupboard, returning with his weapon, which he passes to Hawkeye like a fine bottle of wine. Hawkeye holds it just long enough to be polite: the rifle is a dead weight in his hands. As Tucker extols the Winchester’s best features Hawkeye has a sudden vivid memory: of lying half-drunk in a foxhole arguing with Potter while North Koreans fired on them from somewhere nearby. Potter won the day and Hawkeye can still remember the weight of his army issue pistol in his hand, the kick of the recoil, the stink of powder as he discharged it into the air. Afterwards when he searched the bushes for casualties and came up empty, his hands were still shaking.
Tucker has run out of things to say and takes the rifle back, cradling it comfortably in his calloused woodsman’s hands. He’s just a man with a bandaged foot, holding a weapon; but it’s enough to make Hawkeye check his watch, make an excuse about another patient still to see, and leave.
Driving back home he wonders how long the echoes will persist for. Whether they will ultimately fade, or just continue to rattle around in the canyon of his mind until it crumbles.
His father is in the kitchen fixing dinner, something he’s got a little better at over the years, but not much. Which is not really a problem because after the 4077 mess tent, Hawkeye has accommodating standards for food.
“Hello, son. Just finished the rounds?”
“Yeah.” Hawkeye sits at the table.
“How’s Mrs Burey getting along?”
“Pretty good. She should be up and about by next week.”
“I’ll drop by and see her day after tomorrow.” Daniel returns to the stove; takes the lid off a pan and prods something within. It never ceases to impress Hawkeye how much his father cares, about all the ailing mortals he’s responsible for. How he knows all their names; remembers their stories. “How about Harry Tucker?”
“He’s okay too. Wound’s granulating fine.”
Daniel grunts. “Damn fool’s lucky he didn’t chop the whole foot off. I’ve lost count of the number of eight-toed woodsmen I’ve seen.”
“I guess working the timber’s not the safest job in the world.”
“Guess not. But it still seems to be a job plenty of the young ‘uns go in for.” Daniel gives the pan contents a final stir, then replaces the lid. “He was a couple years below you at school, wasn’t he?”
“Harry?” Hawkeye casts his mind back a lifetime ago. “I guess. I don’t remember.”
“He missed a lot of school, as I recall. Rheumatic fever when he was…” Daniel pauses, carding through his unfailing memory of people cared for. “…Eleven. That’d be why he didn’t get drafted, too.”
“Some people have all the luck.” Hawkeye doesn’t mean this to come out as bitter as it sounds. Daniel looks at him, but says nothing.
They’re halfway through dinner when the phone rings. Daniel rises at once and heads off down the hallway. Hawkeye hears him speaking; after a while, the clunk of the phone receiver being replaced. When he comes back into the room, he’s frowning. “That was George Maddox. Sounds like complications with their youngest. I told him one of us would get over there right away.”
Hawkeye is surprised. Usually his father would already be putting on his coat. But now he is looking at Hawkeye levelly. Hawkeye swallows. “Their youngest… Remind me.”
“Ella. Two year-old, went down with the influenza a fortnight ago. From the sounds of what George was saying, now she’s got a possible chest infection.”
The kitchen suddenly feels too small. “Oh.”
“You want me to take care of it?”
The question is enough to bring Hawkeye to his feet. “No. That’s okay. I don’t mind heading out again.”
“I’ll keep your supper warm.” His father reaches for the plate.
“Great.” Hawkeye has absolutely no appetite left.
His medical bag is where he left it, dumped by the front door. Hawkeye checks its contents, then checks them again. Then he puts on his jacket, takes the car keys and heads out.
It’s a thirty-minute drive to the Maddoxes’ place, most of which he spends mentally running through everything he knows about paediatric respiratory illness. When his headlights pick out the post and rail fence with the mailbox on it he’s almost startled: he has no recollection of the intervening miles between here and home.
George Maddox must have heard the car’s engine, because the front door opens before Hawkeye reaches the top step. “Doctor Pierce - thanks for coming out. Louise has been fretting herself to a shadow over Ella all day.”
Louise Maddox is in fact at her daughter’s bedside, and when she looks up as they enter the room Hawkeye can see that she’s been there all day and probably most of the night before. He sits down beside her and gets his first look at his patient.
Ella Maddox is at the stage where babyhood and child meet. She doesn’t take up much room in the bed. Her limbs are too still under the covers. The raspy sound of her breathing, wheezy and laboured, is loud out of all proportion to the small chest rising and falling.
Hawkeye gets out his stethoscope and listens; takes the temperature and pulse. When he touches the girl she twitches and coughs, then struggles for breath again. Hawkeye listens to the chest once more, then folds away his stethoscope and looks at the parents. “How long has she been like this?”
“She had the ‘flu two weeks back, but she seemed to be getting over it. Then day before yesterday she started looking right peaked again and stopped eating, kept coughing and all.” Louise keeps one hand on her child’s arm all through the examination.
“Have you noticed if she’s coughing up any mucus?” Both parents shake their heads; after a moment, Louise volunteers the information, “She did get sick a couple of times.”
Hawkeye reaches for his bag. “Your daughter has bronchiolitis.” At their incomprehension, he elaborates. “Her airways are inflamed, probably by a virus or bacteria that followed on after she was weakened by the influenza. That’s why she’s having trouble breathing. You did right to call. If she didn’t get treatment, she could develop pneumonia.” He sees their eyes widen and continues quickly. “I’m going to give her medicine, sulfa. It works very quickly: she should start picking up in a couple of days. Make sure you get her drinking plenty of fluids, and keep her warm. Tomorrow we’ll come by and check on how she’s doing: but if she gets worse in the meantime, phone right away.”
