One Bright Morning

by Duncan, Alice

  Maggie blushed when she realized she was staring at Jubal Green’s hairy chest. She couldn’t quite get her eyes to drift any lower than that and, anyway, she had kept the sheet and blanket on him from the waist down. She wasn’t altogether sure she wanted to see that bulge again. Still, she had to admit that he was a very well-favored man in that department.

  “Don’t want you to catch a chill,” she told him as she carefully smoothed the blanket up over his shoulders.

  Maggie realized that the sound of chopping could no longer be heard from out back and she sighed heavily. That meant she’d have to go out back and bully Ozzie Plumb some more, she reckoned. She was getting right good at bullying that man, much to her disgust.

  She smoothed her hair and rubbed the back of her neck, got herself a drink of water from the pump, and stepped outside.

  When she walked around to the back of the house, Ozzie Plumb was draped artistically over the wood pile, dead. A shotgun blast had ripped his back open.

  Chapter Three

  Maggie didn’t even remember getting herself back into the house. She only remembered staring at that gigantic, gaping, bloody hole in Ozzie’s back, sucking in a huge shuddering breath, turning on her heels, and running hell for leather in the other direction. She paused inside the door with her back pressed against it and sobbed in fright.

  With shaking hands, she slammed the bolt down.

  “Oh, great God,” she breathed. “Oh, great God, please help us.”

  She managed to make it to the kitchen table before her knees gave out on her and she collapsed.

  “Oh, Lord, please tell me what to do now. How could I have missed hearing the sound of a shotgun?” she asked herself in her frenzy. “I was probably so blamed busy with Jubal Green that I wouldn’t have heard a train if it hit the house. What on earth am I supposed to do now?”

  She had absolutely no idea what to do with poor Ozzie. She was afraid to go out there and try to wrestle his body somewhere, even if she knew where she could wrestle it to. When Kenny had died, the whole community had more or less expected it, and they had already made arrangements. But this time, nobody except Maggie knew Ozzie was dead from this unexpected shotgun wound in his back.

  “Oh, well,” she thought aloud. “He’ll probably freeze overnight. That ought to keep him.”

  She didn’t know what she’d do after that, and decided she’d just have to think about it later.

  “I’m sorry, God. I’m sorry I yelled at him so much.” Maggie wiped guilty tears away.

  And there wasn’t only Ozzie’s lifeless corpse to consider, either. There was a strange man maybe dying on her bed. She couldn’t very well leave him and go fetch help.

  “I mean, it wasn’t even Ozzie they were after,” she whispered into the warm kitchen air. “They just killed him out of spite. It’s Jubal Green, the man on my bed, the man who can’t move, who isn’t even conscious, that they really want. If I leave the house again, they’re liable to shoot me, and then sure as check, they’ll kill him. Oh, God. I wish Mr. Blue Gully was here.”

  The only bright spot in this whole terrible scenario, as far as Maggie was concerned, was that Annie had gone with Sadie. Then she sat bolt upright in terror.

  “Oh, God, please let Annie be safe.”

  The awful possibility that Sadie and Annie might have been ambushed before they got back to Sadie’s place crossed her mind. She tried to dismiss it with the sensible notion that Sadie and Annie had left hours and hours ago. A long time before Ozzie had been shot.

  But then the fear overtook her again, and she mumbled, “French Jack could have got them first and then come back here for Ozzie.”

  Maggie told herself that she’d better get a firm grip on herself or she and Jubal Green would both be in deep trouble. Then she decided she’d better take a detailed survey of her home to determine just how secure it was and what she could do to make sure French Jack couldn’t get inside. The back porch was a worry, since it was only screened in.

  Very carefully, she made her way to the window and peered outside. She could see nothing except what was supposed to be there: earth and trees and the meadow beyond. Daylight was barely holding on to the edges of the woods, giving the piñon branches a deep golden overlay to their dark green needles. Maggie figured it must be about four o’clock.

  “The time I told Ozzie to have the wood chopped by.” She had to dab at her moist eyes.

