Carry the World

by Susan Fanetti

  “Try to keep it if you can. If you can’t”—he bent and lifted a tin pot from the floor—“that’s what this here’s for.”

  Ada had spent all the energy she had orienting herself in this room, forming a conversation with Jonah Walker, and having a drink. She drifted back into darkness before she could say or hear another word.

  Sound was the first sense that woke. Ada heard a soft, young voice, each word canted up sweetly at its end, very close by. She opened her eyes to a room lit with candles but not wholly without natural light. Dusk.

  Bluebird sat on the bed, cross-legged, with a picture book across her lap. She was reading aloud. She wore a faded and patched pink pinafore dress, and her hair was in two little braids, tied with the pale blue ribbons Ada had brought up for her on one of her visits.

  She wasn’t supposed to bring gifts to her patrons, and she certainly wasn’t supposed to favor some over others, but Ada hadn’t been able to help herself. The Walker children were special, and so much in need. She’d been driven almost at once to give them anything she could. Mrs. Pitts said the librarians were carrying the world up the mountain. Ada wanted to give Bluebird and Elijah the world.

  There were others on her route just as hungry, just as lacking in their clothing and shelter. In fact, there were children on her route whose homes were half as stable and strong as this one, or even less. The Devlins, for instance, living under the tyrannical fist of Tobias Devlin. He’d tried to bring Ada into his tyranny once, and had hit her in the face. Now she saw the Devlin children only at their schoolhouse, and stayed clear of their father.

  Jonah Walker was no tyrant. She’d seen no hint of violence in the man. He took good care of his children, and showed them deep love. He was patient with them, and they were happy. His own aloof suspicion of her and the world she came from hadn’t tainted their good natures. His love for them was so deep and pure that it shielded them from his own unhappiness.

  But they were isolated from the whole world. No friends but each other. No schooling, no knowledge of anything in the world beyond their own holler. And in that, they were in desperate need. The books she brought them, and the little tokens, had literally carried the world into their lives.

  They’d cleaved to her quickly and fervently. She wasn’t simply a book woman to them, and they weren’t simply patrons to her. This house was her favorite on her route. These children were by now as dear to her as if she’d been lucky enough to have carried them in her own body.

  To have this little girl reading so sweetly at her side eased Ada in body and soul.

  Before she let herself be known to have woken, Ada took a few moments and arranged her thinking. Though her main memories and the ideas that formed what she knew of herself and the world, and of the Walkers, were clear and right at hand, recent memories, including the understanding of why she was here, were like loose twists of remnant string. Each thought wanted to twine with all the others, and each time of waking required this act of untangling.

  She was at the Walkers’ house, in Cable’s Holler. She’d been hurt in a storm, had serious injuries to her head and side, and a significant but less severe injury to her knee as well. She had no memory whatsoever of being hurt, or of the storm itself. Her memories were still in a jumble, but she thought her most recent one before this horrible pain was making breakfast for her parents. She’d lost whole days of time, starting from even before she was hurt.

  How long had she been here? How long since the storm?

  Five days, she thought, though her concept of time had been reduced to daylight and moonlight, and she couldn’t keep track from one to the next. But Doc Dollens had been here twice that she could recall, three times in all, and Jonah told her he came every other day. He’d been here today, she thought. That made five days, unless she’d lost another large chunk of time. She’d been here five days, so the storm had been six days ago. If she was counting correctly.

  Jonah Walker had taken care of her all that time. He’d found her, rescued her, saved her, and was nursing her back to health.

  Jonah Walker.

  Jonah.

  She reached a hand out and clasped Bluebird’s little bare foot. It was cool.

  “Mizz Ada! You waked up!”

  It took hard effort to sort words into sentences and find the breath to speak them, but she smiled and tried. “What are you reading?”

  “Snippy and Snappy. Pa said it could make you feel better. Do it?”

  “It does, yes. That’s a good story. You’re doing a very good job reading it.” She truly was. She read nearly as well as her older brother, who had moved on to chapter books and adventure stories some time ago.

