by Lois Ruby
Solomon’s arm had healed, but he looked as worn as a rag, because he’d been driving Dr. Olney from house to farm, morning until midnight.
“There’s sick people all over this town,” he said. They leaned against a bale of prickly hay. The wind whistled through the slats of the bam. Already the water in the trough was starting to freeze up, and the horses needed warm blankets at night and a good rubdown in the morning to get going.
Solomon slyly asked, “Heard from your ma?”
“Not yet. It’s only been two weeks.”
“Nothing from that other woman, either?” Solomon fiddled with the buckle on his boots.
“Which one’s that? Thee means Miz Macon?”
“Other one.”
“Dr. Robinson’s wife? Miz Bowers? Lots of women around here.”
Solomon hung his hat between his knees, just waiting him out.
“Oh, does thee mean Miz Lizbet Charles?”
“That her name?”
“The one who washed thee down like thee was a horse, and put that stinky poultice on thy arm?”
“You’re mighty fresh, James Weaver.”
“Her? Naw, I haven’t heard from her,” he said, stealing a sideways glance at Solomon. “Oh, except she gave me a message for thee. Something about getting married.”
Solomon tossed his hat in the air, and it landed on a horse’s head. “Miz Lizbet’s fixin’ to get married?”
“Did I say that?” James turned to the horse that was trying to buck off the hat. “Did I tell the man she was getting married?” The horse whinnied. “I believe the message was more like, ‘You tell that Solomon not to run off and marry anybody.’ ”
Solomon’s weary face lit up.
“Thee watch out for her when she comes back in the spring. I think she likes thee, Solomon.”
• • •
Maybe because he was still so weak from his journey, or maybe because he’d been to so many sick houses, Solomon came down with the typhoid fever. James and Pa ran into Dr. Olney at Round Corner Drug Store, and the doctor said, “Caleb, I can’t risk his giving it to my little one, if she’s going to make it through her first winter out here.” In a few short months, James was already taller than Dr. Olney, who was looking thin, his cheeks all sunken, his face grayish.
Pa said, “Thee must bring Solomon to our house.”
What? Who would take care of him?
“It’s just James and me, and we’re of hearty stock.” Dr. Olney nodded; there was no time for flowery thank-you’s.
Pa had to go over to Lecompton to pick up some legal papers, but he swore he’d be home before dark to help look after Solomon.
Solomon came to the house, leaning heavily on little Dr. Olney. “Where to?” the doctor asked.
“There’s a small room upstairs,” James said. Miz Lizbet’s room.
“He needs a warm place. Fix him a pallet in front of the fire.” James ran upstairs and dragged the straw mattress and a couple of bedsheets down. Solomon slumped in the rocker, while Dr. Olney rolled his sleeves up. “Where’s your pa?”
“He’ll be back by nightfall. Promised.”
They quickly made up a bed for Solomon on the floor. His knees buckled and he nearly collapsed on the bed. James drew the top sheet up to Solomon’s chin.
“More blankets,” Dr. Olney said. “He’ll have the shakes in a minute, and just when thee’s got him warmed up, he’ll kick off all the covers with the sweats. Thee will have thy hands full, son.”
So, in barely the time for the crack of a whip, James became not only a bad cook, but also a bad nurse. Dr. Olney told him everything he needed to know, while Solomon snored loudly. “The poor man will have pains in his head, his back, his arms and legs. Nothing to do for it. He may vomit.”
“I couldn’t handle that, Dr. Olney.”
The doctor glared at him, while he rolled his sleeves down again. “Thee can handle whatever thee has to, friend.”
“Yes sir.”
“Advanced stages, he’ll have ulcerations in his intestines.”
“Ulcerations, sir?”
“Open sores, inside. Very painful. Just try to keep him comfortable.”
“Snug as a bug in a rug,” James said.
“My words exactly. And wash him with cool water for the fever, give him lots to drink, clear liquids, not milk, and thee must be sure to wash thine own hands real carefully after thee takes care of Solomon. And pray he’s strong enough to make it through, in spite of thy care.”
