Walk on Earth a Stranger
Page 60

“Bite down on this,” Jasper says, reaching a leather-wrapped bit toward the Major’s mouth.
Craven turns away his head. “Just be careful how high you cut,” he says. “I might want to use some of those parts later.”
“I won’t cut any higher than your knee,” Jasper says. He fits the bit into the Major’s mouth. “I’m tying a tourniquet around your leg. This is going to pinch, but it’s got to be tight.”
The Major nods.
Jasper works quickly and efficiently. “Are you ready?”
The Major squeezes his eyes shut and nods again.
“God be with you—with us all,” Jasper says. “Knife.”
I hand him the hunting knife, handle first, then I concentrate on the Major’s face, so I don’t have to see what else is going on. I’ve butchered deer, sure, but the Major is a man, and alive.
I wince at the sound of the blade biting into flesh. The Major clamps down on the bit and grunts. His shoulders curl, and he starts to rise up.
“Hold him!” Jasper snaps.
I press his shoulders back down until he stills.
“Saw,” Jasper says, and puts the handle of the bloody knife in his mouth, between his teeth. I hand him the hacksaw. The scrape of metal on bone makes the hair on my neck stand on end.
The Major’s nostrils flare as he pants through his nose. Tears leak from the corners of squeezed-shut eyes. “You’re doing fine,” I tell him, though I have no idea if it’s true.
The sawing goes on and on, and bone dust fills the wagon, making the air smell like a wet dog. The Major shakes his head back and forth. He cries through the bit, jerking his bad leg.
Jasper spits out the knife. “Hold it down,” he says. “Hold it down so I can finish!”
I grab the Major’s thigh with both hands and press hard. Jasper goes at it again with the saw. I turn my head away as a strange squealing leaks from the Major’s lungs. Jasper picks up the knife to make a few last cuts, but I refuse to watch. With a heavy thump, the leg falls off the box and onto the bed.
“Needle,” he says. I hold the leg down with one hand, even though the Major isn’t kicking anymore, and grab the needle. It’s already threaded with gut. “Be ready to cut the thread when I tell you.”
I pick up the shears and wait while he sews. The tiny wagon smells of fresh blood now, which is a vast improvement on bone dust and sour flesh. The Major is as still as death. I peer close and am relieved to see his chest rise with a breath.
“Cut,” Jasper says.
I snip where he indicates.
“Towels.”
I hand him the clean towels, which he packs at the base of the Major’s stump. He wipes his hand on the last clean towel, and he pulls the bit from the Major’s mouth and checks his pulse.
“Well, he’s alive for now,” Jasper says. “You did good work.”
“Thanks.” I hardly did anything. Just held the man down and tried not to be sick.
We climb from the wagon to find Henry offering another pot of clean water. Tom stands beside him with a stopwatch. “Five minutes, twenty-seven seconds,” he says. “Nowhere near Liston’s record.”
Henry’s smile is squeamish. “But not bad for your first time.”
“Your first time?” I say. “I thought you said you were a doctor!”
“I said I want to be a doctor.” Jasper scrubs his hands again. Triumph fills his face. A man lies near death in his wagon, but Jasper is grinning from ear to ear. “That’s the exciting thing about California—we can all go there and be whatever we want to be.”
I peel off the white shirt and toss it back to Henry. “Well, if he lives, then I guess you really are a doctor.”
“What do you want to be, Lee?” Jasper says. His face is euphoric enough to make me wonder if he snuck some laudanum, but the look he’s giving me is pointed and strange, like he’s searching for a specific answer, one I’m not ready to give voice to.
“Right now? I want to be asleep.”
All three laugh at that. Jasper says, “You know, you helped save two lives today.”
“And if I don’t lie down right now, I’m going to die.”
I can tell Jasper wants to talk more—he’s all wound up from what he’s just done, and I don’t blame him—but I can hardly stay on my feet. I make my good-byes and stumble away.
Jefferson is still asleep under the Joyners’ wagon. I flop down beside him, exhausted, but I can’t sleep for thinking about the preacher’s wife and little Andy wandering around lost and my own baby brother and the Major and even Athena the cow. Above it all rises the possibility, both wondrous and frightful, that the college men have realized I’m a girl. And they didn’t seem even a little bit angry.
When I wake, the Major is still alive. He does not die that day. Or the next.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Summer brings blazing sun and hot winds. The horizon shimmers gold with long, waving grass all dried out and gone to seed. Above it is a sea of sky, crystal blue and stretching forever. The Missouri men insist we’re near the mountains, and indeed, our trail has a slope to it, so gentle you’d never know until you stop the wagons without braking them and watch them roll back a piece. For several weeks, we make excellent time, and on July 3, we make twenty whole miles in one day.
Frank Dilley is so pleased with our progress that he announces a half day’s rest to celebrate Independence Day. We roll out before the sun rises.
“I’m going to go ride with the Hoffmans,” Jefferson says after we’ve mounted up.
“Oh.” It’s such a pretty day, and I was looking forward to riding together. “All right.”
“Do you want to come?”
“I . . . Okay.”
My stomach is in a tangle as we approach the wagon. I know I’ve done the Hoffmans wrong, and I’m not sure how to make right. But when Therese sees me coming, she grins ear to ear and says, “Hallo, Lee!” And that’s that.
She chatters our ears off the whole time, about her brother Otto, who got his arm stuck in a hole while trying to catch a prairie dog; about one of the Missouri men, who whistles at her every time he walks by; and about the tiny mouse that got into Doreen’s bedroll last night and made her squeal like a baby pig.
Seeing the two of them together puts a sting in my chest—the way they laugh so easily, the way she walks beside the sorrel mare with a hand resting on the stirrup or possibly Jefferson’s boot. But Jeff was right; Therese is as warm-hearted as she is pretty, and she gives no indication that she ever thought me unfriendly. Despite the way she gazes at Jeff all the time, I’m sorry I avoided her so long. Friends are hard to come by, and I wasted too much time on the trail being blockheaded.
By noon we’ve traveled eight miles and reached a small creek. It’s barely more than a trickle. Another week of dry weather will turn it into an empty, graveled ditch. The mud on either bank is plowed into long ruts and dried solid—monuments to the wagon wheels that have gone before us.
We make camp with the sun still high. We’re to have a feast tonight, and everyone contributes. Jefferson tickles a couple of trout from the creek. The Missouri men share some coffee—they’re the only ones with any real coffee left—and Mrs. Hoffman makes a mountain of flapjacks and serves them with honest-to-God black-currant jam that she said she was saving for a special occasion. When the college men reveal a bottle of whiskey they’re willing to share, I expect Reverend Lowrey to launch into a sermon about drunkenness and debauchery. Instead, a rare smile splits his face, and he extols the many virtues of partaking in moderation, as exemplified by God’s own Son, who turned water into wine.