Five Magic Spindles: A Collection of Sleeping Beauty Stories

by Rachel Kovaciny

  I treated the boy outside, right in the bed of his father’s wagon. Mindful of Palmer’s advice, I first swabbed out the gash as best I could, then gave the boy that well-gnawed spoon to bite while I poured liquor over the wound and the needle I stitched it up with. He downed a generous slug of the alcohol with considerably less face-pulling than Rosalind.

  Their arrival had awakened Victor, who appeared briefly at the door with his rifle. When I’d finished bandaging up the boy, I instructed his father as to the care of the wound. He gave me two silver dollars warm from his pocket and promised me a dozen eggs if I would ride out their way in a few days to check on the boy.

  When I went inside to wash up, I found Victor pacing restlessly, fiddling about with things, and being more bother than blessing. I sent him out to check on the new little mother and her lambs in the barn. Rosalind had not touched her tea. At first I thought her asleep, but she tossed her head back and forth at times, mumbling. Her face was flushed, and her skin was hot and dry to the touch. I wondered if I should try to sweat the fever out of her but decided she had too little liquid in her to make that advisable. Whenever I tried to get her to drink either willow bark tea or water, she pushed the cup away with surprising force. I gave up on that eventually and set about baking a pan of cornbread to go with what remained of the stew I’d made the day before.

  Then the dog barked, startling me so that I dropped a spoon onto the table with a clatter. I spun around and saw Rosalind out of bed, hanging onto the chair, swaying. “Where is he?” she asked, her rasping voice painful to hear.

  “He’s in the barn,” I assured her as I hurried to her side.

  “I need to find him.”

  “He’s in the barn, checking on the sheep,” I soothed. I tried to guide her back to bed, but she pulled away.

  “No, not Pa. The other man. Luke, he said his name was.” She tried to move toward the door.

  “Rosalind, you’re not well,” I said firmly. “How about some warm cornbread? I’ve just baked some.”

  “I’ve got to find him.” She shoved me away.

  Now, I am neither a light woman nor a weak one. Or so I thought. But Rosalind pushed me hard enough that I had to let go of her arm to keep myself from toppling onto her bed. Regaining my balance, I caught up with her as she reached the threshold.

  “You come back in here,” I ordered as I took hold of her good arm again.

  She twisted and pulled against me. “Why won’t you leave me alone?”

  Hoping her father might be able to handle her better than I could, I called out the doorway for him. She tried to push past me, but I blocked her way. “Blue,” I said, hoping that dog was as intelligent as I believed, “go fetch Victor. Bring help. Please.”

  Blue cocked his head to one side, gave a short yip, and ran out. Rosalind tried to duck under my arm and follow, but I got her around the waist and hauled her back inside, then quickly slammed the door shut. “You are staying here,” I told her.

  “I have to find him,” she moaned. “Why’d he leave?” She began to pace the room, from door to spinning wheel to table to bed to door, around and around and around.

  It couldn’t have been more than two or three minutes before Victor arrived, but it seemed much longer as I stood guarding the door, watching her walk in circles like a sick calf. But then he was there at the window, calling, “What’s wrong?”

  “She’s out of her head from the fever. Help me get her back into bed.”

  Victor and his faithful dog slipped inside, and I barred the door behind them. Then together we tried to convince Rosalind to lie down, or at least to sit by the fire. Finally she consented to sit in her mother’s rocking chair, where she rocked back and forth, still agitated. She began to mumble half under her breath.

  I sat down at the table, worn out by the struggle. Victor pulled the other chair up and looked at me with such anxious sorrow that I took one of his hands in both of mine and squeezed it reassuringly.

  “Fevers are a strange thing,” I said softly. “Distressing to watch and unpredictable as a jackrabbit. All we can do is keep her safe until Mr. Palmer returns.”

  “You really believe he can help her? That story about being a surgeon, the war . . .”