They are simultaneously frightened and thankful. Hawkeye administers the sulfa and packs away his medical kit. George accompanies him to the door, where he takes Hawkeye’s hand in a brief, tight clasp with both of his. His thanks are sincere, jumbled and short. He clearly wants to shut the door and return to his wife and sick child’s bedside. Hawkeye accepts both thanks and handshake and goes down the porch steps. Behind him the door shuts, closing off the yellow light that spilled from the warm kitchen inside.
Hawkeye gets about five miles down the road before he has to pull over. He sits in the dark and breathes, his hands shaking so much he can’t grip the steering wheel. It takes long minutes before he is steady enough to start the car again and drive home.
He goes in the back way, hoping that his father has gone to bed. The kitchen is empty and he goes to the faucet for a drink of water, drinks it in three deep swallows. Fills it again.
A footstep sounds behind him: he turns and his father is standing there in the passage doorway, holding a book with one finger placed between the pages as a marker. “Thought I heard you come in. How was she?”
“Bronchiolitis. Not pneumonia, yet. I gave her some sulfa, said one of us would call in again tomorrow.”
His father nods, agreeing with diagnosis, treatment, recommendation. For some reason his trust tightens the knot of anxiety in Hawkeye’s chest. “Sounds like the best course. You can drop in there after morning surgery.”
Why me? Hawkeye blinks; nods slowly. Lifts the glass and takes another gulp of water. “Sure.”
Daniel watches him, quietly. It occurs to Hawkeye, suddenly and for the first time, that his father must have spoken to someone about what happened to his son, back there on that bus in Korea. Most likely Potter. Probably BJ. Maybe even Sidney. Or, knowing his father, possibly all three. But the person whom Daniel has never asked about it is Hawkeye himself.
The empty glass in his hand trembles: he sets it down. He visualises the half bottle of scotch his father thinks he has hidden well enough. It would be enough for tonight. But Daniel is standing between him and the door that leads to the passage and the house beyond, so instead Hawkeye chooses flight.
"I think I’ll go for a walk. Clear my head before I go to bed.” He doesn’t say, sleep.
His father looks at the dark kitchen window, then back to his son. “It’s pretty cold out there.”
“I’ll keep moving. I won’t be out long. You don’t need to wait up for me.”
His father isn’t so sure, Hawkeye can see. “Where were you thinking of going for a walk? Not much of a moon tonight.”
“Just up to the woods and back. I’ll take a flashlight in case I lose my way.”
His father nods his head, just once. His eyes remain watchful.
It is cold outside, colder than Hawkeye thought. He walks swiftly up the sloping path that leads to the woods, hands deep in his pockets, waiting for warmth to come. But he stays chilled, hands clenched into fists inside his coat, shoulders drawn up and tensed against the winter night.
Once he reaches the trees the ground levels out, but he does not slacken his pace. He places one foot in front of the other, following the narrow path as if it will lead him somewhere. The air burns cold in his throat but he keeps walking, almost running, trees and shadows blurring past.
A root finally catches his toe and sends him sprawling onto hands and knees, damp earth and leaves icy underneath his fingers. He slowly pushes himself up, leaning against a tree, and his eyes travel up through the winter branches to the sky beyond. A fingernail slice of moon flickers, pure and clear in the freezing air.
The last time he can remember seeing the waning moon was in Korea. On a humid July night, just before the armistice was announced. He and BJ had come off a twelve-hour shift in OR and it had been too hot to sleep. They set up two chairs outside the Swamp and drank gin under the stars and talked till the still ran dry.
Looking back on it now, he thinks that maybe it hadn’t been the heat that had kept them awake. He didn’t sleep much that last month, even though he was officially certified as no longer needing a khaki straitjacket. Sidney had reassembled his Humpty-Dumpty brain but the cracks still showed. He could work and eat and tell jokes and even laugh at them, but at nights BJ’s steady listening was the glue that kept the pieces from falling apart.
Above him now the cold Maine moon glimmers down. Korea is ten thousand miles and a lifetime away, yet right now it seems more real than this, his fractured, failing, impossible life. He remembers Sidney saying, Now we’re halfway home, and it seems to him that the rest of his life will always be halfway, and he is so tired of travelling and never arriving.
The first sob catches in his throat but it rips a way for others to follow: he goes down on his knees and cries because there’s really no way of stopping it from coming.
After a long time he comes up for air. He can smell trees and raw earth and knows himself to be, in a way that he thinks he never has before, utterly and painfully alive.
And with this realisation comes another. That this is all there is. This moment, here in the freezing Maine woods. This moment, under the steaming July moon in Korea. This moment, in the silent bus. This moment, as Radar turns away and the instrument drops to the floor. This moment, when Tommy’s eyes close. This moment, feeling Carlye’s lips brush his cheek goodbye.
This moment. When he saw his mother look through him to what lay beyond.
He has always been here, in this moment. Wanting to bring her back. Wanting to follow.
When he returns home it’s well after midnight. His father is keeping vigil in the kitchen with a mug of coffee. The look in Daniel’s eyes when he first glances up at his son’s footstep makes Hawkeye want to run back into the woods again. Instead he pulls out a chair and sits down.
“Any coffee left for me?”
Every day, you choose. To leave, or to stay.
Hawkeye watches his father pour coffee into a mug and makes his choice.