The Marriage Cure

by Lee Ann Sontheimer Murphy

  Between the beadwork and his black hair, his dark eyes made her think he might be Indian but if he was, he had mixed blood for he spoke Gaelic as well as she did. The other language that he used was not familiar.

  He stirred, restless beneath the bedclothes, tossing away the quilt as he thrashed. He mumbled something she could not understand and she took hold of his hot hand, stroked back a stray stand of hair from his face.

  “Hush, mo chroi. Sleep if ye can.”

  Johnny roused at her voice, eyes open wide, looking from one side to another until he found her. His lips moved, then he spoke but his voice was low.

  “Ta ocras orm,” he said. “Wasn’t there rabbit stew?”

  There was but she wasn’t sure he should have any. Everyone knew it was right to feed a cold and starve a fever but Johnny Devaney seemed too thin already. However, there would be no point to nurse him only to starve him to death, and he needed nourishment. Therefore, she nodded, decision made, and propped him against the few pillows.

  “I’ll fetch ye some,” Sabetha told him. “I’ll spoon ye some of the broth if ye’re willing.”

  “I am.” His voice sounded faint as morning mist.

  He took broth from the spoon she offered, almost a cup’s worth before he shook his head.

  “Enough?”

  “Aye.” The word was no more than a breath.

  “Conas ata tu?” He was no better, she knew, but she asked anyway.

  “I’ve never been so bad,” Johnny said, dredging up the words with effort. Then his eyes slipped shut and she settled him back prone, fretting as she did.

  Once he slept, in fitful and uneasy slumber, she tidied the cabin, picking up his discarded buckskins and moccasins, brushing the dirt from them and folding them into a neat pile. Sabetha put his few possessions on the mantle shelf above the fire. Then she ate the rest of the stew, munching a piece of cornbread, washing it all down with the last of the fresh water. That necessitated a trip to the spring so she lifted up the bucket and stepped outside.

  Dusk heightened the shadows, and it would soon be dark. The early spring evening breeze made her shiver and wish she had snatched up her shawl. Sabetha hurried, filled the bucket, and returned to find him asleep.

  She sat in her rocker before the fire and reflected on the day. On rising, she had expected nothing more than the usual routine, the chores, and the ever-present loneliness. Since Henry died the previous spring, she spent most of her time alone. Getting the cow out of the weeds had been her biggest challenge of the day but then the stranger had appeared, dealt with the situation like an experienced farmer, and then fell ill. Now she had a man in her bed and the task of nursing him at hand.

  Maybe Johnny Devaney would be better come morning, she mused. Fevers were strange; they could be short-lived yet vicious or long lasting. Every instinct within told her that his illness would be a long siege but she hoped she was mistaken. Sabetha pulled the rocker over to the side of the bed where she would be near if he needed her. Before she slept, she bathed his face once more with cool water and coaxed a little more tea down his throat.

  In the morning, he was no better. Johnny burned with fever, trembled with chills, and often talked out of his head. Sometimes, for short periods, he woke lucid, drank water or tea, and struggled to talk. Once he awoke, so upset that he sat straight up in bed and called her name. When she rushed to his side, he babbled about a dream that frightened him.

  “I dreamed of a great rattlesnake,” he told her, grasping her hand in his fiery one. “It rattled at me and coiled to strike me.”

  “’Tis but a dream, Johnny,” she said to soothe him but dreaming of snakes was not a good omen. “Yer fever’s making you dream strange, that’s all.”

  “I dreamed I was a dead man,” he cried, eyes wild in his head. “I was dead like my brothers, like my ma, like them all, lying on the trail, eyes open and blind, rain falling into them. Ants crawled on me, biting me but I felt none of it for I was dead.”

  “Ye’re never dead,” Sabetha said, bending down to kiss his hot forehead. “Ye must hush such talk, Johnny. Ye are sick and ye must not upset yerself so. I have made more tea, this time with sassafras and pennyroyal. ‘Tis sweetened with a bit of sugar from your own bag, man, and ‘twill ease ye. Can ye drink some?”

  He nodded so she supported his head so he could sip from the cup. Johnny drank until a coughing fit racked him; she made a mental note to add cherry bark to one of the infusions. He drank a little more and then splayed back across the pillow, spent.

  Eyes closed, he asked, “Are ye alone here, then, cailin?”

  “I am indeed. The nearest neighbor is five miles, at least, and the closest settlement at the big spring is that or more.”

  “And ye’re widowed. Have ye no family?”

  “I do, in Kentucky,” Sabetha said. “But they’re far away, and I am here.”

  A strong chill struck him and he shivered, shaking so hard that the bed shook too. Sabetha pulled the quilt up over him and opened the chest to find a woolen blanket, wrapping it around his thin shoulders. When the chill subsided, he said no more but lay still and quiet.

  Her routine now centered on his care. Sabetha still tended her single cow; she cooked for herself, brought water from the spring, and tended her patient. Her cornfield lay fallow and although she should be planting, she dared not leave him long enough to plant the seed. She bathed him with cool water, put compresses on his forehead, and brewed various teas. When he could manage, she fed him light broths and a bit of milk but he seemed to grow weaker each day.

