Wind Walker (43 page)

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.

“Row?” Amanda whispered.

“We gonna just sit here and watch him die?” Burwell spewed suddenly, his face flushed red with fury.

Amanda glanced quickly at her father, then said, “Row, he needs you now.”

Closing his eyes, Burwell wagged his head. “I-I don’t think I can sit here with ’im, Amanda—”

“Pa—Pa.”

Roman Burwell immediately collapsed to his knees there on the pallet with that pitiful groan from his son’s lips. As tears started welling from the farmer’s eyes, he scooped up Lucas’s hand between both of his. How small and white it looked to Titus now, lying there, protected between the father’s big, strong, hard-boned paws. How small and frail and helpless too.

Anyone close to that awning now, in the death-still quiet that held its grip on family and friends and fellow sojourners on this road to Oregon, could plainly make out how the boy’s breathing came harder and harder over the next excruciating minutes. Almost as if he were struggling to breathe under water. Short, shallow breaths—each successive one seeming to come quicker and quicker, as if the child would never
again catch his breath. And with these last few moments came that pale bluish hue of impending death, its once-seen-never-to-be-forgotten color smeared beneath the tiny youngster’s eyes. How many times in all his living had Titus Bass witnessed that sheen paint its fateful crescent there against pale skin.

Grinding his teeth together the old trapper had gotten to his feet, feeling more weary than he could ever remember being. Without a word he turned away from the awning, his muscles tensed as he hurried on this vital errand to beg of Shadrach what he himself could not do.

At the front of the wagon he now spotted Sweete and Shell Woman. Lunging over the wagon tongue, Bass grabbed the Cheyenne by her shoulders and shook her, bringing her frightened face close to his when he snarled, “You gotta help that boy! Go put your hands on ’im, sing your prayers! Do what you gotta do to save him—”

“Scratch!” Sweete whispered as he jabbed an arm down between Toote and the old trapper, tugging them apart.

He looked up at his tall friend, desperation growing, a plea in his eyes, and in his voice, “You gotta tell ’er to come say her magic words, come help Lucas, Shadrach. For the love of all that’s holy—she can heal ’im.”

“I told you afore—the Cheyenne don’t have no medicine strong enough.”

The despair was growing, more than palpable in the pit of his belly. “How come she saved you … an’ she won’t save that boy?”

“Ain’t that at all,” Sweete said soothingly. Gradually he got Bass’s hands pried from Shell Woman’s arms and got his friend turned aside.

“You gotta make her save Lucas same way she saved you—”

Sweete suddenly shook the smaller man. “Goddammit! It’s different, Scratch.”

He stared at his friend’s eyes and asked, “How?”

Taking a long sigh, Shad explained, “Because when she
healed my arm with her white buffler medicine … there wasn’t no spirit fighting her prayers.”

Bass squinted his eyes, attempting to get his mind around what he had just been told. “N-no spirit fightin’ her prayers?”

“All she had to do was stop that real bad bleedin’, an’ I was healed,” Sweete declared.

“What’s differ’nt here with that boy Lucas?”

Letting go of Titus, Shad said, “Toote told me the Cheyenne’s white buffler medicine ain’t no good fighting against a bad spirit.”

For a long, long time he stared into the tall man’s face. “The snake … it’s a bad spirit she can’t fight with her medeecin?”

“I … I’m real sorry, Scratch.”

He looked at Shell Woman now, feeling so hollow and dry, like everything good had been sucked right out of him. “I’m sorry too. Tell ’er, Shad. Tell ’er I’m sorry I grabbed ’er, if’n I hurt her—”

“Ti-tuzz,” Waits whispered behind him.

Turning, he found his wife standing at the corner of the wagon, holding a small brass kettle, steam rising from its surface in the full blast of summer’s hottest fury. In her other hand she held what looked to be a wet towel.

“What you made—will it help?” he asked her in Crow.

Her eyes already spoke their grim answer for him. Then she said, “No, but I made it from a root that will make it easier … his last journey … for him.”

Bass could see how hard it was for her to stand there without sobbing, without breaking down herself. After all she was a mother too, a woman carrying her baby in her belly right then … experiencing an unimaginable grief just in watching another mother hold her baby in her arms as that child lay dying. He took the kettle’s bail from her and carried it around the front of the wagon to set it beside Amanda. Magpie followed with her mother, leaning in to hand the white woman a spoon, then stepped back into that fringe of stunned onlookers.

Amanda looked up at Bass and his wife, asking, “What is it?”

“Waits made it. Maybeso it’s gonna help … help Lucas so he don’t hurt so much.”

Her eyes bounced back and forth between them for a moment, then she said, “If it will make his going easier, Pa.”

While Amanda raised Lucas up again and held a spoonful of the steamy broth against his lips, Titus knelt on the other side of the child, by the lower leg that was already blackening with an impatient death rising inexorably from the wound. Unwrapping the wet towel Waits handed down to him, Titus found inside a mash of roots and leaves. This dripping pulp he scooped up with his fingers and laid against the wounds, knowing the boy’s flesh was dying, if not already dead, the flesh darkening the way it was, those wound sites seeping a foul ooze. Lucas did not move the leg as Scratch wrapped the wet towel over the poultice.

After a half dozen sips of the steamy broth, Lucas barely managed to turn his head before his stomach revolted and emptied itself. As he watched his daughter, Scratch saw how Amanda positioned herself, refusing to look below her child’s waist anymore, to look at the snakebite, at the bloated, blackening leg. Instead, she kept her eyes only on Lucas’s face as she stroked his tiny arm and gently rocked the boy. Her tears spilled one by one onto the child’s pale, dusty shirt, each drop making its own muddy circle on the much-faded cloth.

Titus turned at the rustle and murmur behind him, watching Hoyt Bingham come through the crowd with a green bottle in his hand. The train’s other captain knelt just inside the late-afternoon shade of the awning and held out the bottle to Roman.

“May—maybe some whiskey help it,” the man offered.

Roman nodded to Titus, and Bingham shifted his offering to Bass. For a long moment he stared at that bottle in the settler’s hand, an old hunger raising its head in the pit of him—the sort of hunger that came when there was nothing else to
do but numb a pain with the forgetfulness of liquor … then he looked at Bingham’s face again and those eyes pleading that he could find some way to help. At last Scratch looked down at how Roman held his son’s tiny hand, not thinking that offer of whiskey was such a fine idea after all.

“Maybeso later,” Titus said softly. “Likely … we could sure use that whiskey … a little later. Thankee most kindly.”

Again and again Waits and Toote brought steaming rags in a brass kettle, rags he held over the soupy poultice. Changing the rag that had cooled off for a hot one as the crowd around them breathed but did not mutter a word. Maybe they were all talked out for now. Nothing more to say. No words that could make any difference. Maybe not even prayer words. So he glanced up at those vacant eyes in those dusty faces here beside the Soda Springs where the small geyser spewed at that moment with a watery gush.