  “If you’re thinking it’s too good to be true, I’ve felt the same. Yet, watching him—he certainly seems capable.” I shrugged. “Sometimes the good Lord sends us what we need right when we need it. Even if it’s not what we wanted.”

  Victor looked down at our hands. “I hope so.” He placed his other hand on top of mine. “If you hadn’t been here, Emma . . . I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  “But I am. And I’ll not leave until we’ve seen her through this.” Not though ten babies all decided to be born that night. Their mothers would have to travel to me, for once.

  Victor said, his voice faltering, “I can never hope to repay you.” His eyes met mine, and he seemed about to say something else, but didn’t.

  “This is what friends do,” I told him. “They help.”

  Chapter 8

  I DID NOT LOOK for Palmer to be back before nightfall. Lincoln was a good twelve-hour ride away, and what with finding a doctor or druggist, resting his horse and himself, then riding back—even if he pushed, it would be late before he arrived. Or so I expected.

  But it was only midafternoon when we heard a horse outside. Victor snatched up his rifle and hurried to the window, flattening himself beside it so he could peer out without being seen much himself. “It’s him,” he said.

  “Him? Now?” I pushed away from the table. “Can his horse fly?” I went to the window to see for myself. Our visitor was indeed Palmer, but riding a different animal, a rangy dun far inferior to his own fine mount. I flung open the door. “Mr. Palmer, where is your horse?” I demanded.

  “In Lincoln. I’ll see him again in a day or two.” He dismounted wearily. “How is she?”

  “Feverish.” I watched him untie a canvas sack from his saddle horn. “Did you get . . . everything you needed?”

  “Yes.” He paused then added, “And I hope I won’t be needing everything I got.” With a rough stubble shadowing his cheeks and dark half-moons under his eyes, he made me worry I’d have another patient on my hands if he didn’t rest soon.

  Victor met him at the door, his face full of questions he didn’t know how to ask. Or wasn’t willing to, maybe.

  Palmer stopped before he entered the house and handed me the heavy canvas sack. Unbuckling the fine gun belt from around his waist, he held it out to Victor, pistol firmly in its holster. “As you asked,” he said.

  Victor took it from him and went inside without a word.

  I set the sack beside Rosalind’s bed. It clinked softly, something metal against glass. I shivered at the sound. Palmer went right to where she still sat restlessly in the rocking chair. He spoke softly as he checked her pulse, felt her forehead, and stilled her rocking so he could look into first one eye, then the other. “How long has she been like this?” he asked.

  “A couple hours,” I said. “Since before noon.”

  “She’s wearing herself out.” He turned to Victor, who watched nearby, arms folded. “I’m going to give her laudanum to make her sleep. Once she’s quiet, I’ll treat her hand.” He asked me, “When was the last time you gave her a dose of liquor?”

  “Early this morning, when I first woke. She won’t drink anything for me now though, or for her father either.”

  Rosalind put up a fuss about the laudanum Palmer coaxed her to swallow. Then suddenly her eyes lost their unfocused glaze and she recognized him. “Oh!” she said, smiling up at him. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “And you’ve found me,” he answered. “Now I need you to drink this. Please, Miss Owens.”

  She obediently swallowed what he gave her, and smiled again when he thanked her for cooperating. But before long she was back to muttering about needing to find him, rocking and rocking as if her life depended on it instead of on any me
dicine we could give her.

  While we waited for the laudanum to take effect, Palmer drew Victor and me to the far side of the room. There he said softly, “While I was in Lincoln, I learned that Mrs. Mortimer has more than replaced me. She’s hired three more gunmen. I have no doubt she intends to do just what she threatened: lay siege to this house.”

  “Three!” My voice squeaked on the word.

  Victor said, “Well, how did you think this would end, Miss Emma? Some nice way? Like you said, she must know you’ve told the whole town what happened here. She needs to end this now, and the only way she’ll want it to end is with us gone, one way or another.”