James shot nervous glances toward Solomon, who seemed to be drifting in and out of sleep. “I sure wish my ma was back from Boston.”
“Well, I wish I was there, son. People don’t die of typhoid in Boston.” Dr. Olney slipped on his coat. And soon it was just James and a sick-to-dying man alone in this house, with the first snow of the winter bunching up on the windows.
It was going to be a long winter.
• • •
Dark, and there was no sign of Pa. Solomon moaned, sort of sucked his lips like a fish.
“Thee must be thirsty.” James put a dipper of water to Solomon’s lips, but the man hadn’t the strength to sit up. He remembered how Miz Lizbet and Ma had spooned water into Rebecca’s mouth, and so he tried doing the same thing. Most of the water slid down Solomon’s chin. He tilted his head back to let the water cool his feverish neck. James needed to wash him down, but he’d never done such a thing and couldn’t imagine touching another person so intimately. But he went for a pan of water and hoped he could just hand the damp rag to Solomon to do the business himself. And what if Solomon had to relieve himself? He thought about Henry Brown, the man who mailed himself in a packing crate, and Rebecca’s asking what he did when he had to make water while he was going through the mail. If only Miz Lizbet had told them that night!
Suddenly the door burst open, as if the wind had forced the catch, and there was a vicious blast of cold air. Solomon’s eyes grew terrified at the sudden shift in temperature. James got up to close the door—and saw her standing there.
“Miz Lizbet!” His first thought was, she’s here to help with Solomon. But one look at her, and he realized he’d have two patients on his hands. And then it struck him that Pa would be back before the night was out, and he’d catch Miz Lizbet, and when Ma got back, James would be to blame for it all.
Miz Lizbet fell onto the mattress in front of the fire, as if there weren’t already an occupant there. She simply shoved Solomon over. She was wheezing, trying to catch her breath so she could speak.
“You can’t stay. Pa’s due back any minute.” He heard the terrible rattling in her chest. She motioned for something to drink, and he fetched her a cup of water, hot off the stove. She looked awful, with dark rings under her eyes. Her buffalo cape slid down to reveal spindles of hair, and welts on her neck.
Oh Lord.
Solomon woke up, surprised to find he wasn’t alone. “Mizlizbet?”
Finally, she caught her voice and asked, “What’s he doing here?”
“Typhoid fever,” James said.
She felt his face, which was the color of burnished copper. “Burning up.”
“Can thee do anything?” James asked helplessly.
“Of course, soon as I can breathe.”
“But thee can’t stay—”
“Don’t be foolish. It’s down way below freezing out there. Your daddy can’t get through in this weather, and I sure can’t go back out in it. I told you I’d only come back if I had nowhere else to go.” She was starting to warm up, so she slipped the cape off. “I need help pulling off my boots, because my fingers are frozen and they might just snap off if I pull too hard.”
So James yanked at her boots, and with them came the rags her feet had been wrapped in. Her bare feet embarrassed him—so pink on the bottom, but the toenails were pitch-black from the boots. Or was it gangrene? She sipped at the hot water and also dabbed at Solomon’s neck with the washrag. “I’ve had days I liked better than this one,�
�� she said. “Solomon Jefferson, you’re going to have to sit up so’s I can take your shirt off, or you’re going to be delirious with fever in a minute.”
And then, she seemed to take over as usual, ordering James around to fetch this and that. “More blankets. I’ll make me a bed here beside Solomon. We won’t neither one of us sleep much tonight, anyway.”
James was sure that he’d never in his life been so glad to see anyone as he was to see Miz Lizbet, no matter what kind of a fit Pa would have when he came home. If Pa made it through what was becoming not just the first snowfall, but the first blizzard of the winter.
CHAPTER TWENTY - SEVEN
The Funeral
It was one of the wettest summers in Kansas history—the kind they could have used back in the 1850s or 1930s. But the farmers who’d begged for water in the spring were now bailing it out of their wheat fields before the harvest rotted.
