The Grass Widow (4 page)

Doc Pickett’s lip curled. On her best days, Effie Richland could invest him with the dyspepsia. He leaned on the saddle horn, gazing narrow-eyed at the farm. Smoke meandered from the chimney. Chickens scratched in the yard. The wind drifted the voice of an unhappy milk cow to him...

The cow. She wasn’t unhappy; she was in full-uddered agony. Doc touched a heel to his mare’s side. What had bothered him wasn’t the cow, but that Joss had bought seed and her fields were

untouched late the next day; he knew her better than that. No Eastern cousin could have kept her from the serious business of planting this late in the spring; no cousin could long have filled the void she seemed able to satisfy only by driving herself at the farm with a fury unreleased in any other way. He dismounted, tossing a rein over the porch rail. “Joss! Joss, it’s Doc! You here?”

He pushed open the door to a kitchen muggy with steam, pungent with the scent of eucalyptus; four pots and the teakettle on the stove boiled clouds into the air. “What the hell—?” He went cautiously in, his eyes probing the dimness of the kitchen.

“Josie?”

He found them in the room the Bodett boys had shared, Joss fighting for the labored breaths he had heard too often in this house in the last weeks, a golden-haired young woman collapsed in exhaustion on the other bed. He gave her a cursory glance before he touched the backs of his fingers to Joss’s face. The fever was hard and dry. Wearily, he turned the damp cloth on her forehead and turned away. He knew he could do more for the suffering cow than he could for her.

With his face against the cow’s warm flank, unashamed, he cried; he loved Joss Bodett with the fierce protectiveness men usually reserve for daughters and little sisters, and watching her die would be the hardest vigil he had drawn since the influenza had struck a month ago. Not for the first time in the past sixteen years, he wondered bitterly why God had chosen him to do His healing work.

He dumped grain into the trough for the pigs and slopped most of the milk over it, lingering to watch their greedy appreciation; he whistled the horses in from the pasture to rub their big soft noses and treat them to a scoop of oats apiece, and scattered grain for the chickens, and took the pail with its scant gallon of milk and trudged through the glare of afternoon sun to the porch to push open the kitchen door.

A gasp and a crash of crockery met him, and the frantic hiss of liquid sizzling a steaming dance across the surface of the cookstove (tea; he could smell it even through the eucalyptus),

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and his eyes adjusted to the darkness to show him the blonde girl looking at him like a deer on the verge of panicked flight, tea still hissing and spitting on the stove behind her. “Please,” she whispered. “Enough ill has happened here. Whoever you are, if you’ve a shred of human decency, go away and let me let her die in peace.”

Cautiously—for she was young and supple and Joss’s gunbelt on the table was much closer to her than to him, and he was forty and his left leg as much wood as flesh—he set the pail on the floor beside him. “I mean no harm, Miss. I’m a friend of the Bodetts—just Joss, now—and a doctor.” He took off his hat, holding it in both hands. “You’re Joss’s cousin from Maine? Miss Blackstone?”

“She spoke of Doc.” She was wary, admitting nothing; she was quite lovely, he thought, and still mostly terrified. “She said no name.”

“Doctors have no name to our townsfolk. We’re just Doc.”

And something in her eased, as if in some comprehension he didn’t understand, but it gave him leave to go on. “When did she take sick? I know she was in town yesterday.”

“Yesterday afternoon, before dark.” She glanced at the stove and bit her lip, as if the teapot shattered across its surface had meant much more to her than someone else’s china. “I’m terribly afraid for her,” she said softly.

He ventured a step into the room. “I don’t mean to question you,” he said gently, “but all of this steam—”

“My father is a physician” —a faint smile twitched to her, there and gone— “Doc to his townsfolk. His specialty is ailments of respiration. Have you heard of hydrotherapy? It has enjoyed some success in cases of pneumonia and bronchial influenza. I knew nothing else to do to try to save her.” She sank to a chair at the table, resting her head in her hands for a moment before she looked up. “But I’ve forgotten my manners,” she said wearily.

“Please sit down, Doctor. I fear I can’t offer you tea.”

“I’m terribly sorry I frightened you. I’ll replace the teapot at soonest.”

“You mustn’t even think to. My clumsiness isn’t your obligation.”

