Chapter Fifteen
Collins Ranch and Bozeman, Montana Territory
Doc Reeves was sixty-four years old and weighed something near a hundred and forty pounds soaking wet. He had been bringing the children of the valley back from worse than a rattler bite for thirty-one years.
He burst into the parlor without preliminaries, set his black leather bag down, and took one look at the small bound ankle on the horsehair settee.
“You sucked the wound,” he said briskly, shrugging out of his coat.
“I did,” Wade replied.
“Good. How long since the bite, Mr. Collins?”
Wade glanced at the clock above the stove. The hands had moved a great deal less than he had felt them move.
“Thirty-eight minutes, Doctor.”
“You acted quickly,” Reeves observed with a small approving lift of his chin. “Sit her up a quarter and let me see the ankle. Miss?”
This last was directed at Zoe, who now stood at the foot of the settee with her hands held tight at her sides.
“Zoe Preston, Doctor,” she answered, dropping a small respectful curtsy with the corner of her apron caught in her hand.
“Miss Preston. I will need hot water from your stove, a clean cotton sheet for binding, and the small bottle of dark liquid in the second compartment of my bag. The label reads aconite. Take some care with it, please.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
She went, the rustle of her grey skirt across the pine boards already moving toward the stove before the doctor had finished speaking.
Wade lifted Sadie by the shoulders with one careful hand and slid the rolled towel beneath her upper back.
The doctor crouched beside the settee. He bent his white-haired head over the wound.
His thumb pressed the skin above the bite, then below.
Then he turned the leg a fraction so the color along the bone could be read under the lamplight.
“Right,” he announced at last, rocking back on his heels.
He gave Wade a measured look over the rims of his spectacles.
“Mr. Collins. You did exactly the work that needed doing. The bite is below the knee, which is good. The cuts you made are clean, which is good. The leg is going to swell. She will be feverish through the night. She will be sore and tired and probably wretched company until Tuesday at the earliest. But she will live, sir, and she will keep the leg. Barring complications I have no reason to anticipate, by next Sunday she will be in the kitchen complaining of confinement.”
Wade kept his face very still. It was a discipline disasters had refined in him, and it served him now.
Lord, please. I am asking. Keep her. Keep her. Keep her.
“Thank you, Doctor,” he managed.
“Thank yourself, Mr. Collins. The next time a child of this valley is bitten by a rattler I shall tell the parents what their neighbor did, and I shall instruct them to follow your example.”
Zoe returned with the hot water, the cotton sheet, and the small dark bottle of aconite held very carefully in both her hands. Doc Reeves took the bottle from her, measured five drops onto a square of muslin, and held the muslin to Sadie’s nose.
“Breathe, child. Slow.”
“What is it, Doctor?” Sadie asked, her small voice gone thready from the work her body was doing against the poison.
“A small unpleasant thing to make the next two hours easier to sleep through,” Reeves replied, his voice gone gentle in the practiced manner. “You will smell something bitter and probably dislike it but you will sleep, anyway. Breathe slow. Look at the beam above your head.”
Sadie breathed. Her small face under the muslin went soft.
Her eyes drifted to the beam, then closed, then half-opened, then closed again.
The grey under the skin of her cheeks began to give over, very slowly, to the warmer color of an ordinary tired child, and the small breaths slowed and lengthened.
Doc Reeves stood, stretched his back with a small grunt, and gave Wade a steady look.
“Carry her up. The bed she sleeps in is where she belongs. Keep her warm. Keep the leg elevated on a folded quilt. Sponge her down with cool water if the fever rises past comfortable. I will come again in the morning.”
“I owe you a great deal, Doctor,” Wade said quietly.
“You owe me a fair fee, Mr. Collins, which I shall collect in the form of a Sunday dinner the next time Miss Preston is willing to cook one for me. Until then, the account stands clear.” He picked up his bag and headed out with a final nod.
Wade lifted his niece.
Sadie weighed less than the wire he had ordered from Gallatin two weeks ago, and the awareness of it sat under his ribs.
Zoe walked ahead of him up the stairs.
She carried Sadie’s quilt over her arm. At the door of Sadie’s room she paused, set the quilt down on the dresser, and went to the bed to turn back the bedclothes.
Wade, at the threshold with Sadie in his arms, heard her at the side of the small bed before he saw her stop.
