Zeke and Ned (53 page)

I started thinking of things I could say to Ned about it. It took my mind off our dead girl.

T
WO OF THE WALLS OF
N
ED'S HOUSE WERE STILL STANDING WHEN
I rode up. The roof had fallen in, smoke still rose from the ashes, and several of the big logs still smouldered. I remembered the house from when Ned and old Watt Christie built it. I helped out with the roofing for a day or two. It was sad to see such a fine house reduced to two walls, both of them still afire, and with nothing but smoky ashes where Ned and Jewel had lived.

Of course, in the War, burned-out houses were a common sight. It was common then, too, to see families living in the open until they could rebuild. But that War was over. It was only meanness now, when a family's home got burned out.

Ned sat on a saddleblanket under a tree, with a piece of wet sacking
over his eyes. Tuxie Miller sat by him, whittling a stick. I suppose Tuxie was whittling to distract his mind from the fact that he had ten younguns now, and no roof to shelter them.

From a distance, it looked as if the Christies and the Millers had been merged together by the troubles. Five or six of the Millers' active tots were scampering around by the barn—it takes more than tragedy to keep active tots from scampering. Just seeing them made me miss my triplets, off with my sister Susan, who wasn't half the cook that Becca was. I knew the triplets would be wanting to come home soon, and eat some of their ma's good grub.

Ned recognized me by the creak of my saddle. I guess. He took the sacking off his eyes and turned his head my way, but I couldn't tell whether he was seeing me, or just hearing me. He had a raw wound on his cheek. I got down and shook his hand. He jumped a little when I took it, but he squeezed my hand hard.

“Can you see at all, Ned?” I inquired. I thought I best not mention my notion of a militia, if Ned was too blinded to join up. Ned would want to be with the fighters, and I knew it would discourage him to have to sit at home and rock in a rocking chair.

“Zeke, I wish you hadn't left when you did,” he said. “I believe we could have stood them off, if you'd been here.”

I knew then that he faulted me as much as I faulted myself. He was right, too. Between us, we could have fought back the posse; at least we could have spread out and kept them from sneaking in and firing the house. Ned would be sitting by his hearth now, not on a saddle-blanket under a tree.

I didn't blame him for faulting me. Still, I couldn't bring the yesterdays back. I had been thinking of getting home with my wife, as any man would have in the same situation. All I could hope was that Ned wouldn't let it be a bitterness between us. I had a dead child; I could see her grave down west of the garden. I didn't want a bitter friend.

“I regret leaving you, but it's done,” I told him. “It's done, and it will have to stay done. What's the news about your eyes?”

“I can see a pinprick out of the right one,” he said. “I seen the sparks fly up, when the roof fell. It's like I'm looking through a keyhole, only it's more like a pinhole.”

Tuxie Miller had ashes all over his shirt, and on his pants legs, too.

“You look like you've been wading in an ash dump, Tuxie,” I said.

“Ned's anxious about his rifle,” Tuxie said. “I tried to look for it in the ashes, but the dern ashes are still too hot.”

“I am anxious about it,” Ned confessed. “If I could just get a little more vision in this right eye, I believe I could sight a rifle.

“I'd like to be able to sight a rifle if that posse comes back,” he added. He had both of his .44 pistols on the blanket with him. His voice was cracky, no doubt from swallowing smoke.

“I see a grave. Is it Liza's?” I inquired.

“That's her, Zeke—Lyle and me dug the grave,” Tuxie told me.

I took my hat off, and walked over to the grave to pay my respects to my little girl. Tuxie went with me, but hung back a little. I had no words to speak, and neither did Tuxie. Liza could have outtalked the both of us a hundred times, had she still been alive. I stood there for a while, remembering all the times Liza had listened to me yarn.

“You're a lucky man, Tuxie,” I said, finally. “You fathered ten tots, and haven't had to bury a one of them. It ain't right to have to be burying your own child.”

A buck deer came out of the woods and stood looking at us, in easy range of a rifle, but neither of us had brought a rifle with us. The buck grazed a few minutes and stepped back into the brush. Tuxie's younger children were making a racket down by the barn.

“At least Ned's got a barn he can stay in,” I said. “You can't house your family in your barn, because you've neglected the roof.”