“It is when I caused it, and no matter. Please tell me about your hydrotherapy. I’ve heard of it, of course, but not for this.”

“Autopsy of such patients shows that their lungs are stagnated with blood, and so congested with mucus that—in effect—they drown. The steam is lighter than the mucus, and helps separate it when inhaled so all may be expectorated. Thrice daily, woolen pads are boiled, wrapped in a dry cloth, and applied to a chest protected by a towel. When the fomentation cools, the chest is wiped with a cold cloth, and another pad applied, until three applications, which creates reflexive increase of circulation, relieving stagnation. Oil of eucalyptus stimulates expectoration of bodily poisons—clove will work as well—and I beg of you, Doctor, don’t approach her with leeches.”

“I’m no Philadelphia doctor.” He saw the dry flicker of her smile before he applied himself to thinking through what she had said. It was so simple he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it himself—but, he supposed, discoveries sat under all noses, patiently awaiting the one that might sniff them out. “Damn!

Begging your pardon, Miss, but this town has buried fourteen we might have saved, all loved and lost for want of naught but more modern medicine. It makes sense, your hydrotherapy.”

“Save the fifteenth.” Her voice was gentle, her utter weariness showing. “My Cousin Joss means more to me than you could possibly imagine.”

He could imagine. Effie had said the girl was with child, and Effie had a gossip’s vicious eye for such things; it was a common enough reason for Eastern girls making sudden visits to distant kinfolk in the west.
And her father a physician? Why not a simple
abortion and be done with it? If needs be and she allows, I’ll send her
home relieved of this burden.
She hadn’t even had time for a proper toilette, he knew: her clothes had been but lightly brushed, her hair hastily re-pinned; she wore that pinched, contained look of gritty efficiency women got about their mouths when their lives went to hell all at once.

“As she does to me, Miss, so help me more. What of food?

Liquids?”

“All you can force, but only when the patient is lucid; there’s danger of choking. Good fat chicken stock, spiced with oregano and sage, garlic if you have it, onion if not. The steam and spices help break up fluid in the lungs, and the fat gives strength if the patient can’t accept meat. Food is fuel; fever burns it. If the stove goes out, you’ve lost your patient.”

“But you’ve no chicken on to stock.”

He meant no offense, but her response held a privileged chill:

“I’ve experience in neither catching nor killing chickens, sir.”

“I’ve plenty of experience in both. Do please allow me to deplete the Bodett brood.”

And they both had the same uneasy thought as he went out the door: his dearth of knowledge had already grievously depleted the Bodett brood. He wondered how much of her father’s expertise she would be able to recall without a specific example before her to jog her memory—and if this jog of her memory would be enough to save Joss Bodett.

The smell of frying chicken brought Aidan awake. She sat up in the chair by the bed, scrubbing her hands over her face and hair; how good a bath would feel! A steaming tub of water, the soothing scent of lilac soap...

Joss’s face was hot and dry. She rinsed a cloth in the pail by the bed and smoothed it across her cousin’s skin, pushing her hair back from her forehead. Joss moaned under her touch, shivering with the fever. “The horses,” she rasped. “They have to take you in. Ma, don’t they have to? Ma? Wouldn’t they—?”

“Yes, Joss,” Aidan said softly. “They would. They have to. Rest, now. Rest.”

“Would you care for tea, Dr. Pickett?” He had waked her from her doze by Joss’s bed, and when she was awake enough to teach him he watched while she applied steaming fomentations to her cousin; he held Joss while she coughed, racking the fever

from her lungs; he held her while she fought weak protest of her helplessness, soothing her while Aidan, nearly unknown to Joss and more accepted for that anonymity, did baser nursing things involving nightclothes and bed linens. Now Joss slept; Doc washed his hands, and Aidan, as good a nurse as any he had known in all his years of medicine, offered him tea, for she had found Jocelyn’s battered old pot in the china closet.

“Tea would be glorious. I’ve not tasted it for a week.” He hung his towel on the wire over the stove and limped to the table. When he was weary—and he was, desperately—his stump ached and itched, and the leg he had left at Manassas ached and itched with it. “Thom and Effie Richland see tea-drinkers as free-staters; they won’t stock it. That leaves Leavenworth, and the post road isn’t one in which Stationers take pleasure, as you may imagine from your recent experience.”

