by Anita Mills
“Yes, of course.” Forcing a smile she held out her hand to Spence. “Danny wrote of you often, Dr. Hardin. He admired you very much.”
“He was a fine young man.” Rather than shake her hand, he let her see his. “I’d just get you all muddy.”
As soon as he was in the house, she took down the porch lantern and held it up to look at the back of his head. Her fingers separated his hair until she found the place. “I think we’d better take care of this first. When I get the clot washed away, you may bleed all over the place.”
“What does it look like?” he wanted to know.
“About like someone took a butcher knife to the back of your head. I don’t know what would’ve done something like this.”
“I don’t know—I don’t remember much of anything, except I was riding home, then the next thing I knew, your husband was picking me up out of the mud. I don’t even know how long I was out.”
“No, I don’t expect so. If you can sit at the table, I can sew the wound up. It won’t be the way somebody who knew what he was doing might do it, but maybe it’ll hold the scalp together long enough for it to heal.”
“I’d be grateful, ma’am. I just hate asking you to do it.”
“I don’t mind. Truth to tell, I owe you a whole lot more than that for what you did for Jess. Anything you need, you just ask, and we’ll sure try to get it.”
“No, I just want to get home. I’ve been gone too long already, and I’ve got a wife and son waiting for me,”
“I remember how that was,” she murmured, holding a ladderback chair for him. “When Jess came through that door, I was so happy I cried my eyes out, knowing he’d made it home.”
“Yeah.” Exhausted, he dropped into the chair and held his head in his hands, fighting sleep. It seemed like seconds before he felt the rag touch his head, and he smelled homemade lye soap. He sat still while she trimmed his hair away from the gash, then washed the area again. It wasn’t until he smelled the turpentine that he had to brace his elbows against the table.
“Danny always said this hurt,” she said, soaking another rag with it “I thought I’d better warn you, because I’m putting it right into the raw place.” As she said it, she pressed the wet cloth against his scalp and squeezed it, flooding the wound. She felt him flinch. “I’m sorry to do this, but it’s all I know. My mother used to put turpentine on anything that bled.”
“That’s all right—it works. I used it myself when I had to.”
“I don’t think I could’ve done what you did, Dr. Hardin. I don’t know how you stood it.”
“Sometimes I couldn’t.”
“But you had to do it, anyway—that was the hard part, I expect.”
“Yes.”
“There’s more than one kind of hero, you know,” she observed quietly. “One kind throws himself into enemy fire for a cause, but your kind puts him back together so he can go home.”
“They went home on crutches, Mrs. Taylor—if they went at all.”
“But that’s something, isn’t it?” Returning to the matter at hand, she said, “This cut’s about three inches wide, maybe a bit more. Is there any particular way you want it stitched?”
“No. Just pull it together and sew it like cloth. If it won’t match, you can leave little places like buttonholes up to half an inch, and if all the debris is out, it’ll fill in with scar tissue.”
“I expect this is going to hurt.”
He felt the needle jab through his skin, tugging it into place as she sewed. Judging by the number of times she stuck him, she was taking small stitches.
“Do you do this often?” he found himself asking.
“No. Just when Danny fell over the plow, and when the axe slipped and cut into Jesse’s foot. He wouldn’t have a doctor, so I soaked it in turpentine, then I just started putting everything back together as best I could.”
“That’s quite an accomplishment.”
“It was luck, Dr. Hardin. I was afraid it’d turn black and gangrene would set in, but it didn’t. I made sure he wore a double pair of wool socks to keep that foot warm.”
“Warmth improves circulation,” he acknowledged, impressed.
“He was just lucky,” she insisted. Tying off the last stitch, she cut the thread, then laid the needle aside. “Mud’s going to get onto your pillow, and when you turn your head, it’ll get into the wound again. I’d better wash your hair.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Is that a doctor or a tired man talking?”
“It’ll be all right.”
“You’re about to drop, that’s what you are. If you can lean your head over a bucket, it won’t take me long to get it clean. Then I’ll give you a pitcher and soap to take into Danny’s room, and I’ll get supper. You can either put on the clean clothes on the bottom of the bed, or there’s a nightshirt in the wardrobe. I don’t mind you sitting down at the table in anything, as long as you’ve got yourself decently covered.”
When she came back, he leaned over the bucket she put on the floor and endured a thorough head washing, the kind his mother had given him as a boy. Laurie rubbed that lye soap through his hair with her fingertips, working up a lather, then she rinsed it. When she finished, she dropped a towel over his head and dried his hair vigorously.
“Thanks.”
“If it wouldn’t take half the night to heat the water, I’d fill the washtub and you could soak in it. But right now you probably need sleep worse.”
“I fell like I could sleep a week, but I know I’ve got to get back on the road in the morning.”
“Well, you’ll be going with clean hair,” she said, stepping back. “When you come out, bring what you’re wearing now with you, and I’ll wash them first thing in the morning.” Lifting the bucket of rinse water, she headed for the back door to empty it.
He had to get up from the table, Spence told himself, but he was so damned tired that his body rebelled. She came back, bringing a lighted lantern with her.
“You’ll need this if you’re to see anything in there.”
