Cheryl Reavis (21 page)

“Show me to the stationmaster’s office,” Mrs. Kinnard said to the nearest person she took to be some kind of railroad employee. “I must speak to the man about the way this facility is run,” she said to Kate.

A baby began to cry loudly.

“Harrison’s on the third floor, Kate,” Robert said, leaning down so she could hear him. “Let me have the basket.” He had to take it from her hands.

“This isn’t what I expected.”

“I know. You need to see him now, Kate. Then I’ll tell you what I know and you can decide what you want to do.”

* * *

Kate heard the urgency in Robert’s voice. She heard it, and she was afraid. The stairs were steep and difficult to climb. She felt light-headed and unsteady by the time they reached the third-floor landing. She stumbled, and Robert took her by the arm to steady her.

“Which way?” she managed to ask.

He led her to the door and opened it. The room was unoccupied.

“They must have moved him,” Robert said. He walked down the hallway, trying one door after another until one of them opened.

“In here,” he called to Kate and she hurried in that direction. He said something to someone inside the room but she couldn’t hear him clearly or the response.

“The stationmaster apparently took it upon himself to move him in here,” he said.

Kate glanced at his face then back again. He was clearly angry.

The room was so dark. There was only one small slit of a window near the ceiling, and the light from it, combined with that of an oil lamp burning on a nearby table, did little to illuminate her surroundings.

She stepped forward and made her way to the bedside, nodding to a woman who stood nearby.

“This is the stationmaster’s wife,” Robert said. “I’ll leave you now. I need to find Castine.”

“All right,” Kate said, but she was barely listening.

Harrison!

He appeared to be clean and the sheets on the bed were fresh, but the room was so damp and close and oppressive.

“Thank you for sitting with him,” she said to the woman after a moment, her voice quiet so as not to disturb the boy who lay on the bed, his hair wet with perspiration, his eyes closed.

“I’m supposed to get paid for it,” the woman said bluntly. She stopped short of holding her hand out for the money, but Kate wouldn’t have been surprised if she had.

Kate touched Harrison’s arm, then took his hand. It was cold and clammy.

“Harrison,” she said softly. “Can you hear me? It’s Kate.”

She looked at the woman, who was fidgeting with her apron. “How long has he been like this?” she asked, her mouth trembling despite all she could do. She bit down on her lower lip.

“I reckon since sometime last night. Before that, he’d kind of come and go.”

“What does the doctor say?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t talk to me.”

Kate leaned forward to see Harrison better. “His face is bruised. Why is his face bruised?” She knew her voice was rising, but she couldn’t help it. “What happened to him?”

“We—my old man—found him like this at the back of the station four...no, five days ago,” the woman said. “It ain’t hard to figure how he got there.”

“What do you mean?”

“The boy had money and he didn’t have enough sense to hide it. I reckon he got beat up and robbed and he laid out in the rain all night that night. It ain’t our fault he got into trouble, if that’s what you’re thinking. We’ve been looking after him as best we could. Then Mr. Markham came and showed us the picture. We knowed it was him the minute we seen it. Mr. Markham, he said we’d get paid for—”

“This room won’t do,” Kate interrupted, because the rain she could hear beating on the roof was beginning to drip from the ceiling. “I want him moved to someplace with more air and light. Someplace
dry.
”

“The roof don’t leak unless there’s been a couple days of rain,” the woman said as if that somehow negated the leaks.

“I said I want him moved,” Kate said.

“Well, there ain’t no call to be so—”

“Tell the stationmaster I want to see him.
Now!
” Kate said.

They stared at each other, then the woman gave a sharp sigh and left, returning in a few minutes with a short, rotund man wearing spectacles.

“You’re the stationmaster?” Kate asked ahead of whatever excuses he was about to make.

“I am—”

“Then you have the authority to appropriate any room on these premises, is that not correct?”

“That’s right—”

“Then I want him moved out of here to a bigger room—one with windows and a ceiling that doesn’t leak.”

“I done told Markham I ain’t got no other place to put him in—ain’t no ex-Reb telling me how to run my station. Anyway I don’t see how what room he’s in can matter now,” the man made the mistake of saying.

