Clyde staggered away from his horse, fighting against the current. The floodwaters battered his legs and sucked at his feet, trying to pull him down.
“Hang on, Miranda,” he yelled again. “I’m coming for you!”
He hoped he’d gone far enough upstream; the current would carry him swiftly once he’d thrown himself in, and he mustn’t pass the snag before he’d swum to the middle of the river. Clyde sucked in one desperate breath and threw himself belly first into the water. It was cold, bitterly cold, biting deep into his flesh till his joints ached, but he pulled and kicked toward the center of the river with all the strength he had. His hat left his head; Clyde caught one jarring sight of it as he came up for breath. The hat, brim up, rotated on the surface, then filled with water and slid below the red flood.
Went down easy as a fella swallows cream. Clyde’s thoughts had gone strangely calm and observant—accepting of his fate. It’ll take me down just as easy.
He kept pushing toward the center of the river, hoping to catch himself against the jam and fight, hand over hand, down its length toward Miranda. But he had misjudged the distance. The snag was sailing past him now, swift and mocking. Clyde kicked harder, harder still, and through the slap and churn of waves he saw the lightness of Miranda’s dress floating on the surface. Clyde stretched out his hand, caught the fabric, and wrenched it toward him. A weight came along with it, dragging through the water. He rolled, pulling the weight closer to his chest, struggling against the grasping hands of the flood as those hands sought to take him and hold him under, hold him down till all the air and all the life left his body in one long, unheard scream.
His shin smashed into something hard, and Clyde nearly hollered with the pain. Then the tops of his flailing feet scraped against gravel. He could feel the hectic bump and tumble of smaller stones rolling around his boots. He scrabbled with his legs, pushed himself up in water waist deep, and hauled Miranda to the surface beside him.
Eyes squeezed shut, the girl choked and sputtered. A great gout of muddy red spurted up from her mouth and slapped back into the river. Clyde wanted to speak to her, to encourage her to breathe—demand that she live—but he was shaking so badly, it was all he could do to keep moving toward shallower water, racing the flood as it pressed the river’s boundary back and back into the scrubland.
Clyde staggered on, falling to his knees now and then, gouging himself against unseen rocks and shards of broken wood. Finally, he came to a place where the water ran no more than ankle deep—for the moment, at any rate. Clyde sagged forward, holding himself up on hands and knees, and retched out water that tasted of blood and silt. Miranda floated on her back beside him, unconscious, rather blue around the mouth.
“God have mercy,” Clyde muttered. He tried to rise, but his strength was gone. He crumpled to his knees again. He wouldn’t let go of Miranda’s dress. Whether she lived or died, he would bring her back home and lay the poor child at her mother’s feet.
“Get up,” Clyde said. His voice had gone hoarse with effort and desperation. “Get up. Get out of the water.” The river was rising still; he could feel it creeping up his thighs, pooling around his forearms. “Get up!”
The low vibration of Joe Buck’s familiar whicker carried over the river’s rush. Clyde raised his head, and there was his horse, only a few feet away, fetlock deep in the water, waiting for him. Joe Buck had followed him downstream.
“Good fella!” Clyde all but sobbed the words. “There’s a good fella. Now wait, Joe, just wait there a minute . . .”
He mustered a last volley of strength and stood, his whole body quaking. He pulled Miranda along by a limp hand, dragging her first through the shallow water and then through the mud at the surging river’s edge. Clyde drew a few deep breaths to fortify himself. Then he bent and lifted Miranda’s small body. She was so much heavier than she ought to have been, little slip that she was. Clyde heaved her up to Joe Buck’s back and slung her over the horse’s withers, belly down. Then he tried in vain to mount, but he could manage no more than a weak hop.
Joe Buck seemed to understand. He moved away from the river, and Clyde clung to his mane, allowing the horse to take most of his weight. By the time Joe Buck had led Clyde some twenty paces away from the water’s edge, Clyde’s legs had firmed up just enough that he thought he could see his way onto the gelding’s back. He took a few practice hops, then gathered his will and leaped as high as his exhausted legs would allow. Clyde put just enough of his chest over the horse’s back that he could wriggle and kick and thrash his full weight up and over. When he was finally astride, he drooped over Miranda’s body, panting and shuddering, his eyes blinded by tears.
