Outlawed(41)
“If I stay,” I said, “she’ll live.”
Elzy stared into my face. I saw the fear in her. I saw that what I’d said had worked.
“Here,” I said, softer now. “I’ll finish the fire. You strip down, as much as you can stand. Then I’m going to wrap you up together. You’re going to be her warmth.”
Elzy nodded. She began undoing the buttons of her parka with her left hand. I piled fresh wood on top of the kindling in the stove. Thin flames licked up around the logs.
When Elzy was undressed down to a pair of homespun underdrawers—her winter skin pale as a tooth, the scar at her shoulder livid against it—I helped her take off Cassie’s parka and sweater and pants. Each layer was cold, cold, cold. I let Elzy remove Cassie’s undershirt, which she did so tenderly, even with just one good hand, that I felt a stab of loneliness in my chest.
I spread Cassie’s parka on the ground and together we rolled Cassie onto it. Then Elzy lay beside her and wound her long body around Cassie’s body. Cassie was stout and sturdy but today she looked small. I laid Elzy’s parka on top of them both, then wrapped them as best I could, adding sweaters on top for extra warmth. Elzy nestled Cassie’s head against her chest, then shut her eyes.
I don’t know how long they lay like that, the room slowly warming. Outside the wind died down but the snow kept falling; everything was soft and muffled and white. I was afraid Cassie would die and my promise would be broken, and my fear continued without worsening or abating, seeming to stretch back and forward across my life, infinite. Memories began to play in my mind vividly, as though they were still happening. In particular I remembered a day in the winter of Bee’s first year, when Mama was still so sick she never got out of bed. Ulla’s mama and the other town ladies sometimes came to help me with Bee, but that day snow had been falling thickly for hours and no one wanted to venture out. Janie and Jessamine both had the flu and were bundled in their beds, sleeping off their fevers. Bee was six months old—out of her dreamy newborn days and awake to the full horror of living.
That morning as I tried to give her a bottle, she opened her eyes wide, stared at me, and screamed without end. Nothing would quiet her, she spat out the bottle’s nipple, she screamed as I walked her back and forth, bounced her, sang, and recited the names of all the major bones in the human body, all things that had calmed her in the past. In time I became used to her screaming, it seemed like the new condition of my life, I would always be holding her, she would always be screaming, no one was coming to help us, we would be alone forever. I felt desolate but also peaceful. Eventually she quieted, she took the bottle, the snow stopped and spring came and Mama got out of bed and I grew up and got married and was driven away. But in the cabin with the snow falling outside, it was as though I had never left that room, that time of fear and calm together, that child who needed me but whom I could not soothe.
What brought me back was a change in the quality of the silence. Mama said the stories the old ladies told about the evil eye were ignorant, and I know she was right. I don’t believe you can feel a person’s gaze, but I believe you can hear it. When sleeping people open their eyes, their breathing changes, and so do the tiny movements of their bodies, even if they are very sick or tired and can barely move at all. It was this change that I heard in the cabin that day, and so I knew before Elzy, maybe even before Cassie herself, that Cassie was awake.
For the next few days, no one talked about the plan the Kid had proposed. All of us were occupied with caring for Cassie. Texas took over cooking and spoon-fed her warm grits. Lo combed her hair and wrapped her in blankets. Elzy held her hand, and the Kid kept circling and fretting over her, with an anxiety I’d never seen, asking me repeatedly if she was going to be all right.
“She’ll be fine,” I said.
Cassie was fully conscious and speaking, and while her toes were frostbitten, I did not think she would lose any of them. I made a footbath of warm water and feverfew to ease the stinging as her blood came back into her snow-burnt skin, and then I wrapped her feet loosely in lengths of clean cotton. She didn’t talk to me as I cared for her, only responding yes or no when I asked if something hurt, and even then she refused to meet my eyes. The others, however, especially Texas and the Kid, treated me with a new gravity, asking my opinion on what was best to feed Cassie or whether we should use up more of our limited firewood to give the bunkhouse extra warmth. I tried not to think about what would’ve happened if Cassie had died in Elzy’s arms in the kitchen cabin, if I’d promised to save her and had failed.
On the fourth day of Cassie’s convalescence she could walk a little, and the sun came out over the valley. We shoveled a path from the bunkhouse to the kitchen cabin and the horse barn. I visited Amity and stroked her watchful face, and Texas let me feed her a wizened carrot she’d been saving. A little joy crept in around the edges of that day—Cassie laughed at something the Kid told her, too quiet for anyone else to hear; News got out her fiddle for the first time in weeks and played “My Pretty Jane” and “Shinbone Alley”; while we were shoveling, Texas and Lo threw snowballs at each other and then, as though deciding something, at me.
That night, after a dinner of beans lightly burned by Texas, the Kid stood and faced Cassie.
“Cass, friend of my heart, for many years it was just the two of us at Hole in the Wall. Those were blessed years; everything we reap now was sown then. And even as we began to grow, we grew slowly—News, you came to us, and then Elzy, then Texas, then Lo, then Agnes Rose. And then the good doctor, who I think has earned an apology for the skepticism with which we initially treated her.”