  “Stop it,” she commanded herself firmly. She mustn’t allow herself to get weepy again. Her life and that of Jubal Green might depend on her keeping her composure in check.

  “I wish to God I could see,” she said disgustedly.

  In truth, Maggie’s eyesight was not the best. That fact irritated her often. Kenny had gone all moony about her beautiful blue eyes—back in the days when they really were pretty, before she got so dragged down. He told her over and over again how beautiful he thought her eyes were. But Maggie always figured she’d rather have eyes that she could see out of than eyes that were good to look at. She was perverse that way.

  “Oh, well,” she told herself firmly, “it can’t be helped.”

  Kenny’s Spencer rifle lay on a rack over the fireplace in the parlor, and Maggie carefully removed and loaded it. She made it a habit to clean the rifle once a week, just as Kenny had taught her to do, whether she used it or not, just to keep her education up to date. Kenny had taught her to shoot the gun, too. She wasn’t much of a shot, but she didn’t figure French Jack had to know that yet.

  “Let him find out for himself,” she told the rifle, giving it a little pat for luck.

  It made her feel a little better to realize she wasn’t completely helpless.

  She remembered Jubal Green’s guns then, and tiptoed into the bedroom. The rifle he had knocked at her door with was lying across a chest against the wall, and Dan Blue Gully had put Mr. Green’s Colt revolver there, as well, its leather holster neatly folded. Extra ammunition was contained in a pouch next to the weapons, and Maggie suspected there was more in Mr. Green’s saddle bags, which were stacked next to the wall.

  His pocket watch and chain also nestled on the chest, in a tidy little coil. Maggie thought sadly that she actually would have been able to berate Ozzie for not finishing chopping the wood on time, after all. She didn’t allow herself to dwell on that unhappy thought.

  She gathered the weapons and ammunition together and took them into the kitchen. She fetched Kenny’s gun-cleaning box out of the kitchen cabinet and carefully cleaned each gun and loaded it.

  Then she took a deep, deep breath, backed herself against the kitchen wall, and edged over to the back porch. She held Jubal Green’s Colt revolver in her sweaty hand, and devoutly wished the door had a window so she could peek through it to see if someone lurked on the porch. She unlatched the door carefully and peered into the room. No shots rang out, so she braced herself for her foraging expedition.

  Maggie had already made a mental inventory of her needs, which she repeated over and over to herself in order not to forget anything. Her plan was to be as efficient as she could possibly be when she braved the porch. She didn’t fancy being shot because she lingered over the potato barrel.

  She waited until she judged the light to be low enough to provide protection without concealing anything that might be hunkered down outside. Then she pushed the door open, propped it with a book so it wouldn’t slam shut and cause her to have to fumble with it on her way back in, and dashed onto the porch and into the dugout. In less time than it usually took her to sneeze, she had gathered everything she figured she would need for the night and raced back into the kitchen.

  Her arms were piled full and a couple of onions and a turnip dropped and bounced across the floor, but she had done it. She offered up a tiny little prayer of thanks as she plopped the rest of her armload onto the table and relocked the door.

  Working very quickly, she peeled and chopped an onion and threw it, a couple of chopped carrots, a chopped potato, and a m
eaty beef bone into a pot of water and set it on the stove to cook up into a healing soup for Jubal Green.

  Then she stepped into the bedroom to check on her patient. He was burning up once more.

  Maggie swore.

  “Oh, dear Lord, Mr. Green. How am I supposed to tend to your soup if I have to be sponging you off all the time?”

  She removed the blankets from him yet again and realized she needed another sheet. The one that covered him was sopping wet, but she wasn’t about to tend him while his privates were exposed. So, with a weary sigh, she threw the wet sheet into a corner, fetched a clean one, covered him from his waist on down, and began the sponging and drying ritual once more.

  After she had blotted him dry, she went to the kitchen to dish him up another cupful of bark broth. This time, he seemed to be able to swallow it without her having to raise and lower his head with each spoonful. Maggie took that as a good sign.

  “I should have known better,” she sighed an hour later.

