Outlawed(40)

After that a lassitude descended over the bunkhouse. Lo pulled the covers up over her chin and went back to sleep. Agnes Rose picked at a stray thread in her sock until the whole thing began to unravel. Elzy squeezed her bad hand into a fist again and again and again; it made me sick to watch her.

The snow whited-out the windows. The minutes stretched and sagged. Texas got up to check on Cassie, but Elzy shook her head. “Give her some time,” she said.

Hunger dug a hole inside me. Lo reached under her bed, pulled out her bell-trimmed buckskin jacket, and began sucking on the fringe. Everyone politely ignored her. I was a little jealous. I put a finger in my mouth just to taste the salt of my skin.

Finally Elzy got out of bed and started putting on her boots.

“Tell her—” the Kid began.

“I’ll decide what to tell her,” Elzy said.

Elzy left; the day wore on. Almost immediately it was hard to tell how long she’d been gone—five minutes, ten, an hour. After the wind howled particularly loudly, Texas got up and looked outside. Then I did. The air was so thick with snow I couldn’t see the kitchen cabin.

“I’ll go after them,” Texas said, pulling on her boots.

By the feathers of ice on the windows and the bitterness of the wind coming in around the door, I could tell it wasn’t much above zero outside. If Cassie or Elzy had somehow failed to make it to the kitchen cabin or back, if they’d gotten stuck in the snow, then they didn’t have long. I had never treated someone with hypothermia before, but I was sure I knew more about it than anyone else there.

“You stay here,” I told Texas. “I’ll go.”

The snow was piled so high I could barely get out the door. I followed in what must have been Elzy’s tracks, but already they were softened over by several inches of fresh powder. I guessed the temperature at around five degrees—any colder than that and it would have been too cold to snow. Every time the wind gusted, it burned my face and stole my breath from my throat. I could see less than two feet ahead of me. I only made it to the kitchen cabin by following Elzy’s trail.

Inside it was terribly cold, barely warmer than out in the snow. The cabin was dark, and at first I thought it was empty. Then I saw Elzy and Cassie huddled together in a corner. Elzy was crying. She looked up at me, and I saw whoever she had been before she came to Hole in the Wall, someone frightened and alone.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I didn’t want to leave her.”

I knelt in front of them. Cassie’s head was slumped forward. I lifted her chin; her skin was cold and her neck was limp. But when I worked my fingers under her scarf and pressed them against her throat, I felt the weakest of pulses there.

“No,” I said. “She’s alive.”

I shut my eyes as I’d seen Mama do when she needed to make a plan. Between the two of us, we could carry Cassie back to the bunkhouse where it was already warm. But that would take time and a trip back through the snow and wind, during which Cassie’s body temperature would drop even further.

“You need to get a fire going,” I said to Elzy.

The stove’s iron belly was empty—Cassie hadn’t even tried to make grits. Probably she had come to the cabin to sulk and then the cold had caught her by surprise.

Mama had explained to us one especially cold winter how freezing could sneak up on you—how after a while you would stop shivering and feel almost warm, then calm, like someone had wrapped you in a blanket. “But that’s when you’re in the most danger,” Mama said.

If we were out playing and one of my sisters stopped shivering, or if her lips turned blue or she didn’t make sense when she talked, I was supposed to bring her home immediately. But if we were too far, then Mama said I should find any warm place—a neighbor’s house, even a horse barn would do. Then I would strip my sister down, naked or close to it, and myself also, and then get someone else to wrap us tight together, swaddling us like a baby so that the heat of my body could enter her body and warm her from the outside in.

I unwound the scarf from Cassie’s neck. I felt a tiny, weak warming across my wrist, which I realized was her breath. I began to undo the buttons of her parka.

“What are you doing?” Elzy shouted, turning away from the stove. She had lit the kindling; it crackled but I couldn’t yet feel the heat.

“She needs warmth right against her skin,” I said. “I have to get her undressed.”

“You can’t undress her,” Elzy said. “Then she’ll freeze for sure. Are you trying to kill her?”

I remembered how Mama had explained it to me, how the body freezes and shuts down.

“Cassie’s body is out of heat,” I told Elzy, “and we need to put it back. Until then, all her warm clothes won’t do any good.”

Elzy shook her head.

“You should go,” she said. “I’ll take care of her myself. I don’t need you.”

Cassie’s lips had turned a bruisy purplish color. I felt a chill down my spine that I recognized from really bad births—the feeling of death not just in the room but close by, ready.

I looked up at Elzy.

“I know you don’t trust me,” I said. “I know it’s my fault you got hurt, and I’m sorry. But if I leave now, Cassie’s going to die.” Then I made the kind of promise Mama had told me never to make.