Bittersweet (41 page)

“Don’t talk,” Sarah said. “I just needed to know you were here.”

“I’m here.” He closed his eyes and let his head roll on the pillow, side to side, just a fraction of an inch. Around his eyes the flesh was blue and sunken. “God, I hurt, Sarah.”

She stroked his forehead and hummed softly, a lullaby from her childhood.

“I’m hurt bad.”

She crept onto the bed beside him, and though she was as gentle as she could be, he moaned when her weight made the mattress shift. She lay on her side, watching his profile, the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. With an effort he moved his hand into both of hers.

The rooster crowed a premature dawn near three-thirty, and Sarah moved for the first time since she’d lain down at her husband’s side. Her limbs were cramped and stiff. Slowly she crept from the bed. Already Coby was stirring, and a reassuring morning clatter sounded faintly from the direction of the kitchen.

Matthew and Coby had breakfasted. Sarah put a note on the
bar and weighted it down with a coffee tin: “Help yourself. Food’s in the kitchen. Whiskey’s under the bar. Leave money in the can.”

While his mother and Coby loaded the wagon, Matthew hung anxiously about, underfoot, numbed by the sight of adults afraid. Finally, Sarah stopped long enough to notice him. “You’re a good boy.” She smiled for him and kissed his cheek. He was so tall she no longer knelt to embrace him. “Coby and I are going to bring Karl out to the wagon now. Could you run ahead and get all the doors for us?”

“I can carry.”

“Just the doors’ll be best for now.”

As upright as a sentry, Matthew stood at the bedroom door while Sarah and Coby murmured together at the foot of the bed. Karl seemed unaware of them and didn’t respond until Sarah spoke his name. His breathing was shallow and the muscles of his jaws were knotted against the pain.

Coby took one side of the blanket, clutching it near the injured man’s shoulder and knee. Sarah did the same, and on a count of three they lifted him just clear of the bed and lowered the improvised hammock, with him in it, to the floor. They dragged him down the hall and out through the main room, Matthew scurrying ahead to pull rugs out of the way and see that the doors stayed wide. Coby had the wagon near the house, backed up to the steps.

They paused a moment on the porch to let Sarah rest, and Coby talked quietly with Matthew while she saw to Karl. He was barely conscious; the pain had dulled his eyes and shortened his breath. Beads of sweat studded his forehead and upper lip. Sarah pulled a towel from the waistband of her skirt and blotted his face. “Just a little more and we’re done. Just a little more,” she whispered. “Okay,” she said to the hired man, and they took up the corners of the blanket again.

Matthew’s mattress was on the wagon bed, with most of the house’s pillows and blankets beside it. Sarah tucked the bedding snugly around Karl so he couldn’t roll, slipped a pillow under his head, and settled herself beside him.

All morning they drove south and west, the sun warm on their backs and the shadows retreating before them. No one spoke much. Coby sat with his shoulders hunched, his blue eyes riveted to the rutted wagon road, conning the horses painstakingly around potholes and rocks. The boy sat quietly, sometimes facing forward,
sometimes backward, his legs dangling over the bed, where he could see his mother. Sarah had moved; her back was to Coby and Matthew, and she was cradling her husband’s head in her lap.

June touched the desert with a pale tinge of green, and the air was sweet with the scent of the bitterbrush in bloom. Along the roadside, on drab bushes of dusty green, fragile white poppies, the size of a woman’s palm, blossomed, and the blue of lupine mixed with the gray of sage. There was no wind. It was so still that the whistle of a hawk’s wings as it dove brought Sarah’s eyes up. Karl heard it too, and together they watched it pull up on canted wings, a limp brown shape clutched in its talons. The bird circled just above the hilltops, fighting for altitude, the weight of its prey dragging it earthward. Then its wings trembled as it found an updraft, and it soared in solemn, majestic circles.

“I never dreamt I could fly,” Sarah said. “Mam said everybody did. But I didn’t.”

“I still do.” Karl smiled, the corners of the wide mouth turning up almost imperceptibly. “When I was a child, I could scarcely get off the ground. I’d skim along the streets of Philadelphia, just barely clearing the carriages by flapping my arms. Now I soar like that hawk and take off from a standing start.” Sarah had to lean down to hear his words. It hurt him to talk, but she didn’t try to quiet him.

