One Bright Morning

by Duncan, Alice

  “He was passed out in the saloon.” Ozzie still looked downcast.

  “Humph. And I suppose you had to hang around the saloon, waiting for him to wake up.”

  Maggie’s tone was unmistakable. She thought both the doctor and Ozzie were worthless, disgusting specimens of humankind. She was sure Ozzie had spent a good hour or more guzzling bad whiskey while pretending to wait for the doctor to rouse himself.

  “Well, now, Maggie, it were a long, thirsty ride to town,” whined Ozzie.

  Maggie just eyeballed him with contempt and continued scrubbing lye soap over the blood stains on the sheet she held. The water, when she dunked the sheet, turned a deep scarlet. This Jubal Green, whoever he was, had fighting-red blood, she thought. It would be a shame if he didn’t make it.

  She glanced over to Ozzie again and saw that he had turned paper-white and was staring at her bedroom door. She figured the reaction must be from his first glimpse of Dan Blue Gully, and thought contemptuously that at least Sadie had had the cojones to scream. She nodded over at the doorway.

  “Mr. Blue Gully, this here’s my hired hand, Ozzie Plumb. Ozzie, this is Mr. Dan Blue Gully. He’s a friend of the gunshot man. His name is Jubal Green.”

  Ozzie just stared at Dan Blue Gully. Maggie noted that he trembled and decided that was just like him. She supposed if the Indian had been hostile, Ozzie would have fainted.

  “He work for you?” Dan’s head jerked toward Ozzie.

  A loud sniff accompanied Maggie’s reply. “He’s supposed to.”

  Dan nodded. “You need help here,” was all he said to her.

  Then he looked hard at Ozzie. His eyes narrowed slightly and he pointed a long, brown finger at him.

  “You help her,” he said. His voice held no more inflection than it usually did, which meant it was fairly flat, but Ozzie shrank back into his chair. He looked as though he might throw up.

  “Yessir,” he whimpered.

  Maggie was impressed. There was a lot more to this Indian than met the eye. Which reminded her of something. She wiped her hands on her apron.

  “Mr. Blue Gully?”

  He turned to look at her and nodded slightly.

  “Would you mind leaving another one or two of those bark pieces with me? Usually those headaches come in twos and threes, and if you wouldn’t mind, I’d surely appreciate it, if you have enough to spare.”

  “Oh, sure, ma’am,” Dan said. “Should have thought of that myself. Guess I was too worried about Jubal to think about anything else. Here you go, ma’am.” He handed her a little bundle of bark in a leather pouch.

  Maggie shook her head in solemn gratitude. “I don’t quite know how to thank you, Mr. Blue Gully. You don’t know what this means to me,” she said softly.

  The thought of actually receiving relief from the agony she suffered two or three times a month was almost overwhelming. There were tears in her eyes when she lifted her gaze to Dan’s face and she felt a little silly.

  He shuffled in embarrassment. “Shucks, ma’am, it’s nothing. My aunt, she give ‘em to me. I can get more for if you need ‘em later. Hell, them trees grow right there in Arizona.”

  A tear slipped out of Maggie’s eye, and then she really felt silly. “It’s not nothing to me, Mr. Blue Gully. You don’t know what this means to me.”

  “Well, ma’am, if you take good care of Jubal for me, I’ll make sure you have all the bark you need for the rest of your life.” He grinned a little bit to let her know how much he appreciated her help.

  “Oh, I’ll take care of him. Can’t do anything else. After all, he’s in my bed.”

  Maggie gave him a little smile after her small show of levity. Dan only looked a bit puzzled.

  “Well, guess I’ll be off now, ma’am. I’ll be back soon.”

  Although Maggie wondered what “soon” was, she didn’t ask. Instead, she turned to Ozzie who still clutched the edge of the kitchen table with quivering fingers.

  “Get on out and chop some wood Ozzie. You haven’t chopped wood for days, and we’re almost out. What do I pay you for, anyway?”

  Ozzie started to whine a protest, glanced up to see the squat but intimidating form of Dan Blue Gully standing next to Maggie, and his words died unspoken.

  “Yes’m,” was all he uttered as he scrambled to his feet.

