One Bright Morning

by Duncan, Alice

  ONE BRIGHT MORNING

  By Alice Duncan

  One Bright Morning

  Copyright © 1995 by Alice Duncan

  All rights reserved

  Cover Illustration by Darlene Minuto

  Published 1995 by Harper Paperbacks

  A Division of HarperCollins Publishers

  Smashwords Edition September 2, 2009

  Visit aliceduncan.net

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Chapter One

  Lincoln County, New Mexico Territory, 1880

  Maggie had the blasphemous thought that God was seriously at fault when He created women.

  “He made a mistake,” she muttered to the rough log ceiling when she awoke for the fifth time. Only this time, unlike the prior four, she had to get out of bed and start her day. The cold, gray dawn was cracking.

  She pushed the quilts aside and shivered as the icy air hit her. Pains stabbed through her skull in piercing, furious shafts when she thrust her arms into her heavy wrapper and stuffed her feet into her slippers. Thick woolen stockings already encased her legs; she had worn them to bed for warmth. The frigid cold made the hurt in her skull even worse. She glanced toward the window, hoping to get a glimpse of the day, but the glass was frosted over.

  “Maybe it wasn’t a mistake,” she grumbled. “Maybe He hated His mother and He’s punishing all women in order to get back at her.”

  Her teeth were chattering from the morning chill by the time she had stumbled out to the kitchen to stoke up the fire and heat the coffee. Every time her teeth chattered, her head throbbed. She lit an oil lamp, hung it on the peg by the door, and, in spite of her miserable headache, appreciated the comfortable yellow glow it cast in the kitchen.

  She realized that her earlier thought didn’t make any sense. “I guess that’s not it. He couldn’t hate His mother before He invented women. Could He?”

  Maggie was honestly puzzled about that. But there was nobody to ask, now that Kenny was dead. Not that he had ever answered her when he was alive. He would just look at her with those big, sweet calf eyes and smile at her tenderly with that big, sweet smile. Still, she missed him terribly, even if he wasn’t much for conversation.

  “At least Kenny loved me,” she sniffed. “That’s some kind of miracle, anyway.” Maggie’s was a life that had been powerfully short on miracles. “I should have known it wouldn’t last.” Her breath hung in the morning air like a soft cloud.

  Her fingers were stiff with cold when she cracked the ice in the bucket on the porch, put a pot of water on to boil for mush, and set last night’s coffee on the stove lid to heat.

  “Damn it,” she said with rancor as she prepared to meet the day and her child. “Why would God create a body that can’t even function for seven days in the month, and then make her do it anyway?”

  Her little daughter started to fuss in the other bedroom, so Maggie squared her shoulders, put on a smile, and tried to look happy when she peek-a-booed into the room.

  Annie saw her mama, stopped crying, hiccoughed, and then laughed at Maggie, who was making a silly face at her. She pulled herself up in the crib her daddy had built for her and held out her chubby arms, which were swathed in layers of thick flannel.

  In spite of herself, Maggie laughed when she walked over to her little girl and picked her up. Annie looked like a roly-poly muffin, swaddled up as she was.

  “How’s mama’s best baby this morning?”

  “Mama’s bay,” Annie confirmed, and hugged her mother tightly around the neck.

  “I love you so much, I just can hardly stand it, baby girl. And we’re going to be all right. You just see if we aren’t.” Maggie knew she was trying to make herself feel better with those words. The kitchen was warmer than the bedroom, so Maggie carried Annie in there, and laid her down on the table to change her diaper.

  Annie’s sweet little face looked wet and red and miserable. So did her sweet little bottom. Annie was just fifteen months old. Maggie wiped the tears off of her baby’s cheeks, kissed her soundly, changed her diapers, rubbed her chafed behind with glycerin, tickled her tummy, and bundled her up again.

  “I miss your papa, Annie, honey. He loved you so much, and now you’ll never even know him.”

  Maggie shook her head sadly as she settled Annie into the lovely high chair that Kenny had built and lowered the wooden tray that he had fashioned on hinges so that the baby wouldn’t fall out and hurt herself.

