“But I thought you said there wasn’t time to help free Atticus.”
“I negotiated,” Drusilla said. “Everything in Paducah is a negotiation. Anything can be bought for the right price. Let’s keep moving. Less talk. It expels too much energy.”
Having to agree, I didn’t say another word. I wanted to tell Drusilla how grateful I was to her, how I would never forget her for as long as I lived—I wanted to take her into my arms and embrace her as my friend. But no energy or time could be spared for such things.
A “little ways” turned out to be the longest fifteen minutes I had ever walked, and when I saw the “carriage”, which was just a small flatbed utility trailer on two wheels pulled by a man on a horse, relief flooded me, and lent extra movement to my exhausted, pain-stricken legs.
The man on the horse jumped down.
“How in the world did you two carry this man all that way?” the man asked as he reached for Atticus’ arm, draping it over his own shoulder to relieve me and Drusilla. The man was as tall as Atticus, maybe taller, and easily helped him onto the utility trailer without our help.
“With difficulty,” Drusilla answered.
She turned to me then, cupped my elbows in the palms of her hands, and peered into my eyes. “When you get to the river,” she began, “there should be a flat-bottom raft hidden in the woods not far from where he leaves you. I don’t know where myself, or even if it’s there; I just know that it’s supposed to be. I can’t say you’ll be safer on the river, but I can say it’ll be faster.”
“Why don’t you go with us?” I reversed our arms, cupped Drusilla’s elbows instead. “You can leave this place and travel with us to—.” I stopped myself. My whole heart trusted Drusilla, but I had learned too many lessons on The Road.
“I have to stay,” Drusilla insisted.
I squeezed her elbows.
“But these people are—”
“They’re negotiable,” Drusilla cut in; her brown eyes enriched by her smile. “Now go”—she took me into a hug—“and make it to your destination safely. I will pray for you.”
The hug broke, and our hands fell slowly from one another.
“I will do the same for you,” I told her, and then I climbed onto the trailer with Atticus who lay on his back, his eyes closed.
I heard the rider’s heels tap the horse’s sides, and the clicking of his tongue against the roof of his mouth to instruct movement.
“Thank you again,” I called out as the horse pulled us away. “I will never forget you.”
Under the blue-gray moonlight and a black sky full of stars, Drusilla raised a delicate hand into the air and waved me good-bye.
“Good-bye, my friend,” I said, though Drusilla was too far away now to have heard.
64
THAIS & (ATTICUS)
The carriage driver talked too much as he carried on about a million unimportant things I could not bother myself with: his dead sons, his long-lost wife, the state of things in Kentucky, his run-ins with bandits and thieves, his aching hip, his self-diagnosed throat cancer which gave him a voice as rough as an un-oiled engine—all I could think about was Atticus. His wounds were not life-threatening insofar as I could tell, but they needed to be cleaned and stitched and cleaned again or else the infection would become life-threatening. I shook my head thinking to myself how I’d warned him about this a long time ago, before we’d found the cabin. But it wasn’t his fault he was wounded now. I just wished it was as minor as it had been before. These wounds were deep, and he’d already bled a lot before I’d tied them off with pieces of my skirt. He was alive, and he wasn’t feverish yet, so that gave me some relief.
But why was he not waking up?
Atticus going in and out of consciousness worried me the most. How much blood had he lost? Concussion? His face had been beaten badly—severe head injury? It could be several things, and all of them I knew there wasn’t anything I could do for. But he could’ve been just exhausted, too. I hoped that was all it was.
“Do you know where I can get medical supplies?” I asked the man, knowing it was a longshot.
“Nah,” the man answered, glancing back at me. “No such thing. Not way out here anyway. Now in the Big Cities, you can find just about anything. Of course, you’d fare better without it than risk going to the Big Cities. Nothing but madness in there. You know I always knew this’d be how things turned out if the world ever ended in my lifetime. I used to tell my…”
I let his words fade on the warm night air.
I laid down beside Atticus, as closely as I could without touching the visible injuries, and careful about the ones I could not see. And as I lay there on my side watching him, stroking his forehead with my fingers, I fought the urge to cry like I always did.
“I’m going to take care of you,” I whispered. “I’m not going to let you die—God won’t let you die; He needs you here as much as I do”—I traced his eyebrow with my fingertip—“You’re going to be all right. You have to be…you have to be…” I swallowed, and sniffled back the sting in my sinuses, and then lay my head beside his bare arm and watched the stars move across the sky as we traveled beneath it.
I fought sleep, but sleep won.
The popping of gravel beneath the wheels of the utility trailer as it veered off the smooth road and went into the woods woke me in the morning. And it woke Atticus—he moaned through the pain, and tried to reposition himself on the wooden trailer floor but could barely move, and the tires going over rough, uneven surface made the whole thing shake and jolt, sending shockwaves of pain through Atticus’ body.
“Ahh! Damn…” he called out, his face contorted.
“Stop the horse!” I told the driver; I sat up beside Atticus—relieved he hadn’t fallen into a coma while he slept—and tried to hold his hand, but he winced and grunted when I touched his fingers.
I jerked my hand away and looked down at his; his middle and index fingers were swollen like sausages, and I was sure they were broken. Why didn’t I notice that before?
In the daylight, I saw the extent of his injuries: red-black bruising went around his right elbow and traveled up his arm—dislocated elbow, I was sure of that too, judging the awkward angle. There were three stab wounds—left arm, right thigh, right hip—and although they were deep, the blade had only cut through flesh, leaving veins and arteries untouched; he would have bled a lot more, and already be dead by now if otherwise, I assumed. On one side of his face he didn’t look like Atticus: his left eye was swollen shut, discolored by bruising and blood blisters. His lips were twice as big as they were supposed to be, and blood continuously trickled from the bottom lip where the split flesh was stretched too tightly by the bruising to close properly; every movement he made with his mouth just split it further.
And there was blood in the white of his right eye, I saw when he pried it open and looked up at me.