Chapter Fourteen
Collins Ranch and Bozeman, Montana Territory
It was a thin, high, single scream, and it cut the autumn morning in half and Zoe’s whole body lifted before her mind caught up.
She came up off her knees, threw the trowel aside, and was already moving across the pasture before she registered that she had decided to move.
Her apron caught against the garden fence.
She tore it loose and ran. Her boots hit the cold pasture grass in long, uneven strides.
Sadie’s white pinafore at the church wall was on the ground now.
Sadie was on the ground beside it, curled against the white-painted boards with both hands clutching her right ankle.
“Sadie! Sadie!” Zoe called urgently, her voice splitting on the second.
She dropped to her knees on the cold ground beside the child, scrabbling at the pinafore.
“Sweet girl! Sweet girl, look at me!”
Sadie’s face was white. Her mouth had pulled into a square shape, her eyes were enormous, and a thin sound was coming out of her, half breath and half whimper. That frightened Zoe more than the scream had.
“What happened, Sadie? What happened?” Zoe pressed.
“It bit me,” Sadie gasped between hiccupping breaths. “Auntie Zoe, it bit me! It was in the grass!”
“What bit you?”
“A snake!” The word came out almost a whisper, as though saying it louder would make it return. “It rattled before it bit me, Auntie Zoe! I heard it rattle!”
The cold of the ground went straight up Zoe’s spine.
“Show me where?”
Sadie pulled her hand back from her ankle.
There were two small dark punctures in the white skin above the top of her boot, set perhaps half an inch apart.
The skin around them had already begun to redden in a slowly widening ring.
A thin trickle of blood had run down inside the boot leather.
Sadie’s right leg, below the knee, was beginning to tremble.
“All right,” Zoe said.
She said it out loud, not for Sadie, but for herself, as her mother had said all right on the back porch in Albany the spring Brody had broken his arm falling out of the apple tree.
“We are going to lift you up,” Zoe said, her hand at Sadie’s shoulder. I am going to carry you. You are going to be very still and very brave.”
“Where is the snake?” Sadie asked, her eyes fixed on the grass at her left boot.
“Gone.”
“Truly?”
“Truly. Snakes don’t stay where they have done their business.”
This was a lie. Zoe had no idea whether snakes stayed. But Sadie needed it.
“Arms around my neck, Sadie! Tight! Tighter!”
Zoe got her hands under the small body and lifted.
Sadie was lighter than she should have been. The thought ran through Zoe’s mind as she straightened, an irrelevant detail noted in the middle of catastrophe, and she filed it away to feel sick about later.
She turned toward the house.
The ranch was three hundred yards across the pasture. The kitchen door was the closest. She ran across the cold grass with Sadie’s hot face pressed against her neck and the small hands knotted in the collar of her dress.
“Wade!” She shouted, breathless. “Wade Collins!”
The back door of the ranch opened twenty paces ahead of her.
Wade came through it without his coat. He took the porch steps in two strides. His face had gone the color of pine ash, and the line of his beard was set. He was moving before he had asked any questions.
“Snake,” Zoe panted as he reached her, the word almost lost in her breath. “Rattler. Her right ankle. Above the boot.”
“How long?” Wade asked, already taking Sadie from her arms with the care of someone disarming a stick of dynamite.
“Two minutes, I don’t know, maybe less.”
“Inside. Kitchen table. Now!” he ordered, and he was moving before she had finished the answer.
For the rest of her life, Zoe would carry the next ten seconds only in pieces, with the order of them lost. The kitchen door swung in.
The warmth of the kitchen came out at them at the threshold.
The smell of the bread she had set to rise on the back of the stove came with the warmth.
Wade lifted his niece from her arms with both his large hands under the small body, careful and exact.
There was Sadie laid out on the long pine table where they had eaten supper the night before.
There was Wade’s voice saying boot off and her own hands moving to obey before her mind caught the instruction.
The boot came off. The stocking was soaked through with blood at the ankle.
Wade took the small pearl-handled folding knife from his vest pocket, opened it with one motion of his thumb, and held it briefly over the kerosene lamp Zoe had lit at dawn and never put out.
Then, he was kneeling beside the table with the knife at the ankle and his other hand wrapping Sadie’s small calf.