  “I’ll call you in when breakfast is ready,” she hollered after him.

  “Yes’m,” he said again.

  “You stay for breakfast, Mr. Blue Gully. With so much going on in here, food’s real late in getting prepared this morning.”

  “Better not stay, ma’am. Got to catch French Jack’s trail, if it’s not too late already.”

  “Don’t want him to get away?”

  “No, it ain’t that so much, ma’am. French Jack ain’t goin’ nowhere until me and Jubal’s dead or he is. I just want to know where he is so he can’t sneak up on us.”

  Maggie looked a little sick. “Oh,” she whispered.

  She glanced toward the bedroom and decided she didn’t particularly want French Jack to sneak up on Jubal Green right now, either, since he was lying unconscious in her bedroom and the only way to him was through her.

  “That’s a good idea,” she added in a somewhat strangled voice.

  Dan Blue Gully touched her arm. “Don’t worry, ma’am. I won’t let him hurt you or your little girl.”

  Maggie looked up at him with worried eyes. “Thank you,” she said, and there was uncertainty in the words.

  Dan shook his head at her a little sadly and seemed to take note of those exhausted blue eyes, rimmed now with tired purple circles, set into a face with cheeks sunken from not enough food, too much work, and too little sleep.

  “You need some rest, ma’am,” he stated flatly.

  Maggie sighed and turned toward her stove. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Dan shook his head again, and took his leave.

  Sadie took Annie to her house to stay for a couple of days since it looked as though Maggie was going to be occupied as a full-time nurse for a while. Maggie felt a little disgruntled when her little girl happily toddled out of the door, holding onto Sadie’s hand.

  “I go wi’ Say,” Annie announced to her mama with a big, nearly toothless smile.

  “Well, you don’t have to look so danged happy about it,” her mama told her with feigned sternness.

  In truth, she hated like the devil to see her baby go away, even for a couple of days. Annie was all Maggie had in the world, and she couldn’t bear to be parted from her.

  “She’ll be just fine, Maggie. You know she loves to play with the twins.” Sadie and Pig Phillips had two little boys just six months older than Annie.

  “I know she will be,” said Maggie, and that didn’t make her feel very good, either.

  Annie would probably be better off if Sadie kept her forever, she thought grumpily to herself. At least the Phillipses had a profitable pig farm and each other. All Annie had here was her.

  She sighed with weariness when she bade Sadie and Annie good-bye at the door. Then she realized she hadn’t heard the steady chop-chop-chop of wood from the rear of the house for a while now, and stepped around back to see what Ozzie was up to.

  He was up to a nap, as usual, and Maggie’s nerves twanged sharply and finally snapped. She picked up a large chunk of wood and hurled it at the man snoring next to the wood block. The heavy chunk hit Ozzie square in the small of his back and Maggie smiled in satisfaction.

  Ozzie sat up with a bellow of rage and pain and thunked his head on the ax handle, which was sticking out at right angles to the blade that he had embedded in the block before he laid himself down to snooze. One hand rubbed his head while the other rubbed his back and he looked over at Maggie with a terribly hurt expression on his wrinkled pink face.

  “Either you finish chopping that wood by four o’clock this afternoon, Ozzie Plumb, or you get the hell off of my place right now,” said Maggie with venom dripping from her tongue. “For God�
�s sake Ozzie, I need you more now than ever. I got me a gunshot man to tend in the house, and I can’t be always after you to do the work I pay you to do. And don’t forget, you miserable son of a sow, that I still have your damned guitar in the house.”

  She whirled around to stomp back to the house before Ozzie could do more than flap his mouth.

  Ozzie wasn’t a quick thinker even when he was awake or he might have mentioned the fact that Maggie didn’t own a clock. Instead, he glared at Maggie’s back for several seconds, all the emotions common to weak men crossing his face, from anger to a craving for revenge, to perplexity. His expression finally settled into a glower of long-suffering abuse when he hauled himself up onto his two hind legs and resumed chopping wood.

  The aroma of fresh-cut pine followed Maggie to the house. It was one she liked a lot, and it mingled nicely with the fragrant wood smoke that billowed out of the chimney. She paused at the door to look about her, and the scene that met her eyes was one of deceptive peace and beauty. In fact, Maggie thought, if she weren’t so blamed exhausted, she might even enjoy it.

