92
I GET BY WITH A LITTLE HELP
FROM MY FRIENDS
I LEANED MY FOREHEAD against the cool glass of my surgery window, blinking at the scene outside. Exhaustion lent the scene in the dooryard an extra tinge of surrealism—not that it needed much extra.
The sun had all but set, flaming gold in the last ragged leaves of the chestnut trees. The spruces stood black against the dying glow, as did the gibbet in the center of the yard, and the grisly remains that swung from it. A bonfire had been lit near the blackberry bushes, and silhouetted figures darted everywhere, disappearing in and out of flames and shadow. Some attacked the hanging carcass, armed with knives and hatchets; others plodded laden away, carrying slabs of flesh and buckets of fat. Near the fire, the skirted bell-shapes of women showed, bending and reaching in silent ballet.
Dark as it was, I could pick Brianna’s tall, pale figure out of the horde of demons hacking at the buffalo—keeping order, I thought. Before being forcibly returned to the surgery, Jamie had estimated the buffalo’s weight at something between eighteen hundred and two thousand pounds. Brianna had nodded at this, handed Jemmy to Lizzie, then walked slowly around the carcass, squinting in deep thought.
“Right,” she’d said, and as soon as the men began to appear from their homesteads, half-dressed, unshaven, and wild-eyed with excitement, had issued cool directions for the cutting of logs and the building of a pulley-frame capable of hoisting and supporting a ton of meat.
The men, disgruntled at not being in on the kill, hadn’t been inclined to pay attention to her at first. Brianna, however, was large, vivid, strongly-spoken—and stubborn.
“Whose stroke is that?” she’d demanded, staring down Geordie Chisholm and his sons as they started toward the carcass, knives in hand. She pointed at the deep gash across the neck, then wiped her hand slowly down her sleeve, drawing attention to the splashed blood there. “Or that?” One long bare foot pointed delicately at the severed throat, and the pool of blood that soaked the dooryard. My stockings lay at the edge of the congealing puddle where I had stripped them off, limp red rags, but recognizably feminine.
Watching from the window, I had seen more than one face glance toward the house, frowning with the realization that Brianna was Himself’s daughter—a fact the wise kept well in mind.
It was Roger who had turned the tide for her, though, with a cool stare that brought the Lindsay brothers to heel behind him, axes in hand.
“It’s her kill,” he said, in his husking croak. “Do what she says.” He squared his shoulders and gave the other men a look that strongly suggested there should be no further controversy.
Seeing this, Fergus had shrugged and bent to seize the beast—one-handed—by its spindly tail.
“Where will you have us put it, madame?” he asked politely. The men had all laughed, and then with sheepish glances and shrugs of resignation, reluctantly pitched in as well, following her directions.
Brianna had given Roger a look of surprise, then gratitude, and then—the bit firmly between her teeth—had taken charge of the whole enterprise, with remarkable results. It was barely nightfall, and the butchery was almost done, the meat distributed to all the households on the Ridge. She knew everyone, knew the number of mouths in each cabin, and parceled out the meat and sweetbreads as they were cut. Not even Jamie could have managed it better, I thought, feeling a warm swell of pride in her.
I glanced across at the table, where Jamie lay swaddled in blankets. I had wanted to move him upstairs to his bed, but he had insisted on staying downstairs, where he could hear—if not see—what was going on.
“They’re nearly finished with the butchering,” I said, coming to lay a hand on his head. Still flushed and blazing. “Brianna’s done a wonderful job of it,” I added, to distract both of us.
“Has she?” His eyes were half-open, but fixed in a fever-stare; that dream-soaked daze where shadows writhe in the wavering hot air over a fire. As I spoke, though, he came slowly back from wherever he had been, and his eyes met mine, heavy-lidded but clear, and he smiled faintly. “That’s good.”
The hide had been pegged out to dry, the enormous liver sliced for quick searing, intestines taken to soak for cleaning, haunches to the shed for smoking, strips of meat taken off for drying into jerky, fat for rendering into suet and soap. Once stripped bare, the bones would be boiled for soup, salvaged for buttons.
