Chasing the Sunset

by Barbara Mack

  “I have to go now,” he told her. “I have a lot more places to go. If you think that you are starting to get sick, get someone immediately, because yellow fever moves fast. You will not have much time.” He put a hand on her arm again, and Maggie felt no menace from him, no desire to run away from his touch. That she felt no fear of the doctor was due partly to the two lying sick in the other room, and she made a sudden, fierce vow to herself. They were not going to die, not if she had anything to do with it.

  “They both have a strong constitution, and that is in their favor. Keep them comfortable, and give them lots of fluids, even if you must dribble it down their throats a drop at a time. Good luck,” he told her, and Maggie saw him out. She sent Ned, who had also had yellow fever before, to tell Kathleen and the others to stay away for the next couple of days.

  She lost count after that of how many times she sponged Tommy and Nick off, dripped water down their throats one agonizing drop at a time. She cleaned up diarrhea, mopped up after sick stomachs, soothed their anguished apologies as one or the other of them regained consciousness for brief moments. Late that night, aching from exhaustion, worried near to tears,

  she pulled a pillow and blanket in between their beds and tried to catch a few minutes of sleep. She was afraid to go to her own room and sleep for fear of one of them worsening, so she curled up on the hard floor and tried to get comfortable.

  She was up and down all night, dozing briefly between caring for them. Sometime early in the morning Ned came back and tried to urge her to go and get a real rest. She refused, saying that she had slept a little bit while he had been on the back of a horse all night.

  “Go sleep for a few hours in one of the bedrooms,” she told him. “You are going to have plenty to do around here, with no other help coming to the stables. You can spell me for a while in the morning after you tend the horses.”

  He was hesitant, but she insisted and sent him on his way, then she went back to sponging and pouring water down reluctant throats. Ned relieved her for three hours later in the morning, and Maggie used the time to eat and prepare some broth to feed her patients with, and some other food that she and Ned could grab quickly. She got a small nap, then grimly went back to the sickroom. Nick seemed a little better, his breathing not so rapid. He was able to sit up and drink some of the lemonade she had made while she was downstairs.

  “Cold,” he whispered as he gulped from the cup she held for him. “Good.”

  “I went and got some of the ice from the icehouse,” Maggie said quietly. “I figured as hot as you were, it would taste good to you.”

  He smiled at her, then laid his head back down on the pillow and went to sleep, his lashes fanning out across the black circles that ringed his eyes. Maggie spent another interminable night, an unspoken prayer in her heart. She could not lose these two, she could not.

  By noon of the next day, Nick and Tommy were well enough to sip some broth. They kept

  it down, too, and drank all of the water that Maggie provided. They were just weak now, a little nauseated, but Maggie refused to let them up beyond using the chamber pot. She remembered what the Doctor had said, and she did not want them to relapse.

  The next morning, Nick tried to get out of bed, and Maggie forced him back, grinning at him as she put her hands on her hips. Tommy giggled from the other bed, and Nick glared at him before turning his disturbed gaze on Maggie.

  “What are you so happy about?” he grumbled. “Glad you have got me weak and can order me around?”

  “If you are well enough to start complaining, you are going to be all right,” she said tartly. “In the meantime, do as you are told. I have worked hard to get you well, and I do not want you sick again.”

  Kathleen came over in a buggy, and Maggie opened a downstairs window to talk to her from a safe distance. Nobody had come down with anything at her house, and even though she knew she should stay away, she told Maggie that she just had to come and see how everybody was faring over here. Doctor Fell had told her that two of the men who worked for Nick were sick as well, she said gravely, and one of them had already lost two children to the yellow jack. Maggie cried a little bit at that, then waved an equally teary-eyed Kathleen off home, and went to nap while Ned took her place in the sickroom. She was on the edge of exhaustion; she knew she had lost weight these last two days because her clothes were hanging on her, loose in places they had not been before.

