Eva nodded and Tarc went back out to the big room. He leaned over Jacob and sent his ghost in to make sure the spleen had not started bleeding again. Mrs. Calder said with asperity, “When is Eva going to come check on Jacob again?”
Tarc bit back an angry retort. He was a little surprised to find that he could speak in a calm tone despite his irritation. “She’ll be out again in a little bit. Jacob is doing fine right now.” He looked over and saw that the wood by the big fireplace was getting low. He headed back out through the kitchen, picking up his wood strap.
After Tarc had replenished their wood and water, he expected to be sent to the store for supplies. To his surprise, Eva told him that Daum had sent a list to the store with one of the men who’d come in for lunch. The store was going to deliver. “Uh, do you just want me to sit with Jacob then?”
“No,” Eva smiled at him, “I want you to go upstairs and study.” She hugged him briefly, “You’re going to be able to do so many things for people Tarc! You have such a wonderful ability.” She frowned, “But, you must have knowledge to be able to use it well…” She finished huskily, “All the knowledge you can possibly get.”
Tarc blinked, not sure whether he felt more proud of what she thought he could do, or more irritated about being sent up to study on such an exciting day. He should have practiced with his knives on one of his trips out to get wood.
He’d been planning to do it when he went for supplies.
That night, Eva had them carry down another mattress and put it next to the table Jacob was on. Feeling surprised at this, Tarc said, “I can stay down here with him.”
Eva snorted, “I’m going to be checking frequently to make sure he hasn’t started bleeding again. I know how you sleep. You wouldn’t check him again until morning!”
Tarc ducked his head, realizing that was probably true.
***
Eva told Jacob he would have to stay in bed for the next four days. In the afternoon of the day after he had been stabbed, she had four men carry him up the stairs on his mattress. They put him in one of the guest rooms. He wasn’t even allowed up to the chamber pot, instead having to go in a big shallow bowl Eva called a “bedpan”. Tarc had to carry that out to the outhouse to empty it, which embarrassed both Jacob and himself.
Eva fed Jacob meat for every meal, claiming he needed the “protein” in meat to make more blood. She also made him eat liver for the vitamins. Jacob tried to refuse but Eva went in and talked to him alone. Tarc didn’t know what she said to him, but after that Jacob ate liver with a minimum of complaining.
The morning after Jacob had been carried upstairs, Mrs. Gates appeared out at Eva’s treatment table. Tarc had just come out of the kitchen and found her sitting there. “Oh, hello Mrs. Gates,” he said.
She stared at him dully for a moment; then said in a bitter tone, “Tell your Mama I’m here to hear her tell me that she won’t help me one more time.”
Tarc found himself desperately wanting to say something about catching more flies with honey than vinegar. However, he realized he really didn’t want to talk to Mrs. Gates at all. Saying only, “Okay,” he turned and went back into the kitchen.
His mother was kneading dough. Tarc said, “Mrs. Gates is back. She’s talking just as ugly as she always does.”
Eva looked up and blew a few stray hairs away from her face. “You might talk ugly too, if you were dying of cancer.”
Tarc shrugged, granting that it might be true, but then said, “I just think that people would be more likely to help her if she didn’t act so hostile to everyone.”
Eva grinned at him, “That’s probably true, but I thought you wanted to try your new ‘heating’ idea on her tumors? Are you going to refuse, just because she’s a sad, desperate, dying woman?”
Tarc blinked, startled to realize that somehow he’d forgotten his own idea! “No, I’d… still like to try it. Unless you think it might make her worse?”
“It might, I don’t know. I’ll go ask her if she wants to try something that might or might not work.”
“Um, do I need to come with you?” Tarc asked, hoping not to spend any more time around the woman than he had to.
“No,” Eva laughed, “you stay here and knead the dough for me. You’d rather do that, wouldn’t you?”
Tarc nodded sheepishly and walked around the counter.
Eva came back in the kitchen and sighed. “She… really is a hard woman to talk to. When I offered to try a new kind of treatment, she barked at me for ‘holding it back all this time trying to get more money out of her.’” Eva snorted, “As if she’d actually paid me for most of her treatments in the past!”
