One Bright Morning (6 page)

Maggie was a good gardener and a good
preserver. In her underground storeroom there were even a couple of
pumpkins and several squash, half a barrel of potatoes, three
strings of onions, an almost-full string of garlic, and two strings
of chili peppers still waiting to be used.

She was proud of her food stores. Of course,
the fact that she had only herself and Ozzie and little Annie to
feed made life easier in that regard. On any day of the year,
though, she would have given up any amount of her well-stocked
larder to have Kenny back. She missed him. And life was sure easier
with a good man around to do some of the work. Maggie didn’t count
Ozzie.

When she got back inside the
nearly empty house, she sat at the kitchen table, put her face in
her hands, and closed her eyes. She was
so
tired. She dimly heard the sound
of chop-chop-chop as Ozzie resumed his labors before her eyes
closed, her elbows folded up, and she fell asleep at the
table.

Maggie hadn’t been asleep very long before a
low moaning sound began slithering around in her muddy brain and
dimly penetrated the exhaustion that had drugged her. Consciousness
was a long time in coming, though. It had to fight to open Maggie’s
eyes, and when her eyelids finally did begin to creak open, they
felt as though they did so through a layer of thick gum.

At last a deep, miserable groan and a
hoarsely cried name sent Maggie shooting out of her chair so fast
that it fell over with a loud crash.

“
Oh, my God,” she cried, and
tore over to the bedroom door.

“
Oh, my God,” she said
again, her heart slamming against her ribs like hail during a
storm.

Jubal Green was bright red and thrashing
back and forth on her bed. His fever had come upon him with a
vengeance.

Maggie put her hands to her cheeks and just
watched him for several seconds, her mind not having yet caught up
with her body. When it did, she realized she couldn’t have slept
much because she still heard Ozzie chopping wood. To the best of
her knowledge, Ozzie never worked more than fifteen or twenty
minutes at a stretch. If he was still at it, her weakness couldn’t
have led her to sleep for very long.

“
Oh, God, I wish I was
stronger,” Maggie said. “Please, God, make me strong for this poor
man.”

She remembered Dan Blue Gully’s instructions
and quickly tore the blankets from Jubal Green’s body. Kenny’s
night shirt was soaking wet with sweat. Maggie dashed to the
kitchen and pumped some fresh, cold water and took it back into the
bedroom.

“
Oh, Lord, Mr. Green, please
don’t die on me. Please don’t die,” Maggie pleaded to the
unconscious man.

She felt his forehead before she sponged him
off. He was hot as a firecracker.

“
Oh, Lord.” It was a little
prayer that time.

Maggie bathed Jubal’s head in cool water,
dried him off, and struggled Kenny’s soaking nightshirt off of him.
She couldn’t help herself from blinking at his body as he lay on
her bed, shimmering in sweat. He was something to look at, all
right. Quickly, she drew a fresh sheet over him.

“
No blankets while you’re
sweating,” Maggie said to herself, trying to concentrate on her
nurse-maiding. “That’s what Mr. Blue Gully said.”

Dan Blue Gully had assumed the properties of
a god of medicine to Maggie’s worried brain by this time. She
needed something to believe in or she was afraid she’d lose Jubal
Green and herself, too. In spite of the food stores, it had been a
hard winter, and Maggie was nearly at the end of her strength.

Jubal Green seemed to calm down some under
her tender ministrations. He stopped thrashing, at least.

“
All right, Mr. Green,”
Maggie said when he lay still. She stroked his forehead tenderly.
“I’m going to get you some of that bark tea. Don’t you move now.”
Even though she knew the poor man couldn’t hear her, she spoke to
him firmly.

She got a cupful of bark tea and a spoon and
took them back into the bedroom, set the cup on the chair next to
the bed, knelt beside the bed herself, and lifted Jubal’s head. It
was heavier than she had expected it to be. Then she very carefully
spooned a little of the tea into his slack mouth. It dribbled out.
Maggie almost cried.

“
Oh, please, Mr. Green.
Please help me here.”

She tried again. The tea dribbled out again.
This time Maggie did cry.