  Even now, during the tag-end of a hard winter, the woods were beautiful. Piñons and mesquite lined the clearing in which Kenny had built their home, and the front of the house afforded Maggie a grand view of the meadow where Kenny had planted his corn. Maggie couldn’t keep up the field alone, so it was reverting as fast as it could to meadowland.

  A little branch of the Hondo River ran beside the house, so water was easy to come by. Water was the only thing easy to come by around here. The stream was so insignificant that nobody had bothered to name it yet, but Maggie always thought of it as Bright’s Creek. She thought of Kenny every time she fetched water from it. Building the house near the stream was the smartest thing Kenny had ever done, most likely.

  The house itself could more appropriately be termed a cabin, since it was put together out of thick rough-hewn logs, but Kenny had called it a house, and that was all right with Maggie. It had a kitchen, a bedroom, and a small parlor, and if that wasn’t a house, Maggie didn’t much care. It was hers and she loved it, in spite of the hardships she faced to keep it.

  There was a screened-in back porch where they could keep milk cold in the winter, and a dugout that could be accessed from the porch. She stored her fresh and preserved vegetables in barrels in the dugout. Kenny had built shelves on the porch, and Maggie still had jars and jars of preserved fruits, vegetables, pickles, and jams from her garden’s reapings during the summer and autumn, in spite of winter being almost over.

  Maggie was a good gardener and a good preserver. In her underground storeroom there were even a couple of pumpkins and several squash, half a barrel of potatoes, three strings of onions, an almost-full string of garlic, and two strings of chili peppers still waiting to be used.

  She was proud of her food stores. Of course, the fact that she had only herself and Ozzie and little Annie to feed made life easier in that regard. On any day of the year, though, she would have given up any amount of her well-stocked larder to have Kenny back. She missed him. And life was sure easier with a good man around to do some of the work. Maggie didn’t count Ozzie.

  When she got back inside the nearly empty house, she sat at the kitchen table, put her face in her hands, and closed her eyes. She was so tired. She dimly heard the sound of chop-chop-chop as Ozzie resumed his labors before her eyes closed, her elbows folded up, and she fell asleep at the table.

  Maggie hadn’t been asleep very long before a low moaning sound began slithering around in her muddy brain and dimly penetrated the exhaustion that had drugged her. Consciousness was a long time in coming, though. It had to fight to open Maggie’s eyes, and when her eyelids finally did begin to creak open, they felt as though they did so through a layer of thick gum.

  At last a deep, miserable groan and a hoarsely cried name sent Maggie shooting out of her chair so fast that it fell over with a loud crash.

  “Oh, my God,” she cried, and tore over to the bedroom door.

  “Oh, my God,” she said again, her heart slamming against her ribs like hail during a storm.

  Jubal Green was bright red and thrashing back and forth on her bed. His fever had come upon him with a vengeance.

  Maggie put her hands to her cheeks and just watched him for several seconds, her mind not having yet caught up with her body. When it did, she realized she couldn’t have slept much because she still heard Ozzie chopping wood. To the best of her knowledge, Ozzie never worked more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a stretch. If he was still at it, her weakness couldn’t have led her to sleep for very long.

  “Oh, God, I wish I was stronger,” Maggie said. “Please, God, make me strong for this poor man.”

  She remembered Dan Blue Gully’s instructions and quickly tore the blankets from Jubal Green’s body. Kenny’s night shirt was soaking wet with sweat. Maggie dashed to the kitchen and pumped some fresh, cold water and took it back into the bedroom.

  “Oh, Lord, Mr. Green, please don’t die on me. Please don’t die,” Maggie pleaded to the unconscious man.

  She felt his forehead before she sponged him off. He was hot as a firecracker.

  “Oh, Lord.” It was a little prayer that time.

  Maggie bathed Jubal’s head in cool water, dried him off, and struggled Kenny’s soaking nightshirt off of him. She couldn’t help herself from blinking at his body as he lay on her bed, shimmering in sweat. He was something to look at, all right. Quickly, she drew a fresh sheet over him.