  It didn’t look as though the water would ever boil. Maggie and her daughter sang a little back-and-forth tune while she poured herself a cup of not-quite-hot coffee. Then she swallowed it with a shudder. Sometimes coffee would ease the pain of these God-awful headaches.

  She was startled when she heard a loud, thumping bang on the kitchen door.

  “Mercy sakes, what’s that, Annie?”

  Annie offered her mama a toothless smile, and Maggie grinned back.

  “Ozzie?” she called.

  Nobody answered.

  The thumping bang came again. This time it was followed by an odd, straggling scrape, as of wood sliding against wood.

  Maggie planted a quick kiss on her daughter’s curly hair and headed to the door.

  Somebody had told her about zombies once. Whoever it was said that zombies were the undead, and that’s pretty much what Maggie felt like when she trod miserably over to the kitchen door and opened it up.

  She expected to find Ozzie, drunk, propped against it with a stupid grin on his face, and she was prepared to lecture him soundly. Ozzie Plumb was her hired man, and if a more useless individual than Ozzie existed on this earth, Maggie had yet to meet him. She’d fire him and hire somebody else, but she didn’t quite know how to go about it. Anyway, there wasn’t anybody else in this neck of the world to hire. And even if there was, who’d work for a woman, except another bum like Ozzie?

  “Oh, sweet Jesus,” Maggie breathed at the sight that greeted her eyes.

  A big roan horse stood there. It seemed to loom from out of the misty dawn, and it was peering at her with solemn brown eyes. Astride the horse was a man unknown to Maggie. The stranger had apparently reached out to bang at her door with the stock of the rifle which now dangled helplessly from his fingers. The rifle slipped out of his slack grip as Maggie stared at him and made a dull, crackling sound as it hit the frozen dirt. Blood dripped from the fingers that had held the gun.

  Blood soaked the stranger’s long duster and trouser leg, as well. It had begun to congeal in the icy February dawn, and Maggie saw the glint of ice crystals where blood had dripped down to the stranger’s boot and dribbled over the side.

  “I’m awful sorry, ma’am,” the man breathed through white lips. He was drooping at an odd angle in his saddle.

  As Maggie watched in horror, the stranger’s eyes slid shut. He slumped over his horse’s neck as he passed out and would have fallen onto the frozen earth, but his duster caught on the saddle horn and he couldn’t.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus,” Maggie murmured again.

  She swallowed the sick feeling in her gut and reached for the man’s shoulders. The fellow was leaning perilously, and Maggie didn’t want him to fall.

  “Ozzie,” she hollered. “Ozzie, get your worthless butt out here right now!” The sound of her own loud voice ripped through her poundi
ng head like a bullet, but she tried to ignore it.

  She’d have to nursemaid this person, she guessed, whoever he was. At least that was one thing she knew how to do, was to nurse people. When Kenny had been kicked by a horse, she’d had to learn. And then he had died anyway. Sometimes life just wasn’t fair.

  She could hear the baby beginning to fuss in the kitchen, but Maggie couldn’t see to her child right now. This poor stranger might die right here, half out of his saddle, if she didn’t do something quick.

  “Ozzie!” she bellowed again.

  “I’m comin’,” came a thin, warbly voice.

  Maggie had managed to prop the stranger’s broad shoulders in her arms by the time Ozzie made it out to the kitchen side of the house. He was a small man with a lined, skinny face that ran towards florid. Right now he looked a little green. Maggie figured he must have spent most of last night drinking in town. She guessed that if it were light enough, she would have found the whites surrounding his puffy-lidded, milky-blue eyes shot with blood, and the thought disgusted her.

  “This man’s hurt. Help me get him inside.”

  “Jesus H. God,” breathed Ozzie. “Whoozat?”

  “I have no idea who it is,” Maggie snapped. “Help me get him inside.”

  Ozzie lurched over and helped her lower the man out of his saddle. Then they dragged him inside the house. The fire Maggie had built up in the kitchen stove had already warmed the place up considerably.

