Bonesetter (25 page)

Trying to imagine how best to place his hands to pull on the boy’s ankle, Pell found himself wishing for a model.
Gia’s leg was closest in size to Falin’s, so he turned to her asking, “Can I have your help?
I’ve never done this on an ankle before.
I need to determine how to position Falin and how to place my hands so that I might have the best chance of doing it in one try.
Since your leg is closest in size to his, I would like to use yours to try out some different ways to position it.”
She agreed readily, but was obviously puzzled as to his intent.
She became even more puzzled when he asked her to lie down, nonetheless she did so.
He knelt down at her feet and grasped her ankle but even a mildly strong pull on her ankle simply scooted her butt along the ground.
With both hands on her ankle in order to provide a grip capable of great force, he had no other hand to apply counterforce at her knee.
He asked Manute to grasp her knee and pull so that he would have something to pull against.
Unfortunately, Manute could not get much of a grip, so his hands simply slid up onto her thigh causing Gia to complain about the friction burn.
Next Pell had Manute bend her knee up to a right angle and pull against the back of her thigh while Pell pulled in the opposite direction.
This had some potential, but he and Manute had difficulty coordinating their efforts.
They wound up tugging her leg back and forth between themselves, rather than applying the powerful traction Pell knew would be necessary.
Thinking that he had to find a way to apply both force and counterforce himself, Pell sat on his buttocks at her feet and grasping her ankle, began to reach out with his own feet looking for a place to put them in order to achieve purchase for application of such a counterforce.
Her crotch was an obvious stirrup in which to place his foot.
Thinking hard about the problem and its solution, he began to slide his foot in that direction.
Suddenly he saw her watching his foot with wide eyes.
He realized what he had been about to do and his hormones burst onto the scene. Suddenly both embarrassed and sexually stimulated he jerked his foot back and scrambled to his feet.
Not realizing that they couldn’t see either his red face or his erection in the twilight, he turned away.

“Have you figured it out yet?”
Gia asked curiously.

Hardly trusting himself to speak, Pell choked out, “Not yet.”
After a moment, when he judged that he had control of his voice again he asked her to turn on her stomach.
Pell backed up a little to stand over her knee and then, bending her knee, brought her foot up behind her so that her calf stood straight in the air.
Placing his foot on the less arousing back of her thigh, he judged that he could obtain a powerful grip on her foot and ankle.
“OK this will work,” he said staring off into the distance.
“Manute, help Tando roll Falin onto his stomach.”

They rolled him quickly and stared at Pell awaiting his next move.
He looked at the boy, face down in the dirt and said, “For the Spirit’s sake, turn his head so he can breath
e
.”
Manute quickly did this while Gia knelt by his face, brushing dirt off his listless face.
Pell picked up the boy’s ankle by the board splint attached to it just as Gia cried out.
“He’s not breathing!” Gia exclaimed. Just as she said the words, Pell had begun to pull on his ankle.
The boy gasped in a torpid fashion.
“Oh!
Do that again! The pain makes him breath!
Keep going!”

Pell had let go at Gia’s exclamation.
Thinking that he had never been commanded to purposely hurt someone before, Pell grasped the splint and used it as a lever to bend the leg into an even more deformed position than before, just as he had done with each of his successful bonesettings in the past.
The boy gasped and struggled, flailing weakly about but Tando and Manute easily controlled him.
Pell placed his instep on the back of the boy’s distal thigh and began pulling strongly on the splint with one hand and on the foot with the other.
He felt the bones grating together in a sickening manner and thought to stop.
But he remembered his false try with Tando when he hadn’t been able to pull hard enough so instead he continued to pull harder and harder.
He straightened his back, heaving as hard as he could as the boy continued flailing weakly beneath him.

Again, Gia cried out, “The leather straps are cutting into his flesh!
Stop! You’re pulling too hard!
Stop!”

Pell, fearing that he hadn’t pulled long enough or hard enough, nonetheless began pulling less on the splint and more on the foot in order to rock it back out straight.
There was some crunching in the bones beneath his hands and the ankle rocked back into a better alignment.

