“Y-you’re right, Amanda,” he said quietly, handing her the open canteen. “Give Lucas anything he wants what’11 make him feel better. Anything.”
Her eyes suddenly softened. “I’m sorry, Pa. So sorry.” And she started to cry again, her upper body quaking with the force of her sobs.
Quickly Bass threw his arm around her shoulder, saying, “Don’t do that now, Amanda. Time enough for that later. But right now … for what time you got left … you be Lucas’s mother. You just be this boy’s mama.”
When he took his arm from her shoulder and rocked back, Amanda gently raised the child and delicately pressed the canteen’s neck to Lucas’s lips. She allowed only a dribble to pour across his tongue as he swallowed again, then again, greedily. Finally he opened his eyes into cracks and she took the canteen away.
“Mama,” he groaned, barely audible. “I hurt so much.”
“Your leg?”
“Ever’ where,” he sighed, lips glistening with the last drops of water.
Titus got to his knees, then patted the pallet next to Amanda. “Roman—c’mere. Be with your people.”
For a long moment the big, burly farmer just stood there at the edge of the awning’s shadow, staring down at his son, grief relentlessly chiseling away at his sharp, thick-boned features. His arms hung stiffly at his sides, those big callused farmer hands balling into fists with a white-knuckled intensity, then opening before they balled again with a fierce helplessness.
“Row?” Amanda whispered.
“We gonna just sit here and watch him die?” Burwell spewed suddenly, his face flushed red with fury.
Amanda glanced quickly at her father, then said, “Row, he needs you now.”
Closing his eyes, Burwell wagged his head. “I-I don’t think I can sit here with ’im, Amanda—”
“Pa—Pa.”
Roman Burwell immediately collapsed to his knees there on the pallet with that pitiful groan from his son’s lips. As tears started welling from the farmer’s eyes, he scooped up Lucas’s hand between both of his. How small and white it looked to Titus now, lying there, protected between the father’s big, strong, hard-boned paws. How small and frail and helpless too.
Anyone close to that awning now, in the death-still quiet that held its grip on family and friends and fellow sojourners on this road to Oregon, could plainly make out how the boy’s breathing came harder and harder over the next excruciating minutes. Almost as if he were struggling to breathe under water. Short, shallow breaths—each successive one seeming to come quicker and quicker, as if the child would never again catch his breath. And with these last few moments came that pale bluish hue of impending death, its once-seen-never-to-be-forgotten color smeared beneath the tiny youngster’s eyes. How many times in all his living had Titus Bass witnessed that sheen paint its fateful crescent there against pale skin.
Grinding his teeth together the old trapper had gotten to his feet, feeling more weary than he could ever remember being. Without a word he turned away from the awning, his muscles tensed as he hurried on this vital errand to beg of Shadrach what he himself could not do.
At the front of the wagon he now spotted Sweete and Shell Woman. Lunging over the wagon tongue, Bass grabbed the Cheyenne by her shoulders and shook her, bringing her frightened face close to his when he snarled, “You gotta help that boy! Go put your hands on ’im, sing your prayers! Do what you gotta do to save him—”
“Scratch!” Sweete whispered as he jabbed an arm down between Toote and the old trapper, tugging them apart.
He looked up at his tall friend, desperation growing, a plea in his eyes, and in his voice, “You gotta tell ’er to come say her magic words, come help Lucas, Shadrach. For the love of all that’s holy—she can heal ’im.”
“I told you afore—the Cheyenne don’t have no medicine strong enough.”
The despair was growing, more than palpable in the pit of his belly. “How come she saved you … an’ she won’t save that boy?”
“Ain’t that at all,” Sweete said soothingly. Gradually he got Bass’s hands pried from Shell Woman’s arms and got his friend turned aside.
“You gotta make her save Lucas same way she saved you—”
Sweete suddenly shook the smaller man. “Goddammit! It’s different, Scratch.”
He stared at his friend’s eyes and asked, “How?”
Taking a long sigh, Shad explained, “Because when she healed my arm with her white buffler medicine … there wasn’t no spirit fighting her prayers.”
Bass squinted his eyes, attempting to get his mind around what he had just been told. “N-no spirit fightin’ her prayers?”
“All she had to do was stop that real bad bleedin’, an’ I was healed,” Sweete declared.
“What’s differ’nt here with that boy Lucas?”
Letting go of Titus, Shad said, “Toote told me the Cheyenne’s white buffler medicine ain’t no good fighting against a bad spirit.”
For a long, long time he stared into the tall man’s face. “The snake … it’s a bad spirit she can’t fight with her medeecin?”
“I … I’m real sorry, Scratch.”
He looked at Shell Woman now, feeling so hollow and dry, like everything good had been sucked right out of him. “I’m sorry too. Tell ’er, Shad. Tell ’er I’m sorry I grabbed ’er, if’n I hurt her—”
“Ti-tuzz,” Waits whispered behind him.
Turning, he found his wife standing at the corner of the wagon, holding a small brass kettle, steam rising from its surface in the full blast of summer’s hottest fury. In her other hand she held what looked to be a wet towel.
“What you made—will it help?” he asked her in Crow.
Her eyes already spoke their grim answer for him. Then she said, “No, but I made it from a root that will make it easier … his last journey … for him.”
Bass could see how hard it was for her to stand there without sobbing, without breaking down herself. After all she was a mother too, a woman carrying her baby in her belly right then … experiencing an unimaginable grief just in watching another mother hold her baby in her arms as that child lay dying. He took the kettle’s bail from her and carried it around the front of the wagon to set it beside Amanda. Magpie followed with her mother, leaning in to hand the white woman a spoon, then stepped back into that fringe of stunned onlookers.
Amanda looked up at Bass and his wife, asking, “What is it?”
“Waits made it. Maybeso it’s gonna help … help Lucas so he don’t hurt so much.”
Her eyes bounced back and forth between them for a moment, then she said, “If it will make his going easier, Pa.”
While Amanda raised Lucas up again and held a spoonful of the steamy broth against his lips, Titus knelt on the other side of the child, by the lower leg that was already blackening with an impatient death rising inexorably from the wound. Unwrapping the wet towel Waits handed down to him, Titus found inside a mash of roots and leaves. This dripping pulp he scooped up with his fingers and laid against the wounds, knowing the boy’s flesh was dying, if not already dead, the flesh darkening the way it was, those wound sites seeping a foul ooze. Lucas did not move the leg as Scratch wrapped the wet towel over the poultice.
After a half dozen sips of the steamy broth, Lucas barely managed to turn his head before his stomach revolted and emptied itself. As he watched his daughter, Scratch saw how Amanda positioned herself, refusing to look below her child’s waist anymore, to look at the snakebite, at the bloated, blackening leg. Instead, she kept her eyes only on Lucas’s face as she stroked his tiny arm and gently rocked the boy. Her tears spilled one by one onto the child’s pale, dusty shirt, each drop making its own muddy circle on the much-faded cloth.