Chapter 2
He knew her from the feed store in the valley.
She had bagged his chicken scratch a dozen times and never once looked up from the register, a tall girl with a dark braid and a name tag that said Sylvie.
Right now she was holding the tin cup out in front of her like a weapon.
"Sylvie," Joe said. "Sylvie Kessick."
She did not lower the cup.
"Don't come down here."
"I'm not coming down there." He stepped out from behind the fir with the rifle pointed at the dirt and his other hand open. "This is my spring. That's my spring house you're sitting next to."
"I know whose it is."
"Then you know I'm not going to hurt you."
Sylvie's eyes went to Mack, who had come out of the timber beside Joe and was standing with his head low.
"Is that dog going to bite me."
"Only if I'm stupid enough to tell him to."
Something moved under the blue tarp.
Joe's hand tightened on the rifle before he could stop it.
"That's my brother," Sylvie said fast. "That's Tobin. He's eleven. He's hurt, okay, he's really hurt, and I couldn't carry him any further and the only water I knew about up here was yours."
Joe crossed the clearing.
The boy under the tarp was small and gray faced and soaked through with sweat despite the cold. He had a sweatshirt wrapped around his left thigh and the sweatshirt was black in a way that fabric only gets one way.
Joe put the back of his hand against the kid's forehead.
Burning.
"How long."
"Since last night. Since the sky."
"How long since he stopped talking sense."
Sylvie's face came apart.
"About an hour," she whispered.
Joe stood up and pulled the whistle out of his collar, the brass one on the paracord that Imogen thought was ridiculous, and he blew three long blasts down the mountain.
Then he crouched back down and started unwrapping the sweatshirt.
"Sylvie," he said. "I need you to listen. My wife is a pediatric nurse. She'll be up here in under ten minutes and she is going to be the best thing that has happened to your brother since he got hurt. Do you understand me."
Sylvie Kessick dropped the tin cup and sat down in the pine needles and started to cry so hard she made no sound at all.
Imogen came up the trail in eight minutes flat.
She had the big pack on, the red one, and she had Hazel behind her carrying the second bag, and she did not say hello to anybody.
She knelt in the needles and put two fingers on the boy's neck and watched her own wrist.
"One thirty two," she said. "Respirations twenty eight. Skin's clammy. Hazel, tarp under him, we are not doing this in the dirt."
Hazel had the ground sheet out and rolled before her mother finished the sentence.
"Joe, lift on three. Support the leg. One, two."
They moved him.
Imogen peeled the last of the sweatshirt back and Joe heard her breath go out through her nose.
The wound was in the meat of the thigh, outside and high, about two inches across and ragged at the edges.
There was a second one, smaller and rounder, on the front.
"That went through," Imogen said flatly.
Joe said nothing.
"Sylvie," Imogen said, and her voice changed completely, warm and level, the voice she used on four year olds with ear infections. "Honey, look at me. Not at him. At me."
Sylvie looked.
"What was he doing when this happened."
"We were on the road. The state road. Everything stopped and there were people out of their cars and there was yelling, and somebody had a truck that still ran, and there was a fight over it, and Tobin was standing by the guardrail."
"Did he fall."
"There was a bang," Sylvie said. "There was one bang and then he was down."
Imogen's jaw worked once.
"Okay," she said. "That's what I needed. Thank you."
She opened the red pack.
Joe had packed that bag. He had packed it twice, and Imogen had unpacked it both times and repacked it her way, and he had eventually stopped arguing, because his wife had spent fourteen years doing this for a living and he had spent fourteen years reading about it.
She laid a clean towel out and set things on it in an order she clearly had memorized.
Sterile saline in a bag. A sixty cc irrigation syringe.
Gauze, rolled and flat. A packet of hemostatic dressing.
Trauma shears. A tube of antibiotic ointment and a bottle of amoxicillin from the vet supply in Heber that Joe had bought for the goats and had labeled in his own handwriting with a human dose conversion that he had been mildly embarrassed about until exactly this moment.
"Hazel," Imogen said. "Water, boiling, three minutes at this elevation minimum, and then set it off to cool with the lid on. Do not take the lid off. Don't touch the inside of the lid."
"Rocket stove or fire ring."
"Rocket stove. I want it fast and I don't want smoke."
Hazel had the little steel stove out of the side pocket and a fistful of dry fir twigs snapped to length and a curl of birch bark going in under ninety seconds.
She lit it with a ferro rod. One stroke.
