Читать книгу Watershed - Mark Barr - Страница 12

CHAPTER FOUR

CLAIRE LAY ON HER MOTHER’S BED WITH HER UNDERPANTS bunched up in her fist, her skirts rolled back while Doc Peters made the burning alternately better then worse with his hands. Her mother had sent Tom to the store for groceries, had taken little Nan out under the big oak. There was no door between her mother’s room and the kitchen, and none between the kitchen and the front room. Claire found herself staring absently at the living room curtains where the light played through the trees.

“Here, too?” Doc said, raising his face to look up at her.

Claire nodded, wincing. Doc sat up straight, shaking his head. In the afternoon heat, the house was stifling, and his face shone with sweat.

“Looks like the old mining camp special is making a comeback. Nasty stuff. You’re the third case this month.” He wiped his hands on a towel. “You’re lucky. Three years ago I couldn’t do a thing for this, but the Germans have come up with a medicine. I’ll write to Memphis for some.”

Claire smoothed her skirts down. “Who were the men you treated?”

“Oh, I can’t tell you that.” But Claire saw him quickly search her with his eyes first.

“Travis was one of them,” she said.

Doc considered, then said, “He was.” He began gathering the instruments that he’d spread out on the bedside. “I never figured that he’d be bringing it home, though, Claire. Else, I would have given him a sterner lecture. I figured that you two were quits in that department if he’d taken to doing what he was doing.” He patted Claire on the thigh. “You ask me, he has a woman like you at home, he’s got no business looking elsewhere.”

Claire’s lips pressed into a hard line. She pulled her leg away from Doc’s hand.

“Did he say who he caught it from? Which one of them?”

Doc shook his head, stood up. “He didn’t say. I didn’t ask.”

“You should have.”

Doc considered her. “It don’t do for a lady to trouble herself with some things. Knowing who she was wouldn’t change the situation, except that you’d have one more thing eating at you, and that one they don’t make a medicine for.”

“I’ve got two kids, Doc. They don’t have a daddy around anymore.”

Doc rolled his shirtsleeves down. He looked at her, moved his jaw ruminatively.

“Who did that other fella get it from?” she asked.

“Some gal from that place over the old gas station. But there’s nothing to say it was the same woman.”

“It’s enough for me to think on.” She walked Doc to the front door.

“I’ll wire to Memphis for those sulfas,” he said. “It might take a few days.”

“It can’t get here too soon.” She imagined the wait. A week seemed like a long time.

“I’ll send word when it arrives. And, Claire, on that other business, don’t go making trouble. Probably coincidence.”

“Thanks for seeing me so quick, Doc.”

He nodded and went out onto the porch. “Eliza, she’ll be fine,” he said to her mother, who sat under the tree arranging sticks with Nan.

“She’d better be, at your prices,” her mother said. Doc took this in with an uncomfortable smile and went out into the sun.

Claire picked Nan up. The child smiled at her, offered one of the twigs. Claire pressed her forehead against her daughter’s, kissed her nose. By the same age, Tom had been a chatterbox, making up his own singsong language, but Nan remained mute. Children took their own sweet time, Claire knew. There was no measuring stick for progress.

A figure came along the road and she looked up, thinking it was Doc back with something he had forgotten, but it was Travis.

“Mama, take Nan back into the house,” she said, handing the child to Eliza.

Travis didn’t look like he’d bathed after the workday. The front of his coveralls were stiff with mud and concrete. His hat was pulled down tightly on his head, but she could see enough of his eyes to know he’d been drinking. For courage, no doubt. Claire started after her mother.

“Claire,” he called. “Dammit, Claire! Wait. I want to talk to you.”

“I don’t feel much like talking to you,” Claire said, hurrying for the house.

He broke into a loping run, and Claire began running herself. Her mother had left the door open and Claire closed it quickly and threw the latch. Travis loomed in the glass, a large, dark shape against the curtains. The door rattled as he shook the knob.

“Claire,” he said, his voice low but loud enough for her to hear. She grasped the knob herself now. She saw his hand rise to shade his eyes. He leaned his head close to the glass to peer through. The door shook again, and this time pictures all along the front wall rattled.

Now her mother was at her shoulder.

“Let him in, child,” she said. “Before he pulls the door off the hinges.”

The shape leaned to the glass again.

“Claire, I’m taking the car. I ain’t walking all the way into town every morning.”

“Take it,” Claire said. “Is that what you came for? Then go on.”

“No, that’s not what I came for,” he said. “I…” There was a pause, and then the shape moved away from the window.

When she heard his voice again, it was farther out in the yard. She lifted a curtain and saw Tom talking with him. The boy stood holding the bag of groceries, his father standing over him with hands thrust into pockets, his big shoulders hunched as he talked. Claire started to go out and rescue her son, but something in Tom’s face told her that the boy was taking care of himself. He nodded respectfully, hearing his father out, the tight-lipped expression never leaving his face. When Travis finally went to the car and drove away, Tom watched until he was out of sight and then came to the house. Claire opened the door for him, taking one of the sacks. The boy’s eyes showed strain.

“What did he want?” Claire asked.

“He said that it’s all a big misunderstanding,” the boy said.

“Like hell it is,” Claire said.

