Conor's Way

by Laura Lee Guhrke

  A drop of rain hit the back of her hand, darkening the worn brown leather of her glove. Another drop fell, then another. Olivia glanced up at the heavy, gunmetal gray clouds overhead, and she wondered if she ought to turn back. It had rained during the night, and the road was already muddy. She might make it to town, but if another storm came down now, Cally would never be able to get her home.

  Her trip was probably futile anyway. Stan had told her last time she was in town that she could no longer buy at the store on account, and she doubted asking again would accomplish much.

  Olivia caught her lower lip between her teeth and stared at the rutted, curving road ahead. Times had been hard ever since the war, but since Nate's death the previous summer, times had gotten even harder. Nate had been old, cranky, and not always reliable, but he'd been strong for his age, handy with a hammer, and staunchly loyal. He'd also been there to help her bring in the harvest.

  She had three girls to raise, hogs and chickens to tend, peaches to harvest come September, and there weren't enough hours in the day to manage everything by herself. Until Nate's death, she hadn't realized how dependent she'd become on the old farmhand or how much she would miss him.

  She thought of her girls and wondered how she was going to provide for them if she couldn't get her peach crop to market. Perhaps she should never have taken them in when their parents died in '65. Perhaps they'd have been better off going to the orphanage if she couldn't take care of them properly.

  All the burdens suddenly seemed so heavy, and Olivia felt much older than her twenty-nine years. "Lord," she murmured, "I could really use some help down here."

  As if in reply, the rain began to pour down, and Olivia sighed. "I guess not."

  She hunched forward on the seat and pulled her broad-brimmed straw hat down lower over her eyes. It wasn't much to ask for, really. Just one man to help, a man who didn't mind hard work and didn't expect to get paid for it.

  Olivia pulled on the reins slightly, guiding Cally around the sharp bend in the road. As the wagon rounded the curve, she noticed something lying directly in her path about two dozen feet ahead. She jerked hard on the reins, bringing Cally to a stop, and stared between the mule's ears at the man who lay sprawled in the middle of the road.

  She should probably just turn around right here and head home. There were always nasty characters wan­dering the roads these days—had been ever since the war. Olivia toyed with the reins in her fingers, uncer­tain what to do. She was alone, and the man was a stranger.

  Still, he didn't look like much of a threat just lying there like that. Keeping her gaze fixed on him, Olivia climbed down from the wagon. She hitched her faded brown skirt up enough to keep the hem out of the mud as she moved closer.

  It was kind of hard to tell what he looked like, but Olivia knew he wasn't from around Callersville. His short hair was black, but caked with mud. His face was lean and clean-shaven, but swollen and darkened by purple bruises. There was a deep gash above his eye, and another on his chin. His clothes were torn and muddy. He didn't move as she came cautiously closer, and she wondered if he was dead.

  But as she hunkered down beside him, she saw the rise and fall of his chest. No, he wasn't dead. At least, not yet.

  She stood up and glanced around, but she saw noth­ing that might explain what this man was doing out here in this sorry condition. He was alone and didn't appear to have any belongings with him.

  Suddenly he groaned, and she realized he must be in a great deal of pain. She couldn't just leave him here. If she could get him into the wagon somehow, she could take him back to the house.

  Olivia stared down at the unconscious stranger, and she wondered if he knew how to patch a roof and pick peaches. Right now, he didn't look capable of much at all. She sighed and pushed back her hat, glancing at the dark skies above, blinking at the rain that hit her face. "Lord," she said heavily, "this isn't exactly what I had in mind."

  2

  Conor came awake reluctantly. He knew he was still lying in the road, and it was raining again. He also knew that everything hurt. Every part of his body ached, making him acutely aware that he was awake. He kept his eyes shut, willing himself back into uncon­sciousness, but it didn't work.

  He heard a voice above him, a woman's voice. Turning his head sideways, he opened his eyes and found himself staring at the sodden hem of a dull brown skirt. The image blurred, and he blinked, trying to focus. After a moment, the image of the woman standing beside him became clear.