  “Readin’ is my favorite thing ‘cuz the pictures go in my head and get big.”

  “That happens in my head when I read, too.”

  “You look kinda funny, Mizz Ada. Pa says your head hurts bad.”

  “It does. But it helps when you read.”

  “Alright. I’ll do it more.” Bluebird shifted on the bed, turning to sit against the headboard and canting the book so Ada could see the pictures.

  Within a page or two, a shadow filled the open doorway, and Ada slid her eyes from the book. Jonah stood there, his arms crossed.

  “Supper’s on the table, Bluebird. Whyn’t you set the book aside for now and go get washed to eat.”

  “I ain’t done, Pa. There’s”—she turned the pages to the end—“three pages left.”

  “If Mizz Ada wants, you can finish after.”

  Ada turned back to Bluebird. “Let’s do that. I need a rest.”

  “Alright then.” Bluebird closed the book and leaned over to put a very careful kiss on Ada’s cheek. Then she scooted off the bed. Jonah stepped into the room to clear the doorway. When his daughter was gone, he came to the bed and crouched at Ada’s side.

  “You kept water down all day today. How ‘bout some broth? Doc says you need to get some food in.”

  Every slightest move made her wildly dizzy and slammed a hammer in the side of her head. She was constantly thirsty, but her stomach rolled with every drink, and she’d been sick many times in the days she’d been aware enough to know it. Her middle ached horribly, and her side throbbed. She had a long stitched wound there; she’d seen it when Jonah had last washed her.

  He washed her. He’d changed her nightclothes a few times. He’d tended to her in other ways, embarrassing ways, as well. Her thinking was hazy on the matter, but she thought he was dressing her in his wife’s things. He was taking care of her.

  The thought of it confounded her, made confusing feelings spin around her disordered memories and notions and turn it all into knots.

  “What d’ya think?” he asked, and Ada remembered he’d urged her to eat.

  Keeping water down today had been a blessing, and she thought risking something richer, even broth, would be counting her blessings a bit too early. She couldn’t face being sick again.

  “Not yet.”

  “You need food to get strong, Ada.”

  He said her name now, freely. Kindly. She’d known him since early last autumn, and it was now well into spring. Months and months of regular visits, when she’d grown close to his children, come to love them dearly, while he’d barely looked at her, and never uttered any iteration of her name. Now he said the most familiar version as if he’d known her and cared for her all his life.

  Each time he did, Ada felt pleasure flutter in her chest. It frightened her.

  “I’ll try tomorrow, Jonah.” His name felt dangerous on her lips, but he wouldn’t hear of her calling him anything else now.

  “Alright.” He smiled and sat at the edge of the bed, near her hip, easing his weight carefully, so as not to hurt her. “How’s this doin’?” He put his hand on her head, cupping his palm at her jaw, and leaned in, using the candlelight to check her head wound.

  “It’s sore, but not like it was.” She ached everywhere, was weak and dizzy, and the smallest act required heroic effort,
but the steady pulse of nearly unbearable pain had abated. Now pain so intense only flared occasionally, when she tried for more than she could accomplish.

  “Looks better,” he declared. “Swellin’s down. The cut’s healing under the stitches.” He came off the bed and turned, crouching again at the side. “Can I see?”

  Ada nodded, and he pushed the covers away and lifted the nightgown. “This one looks pretty good, too. And you ain’t quite so hot. You’re doin’ better. But you gotta eat soon.”

  His hand rested on her side, over her ribs, just above the wound, and just below her breast, near enough that she thought she could feel the heat of his finger, almost touching the underside of that unimpressive mound.

  The touch lingered. Ada brought her gaze to his face and found him looking, as if he were waiting for her. Their eyes locked. His thumb moved slightly, brushing an inch of her skin.

  There was a pull between them, so powerful she nearly heard the hum of it. But she ached, and her mind was full of cracks. She was too weak even to sit up without his body to support her.