“Go on home,” Clyde croaked. “Joe, get us home.” He didn’t know the way—he had no idea how far the Nowood had carried them. If God was merciful, Joe Buck would puzzle it out.
Clyde didn’t look up as his horse hustled away from the river. He clenched his fist in the back of Miranda’s dress, concentrating on keeping her balanced over Joe Buck’s withers, for if she fell to the ground, Clyde wasn’t sure he could lift her a second time. He prayed that the girl would wake. One sob after another tore at his chest, but Clyde refused to wail. That wasn’t the sort of thing a proper man would do, he knew that much; and even here, in the blankness and solitude of the prairie, he was determined to be the right sort of man.
God, don’t let her die, Clyde prayed. But God was somewhere far away, and His back was turned. He knew the prayer was futile even as he repeated it.
Joe Buck grunted, lifting his head in surprise. An instant later, Miranda’s small body convulsed and heaved. She vomited water down the horse’s shoulder, then coughed weakly and drew a long but ragged breath.
“Go on,” Clyde called to his horse. “Get us home fast, old fella!”
Joe Buck broke into a jog. Clyde lifted Miranda as carefully as he could manage and sat her upright, cradling the girl against his chest. Her head lolled on her neck and she moaned, weak and frail, but she was conscious and breathing. The horse pushed through stands of grass, swerving to avoid sage thickets. Clyde’s legs burned from the effort of keeping his seat. The gelding’s neck had darkened from its usual gold to muddy brown. He was wet—hide soaked to the skin—and Clyde realized with a dull flush of surprise that the rains had reached the prairie. He couldn’t feel the rain anymore—the river had chilled him too deeply; his skin was nerveless, stiff as stone—but he could hear falling water hissing in the grass all around him.
Through drifting blue-black columns of rain, Clyde spotted the small regular shapes of the farm. It lay half a mile or more away. He hugged Miranda tighter, murmuring close beside her ear. “We’re almost home now, sweetheart. Don’t you give up yet.”
When he trotted up the cart lane toward the sod house, Joe Buck sent up a call to his herd. The horses whinnied back, their cries loud and sharp through the monotonous pounding of the rain. The calling horses brought Nettie Mae to the sitting-room window, then to the door. She left it hanging open behind her and flew down the steps toward Clyde.
“Lord have mercy,” she exclaimed, reaching up for Miranda.
Clyde let his mother take the girl, and Miranda fell, limp and moaning, into Nettie Mae’s arms.
“She was swept into the river,” Clyde said.
“You were, too, by the looks of you.”
She spoke with steady resolve, but nevertheless, Clyde could hear the anxiety in her voice. It hadn’t been so very long since he’d been down in the grips of that terrible fever.
“I’ll be just fine,” he said. “Get Miranda inside and warm her up. I’ll put Joe Buck away, then I’ll come in, too.”
The walk from the paddock to the house was a long and perilous march with no one to carry him, nothing on which to lean, and all the while he trembled, aware of the slash of rain around him and the dark weight of clouds hanging overhead. Lightning might strike at any moment. He was helpless and exposed, powerless before the rage of the storm.
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br /> When he staggered through the kitchen door, he found his mother kneeling before the hearth. Someone had spread two thick quilts on the floor, and there Miranda lay, stripped of her wet clothes, shivering violently, all color drained from her pale form. The girl was so small, so weak. White flesh sank into a hollow below her ribs. Her knees and elbows seemed too large for those delicate limbs. She was tiny and breakable, a figure carved from ice; when she coughed, Clyde held his breath, certain the spasms would shatter her frail body.
Cora lingered nearby, her back pressed against the wall, which was all that was holding her upright now. She had covered most of her face with her hands; only her eyes remained visible, dull and stricken, peering through her fingers with helpless dread. Beulah stood ready, another heavy blanket bundled against her chest, while Benjamin and Charles appeared from the sitting room, their arms heaped with sticks of dry firewood.
“This is all the wood from the other hearth,” Benjamin said.
