Tisha

by Robert Specht

  Forty Mile was the first town across the Canadian border, but it was still ninety miles. I didn’t see how he could make it, not as tired as he was. The weather outside was as mean as ever. “That’s a long trip, Fred.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’d have to get some sleep first, a few hours anyway, but I could do it. There are places I could stop at on the way. I’ve traveled in worse weather.”

  “When would you start out?” I asked him.

  “After we eat and I get a few hours sleep. You’d have to manage here alone.”

  It was a grim meal. I hardly tasted the food. When Chuck and Ethel finished they sat stupefied. They couldn’t stay awake anymore. They used a pail to relieve themselves, then they bundled up together in a sleeping bag we’d taken from the Terwilligers’ sled. They were asleep before we buttoned the bag up.

  Fred and I had another cup of tea.

  “I hate to leave you all alone here,” he said.

  “How long do you think it might be?”

  “Mr. Strong’s due up the river in a day or two. I’ll leave word at Steel Creek that you’re here. With the weather like this, well, you’ll be here a couple of days. Maybe more.”

  “You better get to sleep,” I said.

  “You think you can stay awake?”

  “I’ll have to.” Somebody had to wake him up.

  I took Patricia out of my parka to look at her again. She was losing the blue color. Her little hands were pink. If she woke up she’d have to be fed, so I had another reason for staying awake.

  Fred laid out another sleeping bag and told me to wake him in three hours. He fell asleep almost as fast as the kids had. My watch had stopped, so I set it at twelve, then sat down on the edge of the cot. Jennie’s face had begun to blister. Her foot was still in the wash-tub, the skin on her leg beginning to wrinkle. I leaned over, picked up some snow and bathed her leg with it. When my hand touched the flesh it made me shudder.

  After a few minutes I felt sleepy and got up. The dog that had been in the dough was lying between the stove and the wall. He lifted his head. We’d chained him up outside with the other dogs, but they’d attacked him, so we’d brought him in. I stood by the high wall for a few minutes, then I sat down on a stool by the stove. I took the baby out and rocked her. I brushed her cheek with my lips. It was warm, soft as a flower petal. She looked like Elmer around the cheeks and eyes, but she had Jennie’s mouth, kind of pouty and nice. “Patricia?”

  I’d changed her diapers and gone over her carefully to see if there was anything wrong with her. She had a black and blue mark on her thigh and it had swelled a little, but she didn’t have any broken bones. Outside of some chafing from wet diapers she seemed all right. I rocked her some more and talked to her. She squirmed a little and there was a flash of pink tongue before she sucked it back in her mouth. Then she yawned. Excited, I walked back and forth with her. I had a bottle filled with diluted condensed milk, all set to be plunked in a saucepan if she woke. “Come on, Patricia. That’s it,” I said. “Just wake up and start yelling. You can do it …”

  She stopped and was still.

  There was a small fruit crate lying by the stove with some kindling in it. I emptied it out, laid some newspapers on the bottom, then wrapped a blanket around Patricia and placed her in the crate. After that I put some more wood in the stove. The sides of it were so thin that the fire gleamed through in places.

  I sat down on the edge of the cot again and bathed Jennie’s leg. I fell asleep right in the middle of it. I caught myself falling forward and my knees almost touched the floor before I woke with a start. For the next couple of hours I kept putting snow on my face and neck to stay awake.

  A half hour before I was supposed to wake Fred, Jennie began to scream.

  She kicked away the washtub and I had to grab her to keep her from falling off the cot. It happened so suddenly that I was terrified. One moment everything was still and the next I was wrestling with Jennie and sobbing hysterically for Fred. She thrashed around, screaming in pain. And finally Fred was on the other side of the cot, holding her in a firm grip, talking to her while she stared at us wild-eyed. She kept trying to talk, but her mouth was twisted in an ugly sneer and her words were just a babble of sound.

  “Jennie, you’re here with Anne and me,” Fred kept repeating. “You’re safe. You’re safe, Jennie. Try to understand.”

  The wild look went out of her eyes. She stopped struggling and fell back in exhaustion. She realized where she was. Her eyes closed and tears of pain welled up from them. “Eshuh,” she said quietly. “Ee-shuh.”