  His gaze traveled upward, past the shabby dress and faded duster that disguised any feminine shape she might have had, to her face. But she wasn't looking at him. Her face was tilted skyward, and he heard her breathe a heavy sigh before she looked down and saw him awake and staring at her.

  She didn't smile. She placed her hands on her hips, small hands in a man's gloves. She pursed her lips and studied him from beneath the brim of a battered straw hat. "Well, now," she said in the slow, drawling voice of a Louisiana native, "you're in pretty sorry shape, mister."

  Conor was in complete agreement with that assess­ment of his situation.

  She met his eyes. "You out here 'cause you tried to rob somebody?"

  He tried to shake his head and winced at the pain that small movement caused. He swallowed hard. "No."

  "Somebody rob you?"

  "You might say that."

  "Mmm." She turned away, and he thought she was going to leave him there. He was certain of it when he watched a wagon pulled by a sorry-looking mule roll past him. But she brought the wagon to a halt and jumped down again, her boots making a splash as she landed in a puddle.

  She walked back over to him. "Think you can make it into the wagon?"

  Conor nodded and started to sit up, but intense pain sliced through his midsection. He groaned and fell back into the mud. The woman moved to help him, but he told himself he didn't need her help. He drew a deep breath, set his jaw, and rose to his feet without assistance.

  But before he could take a step toward the wagon, everything around him started spinning, and his knees buckled. She was at his side in an instant, wrapping an arm around his hips and bracing her shoulder under his to prevent him from falling. She staggered a little beneath his weight, but she kept him on his feet. "Proud, aren't you?" she commented, and Conor had no idea if it was a compliment or a criticism.

  He leaned on her heavily as she helped him to the wagon. It was only a few feet, but it seemed like miles to Conor. When they reached the back, he waited a moment to catch his breath, then lifted himself into the wagon, falling back to hit the floorboards with a thud, his legs still dangling over the edge. He closed his eyes and fell back into unconsciousness.

  Olivia walked to the front of the wagon, climbed in, and snapped the reins. Poor Cally floundered in the mud for a second, but he soon found his feet, and she turned the wagon around, heading for home.

  As abruptly as it had begun, the rain stopped, and she was grateful. Cally would be able to get them to the house without too much trouble.

  She thought of the battered man in the back of her wagon. What was she going to do with him? Olivia had tended enough wounds during the war to know he had several cracked ribs and was probably bleeding inside. It would be weeks before he was on his feet, and when he was, he'd walk on down the road.

  Olivia turned her head and looked at him. He was unconscious again. She cast a rebellious glance in heaven's direction. Next time she asked God for a man, she'd be a lot more specific about what she wanted.

  "Is he dead?" Carrie's hushed voice piped up in the silence and was immediately followed by a disgusted sound from her older sister.

  "Of course not," Becky said, with all the superiority that came from being fourteen and the oldest. "We wouldn't be tendin' him if he was dead, would we?"

  "I guess not." Carrie watched from the doorway as Becky and Olivia bent over the stranger on the bed. Her younger sister, Miranda, stood beside her, wide-eyed and silent. Chester, the family's
sheepdog, had given the man a suspicious sniff, then positioned himself between the bed and the two girls in the doorway, knowing strangers were not to be trusted.

  Olivia pulled off her hat and tossed it onto the chair that stood in one corner of the room, then peeled off her sodden duster. It landed atop the hat. Rolling up her sleeves, Olivia cast a glance at the young girl opposite.

  "How is he, Mama?" Becky asked.

  "I'm afraid it's pretty bad, honey. He may be bleed­ing inside."

  "Should we roll him off the board?"

  They had found a long wooden plank in the barn to use as a makeshift stretcher, enabling them to get him out of the wagon and into a bedroom on the first floor of the house. They had laid him on the bed, board and all. He had let out a groan or two, but he had not awakened.

  Olivia stared down at him and frowned thoughtfully, considering Becky's question. "I don't think so," she answered. "Some of his ribs are cracked, and it'll be easier for me to bind them if we leave him as he is for now."

