Or failing that, peppermint. Anything that'll bring a fever down. She looked up at him. Do you have those things?
Nathan was watching her. Mr. Cole, we might have willow bark, he said. In the kitchen. My wife kept he stopped.
He didn't finish the sentence. Just pressed his mouth closed for a moment and then said in the kitchen in the cabinet near the stove. She kept things like that. "Will you get it?"
She asked, not demanding, just asking directly the way she would have asked anyone. "I'll stay with him." He left the room without another word. She stayed at the crib and kept the cloth on Caleb's forehead and talked to him in the low even voice she'd used with her nephew all those years ago, not saying anything in particular, just making sound, making presence, letting the baby know there was someone there.
Caleb had stopped crying and started making a different sound, something that was almost a whimper, which she thought was better than screaming. Whimpering meant a child was still communicating, still trying to reach someone. She could work with that. When Nathan came back with the willow bark and a clean bowl and a pitcher of water that was actually cold from the well, he stopped in the doorway for a moment and looked at the two of them.
The stranger crouching at his son's crib, her coat still on, her travel bag still on the floor where she'd dropped it. And something moved across his face that he covered over almost immediately. Here, he said, "Thank you." She knew what she was doing with the willow bark.
Her mother had been the woman people called on in their town when someone got sick and there was no doctor close enough to matter. She'd learned from watching, from being in the room, from being the oldest girl who didn't get sent out when things got serious. She prepared the solution carefully, let it cool enough to be safe, and then spent the next 30 minutes working with Nathan to get Caleb to take small amounts of it, which the baby resisted, and then gradually stopped resisting as the fever began slowly, incrementally to ease. By midmorning, the fever had dropped enough that Caleb fell into a proper sleep instead of the shallow, exhausted doze of a sick child.
Nathan sat in the chair and watched his son sleep, and Evelyn sat on the edge of the trunk near the window and let the silence hold for a while before either of them said anything. "You didn't have to do that," Nathan said finally. He wasn't looking at her. He was looking at Caleb.
I know most people would have walked away when Briggs told them to. Most people weren't looking at a sick baby when Briggs told them. He was quiet again. Then where are you from?
Ohio originally. Moved to Cheyenne 2 years ago. She paused. I've been looking for steady work.
I can cook. I can clean. I can manage a household. I know something about livestock.