Chapter 27

When Fran had left and suggested I sleep, I'd almost scoffed at the idea, but inside of a few moments I'd felt myself becoming sleepy. I was actually wondering why I was so darn sleepy, then it dawned on me that Mama Tang and Fran were good buddies; I couldn't help wondering if either Mama Tang's 'good for you' soup or Fran's tea hadn't had a few herbal additions that encouraged a person to rest and sleep. I know it sounds paranoid, but after the early morning that I'd had I couldn't help myself. For some reason I was suspicious of everybody that came near me and everything that happened to me.

I did fall asleep, but I can't say I rested well. I don't really remember the details of the nightmares that I fell into, but in each one, the group of women who had been rather rough on me earlier in the day showed up and tormented my rest. It was almost a relief to be awakened for lunch by a very timid young nurse who seemed extremely apologetic about disturbing my rest.

I was halfway through a tasteless meal of dry overcooked chicken and ultra bland mashed potatoes with a side order of overcooked mixed vegies when it suddenly dawned on me that I was now probably regarded as an ogre by many of the nursing staff of the hospital. I sighed and decided that I'd probably earned the title, at least as far as mistreatment was concerned. However, I felt I could calm down a lot of the rumours that must be flying around the hospital if I was careful of what I said and did, at least with most of the hospital staff. I really didn't give a damn what Phillipa Manicotti and her coven of witches thought of me.

When the young nurse showed up again to take away my empty plate, I smiled at her.

"Hi again." I kept my voice calm and quiet. "I'm sorry if I seemed grouchy when you woke me for lunch, but I'd been trying to sleep and really didn't get much rest. It seemed that ever time I closed my eyes and fell asleep, I'd have a nightmare. One featured a witch with a dirty wash rag who was trying to grind germs and viruses into my wound and another nightmare had a pair of witches who were rolling me around in a drum full of sharp objects and laughing when I complained."

"Oh." She whispered, pausing as she looked at me in surprise.

"I was fine before this morning, but now..." I paused for effect. "Now I'm afraid I'm going to be damn defensive of any of the hospital staff even touching me."

"Oh my." Her voice was extra soft. "You really shouldn't feel that way. We really do our best to be careful."

"Oh, I imagine most of the people working here do care." I sighed. "However some of them just don't give a shit. Unfortunately I happened to be their helpless victim earlier today. Now, after having them throw me around and reopen my wounds, I have to worry about secondary infections and other complications. I have the oddest feeling that they actually treated me that way intentionally and were bound and determined to hurt me if they could."

She suddenly looked uncomfortable and I picked up on her discomfort.

"Those bitches did do it intentionally." I snapped unthinkingly as I stared at her intently. "I think you know something about it too."

"Oh dear." She sighed and looked over her shoulder at the door almost fearfully, then her voice dropped to a barely audible whisper. "I really can't say for sure and it could cost me my job at the hospital if I did say anything. They're so high in the union that they could have anyone who speaks out against them fired."

"Not if they get fired first." I growled. "Look, you don't have to tell me anything, in fact it's probably better if you don't. However, if you do know anything or have overheard anything, I'd like you to talk to the hospital administrator; I think his name is John Sousa. If you don't feel comfortable talking to him, you might talk to either Dr. Franklin or Dr. Timmins. All of them know about my case."

The nurse just shook her head and seemed to shrink away from the idea. Instead, she quietly picked up my tray and in a moment I was left alone. My solitude didn't last for long, I'd scarcely managed to calm down when I heard two voices I recognised in the hallway.

One of the voices was Lisa-Marie's while the other was Andy's and they seemed to be having a fairly loud discussion with someone they really didn't like. Almost instantly I grew frustrated because I couldn't make out most of their words, only the tenor of their discussion and the obvious quality of dislike in their voices.

When they came into the room a moment later both of their faces appeared to be flushed, but they both seemed to be trying to sound pleasant, in other words, the exact opposite from the tones I had heard a moment before. Of course once I'd received a hug and kiss from both of them I tried to find out what had happened outside my room, but neither of them seemed to want to cooperate.

"Just forget it." Andy insisted as I tried to pressure them into telling me what had happened.

"After this morning I don't think I dare forget anything." I snapped. "From what I've heard and felt today I think someone is out to cause me problems."

