The Lighthouse Road

trailing the desperate mother.

By the time Thea reached the second floor her shouting had given over to sobs. She went down the hallway from door to door, stepping into each room to check for the boy. It was in the fourth room, in the surgery, that she found him, lying on the table, Hosea standing above him with a pair of eight-inch nickel-plated shears in his hand. On a tray next to the boy lay a pile of bloodstained gauze and a long needle and syringe. The boy was naked and wailing.

Rebekah managed to get her arms around Thea before she reached the table. Before she reached her boy. Thea’s cries mixed with Odd’s and Rebekah hugged her tight.

Hosea spoke. “Dear child, there’s nothing amiss.” He set the shears on the table, turned and reached out for Thea, took her hands in his, and tried to pull her to him.

'My boy! “Thea shrieked, fighting to free herself from both Rebekah and Hosea. They held her tight. Her crying had sapped her breath and she went limp in their arms and could only muster a whisper as she said, “Good Lord, my boy.'

Hosea ushered her to a chair and urged her to sit. To Rebekah he said, “Apply an ample dose of Vaseline to the boy’s prepuce and wrap him up.” Turning to Thea he said, “Miss Eide, listen to me.”

Thea seemed to have no breath left in her.

“Miss Eide!” Hosea shook her by the shoulders. “Miss Eide, listen to me. Odd is fine. I gave him an examination this morning, I circumcised him. There’s nothing wrong with the boy that a little nap won’t cure. You’ve nothing to worry about. These are things the child must have done. Do you understand me?”

Of course she did not.

On the table on the other side of the room Rebekah had wrapped the boy’s bottom, had dressed him in his layette and his knit hat. In her clumsy way she picked him up and carried him to Thea, who pushed Hosea out of the way and stood and took her boy in one motion. Odd stopped wailing as soon as he was in his mother’s arms. Thea hurried from the surgery, ran up to her bedroom, and closed the door behind her.

Hosea and Rebekah stood in the surgery, looking at each other, shocked though they ought not to have been.

After a moment Hosea said, “There’s no use denying it any longer. She’s suffering badly. Postpartum melancholia. Worse than I’ve ever seen it.” He looked at Rebekah and said softly, “Will you check on Thea?”

Hosea read deep into the night, consulting his old medical journals and further chapters in Fox’s Psychopathology of Hysteria. Around midnight he’d decided there was but a single course of action: He must remove her ovaries to quell the madness. It was a decision that greatly eased his concern, and after he reread Battey’s “Oophorectomy: A Case Study” in the British Medical Journal he made notes in his surgeon’s journal. Before he retired for the night, he wrote a long explanation in Norwegian and practiced it twice.

Early the next morning, after only two hours’ sleep, as soon as he heard stirrings in Thea’s bedroom, he knocked quietly on the door.

He knocked, put his ear to the door, and listened to her feet hurry

ing softly across the floor. “Miss Eide?” he said quietly. He knocked again when she did not answer. “Miss Eide, I must speak with you. May I come in?”

When she failed to answer again he pressed the door open. She sat on the bed, Odd clutched in her arms. She had the look of a cornered animal.

“Thea, dear, what do you think I’ve done? Do you not understand that I took Odd yesterday only to perform perfunctory and essential examinations? That if I’d failed to perform those examinations I would have been in breach of the code of ethics by which my profession is governed?”

He’d intended to spare her his lecture on professional ethics, to cut right to the matter at hand, but he couldn’t help himself.

She only looked at him fearfully.

He proceeded in Norwegian, reading from the notes he’d prepared late the night before, notes he hoped would convey not only his sense of urgency but his profound affection for her and her boy. “Miss Eide, I am your friend. I have tried to help you. And your boy.” He paused, judged the look on her face, and took a step closer.

“Thea, I was helping your boy yesterday.” He paused again, looked at his prepared remarks, looked at Thea, still clutching Odd on the bed, her eyes swollen with tears and lack of sleep, and thought he loved them both. He wished he could tell her, wished he could convey the honesty of his feelings. Instead he returned to his remarks.

“Thea, you are sick. Postpartum melancholia. You must get well. If you don’t, you will be unable to care for the boy.”

This last made her clutch Odd tighter still.

“I would like to perform a surgery called Battey’s Operation to remove from your body what’s causing your morbid condition. I will remove your ovaries. It will cure you. Do you understand what I’m proposing?”

She only looked more frightened.

“Miss Eide, without this surgery, you will go insane.” This last he said in English as he shook his solemn head.

And so two days later Hosea Grimm held a sponge to Thea Eide’s nose. She breathed in the chloroform and went into a catatonic sleep and he, with his sure hands, removed his scalpel from a bath of carbolic solution, took measure of her linea alba, and made a small incision from which he removed the first of her ovaries. He stanched the flow of blood and stitched the incision. He gave her another dose of chloroform and made a matching incision on the other side of her abdomen and repeated the procedure within and without. An hour later, after Thea woke vomiting and feverish, he injected a dose of morphine into her thigh and set a cold compress on her forehead.

He stood back, wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his shirt, and believed honestly that his methods were sound and that Thea Eide, asleep again on the table, awaited a kinder fate thanks to his steady surgical hand.

If Thea had spent her life in prayer and devotion in hope of finding God’s grace, and if God’s grace meant everlasting life in heaven’s gentle glow, then what she found in her fever dreams those ten days after her surgery were her hopes dashed. Whatever bacillus took root in her womb was swift and voracious. A riotous fever set in, and in her delirium there were no trumpets, no bronze altars, no jasper and carnelian, no unapproachable light. There was only the Cimmerian wilderness of her fever and Odd’s howling. She wanted to reach for him, wanted to take away his sorrow, but she was too weak to say so, much less do it.

Odd’s care had fallen to Rebekah. And Eleanor Riverfish, who became Odd’s amah, and who visited five times a day to nurse the boy. It was in this way that Odd Einar Eide and Daniel Joseph Riverfish became brothers, and it was in Eleanor’s arms that he forgot the warmth of his mother’s lap and the soothing sound of her singing voice.

The only song that remained was the dirge of her final hours. She sang in time to her slowing heart her last true words: My boy, my boy, my love. Odd would never hear those words, though one day he’d learn them in his own way.

Finally her fever boiled and her brain burst and she left him. She left all the world. And wherever else her sorrow scattered in the hereafter it went first to Odd’s infant heart and found shelter there.

XXVI.

(June 1921)

The first time Odd saw Rebekah with the child, he read the end of their story in the look on her face. Her gaze rested on the boy with the same vacant ambivalence she used to train on butchered capons