  She heated some water and washed herself, thinking absently that she would wash Tommy and Nick’s hair for them this afternoon. She had just finished braiding her hair and pinning it up when Ned came to tell her that Tommy had diarrhea again and was complaining of another headache.

  Maggie leaned her head down and rested it on the coverlet, letting herself dissolve into easy tears. Tommy had worsened quickly. Maggie had Nick, who was still feeling better, moved to another room and told Ned to take care of him; then she took over the sole care of Tommy. Doctor Fell came again and stood at Tommy’s bedside and stared somberly down at him after a cursory examination.

  “I am sorry, Mrs. Reynolds,” he said heavily. “There is nothing else to do. Keep him as comfortable as possible, keep putting liquids down him and giving him the quinine, and pray. It is in God’s hands now.”

  Maggie did not sleep at all that night; she was too busy sponging Tommy down, giving him sips of lemonade and apple cider, and talking to him. All night, she kept up a running one-sided conversation, until her voice was little more than a cracked whisper.

  “You are going to get better, Tommy,” she told him over and over. “I want you to concentrate. You can hear me, I know that you can. You are going to get better, you listen to me now. Do as I say.”

  It was morning now, and Tommy was still tossing and turning, moaning in his sleep and curling up into a ball as he tried to escape the pain in his joints. he black vomit had not come yet, and Maggie was heartened by that. Surely that meant he was on the mend, surely if he was going to die, he would be showing these other symptoms. She told herself that over and over, and she told it to Tommy, too.

  She knelt now beside his bed. She was tired, so tired. She wiped away the weak tears that coursed down her face and turned her head as she heard the door creak open. Nick stood silently in the doorway.

  “Go back to bed,” she told him wearily. “You are not better yet and you should not be here.”

  “Doctor Fell told me that I could get up for short periods, and I wanted to see how you were.” He crossed the room to stand at her side. “He also told me that Tommy is not any better,” he said quietly.

  Maggie refused to look at him. “He is not any worse, either.”

  Nick put a hand on her shoulder. “Go and take a break, Maggie. Ned can watch Tommy for you. There is no sense in killing yourself.”

  “No,” she said, and set her lips together mulishly. “I will not.”

  She heard his gentle sigh.

  “Maggie.”

  She cut her eyes toward him. Nick had seen eyes like that once on a mountain lion he had cornered by mistake. He wanted to back slowly away, just like he had done that time. He would not have been surprised to see a tail behind her that twitched slowly and dangerously, just like the one that had been on the cat.

  “You cannot keep him from dying singlehandedly,” he said anyway, knowing as soon as the words left his mouth that they were a mistake. Maggie surged to her feet and faced him defiantly, trembling.

  “Do not say that,” she warned between clenched teeth.

  “Say what?" he persevered despite his instincts. "That Tommy is sick enough to die?” He scrubbed a hand over his face, and Maggie noted dispassionately that he needed a shave badly. “He is, Maggie, and pretending that he is not is not doing anybody any good, least of all you.”

  Maggie felt something give way in her chest. The days without sleep, the dreadful fear that she had lived with for days, her own inability to do anything for Tommy all rose up in her and combined to form the purest, hot
test rage she had ever felt. Her heart pounded and her hands shook with the force of the wrath that snaked through her whole body. She had not felt this angry in years, not even when she had her whole life stripped from her by that worm who had called himself her husband. She had not had a temper tantrum since she was a small child.

  But she was about to have one now.

  She reached blindly for the closest object and hurled it at him. Nick ducked, and the pitcher exploded into a hundred shards as it hit the door behind him. The bowl that had been beside it was destined for the same fate, only it hit the wall as Nick moved and she adjusted her aim. At any other time, Maggie would have laughed at the comical expression on his face.

  “He is not going to die! He is not!” she screamed. “Don’t you tell me that, you . . . you . . .” and Maggie screamed the dirtiest, vilest word that she knew at him, her fury a palpable thing.

