“Pa?” she questioned, weak and winded like a frail animal as Roman held her up, kept her from collapsing.
That’s when Bass moved his gaze to his son-in-law’s face—reading the stoic pain registered there. The iron set of a man’s jaw when that man knows if he doesn’t clamp his teeth tight his chin is going to quiver and he will betray himself … when a man realizes he must be strong for everyone else even though his own heart is already crying out in bitter anguish. In Roman Burwell’s eyes showed the despair of a man who already knew.
“Snakebite, Amanda,” Titus declared.
Burwell cleared his throat and asked in a whisper, “Rattler?”
When Scratch nodded, Amanda stifled a shrill sob and twisted about to bury her face in Roman’s chest.
Titus looked down at the child as he stuffed his knife back into its scabbard with one hand, slowly continuing to twist the stick with the fingers of his left hand, tightening, tightening, tightening the tourniquet.
“Lucas,” he said quietly, bending low so his face was just inches from the boy’s, “we’re gonna take you back to the wagon, son.”
“Get me better there, Gran’papa?”
God, how he wanted to lie to the child, to tell Lucas everything the boy wanted to hear, deserved to hear … but instead he said only, “Jackrabbit, you help me help Lucas now.”
“Yes.”
“Take hold of the stick from me,” and he waited while his son seized hold of the stick. “Don’t let go of it. Keep hold of it—I’m gonna pick Lucas up.”
“I-I can help you, Titus,” Roman offered.
“No,” and he shook his long hair. “You keep hol’t of Amanda. Just keep hol’tin’ her real tight too.”
Once Jackrabbit had the ends of the stick steadied in his two tiny hands, Scratch quickly stuffed both his arms under the child. Raising first his narrow shoulders, Lucas’s long, corn-silk hair spilling over Bass’s forearm, Titus next raised the knees, then got his own legs under him and stood. Digger was the more inquisitive of the two dogs, rising on his back legs to momentarily sniff at the boy. He turned and slowly started through the sagebrush as the crowd peeled back from his path, he and everyone in that crowd on either side of him moving slow as a death march, both his loyal dogs easing along at his heels. Bending his face over the child’s, Bass was constantly vigilant that he not let the sun’s intense afternoon light touch the boy’s face.
His left moccasin finally worked its way off and he began to walk through the sage across that rough, rocky ground with one bare foot. Waits immediately scooped up the moccasin and dashed in front of him, holding up the limp moccasin and quickly pointing at his foot. He shook his head and resolutely continued for the wagon. On both sides of him the crowd quietly murmured in wonder and fear, explaining to one another what they heard had happened; in that way a story was told in but a matter of a half dozen compelling words from one mouth to the other, to another, then to the next, on and on as they shuffled through the sagebrush on either side of him and the boy’s gray-faced parents.
He could hear Amanda sobbing behind him, could make out Roman talking softly to her as he continued to clutch his big arm around her quivering shoulders, holding her up, helping her walk, getting her back to the wagon for the sake of their youngest. Eight-year-old Annie suddenly pushed through the crowd and stopped right in front of her grandfather, staring at her little brother Lucas, her eyes never so wide. She stood rooted to the spot as Titus approached. He realized she needed something to do.
“Annie, go lay some more wood on the fire for me.”
In an instant the child had whirled about on her heels and darted back through the edge of the throng that made way for her. Titus took a deep gasp as his bare foot found some tiny cactus hidden among the dried bunchgrass. And kept walking with that boy cradled in his arms.
“Waits,” he called out to his wife in Crow. “Gather your medicines.”
She stared into his eyes a long moment, then understood. Her eyes fell to the ground.
“Everything you have,” he choked in his wife’s tongue as she turned aside. “We’ll need it all … so we can do everything we can.”
* Carry the Wind
* Yellowstone River.
* Today’s Steamboat Springs.
SEVENTEEN
“Is there anything we can do for the boy?” Titus whispered to his wife as he crouched at the fire beside her, their faces almost touching as they rummaged through Waits-by-the-Water’s rawhide pouch filled with small skin sacks of leaves and roots, powders and mosses, bark and crushed insects too. All of it they spread out on a piece of old blanket between them, then waited for the water to come to a boil.