Kate turned to face him. It took everything she had to sound calm. “As you can see,
I
am not an ‘ex-Reb,’ as you put it. You will show me the rooms in this place—all of them.”

He took a moment, apparently to decide who Kate might be and what would be his most profitable response. He glanced at his wife once before he answered. “If I do,” he said finally, “how do I know I’ll get paid?”

“You don’t,” Kate said. “But I can promise you this, you won’t get any money at all unless you do as I say. I understand you expect this boy’s family to reimburse you for his care before Mr. Markham arrived. Any claims you have will not be honored unless
I
approve them. Do we understand each other?”

The stationmaster didn’t say whether he did or didn’t; he merely threw up his hands and headed for the door. “The big room,” he said to his wife on his way out.

“But we might need that room if there’s any rich people coming in on the—”

“You heard what I said!” He shoved past Mrs. Kinnard, who walked up just as he was exiting the doorway.

“What’s happening?” Mrs. Kinnard asked. “Who is that rude man?”

“Mrs. Kinnard,” Kate said. “Will you kindly go with this woman? We’re moving Harrison to another room. I need your opinion as to which one will be the most suitable.” Kate looked at the stationmaster’s wife. “Mrs. Kinnard ran a wayside hospital during the war, so don’t suppose for a minute that she won’t know what a gravely ill young man will need to aid his recovery. If she is happy with what you show her, then I will be, as well.”

Kate turned her attention back to Harrison, not knowing whether either woman would comply, and she took his hand again. He hadn’t stirred during the exchange, not once.

“I’ll...tell somebody to bring you some fresh water,” the stationmaster’s wife said after a moment. “He’s fevering again. I reckon he needs sponging.”

“Yes. Thank you,” Kate said, accepting the woman’s token change of attitude—for the moment, at least. She took off her hat and jacket and rolled up her sleeves. She needed her trunk, but she wouldn’t worry about that now. She pulled the one chair in the room near the bedside and sat down heavily.

The memory of Warrie Hansen singing to Jake and Joe and Robbie suddenly filled her mind.

Go tell Aunt Rosie,

Go tell Aunt Rosie...

Did anyone ever sing to you?
she thought. Mrs. Howe? A nanny hired to make sure you were rarely seen or heard?

God relies on mothers.
The midwife who had delivered him had told her that.

And how little help she had been thus far.

“Harrison—Harrison,” she said softly to him, covering his hand with hers. “Listen to me, now. You’re going to be all right. I’m here—and Mrs. Kinnard. You may have met Mrs. Kinnard when you came to visit John last summer. If you did, then you know she’ll get things done for you. We’re going to find you a better room so you won’t have to be here in the dark and—” Her voice broke and she barely smothered a sob.

She looked around at a small noise. She hadn’t realized that Robert was in the room. He came to stand on the other side of the bed, and she looked up at him, shaking her head in despair.

“It’s good to talk to him,” Robert said. “Sometimes I could hear—understand—what people said. I heard you the night I came home—and I heard soldiers and the people who took care of me after Gettysburg. Talk to him, Kate. Give him hope.”

She looked at him, still very close to tears, and he nodded his encouragement.

Hope
.

And how could she do that when she herself had none? Even someone so inexperienced in these kinds of things as she, could see how very ill Harrison was. She heard Robert leave, and she sat there trying to think of what to say. Any mention of Mrs. Howe would likely take him right back to whatever had happened at school that had caused him to run away.

“You would be very surprised at the change in me,” she said finally, leaning close again. “I can bake cornbread now. Can you believe it? Max and John don’t know about that yet. Can you imagine what
they
will say? When you’re better, I’ll make us some—we’ll have cornbread and tea with lots of sugar, just the way you like it, and we’ll sit on the upstairs veranda at Max’s house. We’ll have the tea in tin cups—you know how we both break things.

“And I have some new books. I bought them at that little bookshop—you know the one. We found it when we were supposed to be visiting the museum, but we went looking for Charles Dickens instead. Remember that? Mr. Howe’s English friend sent you a bundle of old newspapers—he knew how much you liked to read the London papers, only he didn’t know what you really enjoyed were the chapters they published of Mr. Dickens’s books. You were missing so many chapters from
David Copperfield
—and nothing would do but we find the whole book—” She stopped again, thinking that the stationmaster’s wife had come back.