“I daresay calling it a road is giving it a bit of a compliment. Please, Doctor, sit down.” She lifted the lid of the teapot, checking the progress of the brew. “Might you tell the ice man to put this household on his route? I’m afraid I don’t know how to keep food without an icebox.”

He sat, stretching his wooden leg under the table out of the way. “Our ice man met an untimely end a few years back, and none has taken up the job. Others miss him more than the Bodetts, I imagine; they have a spring that serves as well as an icebox, if not as conveniently. I’ll show you where it is.” He accepted the tea she offered, adding sugar as he wondered how to make his suggestion; it felt strange to be hesitant in this house he had known so well for so long. “May I keep the night watch, Miss Blackstone? It seems sleep might ease some edges from your life.”

She looked at him across the rim of her cup; it seemed to him that the mistrust in her eyes was more instinctive than immediate.

“I lost more than a leg in Virginia,” he said quietly. “You’re most lovely, but I couldn’t harm you if I cared to.” The lie served him well in the Station, where his devout lack of interest in women would have been noticed and cruelly commented upon without

its protection; he took his urges to the waterfronts of Kansas City, where a one-legged man could be anonymous in his search for physical companionship. “Not to mention that mistreating a guest in Joss’s home would betray our friendship. She’d not take such betrayal lightly, and her temper has a lighter trigger than her daddy’s Peacemaker.”
And no threat; she’s likely dead by
morning. Oh, Josie—

Reluctantly, she returned his strained smile. “I’ll admit I’d feel her better cared for if you stayed. When it comes down to the night, sir, you are the physician.”

“And a better one today for having met you. Now my prescription for you, my dear, is a long hot bath. Make your preparations, and I’ll make your tub. Heaven knows there’s no dearth of hot water.”

“Miss Blackstone?”

Drowsily, Aidan stirred. Her dream was undefinable: essences of warmth and closeness, of suspension, of precious nurture…

“Miss Blackstone.”

But a man’s voice didn’t belong where the world was warm and wet and safe, even a voice as gentle as the one penetrating that womb of semiconsciousness, and when a hand touched her shoulder she started awake to the realization of her nakedness in a cooling tub of water and the apologetic, mustached smile of the handsome (and harmless) Doc Pickett. “I didn’t mean to frighten you, but you mustn’t take the risk of a chill.”

She struggled to sit up, trying to cover herself with her hands; he turned his back. “Joss? Is she—”

“She’s breathing well enough.” He offered a flannel towel behind him. “You must feel better. Ofttimes a bath is as close to God’s heaven as we’ll know on this earth.”

“This one was.” Acutely aware of him—and feeling as much safety in his presence as she had felt in the dream—she wrapped herself in the towel. “I don’t think I’ve ever wanted one so badly.”

She slipped into a silk nightdress and matching wrapper. “Is there any change?”

He glanced back to see her dressed, and sent her a half-guilty, half-worried smile. “Have I been hasty with the fomentation?

They seem to improve her so, I applied them again.”

“The danger is over-stimulation of the blood. What behooves the lungs may be of detriment to the heart. If—” She hesitated. Her father was a talker when it came to his calling; she had heard progressions of research that included things later proven erroneous. Now, she had to separate the wheat of memory from the chaff. “If the lungs labor too soon after fomentation for reapplication,” she said slowly, “hot water may be offered to the feet, or a cloth with pungent oils to the face. Dr. Pickett, I’m playing with fire—”

“I trust you,” he said simply, and made her trust herself. “Seth was dead by now—poor Seth never stood a chance—and this far into it I knew we’d lose Harmon. Ethan fought to the end—”

Wearily, he sat. “I thought he’d pull it out,” he whispered. “I’ll beat this son of a snake, Doc,’ he said, so surely I had naught but to believe he could, and then he—” tight-lipped, he shook his head. “Forgive me. You’re too young for all of—”

“Do you think God cares how old I am? He simply thrusts life upon you.”

His laugh was strangled: it was the laugh of a brand-new doctor turned onto the fields of war without even the grace of a cause in which he could believe, so torn had his home state of Kansas been in that conflict. “He does that, Miss Blackstone; yes. God does do that.”

She made tea, and lifted the lid of a Dutch oven he had set back on the stove to simmer; he had fried the legs and breasts of the chicken and put the rest to stock with onion and spices.