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teammate yelled at Jones, “Hey, man, this ain’t American football!”
    Jones jumped to his feet, and said, too close to his face, “It’s America, isn’t it? You think this sport is for wimps?”
    â€œWho you callin’ wimp?!” one of the other players barked, jumping up and shoving Jones as well as two more players nearby, all of whom had come out to wear T-shirts and shorts in the icy mud for exactly this sort of thing.
    â€œIt was a clean hit!” Jones shouted, pushing back. As more players joined the melee Jones grabbed the arm of the burly guy he leveled and started to help him up when he saw the guy’s head was split open.
    â€œHey, Jones,” somebody said, “you’re not supposed to tackle with your face.”
    â€œHe does everything with his face!” somebody else said. “Just ask your girlfriend!” All the guys were laughing even as they were shoving.
    Jones prodded the gash on the head of the guy he had hit. “Come on, let me see, let me see. Hey, bring me my bag, will ya?”
    Three minutes later the muddy, bruised, bloody ruggers were clustered at the edge of the field, grimacing like six-year-old boys as they watched Jones sewing closed the gash on the guy’s forehead. “Don’t worry,” Jones said. “You’ll be pretty as ever! Scissors.”
    The biggest, gnarliest guy responded quickly because he was, in fact, a surgical assistant. He handed Jones the scissors from his medical bag—the one he always brought to the games because stitches on the field were as regular as cold beer afterwards—and Jones clipped the stitches and was returning the tools to his medical bag when he saw his cell phone flashing as he had programmed it to do when the hospital called him in an emergency.
    * * *
    Still in his muddy uniform, Jones walked into the hospital and called to Nancy, the Emergency Room nurse, “What’s up?”
    â€œWe’ve got a newborn who’s not breathing right, and the new resident in the ER doesn’t have any pediatric experience.”
    With the hurried focus of emergency, Jones washed his hands as she slipped a hospital gown over his rugby clothes. Nancy was forty-five and had raised two daughters alone and was now raising two grandsons because one of her daughters was in rehab; Nancy was a natural caregiver but was also so tough that the joke around the Emergency Room was that if Hitler had had Nancy we’d all be speaking German. When Jones had started doing shifts in the ER as a resident eight years ago, she had treated him in the same way a general might treat a private, as if he knew absolutely nothing. Sometimes she still treated him that way. But when Nancy was on duty, no one ever died due to neglect, or because of a misdiagnosis by a rookie doctor. Jones preferred her over all the other nurses. “Is that your blood?” she snapped at him.
    â€œI don’t think so.”
    Twenty seconds later he was examining the baby, a trembling, boney mass that resembled a fetal bird more than a human child. “Looks like poor prenatal nutrition,” Jones told Nancy. “How’s her mother’s health?”
    â€œWe didn’t get blood work on her,” Nancy said. “The baby was born on the gurney in the ER last night, while you were sewing up the drunk. The mother walked in out of the snowstorm and didn’t even have a coat. She walked out this morning.”
    â€œHer daughter’s frail, but she’s hanging on. If she sleeps, she just might turn the corner. I’ll watch her.”
    Jones pulled up a chair and settled down into it. Nancy looked down at his muddy, bloody knees, and he covered them with the surgical robe. “Did you sleep any?” she demanded, folding her arms across her chest and staring at him over the close-work glasses resting on the end of her nose. “You worked the last shift,