Let me go. Let me go. Ma, hold still, son. It hurts. I know.
You don't know. I know. Make her stop. She's saving your leg, Abel. I don't care.
And then, because he did not know what else to do, Anel Branick started to sing. Low, rumbling, an old song his mother used to sing about a river and a girl in a boat. And horribly, terribly off key. Abel stopped screaming just for a second out of pure shock. That's awful, he gasped.
I know that's the worst singing I ever heard. probably. Why are you doing it? So you'll think about how bad it is instead of your foot. Abel stared up at him, tears running into his ears.
Then he laughed, a wet, hicoping, helpless laugh, and Odessa bent over his foot with her knife and her needle, did not look up. But Anel saw it, the corner of her mouth twitching. She cut out the rot, drained it, packed it, stitched it. By noon, Abel was sleeping. By evening, the red streak had stopped climbing.
Mrs. Lund tried to give Odessa a dollar. Odessa gave it back and a peppermint from her pocket for the boy. When the cart had rattled away, she sat down hard on the porch step, hands shaking now. Now that it was over. Anel sat beside her.
The step creaked. "You sang," she said. "I did. You were terrible. I know.
Truly terrible." I said, "I know." She looked over at him and laughed out loud. Tired and real. Don't you ever stop, she said. That evening, she found his carving tools. They were in a crate in the corner of the kitchen, knives and gouges and little chisels, rust creeping over the blades.
She clucked her tongue like he had committed a crime, and sat down with a rag and a tin of oil, and set to work on every single one. And at the bottom of the crate was a little tin box, old dented, the kind that tea comes in. The lid crusted over with rust and dark pine pitch, so thick that whatever had once been stamped on it was buried. She could just feel the raised letters under her thumb. She picked up a knife to scrape at it.
Leave that one. His voice from the doorway. Not loud, but something in it. She stopped. It's rusted shut, she said.
I know. Leave it. I could clean it for you, please. She set it down gently like it was made of glass. He came and sat across from her, picked the tin up in one enormous hand, turned it over.
It was my mother's, her tea. The last tin she drank from. He was quiet a moment. Before the fever took her, I was 14. I keep my blades in it.
Have since. What was her name? He looked at her, surprised. Nobody had asked him that in 25 years. Ruth, he said.
Ruth, Odessa repeated like she was setting it on a shelf somewhere safe. He put the tin back in the crate, and she never touched it again. Not then. The days that followed were small and good and frightening in how good they were. Two more patients came up the mountain.
A ranch hand with a wrist bent the wrong way. A young mother with a baby who wouldn't stop coughing. They came afraid. Every one of them, eyes darting from Anel to Odessa and back again, like they could not decide which of them was more dangerous. And Odessa would meet them at the door and say, "Come in out of the cold." Anel, "Put the kettle on." Plain as that, like he was just a man.
He learned she drank her coffee black and bitter and much too fast. She learned he hummed while he worked badly. He learned she before dawn everyday, not because she wanted to, because some old part of her did not believe it was safe to sleep past the dark. So he started waking before dawn, too, so the fire would be warm when she got up. She never said anything about it.
But on the fourth morning, there was a cup of coffee waiting by his chair, black, too strong. He drank every drop. It was the ninth morning when he found the horse. Bishop, his gray gelding, 12 years together. The animal had carried him up and down this mountain through every blizzard and every humiliation the town could throw.
Bishop was down in his stall on his side, legs thrashing, a thick white foam pouring from his mouth, his whole body seizing over and over like something inside him was trying to tear its way out. Odessa, he didn't know he had shouted until she was there. Night gown and shawl, barefoot in the straw. She took one look and dropped to her knees. What happened?
What's wrong with him? What Anel? Hush. She pried the horse's lips back, smelled his breath. Then she was up at the feed trough digging through the grain with both hands.
She came up holding something. Small white chunks, pale and woody, like pieces of parsnip. Water hemlock, she said. Her voice had gone flat. Root chopped up.
Somebody mixed it in his feed. Water. What? It grows by creeks. My mother taught me never to touch it before I was 10.
And my husband saw two men die of it in Ohio. She dropped the pieces like they burned. There's nothing to be done. Anel, I'm sorry. There's nothing.
He sat down in the straw, pulled Bishop's great gray head into his lap, held it. The horse convulsed, foamed, rolled one terrified eye up at him, and Anel went very still because he had seen this before. A bed, a small room, a small woman, foam on her lips, her body arching and arching, and a 14-year-old boy standing in the doorway, too frightened to come closer. "It's the fever," the grown-ups had said. Mountain fever.
Nothing to be done. Anel. He couldn't answer. Anel, what is it? My mother, he said, and his voice was not his own.