With an effort, he looked up, and for a moment, he forgot his fatigue. The lantern flame reflected in her brown eyes made them seem almost gold. As callused as her hands were, as faded as her dress was, there was a quality in her eyes that pushed those thoughts from his mind. For a second suspended in time, he thought her husband had erred in describing her as pretty. Laura Taylor was beautiful.
When Spence woke up, the sun was streaming through the small window, and the tatted edge of the muslin curtain cast a lacy shadow on the wall across from it. For a moment, he wondered where he was, then he remembered. He’d been ambushed and left for dead, but Jesse Taylor had found him and brought him here.
He turned over and realized every muscle in his body was sore. But he was alive, he reminded himself, and for that alone he ought to be damned grateful. His head still hurt, but not with the pounding, throbbing pain of last night. Touching the back of it, he could feel the short place where his hair had been sheared, then he checked the stitches. They were surprisingly good, considering the fact someone with no training had done them.
There wasn’t much in the room—a bedstead, a chest, and a narrow wardrobe. Danny’s room, they’d called it. If it was painful for him to remember the kid, it had to be unbearable for the Taylors. Things like that were hard to get over.
He smelled coffee. She was fixing breakfast, and he’d better get up if he wanted any. Then he’d ask Taylor to take him into Charlotte, where he’d have to buy himself a horse. And a gun. From here on out, until he got home, he’d be a lot more aware of what went on around him. He couldn’t afford any more daydreams.
Clean clothes lay on the bottom of the bed, folded next to his feet. The shirt might be his, but the pants weren’t, and neither were the socks. But they were clean. If Jesse would let him borrow them, he’d see they got back.
“Dr. Hardin, are you awake?” Laura Taylor’s v
oice carried through the closed door.
“Yeah!”
“I’ve got salt pork fried and mush made.”
“I’ll be right out!”
“There’s no hurry—it’s hot enough it can wait for you.”
It didn’t take him long to throw on the clothes and pull on his boots. The pants were about an inch short, but other than that, they were a surprisingly good fit. His fifty dollars was right where he’d left it—in plain sight on the chest. He stuffed it into the pants.
She looked up from the table when he came out. “Well, you look a lot better this morning than you did last night,” she observed, smiling.
“I feel better, that’s for sure.” Taking the chair in front of the empty plate, he glanced around. “Where’s your husband?”
“He went into Salisbury, but he’ll be back before long. He said he needed to see about something.”
“Oh?”
“You drink coffee, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“This might not taste very good to you, but it’s all we’ve got. The way things are around here, we’re lucky to have any, so we have to stretch it a little. If you don’t like it, you can pour it out. The pump squawks and squeals, but it works, so there’s plenty of water.”
“It’ll be all right.”
“You might want to withhold that judgment until you taste it, she warned him. “I do have a little raw sugar, if you want to cover the taste a little. I asked Jesse to see if anybody has cream in Salisbury, but I don’t expect him to find any. There aren’t many cows around, and what milk there is goes to the children,” she explained. “Sometimes, somebody will skim a little cream off to sell. And sometimes, that’s just wasted, because nobody’s got any money to buy it.”
“Time’s are pretty hard, all right. We’ll be years getting over the war.”
“Yes. But we’re better off than a lot of folks right now. Last month, Jesse helped Silas Hawkins bury his wife—he made the box and dug the hole for him. When he was leaving, that old man gave Jess five dollars, saying he had more where that came from. I shouldn’t be telling that, but I don’t think you’ll be trying to rob Mr. Hawkins, anyway. We’ve kept quiet about it around here, though,”
“Five dollars isn’t much for that.”
“It is if nobody’s got any money,” she countered.
“I suppose so. It’s just hard to get to think that way when there used to be plenty of it. My wife spent more than five dollars on a pair of stockings.”
“Really? You’ve got rich folks, then. Even before the war, I would never have asked for anything like that. Books maybe—but not stockings.”
The way she said it, he felt almost ashamed. “Well, it wasn’t my money,” he conceded. “Her daddy owned half the county.”
“Oh. I guess that explains it, then. Still, he must’ve been pretty wasteful.”
She didn’t know the half of it, he thought. Five dollars wasn’t much more than a cigar to Cullen Jamison. Or it hadn’t been, anyway. Thinking to shift the conversation to a more common ground, he took a sip of the coffee and he almost couldn’t swallow it. When he looked up, she was watching him expectantly, and he felt compelled to say something.
“It’s got an unusual flavor to it.” Setting the cup down, he dared to ask, “What’s in it?—besides coffee, I mean.”
“I thought you might ask that,” she murmured wryly. “There is some coffee, but it’s mostly roasted cottonseed, a little parched corn, and some chicory. I had to grind all of that with the coffee or we’d be drinking plain water. It takes getting used to,” she admitted. “I guess you’d probably have the water, wouldn’t you?”
“No, it’s fine,” he lied. “It just had a different whang to it, that’s all, and I wondered where that came from,”
“You’re being polite, Dr. Hardin. The first time I fixed some for Jesse when he came home, he told me it wasn’t fit for hog swill, but when he found out there wasn’t anything else, he started drinking it. We’ve tried a lot of things around here, but none of them taste much like coffee.” She started to rise. “It won’t take me any time to pump the water.”