“
Damn it,” she said, and she
put his head back down and wiped her eyes with the back of her
hand.

She stared down at him, and cursed again
with frustration. He was such a handsome man. His sun-streaked,
thick, wavy hair ruffled over his forehead and looked pretty
against her pillow. And he just lay there, eyes closed, sick as a
dog, and he wouldn’t drink his tea. Flat on his damned back.

That gave Maggie an idea. She lifted his
head again so that his mouth dropped open. Quick as she could she
shoveled in a spoonful of bark tea and laid his head back down.

Jubal gagged a little, then swallowed, and
Maggie very nearly laughed out loud. She continued to spoon tea
between his lips. It was awkward, and Maggie guessed that if she
were a clever person, she could have figured out an easier way to
do this but it worked, so she did it anyway.

As she worked, she recalled the cry that had
ultimately awakened her from her nap at the kitchen table. Maggie
could have sworn that Jubal Green had cried out the name,
“Sara.”

“
Now I wonder who Sara is to
you, Mr. Jubal Green,” Maggie said to keep herself company. “Is she
a sweetheart? Mr. Blue Gully says you don’t have a
wife.”

She considered the man whose head she held
cradled in her arms. His deep fevered flush had tamed down some,
and left him more nearly his normal complexion. At least Maggie
assumed it was closer to his normal complexion. When she had first
laid eyes on him, he’d been pale as death. Of course, Maggie’s own
senses had then been swimming in a wash of agony, so she couldn’t
be sure of anything.

Now as she watched him, she saw a face that
was lean and tanned and very well favored under its stubbly beard.
“You’re sure good-lookin’ enough to have yourself a
sweetheart.”

There were little white lines around his
eyes, the kind that come from creases that don’t get tanned when a
person’s in the sun a lot. Maggie had most often seen those creases
on the faces of people who smiled a lot, and she hoped Jubal Green
was one of those smilers.

“
Although, I don’t suppose
it will matter in the long run what kind of man you are. When
you’re well again, you’ll just up and go away again and that will
be that.” She didn’t know exactly why that realization saddened
her.

“
I guess I’m just a little
bit tired,” mused Maggie, who hadn’t slept more than six out of the
last forty-eight hours.

She continued to spoon bark tea into Jubal
Green’s mouth until the cup was empty, then guessed that was enough
for now. She felt his forehead again, realized his fever had gone
down a lot, and chalked up another score for Dan Blue Gully. The
Indian really knew his doctoring.

Then she stood up, put her hands on her
hips, and stretched out her aching back. Stabbing pains radiated
from her spine and she groaned. She’d been bent over and tensed up
for a long time.

“
I guess I’d better make up
some rich soup for when you’re well enough to take nourishment, Mr.
Jubal Green,” she told the sleeping man.

She reached down and felt his naked arms.
They were a little cool now, so she put one more blanket over him.
His biceps were also hard as rocks, Maggie realized as she tarried
a bit to lightly stroke them in appreciation.

She decided not to bother with another one
of Kenny’s night shirts for a while. Not only was it a pain to get
it on and off the sleeping, wounded man by herself, but she found
she rather enjoyed looking at him this way. He was quite
something.

Maggie blushed when she realized she was
staring at Jubal Green’s hairy chest. She couldn’t quite get her
eyes to drift any lower than that and, anyway, she had kept the
sheet and blanket on him from the waist down. She wasn’t altogether
sure she wanted to see that bulge again. Still, she had to admit
that he was a very well-favored man in that department.

“
Don’t want you to catch a
chill,” she told him as she carefully smoothed the blanket up over
his shoulders.

Maggie realized that the sound of chopping
could no longer be heard from out back and she sighed heavily. That
meant she’d have to go out back and bully Ozzie Plumb some more,
she reckoned. She was getting right good at bullying that man, much
to her disgust.

She smoothed her hair and rubbed the back of
her neck, got herself a drink of water from the pump, and stepped
outside.

When she walked around to the back of the
house, Ozzie Plumb was draped artistically over the wood pile,
dead. A shotgun blast had ripped his back open.

