The Texan

by Joan Johnston

“If it was the gas making you sick, I’d be sick, too. More likely, we’d both be dead!” Bay dragged Owen’s shirt off over his head and said, “Turn over.”

  Bay saw the problem immediately. Red streaks radiated from three of the four Band-Aids on his back. “These wounds are infected. What I need is penicillin. And we don’t have any.”

  “See. Wouldn’t have made any difference if I’d said something sooner.”

  “I might have been able to cut out whatever was causing the infection and cut out the infection along with it, if you’d told me sooner,” Bay said angrily. “You said your legs hurt, too. Get those camouflage pants off, so I can take a look.”

  “This isn’t the way I pictured getting naked for you,” he said.

  Bay was terrified when she realized he was too weak even to sit up and pull off his pants. She shoved his hands out of the way and unsnapped and unzipped his camouflage trousers and pulled them off.

  As she’d suspected, two of the wounds in his calves where she’d pulled out lechuguilla spines had also become infected.

  “You’re a mess!” she said. “What am I going to do with you?”

  “Bury me?” Owen quipped.

  “If you weren’t in such bad shape, I’d make you pay for that,” Bay said. “I can use hot cloths to soften these wounds enough to drain them. But I don’t think that’s going to be enough.”

  “I don’t suppose you did a paper on this?” Owen asked.

  “Don’t be ridicu—” Bay stopped herself and smiled. “I did! Oh, if I can just remember. It was a paper on herbal remedies. You wouldn’t believe how many desert plants are antimicrobial.”

  “Give it to me in English,” Owen said.

  “You can crush the seeds and boil the bark and make an antiseptic that can be used directly on the wound. Or I can make a tea you can drink. There are poultices to help with the inflammation and to draw out poisons,” she said excitedly. “If I can just remember which herbs are used for what.”

  “I’m sure if you put your mind to it—”

  “What if I’m wrong?” Bay interrupted. “What if I give you a remedy that doesn’t work? Or one that’s meant to cure something that isn’t wrong with you?”

  “So what? A couple of wrong things won’t matter as long as you give me at least some of the right thing. What can you remember?”

  “Mesquite, because it’s so common in South Texas. I think it has to be dried, or you have to use gum from the trunk, and I’m not sure I can get what I need soon enough to do you any good. But I think the pods can be boiled for tea.”

  “All right. One mesquite tea,” Owen said, as though he were ordering from a menu in a restaurant. “What else?”

  “Catclaw…” Bay hesitated. “Catclaw something.”

  “Cactus?” Owen suggested.

  “Not cactus. I remember thinking at the time it must be a mistake, because it’s a different word than cactus.”

  “Acacia,” Owen said. “There’s catclaw acacia.”

  “That’s it!” Bay said. “That works like mesquite. But it doesn’t have to be dried first.”

  “I’ve seen some of that around here. I can describe it for you.”

  “Good. I think sage has some medicinal value, too.”

  “You know what that looks like?”

  “Yes, I do.” Bay put her fingers to her temples. “Oh, I wish I could remember exactly what to do.”

  Owen laid his hand on her thigh. “Go out and hunt your herbs, Red. Or should I call you ‘Medicine Woman’?”

  Bay laughed through the tears that were blurring her vision. “Let’s wait and see how you feel after you’ve been dosed with a few of my remedies.”

  She started to rise, but he tightened his hold to keep her in place. When she met his gaze he said, “Thanks for taking care of me, Red. I mean … considering everything.”

  She lifted a brow. “You mean, considering you’re a Blackthorne, and I’m a Creed?”

  “Yeah. That’s what I mean.”

  “This doesn’t change anything, Owen.” The shorter, more affectionate name wouldn’t come out. Last night things had gotten too familiar … too frightening. So she’d taken a step back. “We still live on opposite sides of the fence.”

  “We could both move.”

  She stared at him in confusion. “What?”

  “I said I have to stay in Texas to be a Ranger. I didn’t say I had to stay in Bitter Creek. I wouldn’t mind moving to the Hill Country near Fredericksburg. How about you?”