  To bind his ribs, she had to get his shirt off. The shirt was spattered with blood and torn in so many places, it wasn't worth mending. She grabbed the edges of his collar and gave the white linen a hard yank. Buttons went flying and the shirt came apart in her hands. "Dear God."

  "What is it, Mama?" Carrie spoke again, stepping through the doorway as if to have a look.

  Olivia held up one hand to stop the child, and Carrie came to a halt just inside the door. She then glanced at Becky, who was staring in astonishment at the vivid scars across the man's chest.

  "Becky, go to the kitchen, and take the girls with you," she ordered, wanting them out of the room. "Take Chester, too. Put the kettle on to boil. Unhitch

  Cally and put him in the barn. Bring the water to me when it's boiling, and a pail of cold water from the pump. Can you do all that?"

  "Yes, ma'am." Taking her sisters by the hand, Becky ushered them out of the room. Never far behind the girls, Chester followed.

  Olivia stared down at the man. Despite his present condition, he was strong and well muscled, as if used to hard work. Once his injuries had healed, maybe he'd be willing to stay for a while. Maybe he'd be able to help her with the farm. Maybe God had answered her prayer after all.

  She leaned closer and studied his scars, which were visible despite the black hair that covered his chest. She recognized the marks of burns, whip lashes, and bullet wounds. But still others were jagged, as if his skin had been ripped open. She had occasionally seen the scars of cruelty on black slaves, she'd seen the scars of battle on Confederate soldiers, but she had never seen any­thing like this.

  She traced one white line from his collarbone to his shoulder with the tip of her finger, wondering what had been done to him. Terrible things, she knew, and a wave of compassion ran through her.

  When she pressed a hand to his forehead, she felt the heat of a slight fever. By nightfall, it would be worse. He stirred in sleep and shook his head restlessly, then muttered a string of curses. Olivia snatched her hand back, appalled, knowing he must be a very bad sort of man to utter such words, even in sleep, and she knew she'd been mistaken. God would never send her such a man to help her. The other way around was probably closer to the truth.

  She left the room to gather the items she needed. First, she picked comfrey leaves in the garden, trying to remember everything Old Sally had told her about medicinal herbs. She wished the other woman were here now, but like Nate, like her family, Old Sally was gone.

  She had Becky steep the comfrey in boiling water, instructing her to place jars of the liquid in the well to cool. Then she collected scissors, iodine, bandages, and rags. By the time she returned to his room, the man was tossing in the bed, as if tormented by some violent nightmare.

  Olivia walked to his side and set her supplies on a nearby chair. When she felt his forehead again, she was alarmed by the heat. She hadn't been gone long, but his fever had gotten much worse. No wonder he was deliri­ous. His ribs could wait. The first thing she had to do was get him out of his wet clothes.

  Becky entered with a bucket of cold water and brought it to Olivia, then left the room again. She returned moments later with the kettle of steaming water. Olivia pointed to the thick rug at the foot of the bed. "Put it there," she instructed. "I'll—"

  "Bastards!" the man shouted, his fist slamming the harmless pillow beside him. "Bloody fucking bastards!"

  She glanced at the fourteen-year-old girl who stood by the foot of the bed. Becky's gaze was fixed on the man, her mouth open in horrified awe.

  "Becky," she said sharply, and the girl looked up. "Go on out and get the girls some dinner," she added in a softer tone. "I'll stay here."

  "Won't you need my help?"

  She gave Becky a reassuring smile. "I'll do fine. It's almost noon, and I need you to feed the girls some of that stew I started this morning."

  Becky gave the man in the bed one last curious glance, then departed, leaving Olivia alone with her tor­mented patient.

  Moving to the foot of the bed, Olivia pulled off his boots and immediately encountered a problem she hadn't thought of before. There was no way to get his trousers off. They were still wet and he was a big man, too heavy to lift or move by herself.