The prized hooves and horns sat bloodily discreet on my counter, brought in by Murdo Lindsay. Tacit trophies, I supposed; the eighteenth-century equivalent of two ears and a tail. I had got the gallbladder, too, though that was simply by default; no one wanted it, but it was popularly assumed that I must have some medicinal use for almost any natural object. A greenish thing the size of my fist, it sat oozing in a dish, looking rather sinister next to the set of detached and muddy hooves.
Everyone on the Ridge had come at the news—even Ronnie Sinclair, from his cooper’s shop at the foot of the slope—and little remained of the buffalo now, save a rack of scavenged bones. I caught the faint odor of roasting meat, of burning hickory wood and coffee, and pushed up the window all the way to let in the appetizing smells.
Laughter and the crackle of fire came in on a gust of cold wind. It was warm in the surgery now, and the cold air from the window felt good against my flushed cheeks.
“Are you hungry, Jamie?” I asked. I was starving myself; though I hadn’t realized it ’til I smelled food. I closed my eyes and inhaled, buoyed up by the hearty scent of liver and onions.
“No,” he said, sounding drowsy. “I dinna fancy anything.”
“You should eat a bit of soup, if you can, before you fall asleep.” I turned and smoothed the hair off his face, frowning a little as I looked at him. The flush had faded a bit, I thought—hard to tell for sure in the uncertain light of fire and candle. We had got enough honey-water and herb tea into him so that his eyes were no longer sunken with dehydration, but the bones of cheek and jaw were still prominent; he hadn’t eaten in more than forty-eight hours, and the fever was consuming an immense amount of energy, consuming his tissues.
“D’ye need more hot water, ma’am?” Lizzie appeared in the doorway, looking more disheveled than usual, Jemmy clutched in her arms. She had lost her kerch and her fine, fair hair had escaped from its bun; Jemmy had a good handful of it in his chubby fist, and was yanking fretfully at it, making her squint with each yank.
“Mama-mama-mama,” he said, in an escalating whine that made it obvious that he’d been saying the same thing for quite some time. “Mama-mama-MAMA!”
“No, I have enough; thank you, Lizzie. Stop that, young man,” I said, getting hold of Jemmy’s hand and forcibly unpeeling his fat little fingers. “We don’t pull hair.” There was a small chuckle from the nest of blankets on the table behind me.
“Ye’d never ken it to look at ye, Sassenach.”
“Mm?” I turned my head and stared blankly at him for a moment, then followed the direction of his glance with my hand. Sure enough, my own cap had somehow disappeared, and my hair was standing out like a bramblebush. Attracted by the word “hair,” Jemmy abandoned Lizzie’s fine locks, leaned over, and grabbed a fistful of mine.
“Mama-mama-mama-mama . . .”
“Foo,” I said, crossly, reaching to disentangle him. “Let go, you little fiend. And why aren’t you in bed, anyway?”
“MAMA-MAMA-MAMA . . .”
“He wants his mother,” Lizzie explained, rather redundantly. “I’ve put him in his cot a dozen times, but he’ll be climbin’ out again, the instant my back’s turned. I couldna keep him—”
The outer door opened, letting in a strong draft that made the embers in the brazier glow and smoke, and I heard the pad of bare feet on the oak boards in the hall.
I’d heard the expression, “blood to the eyebrows” before, but I hadn’t seen it all that often, at least not outside the confines of a battlefield. Brianna’s eyebrows were invisible, being red enough to have blended into the mask of gore over her face. Jemmy took a good look at her, and turned down his mouth in an expression of doubtful distress, just this side of outright wails.
“It’s me, baby,” she reassured him. She reached a hand toward him, but stopped short of touching him. He didn’t cry, but burrowed his face into Lizzie’s shoulder, rejecting the notion that this apocalyptic vision had anything at all to do with the mother he’d been fussing for a few minutes earlier.