"We heard about that." Lisa-Marie answered me instantly. "Actually what you overheard was the last of that issue. We just let the former head nurse know what we'd just been in a meeting with Mr. Sousa; she and her friends are no longer allowed to attend to you in any way."

"What?" I stared at her.

"Lisa-Marie, you weren't to tell him." Andy frowned.

"Andy, he needs to know so he won't worry." Lisa-Marie barked in return.

Andy simply shrugged her shoulders and threw her hands in the air as if she was disgusted. "Mr. Sousa won't like it."

"I don't give a damn what that pipsqueak thinks." Lisa-Marie snapped. "If I could afford it, I'd pull Tom out of here and hire a darn nurse to treat him at home. You heard those three bitches in the restaurant. How can you trust this place after that?"

"Wait a second, what did you overhear?" I asked, almost afraid to find out.

"Oh, we stopped at Mama Tang's restaurant on the way here. We were in the back with Mai Lin, talking to her dad, when these three nurses came in for coffee after their shift was over. I didn't know who it was, but Andy looked out and recognised the gossip columnist, Phillipa Manicotti and two of her buddies."

"Oh great." I sighed. " I suppose they were talking about me, were they?"

"I guess so, but we didn't realise that right then. What they were talking about was the fact that they might have been a bit too rough on a patient. One of the women was actually almost in tears because she was afraid they might be disciplined for something they did." Lisa-Marie said quietly. "One of the other two tried to calm her, saying they didn't have to worry because she felt that between them they controlled the union local so they were safe. That's when the third one spoke up and told them both to be quit in a public place."

"They were arguing about that and the one was making comments about how the guy they'd mistreated deserved everything he got. That's when the little bell over the front door jingled as someone walked in and they all shut up." Andy volunteered. "Right about then, the shit hit the fan."

"I just wish Mama Tang had been a little later." Lisa-Marie sighed.

"Pardon?" I frowned, feeling that they had lost me somehow.

"Well, the person coming in the door was Mama Tang and she'd just been here to see you, so she'd heard about your problems with the three women who were having coffee. As soon as she saw them, she started shouting at them to get out of her place and never to come back. When she felt they were too slow about leaving, she screamed at her son to call the cops. Then she started screaming at everyone in Chinese." Lisa-Marie tried to explain.

"What happened then?" I couldn't help, but grin at the idea of what it must have seemed like to the three old hags.

"Well, Mai Lin's dad went running out of the kitchen with Mai Lin on his heels. The three women had enough at that point and they went running outside..." Lisa-Marie started to say.

"I almost wish they hadn't." Andy interrupted. "That was when Mai Lin started to translate what her mom was saying and it was about what those old biddies had done to you."

"Well, it's a good thing they left then because Fran came in a minute later and calmed things down. If they hadn't left that fast you might have started to tear out hair in the mood you were in." Lisa-Marie chided Andy. " It was only because of the fact we hadn't done anything physical to that crew of bitches and because of Fran's intervention that we got in to see Mr. Sousa. As it is, the hospital is investigating the three of them and the head nurse too, but if we'd have started a fight, who knows what would have happened."

"Whatever." Andy snorted. "I still think it would have been more satisfying to clean their clocks."

"Oh yeah, that would look great when you walked into your class in Edmonton on Monday. There you'd be all scratched and bruised, taking a course on emergency medicine." Lisa-Marie chided Andy again. "People would think you came from an abusive family or something."

"I'd still like to boot that old bitch's ass." Andy's face twisted into a pout.

I couldn't help the smile that twisted my lips as I thought of the image of Andy kicking someone in the butt. Somehow the vision just didn't fit with the gal that I knew. I was going to comment about it, but just then Fran and Mai Lin came into the room.

The next few minutes were confusing for me to say the least; it seemed to me that all the women were talking at once. Since Fran had been around earlier, she simply smiled and waved at me. However Mai Lin hadn't seen me for a week, so she had to say 'Hi' then wanted to talk to me about how things had gone with everything on the farm as well as how happy she was to have spent time there.

Actually Mai Lin was quite loud and because she was so excited, she was jabbering a mile a minute about her experiences. For the next few minutes I got a full rundown of what had happened from her viewpoint.

