Three Nights Under His Window

“Ma’am, I’m going to need you to stay on this side of the doors.”

The charge nurse said it kindly, which somehow made it worse. She had one hand flat on the steel push plate of the ICU doors, and she did not move it.

Through the narrow window in the door I could see the hallway, the blue curtains, the corner of a bed. I could see my mother-in-law, Arlene Strand, sitting in a vinyl chair with her purse on her knees.

She looked up at me through the glass. Then she looked down at the floor.

“I’m his wife,” I said. “Tammy Strand. Rick Strand is my husband. They flew him in from Lake County about three hours ago.”

“I know who you are, Mrs. Strand.” The nurse lowered her voice. “His mother is listed as his contact. She’s told us there’s a safety concern.”

I did not understand the words at first. A safety concern. I thought she meant the tractor, the ditch, the soft shoulder of the section road where it all happened.

“What kind of safety concern?”

The nurse glanced at the window, then back at me. “She told us the marriage is in trouble. She said you’ve made threats, and that he told her he was afraid of you. When that gets reported, we put a hold on visitors until social services can review it.”

I stood there in my work fleece with my name badge still on. It said Tammy, Front Desk, in green letters.

“That’s not true,” I said. “None of that is true. We’ve been married nineteen years.”

“I believe you might be telling me the truth,” she said, and she sounded like she meant it. “But I can’t make that call tonight. Social services reviews it Monday morning.”

It was Friday. It was a quarter to eight at night.

The call

The call had come at ten after four that afternoon.

I was at the front desk at the seed dealership in town, finishing up the invoices for a co-op order, when my cell phone buzzed against the counter. It was Deb Halvorsen, our neighbor to the south. Deb never calls during the day.

“Tammy, it’s Rick,” she said. “He’s alive. Jeff’s with him. The tractor went over in the ditch on the section road.”

Rick had been pulling the grain cart behind the old 4440. Our hired man had quit the week before, right in the middle of soybeans, so Rick was doing two jobs.

It had rained two days straight that week. The shoulder of the section road was soft as pudding. He was pulling a full cart, and the shoulder gave way, and the tractor went over on its side into the ditch.

The cab held. Thank God for that cab. But he had not been buckled in, because no farmer I have ever met buckles in to run a grain cart a quarter mile, and he had been thrown against the door.

Jeff Halvorsen was combining the field across the road. He saw the cart go over, and he was out of his own cab and running before the dust settled. He called 911 with one hand and held Rick’s head still with the other.

By the time I got Deb’s call, they had already decided on the helicopter. Sioux Falls was seventy miles away by road. It was about twenty-five minutes by air.

“Go,” Deb said. “I’ll get the kids.”

But I couldn’t let her. Not yet.