Brianna ignored both her son’s rejection and the fact that she was leaving footprints composed in equal parts of mud and blood all over the floor.
“Look,” she said, holding out a closed fist to me. Her hands were caked with dried blood, her fingernails crescents of black. She reverently uncurled her fingers to show me her treasure; a handful of tiny, wriggling white worms that made my heart give a quick bump of excitement.
“Are they the right kind?” she asked anxiously.
“I think so; let me check.” I hastily dumped the wet leaves from the herb tea onto a small plate, to give the worms a temporary refuge. Brianna gently deposited them on the mangled foliage and carried the plate to the counter where my microscope stood, as though the plate bore specks of gold dust, rather than maggots.
I picked up one of the worms with the edge of a fingernail, and deposited it on a glass slide, where it writhed unhappily in a futile search for nourishment. I beckoned to Bree to bring me another candle.
“Nothing but a mouth and a gut,” I muttered, tilting the mirror to catch the light. It was much too dim for microscopic work, but might just be sufficient for this. “Voracious little buggers.”
I held my breath, peering through the fragile eyepiece, straining to see. Ordinary blow-fly and flesh-fly larvae had one line visible on the body; screw-worm larvae had two. The lines were faint, invisible to the naked eye, but very important. Blow-fly maggots ate carrion, and only carrion—dead, decaying flesh. Screw-worm larvae burrowed into the living flesh, and consumed the live muscle and blood of their host. Nothing I wanted to insert into a fresh wound!
I closed one eye, to let the other adapt to the moving shadows in the eyepiece. The dark cylinder of the maggot’s body writhed, twisting in all directions at once. One line was clearly visible. Was that another? I squinted until my eye began to water, but could see no more. Letting out the breath I’d been holding, I relaxed.
“Congratulations, Da,” Brianna said, moving to Jamie’s side. He opened one eye, which passed with a marked lack of enthusiasm down Brianna’s figure. Stripped to a knee-length shift for butchering, she was splotched from head to toe with gouts of dark blood, and the muslin had stuck to her in random patches.
“Oh, aye?” he said. “For what?”
“The maggots. You did it,” she explained. She opened her other hand, revealing a misshapen blob of metal—a squashed rifle-ball. “The maggots were in a wound in the hindquarters—I dug this out of the hole behind them.”
I laughed, as much from relief as from amusement.
“Jamie! You shot it in the arse?”
Jamie’s mouth twitched a little.
“I didna think I’d hit it at all,” he said. “I was only trying to turn the herd toward Fergus.” He reached up a slow hand and took the ball, rolling it gently between his fingers.
“Maybe you should keep it for good luck,” Brianna said. She spoke lightly, but I could see the furrow between her invisible brows. “Or to bite on while Mama’s working on your leg.”
“Too late,” he said, with a very faint smile.
It was then she caught sight of the small leather strip that lay on the table near his head, marked with overlapping crescents—the deep imprints of Jamie’s teeth. She glanced at me, appalled. I lifted one shoulder slightly. I had spent more than an hour cleaning the wound in his leg, and it hadn’t been easy on either of us.
I cleared my throat, and turned back to the maggots. From the corner of my eye, I saw Bree lay the back of her hand gently against Jamie’s cheek. He turned his head and kissed her knuckles, blood notwithstanding.
“Dinna fash, lassie,” he said. His voice was faint, but steady. “I’m fine.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but caught sight of Bree’s face and bit my tongue instead. She’d been working hard, and still had Jemmy and Roger to care for; she needn’t worry for Jamie, too—not yet.
I dropped the maggots into a small bowl of sterile water and swished them rapidly round, then dumped them back on the bed of wet leaves.
“It won’t hurt,” I said to Jamie, trying to reassure myself as much as him.
“Oh, aye,” he said, with an unbecoming cynicism. “I’ve heard that one before.”
“Actually, she’s right,” said a soft, rasping voice behind me. Roger had already had a quick wash; his dark hair lay damp against his collar, and his clothes were clean. Jemmy, half asleep, lay against his father’s shoulder, dreamily sucking his thumb. Roger came over to the table to look down at Jamie.
