They Called Her Mrs. Doc. (24 page)

“A surprise cake?” asked Samuel.

“For Mama’s birthday,” said Vivian, as though that should explain everything.

“It’s not my birthday,” said Cassandra.

Vivian’s defiance returned. “I heard Papa say to Mrs. Foigt, ‘See if you can discover what Cassandra would like for her birthday,’ ” she said with her nose rising into the air. “I heard it myself.”

Samuel began to laugh and Cassandra looked at him in surprise and then began to laugh along with him.

“Mama’s birthday isn’t for three weeks yet,” he informed the children.

“Then why did you say it?”

“Because I wanted to know ahead so that if I needed to order from Calgary, I would have plenty of time,” answered Samuel and reached out a hand to draw Vivian up against his side.

“She used all the eggs,” Thomas tried again.

But Cassandra didn’t seem to hear him.

“Thank you for thinking about me, honey—even if it didn’t work out well,” and she gave her daughter a hug.

“I told her she should have made sugar cookies,” said Christina with a slightly know-it-all tone. “She knows how to do those.”

“Or ginger snaps,” put in Peter. “She never burned her ginger snaps yet.”

“What will we do for supper?” groused the practical Joseph, who had arrived home, tired and hungry, from his after-school job at Mr. Stockwood’s store.

“Well—it might be a good night to eat at the hotel,” suggested Samuel and got a roar of approval. “In the meantime I’ll open the windows and see if we can clear some of the smoke out of the kitchen.”

And Samuel went to open up the house.

“It’s breezy,” he said when he joined the family. “And I opened the windows straight through. Perhaps it will clear things out a bit.”

Yes,
thought Cassandra.
If there is one thing that we can count on here, it’s the breeze.

“Well, let’s go,” said Samuel, “or we’ll miss our supper.”

To which Thomas replied dourly, “We might have to stay there for breakfast, too. She used all the eggs.”

Samuel’s hand was becoming more usable every day. Cassandra dared to hope that he would soon be able to handle the office on his own and she could return to her housework.

But for the time being, he still needed her hands occasionally, and she felt that it was wise for her to be available as much as possible.

The community folks were quite accustomed to seeing her in the doctor’s office and no one questioned her right to be there.

In fact, neighbor women were beginning to stop her on the street or in the grocers to ask what they should do for Johnnie’s cough or Mary’s fever. Cassandra hardly knew how to respond. She didn’t wish to dismiss the illness casually or seem unconcerned. At times she answered with a response she had heard Samuel give a patient for a similar malady, always adding that if they felt further concern to bring the patient to the office where Samuel might see him.

They always nodded their heads in complete agreement, seeming to feel that the matter had been properly attended to.

This concerned Cassandra and she discussed it with Samuel, who seemed to feel that the “switch” of doctors held no threat to the community. “If they really need me, they’ll call,” he said with confidence, but Cassandra still felt uneasy and on several occasions made sure that Samuel himself popped by the house in question and took a look at the patient.

But it was little Ross Hansen who renamed Cassandra.

It happened one day when the office waiting room seemed to hold more patients than usual. Cassandra had just helped Samuel extract a nasty sliver from the small boy’s hand. Samuel then proceeded with the bandaging, a task he was now able to do easily.

As the boy and his mother turned to leave the office, she said to her son, “Say thank you to Doc.”

The lad turned his big brown eyes, now dry of all tears, toward Samuel and said a rather shaky, “Thank you, Doc.”

Before Samuel could answer, the child turned to Cassandra. “Thank you, Mrs. Doc,” he said solemnly.

Laughter rippled around the room and Cassandra smiled at the wee boy.

“You are welcome, Ross. I hope your finger gets better quickly.”

When the door closed on the pair, the people in the room enjoyed a chuckle again—and the name stuck.

Chapter Twenty

Mothering

It felt good to be back in her own kitchen without the requirement of going to Samuel’s office daily. But Cassandra found that she never felt quite the same about Samuel’s occupation after serving with him for that period of time.

