Outlawed(29)

I was not afraid of blood. I had seen it enough times—blood from a cut, blood from a nose, blood from a birth, bloody sheets and towels, legs and vulvas, babies taking their first breaths, covered in blood. I was not afraid of pain—I’d been the one a woman clung to as she screamed her way into motherhood. I was not even afraid of death—I’d washed an old woman’s body on the night after her last night, I’d dressed a stillborn baby in his shroud. But now I was the cause of someone’s pain, and I was the only one who could stop it, and that made me afraid.

Texas brought me a bottle of whiskey, a jug of water, a soup pot and a ladle. Lo brought me a white nightdress with pale blue flowers. I added half the bottle and the whole jug, stirred, then tore off a length of the nightdress, soaked it, and wiped my hands down. I did the same with the knife. It was the first thing Mama taught me when I started going to births with her: Everything that touches the patient has to be clean.

Someone had lit all the kerosene lanterns in the bunkhouse, but I couldn’t see anything at the center of Elzy’s wound. I tore another handful of cloth and dunked it in the whiskey water. Then I gave Elzy a sip from the bottle.

“This is going to sting,” I said, and began to wipe the old blood from the wound.

Elzy cried out, high and loud, that animal sound that comes from hurting bodies, but the wound was clean and I could see the lead glinting in the flesh. I knew an artery ran from the shoulder down to the elbow; if the knife slid wrong I would cut it open and she would die. Slowly I pressed the very tip against the metal. I could feel the bullet begin to shift, but Elzy screamed again and jerked away, and the knife sliced a new cut across the flesh of her upper arm. I waited for a moment without breathing, but the cut only trickled blood; the artery was safe.

“Hold her still,” I said to whoever would help me, and Agnes Rose stepped in to hold Elzy’s arm.

I washed the wound again, and again tried to pry the bullet loose. Again Elzy screamed, but Agnes Rose held her fast. I felt the bullet give but not give way, and when I pressed harder, the knife point slid off into the flesh. I felt Elzy’s howl at the bottom of my gut.

I handed the knife to Agnes Rose and wiped my hands again with whiskey water.

“I’m going to try to get it out with my fingers,” I said more to myself than to anyone else.

My hands were shaking. I knew I was almost as likely to kill Elzy as to save her. Then I would have two deaths on my conscience in a single day. I swallowed hard. I knew what Mama would have done.

I imagined the wagon driver standing in front of me. I imagined a bloodstain at the center of his chest and his eyes still open, full of sorrow and fear. I nodded. Then I took hold of the bullet and began to pull.

The bullet slid under my fingers. It slid and then it held. Elzy cried and her blood covered my hand.

In my head I recited what Sister Rose had whispered every night before we slept: “Mother Mary, shelter us, love us more than we deserve.”

I pulled again and now I felt a new movement, and then the flesh gave up the lead with a wet sound and new bright blood filled the wound. It pooled but did not pulse; vein blood. I washed it away.

Elzy was still screaming, but with the bullet gone I felt a wave of power carrying me forward. Someone had already torn me a length of cotton. I washed the wound once more and wrapped it tight with many layers. Elzy’s face was wet with tears but I could feel relief buzzing in the room, almost like joy. It would last until I lay down in my bunk to sleep and remembered the way the driver’s father had cradled his body, just as he must have done the day he was born.





CHAPTER 5




After my failure at Sutton’s Gulch, the others were cold or outright hostile to me. At night, I heard Cassie trying to convince the Kid to send me away, but Elzy’s wound required my care. We were lucky—with daily applications of witch hazel and clean dressings the wound began to close, and the red border of infection I’d been anticipating with dread failed to materialize. Elzy wouldn’t look at me when I examined her, and only spoke if something hurt.

On the morning of the seventh day after I got Elzy shot, Agnes Rose came to visit me in the orchard. I’d taken to spending most of my time there since the others had made it clear I wasn’t welcome at the firepit, or in the bunkhouse, except to sleep or check on Elzy. When Agnes Rose came up the path I was rereading Mrs. Schaeffer’s book, the part about stillbirths and their possible causes.

“What do you know about sleeping tonics?” Agnes Rose asked.

The question made me nervous. I didn’t want to betray the Kid’s confidence.

“Are you having trouble sleeping?” I asked.

Agnes Rose rolled her eyes.

“It’s for a job,” she said. “When you came here, you said you could mix something to put a man to sleep. Was that just talk?”

The person who had spoken so confidently that night about her own abilities felt like a stranger to me now. But I still remembered what she knew.

“I can do it,” I said. “I just need some laudanum.”

The trading post was two days’ ride northwest of Hole in the Wall, on Lourdes Creek in the grasslands. Since it was Arapaho hunting ground there were no roadhouses, and when we stopped for the night near a small stream we saw the remains of other camps: eggshells, the charred leavings of a fire, human shit poorly covered in dirt.