Conor's Way (3 page)

She didn't smile. She placed her hands on her
hips, small hands in a man's gloves. She pursed her lips and
studied him from beneath the brim of a battered straw hat. "Well,
now," she said in the slow, drawling voice of a Louisiana native,
"you're in pretty sorry shape, mister."

Conor was in complete agreement with that
assessment of his situation.

She met his eyes. "You out here 'cause you
tried to rob somebody?"

He tried to shake his head and winced at the
pain that small movement caused. He swallowed hard. "No."

"Somebody rob you?"

"You might say that."

"Mmm." She turned away, and he thought she
was going to leave him there. He was certain of it when he watched
a wagon pulled by a sorry-looking mule roll past him. But she
brought the wagon to a halt and jumped down again, her boots making
a splash as she landed in a puddle.

She walked back over to him. "Think you can
make it into the wagon?"

Conor nodded and started to sit up, but
intense pain sliced through his midsection. He groaned and fell
back into the mud. The woman moved to help him, but he told himself
he didn't need her help. He drew a deep breath, set his jaw, and
rose to his feet without assistance.

But before he could take a step toward the
wagon, everything around him started spinning, and his knees
buckled. She was at his side in an instant, wrapping an arm around
his hips and bracing her shoulder under his to prevent him from
falling. She staggered a little beneath his weight, but she kept
him on his feet. "Proud, aren't you?" she commented, and Conor had
no idea if it was a compliment or a criticism.

He leaned on her heavily as she helped him to
the wagon. It was only a few feet, but it seemed like miles to
Conor. When they reached the back, he waited a moment to catch his
breath, then lifted himself into the wagon, falling back to hit the
floorboards with a thud, his legs still dangling over the edge. He
closed his eyes and fell back into unconsciousness.

Olivia walked to the front of the wagon,
climbed in, and snapped the reins. Poor Cally floundered in the mud
for a second, but he soon found his feet, and she turned the wagon
around, heading for home.

As abruptly as it had begun, the rain
stopped, and she was grateful. Cally would be able to get them to
the house without too much trouble.

She thought of the battered man in the back
of her wagon. What was she going to do with him? Olivia had tended
enough wounds during the war to know he had several cracked ribs
and was probably bleeding inside. It would be weeks before he was
on his feet, and when he was, he'd walk on down the road.

Olivia turned her head and looked at him. He
was unconscious again. She cast a rebellious glance in heaven's
direction. Next time she asked God for a man, she'd be a lot more
specific about what she wanted.

***

"Is he dead?" Carrie's hushed voice piped up
in the silence and was immediately followed by a disgusted sound
from her older sister.

"Of course not," Becky said, with all the
superiority that came from being fourteen and the oldest. "We
wouldn't be tendin' him if he was dead, would we?"

"I guess not." Carrie watched from the
doorway as Becky and Olivia bent over the stranger on the bed. Her
younger sister, Miranda, stood beside her, wide-eyed and silent.
Chester, the family's sheepdog, had given the man a suspicious
sniff, then positioned himself between the bed and the two girls in
the doorway, knowing strangers were not to be trusted.

Olivia pulled off her hat and tossed it onto
the chair that stood in one corner of the room, then peeled off her
sodden duster. It landed atop the hat. Rolling up her sleeves,
Olivia cast a glance at the young girl opposite.

"How is he, Mama?" Becky asked.

"I'm afraid it's pretty bad, honey. He may be
bleeding inside."

"Should we roll him off the board?"

They had found a long wooden plank in the
barn to use as a makeshift stretcher, enabling them to get him out
of the wagon and into a bedroom on the first floor of the house.
They had laid him on the bed, board and all. He had let out a groan
or two, but he had not awakened.

Olivia stared down at him and frowned
thoughtfully, considering Becky's question. "I don't think so," she
answered. "Some of his ribs are cracked, and it'll be easier for me
to bind them if we leave him as he is for now."

To bind his ribs, she had to get his shirt
off. The shirt was spattered with blood and torn in so many places,
it wasn't worth mending. She grabbed the edges of his collar and
gave the white linen a hard yank. Buttons went flying and the shirt
came apart in her hands. "Dear God."

"What is it, Mama?" Carrie spoke again,
stepping through the doorway as if to have a look.

Olivia held up one hand to stop the child,
and Carrie came to a halt just inside the door. She then glanced at
Becky, who was staring in astonishment at the vivid scars across
the man's chest.

"Becky, go to the kitchen, and take the girls
with you," she ordered, wanting them out of the room. "Take
Chester, too. Put the kettle on to boil. Unhitch Cally and put him
in the barn. Bring the water to me when it's boiling, and a pail of
cold water from the pump. Can you do all that?"

"Yes, ma'am." Taking her sisters by the hand,
Becky ushered them out of the room. Never far behind the girls,
Chester followed.

