Anita Mills (4 page)

“Just you—the rest of ‘em weren’t worth a hill of beans between ‘em.” Steadying Spence, Jesse Taylor held the lamp to his face. “You’ve got a black eye, too. Queasy?”

“Yeah.”

“You took a hard hit, Doc. But I’m not doing you any good standing out here in the rain.” Casting a sidewise glance at the bony horse, he admitted, “I don’t know if Old Dolly’ll carry both of us, but if she won’t, I’ll be the one to walk.”

“I’m all right.” But even as he said it, Spence knew he wasn’t. He’d be real lucky if he didn’t have a concussion the way his head hurt.

“Here,” Taylor said, shrugging out of the canvas coat. “At least I’ve got more than a shirt on under this. You’ll catch your death soaked like that. It may be the middle of May, but this rain’s downright cold.” He thrust Spence’s arms into the sleeves and pulled it closed around him. “You may be wet, but this’ll at least help you get warm.”

“Thanks.”

“They take anything but your coat and horse?”

“Yeah.”

“If they got your money, Laurie’s got a little put aside that we can spare. Maybe it’d be enough to get you home.”

Spence shook his head and wished he hadn’t. “I had my money in my boots—I didn’t want anybody seeing it.”

“Well, it’d better be hard cash instead of Confederate scrip, that’s all I can say.”

“Yeah, I know. I’ve got fifty dollars in Union money under my foot.”

“Whooeee—and I was offering
you
money,” Taylor said, grinning. “Around here, that’d make you a rich man,”

“The hell of it is they got my bag, and my wife’s picture. I kept it in a book so I wouldn’t lose it, and it’s gone.”

“Only hope you’ve got of seeing that again, Doc, is if they trade your clothes for money.”

“It was in my bag—in my field kit. They stole my field kit. I had the damned thing through the whole war, and now it’s gone, too. There’s no way I can replace it or my wife’s picture.”

“I’ll ask around tomorrow, but first I’ve got to get you home. Can you mount up by yourself, do you think?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you take the saddle, and if Dolly’ll hold us, I’ll get up behind you. That way if you get to falling, I’ve got my arms to stop you. But we’d better get going, or Laurie’ll be worried something’s happened to me. You’d think she’d know if I made it home from the war, she can count on me being around, but I guess Danny’s death changed her some——she’s afraid to take anything for granted.”

“He said she raised him,” Spence remembered.

“Yeah. If you can get your foot in the stirrup, I can boost you up, Jesse said. “Dolly won’t move until you’re up there.”

Grasping the saddle horn, Spence pulled his aching body into the saddle. He’d made it without help.

“Your wife won’t mind having unexpected company?”

“No. Laurie’s not exactly your ordinary woman, Doc. Little inconveniences don’t bother her. If they did, she wouldn’t have made it with the life she’s had. When her ma died, she was just shy of twelve, and Danny was only five. There was a notion afoot about splitting them up to raise ‘em, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She’d promised her ma she’d look after him, and by God, she did it. She did more than a grown woman would have—cooking, cleaning, sewing, teaching him to read like you would expect, but that was only half of it. She either raised or hunted everything they ate, and she got an egg business going, too. She’s a hard worker, and she knows what she’s doing. I think you’ll like her, Doc.”

“I look pretty rough right now,” Spence murmured.

“She won’t care. Danny wrote her about you, and I came home with both legs because of you. That’s enough for her. You might find her a little different from most women, though.”

“How’s that?”

“She likes to read—no, it’s more than that—she’s got a
passion
for it. First Christmas we were married, I wanted to buy her a Sunday dress, but she wanted books instead.”

“Lydia isn’t much for books of any kind,” Spence conceded.

“Not too many of ‘em are. I don’t mean to say Laurie lets herself go, or anything like that, Doc. She’s a pretty woman, no matter what she wears.” Realizing he’d been running on about someone Hardin had never seen, Jesse forced himself to change the subject. “Looks like Dolly’ll carry double just fine.”

“Yeah.”

“Riding all right?”

“Yeah.”

“The way you’re wobbling in that saddle, I’d be surprised if that was the truth.”

“I’m dizzy, that’s all.”

“If you think you’re going to fall, we’ll stop.”

“No.”