“Sadie.” Wade kept his eyes on the wound, his voice gone low and quiet. “You will feel a small cut and you will not cry out, okay? You will be very still.”
“Yes, Uncle Wade,” Sadie answered, her small chin tightening with the effort of the bravery requested.
Wade made a small, careful slice over each of the two punctures, no more than the depth of the punctures themselves. Sadie didn’t cry out. Her face had gone past white into something grey, but her chin held, and she watched the ceiling beam above her head with absolute concentration.
Zoe held her hand.
Lord, she said inside herself, looking down at the small pale fingers under her own, I have little skill at this kind of asking. I have not had a child of my own to learn it on. But I am asking, Lord. Keep her. Let the swelling go down. Let the cut be clean. Give the doctor the road. I am asking.
Sadie’s small fingers moved once against her palm.
Zoe held them tighter.
Wade bent forward. He set his mouth against the wound, and he sucked, and he turned his head and spat.
He did it again, three times, four times, with a steady, awful rhythm.
The smell of the blood and the spit and the kerosene lamp and the bread on the stove began to rise in the kitchen, all of it warm, all of it wrong.
“George!”
Wade kept his eyes on the wound and his voice steady. The single word carried out the open kitchen door, across the yard, into the barn where George had been mucking out stalls since breakfast. He came running.
“Get Doc Reeves. Tell him rattler bite. Ankle. Eight-year-old. Time of bite, half past ten. Ride hard!”
George was already moving. Zoe heard the slap of the barn door and the sound of the sorrel mare being thrown into a canter without preliminaries.
Wade sucked again. He spat again.
The clock on the shelf above the stove showed a quarter to eleven.
Wade lifted his head, wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve, and looked at his niece for the first time since the cutting had begun.
“You did very well,” he said gruffly.
Sadie’s small eyes searched his face. “Did I cry, Uncle Wade?”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I wanted to,” she confessed in a small voice, as though admitting to a great failing.
“Wanting is allowed,” Wade replied, and he brushed back the damp hair at her temple with a brief touch of his enormous callused thumb. “Doing is the part we control.”
Sadie absorbed this. Her small grey face settled by a degree.
Wade ripped the long strip of clean linen Zoe had set on the table beside the tin basin, made a careful, flat pad of it, pressed it to the wound, and bound it firm with three quick turns above the ankle and a knot he tied without looking.
“Now,” Wade instructed, his hands working the linen with steady precision. “You will stay still on this table, keep your leg low, lower than your heart, breathe slow and you will not move. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Uncle Wade,” Zoe whispered.
“I am here.”
“I know.” Her small fingers tightened briefly on Zoe’s. “You’re always here.”
Zoe was still standing on the other side of the table.
Her feet had stayed planted since Wade had taken Sadie from her arms. Her right hand was wrapped tight around Sadie’s left, and the small fingers had gone white at the knuckles with the grip.
Zoe felt the trembling that had begun in Sadie’s leg now moving up through Sadie’s wrist and into her own hand.
The trembling, she understood after a moment, was hers.
Wade looked up.
He looked at Zoe across the table for one beat, two.
“You need to sit down.”
“I’m fine.”
“Sit down, Zoe.” He came around the end of the table, pulled out the chair at Sadie’s head, and set his broad hand briefly against Zoe’s shoulder. He pressed her into the seat.
The trembling moved out of her hand and up into her shoulders. She held it back as long as she could, and then she could not hold it back any longer. She put her face to the hand that still held Sadie’s and pressed her forehead against the child’s knuckles and didn’t, for a moment, breathe.
Wade moved Sadie to the parlor and returned without Zoe’s quite noticing it.
“She’s going to be all right,” Wade said, behind her shoulder, low.
“You cannot know that.”
“She is going to be all right, Zoe. I have seen this twice. Both times the person lived. We got to it in time.”
“I should have been watching her.”
“You were watching her.”
“I was at the squash bed. I told her she could go to the church. I told her to stay where I could see her, but I...”
“Zoe.”
“I turned my back. I turned my back to put the vines in the wheelbarrow. If I had been—”
“Zoe.”
She lifted her face.
Wade stepped around the chair and crouched in front of her until his face was nearly level with hers.