Nettie Mae didn’t look up from Miranda’s body. She patted the girl’s cheeks, none too gently—first one, then the other. “Good boys. Stack the wood there on the bricks. Benjamin, you put two big pieces on the fire. Do you know how to use the bellows?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Get the fire blazing up good and hot, then. Your sister needs the warmth. Beulah, give me that blanket. Charles, you run upstairs and fetch me two pillows from one of the beds. I don’t care whose bed; just bring me pillows. Then you and your brother will both go and change into dry clothes and dry your hair with towels, do you hear me? It won’t do for you boys to fall sick, too; you must keep dry and warm.”
The boys jumped to do as they were told, and Beulah helped Nettie Mae tuck the blanket around Miranda’s body. Then they rolled her onto her side and held her there.
“What shall we do now?” Beulah asked. She was calm and curious, not shaken in the least by her sister’s near drowning.
“We must tilt her body—so.” Nettie Mae held one arm at a steep angle, elbow toward the ceiling, palm toward the floor. “That should cause any water left in her lungs to run back out again.”
Beulah settled by her sister’s feet, bent the girl’s knees toward her chest, and propped her tiny hips on her lap. Charles appeared a moment later with the cushions, and Nettie Mae instructed Beulah in their arrangement. Soon Miranda’s lower body was raised well off the floor. She coughed again, and this time it rattled with the sound of water. A trickle spilled from the corner of her mouth.
“Good. That’s good.” Tenderly, Nettie Mae petted Miranda’s limp, wet hair. “Cough it all up, my girl. Go on.” Without taking her eyes from the child’s face, she said, “Clyde, you had better get warm and dry, too. You’re no safer from fevers and chills than the little boys are. You ought to know that by now.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He was grateful for the banister on the stair. Without it, he could never have climbed to the second floor, where he kept his pine trunk of clothing. Weak and exhausted as he was, Clyde had to haul himself up the staircase hand over hand, for his legs were shaking so badly, they were all but useless. In his former bedroom, he found the little fellows donning their woolen nightdresses and sniffing back tears.
“What’s all this, now?”
“Clyde,” Benjamin said, “we feel awful bad. It’s our fault Miranda almost got drowned.”
He laid a hand on each of their rain-soaked heads. “I don’t know about that.”
“I don’t know either,” Charles said, “but Ma and Nettie Mae—I mean, Mrs. Webber—they’re gonna be real sore with us once they aren’t so busy being worried about Miranda.”
“We didn’t know she followed us toward the river,” Benjamin added. “If we’d seen her do it, we would have told her to go on home.”
“I know, little fellas—I know.”
“I wish Pa was here,” Benjamin said solemnly. Little Charles could no longer hold back his tears, and he ground fists into his eyes, sobbing and choking.
Clyde took a bathing towel from a peg by the door and tossed it to Benjamin. “I know you miss your pa, but at least you got me, right? Dry off your heads, now. My mother was right; you shouldn’t get sick yourselves. You won’t be much help around the farm if you do.”
Rain battered the roof and hissed against the window panes. When Charles had calmed himself—and dried off as well as he could—he returned the towel to Benjamin and said, “Was the river really flooded, Clyde?”
“It was flooded something awful.”
He rummaged in his trunk and took out the good brown union suit his mother had knitted for him earlier that year. Then he peeled off his wet, clinging clothes and dried himself as best as he could with the used towel. He had bashed his leg badly on that rock in the river; a red gash had opened on his shin, already ringed by a purple bruise. Clyde dabbed at the wound with his towel, then shimmied into the union suit. The wool clung to his damp skin, and it took the last reserves of Clyde’s strength to pull the thing on and work the buttons down the front.
“Will the flood come here? All the way to the house?” Charles stared out the window, but there was nothing to be seen, save for columns of silver—the terrible deluge blotting out all sight of the farm, the barn, and the animals’ pens. “Will it be like Noah’s time?”
“No, little fella. It won’t be bad as that. Why, we’ve had rains like this before.”
“I don’t remember any so bad,” Benjamin said, with all the wisdom and experience of an eight-year-old.