Tuxie only sighed. I guess he had more on his mind than a barn roof with a hole in it you could throw a mule through.

“Jewel's in the barn, Zeke,” he said. “Dale's tending to her. Dale was hoping you'd come.”

I knew Liza was dead. I thought I was prepared for it, but seeing the fresh dirt on her grave brought it home harder than I had expected. It wasn't that I didn't want to go to Jewel, but for a moment, I felt too weak-legged to walk to the barn. The same weakness came over me that I felt that day in the courtroom, the same weakness when the Squirrels cornered me and tried to tie me with Rat's suspenders. Ned's wheelbarrow was nearby. I plopped on it and cried. My crying embarrassed Tuxie, I guess, because he went back over to Ned.

When the weakness left me and I went on down to the barn, what I saw shocked me near as bad as the sight of Liza's grave. Jewel lay on a saddleblanket, too—saddleblankets were the only blankets the Millers and the Christies had left.

Jewel began to cry the moment she saw me. Besides being outraged, she had been beaten black and blue. Dale later told me one of the marshals beat Jewel with a heavy stick because she didn't submit quick enough to suit him. From the look of my Jewel—one of her eyes was swollen shut—if the stick had been a little heavier, I'd have two daughters dead and buried.

Dale Miller looked weary. Who could blame her? She had a newborn baby at the breast, Jewel to nurse, nine other children running around like banshees, and only Ned's barn for a house.

“She lost the baby, Zeke,” Dale told me at once.

“Oh, Pa . . . ,” Jewel sobbed. When I hugged her, I could feel how weak she was. She could barely lift her arms to put them around me, and it was a long time before she could say anything more.

It was all I could do to control myself, when I looked at my Jewel, so beaten and weak. I felt a seizure coming, I was so angry at the ruffians who would treat a woman—my own beloved daughter—so bad. If the bunch of them had been brought before me then, I feel I would have strangled them all.

But they weren't there, and Jewel was, white as death except for the bruises on her face and arms. Dale said she was bruised from head to toe, but I didn't look. I'd seen enough to prompt some hard strangling, if I ever caught up with the men who used her so rough.

In my arms, Jewel cried and cried. I think she wanted to tell me about losing the baby, but she couldn't get it out. I noticed that her feet were coated with mud, and asked Dale about it.

“She burned her feet bad, getting Ned out of his hiding place,” Dale told me. “I guess the stairs were on fire when she got back here and found him. The mud from the pigpen's all I have to soothe her feet.

“She saved him, though,” Dale added. “He'd have died when the roof fell, if Jewel hadn't made it back here, walked up the stairs, and pulled him out.”

“I don't see how she did it,” I said, and I didn't. “She's so weak now I doubt she could stand, much less pull Ned out of a fire.”

“That's from the bleeding,” Dale told me. “We almost lost Jewel from the bleeding last night, Zeke.”

For a minute, Dale had that thousand-year-old look—the same as Becca had, when she was rocking on our porch. Maybe it came to women from seeing young ones die, or almost die. Dale was stout as a
post, but for a moment she looked as if she might be having a spell of
my
weakness. She was ashy, too, like Tuxie. When I asked her about it, she said she had been trying to salvage a pot or two from the kitchen.

“It's hard, what Jewel went through,” Dale said. Jewel seemed to doze, and we walked outside.

“Hard what you went through, too,” I told her. “First Tuxie's leg, and then now this.”

Dale looked at me as if to say that I didn't know what hard was, and shouldn't be presuming to talk to her about it. She looked as if she wanted to peck me like a hen pecks a bug.

But she didn't.

“Yes, it's hard on all of us,” she said. “Hard—but your Liza's the only one of us who's dead, Zeke.”

“That's right,” I said. “Ned might get his sight back, and Jewel might have another fine baby yet. My Liza's the one that won't be among the living no more.”

Dale looked at me hard again, as if she wanted to say more. But the baby was fussing at her—I expect it was wanting the breast—and Dale turned away.

Maybe she figured that whatever she had to say to me could wait, which was my opinion, too.