  “Patricia’s here, Jennie,” I said. “… She’s sleeping. Do you want to hold her?”

  She nodded.

  I brought the baby and laid her in the crook of Jennie’s arm. She raised her head to look at the baby a moment, then slumped back and closed her eyes. The pain she was suffering must have been excruciating, but she lay still. She had her baby.

  “Jennie,” Fred said, “I have to get you to a doctor … you understand?” She nodded without opening her eyes. “Anne’ll stay here with the baby and take care of her.” She only made the barest movement. She understood.

  Chuck and Ethel hadn’t waked up. They’d lived in close quarters all their life. They were used to all the noise that went with it.

  While Fred made preparations to leave I warmed up a chunk of vegetable soup and fed the broth to Jennie. She was able to drink only a little of it. Once in a while she moaned softly, but from the moment I’d given her the baby she’d hardly made a sound. The only way I knew what she was going through was when I looked into her eyes. The pain was there, the pain of losing her husband and leaving her baby, and the pain in her tortured body. I could hardly imagine the suffering she was going through.

  When Fred was ready we carried her out. The cabin and the hill in back of it gave us little protection from the wind as we lashed her into the sled. Gray sleet drove at us, the cold pressing like water. When the lashings were secure I leaned over Jennie to say a hurried good-bye. “I’ll take care of the baby, Jennie. I’ll take good care of her.”

  She moved one mittened hand feebly and pulled the scarf from her mouth. One side of her mouth twisted up before her hand dropped. She had tried to smile.

  Fred was ready to go.

  There were so many things I wanted to say to him—how much I admired him, how much I needed him and wanted him, how deeply I loved him. But there was no time. Instead I said, “Please be careful, Fred.”

  “I will. Just don’t you get scared.”

  “I’ve got the easy part.”

  I didn’t wait for him to kiss me. If I did, I’d have waited till Kingdom come. I kissed him hard enough so that maybe it would keep him warm and safe and alive all the way he had to go.

  Then he was gone, the sled disappearing in a gray swirl. I turned back into the cabin.

  After a while I knew I couldn’t stay awake any longer. I’d kept walking back and forth with Patricia as long as I could, coaxing her to wake up. It wasn’t doing any good. She’d move a little, open and close a tiny fist, and that was all. She was a perfect little thing and inside of her there was a struggle for life going on, but there was no way I could help her. I felt myself caving in. I put some more wood in the stove, then crawled into Fred’s sleeping bag with her. Even if the stove went out we’d all be warm enough.

  I didn’t know how much later it was that I started to wake up, thinking there was an alarm ringing somewhere. Groggy, at first I thought it was my father’s alarm clock and I wondered why he didn’t turn it off. It seemed to keep ringing for hours and it made me angry until I realized it wasn’t an alarm at all. It was a baby crying.

  Then I was awake. Beside me, Patricia was spluttering in rage—the most wonderful sound I’d ever heard. I was out of the sleeping bag in a moment. I stood up too fast and bumped my head on the ceiling. The fire in the stove was just embers. Shaking the ashes down, I heaped up some paper and kindling, then wood on top
of that. It caught right away and I plunked the bottle I’d prepared into the saucepan. Then I turned up the oil lamp.

  Chuck and Ethel were still asleep, the top of Chuck’s head poking out of the bag. I rocked Patricia in my arms, talking to her, telling her she’d be eating soon, filling up on all she needed. I looked at my watch. It said 8:30. That meant I’d slept almost five hours since Fred had gone. I wondered what the real time was, whether it was day or night. I’d lost track and there was no way to tell. Sleet was needling at the window. It was iced over and it looked to be night outside. I couldn’t be sure, though. I kept going over to the stove to check the bottle, but it always seemed as cold as ever and Patricia kept yelling. Her fingers found her mouth and she shoved them into it, gums clamping down on them. They satisfied her for a couple of minutes before she realized nothing was happening, then she bawled again for the real thing.

  The bottle was tepid when I gave it to her. I just couldn’t wait for it to get any warmer. She grabbed at the nipple, struggled with it, then pushed it out. I tried again and the same thing happened. I checked the nipple and it was all right, but when I gave it to her again the milk dribbled down her chin. She wasn’t getting it.

