“You’re the smartest girl at the mill. The smartest . . . I do love you. I love . . .”
She was determined not to let him worm his way back into her heart.
“’Lizbeth?”
“I’m here,” she said.
“I’m such a rat,” he said in a whispered mumble.
When his head fell slack to the side, she shook him.
“Damn you, Nate. What the hell do I do now?”
When he didn’t answer, she unbuttoned his shirt and wet his chest with a cool rag. Against his skin, the rag turned hot as if she’d set it on a firebox, nearly burning her hand. She replaced it with another cool rag until that one heated up too. Trying to cool him down all day, she ran back and forth to the river until dark, filling up the bucket and pouring cold river water onto his calf, then cooling his skin with rags, hoping someone would come along their claim to help. Of all the days, no miners passed.
By nighttime his fever cooled slightly, but the wound turned an awful sight of blackened, rotted flesh, smelling putrid and sticking to the rag. No amount of soaking would leach out that damn snake poison. She wondered if this was how it would end between them. Nate would die and she would become a widow, free of her lady-man loving husband. Free to start over. She felt sick at her wicked thinking.
He lay still on the muddied floor of the Goodwin cabin, his breathing shallow and labored. Yellow Dog nudged into the partially opened door, looking up with big dopey eyes. She had no heart left to shoo him away, so he stayed inside while she cradled Nate’s head and dripped more water into his mouth. She remembered cradling her mother the same way when she’d cut her wrists through, Samuel wrapping the bandages down tight to stop the blood. A weird breathing had come out of her mother’s mouth then, strange and eerie, yet somehow peaceful too. Now she’d endure another loss. A fourth loss. First her mother into madness. Then little Lucy. Then her father. Now Nate. Perhaps this was the grand price God demanded of her. She’d affronted Him, surely. Now she’d pay. Leaving her in the West alone to fend for herself like a feral cat.
She dropped the cup and prayed with her hands clasped silently, asking for mercy. She asked for herself and for Nate. She pleaded, saying he wasn’t a bad man. He was her family, and she didn’t want him to die. When she ran out of prayer, she listened to him breathe. When his breathing slowed too quiet, she nudged him.
“Nate? Can you hear me?”
His face winced, but his eyes stayed closed.
“Nate. Nate!”
When he didn’t answer back, she realized she couldn’t live with herself if he died. She flew out the door, planning to run all the way to Coyoteville in the dark for a doctor. Under a full moon casting creepy shadows from the sugar pines, she ran twenty steps before bumping into a man walking down the trail. He stood short and stout, with a guitar strapped around his shoulder and a wide straw sombrero on his head. Frantic, she spit out the story of Nate and the snakebite.
The man said his name was Álvaro and he’d come all the way from Culoma Town.
“You’ve got to help me,” she said, shaking the stranger’s shoulders.
Álvaro followed her back to the cabin to see Nate, lying lame on the floor.
“Mmmm. Looks bad, señora,” he said, taking off his guitar and leaning it up against the cabin wall.
“What should we do?”
“Some say if you bite the snake after it bites you, the wound will heal,” he said.
“What?”
“And tobacco,” he said, pulling a string of rosary beads out of his pocket and fingering them. “I once saw an Indian put tobacco leaves on her boy’s leg after a snake got him. Next day he was running around after the cows.”
“Is that true?”
“Sí, señora. When my uncle stepped in a rattlesnake nest, mi madre used guaco leaves. The baby rattlers are the worst. Horrible.”
“Stop,” she said, replacing the compress on Nate’s leg. “Stop with the stories! Help me.”
“Do you have any tobacco?” Álvaro asked.
“No.”
“Did you suck out the poison?”
“No.”
“Then he will lose it.”
“What?”
“The leg. It must come off.”
Oblivious to the decision before her, Nate lay still with closed eyes. She blinked back at Álvaro and pleaded for him to get a doctor, promising him money without a clue how she’d keep the promise.
“A big reward if you bring whiskey too. I’ll pay.”
“Sí, señora. I leave my guitar here.”
