One Bright Morning (2 page)

When he led Old Bones, the mule, out of the
barn, Maggie lifted up the guitar for him to see. She wanted him to
know she was holding it hostage so he wouldn’t neglect any of her
instructions.

“
You see here, Ozzie? You
just do what I say, or I’m going to smash this guitar into a
billion pieces. Then I’m going to feed ‘em to you.”

The icy air was breeding with the pains in
her head and creating infinite numbers of little new pains, sharp
and brittle, and all stabbing into her skull, but she did her best
to pretend they weren’t there.

Ozzie still looked hurt when he whined,
“Jeez, Miss Maggie, I’m goin’.”

Maggie just snorted and turned back to the
house.

“
Sometimes I just purely
don’t know why life is so blamed hard, Annie,” she muttered as she
rummaged around in her kitchen cupboard.

Annie apparently thought her mama had said
something very funny, because she laughed at her and thumped on her
wooden high-chair tray.

Maggie grinned at the baby because she
couldn’t help it. “Here, sweetie, you chew on this. Mama has to
tend to a sick man.”

She opened a tin and handed
Annie one of the hard biscuits that she had made out of graham
flour and arrowroot from a recipe in a
Ladies’ Home Companion
. The magazine
claimed they were good for teething babies. The biscuit would at
least keep Annie occupied while she tried to do for the stranger,
Maggie figured. Annie banged happily on her tray, and Maggie sighed
when she looked at the pretty piece of furniture that Kenny had
made.

“
Your daddy was so good to
us, Annie girl.” She felt like crying all of a sudden.

Whenever Maggie had her monthlies and these
detestable headaches, she succumbed to moods. She knew it was weak
of her, but she just figured it was her nature to be weak.

Annie gurgled happily as she gummed her
biscuit. She smiled at her mama, and Maggie smiled back.

“
I love you, baby
girl.”

She could see Kenny every time she looked at
Annie. The baby had his sweet nature as well as his shiny, curly,
light brown hair and big brown eyes, and she was pretty as a
picture. Maggie sighed gustily and began foraging in her medicine
chest.

Sometimes it seemed to Maggie that life was
just too blasted hard. She’d spent most of the first seventeen
years of it trying to appease her aunt and uncle and having no luck
at all. Then, when Kenny Bright had wandered through southern
Indiana, fallen hopelessly in love with her, married her, and
brought her to his farm in Lincoln County in the New Mexico
Territory, she thought her luck had finally changed.

“
I should have known
better,” she chided herself grumpily as she gathered up her nursing
equipment.

By the time Kenny got kicked by the horse,
he had taught Maggie enough so that she could keep herself and the
baby alive, at any rate, barring unforeseen Indian raids, outlaw
incursions, drought, flood, or fire. Those were things that were
liable to happen at any time, Kenny or no Kenny. Now she had a cow
and a mule and a vegetable garden and chickens and Annie. And
Ozzie, for what good he did her.

“
And now I’ve got me a
gunshot cowboy.”

Life on a farm had sounded nice to Maggie.
She liked animals, and she certainly didn’t mind hard work,
although she was kind of little. Life on a farm in Lincoln County,
New Mexico Territory, in 1876, however, was nothing like life in a
snug little town in southern Indiana in 1876, the year she had left
the state.

“
This damned Territory,” she
grumbled as she ripped clean linen into bandage-sized
strips.

Until she moved to New Mexico, Maggie had
never uttered a swear word in her entire life. It had never
occurred to her. Now a swear word occurred to her every other
minute or so. That was just one more reason she was glad her aunt
wasn’t here. Aside from the fact that Maggie and her aunt hated
each other, her aunt would have blistered the back of her hand for
even thinking a swear word.

The water she had set to boil was bubbling
now, so she poured some into a deep bowl. Then she grabbed a tin of
alum from the cupboard, gathered up her linens, some soft flannel
squares, a knife, her scissors, a couple more bowls, and looked
about the kitchen to see if she had missed anything else she might
need.

“
Lordy, I thought these days
were over.” Frowning, she surveyed her kingdom, juggling her
nursing tools.