J
EWEL GOT WORSE IN THE NIGHT
. W
E BROUGHT
N
ED DOWN TO SIT
by her, which helped a little. Jewel got so weak we thought she was going. Ned persuaded Tuxie to go off looking for Old Turtle Man, though none of us had any confidence that Tuxie could find him in time, or find him at all, for that matter. Unless the moon was bright, Tuxie Miller was hard put to find his way home. Mainly, he relied on his horse for direction.

I offered to go. I knew the hills better than Tuxie, but Jewel didn't want me to leave.

“Stay, Pa,” she whispered. And that was all she said.

Ned couldn't see her; he had no idea how bruised and torn she was, though he did know that she had lost the child. Later, when she was better, Jewel told me that she was glad Ned was blinded when she walked home and pulled him out of the house. The possemen hadn't left her a stitch, and the only clothes she could find were an old pair of
overalls that Ned hung on a nail in the barn, and only wore when he had to cut a calf or a shoat, or do other bloody work.

She had been wearing the overalls when Dale and Tuxie found her, laying by Ned under the tree. There was so much old blood on the overalls that it took Dale a while to realize there was new blood, too— Jewel's blood.

That's when she knew the child was lost.

“Zeke, what if she dies?” Ned said to me several times in the night. “What'll I do, if she dies?”

“She won't die,” I told him. I was trying to believe it myself.

“Well, but why won't she? Dale says she's bled out,” Ned said.

“Jewel's strong. She won't die,” I told him.

It was a hope, mostly. I knew I would nearly die myself if I had to go back to Becca and tell her our Jewel was gone.

My hope was not to fail. It was a good hour after sunup before Tuxie got back with the old healer, and by then the crisis had passed. Dale was feeding her brood chicken soup out of a big kettle Ned kept in the barn to render lye. Dale cleaned the kettle, and threw a chicken in it every time she could catch one. Jewel even took a little nourishment; I spooned her a few swallows of soup myself. The spoon was burned black from the fire, but it still held soup.

The old healer stayed for two days. He made a poultice that dried up Jewel's bleeding, and another that he tied around Ned's eyes. One problem was a shortage of pots. Dale refused to give up the big kettle. She needed it to feed her brood. Old Turtle Man had to brew his potions in a bucket, which didn't suit him. He fussed at Dale, and she fussed back. Finally, Tuxie rode home and brought back the Miller's big kettle, which settled the dispute.

Old Turtle Man made Ned lay flat on his back. He bound the poultice tight around his eyes, and told him to leave it that way for a week. Jewel was to change it twice a day.

Ned was vexed at the order.

“I can't be doing without my eyes for a week,” he announced, but the old man lectured him soundly. No doubt he had heard patients complain before.

The upshot of it was that Ned lost the sight in his left eye forever. Old Turtle Man thought the other eye would recover, if Ned was mindful.

“You better mind him, Ned,” Dale told him. “If you lose that other
eye, Jewel will have to wait on you hand and foot for the rest of your life.”

“I despise being waited on,” Ned said. Except for his eye, he had not suffered a scratch, which made it hard for him to keep still. I couldn't blame him; I like to be up and doing myself.

Jewel began to get some of her strength back, enough that she could help Dale a little with the tots. But a sadness had settled in my Jewel's eyes—no doubt she had seen sights no woman ought ever to see. She lost the sparkle in her eyes, up on that hillside.

Jewel's only hope and joy was Ned Christie. She sat by Ned all day. When his poultice needed changing, she changed it; if he requested grub, she brought it. I don't suppose I've ever seen a closer couple than my Jewel and her Ned.

I
T WAS THE NEXT DAY
I
SHOT THE BUCK DEER THAT WANDERED OUT
of the woods while I was grieving by Liza's grave.

Tuxie Miller skinned it out, and we had venison that night. Everybody was hungry for meat. It was a small buck, and fifteen of us eating, but we got our fill. Tuxie Miller hadn't said two words since I arrived— I think he was shocked that he no longer had a house—but at least he was healthy in the appetite department. He ate most of that deer's hindquarter all by himself. Tuxie was a noisy eater, too. Ned got tired of listening to him chomp.

“Sounds like you're eating it bone and all,” he complained. “A pig could eat quieter than you, Tuxie.”