With Álvaro gone, she sat on the floor, leaning her back against the wall next to the guitar, waiting. Still holding a cool rag on Nate’s leg, she lost all sense of time, drifting, falling, dreaming. She dreamed of her father back on the orchard, climbing a tree, plucking apples from the tallest branches, saying, “I can see heaven.” He lifted her little eight-year-old self to the highest branches, holding her legs tight as she peeked out from the treetop to see the white house, the holes in the leaky barn roof, the rotting fence falling away, the Concord church steeple poking up to heaven, and her mother thinning carrots in the garden, looking placid, with no hint of her coming madness.
“Señora. Wake up, señora. El médico está aquí.”
She squeezed her eyes tight and poked her temples, trying to recapture the images of her once happy family back on their orchard in Concord. Trying to uncover the deep holes of her mind to find them. Her parents. Her family. But someone shook her, dissolving the remembrance.
“Señora. El doctor está aquí.”
She woke up confused, then remembered telling a man to run to town for a doctor and whiskey. Elisabeth grabbed the jug and dripped whiskey in Nate’s mouth, hoping it might help him endure the pain. Drops of rain began pattering the roof overhead, slow and deliberate, as the doctor explained how he’d cut the leg. Álvaro held Nate’s shoulders down, and the doctor sawed back and forth like he was cutting a branch from a tree. The whiskey didn’t quite numb Nate senseless, and he writhed and squirmed with force at the cutting, but he didn’t holler out. She admired him staying brave, getting through the cutting by kicking his good leg out and digging his boot heel into the muddy floor to brace himself.
“Hold him still, woman!” the doctor said.
She obeyed, holding Nate’s working leg down, pressing with all her might until her arms shook and sweat dripped from her forehead. The rain began pounding down harder on the cabin shingles, but it didn’t drown out the sickening sound of metal on bone. Blood pooled on the dirt floor of the cabin as the doctor finished sawing. When the doctor severed bone with a crack, Nate fainted limp under the pain of losing a piece of himself. She let go of Nate’s good leg, cringing at the sound of the doctor scraping bony shards smooth with a file.
“So no pointy parts break through the skin,” he said.
Nate twitched, and Álvaro poured more whiskey into his mouth. When Nate’s eyes rolled back and settled calm, the doctor pulled the extra flaps of skin taut over severed leg bone and sewed it up with strong horsehair, like a woman at a quilting bee.
“I’ll leave an opening here so it’ll drain,” the doctor said, pointing to his work. “Keep it clean with hot water so it doesn’t turn putrid.”
She looked down at the snake-bit leg lying alone on the dirt floor, bloated black with poison. A spate of guilt filled her lungs at thinking how she waited too long before going for help. What sort of woman had she become, stalling, musing that a dead husband might’ve made her free? Feeling sick, she gulped for air over and over like a duckling drowning without a mother or a father, and grabbed the bloody shank and ran out of the cabin.
“It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault!”
She ran through the rain and into the pine grove behind the cabin, falling to her knees and clawing and scraping the dirt, opening up a muddy hole. Yellow Dog helped her dig, and she shoved Nate’s limb, wet and gooey, down into the shallow hole and covered it up unti
l even his toes disappeared beneath the earth, burying away any reminder of her heartless self.
PART 2
“There is no estimating the wit and wisdom concealed and latent in our lower fellow mortals until made manifest by profound experiences; for it is through suffering that dogs as well as saints are developed and made perfect.”
—JOHN MUIR
13
“We return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, which nature cannot repair.”
Separating Nate from the rotten leg saved his life, but didn’t quite bring him back to the living. Over the next weeks he fought a god-awful fever, tossing about in bed between fits of sleep laced in hazy understanding that his leg ended without a knee. Elisabeth fixed on helping him, cleaning the stump, changing his bandage, and emptying his piss pot. With no appetite, Nate didn’t want food. She spooned sips of pork broth into his mouth anyway, knowing he’d need nourishment to live. Through a fevered daze, Nate apologized, babbling on about being sorry, saying he amounted to a nothing. A failure. A sorry excuse for a man. A sinning bugger. She didn’t disagree, letting him ramble on until sleep took him again.