Dr. Baxi, the coroner, came in out of an energetic storm to give Dana and her family the final results of his study on Lizbet Charles. Dana’s mother took his raincoat and hung it over the bathtub, and Dr. Baxi sat in the front room in his stocking feet while his boots dried. “How’s Save Wolcott Castle coming, Jeffrey?”
“We’re hoping to raise $100,000 at the July Fourth party. We’ll either have a thousand people there, or twenty-five. Could go either way. I’d gladly hit you up for a donation, but I’m sure you’re here for another reason.”
“Yes, the remains.”
So, Lizbet Charles was reduced to the status of “remains”? How demoralizing! He wouldn’t feel that way when she gave him the journal, Dana thought.
“It’s generous of you to share the results with us, Punir,” her mother said.
“Dana found the subject, and she was there at the initial examination. I thought you all might like to know what we’ve confirmed before the report is released to the press tomorrow.”
Raindrops came down the chimney and splattered on the fireplace grate, as Dr. Baxi began his explanation. “We’ve ground up bone fragments, put them in a liquid solution, and run them through the gas chromatograph and mass spectrometer.”
His accent made it difficult for Dana to figure out just what these technological wonders really were, but she said, “Sounds impressive. I guess you learned a lot?”
“Not so much,” he said sadly. “We know the subject wasn’t poisoned, nor did she die of any sort of drug ingestion.”
Dana’s mother said, “Aren’t we relieved to know she wasn’t a junkie, 135 years ago?”
“Also,” Dr. Baxi continued, “we know she died in the winter, because very cold conditions would retard putrefaction, and there were actually patches of tissue internally protected by the large-mass bones. I surmise that the cold weather preserved her somewhat, and that there followed a very dry spring that partially mummified the remains.”
Lizbet Charles was a mummy? Didn’t they go out of style in King Tut’s time?
Dana’s father asked, “Then, what did she die of?”
“Well, it is more productive to say what she didn’t die of. There is no evidence of a gunshot wound, no place where a knife penetrated bone, or a blunt object cracked bone. Obviously, there was no fire in the room.”
“Couldn’t she have died in a fire first, and then been dragged into the room?” asked Dana.
Dr. Baxi stroked his chin. “Possible, but not likely. Judging by the arrangement of the bones, she died in that bed. And I submit that she wasn’t in a raging fire anywhere, because her bones are in good condition. You know, it’s not unusual for a skull to literally burst outward from the intensity of heat in a fire.”
“Oh, that’s terrible,” Dana’s mother cried.
“Nor could we prove smoke inhalation, without lung tissue to examine.”
Dana’s father said, “But she could have died of smoke inhalation, maybe during Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence in 1863?”
Dr. Baxi shook his head. “Simon Fleicher, the forensic anthropologist, places her death between 1855 and 1860, definitely pre-Civil War. But when his graduate students studied the climatic conditions of the period, they found the year I was looking for in terms of her degree of preservation, that is, an intensely cold winter, followed by a very dry spring. I say she died in the winter of 1856.”
Dana was getting confused with all the technological detail, and she just wanted the bottom line. “Well then, how did she die?”
“Natural causes.”
“What? How boring,” her mother said, but then she added, “The poor thing was only about twenty years old; why would she die of natural causes?”
“I don’t necessarily mean heart degeneration or any such thing. It is my hypothesis that she died of the natural progression of a disease, such as cholera. The grad students suggest this as a possibility, although the cholera epidemic passed through here about ten years before the subject died. Malaria’s another possibility, or yellow fever, smallpox, even simple pneumonia. These were not easy times in your country.”
Dana thought about Millicent Weaver’s saying, “These are troubling times,” and worrying that she’d never get back to see Caleb or James again. Did she?
“But it sounds like you have a different theory, Punir. Care to share it?”
“Hypothesis, you understand, Jeffrey. I am sticking my neck out, but it’s a very short neck. Still, based on the research of the period, I’d submit that the young lady died of typhoid fever.”
Just what Jeep said! “Before or after she got to the room?”
“I say she died in the room, but now you’re talking speculation,” Dr. Baxi said thoughtfully. “Or conjecture, whichever you prefer.”