“How is it, man?” he said quietly.
Jamie moved his head on the pillow, dismissive of discomfort.
“I’ll do.”
“That’s good.” To my surprise, Roger grasped Jamie’s shoulder in a brief gesture of comfort. I’d never seen him do that before, and once more I wondered just what had passed between them on the mountain.
“Marsali’s bringing up some beef tea—or rather, buffalo tea—for him,” Roger said, frowning slightly as he looked at me. “Maybe you’d best be having some, too.”
“Good idea,” I said. I closed my eyes briefly and took a deep breath.
Only when I sat down did I realize that I had been on my feet since the early morning. Pain outlined every bone in my feet and legs, and I could feel the ache where I had broken my left tibia, a few years before. Duty called, though.
“Well, time and tide wait for no maggot,” I said, struggling back to my feet. “Best get on with it.”
Jamie gave a small snort and stretched, then relaxed, his long body reluctantly readying itself. He watched with resignation while I fetched the plate of maggots and my forceps, then reached for the leather strip by his head.
“You’ll not need that,” Roger said. He pulled up another stool and sat down. “It’s true what she said, the wee beasts don’t hurt.”
Jamie snorted again, and Roger grinned at him.
“Mind,” he said, “they tickle something fierce. That’s only if ye think about it, though. If ye can keep all thought of them out of your mind, why, there’s nothing to it.”
Jamie eyed him.
“Ye’re a great comfort, MacKenzie,” he said.
“Thanks,” said Roger, with a husk of a laugh. “Here, I brought ye something.” He leaned forward and deposited a drowsy Jemmy into Jamie’s arms. The little boy uttered a small squawk of surprise, then relaxed as Jamie’s arms tightened about him in reflex. One chubby hand swung free, seeking anchorage, then found it.
“Hot,” he murmured, smiling beatifically. Fist twined in Jamie’s ruddy hair, he sighed deeply and went soundly to sleep on his grandfather’s fever-warm chest.
Jamie narrowed his eyes at me as I picked up the forceps. Then he gave a slight shrug, laid his stubbled cheek gently against Jemmy’s silk-bright hair, and closed his own eyes, though the tenseness in his features was a marked contrast to the rounded peace of Jemmy’s.
It couldn’t have been easier; I simply lifted away the fresh onion poultice, and tucked the maggots one by one into the ulcerated slashmarks on Jamie’s calf. Roger circled behind me to watch.
“It looks almost like a leg again,” he said, sounding surprised. “I never thought it would.”
I smiled, though I didn’t look round at him, too intent on my delicate work. “Leeches are very effective,” I said. “Though your rather crude knifework may have been useful, too—you left big enough holes that the pus and fluid were able to drain; that helped.”
It was true; while the limb was still hot and grossly discolored, the swelling had subsided markedly. The long stretch of shinbone and the delicate arch of foot and ankle were once more visible. I was under no illusion about the dangers still remaining—infection, gangrene, sloughing—but nonetheless, my heart grew lighter. It was recognizably Jamie’s leg.
I pinched another maggot just behind the head with my forceps, careful not to crush it. I lifted the edge of the skin with the slender probe I held in my other hand, and deftly inserted the tiny, wiggling thing into the small pocket thus provided—trying to ignore the nastily spongy feel of the flesh under my fingers, and my memory of Aaron Beardsley’s foot.
“Done,” I said, a moment later, and gently replaced the poultice. Stewed onion and garlic wrapped in muslin and soaked with penicillin broth would keep the wounds moist and draining. Renewed every hour or so, I hoped that the warmth of the poultices would also encourage circulation in the leg. And then a dressing of honey, to prevent any further bacterial invasions.
Concentration alone had kept my hands steady. Now it was done, and there was nothing more to do but wait. The saucer of wet leaves rattled against the counter as I set it down.
I didn’t think I had ever been so tired before.