But it was Castine who brought the fresh water and some hemmed pieces of clean flannel. Robert followed him into the room, and he took the ewer from Castine so he could set the basin on the table near the bed.

“Anything else you need me to do, Mr. Markham?”

“No. Thank you, Castine. Just keep an eye on the vermin in this place.”

“Yes, sir. My pleasure, sir.”

Robert wet a piece of flannel and handed it to Kate. They began to work together, sponging Harrison’s feverish body. Robert showed her how to fan the wet flannel in the air to make it feel colder before she used it to wipe the perspiration away. And all the while Harrison didn’t open his eyes, didn’t move. There was only the sound of the rain and his labored breaths.

In.

Out.

Mrs. Kinnard returned. She had changed clothes and had put her elaborately dressed hair into a snood. At the moment she looked like someone who might work in the Kinnard household rather than its mistress.

“It took some doing, but the room is ready,” she said.

Kate stood back as Robert and Castine—and two men she didn’t know—lifted Harrison up, mattress and all and carried him out into the hallway. She gathered up her belongings and followed down the dark passageway to a room on the other side of the building. It was a large and airy corner room with whitewashed walls and double two-over-two windows. Rivulets of rain ran down the windowpanes rather than dripping from the ceiling.

The room didn’t look as if it had been recently occupied, but more like one that had been held in reserve for a more important traveler than the gravely ill boy who was being carried into it now.

She waited outside until Harrison had been put to bed.

“Your room is there across the hall,” Mrs. Kinnard said. “It’s small but I expect you won’t want to spend much time in it. Private Castine has brought up your trunk. If you have a dress more suitable for attending the sick, it—”

“I do,” Kate said, interrupting. “And I brought sheets and some blankets and some other things I thought we might need as well—apples if you’re hungry. I’ll go get them.”

“Excellent,” Mrs. Kinnard said. “I’ve told those mercenary station people to move a cot and two more chairs in here. I believe we will likely need to take turns sleeping.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Kinnard,” Kate said, but Mrs. Kinnard had no intention of being thanked for what she considered should be obvious.

“I see what needs to be done and I do it, Miss Woodard. I always have, and with God’s help, I always will. There is no need to thank me. It is simply the way I am.”

Kate left and went to the small room across from Harrison’s and closed the door behind her. She stood waiting for the rush of emotion she knew would come, but she was determined not to waste time weeping. She wiped at her eyes and gathered her strength and set to work unpacking the trunk.

Don’t worry—pray.

Don’t weep—do.

She closed her eyes, her mind a jumble.

Harrison—the Lord bless thee, and keep thee...thank You for letting me see him again...Thy will, not mine.

Thy will. Thy will!

She changed clothes and put on the apron, making sure she had her money tucked into one of the pockets. She didn’t trust the stationmaster or his wife not to harvest whatever they could from her belongings.

When she returned with the sheets and a blanket, and the candles and matches, Mrs. Kinnard had taken over the job of sponging Harrison in an effort to bring his fever down. From time to time she moistened his lips as well, and she filled a quill with water from a glass and fed it to him.

“He can still swallow,” she said when she realized Kate was there. “That is a good sign.”

Kate believed her without question. How strange it was that she could be so glad, so grateful for this vexing woman’s presence.

Thank You, Lord. For Mrs. Kinnard. For Robert. Thank You for them both, and for the others, as well. Max and Maria and Mrs. Justice. Perkins and Castine. I’m not alone... I’ll try to remember that...

“Now,” Mrs. Kinnard said. “I believe this boy should be allowed to rest for a time before we try to bring down his fever again. He’s been bothered enough.”

Kate nodded, still willing to accept Mrs. Kinnard’s opinion. She sat down in one of the chairs.

“It would be more helpful if you went to find Robert,” Mrs. Kinnard said. “We should know everything we can about this situation—even if it isn’t much. And you, you’re looking...pinched. Go get some air. Eat something—”