She looked into his eyes, and he already knew.
“There is nothing I know of that has enough power to kill the snake’s spirit,” she confessed in a barely audible whisper, even though she spoke in Crow.
“Except the First Maker,” he whimpered as Shad came up to kneel beside him.
Sweete glanced at his wife and said, “Toote seen a lot of rattler bites.”
“And?”
Shad’s face was long and drawn as he answered, “But none of ’em ever made it, Scratch.” Then Sweete laid his trunk of an arm across the thin man’s shoulders. “You done all you could. You sucked him, you burned them bites too. There ain’t nothing but the leaves and roots and a medicine man’s prayin’ left to do now.”
How he wanted to let go so his own shoulders could quake with frustration, with utter fear, even some building anger too. But instead he turned and peered into the face of his old friend. “Ask Shell Woman to bring over anything she’s got what’ll help us make the boy feel a li’l easier. I knowed her medeecin saved your arm, likely it saved your life. I can only pray Shell Woman’s power gonna save that li’l boy’s life too.”
Without a word, Shadrach stood and shuffled off. Behind him Titus could hear Amanda sobbing again as her feet dragged across the sandy soil. Other folks were murmuring around them too, everyone staying back aways, keeping a respectful distance from the wagon and the wide awning Roman had just finished stringing up between the top of the wagon bed and a pair of poles when Magpie came running with her terrible news.
Titus had Magpie and Leah pull out the canvas bedsacks and comforters from the back of the wagon as they approached, instructing the girls to make Lucas as soft a pallet as they could in the shade beneath that awning on the lee side of the wagon near the fire. It was where the children and the two dogs always chose to sleep each night on the trail. This is where Digger and Ghost now dropped to their bellies and scooted across the sandy ground to keep a watch on the humans. And here too Scratch slowly settled with the tiny body in his arms, Jackrabbit still clutching that tourniquet stick with both his tiny brown hands.
“Amanda,” he had called to her in a quiet voice as Roman brought her up to the awning, the crowd stopping several yards behind mother and father. “You need to be strong, woman. This boy needs a-strong mother right now.”
She had nodded.
“Can you be strong for my Lucas boy?”
Her chin quivered so as she had nodded again, then slowly peeled herself away from Roman.
“C’mere an’ sit beside me, daughter,” he asked.
Once she had settled right beside her father, Amanda took a long, deep breath, then leaned over and wrapped her arms around Lucas, slowly taking him from Bass’s embrace. Into Jackrabbit’s ear he had whispered, “Your hands tired?”
The boy shook his head, and kept holding that stick with white-knuckled intensity, his big black eyes pooling, tears muddying his cheeks.
“Amanda,” Titus, said softly as he shifted onto his knees over her and Lucas, reaching back for his skinning knife, “I’m gonna have to cut ’im a li’l—”
“Cut him?”
“On them bites.”
For a few long moments she had stared at those two punctures high on the side of Lucas’s right calf. “Will it hurt him?”
/> He shook his head. “Don’t think he’s gonna feel nothin’ much from here on out now.”
After she had nodded reluctantly, he clutched the sharp blade down near the point and started work on those two swollen black holes, saying, “I gotta suck out what I can.”
Gently, carefully, slowly he had sliced down with the tip of the blade through each of the holes, making the incisions long enough below each hole to account for the downward curve of the rattler’s fangs as they struck the innocent boy at play. The skin bled freely, instantly, the flesh so taut, swollen, and already hot to the touch.
Lucas groaned.
“Stop, Pa!”
Softly Bass said to her, “I ain’t hurtin’ him. It’s the p’isen, Amanda. That’s what pains him so.”