Letting out a gasp, Pell bent down to look at the ankle but even before he could see Manute shouted, “You did it!”

Hoping it had indeed been enough, Pell tried to press the splint against the calf where he had shaped it to fit but it wouldn’t go.
Holding the splint near the leg, he crouched down to see why, surprised to find himself shaking from the effort just past.
He saw immediately that the ankle was much better, no longer flopping off to the side as it had.
However, it was not quite straight, still having a small bend out laterally so that the splint would not fit against the medial side of the calf.
It also looked as if the foot still wouldn’t go quite flat on the ground when Falin stood on it.
Manute and Tando also gathered close to inspect the outcome.
They both jumped back when Gia cried out yet again.

“He’s hardly breathing again! Pell, work on his ankle some more, it keeps him going!”

Pell had been wondering whether he should try to set the ankle again, fearing that his next try might not even be as good as the one he had just completed.
Gia’s pleas decided the matter.
He stood and once again grasped the splint in one hand and the foot in the other, placing his own foot on the back of the boy’s thigh. He increased the deformity anew, pulling
as hard as he could
while the boy once more began to gasp and cry out.
Pell tried to pull the foot over medially to correct the deformity that had remained after his last try but the leg just came with him when he moved the foot in that direction.

“Tando, come pull on the leg!” he gritted out.
“Yes, yes, grasp it there, just above the ankle.
Move it outwards!
No dammit, outwards, toward you!
No!
The other way!
Yes, yes!” Now that Tando had given him something to work against, Pell pushed the foot over onto the end of the leg, shoving mightily until it wouldn’t go any farther.
His own muscles were protesting vigorously and he didn’t think he could possibly pull any longer so he tilted the foot back straight.
Holding the splint against the calf he stooped again to look, then sat down beside it, exhausted.
The leg was much straighter now.
Still not quite perfect he didn’t think.
It was hard to tell for sure because
he was trembling from the exertion. The
swelling in the ankle
made it hard to see too
.

Tando and Manute were exulting over what appeared to them to be a perfect job. Gia was sobbing into Falin’s ear, begging forgiveness for giving him too much medicine.
Donte kept trying to tell Gia that it wasn’t her fault; she just hadn’t wanted him to suffer.
“Better to suffer than to die!” Gia wailed, fluttering about the boy’s face, begging him to breathe deeper.

Pell strapped the splint to Falin’s calf with two of the leather straps that Donte had cut earlier, then he asked Gia if she wanted him on his back now.
When she nodded, they all rolled the boy over and Pell began to worry about fitting the other splint into place.
He padded it with the soft fur Donte had cut for that purpose and then placed it against the lateral side of the ankle.
To his relief, it fit fairly well.
While peering at the fit he noticed in dismay that, as Gia had said, the wet straps from the first splint had cut into the swollen flesh.
Blood was oozing from beneath one of the straps and the other was deeply creasing the skin.
Using one hand to squeeze the two splints towards one another and against the sides of the ankle, he tried to use the other hand to worry the knots in the straps loose.
“Tando, I need help.
Can you get these knots loose?
No?
Well cut the straps then.”
Pell held the splints firmly in place while Tando did so.
It was difficult to see in the twilight and under the edges of the splint but the skin did appear to be broken where the straps had cut in.
However, he thought it to be a small wound.
Carefully holding the ankle against the lateral splint, he pulled away the medial splint and had Tando pad it with fur like the lateral one.
With both splints back in place, Pell held them in place and had Tando bind the two splints about the leg with fresh straps from the pile Donte had made.

Through all this, the constant small manipulations of Falin’s painful ankle kept the boy gasping in pain.
Shortly after they finished the splinting however, Falin began to breathe shallowly again.
This caused Gia a great deal of distress and she begged Pell to undo the splints and begin to manipulate his ankle again.
To his surprise Pell found himself disagreeing, “No, Gia!”
Before that moment, he would have thought that he would do anything that
girl
asked.
“If we move his ankle too many times I’m afraid the swelling will become much worse.
Better that he die now, rather than later of a limb with the swelling sickness!” Though they didn’t understand the infection that caused such deaths, everyone knew that the deaths that came from a limb that swelled too much were horrifying.”