“
Wish me luck, Annie, babe,”
she told her daughter.

Annie gurgled and gnawed on her biscuit with
gusto.

Maggie figured she might need more light, so
she hooked an oil lamp over her arm, took a deep breath, and
stepped into her bedroom.

“
Oh, Lord, please help me.”
Some of her stoicism deserted her when she peered at the man passed
out on her bed. “He looks dead already.”

She stared down at the stranger for a long
moment or two. He was a good-looking man, or would be if he weren’t
pale as a frosty window and unconscious. He had thick, sun-bleached
brown hair.

“
Damn man’s hair is a lot
prettier than mine,” Maggie mumbled bitterly, brushing her own
tangled mane out of her eyes. She hadn’t had time to brush it yet
this morning.

She couldn’t tell what color the man’s eyes
were because they were closed, but his eyelashes were long and
dark.

“
That figures, too. Men
always get the lashes.”

He had thick stubble on his chin and cheeks,
as though he hadn’t shaved in a few days.

“
You’re taller than Kenny
was.” Maggie could tell that because of the way his legs dangled
over the end of the bed. She wondered if that would prove to be a
problem, since she figured his leg to be gunshot, but decided she’d
just have to cross that bridge when she came to it.

Then Maggie took one more deep breath,
squared her shoulders, laid her tools out, and began unbuttoning
the man’s duster. If he’d been hit in the chest, she figured that
was the wound she’d better tend first. She didn’t know much about
gunshot wounds although, Lord knew, there were enough of them to go
around in this Territory. Somebody was always getting shot up.
She’d had to dig a bullet out of Ozzie’s arm once when some gun
play had erupted in a saloon in town.

“
I swear. If it isn’t the
Apaches, it’s the bugs. If it isn’t the bugs, it’s the prickles. If
it isn’t the prickles, it’s the animals. If it isn’t the animals,
it’s the outlaws. And if it isn’t the outlaws, it’s the
weather.”

She eased the stranger’s duster off of his
shoulders and noticed that there was a folded paper sticking out of
his shirt pocket. Maggie opened it up curiously. Half of the paper
was soggy with blood and she grimaced. It was a “Wanted” broadside.
Maggie looked at the picture on the poster and then peered down
again at the stranger on her bed.

After surveying the two critically for a
moment, she decided with some relief that they weren’t the same
man. The man on the poster was a mean-eyed, black-haired fellow
named Jack Gauthier, and the broadside said he was five-foot-seven.
The man hanging over the end of her bed was much taller than that
and had brown hair. Maggie shoved the wanted poster out of the
way.

“
You look like a strong one,
anyway,” she muttered as she peeled the shirt off of his heavily
muscled arms. “We’ll wash you up some and then see where I have to
dig, if I have to dig. Lord, I hope I won’t have to, especially if
you got yourself a chest wound.” Then Maggie breathed a short
prayer that Doc Pritchard would be sober, but she didn’t hold out
too many hopes.

When she had his arms and chest washed off,
she realized the hole was in the stranger’s right shoulder, just
above the armpit. That seemed encouraging to her.

“
As if I knew anything about
it. At least it missed your heart, anyway. Assuming you have one.”
Maggie wasn’t one to take much on faith any more.

The stranger moaned when she pressed around
the wound after she had bathed him, but he didn’t open his eyes.
Maggie’s mouth set into a grim line. She hated this so much, she
could hardly stand it. It made her insides curl up into tight
little knots to poke and prod and hurt people.

And her headache wasn’t any better, either.
Sometimes the pain was so bad her eyes blurred, but she just
blinked hard and kept working.

She found where the bullet was lodged and
decided she’d better try to take it out. Depending on what the man
had been shot with, he could die of lead poisoning if the bullet
wasn’t dug out quickly even if the wound wasn’t bad enough to kill
him on its own. She sterilized her knife over the fire in her
lantern and dunked it into hot water, and then swallowed hard.

“
You just hold on, mister.
This knife is sharp and it shouldn’t take me long.”