  “Hold him there, Ozzie. I’m going to fix my bed and we can lay him down there.”

  She didn’t look to see that he obeyed her. Fortunately, Maggie possessed a stronger will than Ozzie did, and he generally obeyed when he was inside the house and in her line of sight.

  “Who dat man?” Annie asked her mama. She stopped fussing and stared at the unconscious man curiously.

  “I don’t know, baby, but he’s bad hurt.”

  Annie eyed the stranger again. “He hurt,” she said. Her little voice sounded sad.

  Maggie raced into her bedroom and ripped the sheets off the bed. Then she reached into the chest in the corner and took out the old oil skin sheeting that had been used during the two months between the time Kenny got kicked by the horse and he had died. Quick as lightning, she swished the oil skin onto the bed and tucked fresh linens over it, then dashed out to the kitchen again.

  “Help me, Ozzie,” she commanded. And Ozzie did.

  They carried the stranger into the bedroom and laid him on Maggie’s bed. Maggie wished it was warmer in the room, but that couldn’t be helped. She’d just leave the door open so that the heat from the kitchen would warm it up.

  In the mean time, she quickly applied a tourniquet of rolled linen to the poor man’s right arm and determined that his left leg was also bleeding. She folded up another pad of linen and, after a couple of exploratory prods, discovered where the blood was seeping out of his leg. Then she strapped the pad tightly over the leak in his thigh.

  “I’ll have to figure out exactly what’s the matter with that leg when I have time,” she muttered to her unconscious patient.

  Then she piled him with quilts and blankets, hoped he wouldn’t die before she could attend to him, and hurried back to the kitchen.

  She turned on Ozzie so furiously that the man stepped back a pace.

  “You see to the stranger’s horse right now, Ozzie. Then go run to the Phillips’ place and tell Sadie that I need help. Then you go to town and fetch Doc Pritchard. If you don’t do all of those things I told you to do, Ozzie Plumb, don’t you even bother to come back here. And if you don’t do those things and still try to come back here to get your stupid guitar, I’ll bust it. Swear to God, I will, Ozzie. So you just do what I say.”

  An expression of practiced hurt settled onto Ozzie’s wrinkled face. “Now, Miss Maggie, would I fail you?”

  “Yes,” Maggie said shortly. “Now you git, Ozzie, and git now. I’m going to tend to the baby and then tend to this stranger.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Maggie eyed him narrowly and decided he probably meant it. Since she didn’t trust him out of her eyesight, however, she quickly marched outside to the shack next to the barn and confiscated his guitar while he tended to the stranger’s horse.

  When he led Old Bones, the mule, out of the barn, Maggie lifted up the guitar for him to see. She wanted him to know she was holding it hostage so he wouldn’t neglect any of her instructions.

  “You see here, Ozzie? You just do what I say, or I’m going to smash this guitar into a billion pieces. Then I’m going to feed ‘em to you.”

  The icy air was breeding with the pains in her head and creating infinite numbers of little new pains, sharp and brittle, and all stabbing into her skull, but she did her best to pretend they weren’t there.

  Ozzie still looked hurt when he whined, “Jeez, Miss Maggie, I’m goin’.”

  Maggie just snorted and turned back to the house.

  “Sometimes I just purely don’t know why life is so blamed hard, Annie,” she muttered as she rummaged around in her kitchen cupboard.

  Annie apparently thought her mama had said something very funny, because she laughed at her and thumped on her wooden high-chair tray.

  Maggie grinned at the baby because she couldn’t help it. “Here, sweetie, you chew on this. Mama has to tend to a sick man.”

  She opened a tin and handed Annie one of the hard biscuits that she had made out of graham flour and arrowroot from a recipe in a Ladies’ Home Companion. The magazine claimed they were good for teething babies. The biscuit would at least keep Annie occupied while she tried to do for the stranger, Maggie figured. Annie banged happily on her tray, and Maggie sighed when she looked at the pretty piece of furniture that Kenny had made.

  “Your daddy was so good to us, Annie girl.” She felt like crying all of a sudden.