When he came home at night, tired from a heavy work load, Cassandra was anxious to hear about every patient he had treated, their problem and his cure. Sometimes she feared she might tax him with all her questions, but he never seemed to mind sharing the day’s happenings—though, now and then, his answer was simply, “Confidential,” and Cassandra just went on to another topic.

As one season followed another and one year pushed the past one off the wall calendar, Cassandra saw her family grow up before her eyes.

It didn’t seem possible to her that Joseph, their oldest, was about to finish high school. He had switched jobs now and was no longer working for Mr. Stockwood after school, but for Mr. Hick, a local builder. Joseph seemed to love to swing the hammer and only came to his father with one mashed thumb.

Mr. Hick had not been very sympathetic about the thumb. “Best way to learn,” he said dryly. “Ya git one good whack and ya never leave it in the wrong place agin.”

Cassandra wasn’t sure it was a necessary lesson, and her mother-heart gave a sharp lurch as she looked at Joseph’s bruised and bleeding thumb. But the mishap did not deter him. Before it had barely begun to heal he was back at the construction site.

“That’s where the money is,” he told his parents with youthful confidence.

But Cassandra had other dreams for young Joseph.

“Do you think we should send Joseph back East for his education?” she asked Samuel as they prepared for bed one evening.

Samuel thought about it and then replied, “What do you have in mind?”

“Well—perhaps a doctor like his father and grandfather—or a—an attorney. We need more attorneys—or even a teacher or—”

“Have you talked to him about his future?” asked Samuel.

“No,” admitted Cassandra. “Have you?”

“Not really—though I hear his enthusiastic reports now and then.”

“You mean—construction?”

Samuel nodded his head and removed his tie.

Cassandra turned her face to study her husband. A tiny bit of gray was beginning to show at his temples. She thought it becoming. But he still looked almost boyish with his forward lock of hair.

“Really, Samuel,” she said. “Do you think construction is wise? I mean—do you really think that one’s livelihood could be counted on in that field?”

“I don’t know,” replied Samuel thoughtfully. “There’s an awful lot of building going on. The boy’s right. Some people are getting rich.”

It sounded very “iffy” to Cassandra, even though she knew their own small town had grown a good deal since she had entered it as a young bride close to twenty years earlier.
Not that builders aren’t good people and all,
she reasoned with herself,
but it’s such a rough and tumble life. And Joseph has a good mind… .

“What do you think we should do?” asked Cassandra aloud.

“I think we should talk to the boy and see what he thinks he wants to do with his life,” responded Samuel.

“You know what he’ll say,” said Cassandra, her feelings still negative.

“What?” asked Samuel innocently and tossed his white shirt in the laundry basket.

“He’ll say construction,” responded Cassandra.

“If he’s got his mind made up for construction, then he won’t make a very good doctor,” replied Samuel, and that seemed to settle the matter.

As soon as he had graduated from the local school, Joseph started into construction full time with Mr. Hick. The gentleman had been right. Joseph never came home with a banged-up thumb again.

He loved the work even though he was often so tired he could scarcely drag himself to the supper table. Vivian, who considered herself quite a young lady, often complained at the way he smelled, but Joseph would only smile and answer smartly, “It’s the smell of money. Don’t you recognize it?”

“It’s the smell of disgusting sweat,” she would reply, tossing her head much as her mother had at one time been wont to do.

“I worry about Joseph,” Cassandra said to Samuel one day. “He seems terribly obsessed with amassing wealth.”

But when a visiting missionary had a service in the local church and Joseph gave a large donation from his personal savings without the blink of an eye, Cassandra’s eyes filled with tears and she admitted that she might have judged her son too harshly.

It was not difficult to persuade Vivian toward further education. But her chosen field was not nursing, as her father had long ago forecast. She chose instead to study the Arts.

“What do you plan to do with it?” asked Samuel.

“There are ever so many ways one can go,” replied Vivian.

“You don’t need ‘ever-so-many-ways’,” said her practical father. “You just need one.”

Vivian’s stubborn chin protruded. “I’ll choose when I know more about the choices,” she maintained, and Samuel nodded and they sent her off to Montreal to study the Arts. But it was awfully hard for Cassandra to let her go. The only comfort was knowing she would be under the protective wing of Cassandra’s parents.