“Really? She hasn’t paid for the willow bark or poppy tea you’ve given her?”
Eva shrugged, “She’s paid sometimes, but only after dickering about the price. When she’s really angry, she just takes her tea and leaves.” Eva paused, thinking, “Anyway, she’s agreed to try your treatment, but if she realizes that it’s actually your treatment rather than mine I’m sure she’ll balk.”
Tarc certainly believed that. “What are you going to do?”
Eva cast her eyes around the kitchen. They fell on the high shelf where she kept some of her medical equipment. Tarc saw that the glass bottles Eva and Daussie had used to put saline into Jacobs vein had been re-filled and put back up there. Presumably, they’d been pressure cooked as well. He wondered when that had happened. His mother went and got the glass beaker she had asked Tarc to collect Denny Smith’s urine specimen in. “Okay,” Eva said, “Here’s what we’ll do.” She grabbed a handful of cotton balls and stuffed them in the beaker. Then she picked up a bottle, unstoppered it and poured some fluid onto the cotton balls. Tarc recognized moonshine from the smell. “We’ll invert this over her chest in the region of some of the tumors in her lungs. I’ll tell you to hold it in place for… is ten minutes long enough?”
Tarc nodded.
“That way she’ll think you’re only holding it so I can get back to the kitchen. You do your thing and I’ll come back in ten minutes and we’ll take it off.” She looked at Tarc questioningly, “Does that seem reasonable?”
Tarc nodded again, surprised to have his mother asking him about something medical. They went back out to the great room. Eva had Mrs. Gates lie flat on the table and Tarc sit on the bench next to her chest. Eva undid a couple of buttons on Mrs. Gates’ blouse, then quickly inverted the beaker onto her chest directly over two of the bigger tumors Tarc could sense there. The strong smell of the moonshine bit at his nose. Eva studied it for a moment, then said, “Tarc is going to sit here and hold the treatment vessel in place. I’ll be back in about ten minutes.”
Mrs. Gates said, “I’ll hold it myself! I don’t need no damned teenager holding something against my chest!”
Tarc had just put his hands on the beaker. His eyes darted up to his mother. Her eyes were closed and she was biting her lower lip. He couldn’t tell whether she was biting her lip in frustration, or to keep from laughing. He took his hands away as Mrs. Gates gripped the beaker herself.
After a few seconds more, Eva opened her eyes and calmly said, “Mrs. Gates, we are going to do this my way, or we’re not going to do it at all. I need for Tarc to hold the treatment vessel. His life force is an important part of the treatment.”
Life force? Tarc thought. His mother didn’t believe in anything like that… he didn’t think. Then he thought to himself that “life force” was as good a description as “ghost” for his talent. He felt pretty sure however, that Eva just didn’t want to explain what was really going to happen. For a moment, he wondered whether they didn’t have some moral obligation to be honest about it. But Gates wouldn’t understand, really, what they were trying to do. Besides, the crotchety old lady would probably talk to others about whatever Eva said, thus endangering the Hyllis family secret.
Gates slowly let go of the beaker and lowered her hands down to her sides. It looked like she was gritting her teeth, but she sai
d nothing. Tarc reached out and gingerly took hold of the beaker. Pleasantly, Eva said, “Thank you Mrs. Gates. I’ll be back in ten minutes or so.”
Tarc sent his ghost in and felt the two tumors under the beaker. As before, they were warmer and seemed bitter as compared to the tissue around them. Leaning closer to give his ghost more power, he increased the vibration of the molecules in them, making them warmer and warmer. Suddenly he wondered just how warm he needed to make them to kill the tissue there. He had some idea how hot he’d made the fly before it died, but thought that perhaps there might be a big difference between how much heat killed a fly and how much heat killed a cancer. Then he wondered if Mrs. Gates was going to feel pain from the heat in her tumor.
