“Oh,” Dree said. She thanked the woman.
Batsa translated, and the woman did the classic blinking, head-shaking, and holding up a hand to sayit’s-nothing-it’s-nothing.
Maxence touched her arm, which she felt through the puffy layers of her ski suit. “You touch her feet to receive her blessing.” He bent and spread both his hands toward the woman’s boots.
The older woman smiled and bobbled her head from side to side, grinning and saying something as she touched his shoulders and raised him up.
Dree handed him the scarf and whispered to him, “It’s okay to do this even though we’re Catholic, right?”
The cold wind whipped his black curls around his face. “It’s fine. It’s a community and cultural thing.”
Father Booker leaned toward her. “Yes, it’s all right, not that anyone asked the ordained Catholic priest for his opinion.”
“Thank you, Father Booker,” Dree said and performed the same bow and hand reach as Maxence had.
The woman raised Dree up by her shoulders and then smacked her hand to the middle of Dree’s forehead, holding it there and chanting something to the sky.
Dree went cross-eyed, looking at the woman’s hand on her face. Her palm smelled like baked bread and fresh butter.
She asked Max from under the woman’s hand. “This is okay, too, right?”
Max nodded. “You should be honored.”
“Okay.”
The woman’s hand on her face did not move, and the woman said something serious to Dree in Nepali.
If this had happened back in New Mexico, the woman would have been spraying spittle and screaming while she called on the power of Her Savior Jesus Christ to expel the demons from Dree’s soul, so this was a much nicer experience. Dree was all for less screaming and spittle.
The woman removed her hand and said something else, then pressed her hands together like she was praying and bowed.
Batsa told Dree, “She thanks you again for the life of her grandson. Do the namaste back to her, just like that, palms together and bow.”
So, she did.
They said their goodbyes, and Dree kept an eye on the older woman as she went back to the village. The six of them shoved their helmets on their heads, mounted the motorcycles, and carefully pulled out onto the dirt road that led away from the village.
That day’s ride was uneventful, and the next few days passed with little novelty.
In the next couple of villages, many people came to Dree’s makeshift clinic to be treated, but there were no medical mysteries. There were the usual stitches, listening to chests and backs and dispensing antibiotics for pneumonia, wound cleaning and instructions, a few vaccinations she had, a frantic digging through the supplies for a tube of ocular antibiotic gel for a woman with a frightening eye infection, setting a few bones and plastering on a cast, rehydrating salt solution for a few children with diarrhea and probable food poisoning, just the usual.
One clinic was so busy that she couldn’t stop for lunch. Maxence handed her a bite of bread with yak butter every time she breezed by him. Yak butter was really good. It was almost as good as sheep butter, which was saying something.
And as usual, she worked as fast as she could while Batsa translated, and she worked until Maxence quietly told her that it was enough, she had done enough, and she must stop for food and rest.
Nights around the campfire weren’t particularly tense. They stopped talking about the advisability of the NICU clinics. Discussion on the morning survey missions was limited to the suitability of the actual site, whether the ground was level, how much direct sunlight the plot of land would get per day due to the mountains, and the availability of water due to river proximity in the village.
Dree sensed a confrontation was coming, though. The air was thick with arguments left unsaid.
At one village, a woman who seemed to be in her forties slowly walked in, obviously in pain.
Maxence and Batsa had been creating makeshift curtains out of bedsheets from the house that they commandeered at each stop, so they had some semblance of privacy from the dozen or more people in the waiting room. That day’s curtains were printed with a crimson and orange mandala.
The woman explained to Dree what was wrong, and Batsa translated it as, “She has a wound on her chest that will not heal. It has been there for a year or more. She apologizes for the smell, but she says that she cannot make it better.”
Her eyes remained downcast on the souls of her boots as she unlatched her coat and blouse, and Dree reached over and touched her arm, saying, “It’s all right. Just show me, and I’ll do what I can.”
As she unbuttoned her clothes, a foul odor rose from her body. The rotting smell was not sweat or common body odor, but something else entirely.