“She’s going to ask you about Danny, you know. I’m not asking you to lie, but I’m hoping you won’t tell her anything that’ll upset her. Cholera’s a hard way to go, and I’d just as soon she doesn’t know everything about how he went. You were down in Mississippi with him when it happened, weren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s got a lot worrying her right now, Doc. If nothing goes wrong this time, we’ll be having a baby before Christmas. She had a hard time of it when we lost a stillborn son right before the war. She doesn’t say much about it, but I know she’s scared it’ll happen again.”

“What went wrong?”

“Since you’re a doctor, maybe you can tell me. All I know is the doc we had wasn’t fit to be calling himself one. Now, nobody’s ever called me a coward, but honest to God, I couldn’t have stood what she did,”

“None of us could. If it was up to men to have babies, the species would have died out in the first generation. It’s a lot of pain and hard work.”

“It was more than that for Laurie, I can tell you,” Taylor declared flatly. “Doc Burton let her suffer until she was about dead herself before he decided to do anything about it. Four days, Doc—that’s how long she had those pains—and he kept telling her it’d come when it was time, when he should’ve known something was wrong. There wasn’t any way that baby could have come out—it was lying almost crosswise, and all those pains couldn’t push it out.”

“He should have tried to turn it before things got that far.”

“It wasn’t until she started losing a lot of blood that he did anything, and then the bastard made a botch of that, too. He got it to coming feet first, but by then she was too tired to push, and I was sure I was going to lose her. He said it was dead before it was born, and I reckon that was about the only thing he had the right of. But let me tell you, Doc—that baby was fighting to live for most of those four days. You could see it move, and she could feel it kicking. Hell, you want to know why I don’t have any faith in doctors? I could’ve got it out myself better than he did. He lost my son, and he nearly killed my wife. No, sir, I’m not about to forgive or forget that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t your fault—it was his. When it was over, I wanted to kill him. If Laurie had died, he wouldn’t have got out of my house alive.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“And the hell of it was she insisted on paying him, like it was her fault, not his. It was blood money he took, Doc. It wasn’t right.”

“It’d be pretty hard to charge for something like that,” Spence admitted. “I don’t know that I would, anyway.”

“Of course you wouldn’t! You’re not like the rest of ‘em, and you know what? If it’d been you there, it wouldn’t have happened. You wouldn’t have let it go on like that.”

“I don’t know what I would have done under those circumstances. I’d have been pretty green myself. The only births I attended were during medical school, and it didn’t take many of them for me to decide I’d rather be a surgeon. I thought I’d be going out into the world doing something useful, but I don’t know that it worked out that way. Long before the war ended, I realized I was practicing butchery, not medicine.”

“You’re too hard on yourself, Doc. Danny saw all of you work, and he said you were the best the Army of Tennessee had. He said the other surgeons working with you knew it.”

“If success were measured like cordwood, I probably was. I maimed with the best of them. If the experience taught me anything, it was that whatever gift I had, I didn’t want it.”

“You can’t look at it like that. All anybody, even God, has a right to ask of you is that you do. what you can. Instead of looking at those legs and arms stacked up outside the surgery tents, look at how many men went home.”

“Thanks.”

“Hungry?” Jesse asked, changing the subject again.

“Right
now, I could eat grass, but I know I’m not alone in that at least.”

“It’s been pretty bad around here,” Jesse conceded, “but we’ve got beans and cornmeal, so we’re not starving yet.”

“I don’t mind beans,”

“That’s good, because we’ve got a lot of them.”

Both fell silent then, and the night was broken only by the steady sounds of rain hitting mud and Old Dolly’s hooves pulling out of it. Hunched miserably over the saddle horn, he didn’t even know where he was, only that he was still somewhere north of Charlotte, North Carolina, and at the rate he was going, he could’ve crawled home faster.

“Where are we?”

“Almost to Salisbury,” Taylor responded.

“Where’s that from Charlotte?”

“About forty—maybe a little more—miles.”

Spence wished he hadn’t asked. On a good day that’d be another four hours. In this mud, it’d be seven or eight. “How far to Salisbury?” he asked wearily.

“About a mile. Next road to the right goes to my front yard. If you can hang on about another five minutes, we’ve made it home.”

“What day is it?”

“The fourteenth for about four more hours.”