“Sarah, you have been my life so long. I have had everything. Who would’ve thought I would have it all? Seeing the sunrise outside our bedroom window, your head on my shoulder. Nights, sitting quiet by the fire. Even a son. You made my life a miracle. The ministers—they said I would surely burn. Maybe. If I’d had your love only for a day, it would have been worth it. I don’t want to die, Sarah, I want to live wit you.”

“You won’t die,” Sarah said fiercely, and bent over to kiss him.

The team plodded on under the sun’s trackless arc. Karl slept some during the heat of the day, with Sarah, ever watchful, above him. The bloodless face was made even more pallid by the desert dust, and twice he vomited blood. Though Sarah cleaned him as best she could, he had the black-lipped countenance of a nightmare. Fascinated and afraid, Matthew stole looks at him from the corners of his eyes.

Late in the afternoon of the next day they arrived in Reno. The doctor’s office was on a quiet street, off Virginia, at the southern
edge of town. It was a one-story wooden building, painted white, with a gravel drive curving from the street to a wide place in front of green double doors. Coby pulled the wagon to a stop. Before he could climb down, a nurse in a dove-gray dress, a white pinafore, and a short cape came out to meet them.

She introduced herself as Agatha Bonhurst. Agatha was a horse-faced though kind-eyed woman in her mid-thirties, with protruding teeth that she couldn’t quite close her lips around. She gave Karl a cursory examination, peering under his eyelids and probing his abdomen with light deft fingers. Then, sucking her teeth thoughtfully, she walked to the side of the building. “Gunther,” she called. There was a grunt, and a big blond man, speckled with dried mud and carrying a shovel, appeared around the corner.

“What can I do you for, Miss Bonhurst?”

“Can you leave off a minute and lend a hand?”

Karl was placed on a wood and canvas stretcher, and Coby and the big German carried him inside. Behind the double doors was a waiting room twice as long as it was wide, with two large windows having small panes and no curtains. Through an archway, across a narrow hall, was a small, clean, well-lit room with a single bed, a washstand, and a bare table. Under the nurse’s guidance the men set the stretcher on the bed and withdrew the poles from their canvas envelopes. While Agatha went for the doctor, Sarah spoke with Colby and Matthew.

“Coby, I want you to send a telegram. The office is in the Wells Fargo, down Virginia Street—the street we came in on—a few doors down from the Silver Dollar.”

“I saw it when we drove in.”

“Good.” She dug in her purse and drew out a black cloth wallet. “David said he was pretty much settled in Virginia City. Tell him he’s got to come. This is the address he gave.” She handed him a scrap of paper folded small, and dingy from the years in her pocketbook.

“That was some years ago, Sarah,” Coby said dubiously. “I don’t know…”

“Try.” She turned to her son. “Honey, go with Coby to the Wells Fargo office. You’ll see it, there’s a big sign lettered on the side. While Coby’s sending the telegram, you ask for Mr. Ralph Jensen.”

“Mr. Ralph Jensen,” Matthew repeated conscientiously.

“Tell him what happened, and that Coby will be going back out on tomorrow’s stage to look after things. Do you have that?”

He nodded, and Coby held out his hand to him as he had since Matthew was six years old, but the boy was too grown-up to take it now.

As they left, a narrow-faced man with a shock of white hair came down the hallway. Deep lines in his face carved parentheses around a bristling anarchy of white mustache hairs. “Dr. White,” he announced himself.

“Mrs. Saunders.”

The doctor glanced into the room where Karl lay. “Your husband?”

“Yes.”

“Come with me, I’ll want to ask you a few things before I begin the examination.” He was curt without being cold. Meekly she followed him into the sickroom, and while he peered into Karl’s eyes and listened to his heart and breathing, she answered his questions about the accident. Karl lay uncomplaining under the doctor’s hands, his gaze on Sarah.