Just as he’d decided that he’d gone into this, this… experiment on another human being without enough thought, he felt something happening inside the tumor. He immediately stopped heating it, his heart thumping in his chest with fear that he’d done something horrible. He kept his ghost there in the tumor trying to feel what was going on. It felt like the tissue had somehow become more… homogenous. He sent his ghost down to the tumor in the liver. There, at a level much larger than the vibrating molecules he had sensed were responsible for temperature, he felt separate tiny little bags that he realized must be the cells he’d learned about. Each cell seemed like an industrious little bag of molecules. Going back to the tumor in the lung, he realized that the walls of the cells had broken and the molecules were escaping.
Tarc wondered if this meant the cells were going to die as he’d hoped and, if so, whether the membranes always broke when cells were dying. He sat there, eyes closed, as he sensed with great wonderment the changes occurring in the tumor.
Suddenly, Mrs. Gates coughed. Then she was seized by a fit of coughing and when she pulled her hand away from her mouth it had blood on it! Heart pounding, Tarc called, “Mom!”
It seemed like forever, but probably was only a few seconds before Eva appeared at their side. She gave Mrs. Gates the towel she always carried in the kitchen and said, “Here, Mrs. Gates, cough that nasty stuff out.”
Belying her calm tone, Tarc saw over Ms. Gates’ shoulder that Eva’s eyes were wide. He wondered if she knew what to do about this coughing up of blood. “Mom…” he started.
Eva waved him to silence and bent over Mrs. Gates. Tarc presumed she was sending her ghost into their patient. After a moment she straightened and said cheerfully, “Good news, Mrs. Gates. The treatment has mostly killed two of the cancers in your lungs. You’re coughing up the dead parts of the cancer, which is really great! I’m sorry that the coughing is so unpleasant.” To Tarc’s surprise she winked at him.
Mrs. Gates coughing subsided. She gasped a few times, then said, “Are you just trying to kill me now? Don’t want to wait for the cancer to do it?”
Tarc’s mother gritted her teeth a moment, but then she smiled. With a grin she leaned over and patted Gates on the shoulder, saying, “Don’t think I haven’t thought about it, you mean old witch.”
Gates’ eyes flashed wide and she looked up at Eva in startlement. Seeing Eva grinning at her, she narrowed her eyes and said with a slight upturn at the corner of her mouth, “I won’t be paying you if I’m dead!”
Eva grinned and shrugged, “You’ve hardly been paying me while you’re alive. It wouldn’t be a big loss.”
Gates coughed a couple more times and then actually smiled up at Eva, “Do you really think you can fool me with a jar of moonshine?” Her eyes glanced down at the glass beaker Tarc was still holding against her chest, “You probably ain’t done nothin’ really. Just like all the other times.”
Eva gently smoothed Ms. Gates hair, her actions in contrast to her next words, “Probably not. I suspect it’s just your general meanness that killed your tumors.” She took a deep breath and gave Gates a serious look, “Whatever killed those two tumors, they’re dead. You just lay here scaring off our customers for a bit until you feel good enough to go home. Then come on back in a few days and let me check on those tumors. If they stay gone, we’ll try treating some of the other ones.” Eva patted Gates gently on the shoulder again, then turned and went back to her kitchen.
Tarc lifted the beaker off of Gates’ chest and held it away from him, not liking the smell of the vapors rising from it. He stood.
Gates looked up at him and said with a tiny hint of a grin, “Is your mother that rude to all of her customers?”
“Um, no, I think you’re a special case.”
Gates snorted and turned her eyes away, buttoning her blouse.
Chapter Five
Having finished unloading the wagon into the kitchen, Tarc drove it into the stable. He un-harnessed Shogun and got the old horse some oats. He took oats to the two horses they were boarding at present, then put the shovel away. Before leaving the stable, he turned, snatched a knife out from behind his neck, and sent it flying to stand quivering in the wall. As soon as it stuck, he threw a second one at a different mark. His first throw had been a little wild, and he’d missed the knot he’d been aiming at by an inch to the right. The second throw buried its knife exactly in a knot, but the knot broke open and fell out of the board, letting the knife drop to the floor. As he retrieved his blades, he thought to himself that he needed to mark some targets on the wall with something so he could throw at something other than knots. They really didn’t make very good targets.