  “Maggie,” shouted Nick, and then they both turned incredulously as a small voice spoke behind them.

  “Miss Maggie, you threatened to wash my mouth out with soap when you heard me say that after that horse stomped on my foot.”

  The voice was hoarse, and weak. Tommy’s eyes shone at her from the bed, glassy and crusted with sleep, but they were open, and he was coherent. Maggie ran for the bed, putting a shaking hand on Tommy’s forehead. He was warm, not hot, and he was sweating.

  “Do you feel sick to your stomach?” she asked anxiously. “Does your head hurt?”

  “No,” he said, and smiled wanly up at her. "I heard you, Miss Maggie," he whispered. I heard you talkin’ to me all night. I heard you the whole time, telling me to get better."

  Maggie sank to her knees, feeling her energy run out of her like water from the pump. She began to cry, great, wrenching sobs that shook her whole body with their force. She lay her head on Tommy’s stomach, her hands clutching great fistfuls of the blanket, his small hands awkwardly patting her back and stroking her hair, his weak voice entreating her not to cry. That only made her cry harder, and she did not stop crying even when Nick lifted her to her feet and escorted her to her room.

  She cried when he ordered her to go to sleep. She cried as she took off her clothes and put on her nightrail. She cried as she crawled underneath the coverlet and laid her head upon the pillow. Even after her exhausted body had succumbed to sleep, her chest jerked with occasional spasms and more tears spilled down her cheeks.

  SIX

  Maggie sat utterly still, hardly breathing, her gaze riveted on the scene before her. She had gone for a walk just after Nick and Tommy’s bout with yellow fever, and had found this fox den with their out-of-season litter of kittens. She had needed the solitude that day, and Tommy was well enough to leave alone for a little while, so she had wandered the woods alone and had almost fallen into the fox den. She had sat here for an hour that first day, entranced, and she had come here every day since then.

  It had been more than a month since the community’s bout with the yellow jack, and it seemed every household had been hit in some way or other. The quarantine was now over; everything could go back to normal now.

  Doctor Fell had been quick with the quarantine and that had surely saved lives, but it had been bad enough, anyway. Two of the men who worked for Nick had died, one along with his two children, leaving only a grieving widow. Ned had told her that the woman was going back to her family in St. Louis. Kathleen’s family had been left untouched, but one of the neighboring farms had lost half their slave population. Kathleen had told Maggie, her full mouth pulled into a tight line of fury, that the owners had left the slaves who were sick untended, and quarantined themselves with only a few house servants. Nearly one hundred slaves had died, some of them just from pure neglect. Maggie had a hard time understanding that; how could you just not care about so many people dying? Kathleen told her it was because the slave owners thought of their slaves as cattle. It was a tragedy to lose so much livestock, but it never touched their heart, only their bank balance.

  The fox den was in the side of what appeared to be a dried up river bank. Maggie sat on the opposite edge of the bank, hidden partially by foliage, seated on the stump from a long-dead tree. The foxes had become used to her smell, she thought. At first, they had run back into their den whenever the wind would shift and they caught scent of her, the mother fox giving one sharp bark and the kittens running quickly into the den. Now, even when the wind turned and they caught her scent, like now, they stayed out of the den and continued playing.

  She hoped that the kits would survive the winter; most foxes were born in the spring and were nearly grown by the time winter came again. She smiled at the antics of the two red fox kittens as they hissed and mock-fought over a stick. Their mother lolled on the ground, not far from where they, seemed not to pay the least bit of attention to the kits. They rolled over and over, growling and batting at each other. One of them finally gained possession of the stick and ran to barricade itself in a natural hollow in a nearby tree. It gnawed on the stick complacently while the other kitten stalked a grasshopper instead. After a while, the kitten with the stick grew bored, and came out to try and take the grasshopper away from the other.

  “That stick must not have tasted as good as he thought,” said a quiet, slow voice from behind her.

