Between Earth and Sky(53)
Zhawaeshk rubbed his arms again. His sleeves fell back, bunching around his elbows, exposing his scars. He looked at the angry raised lines and then back at Alma. “Askuwheteau have wounds like this too.”
She bristled. What kind of picture did this man paint for Stewart? That of a louse, a drunk, a deviant. Asku was none of these things, not when she knew him. And he’d never been struck. Not once.
She started to speak, to protest, but Zhawaeshk waved her off. “Not ones you could see.” He thumped his chest. “Here. On the inside. We all of us do.”
CHAPTER 23
Wisconsin, 1890
The Christmas ball dominated conversation well into the new year. With each retelling, the evergreen in the foyer grew taller, the mayor’s mansion larger, the food and festivities grander.
Routine had just begun to dull the excitement when a cry—shrill and urgent as the steamboat horns that blared from the Mississippi—split the January air.
Standing on the top stair of the root cellar, Alma’s head whipped toward the sound. Mr. Simms rushed from the workshop across the yard, bearing a large sagging mass in his arms. George raced next to him, cradling the other half of the lanky object.
The jug of molasses slipped from Alma’s hand. It crashed through the crust of snow and shattered on the frozen ground beneath. Alma’s eyes flashed down to the dark liquid oozing between the shards of broken clay, then back up. Mrs. Simms shouted up from the cellar, but her words did not register. The men carried not an object, but a boy, his body limp, his head lolling like a marionette lost of its strings.
The breath in Alma’s lungs froze. Her stomach twisted and tightened. The cook’s heavy footfalls echoed behind her, ascending the cellar steps. “Heavens above, child, whatever is the—my God.”
The woman’s ruddy face went white. She stood rooted beside Alma as the men approached.
“Clear the counter, Martha,” Mr. Simms shouted. “Then go fetch Mr. Blanchard. This boy needs a doctor!”
Her husband’s electric words seemed to shock the life back into her. She bustled past Alma and rushed toward the kitchen, taking the icy steps to the back door two at a time. The men passed in a blur of red. It showed in their cheeks and frost-nipped noses. It colored the fronts of their shirts and stained their forearms. It dripped on the white snow beneath them.
Alma came to life and hurried behind them into the kitchen. Pots and pans lay scattered on the floor where Mrs. Simms had swept them. George and Mr. Simms laid the body down on the wooden counter. The boy’s face was slack and ashen—Charles. He was a Mohican a few years younger than Alma. His stories by the bonfire silenced the night wind, and he stole apples even more deftly than Alice.
Her eyes moved from his face down his torso. When they lit on the twisted, mangled flesh that had once been an arm, she gasped and stumbled backward. Three fingers were missing from his swollen hand. Lacerations crisscrossed his arm, extending well above the elbow, exposing bright-red muscle and splintered bone. Blood was everywhere, spurting in some places, oozing slowly in others.
“Rags, Miss Alma, fetch some rags.”
She heard Mr. Simms’s voice like a distant echo. Her legs moved of their own volition to the cupboard. She grabbed a thick stack of fresh towels and staggered back.
The older man’s burlap hands guided her fingers to the crushed arm. “Keep pressure there now.” He tossed a few rags across the table at George. “You too.”
Her hands trembled as the white linen bloomed scarlet. Warm liquid seeped between her fingers. Her stomach heaved and the room began to spin.
“Breathe, Azaadiins,” George whispered. He moved his hands so the tips of his fingers overlapped with hers. He too trembled.
A few inches above their hands, Mr. Simms tied a thick strip of leather around Charles’s arm. “Keep on the pressure until the bleeding stops.”
Footsteps clamored in the hall and her father bounded into the room. “What’s happened?”
“Accident with the lathe,” the groundskeeper said.
Her father stepped closer to the table, then reeled back. “My Lord! Is he dead?”
“No, sir, but he’s lost a lot of blood. Best we fetch a doctor and quick.”
“Yes . . . yes . . . go saddle the horses. I’ll fetch my cloak and be out presently.”
Mr. Simms flew from the room, parting the cluster of gaping boys who huddled at the back door.
“Off with you,” her father said to them. “Close down the workshop and retire to your dormitory. Prayer is what the boy needs now.”
They shuffled outside with wide eyes and anxious, thin-lipped expressions. A group of girls had gathered in the hallway at the opposite door. Her father shooed them away in similar fashion, sending the newly arrived Miss Wells to keep them upstairs.
“You’ll be okay, won’t you?” he said to Alma and George. “Mrs. Simms is here.”
Alma glanced over at the cook. The woman sat in the corner on an upended pail, her face the color of the whitewashed walls, her eyes glazed and vacant.
Without waiting for a response, her father left the room, his heavy steps muffled by the hallway rug.
Alma looked at George, the sight beneath her hands too gruesome to regard. Sweat beaded across his forehead. His disheveled hair fell forward, shielding his downturned eyes. She could hear Charles’s raspy breath, uneven and urgent, as if he were drowning beneath a current of invisible water. She felt the spasms of his body, his skin cool while his blood ran hot. Her eyes remained anchored on George, not looking as much as clinging, desperate for refuge.