  I started to feel helpless panic, afraid I was doing something wrong, but I didn’t know what. Patricia screamed louder than ever. Chuck’s head popped out from the sleeping bag. He looked over at me, not really awake, then his head disappeared.

  I put the bottle back in the saucepan, thinking that maybe it wasn’t warm enough. Every few minutes I tested it on my wrist. When it felt warm I gave it to her again. She still wouldn’t take it. I tasted it to see if there was anything wrong with it, but there wasn’t.

  Ten minutes later she was asleep again. I sat looking at her, wondering what could possibly be wrong, if maybe she’d been injured internally in some way. If she had been then there was nothing I could do but sit here and watch her die. I crawled back into the sleeping bag with her and lay there in a half stupor.

  The next time she woke I was up before she began to cry. I’d refilled the bottle with fresh milk, and this time I waited for it to heat to the right temperature before I gave it to her. She still wouldn’t take it. She twisted and turned, avoiding the nipple, screaming as though she were in pain.

  Sick with fear, I sat and stared into space. I couldn’t help her. Whatever she needed, I couldn’t give it to her.

  Chuck’s head popped out of the sleeping blanket. He eased himself out of it, shivered, then slipped on his parka. He watched while I tried to get Patricia to take the bottle again.

  “Baby no hungry,” he said.

  “She is hungry, Chuck. That’s why she’s crying. She hasn’t eaten in a couple of days. I don’t know what to do.”

  Chuck wiggled his fingers in front of her. She stopped crying to look at them, then he put a finger in her hand. She grabbed onto it and held it for a few moments before she let it go.

  “Tiny liddle baby,” he said.

  “Did you ever see anything like this happen?” I asked him. “I mean where a baby wouldn’t eat?” I was so desperate I was asking an eight year old for help. He shook his head.

  I tried the nipple again, but it was the same. She took it, then spat it out and started crying. I handed the bottle to Chuck and put her over my shoulder. The bottle seemed bigger in his hands, awfully big. Maybe that was the trouble. She hadn’t eaten in two or three days and she was weak. Maybe she was too weak to hold onto the nipple. “Chuck, get me the first-aid kit. It’s over there on the shelf.”

  He brought it over. There was a medicine dropper in it. Unscrewing the cap on the bottle, I asked Chuck to hold it, pulled some milk up into the dropper and put it in her mouth. She wouldn’t take it, but I kept at it. For I don’t know how long the milk kept dripping out of her mouth. Then when I was almost ready to give up she began holding on to some of it. First just a few drops, then more.

  “She’s taking it, Chuck.”

  He leaned over her, interested. She fussed and fumed, frustrated every time I pulled the dropper out to fill it up again, but she was taking it, all right. When she dropped off to sleep there was about an inch and a half of milk gone from the bottle. She hadn’t taken much, hardly more than a couple of mouthfuls, but at least she’d taken something.

  I put her back in the fruit crate, then set about getting a meal ready. The dog came over to the stove while I was cooking. I sent him out to do his business and he was at the door again almost right away, scratching and whining to get in.

  Ethel woke up just before the meal was ready and the three of us sat down and ate—biscuits and stew. When we were done Chuck and I did the dishes and Ethel sat beside Patricia, talking to her. I couldn’t seem to get my mind going. What I needed to clear it was about twelve straight hours of sleep. I felt as if I was going to burst out crying any minute. I wondered where Fred was, how he was making out. If the weather kept up like this it could take him four or five days to reach Forty Mile, with stopovers for sleep. If it eased up he might make it in two.

  With the dishes done the three of us sat on the cot while I fed Patricia again with the medicine dropper. Chuck was thumbing through a yellowed magazine. He pushed it over to me and pointed to a page. It was a drawing of a trim, neatly dressed housewife standing alongside of an electric washing machine. She was barely touching the clothes as they went through the wringer and dropped into the laundry basket.

  “You like?” Chuck asked me.

  “I sure would,” I said.

  “One day,” he said, “I have lotsa money. I buy for you.”

  “That’s nice of you.”

  “You no more wash and wash and wash.” He imitated me scrubbing at the washboard. “How much cost it that?”