Joe watched his eleven year old throw sparks into tinder on the first try and felt something enormous and complicated sit down in his chest.
"Since when," he said.
"Since like June," Hazel said, not looking up, feeding twigs. "You were always busy. Mom taught me."
Imogen flushed the wound.
She did it with the irrigation syringe at an angle, hard, sixty ccs at a time, working from the inside out, and she did it eleven times without stopping and without changing expression.
"Pressure irrigation," she said, mostly to Sylvie, who was watching with her fists against her mouth.
"This is the part that actually saves him. Not the bandage. Not the pills. The thing that kills people from a wound like this is what's still in it, and there's only one way to get it out and that's volume and pressure. Everything else is theater."
"Should you put something on it. Alcohol, or."
"No. Alcohol and peroxide kill the tissue trying to heal. Clean water and a lot of it."
She packed the entry wound with gauze, a strip at a time, working it in with forceps.
Tobin Kessick moaned and tried to move and Joe put a hand on his shoulder and held him.
"He's not bleeding arterial and he hasn't been," Imogen said. "That's the only reason he's alive after fourteen hours. Missed the femoral by less than an inch."
"How much less."
"I don't want to tell you."
She dressed it, wrapped it, and checked the pulse behind his ankle to make sure the wrap was not cutting circulation.
Then she sat back on her heels and looked at the sky through the trees for a second.
"He needs an IV," she said. "He is profoundly dehydrated and he's septic or he's about to be, and I have exactly four bags of lactated ringers in a cellar a quarter mile downhill and I would like all four of them."
"I'll go."
"Take Hazel. She knows where."
Hazel was already standing.
They got him down the mountain on a travois.
Joe made it in eleven minutes out of two lodgepole saplings and the blue tarp and forty feet of paracord, lashing the crosspieces with a square lashing he had practiced in the backyard in Los Angeles while his neighbors watched through a fence and made their own private assessments of him.
He had never once used it for anything. He used it now.
Mack walked alongside the whole way with his nose about six inches from the boy's hand.
Bill Tandy met them at the tree line with the shotgun and took one look and said, "Kessick's grandkids," and went to get the door.
They put Tobin on the table in the front room, under the window, with a lamp rigged over him.
Imogen got the line in on the second stick.
"First one blew," she said. "He's flat. There's nothing to hit."
She hung the bag off a nail in the ceiling beam that Joe had driven eight months ago for no reason he could now remember.
Then she stood back, and rolled her shoulders, and looked around the room at the six people staring at her.
"What," she said.
Sylvie Kessick said, in a very small voice, "Are you like a doctor."
"No."
"Then what are you."
Imogen wiped her hands on a towel.
"I'm a mother with fourteen years of pediatric trauma experience and a husband who let me buy whatever I wanted," she said.
Delores Tandy made a soft sound of approval.
"And," Imogen said, "I was once known as Imogen the Immortal."
Hazel's head came up.
"What."
"By my father's sorcerer friend, Hennefrick Tarly," Imogen said. "I knew he was always up to no good."
There was a pause of roughly two full seconds.
"Mom," Hazel said. "What are you talking about."
"My father had a friend. He came to the house when I was seven or eight. He wore a coat down to the ground in August and he had a beard he kept in a braid and he told everyone at that dinner table that he was a practicing sorcerer."
"And Grandpa let him in the house."
"Grandpa thought he was hilarious." Imogen checked the drip rate and adjusted the roller clamp a quarter turn. "He took one look at me and said, this one does not die. This one is Imogen the Immortal. And then he asked my mother for a loan."
Bill Tandy laughed out loud.
"See, that's the part," Imogen said. "He always wanted something. Always. He'd do the voice and the hands and the whole performance and then at the end of it there'd be a loan, or a car he needed to borrow, or a couch he needed to sleep on for six weeks. I knew he was always up to no good.
I knew it when I was seven."
"Did Grandpa give him the money," Zachary asked.
"Every time."
"Why?"
Imogen looked down at the boy on her table.
"Because he liked being the kind of person who gave people things," she said. "And because he thought the name was worth it."
She put her hand flat on Tobin Kessick's chest and felt it rise.
"Turns out it was."
The house reorganized itself around a sick child, the way houses do.
Imogen ran the day from the front room without ever raising her voice.
She had Delores tearing sheets into strips and boiling them in a pot on the stove, fifteen minutes at a rolling boil, then dried on a rack near the fire and not touched with bare hands.
She had Bill rigging a second lamp.