  She finally had to use her scissors to cut the trousers off at the sides, a painstaking and difficult task, since he wouldn't lie still. One brief glance at his nakedness and she hastily looked away, covering the lower half of his body with a sheet. Life had changed a great deal since the war, but there were some proprieties that were always observed. Even after her father's accident, when she'd done practically everything but eat his food for him, bathing him was something she had not done. Nate had taken over that particular task. Even during the war, when she'd tended wounded soldiers at the makeshift hospital in Vienna, she'd never caught so much as a glimpse of an unclothed man. The matrons had not allowed it. She was an unmarried woman, after all.

  No one would know.

  Her one quick peek at him had told her nothing at all. One wouldn't mind seeing with one's own eyes what was always so carefully hidden.

  No one would know.

  Olivia bit her lip. She glanced at the open doorway, then she lifted the sheet and took a much longer look, astonished by what she saw. But when she heard her mother's horrified voice censure her all the way from heaven, she quickly lowered the sheet, blushing hotly. Curiosity was indeed a wicked, sinful thing.

  In one of the pockets of his trousers, she found ten greenbacks, but nothing else. She set the money on the washstand and consigned the pieces of his trousers to the rag bag, along with the tattered remnants of his shirt. She wrapped his broken ribs with stout linen, cleaned his cuts with iodine, and applied compresses soaked in the cold comfrey tea to his bumps and bruises. By sunset, she was exhausted, but she knew her work was far from over. His fever was still alarmingly high, and she had to bring it down.

  Throughout that night and the two nights that fol­lowed, she tended him. She sponged his face and chest with cool water. She forced water and willowbark tea into him one spoonful at a time. She tried to soothe him, but her soft voice close to his ear only seemed to make him worse, and she kept out of his way when he raged. She tried to catch a moment or two of rest dur­ing the infrequent times when he seemed to be at peace.

  He spoke, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes a shout, but always incoherently and seldom with tenderness. Most of what he said was unintelligible to her, since he spoke in an odd foreign tongue she did not recognize. But sometimes his words were in English, and she caught wild mutterings about guns and amnesty, a place called Mountjoy, and a man named Sean Gallagher.

  By the dawn of the fourth day, his fever had still not broken. Olivia dipped her rag in the bucket of cold water beside her chair, for perhaps the hundredth time, and wrung it out, watching him and wondering again what horrors he dreamed about. Suddenly, he lashed out with one arm, and Olivia jumped out of the way, watching as he knocked over the china figuri
ne on the bedside table. It teetered, then fell. Olivia made a grab for it, but the china statue fell off the table and hit the floor, smashing into pieces.

  Olivia stared down at the fragments of what had been a shepherdess. It was one of a pair that had belonged to her great-grandmother, brought from the woman's native Scotland and passed down for three generations. Since the war, Olivia had been forced to sell nearly everything of value to make ends meet, but she had not been able to part with the pair of figurines. The delicate shepherdess had survived travel, time, war, and poverty, only to be destroyed by a violent man's dreams.

  Olivia felt for the chair behind her and sank into it wearily. She stared at the broken pieces around her feet, too tired even to sweep them up, and she fought back the sudden urge to weep.

  Conor didn't need to open his eyes to know that he was no longer lying in the road. He caught a luscious scent, an enticing mixture of freshly baked bread, hot coffee, and clean sheets that told him he was in either heaven or somebody's house, and heaven wasn't likely. The thought of fresh bread made him realize how hungry he was. He inhaled deeply, an action that sent a wave of pain through his midsection and made him feel as if iron bands were wrapped around his torso. His hunger vanished.

  He opened his eyes, blinking against the bright sun­light that filled the room. Pulling back the sheet, he saw that someone had removed his clothes and bound his ribs. He frowned, unable to remember anyone doing such a thing. He remembered the fight and the men who'd beaten him, but everything after that was a blur of distorted yet familiar images—people dying, Sean's murder, blood and guns and prison guards, Delemere's voice in his ear, and a strange woman bending over him. Oh, Christ. He'd been having the dreams again.