With Nate’s leg gone, she was stuck with a broken husband, but she took her duty as a wife serious. She wasn’t the sort of woman to leave a husband out for the wolves with a sick fever and only one leg, no matter how bitter her thoughts. Whatever love she’d once felt for Nate had washed away at seeing him loving on that man in the dark. Even so, she wasn’t like Henry, who’d abandoned his family so easily. She’d stay, knowing he’d die if she left him alone. She felt the whole thing was her fault anyhow. If she hadn’t married him and convinced him to come looking for Henry, he might not have gone up to that Fandango. She might not have seen. She might not have taunted him. Then he wouldn’t have run off like that, getting himself bit by a snake.
She thought church might be the only thing to save her from drowning in despair over caring for a feeble husband all by herself in such an untamed place. But Coyoteville didn’t have a church, and it was nearly a days’ walk back to Culoma Town from the North Fork of the American. Besides, Culoma Town didn’t have a proper church yet, only a little log cabin she’s heard about being built by the Catholics, and no self-respecting Protestant would sit in that church just because of broken-up insides, even if it was the only one around for miles. She figured God had forsaken her, like her father. She turned to Emerson instead, flipping back and forth through the pages of “Self-Reliance” over and over again, looking for clues on what to do when a husband couldn’t love her.
She came to understand Emerson believed a man should follow his own instinct and ideals, but drifting along dwelling on the sad state of one’s soul seemed a luxury she couldn’t afford. She had to consider the more pressing practicalities of filling her belly. Winter was creeping up, and they didn’t have the food stores to sustain them through, and she still owed the doctor forty-five dollars for the cutting, a painful sum. Fortunately, Álvaro asked nothing in particular for running to get the doctor, saying he’d see her later.
Determined to make something of a dreary situation, she turned toward the river, finding a private place to bathe upstream in a pool settled calm by a clump of huge boulders separating the main flow. She scrubbed her short-cut skirt, pantaloons, and bodice thin, hanging them over a cottonwood branch to dry, and waded into the edges of the water wearing only her drawers and camisole. The coldness gripped her breath as she sunk down, her toes feeling the soft gravel bottom. Dunking under, her hair flowed long and free, and the water cleaned her clear, washing away layers of dirt and grief and hurt and helplessness. She opened her eyes and saw the small river rocks lying peaceful on the bottom, oblivious to the current above. Coming up from below, she looked down at her bare feet standing on the rocks through the translucent water like a magic window revealing a twin more pure than her diluted self. The river pulled her. Even in the calm of the pool, it gently tugged her toward the faster, deeper, dangerous current. She flapped her arms and captured the eddy, gripping the gravel near the bank. Climbing out wet, she shivered, not with cold but with revival, as if the river had jerked her out of some murky underworld, remaking her anew. Not like a baptism, but more like the American was the River Styx giving her miraculous powers, making her invulnerable, like Achilles.
She scrambled atop a granite boulder, solid and large and flat on top with a six-inch wide gap split down the whole length. Sprawling out on the larger half nearer the river, she watched the water surge and gurgle. She looked up to see the ponderosa pines rising tall out of the river basin. The rich dark green of the branches appeared almost black, with light green, too, and all the greens in between, mixing together into a dazzling fullness. Sugar pine smell hung heady in the air as she stretched out flat on her stomach, drying by the heat radiating up from the split rock into her body, baking her new. She rested her chin on her hands; a soft fall breeze brushed goose bumps along her arms, and she heard it talking. The wind. She listened careful to hear if it might say something to her, when she got distracted by an elegant osprey soaring overhead, with white underwings blinding bright against the blue sky. When the bird pointed down straight for the river, she sat up to watch it dive in with a determined plunk. Lifting up, the osprey faltered. Graceful gliding turned into ridiculous flopping as the bird weighed down heavy with a big fish gripped in its talons underneath the water. The osprey refused to let go of the fish dangling below and instead spread its wings and settled in the water like a floating duck, thinking on a strategy. Determined, it turned itself around in circles atop the water using its wings as oars, mustering up strength. When the osprey sprung up in a whoosh, Elisabeth saw it had a fish nearly as big as itself gripped in its talons. The fish wiggled and wiggled, making things difficult on the osprey, who bumbled along bumping the fish along the surface of the water. She figured the osprey might have to let loose the fish or sink itself, but it refused to give up, stretching wide with wings a little longer and a little stronger than before, lifting up and soaring magnificent, gripping its prize tight, with no hint of the prior lacking grace.
