With each movement of the horse, John moaned. The sound got weaker and weaker as they moved as fast as they dared. Kitty sat behind David on his horse, arms about his waist to hang on, her head pressed against his back as she sobbed softly…and prayed.
Doc’s wife, Kate, was waiting. Many lanterns were glowing softly as the men carried John in and placed him on the wooden table Doc used in the front room he called an office.
Kitty took one look at the bloodied, shriveled flesh and stumbled outside, vomiting. David went with her, holding her on her feet as her sagging knees threatened to buckle any moment.
John was beaten from head to toe, his body stripped of all his clothing. The lashes of the whips and knotted ropes had dug into the flesh again and again, leaving it in strips, threads of muscle hanging from gaping wounds, blood and matter oozing forth among the shreds of skin. Even his genitals had been the target of many blows—swollen and blackened and bloodied with the Vigilantes’ abuse.
“He’s in bad shape, Kitty, real bad,” Doc told her in a sad voice when she returned to the room. “He’s lost a lot of blood, and being exposed like that with so many open wounds might give him the fever. I’ve got my special ointment, and I’ll put as much of that on him as I can tonight, and we’ll just have to wait till morning and see what happens.
“I’m sorry…” he added quietly.
Someone had pressed whiskey to John’s lips, and after a few sips, he had mercifully sunk into unconsciousness. Doc was then able to apply more ointment. “He couldn’t stand for me to touch him if he was awake. Goddamn them, they tried to kill him!”
“No, I don’t think so,” David said, still holding on to Kitty. “They’d have gone ahead and hanged him if they meant to kill him. They left him barely alive, for an example to anyone else who thinks about helping runaway slaves—and who goes against the way they think.”
Doc had to agree. “Yes, I hear slaves rebelling is getting to be a problem, with the war talk. They made an example all right…an example of the kinds of no-good sons of bitches that they really are.”
Kitty remembered something and twisted away from David, turning her wrath upon him. “You knew, David. You knew they planned to do this to my daddy, and you waited too late to do anything to help him. You’re just as bad as they are!”
“No, Kitty, I only heard the rumors.” His face grew pale. “I got worried and told Daddy, and he said we should check on it.”
He held out a hand to her, but she slapped it away, then reached to send a stinging palm across his face. “You’re as guilty as they are. And I’ll bet Nathan knew, too.”
“No, Nathan didn’t know…” They all turned astonished faces to the open doorway where Nathan stood, eyes angry, lips set grimly. “I didn’t know a damn thing till the noise from the slaves screaming woke up everybody in the house.”
He walked slowly into the room, toward the table where John lay unconscious. He muttered an oath under his breath, running nervous fingers through his sandy blond curls. Turning toward Kitty, a stricken look on his face, he gestured helplessly. “By the time I got dressed and ran to the slave cabins, the Vigilantes had already killed Willie—hanged him. They beat Jenny so bad they say she won’t live. Nobody knows what they did with her baby.”
Kitty swayed, and David took her back into his arms. Nathan saw it and frowned.
“I heard the slaves whispering about the white man that was supposed to have been hanged for helping Jenny and Willie,” he continued, “and I figured out what was going on. I started for John’s house and passed here and noticed all the lights and horses…”
He crossed to where Kitty and David stood, unable to control himself any longer. Yanking her from David’s arms he wrapped his own about her and said, “Kitty, darling, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. You’ve got to believe me. If I had known, I would’ve warned your daddy. But no one told me, ‘cause they knew I’d tell.”
John stirred, moaned softly, and they all turned to stare at him. He opened his eyes slowly, then closed them, and Kitty screamed. ‘It’s all right,” Doc said quickly, stepping forward to fasten his fingers around John’s wrist to feel for a pulse. “He isn’t dead. He just passed out again. That’s good. Let him sleep. He won’t hurt that way.”
Doc turned worried eyes upon Kitty. “He’s hurt bad, honey. He may not live. Somebody’s got to tell your mother.”