In the confusion after I'd been rushed off to the hospital on the previous Saturday night, Mai Lin had been left alone at the farm. Although she was a bit worried about being alone, she'd decided that she wasn't going to leave the place completely abandoned so she'd phoned home and Mama Tang had sent her brother to spend the night, just in case there was a problem.

Chan, her brother, had slept on the couch in the new office and had to leave early in the morning to get to his job, but being alone during the day hadn't worried her much. Besides, by the time her brother had left, Willy had shown up to do the chores; Andy must have called him to let him know that I was in the hospital. Mai Lin had gone out to help Willy and he'd reassured her about how safe living on the farm was. Not much later, Fran's sons, David and Samson, had shown up and from then on they'd been the main spurs of the action as far as Mai Lin was concerned. Both of them had simply stepped in and helped in any way that they could.

One of the first jobs they had tackled was the bathroom that I'd plan on putting in on the main floor. That was simply because my friend, Jack Wheeler, hadn't heard I'd been taken to the hospital and had shown up to help me work on it. With the four of them there to work on the job it was done in short order. In fact the bathroom had been done by the time that Lisa-Marie, Andy and Fran had gotten home from the hospital late Sunday afternoon. Dr. Franklin had sent them home because he'd been satisfied that I was recovering from my operation and had insisted that they needed some rest. After David and Samson had left, Mai Lin had helped Willy with the evening chores, then had cooked a quick meal and the four women had sat around talking until bed time.

Monday morning seemed to set the pattern for all of the mornings for the rest of the week. Andy and Fran would get up first and would have coffee ready by the time Lisa-Marie and Mai Lin made it downstairs. Mai Lin would grab a coffee, then join Willy doing the chores while the other women busied themselves around the house. Once the chores were done, breakfast eaten and Fran's son's had shown up for the day, everyone would talk over what they were doing that day. After that, each day was different.

Monday, David had hung around the farm because he was waiting for Fran's customers to come pick up the shipment of herbs that had been sitting in my machine shop. Meanwhile, Samson had borrowed my two-ton truck and gone into town to pick up the windmill tower that I'd traded from Triple Dub. While they were waiting, David and Mai Lin had shifted around the equipment in the machine shed and had cleaned it up in order to have room to work on the tower. While they'd been working on that they'd had to take two breaks to load the herbs as Fran's customers had shown up. Once Samson returned with the tower, they'd laid it out, straightened any bent sections, welded up any broken pieces, replaced any bolts and had it ready for painting by that night.

On Tuesday Mai Lin and the boys had painted the whole tower from top to bottom. When it was nearly complete, the boys had left Mai Lin to finish it while they used the two-ton to go to the municipal yard and get four twenty foot long creosoted bridge timbers. After they got the timbers home, they'd used the front end loader to clear all the snow from a level area near the house and had laid out the timbers in an oversized tic-tac-toe grid with the center square just large enough to mount the legs of the tower. That gave them a temporary base for the tower and was necessary because with the ground frozen solid they could neither dig holes nor pour a concrete base. Then they used the front end loader to move the tower into place and stand it up. Of course once the tower was mounted to the base they had to stretch cables to guy the tower against high winds since the base wasn't anchored. It took some doing, but they managed to find mounting points so their cables would hold the tower stable before they left that evening.

Wednesday morning they mounted an antenna rotor and the big antenna for the CB rig on the top of the tower, then they strung the shielded cable from there to the house and connected it to the lead-in that they'd installed on the house wall previously. Finally they ran a ground cable to the copper ground stake next to the house and grounded the tower itself. When they hooked up the CB rig in the office, they were able to talk to a friend on the outskirts of Calgary, almost eighty miles away. The rest of Wednesday was spent rigging the two mobile CB units in my truck and the tractor cab.

Because the weather had stayed nice all week, when David and Samson showed up on Thursday, Mai Lin had convinced them that she wanted to see the acreage that she was planning to rent from me even if it was still covered with snow. She wanted to measure just how big it was so she'd have some idea of how much work it would be to maintain. On top of that she wanted to have an idea of how she was going to lay out her planting in the spring. When they paced off the area, they decided it worked out to between five and six acres and except for the slight angle that the creek cut on one end, it worked out to be an almost perfect rectangle.

Mai Lin admitted that she'd been so thrilled about having looked over the area I was planning to rent to her that she'd spent the rest of the day working out rough sketches and plans for her garden. David and Samson had left her in the house while they spent the day with Willy as he worked at jobs that needed doing around the barnyard.