“Well, I do,” Clyde said. “And I promise we won’t need to build an ark. Now climb into bed, you two, and wrap up in your blankets.”
“But it ain’t evening yet! We ain’t had any supper.”
“And I bet you won’t have any for a spell yet. We all got to help out with Miranda now, so you might have a long wait. But I’ll try to bring you up a bite of bread and butter soon. How does that sound?”
“Can we have jam, too?” Charles asked, as he slid under the blankets.
“Maybe.”
Benjamin followed his brother into the bed. He stared up at the steep-pitched ceiling for a moment, listening to the rain battering the shingles overhead. Softly, he said, “Clyde, will Miranda die?”
Clyde swallowed hard. A band of heat squeezed tight around his chest, and he found he couldn’t speak. But he forced himself to smile, and the tightness relented a little. “My mother knows what to do. Don’t you worry, little fellas.”
He left the boys in their bed and made his slow, trembling way back downstairs. Miranda was still lying on her side, supported at that awkward angle by Beulah and the cushions. Nettie Mae rubbed the girl’s back through her cocoon of blankets—slow, gentle circles, just as she had done for Clyde whenever he had struggled with childhood sickness. But he had never faced anything like this. The fever that had burned through him weeks ago hadn’t been a patch on Miranda’s plight. To be so small, so fragile, and to be tossed and battered by a flash flood . . . to have swallowed so much water, breathed it in . . .
Cora had sunk onto a chair. Her slender arms were wrapped tightly around her body and she was rocking forward and back, her eyes squeezed shut and her lips moving in silent, desperate prayer. Clyde caught the darting of his mother’s eye, the look of exasperated anger she shot like an arrow in Cora’s direction. He stepped between the two women and stood, arms folded, willing his mother to keep her tongue civil and cool.
“It’s hardly proper,” Nettie Mae said, “for you to be exhibiting yourself in your underthings, Clyde Webber. No, Beulah, don’t turn around and look at him. Eyes forward.”
Beulah kept her attention on Miranda, but although her back was turned to Clyde, he could still sense her mischievous smile, a giggle fighting to be free. The unexpected burst of humor was almost enough to make Clyde laugh aloud. But one glance at Miranda, still pale and shivering, stilled that impulse.
“This was the warmest thing I could think to wear,” he said.
&n
bsp; “You’d have been wiser to put trousers and a shirt over it.”
“What can I do to help, Mother?”
Nettie Mae sighed—softly, so grudging an admission of weakness or frustration that no one but Clyde would have noticed. “I could wish for more firewood, but I won’t send anyone out into that storm to fetch it.”
“The little fellas are hungry,” Clyde said. “Shall I bring them a bite?”
Cora stood—too suddenly, it seemed, for she gripped the back of her chair at once and swayed as if she might faint. A moment later, she regained her composure. “Thank you, Clyde, but I’ll take something up for the boys. It’s time I made myself useful.”
Cora went to the pantry and emerged again with a plate full of sliced bread and pickled eggs. When she had vanished up the stairs, Clyde all but fell into the chair Cora had vacated. His legs were heavy with relief.
Nettie Mae narrowed her eyes. “Time she made herself useful, indeed.”
“Mother, don’t.”
“That woman is perfectly helpless. She wouldn’t know what to do for her own children if you gave her a book on the subject.”
She would have said more, Clyde felt certain—but Miranda stirred in her swaddling of quilts.
“Ma?” The girl’s voice was painfully hoarse.
Nettie Mae leaned over Miranda’s back, stroking her cheek. “You’re all right, precious one. Don’t be afraid.” She glanced up at Clyde and smiled. A smile on his mother’s face was so rare and startling that Clyde leaned back—flinched, in truth—and the chair squealed. “The color has come back to her face. That’s a good sign.”
She rolled Miranda onto her back, then pulled the blankets apart just enough to expose the girl’s chest. Nettie Mae pressed one ear against the child, but after a moment she lifted her head, scowling. “I can’t hear her breathing. That cursed rain is too loud.”
Miranda coughed, but it was a clean, honest sound. There was no wet crackle nor any bubbling rasp. “I want my ma,” the girl said.
One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow: A Novel Page 23