  “I’m not ready,” she whispered. She didn’t know if she was talking about food, or something else.

  “Alright. You let me know when you are.”

  She didn’t know what he was talking about, either.

  Ada felt much worse in the night. For each of the few nights she’d been conscious enough to notice, that had been true. As if the sun itself were her medicine, when it fell fully away and the dark wrapped around the cabin, her fever rose, her aches redoubled, and her thoughts softened and became harder to hold.

  Jonah and the children slept in the room with her, arrayed on the floor around the bed. They knelt at her side each night and said their prayers, and kissed her cheek before they settled onto their pallets to sleep. She was glad; she felt better when she wasn’t alone.

  And each night, at sometime during the deepest dark, when her health reached its nadir, and she despaired of ever feeling well or strong or warm again, Jonah had come into bed with her, to hold her and warm her as the fever trampled her.

  She had a filmy memory, like a faded picture postcard, of him holding her in the same way while she was at her sickest. The memory was woven tightly with her memories of George, and her mind wanted to tell her it had been George who’d held her, but her husband was more than two years dead. If it had been him holding her, if he’d been waiting for her on the other side, she had chosen not to go with him.

  She had chosen to stay here, in this world, and live without him.

  On this night, the end of the first day when she’d been strong enough to feel she might become herself again, as Jonah settled the children and came to lie on the floor by her side, Ada reached out and brushed her fingers over his hand, as much as she could reach.

  He stopped in the midst of fluffing out his quilt. “Ada? Alright?”

  Ada had a question on her tongue, but now that the time had come to ask it, her tongue rolled up. All she could do was stare at him.

  He wore only a union suit that might once have been white but had gone dun with wear. It was clean, though; he kept his home, his children, and himself neat as a pin. Even those things that were little more than rags were clean.

  The cotton of his union suit had worn thin and showed his whole body, or enough of it that even her compromised, feverish brain could conjure the rest. He was tall and broad-shouldered; she’d always known that. And he was lean, too lean; those broad shoulders framed his body with sharp right angles, his collarbones lifted the top of his union suit up so that place where the buttons weren’t fastened fell wide open and showed his throat and the top of his chest, and the curves of his hip bones pushed out the cotton knit farther down his body, where she tried not to let her eyes linger.

  But he was strong, too. He had no extra meat on him, but the meat he had was muscle. His arms swelled with it, above his sharp elbows and below as well. His thighs were thick and ropy; the cotton stretched tight around them. And his chest and abdomen, which she might have expected to be hollow, were solid slabs of muscle.

  She’d felt that chest, that abdomen, those arms. Each night when he held her and offered her comfort so she could manage her pain.

  Ada didn’t remember the storm, or how she’d been hurt. She didn’t remember that day or night, or the next few days and nights. She knew her injuries. She knew Jonah had saved her. She knew Henrietta had come to him for help.

  And she knew somehow that lost time, the mysterious event that had hurt her, had changed her life significantly.

  Something stupendous had changed in Jonah, and in her.

  She understood what it was, or what it might be, and it terrified her. And made her sad. She wasn’t sure she was ready, or he was.

  Or maybe it was all in her mind, and nothing she saw or felt or thought she knew was real.

  But right now, she wanted to believe it was real, and not worry what it might mean.

  “Ada?” he asked again and dropped the quilt. Stepping over it, he crouched beside the bed, close to her head. “What d’ya need, darlin’?”

  Darling, he called her. She didn’t think it was all in her mind.

  Her tongue relaxed and remembered its work. “Will you ... will you sleep in bed with me? From the start?”

  He frowned and set his hand on her forehead. His palm was cool. “You feelin’ the shakes comin’ on?”

  “No. Not right now.”

  His eyes were a deep brown, so dark they seemed depthless. They stared hard at her now, and she tried to find their bottom. As he understood why she was asking, he took a long, slow breath and didn’t let it out.