She flinched when she pressed into the wound
with her fingers, trying to ease the bullet up. But she managed to
get it loose, the knife did the rest, and she picked it out with
tweezers. The stranger groaned some, but he didn’t yell or kick or
wake up. That was some kind of blessing, anyway.

She cleaned up around the chest wound,
sprinkled it with alum, packed it well and wrapped it tight. After
a critical survey of her work, she didn’t think anything vital had
been touched by bullet or knife.

“
As if I could tell if it
was.”

Then she stood up and quickly stretched the
crick out of her back.

“
I’ll have to tackle that
leg now, I suppose. Oh, Lordy, what a way to start the
day.”

She listened for Annie, heard her cooing
contentedly, uttered a small prayer of thanks, squatted down beside
the stranger again, and considered what to do next.

“
I wonder if I’ll have to
cut those boots off you. They look like good ones. I’d hate to cut
them if they don’t need to be cut.” Maggie herself had always been
poor, and she didn’t want to ruin a good boot if she didn’t have
to. “Besides, if you live, I don’t suppose you’d appreciate having
your boots all slit down and spoiled.”

She decided to try to get them off without
cutting, moved to the foot of the bed, and tenderly picked up the
stranger’s left boot. That was the one that was full of blood and
Maggie shuddered as she felt the slippery, sticky substance all
over her hands.

She tugged gently. The boot slid off the
man’s foot with a slick, sloppy pop. A gush of blood poured out of
the boot as soon as it was free of the foot, and Maggie almost lost
what was left of last-night’s supper.

She didn’t have time to throw up, though,
because a grunt startled her into looking up. Although the sound
didn’t come from the direction of the bed, Maggie knew that she and
the stranger were the only two people in the little house who could
possibly make a grunt like that, so she knew it had to be him.

When she realized there was an Indian
standing in her open bedroom doorway, she was so startled that she
screamed.

Then her eyes squeezed shut for a second.
“Oh, God, no,” she sobbed after her scream was over. “Why me, God?
Why are you doing these things to me?”

The man at the door held out his hands in a
gesture people make when they’re trying to calm other people
down.

“
It’s all right, ma’am,” he
said in a very, very deep voice. “I didn’t mean to startle
you.”

Maggie brought a hand up to wipe the
straggling hair away from her forehead and realized too late that
that particular hand was covered with the gunshot stranger’s blood
and that she had just smeared it all over her face. This had been a
trying morning for Maggie, and she was very nearly at the end of
her tether.

“
I’m real sorry, ma’am,” the
man said again. “I knocked, but you was busy and I reckon you
didn’t hear me.”

Maggie figured her headache had sent her
over the edge and she was now crazy. She knew that man speaking to
her so calmly from the door of her own bedroom was an Indian. He
looked like an Indian. He had long, braided hair like an Indian. He
had dark, red-brown skin like an Indian. He had black, shiny eyes
like an Indian. He wasn’t naked like an Indian, thank God, but he
wore cowboy clothes like some Indians wore. He didn’t talk like an
Indian. She figured that meant that God was just playing more mean
tricks on her.

Maggie was hugging the gunshot stranger’s
boot to her breast in fright and couldn’t figure out what to do.
There were no weapons nearby, nothing with which she could defend
herself or the wounded stranger. She wondered if the man at the
door was the person who had shot him and if he had come here to
finish the job. Then she realized that he was talking to her
again.

“
I apologize for scarin’
you, ma’am,” he was saying. “I followed the trail to your house.
That there’s my partner.” He gestured to the unconscious stranger
on Maggie’s bed.

Through her headache and her tumbling
thoughts, Maggie was barely able to comprehend the man’s words;
they seeped through her panicked brain slowly. All at once she
realized she was hugging a bloody boot and thrust it away from her
in revulsion.

“
Ugh!”

“
Here, ma’am, please let me
help you. You shouldn’t be here all alone doin’ this.” The fellow
stepped further into the room.

“
No!” Maggie’s voice held
barely-suppressed panic. “Who are you? What are you doing
here?”

The man stopped. He was medium-sized,
bow-legged, and looked very stolid, as though he had an infinite
supply of patience. Maggie wished she had even a little bit of
it.