A Breath of Snow and Ashes (23 page)

I swallowed, audibly.

At this delicate moment, whoops of greeting came from the trailhead on the other side of the house.

“Duty calls,” I said, a trifle breathless.

Jamie drew a deep breath of his own, squared his shoulders, and nodded.

“Well, I havena died of unrequited lust yet; I suppose I shallna do it now.”

“Don’t suppose you will,” I said. “Besides, didn’t you tell me once that abstinence makes . . . er . . . things . . . grow firmer?”

He gave me a bleak look.

“If it gets any firmer, I’ll faint from a lack of blood to the heid. Dinna forget the eggs, Sassenach.”

It was late afternoon, but plenty of light left for the job, thank goodness. My surgery was positioned to take advantage of morning light for operations, though, and was dim in the afternoons, so I set up an impromptu theater of operation in the dooryard.

This was an advantage, insofar as everyone wished to watch; Indians always regarded medical treatment—and almost anything else—as a community affair. They were particularly enthusiastic about operations, as these held a high degree of entertainment value. Everyone crowded eagerly around, commenting on my preparations, arguing with each other and talking to the patient, whom I had the greatest difficulty in discouraging from talking back.

Her name was Mouse, and I could only assume that she had been given it for some metaphysical reason, as it certainly wasn’t suited either to appearance or personality. She was round-faced, unusually snub-nosed for a Cherokee, and if she wasn’t precisely pretty, she had a force of character that is often more attractive than simple beauty.

It was certainly working on the males present; she was the only woman in the Indian party, the others consisting of her brother, Red Clay Wilson, and four friends who had come along, either to keep the Wilsons company, offer protection on the journey—or to vie for Miss Mousie’s attention, which seemed to me the most likely explanation of their presence.

Despite the Wilsons’ Scottish name, none of the Cherokee spoke any English beyond a few basic words—these including “no,” “yes,” “good,” “bad,” and “whisky!” Since the Cherokee equivalent of these terms was the extent of my own vocabulary, I was taking little part in the conversation.

We were at the moment waiting for whisky, in fact, as well as translators. A settler named Wolverhampton, from some nameless hollow to the east, had inadvertently amputated one and a half toes a week before, while splitting logs. Finding this state of things inconvenient, he had proceeded to try to remove the remaining half-digit himself with a froe.

Say what you will regarding general utility; a froe is not a precision instrument. It is, however, sharp.

Mr. Wolverhampton, a burly sort with an irascible temper, lived on his own, some seven miles from his nearest neighbor. By the time he had reached this neighbor—on foot, or what remained of it—and the neighbor had bundled him onto a mule for transport to Fraser’s Ridge, nearly twenty-four hours had passed, and the partial foot had assumed the dimensions and appearance of a mangled raccoon.

The requirements of the cleanup surgery, the multiple subsequent debridements to control the infection, and the fact that Mr. Wolverhampton refused to surrender the bottle, had quite exhausted my usual surgical supply. As I needed a keg of the raw spirit for my ether-making in any case, Jamie and Ian had gone to fetch more from the whisky spring, which was a good mile from the house. I hoped they would return while there was still enough light to see what I was doing.

I interrupted Miss Mousie’s loud remonstrance with one of the gentlemen, who was evidently teasing her, and indicated by means of sign language that she should open her mouth for me. She did, but went on expostulating by means of rather explicit hand signals, which seemed to be indicating various acts she expected the gentleman in question to perform upon himself, judging from his flushed countenance, and the way his companions were falling about with hilarity.

The side of her face was puffed and obviously tender. She didn’t wince or shy away, though, even when I turned her face farther toward the light for a better view.

“Toothache, forsooth!” I said, involuntarily.

“Ooth?” Miss Mouse said, cocking an eyebrow at me.

“Bad,” I explained, pointing at her cheek.
“Uyoi.”

“Bad,” she agreed. There followed a voluble exposition—interrupted only by my inserting my fingers into her mouth periodically—which I took to be an explanation of what had happened to her.

Blunt trauma, by the look of it. One tooth, a lower canine, had been knocked completely out, and the neighboring bicuspid was so badly broken I would have to extract it. The next to that could be saved, I thought. The inside of her mouth was badly lacerated by the sharp edges, but the gum was not infected. That was heartening.

Bobby Higgins came down from the stable, drawn by the chatter, and was promptly sent back to bring me a file. Miss Mousie grinned lopsidedly at him when he brought it, and he bowed extravagantly to her, making all of them laugh.

“These folk are Cherokee, are they, mum?” He smiled at Red Clay, and made a hand sign, which seemed to amuse the Indians, though they returned it. “I’ve not met any Cherokee before. It’s mostly other tribes near his Lordship’s place in Virginia.”

I was pleased to see that he was familiar with Indians, and easy in his manner toward them. Hiram Crombie, who appeared at this point, was not.

He stopped dead at the edge of the clearing, seeing the assemblage. I waved cheerily at him, and—with evident reluctance—he advanced.