  Ada felt terrible. Her eyes burned and her head throbbed. Her joints ached, which made her sore knee feel like a hornets’ nest, and her side itched. Every second that he stared and didn’t answer drew energy from her, and she wanted to take it back. It had been a stupid, stupid, stupid thing to say, to ask, and she’d imagined everything. She wasn’t clearheaded. The fever was making her delusional.

  But she didn’t take it back.

  “Ada,” he whispered, and his held breath rushed out. She waited for him to set her overheated imaginings to rights. “You want that?”

  “I want you to hold me. Not because I’m shaking. I just want you to hold me. If you want it, too.”

  Another long, deep breath, held too long. Then he blew out the last candle. In the dark, without his answer, she didn’t know what to think. She heard him rustling about, but couldn’t place where the sounds came from in the small, crowded room.

  Then the covers fluttered, and the mattress sagged and the bedsprings creaked.

  “C’mere, darlin’,” he said, lying at her side.

  Ada moved her sore body to him and settled in his arms.

  Chapter Twelve

  Ada watched as Doc Dollens snipped the last bit of hardened thread and drew it carefully from her side. He set aside his snips and tweezers and leaned in to peer at the dark red scar. With his fingers, he pressed gently at its edges.

  “How’s it feel?”

  “It itches a bit still, but otherwise it doesn’t bother me. The sensation’s a little like pins and needles.”

  He nodded. “The nerves there’ll take awhile to knit back together. But it looks good. Jonah did a real fine job stitchin’ it up. He’s a good nurse.”

  “Yes, he is. Do you think a bear did that?” She still didn’t remember how she’d been hurt, but Jonah thought a bear had attacked her and Henrietta. He’d nursed her horse, too, and just as well. Ada had seen Henrietta outside, enjoying the spring warmth. She was healed but had a nasty scar, too.

  Jonah took excellent care of them both. He was so tender and solicitous that Ada’s feelings were just as snarled as her thoughts and memories had been when she’d first woken.

  “I can’t say for sure, but could be. If so, you’ve got an angel on your shoulder, keepin’ watch over you.” Doc Dollens stood and put his hands on her head. “I’m gonna pull the
se stitches, too. The wound is closed.” He picked up his snips. The pressure of his hand and the metal snips working a knot free hurt her, and she couldn’t control a gasp and wince.

  He stopped and leaned sidewise, peering over his spectacles at her. “Still sore?”

  “A bit. Everything else feels much better, but my head still hurts.”

  “And the vertigo?”

  She’d been wildly dizzy for days. “It’s better. I can move about, if I go slowly and don’t try to turn only my head. But if I do, or I move too quickly, it’s bad as ever.” She had trouble eating, too, because the dizziness brought nausea with it.

  “I don’t like that, Ada. It’s been two weeks. The swellin’s down, and the laceration is closed. If you’re still hurtin’ and dizzy, that says there’s somethin’ goin’ inside. I didn’t feel a fracture when I first examined you, and I don’t feel one now, but I think there might be one. That’s a fragile part of your head.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you need to take it real easy awhile longer, and protect your head like it’s broken, because it might well be.”

  “How much longer?” She’d been away from her parents for two weeks. And from her job as well. They needed her wages.

  “A couple weeks, at least. You won’t get down this mountain until you’re full steady on your feet. And you damn sure won’t sit the saddle while you’re dizzy.”

  “But my parents—”

  He patted her hand and cut her off. “Your folks know you’re safe and healin’. They got neighbors lookin’ in on ‘em, and they’re fine. They miss you, but you know they don’t want you to try to get home before you’re strong enough. Think if you pushed yourself and somethin’ happened, how they’d take that. And don’t you worry about work none, either. Miss Avery at the Bull Holler schoolhouse and Esther Cummings at the Red Fern store, they both set up book exchanges for anybody on your route can get to one or the other. The people you see, they’re swappin’ library books you brought ‘em, and havin’ a potluck while they’re at it. I went to the library in Callwood and talked to the librarian there, and you still got your job, and your pay. People love you, Ada. You brought somethin’ good to their lives, and they’re doin’ what they can for you now.”