“Thank You, Lord,” Zoe said. “Thank You for keeping her. Thank You for the road You gave Doc Reeves. Thank You for the breath under her ribs. Thank You.”
Wade laid Sadie on the bed with care. Zoe folded the quilt around the small body, tucked it under the foot of the mattress, and slid a second folded quilt under the leg above the ankle so Sadie’s bound foot rested an inch higher than her chest. She rose, drew the curtain across the south window halfway to soften the late morning light, and turned to him.
“Wade?”
He had set Sadie down on the pillow and was straightening at the side of the bed with his good hand still under the small head, easing it onto the linen. He turned his face toward Zoe at the foot of the bed.
“Yes, Zoe?” he answered, low.
“Sit down.”
“I am fine,” he replied, though his voice betrayed him.
“Wade Collins. Sit down before I fetch the doctor back inside this room to tell you the same thing,” she replied, her patience worn down to its last decent thread.
He sat down on the small braided rug at the side of the bed. The chair was on the other side of the room and his legs, at that particular moment, had little interest in the chair. The rug was nearer the bed. The rug would do.
Zoe knelt down beside him.
Her skirt settled on the rug an inch from his knee. The warmth of her shoulder brushed against his. The smell of her hair, violet soap, and the faint warm linen of her own dress filled his lungs. Wade’s breath came short.
She left her hands in her lap, set near her knees but apart from his, and lowered herself to the rug at his right side. They sat there together with the slow, steady breathing of his niece three feet above his head.
After a minute, Wade opened his eyes.
“I was harsh with her at the creek,” he said, low. His thumb moved once against the quilt.
“Yes,” Zoe answered, her shoulder steady against his.
“She might have died this morning believing me to be a harsh man.” The rough edge came up at the back of his throat and stayed there.
Zoe was quiet for a moment, watching the slow rise and fall of the quilt over Sadie’s small chest.
“She would have died, Wade, knowing you to be the one who came for her on the Helena road and brought her home. The one who slept in the chair outside her door the first night she was here,” she answered softly.
“The harshness has been the surface. She has been reading deeper than the surface. Children who have been required to do so learn that skill early. She knows the man underneath.”
Wade pressed the heel of his hand against his eye and held it there for the count of five.
“I’m going to do better,” he said, his voice rough.
“I know, Wade,” Zoe answered, turning her face from the small sleeping head above them to the side of his.
Her hand came down off her own knee and found his on the edge of the quilt. Her fingers settled between his at an unhurried pace, the warmth of her palm coming to rest against the back of his thumb and staying there. “I’ve been telling myself that I was managing it adequately. I have been wrong.”
“You have been alone, Wade. The two are different things,” she answered. His thumb stilled under hers.
“There is a thing I have been waiting to say to you,” she went on, her voice low at the side of his shoulder. “The last hour has decided that I am going to say it now. May I?”
“Say it, Zoe.”
She turned a careful half inch on her knees on the rug.
“You have been carrying a thing the Lord has been waiting to take off your back far too long. The thing is the harshness. The thing is the bargain you have been keeping with Him since the morning of Nora’s funeral, in which He took your sister and you decided not to be on speaking terms with Him about it. ”
Wade’s hand stayed still under hers. The kerosene lamp threw its steady yellow circle across the rug between their knees.
“Zoe,” he answered, rough.
“I am not finished, Wade.” She lifted her face the last small inch to find his eyes.
“He has been keeping His side of the table set for you. In this house, and in the church at the north pasture, and on the porch step of your kitchen, and at the side of your sister’s child’s bed.
He has been waiting. He has been doing the waiting in the patient manner He used at my mother’s kitchen in Albany while she was dying, and He has been doing it for you, and He is patient, but He has little intention of letting you go on carrying the harshness when He has been holding His hand out to take it. ”
“The forgiving is His, Wade,” Zoe continued, the words coming out unsteady at the back of her throat.
“It’s not yours to refuse on His behalf.
He forgave you for the harshness in the same hour you decided to carry it.
The only piece of the work He left for you was the setting it down.
You can set it down now, at the side of this bed, and you can pick up the next thing instead, which is the being a kinder man for the rest of your days. ”
The kerosene lamp gave a small dry pop at the bedside table.
Wade was quiet for the count of ten.
Then he lifted his free hand off the quilt, set it briefly at the side of her face, and turned her chin so her eyes came up to his.