Gently he squeezed the two wounds between a thumb and finger, swiped off the blood with the side of his hand, then bent over the leg there below the narrow leather whang he had fashioned into a tourniquet. Continuing the pressure on the wounds with his thumb and finger, Titus formed a seal with his lips and sucked. When he sensed the salty taste on his tongue, the warmth against his lips, Scratch pulled back, turned his head, and spat onto the ground. Again and again he bent, sucked, and spat. Until he figured that he had done all the good he could.
“You get it all, Pa?” she asked as he leaned back after that last time and dragged the sleeve of his shirt across his mouth.
“Dunno.”
Roman knelt before him. Looked down at the boy’s leg. Then peered into Bass’s eyes with a plea. “Can we burn him?”
“Burn him?”
Burwell swallowed and said, “I see’d ’em do it with bad wounds back in Missouri. Put a hot poker on it, burn it so it don’t bleed no more.”
“It ain’t that he’s bleedin’, Roman,” Scratch explained, watching the realization of it strike the man doubly hard. Then he thought. “But we can do something else to burn him. Flea, get me my powder horn.”
When the boy had returned with his father’s shooting pouch and horn, Titus pulled the stopper and poured a little powder into the two puncture wounds and the cuts. As he gently kneaded the powder down into the bloody, oozing tissues, he again instructed Flea, “Son, get me a small twig from the fire.”
“Fire on it?” he asked his father in Crow.
“Yes, a good ember on the end of it.”
Roman inched back when Flea brought the tiny branch, a small flame licking at the end. Holding his breath, Titus touched the ember to the first of the wounds. A sudden twist of gray smoke spurted from the swollen flesh as Lucas twisted violently in his mother’s arms.
“Hold ’im still best you can, Amanda,” he ordered as he pressed down on the boy’s ankle with his empty hand, then gently laid the twig against the second wound.
Another spew of sparks and a curl of smoke erupted as Lucas flexed that swollen leg grown so filled with fluid that the narrow leather strip had nearly disappeared between folds of rock-hard flesh.
“We’re ready, Gran’pa,” Leah said behind him.
“Why don’cha move him onto the pallet the girls made for him, Amanda,” he suggested quietly. “Cover ’im up too.”
“You think he’s cold?” she asked as she began to lay her son on the comforters.
“He’s awready got the fever,” Bass had said. “Gonna be burnin’ up with it soon enough.”
Once Amanda had the boy settled on the soft pallet, his head in her lap, Titus creaked to his feet and inched away. He had to find Shell Woman, to beg her to use her powerful Cheyenne buffalo medicine on this dying child.
“Pa?”
He turned there at the fire, his painful reverie interrupted by the desperation in Amanda’s call. He went over and knelt beside her in the shade of the awning again. The sun was settling toward the far western hills. West … where they had been going as a happy family out to make themselves a new home in a new land with new hopes and new, new dreams.
“Something’s terrible wrong,” Amanda moaned. “He’s been restless, real restless for the last little bit—”
Titus heard the boy’s stomach lurch, that unmistakable gurgle as he instantly lunged over Amanda to grab for Lucas, getting the youngster turned on his side just before he spilled the contents of his stomach. The child whimpered when he was finished. Scared.
Bass grabbed up the wet towel they had been using to moisten the boy’s lips and wiped Lucas’s chin and mouth, then swiped it across Amanda’s arm where it had been right under her son’s mouth. “It’s all right, Pa. This sort of thing don’t ever bother a mother.”
He looked deep into her eyes, finding himself filled with so much love for her, filled with so much sorrow for her too. “Don’t bother a father neither, Amanda.”
But he had to drag his gaze away from the pain in her face, looking now at that thin, frail leg still enclosed inside the dirty canvas britches—how vastly different that leg was in its skeletal boniness compared to the pale, red-mottled leg puffed up more than twice its normal size. On the outside of Lucas’s bare calf were those two dark incisions he had made across the fang marks, powder-burnt now, both crude attempts at frontier healing made all the more stark against the youngster’s white skin. For a moment he stared down at the slits he had cut into the muscle to suck the boy. Still a little oozy with blood and seep after the burning, those slits reminded Titus of a reptile’s eyes. Eyes filled with the black of badness, glaring back at him, mocking his inability to save the boy. Sneering at his every effort to live up to Lucas’s trust that his grandfather could make all things better once more.