  Maggie gave a small scream, jumped to her feet and whirled around, her heart beating furiously in her chest. The kittens rushed for the den with their mother right behind, her indolent pose just a pose after all.

  A man who seemed as big as a mountain stood behind her, one brawny hand resting on a carved wooden cane. He was wearing buff-colored breeches that clung to his heavily muscled thighs and a fringed leather shirt that fit like a glove to his massive chest. His pants were tucked

  into form-fitting boots of soft leather that came nearly to his knees. Maggie had never seen boots like these before; they were elaborately beaded and decorated with some kind of painted symbols.

  Maggie studied him unabashedly, and he stood waiting patiently while she did so. Something about his pose relieved most of her fear, though she was still watchful. Her gaze traveled up to his brown face and she caught her breath. A wicked scar bisected the right side from his ear to just above his mouth. The scar was obviously an old one; it was whitish and flat, not the angry red of a new injury.

  His hair was a flat black and fell straight to his collar, a little longer than she was used to seeing men wear their hair. He had a high forehead, and broad, rather flat cheekbones with a nose that looked like the curved edge of a scimitar, a pronounced, firm chin . . . and a lush mouth that made one think of sin and seemed out of place in that hard face. Until one looked at those eyes, of course. They were crystal blue and piercing . . . and the kindest eyes Maggie had ever seen. His eyes spoke to her. They stared into each other’s eyes, crystal blue to emerald green, and as suddenly as that they were friends. Maggie knew beyond certainty that this man would not hurt her, not ever, and that he would be her friend forever.

  “Maggie,” she said, holding out her hand. The hand not holding the cane engulfed hers in a gentle, firm grip.

  “Duncan,” he said in a deep, rumbly voice. “Duncan Murdoch.”

  Her gaze traveled over him again. “Nice to meet you,” she said with a saucy grin and a toss of her head. “Never seen a man as big as you before.”

  His chest shook, and it was a second before Maggie realized that he was laughing without sound.

  “I live over there, at Revelle’s.” She pointed in the general direction of the farm.

  “Horses, right?”

  Maggie nodded. “I am the housekeeper. Nick Revelle owns the farm, and my Uncle Ned is the head stableman.” She sat herself comfortably down on the ground, spread her skirts around her, and patted the stump for him to sit on. “This will be easier for you to get up from,” she said, eyeing the carved cane. He sat easily, and she chattered on as naturally as if they had been friends for years. He listened as intently to her nattering on as if she were telli
ng him the secret to Life.

  “My friend Kathleen works there, too. She is about my age, and she is the only friend I have had for years . . .”

  Duncan and Maggie met often in the forest after that. Sometimes she would take a walk and he would just show up; one minute there was no-one, and the next he was there. He often left as silently as he showed up. Maggie would be in the middle of a sentence, turn to ask him something, and he would be gone. Maggie got used to his silent comings and goings. She hardly even turned a hair at them anymore. She never asked him about himself, or what he was doing here. She sensed instinctively that he would eventually tell her all she wanted to know, without questions. hey talked of more important things than that, anyway. Duncan was surprisingly well-read, and something of an intellectual, and he and Maggie had lively discussions on everything from Plato to the fall of the Roman Empire.

  “They had all those things,” he had said quietly in that voice of his that seemed to come from the bottom of his chest, getting deeper and darker the farther it came. “But they did not really understand what was important. They forgot about love, and dignity, and worshiped at the altar of greed and sensation instead.”

  It was in a moment of accord just like that Nick found them. He had come seeking Maggie over some inconsequential thing; he refused to admit even to himself that the reason he had sought Maggie out was just to be near her. Maggie was sitting on the banks of the river, her legs bared and kicking at the sparkling water. She had leaned back on her arms and was laughing delightedly at something a big, handsome man was saying to her. The man was obviously part Indian, Nick could tell that from here. A friend of his father’s had been Cherokee, and Nick recognized some of the facial features that Indians have in common. That nose was a dead giveaway, as was the straight black hair.