  She rose and said, “Maybe you ought to make sure you’re going to live, before you start planning to pick up stakes and move halfway across the state.”

  “Bring on the tea,” Owen said. “I’ll swallow whatever you put in front of me.”

  Bay smiled. “Be careful what you wish for. Some of these remedies are liable to taste like what they are—bark and leaves.”

  Owen was cursing loudly long before she’d finished washing out his wounds with a mesquite concoction made from leaves, twigs, bark, and pods boiled in water.

  “That hurts like the devil!” he complained.

  “You shouldn’t have hidden the fact you weren’t feeling well. It would have been a lot simpler to treat you before you got so sick.”

  He nearly came off the cot when she applied a boiled poultice of flowering white sage to his back. “Too hot?” she asked sweetly.

  “No,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “I need to go collect some catclaw acacia. Will you be all right?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Owen said.

  It was surprisingly difficult for Bay to collect the leaves and seed pods she needed from the catclaw acacia, because the stems were covered with “catclaws,” which looked like rose thorns and were twice as sharp. Bay had a few wounds of her own before she was done.

  She crushed the green leaves and pods with a stone and threw them into a pot of boiling water to brew cat-claw acacia tea. When it was done, she brought a cup to Owen.

  “Can you turn over by yourself?” She was surprised at the effort it took him to do so. She feared he was much sicker than he’d let on, and that he really needed a hospital and a people doctor. “I’ll help you sit up,” she said.

  “I can do it.”

  In the end, he couldn’t. Bay didn’t lecture him, merely put a hand on an unwounded part of his back and helped push him into a sitting position.

  When he tried to take the cup from her she said, “Let me help. I don’t want to have to start over collecting this stuff. That catclaw acacia fights back.”

  He drank the tea, making faces as he did.

  “How does it taste?” she asked.

  “Like leaves and bark.”

  Bay smiled. “I told you so.”

  When he had drunk the whole cup, Bay helped him lie back down on his stomach. “I want to keep hot poultices on your back until I see some of the swelling and redness go away.”

  It was a sign of just how sick he was that he didn’t argue.

  By dawn the next morning, his calves were looking much better. But Bay conceded that no amount of hot poultices was going to force out the broken-off spikes that were the source of the infection in Owen’s back. His skin was red and tender to the touch. Despite the teas she’d forced down his throat, his fever was raging. If she didn’t act soon, Owen would end up with gangrene. Then it would be too late to do anything but watch him die.

  She sighed heavily.

  “What is it?” Owen asked as he turned his head in her direction.

  She dabbed away the sweat on his forehead with a torn piece of an army-green T-shirt. “I didn’t know you were awake.”

  “I just woke up,” he said in a slurred voice. “What’s wrong?”

  “I need to cut out the spikes in your back.”

  He ran his tongue along dry lips and said, “I figured that was coming.”

  “Well?”

  “I’ve been trying to imagine a scenario where we get rescued in th
e next day or so. I don’t think that’s going to happen. If you think it’ll help, Red, maybe you better make like a doctor and operate.”

  “I don’t have any anesthetic,” she said. “You’re going to feel it when I start cutting. I know there’s some desert plant that would make you sleepy, but I’ve tried and tried, and I can’t remember what it is.”

  “Don’t worry, Red. I’ll be fine,” Owen said. “Maybe you ought to get me something to bite on, so I don’t make you slice too deep by screaming at the wrong moment.”

  “You’re not helping by making jokes,” she snapped.

  “I wasn’t joking.”

  “Oh.” Bay’s hands were shaking by the time she’d cut a piece of sotol, a desert plant with long stems that could be turned into walking sticks, for Owen to bite down on.

  “Why so nervous, Red?” Owen said. “You’re qualified to do surgery, aren’t you?”

  “On animals,” she said. “In an operating theater. With surgical instruments and enough anesthesia to ensure the patient suffers no pain. I’m going to be using a jackknife to cut into you, for God’s sake!”

