Just Over The Mountain Read Online Free PDF

his life. He’d slid down a steep, rocky hill and was stopped once by a tree with fiercely sharp bark and once by the asphalt of the road. He’d been scuffed up all over and one side of his face had been skinned raw.
    Without knowing whether he was safe, June had been in the clinic all that night, tending both law enforcement personnel and criminals who had been arrested, all injured in the raid. She had come home to find Jim waiting for her in her house, bruised and bloody.
    Now she’d like to see how he had healed.
     
    June wasn’t at all surprised to see Elmer’s truck in the hospital parking lot. She had to pass through a clot of four of the six Burnham offspring circled around one of the few outdoor ashtrays. Sadie went with her as far as the information desk where an elderly woman in avolunteer’s pink coat offered to dog-sit. June found the other two Burnham kids waiting in a special room off the Intensive Care area. Small town and country hospitals were used to whole families practically moving in and refusing to leave until their loved one did.
    June took one look at Charlotte and thought it quite possible they would leave without her. She was gray, the color of death, and though her eyes were open, there was very little life in them. She had a plethora of tubes coming out of her.
    Elmer sat at her bedside, Bud stood on the other side. June went to the nurses’ station and asked to see Charlotte’s chart. She reviewed the last EKG tape, the meds that had been prescribed by the cardiologist, the doctors’ orders for the day. The one thing she wished she could read here was not going to appear. Would Charlotte survive this?
    While June read the chart, the nurse urged Bud and Elmer away. “Okay, gentlemen, time’s up. Charlotte needs her beauty sleep, you know. Someone can see her again in an hour.”
    Intensive care personnel were very strict about limiting the visitors and the time spent at a patient’s bedside during these critical hours. But June was not hustled out. With the chart in hand, she went to the bedside. She touched Charlotte’s hand, which was clammy. She gave the hand a squeeze. Charlotte had a tracheotomy and oxygen, so couldn’t speak, but she looked into June’s eyes and mouthed, “Thank you, Doctor.”
    Doctor. June felt a swell of tears. “You’ll be okay, Charlotte. You’re tough.”
    Charlotte nodded, but there was no conviction in it. She closed her eyes.
    June found her dad in the waiting room, chatting with one of the Burnhams. “Dad, got a second?” He excused himself and went to June. “Are you needed here? Or can you escape for a few moments?”
    “What for?”
    “I have another patient here. You might enjoy seeing her.”
    “Who?”
    “Jurea Mull. There’s going to be an unveiling.”
    “This morning? I wouldn’t miss it!”
    June had become acquainted with the Mull family for the first time several months ago. One early morning she’d run for the kitchen phone wearing only a towel and found the four of them seated, nice as you please, in her living room. Clarence, a Vietnam vet, Jurea, his wife, and teenagers Clinton and Wanda. Although the Mulls had come in search of treatment for Clinton’s injured foot, the first and most obvious thing June saw had been Jurea Mull’s morbidly scarred face. One whole side was crushed, leaving a cheekbone caved in and her eye sealed closed by scar tissue. The accident had happened when she was a little girl and her family, mountain people, hadn’t had medical treatment available. The injury had healed, her cranium and facial bones grew, and the result was freakish.
    June was able to convince Jurea to have a consultation with a visiting plastic surgeon who, with his team of traveling volunteers, did surgery for the poor and uninsured. Jurea not only qualified in both categories, but her face presented the doctor with a challenge he could get excited about. Doubtless the case would appear in a medical book, or at least a