“The pain of you working on his ankle is the only thing that has kept him breathing so far!
Would you really rather he just died right now?
At least there is a chance that he might survive the swelling.”

“But there must be other ways to cause pain than to damage his ankle more.”
Saying this Pell grasped the boy’s fingers and bent them back like Denit had done to him so many times when they were younger.
This brought a small moan from Falin but only after he had bent the fingers back so far that Pell feared they might snap.

Tando leaned forward and grasped the boy’s arm pushing the bones together just below the wrist.
“My brother used to do this to me when I was little—it hurts a lot.”
Falin moaned and took a deep breath, thrashing about a little.

For the next half hour or so the group took turns sitting with the boy, stimulating him in various painful ways in order to keep him breathing
until
Gia’s concoction wore off.
Continuing to worry about the swelling, Pell again propped the boy’s leg up on the inverted basket.
With time, Falin gradually resumed breathing steadily.
Working beside Pell to treat the boy, Gia’s thigh accidentally pressed against Pell’s.
His breath caught at the touch.
Her warmth seared into him, then raised goose bumps on that whole side of his body.
She asked an innocent question and he stammered a reply, but a moment later couldn’t remember what the question had been.
Shortly after that, he staggered away, feeling like Pont on too much hemp, cursing himself for being unable to converse intelligently with
the
girl of his dreams.

Donte and Tando were giggling off to one side. Happy to see them in a good mood, Pell forgot his own distress. He went over and asked them what was so funny.
“Oh Pell,” Donte exclaimed, “You are
so
moony eyed over that girl.
It’s obvious you adore her, why don’t you at least say a
few
words to her?
You’re nothing but business!”

Pell felt his face flush again.
“I… I… I, I don’t know what to say,” he mumbled, scuffing his foot in the dirt.

To Pell’s chagrin, Tando guffawed, “Boy, if you can’t talk to the pretty ones you’re going to end up
mated to some bristly old sow.”
He chuckled at his
own
joke and Donte giggled with him.

Seeing how embarrassed and miserable her son was, Donte asked him to go with her to gather some foodstuffs for a feast, saying, “We need to celebrate the successful bonesetting.”
As they walked up to the cave, she suggested that he simply pretend that Gia was one of the girls from the Aldans whom he hadn’t seen for a while.
“Talk to her but imagine that she’s an old friend.
Ask her questions.
She’ll do most of the talking and you can just listen.”

At the feast that night, Gia and Manute shared some “traveling food” which they had brought.
It consisted of cooked grains and root fragments that were packed into little cakes using the fat drippings from a roasted animal.
They tasted as if they had been savory initially, but now, several days after they had set out, they had become a little sour.
The three hosts ate some of the cakes out of politeness but they had been spoiled by the consistently better fare provided by their traplines and diligent gathering.
They furnished a roasted rabbit from the day’s run of the trapline.
They also contributed some freshly baked roots and handfuls of fresh berries Donte had picked earlier that day.
Gia brewed up a special tea that tasted of mint and hemp leaves. The sumptuous meal, along with the mild euphoria from the tea, induced
a
happy feast. They ate out in the small clearing where Falin was laying by the stream and afterwards sat around the fire they had built there, telling stories and monitoring the boy’s progress.
Though Gia continued casting worried looks at her little brother, she and her brother repeatedly expressed amazement at what Pell had been able to do with his ankle.
Such a deformity would likely have cost him his life eventually, as unable to walk much less run, he wouldn’t have been able to carry his own weight in a tribe.
Though no one said anything about it, as if for fear of bad luck, their enthusiasm remained tempered by the knowledge that he might still come to a bad ending from the swelling in his ankle.