  Jubal Green might well be able to swallow his bark tea, but his fever showed no sign of abating this time.

  “I guess fevers are always worse at night,” Maggie murmured to herself and the wall as she bathed his head with cool water an hour later and tried to stop him from thrashing about.

  Forty-five minutes after that, when she was having to physically restrain the man from chasing the demons his fever-induced hallucinations had brought on, she grumbled, “Lord in heaven, I hope French Jack doesn’t decide to attack us now.”

  Two hours from then, when she was piling quilts and blankets on a shivering Jubal Green whose teeth were now chattering loud enough to wake Ozzie Plumb from the dead, Maggie had stopped even trying to keep the tears from coursing down her weary cheeks.

  “Lordy, Mr. Green, if you can just lie there and not die until I can get back from the kitchen, maybe I can get some hot broth down you. That might warm you up some.”

  Maggie didn’t stop to consider if she should try to do anything for herself. Her limbs were aching and stiff from exhaustion, and her eyes felt as though they had been glued into their sockets and then had sand thrown into them. She knew she had to eat something or collapse, so she drank a cup of the same broth she brought to Jubal Green, and grabbed a hunk of stale bread to chew on her way back into the bedroom.

  Slowly, teaspoonful by tiny teaspoonful, Maggie trickled nourishment down the wounded man’s gullet. She was so exhausted and sore that she didn’t even notice the fact that tears still leaked from her eyes. It was almost as though she had stopped feeling anything. The tears she shed meant nothing to Maggie; they were just her body’s way of telling her that this was the end of the road, that it couldn’t hold out much longer against nature, and that Maggie had better give it a rest soon.

  She didn’t have time to listen to her body. She just kept lifting the spoon to Jubal Green’s mouth. Every swallow was a victory, every dribble a defeat.

  An hour and a half after that, Jubal Green’s soul began a slow, slogging climb through a painful, mysterious, sucking, black morass into semi-consciousness. For some time Jubal had been dimly aware of a struggle going on around him and in which he was tenuously involved, but only from a vague, far distance. That struggle somehow seemed not to involve him directly, but was one that was being waged valiantly around him and on his behalf. Sorting it all out was too confusing to him, so he decided not to bother right now.

  When his eyes slowly cracked open, they saw nothing that was familiar to them. He was also in excruciating pain.

  Maybe I’m dead, flitted vaguely through his mind, only to be immediately rejected.

  Too much pain. If you’re dead, you don’t hurt, he decided.

  Then he frowned and wondered how he knew that. After all, he’d never been dead before. And to the best of his knowledge, no other living soul possessed any first-hand knowledge about whether or not pain persisted after life ended. All Jubal Green knew for sure that there was an inordinate amount of pain during life itself. If he was still alive.

  His thoughts began spinning around and making him dizzy, so he decided to stop thinking. He concentrated instead on seeing.

  When his eyes had had a chance to focus in the dimly lit room, he was too weak to lift his head, or even turn it so that he could check out his surroundings. Instead, he took a painful survey of the length of his body which seemed to stretch out forever in front of him.

  He was surprised to find that he was naked and had a bandage wrapped around his chest. He couldn’t see too much of that particular bandage because it was so close to his chin, and he didn’t have enough strength to raise his head. There was more white linen encircling his thigh. The idea that he was being wrapped for burial crossed his mind, but he rejected it with a weak scowl.

  The entire right side of his upper body hurt like fire, and the whole left side of his lower body felt as though somebody had beat him with a steel mallet. The rest of him didn’t feel too good, either. He couldn’t have moved even if he’d been in the mood to, which he wasn’t. He felt remarkably lazy. Jubal Green had never felt lazy before to the best of his recollection, and he hoped it wouldn’t become a habit. He was used to getting things done. Jubal scorned lazy people.

  He couldn’t remember what he had been doing before he woke up in this strange place.

  He became slowly aware that there was a head resting on his belly. He frowned. That didn’t seem right, somehow.

