The Captive Heart (26 page)

“Not a word, I promise.” Kyra's eyes danced, enjoying Miriam's discomfort a little too much. “It's the only way, Miriam. It must be done.”

She nodded, her mouth a thin line. The very idea was mortifying to her, but she had to concede the necessity of it. Slowly, nervously, she lay down against his side and put her arm across his chest.

“I will never be able to sleep a wink,” she muttered as Kyra put out the candle and lay down against Domingo's other side.

Miriam could feel the rise and fall of his chest, the rhythm of his heart. In the beginning it made her very nervous, but then a strange thing happened. Lying close to him, with firelight flickering dimly from the rock walls, listening to his slow, even breathing, her nerves began to dissipate.

I suppose I can get used to anything
, she thought at first, but in a little while she began to realize that she felt safe and warm, and holding Domingo seemed strangely natural. A while longer and she became so completely relaxed that she fell sound asleep.

Chapter 36

D
r. Gant came home early that evening and announced that he was heading back to Saltillo in the morning. He hung up his hat and collapsed, exhausted, into a chair. His shoulders sagged.

“We lost two children in San Rafael,” he said wearily, “and an old man, but I think the worst is over. I treated everybody I could until the antitoxin ran out, burned a lot of infected bedding and trained them to boil and sterilize. There haven't been any new cases in three days. I think we've stopped the spread.”

“You sound like you think you failed,” Caleb said. He was building a fire in the stove because the evening was chilly and Mamm couldn't get warm. She sat huddled in a rocker near the stove, crying softly.

Gant sighed deeply, put his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands. “It's hard for a doctor to watch children die,” he said through his hands.

“It's hard for anybody to watch children die,” Caleb answered, his voice thick with emotion as he closed the iron door and latched it. Flames flickered through the grill. “But how many would have perished if you hadn't come? I don't think we can ever repay you.”

Gant waved him off without looking up. He had toiled day and night, almost single-handedly stemming the tide of disease, and yet he was haunted only by his failures. His limitations. Caleb gave his shoulder a gentle squeeze as he passed, thinking that it was rare indeed to find such a man wearing a three-piece suit and driving a fancy car.

“Oh, Miriam,” Mamm whimpered.

Gant looked up, stared at her. “I'm worried about her, Caleb. I wish there was something I could do.”

“Me too,” Caleb said, lowering himself into a chair near Mamm, then reaching over and tucking the blanket about her legs. “Mebbe she'll be all right. I don't know.”

“I have a friend in Saltillo,” Gant said. “A psychiatrist. I might be able to talk him into prescribing something for her if you like.”

Caleb only shook his head. “No. We'll take care of her. I think she'll be all right once Miriam gets back.”

The girls were cleaning up the kitchen, and when a knock came at the back door Barbara opened it. Micah shuffled in, hat in hand.

Caleb rose and greeted him with a stiff handshake, offered him a chair.

Micah shook his head, remained standing. “I just came to see if you heard anything yet,” he said. He acted subdued, apologetic, all trace of pride gone.

Mamm stared at him with red, puffy eyes, and whimpered, “Have you seen Miriam?”

Caleb sighed, sitting back down. “In the morning I will go and look for them. I would have gone already but for . . .” He nodded slightly in his wife's direction. She was oblivious. “Rachel, do you remember how to find this Needle's Eye?”

“It's on the same trail as the logging place,” Rachel said, drying a plate. “Just a lot farther north.”

“Let
me
go,” Micah said, and there was a note of pleading in his voice. “Caleb, your wife is not well. Wouldn't it be better if you could stay here and take care of her? You been through so much already. Let me go look for Miriam.”

Caleb considered this for a second. The boy was full of remorse, and it was a remorse that Caleb felt he deserved, but he was hoping to make amends. Micah was trying to do the right thing, and Caleb would not stand in his way.

“How would you find them?”

“Jake Weaver was there,” Micah said, twisting his hat in his hands. “I talked to him this afternoon. He says he will guide me to the place.”

Caleb nodded grimly, glancing at Mamm. “All right, then. You find my Miriam and bring her home.”

Miriam awoke to the crackling of a bright fire. Draped over Domingo's inert form, she flinched and recoiled away from him, terribly embarrassed, before she remembered what had happened and where she was. Sitting up, she glanced around the little rock chamber and saw that Kyra was gone. She must have already been out and come back once because the fire had been stoked.

Domingo hadn't even twitched during the night. Gently she felt his forehead—neither too hot nor too cold. Good. Pressing a finger under his jaw, she found his pulse. Weak, but regular. She tucked the top blanket close around him, then rose and looked up through the shaft toward the entrance.

Daylight. She felt guilty for having slept so late. Her first impulse was to go out and look for Kyra, but she thought better of it. Kyra probably left her behind on purpose. Someone needed to stay by Domingo in case he awoke while Kyra was out getting breakfast.

Miriam put on her sandals, draped her poncho over her shoulders and walked gingerly up the beamed shaft to the entrance, yesterday's rattlesnake still fresh in her mind.

In the morning light, the valley in front of her was lovely. The night's rain had brought out a lush green in the narrow vale, and the sun lit the limestone cliffs on the other side a brilliant white. The cliffs were alive with brightly colored birds, though they were too far away to tell what kind of birds. Apparently the place was a nesting grounds because there were hundreds of them, coming and going from little black holes in the face of the cliff. Two hawks patrolled high overhead, facing into the wind and hovering motionless as kites, waiting for a chance to strike.