Dr. White took off his jacket and folded it carefully over the foot of the bed. Karl’s feet thrust out through the rails, his socks still stained from his day’s labor. The doctor arranged his coat so it wouldn’t come in contact with them. Nurse Bonhurst had returned and now stood near the door in the attitude of a watchful servant. “Agatha, light the lamps,” Dr. White said crisply, “then take Mrs. Saunders into the waiting room.”

“Let me stay,” Sarah begged.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I will have to remove your husband’s clothing.”

“No!” Sarah cried, then pressed her fingers to her lips. “Karl,” she whispered, slipping quickly by the doctor to her husband’s side, “I’ll be outside if you need me. Right by the door.” Karl laid his hand on her hair for a moment before she left him.

Within half an hour the boys were back. The wire had been sent. Sarah listened to their story in the hallway near the door to Karl’s room. When they were finished, she sent Matthew outside to wait for Coby. “Take him out to supper,” she said to the hired man. “Keep him out for a while. Get him some candy or take him to look at the trains. He’s had a long day, poor little fellow.” Coby
refused the money she tried to give him, and patted her arm in awkward sympathy.

The waiting room was bare and clean. The windows overlooked the gravel drive and the quiet street beyond. Between them was a wooden bench with a low back. Sarah watched at the window until Coby and Matthew passed from sight around the corner. Across the street a neat row of houses, painted white and nestled among young trees, glowed warmly in the setting sun. Amber light spilled in the hospital windows, under overhanging eaves, turning Sarah’s hair to auburn and touching her skin with color. For a long time she stood with her face to the glass, watching the feathery mare’s tails over the Sierra turn from rose to gold. Finally the sun sank behind the mountains and the clouds took on a bruised purple hue. She turned from the window and sat on the end of the bench. Through the archway she could see the door to Karl’s room. There was a ribbon of lamplight showing beneath it, and she could hear an occasional stealthy sound as the doctor moved about inside.

A man in the rough garb of a railroad worker came in, his left arm, useless, shoved into his shirtfront. He grunted politely at Sarah and waited for a few minutes by a small wooden desk with flowers on it set near the arch. When no one came, he pounded on the wall with his good arm. A moment later the nurse appeared with a clicking step and a peeved expression to lead him away. Sarah asked after Karl, but Nurse Bonhurst would only say she must wait for the doctor.

No one came to light the lamps, and Sarah sat in the dying light. The door to Karl’s room opened, a sudden square of yellow, and the tall figure of the doctor emerged. Sarah bolted to her feet and waited, her hands clasped at her waist, her breath held in abeyance.

“Nurse Bonhurst,” he called down the hall. With a rustle of starched skirts she was beside him. There followed a short whispered conference and he left, his footfalls retreating down the dark hall. A door slammed shut, then there was nothing.

Sarah started forward. “Miss?”

Agatha Bonhurst closed the door to Karl’s room. “You’ll be wanting some light in here, I expect.” She reached into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out a box of matches the size of a first-grade primer. “Dr. White wants me to ask you a few questions.”

“Can I see him?” Sarah’s voice shook, and she pressed her fingertips to her lower lip.

“Not right now, dear, he’s shut up in his office.”

“Can I go to Karl?”

“Not for a bit. There.” She lit the last lamp and came to take Sarah’s elbow. In a soft Southern drawl she said, “Let’s sit down, I been on my feet since six this morning.”

Sarah let herself be led back to the bench. “Is Karl going to be all right?”

“You’ll have to talk to Dr. White about that.” Agatha seated herself next to Sarah and spread her skirts in a comfortable gesture. “For now we need to know if you’ve got folks—a father, a brother, an uncle, somebody who looks after you hereabouts. A friend of the family, even.”

“I’m here with my son,” Sarah replied, “and our hired man, Coby Burns.”

“How old’s your boy?”

“Ten. Ten and a half.”

“There’s no adult male you know here in town?”

“I’ve wired my brother in Virginia City.” Sarah gave a sudden shake of her head. “Look,” she said impatiently, “is Dr. White worried about money? I can pay.” She pulled her purse onto her lap and undid the drawstrings.

Nurse Bonhurst laid a gentle hand on her arm. “Never mind that, dear, the doctor isn’t concerned over pay. Will your brother be in soon?”