  He squinted down what seemed like miles and miles of his own naked flesh to concentrate on the dark, tousled, honey-blond head that lay there. The head was actually butting up against his waist, in the little crook there where it joined his hip. Jubal Green didn’t think that was quite proper and he wondered if he’d been sporting with a whore before he went to sleep. He couldn’t quite remember but, if he had been, it seemed somehow out of character.

  He had a foggy recollection that he and somebody—oh, yes, he and Dan Blue Gully, it was—had been doing something important. Jubal Green never sported with whores when he and Dan Blue Gully were doing important things. They were always very single-minded when they were working.

  Still, he couldn’t account for that head.

  Maybe I am dead, he thought. Maybe that’s an angel.

  That didn’t make sense to him and his frown deepened.

  Just then Maggie gave a deep sigh in her sleep and turned her head over. She had finally fallen asleep sitting beside the bed. She had been holding Jubal Green’s legs down when he was thrashing so hard that she was afraid he’d reopen his thigh wound and bleed to death.

  When his struggles had gradually ceased, her exhaustion overcame her and her eyes had just shut as she sat there, arms still draped over Jubal’s right leg, and with her head lying practically in his crotch. By that point in her life, she hadn’t even noticed the impropriety of her position.

  When he saw Maggie’s face, Jubal immediately rejected his angel theory. Angels didn’t have tangled, dirty blonde hair, huge dark rings around their eyes, smears of blood and sweat on their faces, and look as though they had been dragged, kicking and screaming, through the fires of hell.

  Maybe this is hell, he thought then. That would certainly account for the pain.

  He tried to concentrate on Maggie’s face.

  Can’t be hell, he decided.

  Because that face was a good one, even if it was dirty and tired-looking. And, while he wasn’t all sure about himself, he didn’t figure a face that good would have made it into hell.

  His right hand, the hand that was attached to the shoulder which was presently being consumed by a raging inferno, was resting near that good face, and Jubal found the strength to lift a hand and place a finger on its cheek. His finger gently stroked Maggie’s soft cheek twice. That activity took every single remaining ounce of his energy. Jubal Green’s illness overcame him again, his hand fell, and he slept once more.

  It was the sound of gunfire that woke Maggie up. She was jolted awake and up onto her feet in one je
rky motion that was too sudden, and she nearly blacked out and toppled over onto her patient. She managed to keep upright by clinging desperately to the table beside the bed. Then she was horrified at what might have happened had she actually fallen onto the invalid. It didn’t bear thinking of.

  “Oh, my God, I’m sorry, Mr. Green,” she whispered.

  She was trying to chase the black fog, sprinkled with shooting stars, away from in front of her eyes where it gyrated in sickening waves.

  When she could move without falling down, she dashed into the kitchen to try to figure out where the gunshots were coming from and where they were being aimed. She picked up Kenny’s Spencer rifle just in time to hear a bullet slam into the side of her house. She briefly thanked God that Kenny had built the house out of thick piñon logs.

  Then she got furious.

  “How dare those bad men shoot at my house?” she stormed. “I didn’t have anything to do with their problems. I’m just trying to keep one of them alive.”

  Maggie couldn’t remember ever feeling such a combination of rage and indignation before in her life. She crept over to the kitchen window and peeked outside, making sure she didn’t give anyone who was out there enough of a target to aim at.

  Daylight was just beginning to creep over the forest. The trees still looked black, but their pointy tops could barely be perceived outlined against the gray sky. Maggie strained to pick out men in the trees and then gave up the effort in disgust.

  “My eyes are so blamed bad, I couldn’t see anybody in those stupid trees in broad daylight,” she grumbled to herself.

  She saw the flash of light just before the sound of the shot reached her, and a tiny split-second after the sound of the shot came the noise of the bullet thunking into the wooden log siding of the house. Maggie smiled a nasty smile.

  “You son of a bitch,” she said to her unknown adversary, and she aimed as well as she knew how to aim and pulled the trigger.

  The rifle’s recoil nearly knocked her across the kitchen floor and the sound almost deafened her. That startling result of her self-defense, however, was not enough to block out the satisfying cry of pain that wailed across the clearing from the woods. She grinned triumphantly.