• • •
But what else did they have? They couldn’t take a giant leap back in history and live out Lizbet’s last days. Dana called Mike and Derek, Sally and Ahn, and, of course, Jeep. “I’m cancelling the pact,” she told each of them. “Lizbet Charles is back, and we’re putting her to rest.”
Just after dinner, they met outside Lizbet’s room. Dana said, “This is her funeral.”
“Funeral? Then we need some good sappy music,” said Derek.
“No, just our voices,” Dana decided. She knew how she wanted to do this, and they were just going to have to go along with it all, or she’d do it alone. She led them past the barricades into the little room where Lizbet had spent her last hours. She put a candle in the center of the room and sat down on the rough floor. They all solemnly followed. Holding hands, they formed a tight circle, and the only light was the candlelight, which made the corners of the small room seem like nests of secrets.
And they talked about everyone they’d ever cared about who’d died.
Mike: “When I was three, my turtle Shellshock …”
Sally: “My great-grandmother was so old she couldn’t even… .”
Derek: “Jim Morrison drugged himself to death. Idiotic …”
Ahn: “My parents, both the same night… .”
Dana: “President Kennedy …”
Jeep: “Miz Lizbet Charles.”
CHAPTER TWENTY - EIGHT
The Return of Marshal Fain
December 1856
James brought in all the firewood and stacked it along the back wall, before the snow drifted so high that they couldn’t open the door. Snow covered the ice on the windows. It was eerie not to be able to see out, even in broad daylight. They were cut off, sealed in, but inside it was warm, and Miz Lizbet looked after James and Solomon, and there was a feeling of making do, like camping by a river, and it wasn’t so bad.
Two days passed before the storm stopped raging enough for James to shovel a path to their door, in case Pa was trying to get home. Trembles wouldn’t even poke his head out the door.
Solomon grew stronger and was sitting up at the table after four days of Miz Lizbet’s care and cooking. James had just scooped himself up some rabbit stew—his vegetarian days had passed quickly—when he heard the crunching of boots on the snow.
<
br /> James opened the door on a glorious day, deceptively sunny, but still bitter cold, and there came Pa up the front steps. James rushed up to him, but stopped just short of throwing his arms around him.
“Lord it’s good to see thee, son!” Pa pulled him close. Everything about him was cold—his rough coat, his rough beard, which James had thought he might never feel against his skin again. And then he was gripped with the horrifying thought: Miz Lizbet.
“Good day, Mr. Weaver,” Miz Lizbet said, while she fed Solomon spoonfuls of her chicken broth. Solomon lifted his heavy head and managed a weak, “Welcome home, Mr. Weaver.”
Pa looked them both over, was silent for a good long minute while he prayed and thought it through, and finally he said, “Thee’s been most helpful.”
“That’s true, Mr. Weaver, because Solomon needed more than the boy could provide, and I suspect you could use a good hot meal yourself.” She hurried to the stove to ladle out some stew for Pa.
“Thank thee kindly,” Pa said, while James paced the room searching for some way to explain just who Miz Lizbet was.
Pa yanked his boots off and kneeled on Solomon’s bed, warming his hands over the fire. Miz Lizbet stood behind him, with the dinner plate in her hand.
“I trust you’re Mrs. Weaver’s handiwork?” he asked.
“Yes sir.”
Pa sighed.
“But it’s not her fault, Mr. Weaver, or your boy James’s, either. I just kept coming back and wouldn’t leave.”
Pa slid his hands back and forth until his dry skin made a near-screeching sound. Miz Lizbet, Solomon, James—all of them held their breath, until Pa said, “Thee’s welcome here.”
James was giddy with relief. “Her name’s Lizbet Charles, Pa. We didn’t mean to keep it from, thee, honest, we just—”
Pa waved his words away. “Thy mother is a resolute woman. The day we married, she swore to love and honor, but not to obey.” Pa got to his feet and took the dinner plate from Miz Lizbet. He fingered a bit of butter off the top of the corn bread before it all melted in. He put his plate down and straddled a chair across from Solomon, while they all waited. “But we shall have to be discreet, Miz Lizbet Charles. Now, have thee said grace?”