If he could get a horse anywhere, Spence still had from two to four days of travel ahead of him. And he might as well forget about writing Liddy from Salisbury. The place probably wouldn’t even have a post office.

“Yeah, there’s a lantern on the porch,” Jesse murmured. “Soon as we get inside, we’ll get those wet clothes off you, and Laura will clean up that head. When that’s done, we’ll eat the beans, and then you can sleep in Danny’s bed.”

The horse sensed food and broke into a hard trot right up to the door. Jesse dismounted by leaning far enough to catch a tree branch, then easing his body to the ground. “If you can get out of the saddle, you might want to do it real fast. Otherwise, you’ll be getting down in the smokehouse. The old girl puts herself up at night.”

“Jesse?” A woman peered out the door.

“Yeah!” he yelled. “We’ve got company—I found Doc Hardin on the road. You’d better get out the turpentine and a good needle, because he’s needing his head sewed up!”

She came outside at that. “What happened?”

“Butternuts waylaid him for his horse. He’ll need dry clothes, too.”

“Yes, of course.” Forcing a smile she held out her hand to Spence. “Danny wrote of you often, Dr. Hardin. He admired you very much.”

“He was a fine young man.” Rather than shake her hand, he let her see his. “I’d just get you all muddy.”

As soon as he was in the house, she took down the porch lantern and held it up to look at the back of his head. Her fingers separated his hair until she found the place. “I think we’d better take care of this first. When I get the clot washed away, you may bleed all over the place.”

“What does it look like?” he wanted to know.

“About like someone took a butcher knife to the back of your head. I don’t know what would’ve done something like this.”

“I don’t know—I don’t remember much of anything, except I was riding home, then the next thing I knew, your husband was picking me up out of the mud. I don’t even know how long I was out.”

“No, I don’t expect so. If you can sit at the table, I can sew the wound up. It won’t be the way somebody who knew what he was doing might do it, but maybe it’ll hold the scalp together long enough for it to heal.”

“I’d be grateful, ma’am. I just hate asking you to do it.”

“I don’t mind. Truth to tell, I owe you a whole lot more than that for what you did for Jess. Anything you need, you just ask, and we’ll sure try to get it.”

“No, I just want to get home. I’ve been gone too long already, and I’ve got a wife and son waiting for me,”

“I remember how that was,” she murmured, holding a ladderback chair for him. “When Jess came through that door, I was so happy I cried my eyes out, knowing he’d made it home.”

“Yeah.” Exhausted, he dropped into the chair and held his head in his hands, fighting sleep. It seemed like seconds before he felt the rag touch his head, and he smelled homemade lye soap. He sat still while she trimmed his hair away from the gash, then washed the area again. It wasn’t until he smelled the turpentine that he had to brace his elbows against the table.

“Danny always said this hurt,” she said, soaking another rag with it “I thought I’d better warn you, because I’m putting it right into the raw place.” As she said it, she pressed the wet cloth against his scalp and squeezed it, flooding the wound. She felt him flinch. “I’m sorry to do this, but it’s all I know. My mother used to put turpentine on anything that bled.”

“That’s all right—it works. I used it myself when I had to.”

“I don’t think I could’ve done what you did, Dr. Hardin. I don’t know how you stood it.”

“Sometimes I couldn’t.”

“But you had to do
it
,
anyway—that was the hard part, I expect.”

“Yes.”

“There’s more than one kind of hero, you know,” she observed quietly. “One kind throws himself into enemy fire for a cause, but your kind puts him back together so he can go home.”

“They went home on crutches, Mrs. Taylor—if they went at all.”

“But that’s something, isn’t it?” Returning to the matter at hand, she said, “This cut’s about three inches wide, maybe a bit more. Is there any particular way you want it stitched?”

“No. Just pull it together and sew it like cloth. If it won’t match, you can leave little places like buttonholes up to half an inch, and if all the debris is out, it’ll fill in with scar tissue.”

“I expect this is going to hurt.”

He felt the needle jab through his skin, tugging it into place as she sewed. Judging by the number of times she stuck him, she was taking small stitches.

“Do you do this often?” he found himself asking.

“No. Just when Danny fell over the plow, and when the axe slipped and cut into Jesse’s foot. He wouldn’t have a doctor, so I soaked it in turpentine, then I just started putting everything back together as best I could.”