“I…I’ll go,” she said after a moment of silence, her body shaking. “It’s best that I be the one to do it.”
Nathan spoke up quickly. “I’ll go with you. My horse is right outside. We’ll go to your house and bring your mother back in your daddy’s wagon.”
Chapter Eight
Kitty had been too distraught on the ride home to talk. She had clung to Nathan’s back and wept silently as the horse trotted through the night along the rutted dirt road.
Lena had reacted when told about John’s beating in the way that Kitty had expected. She went into hysterics, and Nathan had to carry her out to the wagon once he had it hitched to a team of mules. Kitty felt scornful of her behavior, knowing it was only an act for Nathan’s benefit. She didn’t love her father. How could she, the way she treated him?
When they had arrived at Doc’s, Lena had scrambled down from the wagon, not waiting for Nathan to help her, and she ran into the house screaming at the top of her lungs. Doc, in a show of strength despite his wiry size, met her at the door and pushed her back onto the porch, gruffly ordering her to calm down or he would not let her enter. Subdued, finally, Lena allowed Kate Musgrave to lead her back to the kitchen for a cup of warm broth before letting her see John.
The night wore on, and as an orange sun rose against the watermelon sky that heralded a new day, Doc told Kitty he was going to need more laudanum to still John’s pain as he was starting to awaken. “I’ve done what I can with the salve, but his whole body is just one big mass of wounded flesh. I’ll need some opium for the laudanum.”
Kitty nodded and got to her feet. She had been sitting at the fireplace hearth, Nathan hovering anxiously nearby. “Where are you going?” he asked as she started for the door.
“To pick some poppies from the shed where Doc grows them for his opium,” she answered dully. “In winter, he has to grow the flowers indoors or the cold will kill them.”
“You know how to make opium?” he asked incredulously.
“Of course, she does,” Doc snapped. He snorted before returning to where John had been put to bed on a soft, goose-feather mattress.
Nathan followed Kitty to the back of Doc’s house, where she crossed the dirt yard to an old wooden shed. Stepping inside, they could see rows of poppies in the early morning sunlight that filtered through an open window, giving them warmth.
Kitty took the handle of a woven straw basket that hung on a nail near the door, then knelt among the poppies. “You have to pick the heads, just after they’ve ripened,” she explained.
“How’d you learn to do that?” Nathan wanted to know.
“Oh, Doc taught me when I was real little. He taught me all about making medicine from plants. I know how to make quinine from the dogwood tree.”
“Quinine from dogwood trees?” he asked, amazed. “I never knew that. Do you use the flower? They only bloom at Easter…”
“No, not the flower. We use the berries that come in the fall. We make enough quinine then and hope it will last for a year. Doc says the bark has alkaloid—which has something called ‘cinchona and Peruvian bark’ in it.
“Did you know that the cordial you take for dysentery is made from blackberry roots?” she asked as she searched the poppies for ripe bulbs, anxious to talk about something to take her mind off her father for a little while. “And you can also make it from ripe persimmons, but we don’t have many of those around here. Doc also taught me how to make an extract from the barks of the wild cherry, dogwood, poplar, and wahoo trees, that you can use for chills. Then for coughs, we make a syrup from the leaves and roots of the mullein pl
ant and globe flower. Castor oil, of course, comes from the castor bean.”
“And you know how to do all this?” He was unable to keep the shock and amazement from his voice.
“What’s so strange about that?”
“Well, most young ladies…”
“Most young ladies make me sick,” she snapped, “I told you before, Nathan, I love medicine. I love helping sick people. You find that shocking, but I don’t. Women have the right to do what they want with their lives, just as men do.”
He shook his head in wonder. “I…I guess you have a point, Kitty.”
She stood up, the necessary supply of poppy heads in her basket. “I know I do. My father agrees with me.” And she began to blink back tears as she thought of the condition he was in.
Hurrying back to the house, she sat down at the kitchen table with Kate to extract the opium from the poppies. Nathan watched as they used a large-sized sewing needle to pierce the bulbs, catching the opium gum in a cup.