  “No blankets while you’re sweating,” Maggie said to herself, trying to concentrate on her nurse-maiding. “That’s what Mr. Blue Gully said.”

  Dan Blue Gully had assumed the properties of a god of medicine to Maggie’s worried brain by this time. She needed something to believe in or she was afraid she’d lose Jubal Green and herself, too. In spite of the food stores, it had been a hard winter, and Maggie was nearly at the end of her strength.

  Jubal Green seemed to calm down some under her tender ministrations. He stopped thrashing, at least.

  “All right, Mr. Green,” Maggie said when he lay still. She stroked his forehead tenderly. “I’m going to get you some of that bark tea. Don’t you move now.” Even though she knew the poor man couldn’t hear her, she spoke to him firmly.

  She got a cupful of bark tea and a spoon and took them back into the bedroom, set the cup on the chair next to the bed, knelt beside the bed herself, and lifted Jubal’s head. It was heavier than she had expected it to be. Then she very carefully spooned a little of the tea into his slack mouth. It dribbled out. Maggie almost cried.

  “Oh, please, Mr. Green. Please help me here.”

  She tried again. The tea dribbled out again. This time Maggie did cry.

  “Damn it,” she said, and she put his head back down and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

  She stared down at him, and cursed again with frustration. He was such a handsome man. His sun-streaked, thick, wavy hair ruffled over his forehead and looked pretty against her pillow. And he just lay there, eyes closed, sick as a dog, and he wouldn’t drink his tea. Flat on his damned back.

  That gave Maggie an idea. She lifted his head again so that his mouth dropped open. Quick as she could she shoveled in a spoonful of bark tea and laid his head back down.

  Jubal gagged a little, then swallowed, and Maggie very nearly laughed out loud. She continued to spoon tea between his lips. It was awkward, and Maggie guessed that if she were a clever person, she could have figured out an easier way to do this but it worked, so she did it anyway.

  As she worked, she recalled the cry that had ultimately awakened her from her nap at the kitchen table. Maggie could have sworn that Jubal Green had cried out the name, “Sara.”

  “Now I wonder who Sara is to you, Mr. Jubal Green,” Maggie said to keep herself company. “Is she a sweetheart? Mr. Blue Gully says you don’t have a wife.”

  She considered the man whose head she held cradled in her arms. His deep fevered flu
sh had tamed down some, and left him more nearly his normal complexion. At least Maggie assumed it was closer to his normal complexion. When she had first laid eyes on him, he’d been pale as death. Of course, Maggie’s own senses had then been swimming in a wash of agony, so she couldn’t be sure of anything.

  Now as she watched him, she saw a face that was lean and tanned and very well favored under its stubbly beard. “You’re sure good-lookin’ enough to have yourself a sweetheart.”

  There were little white lines around his eyes, the kind that come from creases that don’t get tanned when a person’s in the sun a lot. Maggie had most often seen those creases on the faces of people who smiled a lot, and she hoped Jubal Green was one of those smilers.

  “Although, I don’t suppose it will matter in the long run what kind of man you are. When you’re well again, you’ll just up and go away again and that will be that.” She didn’t know exactly why that realization saddened her.

  “I guess I’m just a little bit tired,” mused Maggie, who hadn’t slept more than six out of the last forty-eight hours.

  She continued to spoon bark tea into Jubal Green’s mouth until the cup was empty, then guessed that was enough for now. She felt his forehead again, realized his fever had gone down a lot, and chalked up another score for Dan Blue Gully. The Indian really knew his doctoring.

  Then she stood up, put her hands on her hips, and stretched out her aching back. Stabbing pains radiated from her spine and she groaned. She’d been bent over and tensed up for a long time.

  “I guess I’d better make up some rich soup for when you’re well enough to take nourishment, Mr. Jubal Green,” she told the sleeping man.

  She reached down and felt his naked arms. They were a little cool now, so she put one more blanket over him. His biceps were also hard as rocks, Maggie realized as she tarried a bit to lightly stroke them in appreciation.

  She decided not to bother with another one of Kenny’s night shirts for a while. Not only was it a pain to get it on and off the sleeping, wounded man by herself, but she found she rather enjoyed looking at him this way. He was quite something.