“Hey Blue,” Mae got up from the table, “that’s a mighty fine beard y’ workin’ up there, you come over of an evenin’ and we’ll comb it for yuh.”
The Chinese had her mouth full and she had to put her hand up while she giggled.
“God’s truth,” Mae said, “all we ever see now is that Jenks and he ain’t good for much more’n polishin’ his damn guns. Beard like that’d keep a girl warm these nights.”
“And that New Englander Maple,” Zar said, “he does not drink, he does not use the women, he stays there in my tent. I buy from him I must pay money, a fine way to trade.”
Adah came out carrying two bottles. She told me there was turpentine in the little one for rubbing on the boy’s legs. In the big bottle was rum, which was better than whiskey, I was to mix it with some hot water and make him swallow as much as he could take. “Nothing like rum for the chest,” she told me.
Well I thanked her and went back and did as she said. And for a while it seemed to help. But in the afternoon Jimmy began to shiver again and he wouldn’t take any more rum. Each time he coughed his whole body shuddered. Molly fixed up some flour soup with bits of salt beef for supper but he wouldn’t eat it.
It began to frighten me hearing that boy cough away like a man, the sound came up from his bowels and pushed his tongue and eyes out and turned his face crimson. We had him wrapped in all the blankets and the fire built up high but he couldn’t stop his shivering. I began to feel the awful helpless rage. We fussed with him hour after hour — sitting him up to ease his breathing, laying him down again — but nothing comforted him and he couldn’t get to sleep.
It must have been close on midnight and Jimmy began to whimper and look up from one of us to the other. But we didn’t know what else to do. There was an unnatural burning in his eyes and his cheeks drew in with each wheezing breath. Molly couldn’t look at him any more, she walked back and forth fingering the cross at her throat. When the boy was taken with a heavy fit of coughing she stepped up into the cabin and walked away in the dark.
Then I felt a breeze at my feet and I went into the cabin after her. She had the door partly open and she was looking across the windy moonlit reach to the Indian’s shack. “Mayor,” she said, “what will you do if the boy dies, will you bury him beside his Pa?”
She didn’t wait for any answer I might have had but went out just in that dress and headed across for John Bear’s place, walking that stiff walk of hers, hugging herself against the bite. A great anger rose in me as I closed the door, I could have struck her right then, I was distressed for the boy’s illness, I damned her for the grip she had on my life, this unrelenting whore.
A few minutes later the Indian was standing in the dugout looking down at Jimmy. The boy stared back in fear, Bear wore his buffalo robe over his shirt and his black hair hung from under his hat down to his shoulders. They regarded each other and no word was spoken — and then the Indian bent down and tore the top blanket off Jimmy with such suddenness that he cried out and began to cough.
Bear went into his doctoring with a speed that was like solace. He hung the blanket across the doorway leading to the cabin. He put a pot of water on the stove and poked up the fire. When the water was boiling he threw in some herbs he had and in a few minutes the air in the dugout was sweet and steamy. We all watched his moves transfixed: he drew a tin out of his pocket and poured a handful of seed in his palm. Then he kneeled down and looked around the dugout.
“He wants a stone,” Molly said to me.
I ran outside and found a flat piece of rock and brought it to him. He began to pound the seed into a powder, when it was well ground it made the sharp odor of mustard. He took some water from our pail and spilled it over the powder till he had a thick paste of earth and mustard. Then, cupping it in one hand he went over to Jimmy and went down on his knees, straddling the boy.
Jimmy began to struggle then, kicking and throwing his arms up, but the Indian just drew back and looked at him until he quietened and turned his face away. Holding the mustard paste in one hand, Bear exposed the boy’s chest. Seeing that small white ribbed body made my heart hurt. Bear spread the medicine across from under one arm to the other, up to the throat, down as far as the stomach. Then he pulled down Jimmy’s shirt and bound the blanket tight around him.
I will say this, whatever else was to happen John Bear was the best doctor I ever saw, white or red; he had a true talent for healing and it must be owned him.
Before he left he stepped up to Molly and while she stood startled, unwound the thin chain from her throat and dropped the cross at Jimmy’s head. He was no Christian but a modest man; Molly had clutched the cross during her healing and he was no one to deny the power of a charm.
Then came that long day and night with the wind whipping snow down from the rocks, and inside the dugout, droplets of water prickling the sod walls as the steam rose from the pot on the stove. I kept feeding the fire and filling the pot. Molly sat with the boy propped against her, he was coughing up matter and spitting it into a rag she held to his face. His eyes were smarting from the mustard, his chest ached with the coughing and burned from the poultice, he was in thorough misery. Whenever he made as if to tear the blanket away she held his hands and whispered: “Let it burn, let it burn deep!”
Sometime during that siege Miss Adah came pounding on the door wanting to know how the boy was doing. She wouldn’t come in so I had to step outside and we shouted to each other a few moments before she scurried back to the saloon.
Jimmy didn’t take anything for supper but during the night, after the snow let up, I thought he was breathing easier. Still he couldn’t close his eyes and Molly, laying his head against her breast, put her arms around him. It was an effort for her, she was blushing, she kept looking at me as if she expected me to laugh at her.
There was a panic in her eyes for a moment, she wanted to talk to the boy, to soothe him, but she had trouble with the words. She had to go back a long way to find them:
“I bet you never seen a big city. Molly used to live in New York, did you know that? Oh it’s a grand place with stone houses all in rows, and cobbled streets and lamps on each corner that the man comes to light each evening with a long taper. And the carriage buses you see, so shiny and clean, with horses pulling them that are braided in the mane, high stepping. Did you know that …?”
I was sitting with my back to the wall and chewing on a prairie cake and as Molly went on talking I watched her close. The more she talked the easier the words came. The boy’s eyes were open and listening and he was breathing heavily, and Molly sat with her own eyes closed as she summoned up her pictures.
“… and each morning I would have a fresh black frock to put on and a white linen apron and a little starched cap to pin to my hair, as clean and starched as a nun I was. And that house! Well you’ve never seen the likes, a good fifteen rooms, each room fitted out with its own set of furniture and its polished floor of wood and its fancy rug. Why you could disappear into one of those big soft beds. And in the dining room, that was a room just used for eating, can you see that? the table would be covered with a fine cloth tasseled at the edges, and maybe ten settings of pure silver forks and knives and spoons, with three or four glasses at each place for the different waters or wines. And with the people all talking and laughing and the room lit up with candles, in we would come from the kitchen, three or four of us, carrying trays of hot vegetables and buns and a hen, maybe, and a roasted ham to serve to all the ladies and gentlemen. All the ladies and gentlemen …”