Back at the cabin, she shoveled dirt onto the bloody spot on the floor where the doctor made a mess sawing off Nate’s leg. Patting it down flat with her bare hands, she wished for a wood floor but knew they hadn’t the money for planks. After, she worked the claim, crouching along the riverbank, panning with the rocker box Nate had fashioned when he still had both legs. Yellow Dog crowded up too close, slobbering. When she shooed him off, he slunk low, his big brown eyes pleading patient, waiting on food or love or something else. But he never left her side.
In between bouts of panning, she encouraged Nate to sip soup and drink water. Her anger at him fell away, replaced by a wave of pity as she cleaned his stump with boiled water as the doctor instructed. She rolled him over and wiped his bottom when he messed himself, and scrubbed his dirty trousers and ranky blanket in the river. After three weeks, his fever broke, and she made him sit up in bed to eat a meager pork broth she’d cooked up from a small shank she’d been picking off over the past weeks. The broth brought the color back to Nate’s cheeks, and he rubbed his stump, looking forlorn with a crumpled-up face.
“Nothing to be done about it. At least you’re among the living,” she said.
“That I am,” he said.
“You can’t stay in bed forever.”
She handed him a cup of water, knowing he’d have to get up into the chair soon. He sipped, then let his head drop back on the bed.
“We’ve got to work the claim. Or we’ll lose it,” he whispered.
“I know.”
“The mining laws say if we don’t work it, someone else can claim it,” he said, closing his eyes, drifting.
“I understand. I’ve been working it while you’ve been healing,” she said, sharper than she’d meant.
Yellow Dog whined outside the cabin door, softening her. The cabin reeled rank from Nate’s
swollen-up stump, so dog stank wouldn’t make it much worse. She opened the door and let Yellow Dog inside. He crawled atop Henry’s bearskin rug in front of the fire, and she got on her hands and knees and hugged him. Yellow Dog put his chin on her shoulder and nuzzled back, then together, they curled and fell asleep.
In the morning she opened the cabin door, and Yellow Dog darted out. A moment later he came back with a tiny pika in its jaws, dropping the furry thing at her feet. Before Yellow Dog could tear at the fur to crunch and gulp it down whole like she’d seen him do before, she grabbed the pika, cutting off his head and throwing it to Yellow Dog as a gift. She gutted the pika and stuck it through, cooking it over the morning fire until the smell of singed fur filled the cabin. She ate the tiny meal, pulling off the meat and skin with her teeth, picking the bones clean, without offering even a bite to Nate sleeping in the bed.
As winter crept up, fewer miners traveled by their cabin, instead hunkering down from the cold in one of the dozens of mining towns sprung up around the placers. That meant less mending and less money for food. They had no choice but to hang on at the river claim, eating the last of their beans mixed with miner’s lettuce found growing wild in the forest, hoping on gold. By month’s end, she helped Nate out of bed, setting him up in a chair by the fire.
“You’re gonna need to buck up. Help out.”
“Will do,” he said.
She cut a tall pine branch for him to balance his weight on and encouraged him to walk. If Nate suffered in pain, he never complained, just hobbled around with his stump flopping and wiggling every which way something ugly, stuffed in a trouser leg she sewed up short. Praising his efforts, she said he’d soon grow strong as ever. She was careful not to go overboard, knowing false praise would hurt his pride. She pretended getting around on one leg was no different from getting around on two, even though she knew it wasn’t true. When he’d gained a bit of strength, she encouraged him to get outside for some air, helping him to a stool she set down by the river. She wrapped him in blanket and thrust a pan in his lap.
Prospects of a Woman Page 9