Roger had told me Duncan’s description of Hiram as “that wee sour-drap.” It was apt. He was small and stringy, with thin grizzled hair that he wore strained back in a plait so tight that I thought he must find it difficult to blink. His face deeply lined by the rigors of a fisherman’s life, he looked about sixty, but was likely much younger—and his mouth was habitually downturned, in the expression of one who has sucked not merely a lemon, but a rotten lemon.

“I was looking for Mr. Fraser,” he said, with a wary eye on the Indians. “I had heard he was back.” He had a hatchet in his belt, and kept a tight grip on it with one hand.

“He’ll be back directly. You’ve met Mr. Higgins, haven’t you?” Evidently he had, and had been unfavorably impressed by the experience. His eyes fixed on Bobby’s brand, he made the smallest possible nod of acknowledgment. Nothing daunted, I waved a hand round at the Indians, who were all examining Hiram with much more interest than he showed in them. “May I introduce Miss Wilson, her brother Mr. Wilson, and . . . er . . . their friends?”

Hiram stiffened further, if such a thing was possible.

“Wilson?” he said, in an unfriendly voice.

“Wilson,” agreed Miss Mouse cheerily.

“That is my wife’s family name,” he said, in a tone that made it clear he considered the use of it by Indians to be grossly outrageous.

“Oh,” I said. “How nice. Do you think they might be your wife’s relatives, perhaps?”

His eyes bulged slightly at that, and I heard a strangled gurgle from Bobby.

“Well, they plainly got the name from a Scottish father or grandfather,” I pointed out. “Perhaps . . .”

Hiram’s face was working like a nutcracker, emotions from fury to dismay passing in swift succession over it. His right hand curled up, forefinger and little finger protruding in the horns, the sign against evil.

“Great-Uncle Ephraim,” he whispered. “Jesus save us.” And without further word, he turned on his heel and tottered off.

“Goodbye!” called Miss Mousie in English, waving. He cast a single, haunted glance over his shoulder at her, then fled as though pursued by demons.

THE WHISKY FINALLY arrived, and, a fair amount of it passed out to patient and spectators alike, the operation at last commenced.

The file was normally used on horses’ teeth, and thus a little larger than I would have liked, but worked reasonably well. Miss Mouse was inclined to be loud about the discomfort involved, but her complaints grew less with her increasing intake of whisky. By the time I had to draw her broken tooth, I thought, she wouldn’t feel a thing.

Bobby, meanwhile, was entertaining Jamie and Ian with imitations of Hiram Crombie’s response to the discovery that he might possibly share some family connection with the Wilsons. Ian, between bursts of laughter, translated the matter for the Indians, who all rolled on the grass in paroxysms of mirth.

“
Do
they have an Ephraim Wilson in their family tree?” I asked, taking a firm grip of Miss Mousie’s chin.

“Well, they’re not sure of the ‘Ephraim,’ but aye, they do.” Jamie grinned broadly. “Their grandsire was a Scottish wanderer. Stayed long enough to get their grandmother wi’ child, then fell off a cliff and was buried by a rockslide. She marrit again, of course, but liked the name.”

“I wonder what it was made Great-Uncle Ephraim leave Scotland?” Ian sat up, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes.

“The proximity of people like Hiram, I expect,” I said, squinting to see what I was doing. “Do you think—” I realized suddenly that everyone had quit talking and laughing, their attention focused on something across the clearing.

This something was the arrival of another Indian, carrying something in a bundle over his shoulder.

THE INDIAN WAS A gentleman named Sequoyah, somewhat older than the young Wilsons and their friends. He nodded soberly to Jamie, and swinging the bundle off his shoulder, laid it on the ground at Jamie’s feet, saying something in Cherokee.

Jamie’s face changed, the lingering traces of amusement vanishing, replaced by interest—and wariness. He knelt, and carefully turning back the ragged canvas, revealed a jumble of weathered bones, a hollow-eyed skull staring up from the midst of them.

“Who in bloody hell is
that
?” I had stopped work, and with everyone else, including Miss Mouse, stood staring down at this latest arrival.

“He says it’s the auld man who owned the homestead MacDonald told of—the one that burned inside the Treaty Line.” Jamie reached down and picked up the skull, turning it gently in his hands.

He heard my small intake of breath, for he glanced at me, then turned the skull over, holding it for me to see. Most of the teeth were missing, and had been missing long enough that the jawbone had closed over the empty sockets. But the two molars remaining showed nothing but cracks and stains—no gleam of silver filling, no empty space where such fillings might have been.

I let my breath out slowly, not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed.

“What happened to him? And why is he
here
?”

Jamie knelt and laid the skull gently back in the canvas, then turned some of the bones over, examining them. He looked up, and with a small motion of the head, invited me to join him.

The bones showed no sign of having been burned, but several of them
did
show signs of having been gnawed by animals. One or two of the long bones had been cracked and split, no doubt to get at the marrow, and many of the smaller bones of hands and feet were missing. All of them had the gray, fragile look of bones that had lain outside for some time.