Josiah took the parcel and the two canteens Whitaker had ready, heavy and sloshing, and the doctor gripped his wrist hard for a moment with a hand that had delivered half the children in the street behind them. "Be quick," Whitaker said. "And whatever they shout tomorrow, remember that one of us heard you." Josiah rode out of Cienega Wells into the full dark with town light falling away behind him and the canteens knocking soft against his saddle, toward a feverish woman, four children, and a road that thirty armed men had promised themselves by morning.
Chapter 11
: Fever Water
The heat did not leave the Rawlins house when the sun went down. It stayed in the adobe walls and in Clara's skin, and rose from her in waves that made the lamplight seem thin. Josiah sat on a stool too small for him beside the bed and wrung out a cloth in a basin of well water, cool from deep earth, and laid it across her forehead. She turned toward the coolness and murmured a name that was not Ben's and not any child's, and then was quiet again except for her breathing, quick and shallow through cracked lips.
Pearl stood at the foot of the bed with the basin held in both hands, solemn as a grown woman at a well. She was nine, with her mother's dark hair coming loose from its braid and her father's stubborn set to the jaw. When Josiah lifted the cloth, she stepped forward without being told and held the basin steady. In the other room the three little ones slept in a tangle on a pallet.
"You can rest a spell," Josiah told Pearl. "I will call you if she stirs hard."
"I am not tired," she said. It was not true, and both of them knew it, but Josiah nodded as if he believed her, because the work was keeping her from fear, and fear in a small house with a sick mother could do harm all its own.
Near midnight Clara opened her eyes and for a moment they were clear. She saw Josiah and knew him. "Ben?" she said.
"He is out looking," Josiah said. "He will be back before light."
"Tell him not to go far," she whispered. "Tell him the children—" The sentence broke apart. Her hand moved on the coverlet, searching, and Pearl came quickly and put her own small hand into it. Clara's fingers closed. "Pearl," she said, with relief so plain it hurt to hear. "There you are." Then the fever took her again and her eyes went unfocused and she began to speak to someone standing in a corner where no one stood.
Josiah changed the cloth. He gave her water by spoonfuls, a few drops at a time, waiting between each for the swallow. His own well water had a taste of stone and iron, clean and cold, and he thought that water was the only honest thing left in the valley. Men lied about it and fought over it, but the water itself gave itself to whoever lowered the bucket.
Outside, a horse stamped at the corral and an owl called along the dry creek. Josiah listened with half his mind while his hands kept their rhythm — cloth, basin, forehead, spoon. It was work he knew from another sickroom years before, when Miriam had taken ill and he had sat the same way, useless except for this. He had learned then that nursing was mostly staying.
At the darkest hour, just before the false dawn, Clara's breathing changed. It grew ragged and then too quiet. Pearl made a sound low in her throat and clutched the bedpost. Josiah leaned close, one hand flat and gentle on Clara's breastbone, feeling for the lift of it. For three of his own heartbeats he felt nothing certain, and the room seemed to tilt toward an ending he had seen too many times in war and after.
Then she drew a breath. And another, slower. The sweat broke on her all at once, soaking the cloth, soaking her nightdress, and the terrible dry heat began, gradually, to leave her skin. Josiah sat back and found his own shirt damp and his hands unsteady.
"Is she better?" Pearl asked, in a whisper so small he almost missed it.
"She has turned a corner," he said. "We will keep her cool and quiet. You did well, Pearl. Your mama knew you were here."
The girl nodded and, without ceremony, climbed onto the far side of the pallet in the next room and was asleep before her head found the blanket.
Hoofbeats came with the first gray light. Ben Rawlins rode into the yard on a horse lathered white at the neck despite the dust, and he came through the door already expecting the worst. He stopped when he saw Clara sleeping, truly sleeping, her face pale and damp and peaceful.
"She broke the fever an hour ago," Josiah said quietly. "She will need broth and rest and no excitement. But she is still with us."