  I looked at the price. “A hundred and two dollars.”

  He thought about it, but didn’t say anything.

  The Terwilligers’ dog woke up and sniffed the air. Then it began to whine. A few seconds later a wolf howled somewhere. It wasn’t the long lonely cry, but the excited hunting call and it was answered right away by the other wolves. I wondered if they had somehow found their way into the slough bed.

  Chuck said something to Ethel in Indian. She answered, “Aha”—yes. I thought it was something about the wolves. I asked him what he’d said.

  “I tell Et’el this good place, ask she like stay here. She say yiss.”

  He was still worried about going back to Chicken. I wondered what would happen when we got back, what Mr. Vaughn and Angela Barrett would say. But I didn’t really care one way or the other. They didn’t seem important anymore, not after all this. The only one I was concerned about was Maggie—what she’d be going through when she found out about Jennie.

  Time passed. We couldn’t go outside, so we made the best of staying inside. To pass the time we played games—Hot and Cold, Hide the Thimble. Their favorite game was one they made up themselves. They’d run across the room and I’d try to give them a light whack on the bottom as they went by. If I missed they won.

  Each time Patricia woke up, every hour or so, she took a little more milk. I kept trying her with the nipple, until finally—it must have been almost a day later—she took it. She finished a whole bottle, then threw half of it back up, but she was getting stronger. In the next few hours she took two more half-filled bottles.

  The only thing I’d have wished for was some uninterrupted sleep. Patricia wouldn’t sleep for more than a few hours at a time even after she started taking the bottle. Sometimes she’d cry for what seemed hours, and I’d walk up and down with her in a daze untill she settled into an uneasy sleep and I’d do the same. I started to get cabin fever, snapping at Chuck and Ethel for no reason at all, then hating myself for it. They were helping out as much as they could, bringing in wood and snow, helping with the dishes and keeping things in order. Chuck even warmed the bottle and helped me feed the baby once.

  After two days of it the time came when I just couldn’t bring myself to wake up. Pat
ricia began to cry when we were all asleep. I nudged Chuck and asked him to put the bottle in the saucepan, then I gave Patricia to him and told him to wake me when the bottle was ready. I ducked down into the sleeping bag and that was all I remembered until I woke up some time later to hear her crying again. I didn’t know how long I’d slept but Ethel and Chuck were awake. She was sitting on their sleeping bag holding Patricia. Chuck was at the stove, warming a bottle.

  “Chuck, how long have I been asleep?”

  He shrugged. “Long time, I think.”

  I got up, feeling pretty good. “Don’t you have any idea how long?”

  He shook his head. “You give me baby. I give milk for him. He go sleep, I go sleep. He wake up, I wake up, Et’el wake up. You not wake up. You have one good sleep.”

  I took Patricia from Ethel. “You and Ethel fed her?”

  “Yiss. I do good?”

  I hugged him. “You did marvelous. I needed that sleep bad.”

  He beamed. “You happy me, I glad.”

  “Happy? I adore you. And that goes for you too,” I added to Ethel.

  Only then did I notice how quiet it was. The wind had stopped blowing. I went to the door. Outside the sky was bright with stars, the air still. It was so bitterly cold that my breath snapped into crystals. I came right back in.

  From then on I wasn’t worried about a thing. I knew we’d make out and that someone would come for us eventually. All we had to do was wait.

  The next day the weather was lovely. The sun shone bright in a cloudless sky and it was warm enough to walk around with parka hoods down. Chuck and Ethel went out early and busied themselves building a “roadhouse,” then played hunter for a while. In the afternoon, I brought one of the sleeping bags outside, laid it against a stump and just sat taking in the sun with Patricia on my lap. The sun felt so good that I started to drowse, listening to Chuck make the sounds of a rifle as he tried to “shoot” Ethel the Moose or Ethel the Caribou for the nth time. I heard her squeal with delight as he missed her, then silence as she fell and he started to carry her back to the roadhouse for skinning and eating. Then I heard another sound, a sound I’d become so familiar with the past few months that I knew I wasn’t hearing things. It was coming from the direction of the river. I opened my eyes to see Chuck and Ethel standing stock still, listening. They’d heard it too.