When he went back in, he carried a couple of buckets of water in from the well to top up the barrels in the kitchen and bar. Daum said, “I need a couple more bottles of ‘shine up from the cellar.” He held some empty bottles out to Tarc.
Tarc took the two empty bottles and picked up a candle. He stopped at the fire to light the candle and then headed down the stairs to the cellar. He lifted two new bottles of shine out of the current crate and put the two empty bottles in their place.
Without warning, the candle guttered out.
Intellectually, Tarc had always known that the cellar was a very dark place, but he’d never actually been down there without a candle before. He could see absolutely nothing and thought of his father’s saying, “black as the inside of a coal miners ass.” His first thought was that he should have propped the door to the cellar open when he came down, but of course it was too late for that now. He reached out, feeling for the stacked crates of moonshine he thought were just to his left, but didn’t encounter them with his fingers.
Tarc tamped down his incipient panic. Closing his eyes he tried to think of exactly which direction he’d been facing when the candle went out. Suddenly, he realized that his ghost could feel the crates of moonshine behind him and to the left! They just weren’t directly to his left as he had thought.
He reached out his hand and felt the crates, exactly where his ghost said they were. He expanded his ghost into a large nebulous sphere around himself. With dawning excitement he recognized that he could feel almost everything in the basement!
It was very different than seeing. He had no idea about colors. Instead of color, this sense differentiated things by how warm they were. Objects that were cold were actually quite hard to detect. The surfaces of the walls and the objects in the cellar were slightly warm, presumably heated by the air. This warmth made those surfaces faintly detectable by his ghost.
Just like his ability to push things diminished with distance, he could tell much more about the things that were close to him than he could about those that were far away. In addition, up close, his ghost could even tell him about things behind surfaces that would have blocked his normal sight. With some concentration, he could tell which crates had full bottles of moonshine and which had the empties. This was moderately difficult, because the bottles and their moonshine were relatively cool. On the other hand, by their warmth, he could quite easily discern the location of four mice that huddled in little crevices.
And one rat.
For a moment he wondered if he should be trying to catch the varmints. However, he knew that if he so
much as approached their hiding places, they would quickly move on. It would probably be better to set traps for them now that he knew where they were.
Back upstairs, Tarc handed the bottles of moonshine to his father. “We’ve got some mice and a rat in the basement. Do you want me to put out traps?”
Daum narrowed his eyes at Tarc, “How do you know we have mice and rats? Did you find some droppings?”
“The candle went out while I was down there. I had to use my ghost to find my way out of the cellar and I realized that I could feel the mice and rats with it too. They’re warm, just like a person.”
Daum snorted, “I’ve had this talent for decades, and I’ve never thought of looking for varmints with it!”
Tarc grinned at him, “And here you as much as told me our talent was useless.”
“Well, I had figured out I can balance my knife with it.” He winked, “And, I have been using it to aim my arrows for quite a while. Just like I’d hoped though, your talent is a lot stronger than mine. Your mother is really excited about what you can do for sick people and that makes me really proud.” He gave a little laugh, “And now that you’ve figured out this new use for our talent, we have fallback careers chasing vermin if this tavern thing ever falls through.”
Tarc laughed with him, “I’d rather stick with the ‘tavern’ thing.”
***
Tarc had just finished his breakfast when Eva said, “It’s been four days; let’s try getting Jacob out of bed.” As they climbed the stairs, she quietly said, “We’ll get him up very slowly. I’ll do the talking. That way you can keep your ghost in there on his spleen to make sure it isn’t bleeding. If it even feels like it’s going to start bleeding, you put pressure on it so it doesn’t happen, okay?”
When they got up to his room, Jacob became quite excited at the prospect of getting out of bed. At first, Tarc had been somewhat jealous of his friend because he got to lie around in bed. After a day or so, however, he realized that being in bed all the time must be something like being in jail.
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