“It’s not necessary, Mrs. Taylor. I’ll do just fine with this, but I will take some of that sugar.”
She sat back down. “How much?”
“How much have you got?”
“Some,” she replied, passing him the half-empty bowl. “I was just going to put it into your coffee for you. It looks better after it dissolves.”
Digging a spoon into it, he noticed whoever had broken it up had left some rather large grayish brown chunks. He felt guilty for taking so much, but he put two heaping spoonfuls of it into the misnamed coffee. As he stirred it, small black specks floated to the top.
“I’ll get you the water,” she said again.
“Sit down.”
“Those aren’t bugs, you know,” she offered. “I cooked it down in a cast-iron pan, and some of the seasoning came off into it. It didn’t look so bad until after it evaporated.”
He took another sip. Now there was a greasy sweetness to the stuff. “Much better,” he managed.
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
She pushed the platter of mush slices toward him. “There’s no syrup, but I have some preserves in that little white jam pot. It’s chokecherry.”
“I’ll eat anything.”
“There you go again—deciding before you try it.”
“I’m not a hard man to please.”
“That, Dr. Hardin, remains to be seen. The war
may be over, but we’re still living on secessionist recipes.”
“This looks good to me,” he assured her. “Last winter, my wife wrote me that butchers down home were selling dressed rats for meat.”
“I don’t doubt it. Yankee thieves picked us pretty clean, too, and people were eating their horses and mules for meat, but I was one of the lucky ones. Old Dolly got pretty skinny, but both of us managed to stay alive until Jesse came home. We’ve just about got the only garden in the neighborhood because he was here to plow it.” Her expression clouded for a moment, then she managed to smile. “I don’t know that we’ll get to eat most of it, but if we stay, we’ll have plenty.”
A bite-sized piece of mush was headed to his mouth. “You’re thinking about leaving?”
“Jesse is. I try not to, but the question isn’t whether we go anymore—it’s when. He says we’re poorer now than we were before the war, and it’s only going to get worse. He says the Yankee politicians are going to be even worse than the soldiers. He thinks North Carolina is going to be like an occupied country.”
“He’s probably right about that”
She closed her eyes to compose herself, then looked across to Spence. “The war changed everything, Dr. Hardin—it took Danny’s life as surely as if he’d been shot on the battlefield, and it sent home a different Jesse. He used to dream of making this place prosper, and now he just thinks it’s downright worthless. He’s got it into his head that his only chance of amounting to anything is with the railroad. He wants us to go out west and start over.”
“And you don’t want to go.”
It was a statement, not a question, but she answered it, anyway. “It isn’t so much that I don’t want to go. It’s that I don’t want to leave. I was born in this house. Danny was born in this house. Mama died here, and so did Daddy. I’ve never lived anywhere else in my life, Dr. Hardin.” As his gaze took in the cracked walls, the rain-stained ceiling, she sighed. “I know it’s not much—but it’s home to me.”
“Maybe you should tell him that.”
“I did. He says I’ll get over it, that there’s a whole world out there, and when I see it, I’ll be glad we left North Carolina.”
“You could put your foot down, I guess.”
“I’m not sure it-would do much good. Do you ever read any military history?” she asked suddenly.
Momentarily baffled, he responded, “Like what?”
“About the great generals.”
“Not much, anyway. Why?”
“Well, I’ve read about some of them—Alexander the Great, Hannibal, William the Conqueror, Marlborough, Napoleon, Wellington—any I could get my hands on, anyway.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, and there’s two things I’ve noticed about the winners—they chose where they fought their battles, and they saw each one of those battles as part of the whole war. That’s where Hood went wrong at Franklin, you know. Once the Yankee army got past him, he should’ve let it go instead of risking everything right there. His objective was Nashville, but by the time Franklin was over, it was the Army of Tennessee that was gutted.”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t fight to keep this place if it means losing Jesse,” she went on. “If I put my foot down and say I won’t go, Jesse’ll stay here, and he’ll be miserable. Maybe I can win the battle, but I’ll lose the war. This place isn’t good enough for him, and if I make him stay, maybe I won’t be either.”
“I don’t see that happening, Mrs. Taylor. He brags about the way you survived without him and Danny, about how you stood off Stoneman’s cavalry by yourself. I don’t see him walking out of here without you.”
“I know. But his dreams aren’t here anymore. Jesse’s the kind of man who’s got to have his dreams. If I take them away from him, he’ll just give up hope, and I can’t let that happen. I won’t let that happen.”
“Everybody’s got dreams, but sometimes we don’t understand what they cost.”
“But I don’t need a big, fancy house, or silk dresses, or anything like that. He wants things for me that I don’t really want for myself. But,” she added, sighing, “he’s going to give them to me, come hell or high water, or else he’ll die trying.”
“I see.”
“I don’t know why I’m telling you this—I don’t even know you,” she mused. “I just guess I’ve got to say it to somebody, because Jesse’s not listening. This place is like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross to him. I’m going to have to go with him, Dr. Hardin.”