  “Think of the alternative. If you don’t operate, I’m going to die a slow, lingering—and very smelly—death from gangrene.”

  “When you put it that way, I suppose I have no choice,” she said acerbically.

  “I trust you, Red.”

  “I don’t want this responsibility, Owen.”

  “Too late to worry about that now. I’ll try to stay still and keep down the noise.”

  “Feel free to moan and groan,” she said. “At least that way I’ll know I haven’t killed you on the operating table.”

  When Owen didn’t say anything she said, “That was a joke.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Ha ha.”

  Bay tried to reassure him by smiling. “I’m a good surgeon, Owe. I’ll get you through this okay.”

  “Thanks, Red.”

  He didn’t speak after that, because he had his jaws clamped on the piece of wood to keep from screaming. Bay made a neat, precise incision, found the first offending spike and used the tweezers to pull it out. Bay knew she was hurting him, because when she cut, every muscle in his back tensed.

  His face ran with sweat, and despite his gritted teeth, a groan issued from his throat.

  “One down,” she said.

  He groaned loudly at that announcement.

  “Don’t be a baby,” she said. “It’s just a little surgery without anesthesia.”

  She knew she’d made him laugh, because the sound ended in a gasp when she made the next incision. There were three spikes in his back, and she had them all out in five minutes. They were the most grueling five minutes of her life.

  “I have to sew up these incisions,” she said. “I give you fair warning the stitches may be a little crooked. I never could sew a straight seam. Can’t cook worth a damn, either—except for macaroni and cheese—and you know that makes me gag.”

  He was laughing again. She could feel it in his body, which was better than seeing his muscles stretched taut with pain while she’d been cutting. There had been no needle or thread in the first-aid kit, so she’d improvised.

  Ironically, she ended up using a lechuguilla spine for a needle and peeled a yucca leaf into thread-sized lengths. She made quick work of the sutures. Ordinarily, she would have wanted them close together to minimize the scar. But she made the stitches as far apart as she dared, because she couldn’t bear his pain.

  “You’re going to have some really sexy scars back here, Owe.”

  “Do girls go for that sort of thing?”

  She was surprised to hear him speak and realized he’d spit out the piece of wood. It was marred with impressions of his teeth. “Scars like this are a sign you’ve survived in battle.”

  “Some battle,” he said ruefully. “Me and a cactus going three rounds, and I nearly bit the dust.”

  Bay wanted to tell him the worst was over. Maybe it was. The offending spikes had been removed. She’d used more of the acacia concoction to rinse the three wounds before she’d sewed them up. Now she had to make sure Owen rested and kept drinking the foul-tasting teas she brewed, so his body could heal.

  “You’ll make a good mother,” Owen murmured. “You’re tender and gentle and caring.”

  Bay felt her throat swell closed. He couldn’t know how it hurt her to hear him say that. She knew she ought to tell him the final secret she’d been keeping from him, but he kept on talking, so she remained silent and listened.

  “My mom never spent much time with us kids. We had servants to take care of us. But I never stopped wanting her to notice me. I remember once I fell and skinned my knee. I couldn’t have been more than six or seven. I landed pretty hard, and it was nice and bloody. I figured if anything would get her attention, that would.”

  He stopped, and she heard him swallow hard.

  “Anyway, she was up in her studio, painting. I knew I wasn’t supposed to interrupt her, but I did it anyway. She took one look at me and yelled, ‘Get out! I’m working!’”

  “What did you do then?” Bay asked, her heart aching for the little boy he’d been.

  “I got out. I never washed my knee, and it got infected. My dad was pretty pissed off when he noticed it. He took me to the doctor, and I ended up getting a shot of penicillin in my butt. I’ve got a scar there. On my knee, not my butt,” he clarified with a laugh.

  “I’m so sorry, Owe.”

  “I didn’t tell you that to get your sympathy. I just wanted to explain a little about why we Blackthornes are the way we are.”

  “You’re not at all like your mother,” Bay said certainly. She pursed her lips. “I suppose that means you must take after your father.”