His knees came down on the kitchen boards an inch in from her own. His good hand settled at the edge of the table beside her right hand. His other hand came up, stopped at the level of her elbow, and stayed there a beat before it closed around her sleeve.
She lifted her face.
His pale blue eyes were three inches from hers. The lines at the corners of them had eased. His jaw had let go. On his face was the honesty he had carried into the church on the afternoon Sadie ran. The difference was that the honesty today was for the woman at the kitchen table.
“Zoe.” Her name came out low, the warmth of his hand at her elbow came through the wool of her sleeve. “Zoe. Look at me.”
She was looking. There was nowhere else to look.
“You didn’t put a snake under my niece’s foot,” Wade said firmly.
“You let a child play in her own kitchen garden on a Sunday morning. A snake placed itself, Zoe. Snakes do that. The thing was no punishment and no sign and no failure of yours. It was only a snake. Our girl was bitten, and we have done what was needed. She is going to be all right.”
Our girl, he had said.
Two words. He had set them down between them as though he had been carrying them for some time and had only this minute remembered they were his to give.
She drew a breath and held it for the count of two before she let it out.
“Wade,” she said, the word coming out unsteady at the back of her throat. “Thank you.”
His thumb closed once around the side of her own hand, warm and steady, and stayed there. “I am very frightened,” she whispered.
Wade drew a slow breath. He looked at the side of her face for a long count. Then he turned his head toward the parlor where his niece was sleeping, and he lifted his other hand off the table, and he set it over both of theirs.
“I haven’t said a prayer aloud in years,” he answered, his voice rough at the back of it. “I have small skill at it just now. But I am asking you to start one with me, at this table, for our girl.”
Her free hand came up and covered his.
“I will, Wade,” she answered, the wetness at her lashes coming down at last.
Wade closed his eyes. His head stayed up. His face stayed turned an inch toward the parlor door.
“Lord,” Zoe said, low and steady, “we are at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning, and we have a small girl in the next room with a snake bite and a fever rising. We are asking You to keep her. We are asking You to give Doc Reeves the road. We are asking You for the swelling to go down and the cut to be clean.”
She drew a breath. Wade’s thumb moved once against the side of her hand.
“Lord,” he answered, the word coming out rougher than the first one.
“I have been a poor man at this table. I have little business asking You for anything. I am asking anyway, because Sadie is the child my sister left me and I have been her uncle her whole life and her father for three years and four months, and I would like to be her father a while longer. Keep her, Lord. Keep her.”
Zoe set her forehead briefly against the back of Wade’s hand at the table and kept it there for the count of three.
“Amen,” she breathed.
“Amen,” he answered.
“I am here,” Wade said quietly. “George has gone for the doctor. Doc Reeves rides hard and is the best in the valley. Sadie will fight the venom, and she’ll sleep tonight in her bed.
Tomorrow, she’ll be cross at being kept in it.
You may be frightened the whole time. The frightened is allowed.
But I’m here, and we can be frightened together. ”
Zoe closed her eyes.
Wade’s hand stayed under hers.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“For what?”
“For not telling me I was wrong.”
A long pause.
“You were not wrong, Zoe.”
The kerosene lamp flickered in the draft from the open back door.
“Doc Reeves should be at the bend by now.”
Wade rose.
He went to the back door, closed it against the cold, and crossed to the stove. He poured the last of the morning coffee into a tin cup, added two sugars from the small lidded crock on the windowsill, and brought it back to Zoe.
Zoe drew a slow breath. She let it out the same way.
“I don’t like sweet coffee, Wade.”
“I am aware.”
“I find two sugars in a cup of coffee to be a kind of culinary trespass against the bean.”
“Drink it anyway, Zoe.”
The coffee was bitter under the sweetness and warm.
It tasted of bone and of being managed. Zoe drank it in three slow, grudging swallows and set the cup down on the table.
Wade was already moving: to the basin, to wash his hands; to the cupboard, to fetch a clean folded towel; to the bread on the stove, to slide it back from the front of the fire so it would not over-prove in the heat of the kitchen.
Outside, the sound of a horse coming up the creek road at a hard gallop began to reach the kitchen. Wade went to the front window with his hand at the curtain and stood looking down the road.
“Doc Reeves,” he said, the rough edge of an hour’s holding back coming out of his voice at last.
“Already?” Zoe asked.
“George rides hard.”