Up until then Mai Lin had been prattling away uninterrupted and had managed to grab my attention to the point that I hadn't realised that the other three women had grown quiet. However as Mai Lin drew a breath to say something else, Lisa-Marie broke into the conversation.

"Tom, you remember that tomorrow Andy is supposed to go to Edmonton to start that EMT course, don't you?"

"Yeah, it doesn't look like I'm going along though." I nodded with a sad look on my face.

"Well, that's just it. We were just talking and I was thinking that I should stay home so..."

"Wait a second, I think Andy could use your support." I argued.

"I agree." Fran nodded. "From what Dr. Franklin said, Tom will be stuck here for a few days anyway. Mai Lin and I can deal with anything that needs to be done at the farm, after all, Willy and my boys are available to help as well."

"But what happens if Tom gets released before Wednesday night?" Andy jumped into the conversation.

"Then Mai Lin and I will act as his nursemaids while the guys look after everything else." Fran added firmly.

"Fran, we know what you think." Lisa-Marie said impatiently. "We want to know what Tom says."

"I think Fran's right." I sighed softly. "After those witches had at me this morning, I think I'm stuck here for a few more days. I expect Dr. Franklin and the surgeon are going to be extra careful about releasing me after that."

"Well, you can't blame them, Tom." Fran spoke quietly. "If there were any complications after we all complained about your care this morning, I think there'd be a heck of a mess for the hospital and everyone involved."

"No, just for Phillipa whosits and company." I growled. "What pisses me off the worst is that I'd just arranged to take the last of my course by correspondence so I could have time to get my machinery ready for spring planting. Laying here in this bed has sure fucked that royally."

"Well, I think Willy and my boys could take care of the machinery and I could make a trip back here this evening with your books so you could study while you were laying there." Fran offered.

The discussion carried on for a while, but in the long run everyone decided to along with Fran's and my suggestions. Since Mai Lin wanted to be back in time to help Willy with the chores, she and Fran left soon, but Lisa-Marie and Andy stuck around until my supper arrived because they felt that they wanted to talk since they wouldn't see me for several days. Fran came back later that evening with David, Samson and Willy. She had all my books from the Ag. College and the guys wanted to know just what I wanted done around the farm. I'd hardly managed to explain everything to them when a nurse came by to give me a sleeping pill and asked them to leave.

Sunday was a hectic day for me. In the morning I had Dr. Franklin and a nurse come in to check on the state of my health and to change my bandages. They'd hardly left when Joe and Pam showed up for a short visit, but they ended up staying until just before lunch. After lunch, Mom and Dad showed up; they'd just left when Fran and Mai Lin popped by and brought Mama Tang with another thermos of her wonderful soup. Mai Lin was still there when Lisa-Marie and Andy dropped by to let me know they were off to Edmonton. Fran popped back in with a cup of tea just after Lisa-Marie and Andy had left, then she and Mai Lin hung around talking to me until almost supper time.

That evening I fell asleep half way through my meal and slept the whole night through.

Monday morning I was awake early and felt much better. I'd just eaten breakfast when Dr. Franklin came in and I told him that I was thinking about trying to get out of bed. He vetoed the idea, but called for an orderly and had him help me to get into a wheelchair. They wheeled me down the hall and did an ultrasound test on my lower abdomen. By the time I was back in my room, my bed had been remade with a change of sheets and I chuckled about that as the orderly helped me back into bed.

I was still in a good mood about an hour later when Dr. Franklin came back into the room and astounded me. He suggested that if I felt like it, I could try to get in and out of bed on my own if I needed to go to the bathroom, but I was to limit the distance that I walked. He gave me a lot of other limitations too, but all of them seemed to be common sense to me because they all concerned not straining the muscles of my lower abdomen since that's where I'd been sliced open.

I spent most of my day studying and working on my Ag. School courses but was actually sitting up when Mai Lin came in to see me in the afternoon. I was astounded by her reaction when she came in and saw me sitting in the chair. Her eyes snapped wide open, then she let out a little squeak, suddenly she was rushing over to the chair and leaning in from one side to hug me. Then she was kissing me. Just as quickly, she pulled back and kept moving back until she was blocked from moving further by the side of the bed. That's when I realised that she was blushing as she stared at her feet.