  “I agree,” said Palmer. “I hope I didn’t overstep myself, Mr. Owens, but I stopped at the sheriff’s office while I was in Lincoln. I told him all that’s happened here. He said he’d send a man to investigate when he could spare one. He’ll bring my horse along when he does.”

  “I thank you for that,” Victor said. “Whatever happens here, at least there’s a chance for justice that way.”

  Palmer asked, “Can you fire a gun, Miss Thornberry?”

  “Not with any degree of accuracy.” I imagined myself wearing a holster and staring down a hired killer. If reality had not been so alarming, I would have laughed at the conjured image. I elaborated, “What I mean to say is, I doubt I could hit a moving target with anything you’d call dependability. But shoot a gun? Yes, I can do that.”

  “That’s all we’ll need,” Palmer said. “Mr. Owens, when I’ve finished tending your daughter, I’d like to talk over some ideas I’ve had for how we could defend this place, see what you think.”

  “And then you will sleep,” I told him. “What possesses you men to think you don’t need sleep? Turns you into willful children quicker than anything.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  I returned to watching Rosalind. It wasn’t long before her head dropped back against the chair and her eyes closed. Victor carried her to her bed. At Palmer’s request he put her in it with her head closer to the door, the reverse of how she usually slept. This placed her right arm to the wall and her left hand free to be doctored without our reaching over her all the time.

  Palmer checked Rosalind’s pulse again before examining her hand and arm. The red streaks reached up to her elbow now, twice as long as they’d been when he left. Scowling, he set to work.

  While Palmer treated Rosalind using various bottles he’d brought back with him, Victor cleaned and oiled his rifle. Then he did the same for Palmer’s pistols, both the one he’d taken from Mrs. Mortimer and the one Palmer had surrendered that day. He set out boxes of ammunition, a neat stack beside each weapon on the table. I hauled as much water from the stream as I could find containers to fill, so that if we did indeed find ourselves besieged, we would not lack water for Rosalind. I toted bucket after bucket until I thought my arms would pop from their sockets. When Victor finally finished with the weapons, he took my place. He said he would fill the horse trough and make sure the sheep and her lambs had water in the barn as well. Palmer’s spare pistol was tucked into the front waistband of Victor’s trousers, and he looked so fearsome that I was happy we were on the same side of this predicament.

  I returned to the house, there to sink down into the rocking chair, worn out for the time being. Palmer had finished tending Rosalind’s wounds. When I arrived, he was just washing off his own hands. He splashed water on his face while he was at it. By the looks of Rosalind’s hand, he had peeled off the crusted scabs and drained the yellowish pus, then spread a paste of some sort all over and around the puncture wounds.

  “Mr. Palmer,” I said, “you need to sleep. You’ll be no good to us if you’re dozing on your feet when those three new gunmen show up. I doubt they’ve ridden all day and night as you seem to have done.”

  Taking his seat beside our patient once more, he replied, “I once stayed awake more than forty hours, operating on soldiers after a battle. I can sleep when this is over.” He didn’t look at me but focused down on Rosalind’s arm. He traced his forefinger up the longest streak of infection to where it ended inside the crook of her elbow. “I ought to operate now.” His voice became flat, as if he were reading from a book, not speaking his own thoughts. “I should take off her arm here. Minimize the muscle damage.” He circled her arm with his fingers midway between elbow and shoulder.

  “Then why don’t you?” I asked. Though it would be an awful thing for Rosalind to lose her arm, I’d resigned myself to the fact it would very likely be necessary. She would be better off living life with one arm than not living it at all, I reasoned.

  He looked over at me then, his expression as sorrowful as if poor Rosalind had already died. “I can’t,” he said.

  “Why ever not?” I snapped. “You say you’re a surgeon. You’ve amputated arms before, surely. If that’s what must be done, let’s begin.”

  Softly he said, “You asked me how a surgeon could turn killer.” His voice was so low, I had to scoot the rocking chair closer to hear him.