  Owen grinned. “That ogre? Are you sure?”

  “At least he took you to the hospital. He must not be quite as heartless as I’ve always thought.” She made a face and said, “I suppose he must have a few redeeming qualities to make my mother fall in love with him.”

  They looked into each other’s eyes and smiled, and a comfortable silence fell between them.

  Bay reached out and brushed aside the lock of hair that always fell onto Owen’s forehead.

  Owen brushed his knuckles against her cheek, where the scab had fallen off and left pink skin behind.

  She reached up and twined her fingers in his. “You should go to sleep,” she said.

  “I’m not tired.”

  “Don’t argue with the doctor,” she said, putting her fingertips over his eyelids and urging them closed.

  “How about a bedtime story?”

  “What did you have in mind?” Bay said, as she sank down cross-legged on the floor of the tent beside him.

  “There must be a good story about the Blackthornes and the Creeds. Something from a long time ago.”

  “When we all used to sit around the fireplace on winter nights, my father would tell this sad story about Jarrett Creed.”

  “You mean Cricket’s husband before she married the first Blackthorne? Jarrett was killed in the Civil War, right?”

  “Wrong. Cricket thought he was killed. He was wounded and got captured and sent to Andersonville. You know, that really cruel prison. His leg was torn up by a musket ball, and he had to go into the prison hospital.”

  “But a pretty nurse saved him, and he fell in love with her,” Owen said.

  “Whose story is this?” Bay said. “You’re supposed to be falling asleep.”

  “My eyes are closed.”

  “Try shutting your mouth.”

  “Okay, Red. Tell your story.”

  “Cricket received a letter saying that Jarrett had died in the battle at Antietam. She had borne five children, four sons and a daughter. The daughter had died of pneumonia when she was a child. Three of Cricket’s sons—and she thought her husband, as well—were killed in the war. Her one remaining son was reported missing and presumed dead.

  “Cricket had lost everything that was importan
t to her, so she left her home and went to live with her older sister Sloan, at her cattle ranch, Dolorosa. That’s when this mysterious Blackthorne fellow showed up. Seems he made some kind of wager with Cricket, and he won, and they ended up getting married.”

  “They fell in love,” Owen interjected.

  Bay glared at him, and he shut his eyes. “Now, this is where the story gets good. See, Jarrett finally gets released from prison and comes home. And what does he find?”

  “Nobody.”

  Bay growled.

  “Sorry, that slipped out.”

  “He hears some carpetbagger named Blackthorne and his wife have taken up residence at Lion’s Dare, the cotton plantation he’d owned before the war. Meanwhile, Jarrett has no idea where his wife is, and all his sons are reported missing or dead. So he heads for Dolorosa, where his sister-in-law Sloan is living. Sloan gives him the bad news: Cricket is married to another man. And she’s expecting his child.”

  “I thought all her sons were grown men? How old was she, anyway?”

  “Young enough to bear your great-great—however many greats—grandfather,” Bay said with asperity. “Do you want to hear the end of this story, or not?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Anyway, Jarrett wants his wife back. Things are complicated, because she’s pregnant with another man’s child. To make matters worse, Jarrett is no longer a whole man.”

  “Right. He’s missing a leg,” Owen piped up.

  “No, his leg is stiff, so he limps, but he’s still got both limbs.”

  “Then what’s wrong with him?” Owen asked.

  “He’s blind.”

  “Whoa,” Owen said. “Why didn’t I ever hear about any of this in my family history?”

  “Because this is a story about my forebears,” Bay said.

  “What happened next?” Owen asked. “What did Jarrett do?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “What kind of ending is that for story?” Owen complained.

  “The only one we have,” Bay said. “All we know is that Jarrett disappeared and was never heard from again.”

  “I hate that ending! Couldn’t your father have made up something more satisfying?”

  “The truth is the truth.”

  “That’s a tall tale if I ever heard one. Jarrett Creed died in the war. That’s what Cricket wrote in her diary. I’ve seen it myself.”