There was movement among the weeds and cactus down in the bottom. For a split second Miriam's heart froze when she saw a Mexican elbowing his way through the brush, a gun belt around his waist, a goatskin hung over a shoulder and a large bundle dangling from his hand. But it was only Kyra. The bundle in her hand was her poncho, folded over and used as a bag. Even now it was hard to get used to seeing a beautiful woman like Kyra in a man's clothes.

A few minutes later Kyra dropped her bundles by the fire and knelt over Domingo.

“How is he?” she asked.

Miriam shrugged. “No better, but no worse.”

“ ‘No worse' is good enough for now,” Kyra said. “I went to the creek to fill the goatskin. We will need a lot of water. On the way back I found some other things we will need as well.”

While Miriam put a pot of water in the coals to boil, Kyra spread out her poncho. To Miriam's eyes it looked like a useless pile of garden clippings—nothing but weeds, roots, and leaves. But not to Kyra. She seemed to know a use for everything.

The first thing she did was dice a handful of some kind of green herb directly into the pot of water heating up, muttering something about it keeping down infection. While she was doing this she picked up a foot-long stem with dark purple flower petals all over it, plucked some of the petals and ate them.

“Try some of these,” she said. “They will stave off the hunger. I'm sorry I didn't get anything else to eat yet, but I was in a hurry to take care of Domingo. His wounds need to be properly cleaned and bandaged.”

Miriam tried the flower petals. Not particularly tasty—a little sharp on the tongue—but Kyra was right. It would do until something better came along.

The next thing Kyra did seemed downright strange until she explained it. She picked up a leathery, blade-shaped leaf as long as her arm with a fine point on the tip. Putting the needlelike tip in her front teeth, Kyra winced as she bit down and snapped it off. Then, still holding the little point in her mouth, she drew the blade away from her and extracted a few long, fine fibers.

“See? Needle and thread.” She dropped it into the boiling pot, picked up another one and repeated the process. “
Maguey
,” she explained. “There are many different kinds, and you have to be careful not to get the wrong one. Some of them are irritating to the skin.”

“Maguey . . . Isn't that what they call the big ones, taller than a man's head? They look like a green fountain spewing out of the ground.”

“Sí, that is maguey. Some people call it agave. One of the most useful plants in all of Mexico. The flower petals you're eating are from a maguey. When the petals are gone we can roast the stalk over the fire and chew it to get the sugar, like sugar cane.”

She had Miriam take a clean shirt from the saddlebag and cut it up for rags and bandages. The rags went into the boiling pot.

When everything was ready they stripped off Domingo's shirt and peeled away yesterday's makeshift bandages. The bullet wound through his arm cleaned up easily enough, though the exit wound in the back took a bit of sewing.

“He is lucky it missed the bone,” Kyra said.

The deep knife slash across his chest looked a lot angrier. Kyra cleaned it thoroughly, then sewed it up as best she could and treated it with some kind of salve she pressed out of a thick leaf before finally wrapping a clean bandage around it.

The head wound started bleeding again when they unwrapped it. Kyra put a little white root on a flat rock and pounded it into a pulp with the butt of her knife, wrapped it in a bit of rag and dropped it into the boiling pot. A few minutes later she fished it out, let it cool then wiped the wound with it.

“That should stop the bleeding,” she said. While she waited for the coagulant to take effect she sharpened her knife on a stone and plunged the blade into the boiling water to sterilize it.

“I didn't know you were a doctor,” Miriam said.

Kyra smiled. “I'm not. But there
are
no doctors where we live, and most of us could not pay one anyway, so we learn how to doctor ourselves. As I said before, everything we need is already here.”

Working by candlelight, she honed her knife, shaved around the gash in the back of Domingo's head, cleaned it thoroughly, put a couple of stitches in it and wrapped a fresh bandage around it. When she was done they rolled up what was left of the shirt to cushion the back of his head. Kyra lifted the front of the bandage and looked at his eyes.

“His eyes still don't look right,” she said, “but there's nothing more I can do. Now we will just have to wait. I will take the horses down to the creek and tie them where they can graze, and then I will find something for us to eat. You keep watch over him. If he stirs, you should try to get some water into him.”

———

Kyra was gone for an hour, but when she came back she brought a couple of mountain quail. The birds were darker plumed than what Miriam was used to, but still recognizable as quail.

“How on earth did you get quail?” Miriam asked.

“I heard them calling yesterday from the edge of the pine woods, so I set snares by the thick brush this morning. I was surprised to catch them so quickly, but I guess they don't see enough people to be wary.”

Before long Miriam had the quail cleaned and spitted, roasting over the fire. Kyra had also brought some wild onions and something that looked like salad greens.

“I never would have believed that such bounty grew in this wild place,” Miriam said. “I was afraid we would starve.”

Kyra shrugged, wiping her mouth on a sleeve. “Where there is water, there is food. You just have to know how to find what God has provided. There are rabbits here, too. Tonight I will make a stew. Oh, and I brought you something special. You will like this.”

She reached over among her growing pile of green things and fished out a large leaf that had been folded to make a little purse, the top tied with twine. Miriam untied the twine and peered down into it.

“White slime,” she said. “Thank you.”

Kyra laughed out loud. “It is soap, silly. I will stay with Domingo while you go over to the creek and take a bath. It will make you feel better.”

“But where did you get soap?”

A shrug. “From a soap tree.”

Miriam raised an eyebrow. “A soap tree?”

“Sí. It's a kind of yucca. The soap is in the base and the roots. It's good for your hair too—much kinder than the lye soap your mother makes.”

It almost brought a tear to Miriam's eye. It was the little things she missed the most when she was away from home. Her wants were not complicated, but today was Saturday, and tonight the whole family would be taking warm baths. She was beginning to think Kyra was not only a doctor but also a mind reader.