  Whenever Maggie had her monthlies and these detestable headaches, she succumbed to moods. She knew it was weak of her, but she just figured it was her nature to be weak.

  Annie gurgled happily as she gummed her biscuit. She smiled at her mama, and Maggie smiled back.

  “I love you, baby girl.”

  She could see Kenny every time she looked at Annie. The baby had his sweet nature as well as his shiny, curly, light brown hair and big brown eyes, and she was pretty as a picture. Maggie sighed gustily and began foraging in her medicine chest.

  Sometimes it seemed to Maggie that life was just too blasted hard. She’d spent most of the first seventeen years of it trying to appease her aunt and uncle and having no luck at all. Then, when Kenny Bright had wandered through southern Indiana, fallen hopelessly in love with her, married her, and brought her to his farm in Lincoln County in the New Mexico Territory, she thought her luck had finally changed.

  “I should have known better,” she chided herself grumpily as she gathered up her nursing equipment.

  By the time Kenny got kicked by the horse, he had taught Maggie enough so that she could keep herself and the baby alive, at any rate, barring unforeseen Indian raids, outlaw incursions, drought, flood, or fire. Those were things that were liable to happen at any time, Kenny or no Kenny. Now she had a cow and a mule and a vegetable garden and chickens and Annie. And Ozzie, for what good he did her.

  “And now I’ve got me a gunshot cowboy.”

  Life on a farm had sounded nice to Maggie. She liked animals, and she certainly didn’t mind hard work, although she was kind of little. Life on a farm in Lincoln County, New Mexico Territory, in 1876, however, was nothing like life in a snug little town in southern Indiana in 1876, the year she had left the state.

  “This damned Territory,” she grumbled as she ripped clean linen into bandage-sized strips.

  Until she moved to New Mexico, Maggie had never uttered a swear word in her entire life. It had never occurred to her. Now a swear word occurred to her every other minute or so. That was just one more reason she was glad her aunt wasn’t here. Aside from the fact that Maggie and her aunt
hated each other, her aunt would have blistered the back of her hand for even thinking a swear word.

  The water she had set to boil was bubbling now, so she poured some into a deep bowl. Then she grabbed a tin of alum from the cupboard, gathered up her linens, some soft flannel squares, a knife, her scissors, a couple more bowls, and looked about the kitchen to see if she had missed anything else she might need.

  “Lordy, I thought these days were over.” Frowning, she surveyed her kingdom, juggling her nursing tools.

  “Wish me luck, Annie, babe,” she told her daughter.

  Annie gurgled and gnawed on her biscuit with gusto.

  Maggie figured she might need more light, so she hooked an oil lamp over her arm, took a deep breath, and stepped into her bedroom.

  “Oh, Lord, please help me.” Some of her stoicism deserted her when she peered at the man passed out on her bed. “He looks dead already.”

  She stared down at the stranger for a long moment or two. He was a good-looking man, or would be if he weren’t pale as a frosty window and unconscious. He had thick, sun-bleached brown hair.

  “Damn man’s hair is a lot prettier than mine,” Maggie mumbled bitterly, brushing her own tangled mane out of her eyes. She hadn’t had time to brush it yet this morning.

  She couldn’t tell what color the man’s eyes were because they were closed, but his eyelashes were long and dark.

  “That figures, too. Men always get the lashes.”

  He had thick stubble on his chin and cheeks, as though he hadn’t shaved in a few days.

  “You’re taller than Kenny was.” Maggie could tell that because of the way his legs dangled over the end of the bed. She wondered if that would prove to be a problem, since she figured his leg to be gunshot, but decided she’d just have to cross that bridge when she came to it.

  Then Maggie took one more deep breath, squared her shoulders, laid her tools out, and began unbuttoning the man’s duster. If he’d been hit in the chest, she figured that was the wound she’d better tend first. She didn’t know much about gunshot wounds although, Lord knew, there were enough of them to go around in this Territory. Somebody was always getting shot up. She’d had to dig a bullet out of Ozzie’s arm once when some gun play had erupted in a saloon in town.