After the groceries were put away, Claire left Nan with her mother and followed the path behind the house out into the trees along the ridge. She’d spent half her childhood running around these woods. The trees had grown in the decade she’d missed and the trail had given over to underbrush in places, but she found she still knew her way. The path ended at a bluff that looked over a small valley and she rested herself on an outcropping of rocks. The wind was pushing up the valley. She watched it play over the green tree tops below her, the leaves dancing as the breeze brushed along the bluff face.

She didn’t much care that Travis had taken the car beyond a feeling of disappointment at his selfishness. But beneath that, her anger ran like a strong, black current. It puzzled her how easily love rolled over to become something darker, colder. And beyond the sting was the surprise at how easily it all fell away. Everything that she’d worked toward since she was a girl, finding a man to marry, starting a family, making a home, Travis had soiled with his betrayal, leaving her life split open along the seam that had joined her to him. Her sudden freedom was bewildering and a shock, but pleasing as well, though she couldn’t quite put a name to the sensation.

She knew she’d have to go back to him, for the children’s sake, if not her own. But not yet. Let him stew a while more. Let him drive that car around alone for all the town to see. She knew there’d be gossip, but she was beyond caring about that now.

The days passed as Claire and the children found new patterns to their lives in her mother’s house, then the bulk of a week, the rusted snag in her pelvis her constant companion. On Tuesday morning, she awoke in the dark of the predawn, the covers of her pallet twisted about her on the floor. The heat from the infection was a recurring wave now, washing over her, threatening to submerge her entirely. She sat up and pushed her hair from her eyes. Tom lay quietly on the couch, Nan sprawled full length across Eliza’s chair. Claire rose and made her way out onto the porch, where the morning air was already hot and sticky. When she stood, her legs were unsure beneath her. She found her way to the outhouse.

Though Claire never forgot it was to come, when she let her water go, the burning was a surprise. The initial shock was the worst, and she spasmed, squeezing her bare knees in her hands. Each time she hoped it would be better.

The evening before, Doc Peters had sent word that the sulfas hadn’t shown up yet, that he would write to Memphis again.

When she was finished and stood, Claire had to grip the door as a wave of dizziness took hold of her. She pushed her nightgown back down and padded barefoot into the yard.

She made it as far as the porch before she had to sit down. A truck passed on the road, field workers who watched her intently as they went by. Embarrassed to be seen in her nightgown, she stood up again and a coolness came over her. She pushed her hair back from her eyes and discovered she was sweating freely.

Claire went to the iron stove that squatted in the middle of the kitchen, swung its belly open. She took the ash can from the corner with the small shovel, and she began scooping the cold ashes from the stove. When she had cleared enough, she put the can back in the corner for Tom to take out later and began to bring in wood from the pile outside the back door. The logs were from the big windstorm three years back. Some had sat on the ground for too long and were spongy with rot. As she picked each one up, Claire turned it on end and tapped it against the others to roust the spiders and pill bugs. Twice she was overcome with dizziness and had to drop into the chair next to the stove.

When she had loaded enough wood to get breakfast cooked, she gave the flue handle three cranks to clear it and got the big box of matches from the top shelf. She touched the match to a pile of twigs and leaves. They started up quickly with a quiet crackling, but the smoke pooled around the burning twigs, and the flame faded to nothing.

“Draft,” Claire muttered to herself, and gave the flue handle another few cranks. She went through the front room and into the yard. She looked about for leaves that were dry enough, but could only gather the ones from the top of the piles as those farther down were on their way to becoming dirt again. When she had filled the hem of her nightshirt, she went back to the kitchen and thrust the pile of them into the open mouth of the stove. When she put the match to the leaves, they caught quickly and the fire spread. Claire began to feed twigs into the fire, slowly using larger and larger kindling until she was sure that it had taken and was drawing well. She latched the door closed.

Next she got the big skillet down from the shelf and put it atop the stove. Her mother kept a crock of bacon grease, and Claire put a spoonful into the skillet. It would take nearly an hour for the stove to get hot enough to cook on, and the grease would tell her when it was ready.

Tom hadn’t refilled the cedar bucket of well water that stood to one side of the back door before going to bed, so Claire removed the lid and took the bucket down to the stone well. The worn path through the field grass had been padded smooth by a thousand trips before, and the ground was cool and damp against her feet. The well had its own bucket tied to a lift rope, and Claire dropped it down, feeding out rope until the well took no more and she knew that she’d reached water. Her pa had long ago tacked a horseshoe to one lip so the bucket would turn over. Claire counted to three and then began hauling. As a child, she’d pulled water from the well, and she watched for the old knots that she knew marked the halfway point. The sustained effort of hauling the water made her breath come strangely short, and Claire had to steady herself for fear that she would drop the bucket and have to start over. She counted one knot, then two, then the bucket was at the lip of the well, the water clear and cold. A dipper hung on the well wall and she drank to wet her dry mouth. Then she transferred the water to the cedar bucket and began lugging it back to the house.

She put the cedar bucket back in its place beside the door and covered it once again. In the skillet, the grease’s shape had softened somewhat. Claire took the tin coffee pot and filled it from the cedar bucket, setting it next atop the stove. It would take nearly as long as the skillet. Claire sat once again. When she brought her hand before her face, she saw that it had a mild shake to it that try as she might, she could not still. There were coffee beans to grind, but Claire found that she couldn’t command her legs to stand. She was still sitting there, eyes shut, the coffee pot lid gripped in one hand, when her mother came in an hour later to the sounds of sizzling grease. The coffee pot had boiled dry.