  In his lucid moments, though, she began to gain a sense of the man, what he must have been once, when he had home and family. Some tragedy had destroyed his life, she knew, but just what she did not know. The more she learned of him, the more she liked him, the closer she drew to him.

  On the third morning after he came, his fever soared. His skin, hot before, now scorched her hands when she touched him and she feared for him. She had seen such fevers rob the sick of sight or even sense. In her efforts to cool his temperature, she undid the shirt and found that a rash, both red and raised, mottled his skin everywhere save the palms of his hands, the soles of his feet, and his face. Whether the increased fever or the rash bothered him, she was not sure but he grew more restless, tossing, and turning, thrashing in the bed. He grew delirious, calling out for people from his past, speaking all three languages, and sometimes crying out with a loud voice.

  His hands were fever dry when she held them to offer comfort and his lips grew both chapped and cracked from the heat. Sabetha rubbed tallow over his lips and kept his hair pulled back, tangled again and damp with sweat.

  “Davey!” He would cry out, struggling against the blankets. “Davey, where are ye?”

  Sometimes he called for another brother, Seamus usdi and when he did, his dark eyes overflowed with tears. His anguish touched her and she sometimes shed tears of her own, feeling his loneliness, his grief in her own. Her worry grew and she feared he could not stand the intense fever or the wild delirious in his weakened state. She slept little, dozing when she could day or night in the rocker beside his bed, caring for him as much as she could. On the morning after she found the rash, she woke to find him unresponsive and so still, she thought he must be dead.

  Weeping, she touched him and found he still blazed with fever but he would not rouse, even to drink for hours. After that, he alternated between the frightening stupor and periods of restless delirium. Even when he was wild, out of his mind with illness, she could coax him to sip water, milk, or one of her herbal infusions from a spoon. That alone gave her hope that he might live.

  Often she sang to him, old songs that soothed him and sometimes she just talked to him, about her family back in the Kentucky hills or what a mistake she made to wed Henry Trahern.

  “I was but sixteen,” Sabetha told him one long afternoon when he laid unresponsive, hoping that her voice might reach him and keep him connected to life. “He wanted
to leave Kentucky, to come into this new country and that sounded fine to me. I wanted to go more than a few miles from my home, to see the world, and so when he wooed me, I mistook love of the man for love of adventure. But, when we began the journey here, I knew he was not the man I thought and realized I did not love him. I had little choice, and ‘twas no going home so we came here and worked hard. God help me but I never felt for him what I feel for ye now, Johnny dhu, a wanting to care for ye and make ye better. I tried to mend his leg but he never told me when he cut it and by the time I knew, the cut festered with pus and though I tried, I could not save him. But, mo chroi, I mean to do better with ye. I want ye to live and even though I know well ye’ll likely go again when ye’re well, I’ll know ye live.”

  Lost in recollection, she failed to realize that Johnny awakened until he grasped her hand with his burning fingers.

  “Will I live then, woman?” he gasped. “Do ye promise me that?”

  She wasn’t at all certain if he was lucid but weary to the bone, his questions brought tears to her face, sliding down her cheeks unchecked as she bent over him to answer,

  “I do, Johnny, I do.”

  “Tapadh leat.” he whispered. “I’ll hold ye to it then and haunt ye from the pits of hell if you don’t.”

  He broke into a coughing bout and said no more, even when she spooned a tincture of cherry bark and a bit of whiskey down his throat, sliding back instead into a silent stupor. Stubborn since the age of two when she first spoke the words “S’betha do it herself.” she vowed to do her best to keep her word.

  Just before dark, she left him long enough to fetch water from the spring and as she lugged the heavy bucket up through the knee-high weeds, she heard a familiar voice calling out,

  “Traherns! Are ye to home?”

  “Here, Elza!”

  The old man limped into view, his faithful black and white feisty dog at his heels. Faithful as the seasons, he tromped the rugged backcountry since losing his family to a fire years before. As one of the earliest settlers of the region dubbed the Ozarks, Elza Rawlins knew the country and most of the settlers. Last spring, he passed through before Henry’s death but if he had not lost all his faculties, Sabetha knew he would have seen the grave.

  “Missus Trahern!” he called as he approached her. “Are you a widow, then?”

  “I am, Elza,” Sabetha said. “It’s been near a year now.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss, Miss Sabetha. What took your man?”

  This was the last subject she wanted to discuss but she sighed and answered him.

  “He cut his foot with an axe stroke gone wrong and it festered. By the time, he showed it to me, ‘twas little I could do and he soon died.”

  Elza nodded, lowering himself to the ground where he rummaged in his pockets for pipe and tobacco. He lit the pipe and puffed.

  “Now I know why you’ve not planted your corn. It’s getting late if you’re to make a crop.”

  “Aye, I know,” Sabetha said. She had been gone from Johnny’s side longer than she liked now, and she started to move around Elza, bucket in hand. Before she could reach the cabin, she heard him shout.