Chapter Three

Maggie didn’t even remember getting herself
back into the house. She only remembered staring at that gigantic,
gaping, bloody hole in Ozzie’s back, sucking in a huge shuddering
breath, turning on her heels, and running hell for leather in the
other direction. She paused inside the door with her back pressed
against it and sobbed in fright.

With shaking hands, she slammed the bolt
down.

“
Oh, great God,” she
breathed. “Oh, great God, please help us.”

She managed to make it to the kitchen table
before her knees gave out on her and she collapsed.

“
Oh, Lord, please tell me
what to do now. How could I have missed hearing the sound of a
shotgun?” she asked herself in her frenzy. “I was probably so
blamed busy with Jubal Green that I wouldn’t have heard a train if
it hit the house. What on earth am I supposed to do
now?”

She had absolutely no idea what to do with
poor Ozzie. She was afraid to go out there and try to wrestle his
body somewhere, even if she knew where she could wrestle it to.
When Kenny had died, the whole community had more or less expected
it, and they had already made arrangements. But this time, nobody
except Maggie knew Ozzie was dead from this unexpected shotgun
wound in his back.

“
Oh, well,” she thought
aloud. “He’ll probably freeze overnight. That ought to keep
him.”

She didn’t know what she’d do after that,
and decided she’d just have to think about it later.

“
I’m sorry, God. I’m sorry I
yelled at him so much.” Maggie wiped guilty tears away.

And there wasn’t only Ozzie’s lifeless
corpse to consider, either. There was a strange man maybe dying on
her bed. She couldn’t very well leave him and go fetch help.

“
I mean, it wasn’t even
Ozzie they were after,” she whispered into the warm kitchen air.
“They just killed him out of spite. It’s Jubal Green, the man on my
bed, the man who can’t move, who isn’t even conscious, that they
really want. If I leave the house again, they’re liable to shoot
me, and then sure as check, they’ll kill him. Oh, God. I wish Mr.
Blue Gully was here.”

The only bright spot in this whole terrible
scenario, as far as Maggie was concerned, was that Annie had gone
with Sadie. Then she sat bolt upright in terror.

“
Oh, God, please let Annie
be safe.”

The awful possibility that Sadie and Annie
might have been ambushed before they got back to Sadie’s place
crossed her mind. She tried to dismiss it with the sensible notion
that Sadie and Annie had left hours and hours ago. A long time
before Ozzie had been shot.

But then the fear overtook her again, and
she mumbled, “French Jack could have got them first and then come
back here for Ozzie.”

Maggie told herself that she’d better get a
firm grip on herself or she and Jubal Green would both be in deep
trouble. Then she decided she’d better take a detailed survey of
her home to determine just how secure it was and what she could do
to make sure French Jack couldn’t get inside. The back porch was a
worry, since it was only screened in.

Very carefully, she made her way to the
window and peered outside. She could see nothing except what was
supposed to be there: earth and trees and the meadow beyond.
Daylight was barely holding on to the edges of the woods, giving
the piñon branches a deep golden overlay to their dark green
needles. Maggie figured it must be about four o’clock.

“
The time I told Ozzie to
have the wood chopped by.” She had to dab at her moist
eyes.

“
Stop it,” she commanded
herself firmly. She mustn’t allow herself to get weepy again. Her
life and that of Jubal Green might depend on her keeping her
composure in check.

“
I wish to God I could see,”
she said disgustedly.

In truth, Maggie’s eyesight was not the
best. That fact irritated her often. Kenny had gone all moony about
her beautiful blue eyes—back in the days when they really were
pretty, before she got so dragged down. He told her over and over
again how beautiful he thought her eyes were. But Maggie always
figured she’d rather have eyes that she could see out of than eyes
that were good to look at. She was perverse that way.

“
Oh, well,” she told herself
firmly, “it can’t be helped.”

Kenny’s Spencer rifle lay on a rack over the
fireplace in the parlor, and Maggie carefully removed and loaded
it. She made it a habit to clean the rifle once a week, just as
Kenny had taught her to do, whether she used it or not, just to
keep her education up to date. Kenny had taught her to shoot the
gun, too. She wasn’t much of a shot, but she didn’t figure French
Jack had to know that yet.