They finished their chore and Doc came in to finish making the laudanum. “Go sit by your father,” he told Kitty. “If he wakes up, I want you to get your mother out of there. No telling what she’s liable to do—probably start lambasting him for helping those runaways.”
Nathan went with her, and she was grateful for his presence—and his strength when she needed it. They stared down at John’s body, covered in deep cuts surrounded by purple and blackened trenches of torn flesh. There was one deep cut that looked as though the very tip of the whip had slashed right into his eye, and the eyelid was puffed out in a fleshy, swollen bag of broken blood vessels and bruised skin.
“He’s going to lose the sight in the eye,” Kitty said with painful resignation. “He’s going to be blind in that left eye.”
“Maybe not,” Nathan said, patting her shoulder to give her comfort. “Maybe when the swelling goes down, it will be all right. He is going to have some bad scars, though.” He shook his head as his eyes swept over the mutilated body.
Kitty’s head snapped up at the sound of approaching horses. “Someone’s coming…” She started to get up, but Nathan pushed her back down.
“I’ll see who it is.” He crossed to a window and peered out, then, giving her an anxious look said, “Kitty, it’s my father.”
She leaped to her feet, face flooding with the redness of anger. “How dare he come here? Everyone knows he’s one of them…probably the leader.”
“No, you don’t know that’s true,” he said quickly. “That’s only a rumor, Kitty. No one knows who the Vigilantes are. I don’t believe he’d be here if he were a part of this, and, besides, he was asleep at home last night, just as I was.”
She could hear voices through the closed slat door—the solicitous tone of Aaron Collins—the gushing voice of her mother who had a special voice she used around those she considered “society folk”.
Kitty opened the door and stepped out, lips set in a tight line. Aaron turned and bowed slightly, resplendent in a fashionable black coat, his pleated shirt topped by the widest and most elegant of black cravats. He wore mustard-colored trousers, and his boots were polished to a glossy sheen. He looked at her with eyes that reminded her of Nathan, his salt-and-pepper hair curling about his ears the way Nathan’s did. But there the resemblance of father and son ended. She prayed that the man she loved could never be as ruthless as his father.
“Miss Kitty, I came here to tell you how it grieved me to hear of the unfortunate beating your father suffered at the hands of the Vigilantes. All of the county is upset that such a thing has happened. Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Oh, that’s kind of you…” Lena gushed.
Kitty cut her off by snapping, “Do you really expect me to believe you are grieved, Aaron Collins, when it was your slaves my father was helping to escape?”
“Surely you don’t think I had anything to do with this?”
“I only know my father might die because of those murdering bastards,” she cried angrily. “And I know everyone says you are the leader of the Vigilantes. How can you have the gall to come here and pretend sympathy?” She was shaking in her wrath, and Nathan stepped forward to clamp steadying hands on her shoulders.
“Believe me,” Aaron spoke quietly. “I was home in my bed asleep when the screaming of the slaves woke me up. By the time Nathan and I got to the cabins, Willie was dead, and the girl called Jenny terribly beaten.” His voice lowered as he added, “She died this morning. They haven’t found the baby.”
Kitty gasped, turning her face away as she blinked furiously to keep the tears back. She would not let them see her cry.
“I would suggest,” she said, mustering composure as she turned back to face him, “that you send your men out to search for the Vigilantes and see that they are charged with murder, since you pretend to be so concerned by all that has happened.”
“My men are already out asking questions,” Aaron assured her. “It was not anyone’s place to pursue the runaways but mine, since they belonged to me. And it was certainly not their place to kill them.”
Through the partially closed door, the sound of John’s anguished moaning reached them. “I must go to my father,” Kitty said. “Excuse me.” And she turned and went back into the bedroom, closing the door tightly behind her.
Doc was already there, ready with the laudanum he hoped would ease the pain. He lifted John’s head with one hand, spooning in the thick liquid with the other. John swallowed, and Doc lowered his head back to the pillow.