  Palmer avoided my gaze. “I said it was easy, and in a way it was. Easier than believing myself to be a coward, anyway. But that’s what I am. I’ve spent these last few years proving time and again how well I can shoot, that I’m willing to risk my life in exchange for money. My life? Why, it isn’t worth the price of a bullet.”

  I have learned from my dealings with all sorts of sick folks that there are some diseases you can’t see: thoughts that eat you up from inside your own head, and you can’t admit they’re there until they’re about to kill you. Some festering sores in your memory need a lot of time to mend. Some only start to heal once you’ve told someone else they exist. And some can’t be cured, no how. I nodded and rocked and said nothing, hoping Palmer was one who would find voicing his troubles to be a healing process. Besides, I was curious as to what he would say next.

  He went on, “I finished medical school the second year of the war and went right to work for the army. At first I treated more sick than wounded. Excepting when there was a big battle, we mostly had to deal with dysentery and . . . and other camp diseases. But when there was a battle, we’d be pressed hard for days.” He lifted his head and stared out the window, his gaze focused somewhere in the past. “We’d find a barn or a big house, sometimes a church, to use for the amputations. We’d learned that a man had a better chance of surviving an amputation than a wound filled with dirt and gunpowder and a bullet and the devil knows what else. So we’d take off any limb we suspected would become infected.

  “They’d lay a man on the table in front of me. If we were lucky, we had chloroform. Sometimes we didn’t. We’d use laudanum if we had that instead, but sometimes . . . sometimes we just had a couple of strong orderlies to hold the man down and a leather strap for him to bite on.

  “There were days when my arm would ache from using that bone saw. Ache like I’d been taking down trees with it. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Nor the smell, nor the sight of all those mangled bodies.”

  He turned away from the window, his haunted eyes seeking mine. “It was the screams. I still hear them, Miss Thornberry. Men begging me not to cut them up. Others waiting their turn, crying for help, for water, for their mothers or their wives. And I could only treat one at a time. No matter how fast I worked, how long I stayed there, I could never help them all.”

  He rubbed his hands together, one inside the other, as if washing them. “One day, I . . . I couldn’t stay. I was through. I’d cut off one limb too many, and yet I’d saved far too few men. I got sick. When I was better, they made me a clerk. I filled bottles and inventoried supplies and stayed as far away from wounded soldiers as I could without leaving altogether. I thought maybe eventually I’d be able to treat them again.

  “But then the war ended. And I knew the truth. I knew I was a coward. I’ve been lying to myself ever since that I wasn’t. I let myself get shot at; I shoot other men. But it’s never really fooled me. Well, now I’m through fooling
anyone else too.”

  I leaned forward. “Mr. Palmer, you’ve come to a fork in your trail. You said yourself that a man doesn’t have to stay on the path he’s been following. Here’s your chance to find a new one.” I gestured to Rosalind. “A few hours won’t make that much difference, will it? You’d still be able to save her if you waited for three or four hours to operate?”

  “I think so. That’s morphine I put on her wounds—we used it in the war to stave off infections and sometimes treat minor ones. I hoped it might help a little.”

  “Then get some sleep,” I said. “You’ll have a clearer head and a steadier hand if you do. And if you can’t operate, then maybe you can . . . can tell me how to do it.” The idea filled me with dread, but if it was the only way to save Rosalind’s life, I would do what I had to.

  Palmer rubbed his eyes with his fists the way a little child would. “Maybe you’re right.” He stood. “I’ll sleep in the barn’s hayloft. Good vantage point if someone . . . visits.” He stopped halfway to the door, right hand flat against his leg where his pistol ought to be.

  “While you’re at it, might as well take Victor his rifle,” I suggested.

  “Good idea.” He gathered up several boxes of ammunition and the rifle, and left.

  I knew then that Palmer was not so different from the other men who drifted through Mortimer Junction after all. The war wasn’t finished for him yet either.

  Chapter 9