While Amanda continued to gently rock the child against her, humming over and over again the same few notes of some barely remembered song as a mother is wont to do when she has to watch her very flesh and blood slipping from her grasp, Titus got down on his hands and knees to smell the drying puddle of what little had remained in Lucas’s belly before the boy heaved it across himself, Amanda, and that baby quilt she had managed to get sewn just before the birth of her youngest. Leaning back, he scooped up a double-handful of prairie sand and spilled it on the rancid puddle. Several more times he filled his hands with sand and poured it out until the whole spot was buried.
Buried, he thought. Just like this woman’s gonna have to do to her baby. Sour and sickly, that vomit’s stench clung in his nostrils—proof to the old trapper that the boy was already dying inside. Oh, how his heart ached for this mother now, knowing that all too soon she would be wrapping up her baby in that very same quilt and consigning his tiny body to a shallow hole in the ground. Burying him, the way he had attempted to bury that—
“Mama …” Lucas whimpered softly, the last syllable trailing off in a moan.
“Yes, Mama’s here.” She bent her head low across his face, brushing his cracked lips with her ear.
He croaked, “Water?”
Amanda looked up at her husband. “Row, get him some water.”
Scratch studied the child’s face as Roman fetched the canteen from the sideboard of the wagon. Lucas’s face was bathed in sweat. No longer were tiny jewels beading his forehead. Now he was in the full grip of a last, excruciating fever. Amanda took the canteen, stuffed it between her knees, and started to worry the cork from the neck.
“Lemme,” Titus offered.
“I gotta pour some water on his poor tongue,” she said in desperation while she passed her father the canteen.
“No, not that way,” he said as he pulled the cork and looked around them. “Here, I’ll use the corner of your apron.”
Picking up the corner, Bass pressed it against the canteen’s mouth as he turned it upside down. Water soaked a bit of the apron. This he brought to the child’s mouth, rubbed it across the dry, cracked lips.
“Here, Lucas—suck on it. Suck the water.”
“For God’s sake, Pa!” she whimpered. “Give him a drink of water!”
“He’ll just throw it up,” he wanted to explain. “This way his tongue won’t be so dry—”
/> “It doesn’t matter,” Amanda snapped, her red eyes hardened with despair. “He’s gonna … Lucas is going to … it damn well doesn’t matter anymore if his stomach don’t hold it.”
He felt shamed, chastised by her words, more so by his lame attempt to do right by Lucas when the time to do anything for the child was past them all. No longer should any of them worry about the boy throwing the water back up.
“Y-you’re right, Amanda,” he said quietly, handing her the open canteen. “Give Lucas anything he wants what’11 make him feel better. Anything.”
Her eyes suddenly softened. “I’m sorry, Pa. So sorry.” And she started to cry again, her upper body quaking with the force of her sobs.
Quickly Bass threw his arm around her shoulder, saying, “Don’t do that now, Amanda. Time enough for that later. But right now … for what time you got left … you be Lucas’s mother. You just be this boy’s mama.”
When he took his arm from her shoulder and rocked back, Amanda gently raised the child and delicately pressed the canteen’s neck to Lucas’s lips. She allowed only a dribble to pour across his tongue as he swallowed again, then again, greedily. Finally he opened his eyes into cracks and she took the canteen away.
“Mama,” he groaned, barely audible. “I hurt so much.”
“Your leg?”
“Ever’ where,” he sighed, lips glistening with the last drops of water.
Titus got to his knees, then patted the pallet next to Amanda. “Roman—c’mere. Be with your people.”
For a long moment the big, burly farmer just stood there at the edge of the awning’s shadow, staring down at his son, grief relentlessly chiseling away at his sharp, thick-boned features. His arms hung stiffly at his sides, those big callused farmer hands balling into fists with a white-knuckled intensity, then opening before they balled again with a fierce helplessness.
Wind Walker Page 32