“Poppa, can you hear me?” Kitty asked anxiously. “You’re here at Doc’s, and we’re going to take care of you. You’re going to be all right.”
“…tried to kill me…” he whispered so low they had to bend their heads to hear the words being forced through swollen, purple lips. “…passed out, and they kept…beating me…”
“John, you need to rest,” Doc spoke firmly. “You need to build up your strength. You’re hurt bad…”
“…goin’ to kill them…” he whispered. “So help me, God…I’ll get them.”
“Poppa, hush now,” Kitty cried, her heart constricting with pain.
Doc forced down another spoonful of laudanum. “…my dog…” John moaned then, remembering. “…Killer.”
“He’s going to be all right,” Kitty told him, remembering Jacob telling them about the old hound when they had returned to get Lena. “Jacob says he’ll be fine.”
He closed his eyes, sighed, and grew very still. She looked at Doc anxiously, who nodded. “He’s just asleep. The laudanum should knock him out for several hours, and he needs his rest. That’s what’s going to save him, honey—rest and getting his strength back so those wounds will heal. We’ll keep watch to make sure if infection does set in, we’re ready. Now why don’t you let Nathan take you home so you can get some sleep? You’ve been up all night, and you’re starting to show signs of wear. It won’t do your daddy any good if you collapse. And I’d like to get your mother out of here, too. She’s no good to anybody with that constant harping of hers.”
Kitty nodded. She had no intentions of going home to stay, however. But she would take Lena there and leave her.
Returning to the hallway, she saw her mother on the porch bidding goodbye to Aaron Collins. She came inside as Nathan hung back to speak privately to his father. Kitty wondered what that was all about. Then Lena was standing in front of her, eyes shining as she said, “He had nothing to do with all this, Katherine, and he’s so upset by it that he wants to make up for the way he’s been feeling toward you. He says he’ll have no objections in the future to Nathan courting you.”
“Oh, Mother, you didn’t say anything to him about that!” Kitty was mortified.
“I certainly did,” Lena was belligerent. “I have a right as your mother to be concerned about your future. I still have hopes that you and Nathan will get married, and when that happens, you’ll thank me for everything I’ve done.”
“I’ll thank you to stay out of m
y life and let me run it.” Suddenly she felt very weary and tired. “Look, we’re going home now. Doc has given Poppa something to make him sleep for a long time. There’s no point in you being here to get in the way. People will be coming soon for Doc’s regular office hours, anyway, so we need to get home and see to things there.”
Lena’s lips tightened. “Folks will wonder why I’m not at my husband’s side…”
“They’ll know you need your rest, too, besides, some of your neighbors might be calling on you once they hear what’s happened.”
Her mother’s eyes glittered with excitement. “That’s true. I’ll need to have some pie and coffee to serve them, and I’d better get home and get to baking.”
Kitty shook her head and sighed. Only her mother would turn such a happening into a social gathering. They moved onto the porch, and she told Nathan they were ready to go home. “As soon as I get Mother settled, I’ll ride back with you so I can look after Poppa. Kate will be needed to help Doc with his patients when they start coming in.”
Her mother hurried inside, and Nathan and Kitty ran to the barn to check on Killer’s condition. The old dog lay in a corner on a pile of straw, Jacob sitting beside him looking sad and dejected. “He going to be all right,” Jacob told them. “Got a bad place on his head that’ll take some time to heal, but he gonna live. You tell Mastah John that. He’ll want to know about his dog…”
Kitty told him that John had already awakened and asked about him, and Jacob nodded quietly and said, “I’m gonna keep on prayin’, Miss Kitty. Your pappy’s too fine a man to die. We need him…”
“Yes, Jacob, we do need him, and God isn’t going to let him die.” Blinking back tears, she let Nathan lead her from the barn to where his stallion was waiting.
He mounted the horse, then pulled her up behind him. “I really should change clothes,” she said dully, “but I want to get back to Poppa.”
Love and War: The Coltrane Saga, Book 1 Page 10