  She put her bucket down and picked up her skirts to run, entering the cabin to find him half-upright, flailing at the air with both fists. He repeated a phrase over and over in the tongue she could not understand with desperation,

  “Utalotsa Kalonayelis, Utalotsa Kalonayelis!” Johnny yelled, and then switched to Gaelic. “Tóg ort!”

  His wildness would sap what little strength he might have left, and she feared for him. Sabetha answered him in Gaelic, without thinking, her voice sharp.

  “Stad! Na dean shin!”

  When he shouted again, she changed back to English, repeating what she had said before,

  “Stop! Don’t do that, ye’ll hurt yerself.” She caught his hands with her own. “Johnny, man, hear me! Ye mustn’t.”

  “Help me,” he whispered. “Make them go away, won’t ye?”

  He was delirious, but she still asked, “Who?”

  “Raven mockers,” Johnny whispered, then collapsed onto the bed, spent and shivering as another chill took him, rattling his bones until his teeth chattered.

  By the time she covered him, talked to him in a patois of Gaelic and English, and saw him settled, quiet for the moment, she had forgotten Elza’s presence until he spoke.

  “That boy’s Cherokee, ain’t he?” he said, coming to stand at the foot of the bed. “He ain’t all Indian but he’s part. Bad sick, too.”

  “How do you know he’s Cherokee?” Sabetha asked.

  “That’s what he’s talking, some of it.”

  “Do ye know what he said?”

  He nodded. “He told the Raven Mockers to leave. They are some kind of spirit that steals souls from the sick and dying, some Cherokee thing. Where did he come from?”

  “He said from Fort Gibson in the Indian Nations,” Sabetha said. She still held Johnny’s feverish hand in her own. “Do ye speak Cherokee? Could ye teach me some?”

  Elza snorted. “I know a few words, no more, not enough to help you much. You won’t need any much longer; he looks nigh death.”

  Sabetha rejected his words. “He’ll not die, Elza. He will not.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “He might not but he looks awful bad. If you don’t get your corn in, you’ll starve come winter. Reckon you can trail him back to the Nations, but that Fort Gibson is a bad place, I hear, full of sickness and death.”

  “He has a brother there,” Sabetha said.

  Elza sighed. “I was at Horseshoe Bend with Jackson and that changed my mind about Indians. Hated ‘em before, but I felt right sorry for them after that. I reckon this boy here has been through hell and back to get here. Is he your man now?”

  He was not but he could be, if he lived and if he were willing. Sabetha shook her head.

  “He’s not; he was sick when he came.”

  Elza spoke aloud,. “But he might be, if he lives. Girl, I’ll stay a day or two and plant your corn for you. Then you can tend to him better.”

  Her eyes welled up with tears at the unexpected gesture. “Thank ye, Elza.”

  “Aw, you’re welcome. I just hope your Indian lives.”

  True to his word, old Elza stayed and planted for her, working for two days. Each night he slept out beneath the stars, but he took meals with her, and she killed one of her prized hens to make a pot of chicken with dumplings. He ate her food, offered his advice about both the corn and Johnny and left on the third day, waving farewell, his dog Boots trailing at his heels.

  With the corn planted, her immediate focus was Johnny. He took some of the rich chicken broth but he still burned with fever, still suffered bouts of delirium and the subsequent stupor. Neither her cold rags nor any of her herbal remedies seemed to help because he did not improve. She gave him water, the teas, and sometimes milk, spoonful by careful spoonful. Day by day, she watched as he wasted away, the bones of his face grew more prominent as his flesh melted, devoured by his body to survive. He was skinny when he came but now he looked emaciated and she could see the outline of each rib bone too well. Those dark eyes sunk into his skull and his complexion, darker than hers when he arrived, faded to a pallor that was worm white. His strength diminished, little by little, and she slept in snatches, too worried to leave his side for long. That terrible rash that covered his body must itch and now seeped blood. Sabetha turned him in different positions, from his back to his left side then his right to keep down the irritation and finally, in desperation, began rubbing wool wax into the rough, inflamed skin. That seemed to soothe it a bit. When his whiskers grew, just enough to be annoying and he pawed at his face; she took down Henry’s razor and shaved him, leaving his face smooth.

  Every day, each night, she still talked to him and often sang. Elza, before he departed, had remarked that it seemed to him that the sick that folks interacted with lived more often than those left in silence. Whether or not it reached him,
whether or not he heard any of it, she did not know but she made the effort. As he sank lower, grew weaker, her will that he must live strengthened until she believed nothing but her will kept him alive.

  On the twelfth morning after he came into her valley, she sensed the crisis nearing. Johnny grew restless, more than he had before, twitching and tossing. Now he moaned aloud and his breathing slowed, shallow and light. When she put her hand on his chest, she felt his heart racing and the fever heat, long intense, burned higher and hotter. When he calmed, the fever remained but his stupor deepened and he did not respond, not to her voice nor would he sip liquid from her spoon.

  Terrified, she sang to him throughout the long day, sang until her voice cracked and grew hoarse. She sang old lullabies, ballads, and she prayed aloud, reciting the prayers that her parents, Catholic to the bone, taught her. The Latin felt strange upon her lips but she repeated the words she learned. If she had known any Cherokee charms, she would have chanted them as well.