Olivia stared down at the man. Despite his
present condition, he was strong and well-muscled, as if used to
hard work. Once his injuries had healed, maybe he'd be willing to
stay for a while. Maybe he'd be able to help her with the farm.
Maybe God had answered her prayer after all.

She leaned closer and studied his scars,
which were visible despite the black hair that covered his chest.
She recognized the marks of burns, whip lashes, and bullet wounds.
But still others were jagged, as if his skin had been ripped open.
She had occasionally seen the scars of cruelty on black slaves,
she'd seen the scars of battle on Confederate soldiers, but she had
never seen anything like this.

She traced one white line from his collarbone
to his shoulder with the tip of her finger, wondering what had been
done to him. Terrible things, she knew, and a wave of compassion
ran through her.

When she pressed a hand to his forehead, she
felt the heat of a slight fever. By nightfall, it would be worse.
He stirred in sleep and shook his head restlessly, then muttered a
string of curses. Olivia snatched her hand back, appalled, knowing
he must be a very bad sort of man to utter such words, even in
sleep, and she knew she'd been mistaken. God would never send her
such a man to help her. The other way around was probably closer to
the truth.

She left the room to gather the items she
needed. First, she picked comfrey leaves in the garden, trying to
remember everything Old Sally had told her about medicinal herbs.
She wished the other woman were here now, but like Nate, like her
family, Old Sally was gone.

She had Becky steep the comfrey in boiling
water, instructing her to place jars of the liquid in the well to
cool. Then she collected scissors, iodine, bandages, and rags. By
the time she returned to his room, the man was tossing in the bed,
as if tormented by some violent nightmare.

Olivia walked to his side and set her
supplies on a nearby chair. When she felt his forehead again, she
was alarmed by the heat. She hadn't been gone long, but his fever
had gotten much worse. No wonder he was delirious. His ribs could
wait. The first thing she had to do was get him out of his wet
clothes.

Becky entered with a bucket of cold water and
brought it to Olivia, then left the room again. She returned
moments later with the kettle of steaming water. Olivia pointed to
the thick rug at the foot of the bed. "Put it there," she
instructed. "I'll—"

"Bastards!" the man shouted, his fist
slamming the harmless pillow beside him. "Bloody fucking
bastards!"

She glanced at the fourteen-year-old girl who
stood by the foot of the bed. Becky's gaze was fixed on the man,
her mouth open in horrified awe.

"Becky," she said sharply, and the girl
looked up. "Go on out and get the girls some dinner," she added in
a softer tone. "I'll stay here."

"Won't you need my help?"

She gave Becky a reassuring smile. "I'll do
fine. It's almost noon, and I need you to feed the girls some of
that stew I started this morning."

Becky gave the man in the bed one last
curious glance, then departed, leaving Olivia alone with her
tormented patient.

Moving to the foot of the bed, Olivia pulled
off his boots and immediately encountered a problem she hadn't
thought of before. There was no way to get his trousers off. They
were still wet and he was a big man, too heavy to lift or move by
herself.

She finally had to use her scissors to cut
the trousers off at the sides, a painstaking and difficult task,
since he wouldn't lie still. One brief glance at his nakedness and
she hastily looked away, covering the lower half of his body with a
sheet. Life had changed a great deal since the war, but there were
some proprieties that were always observed. Even after her father's
accident, when she'd done practically everything but eat his food
for him, bathing him was something she had not done. Nate had taken
over that particular task. Even during the war, when she'd tended
wounded soldiers at the makeshift hospital in Vienna, she'd never
caught so much as a glimpse of an unclothed man. The matrons had
not allowed it. She was an unmarried woman, after all.

No one would
know
.

Her one quick peek at him had told her
nothing at all. One wouldn't mind seeing with one's own eyes what
was always so carefully hidden.

No one would
know
.

Olivia bit her lip. She glanced at the open
doorway, then she lifted the sheet and took a much longer look,
astonished by what she saw. But when she heard her mother's
horrified voice censure her all the way from heaven, she quickly
lowered the sheet, blushing hotly. Curiosity was indeed a wicked,
sinful thing.

In one of the pockets of his trousers, she
found ten greenbacks, but nothing else. She set the money on the
washstand and consigned the pieces of his trousers to the rag bag,
along with the tattered remnants of his shirt. She wrapped his
broken ribs with stout linen, cleaned his cuts with iodine, and
applied compresses soaked in the cold comfrey tea to his bumps and
bruises. By sunset, she was exhausted, but she knew her work was
far from over. His fever was still alarmingly high, and she had to
bring it down.

Throughout that night and the two nights that
followed, she tended him. She sponged his face and chest with cool
water. She forced water and willow bark tea into him one spoonful
at a time. She tried to soothe him, but her soft voice close to his
ear only seemed to make him worse, and she kept out of his way when
he raged. She tried to catch a moment or two of rest during the
infrequent times when he seemed to be at peace.

He spoke, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes a
shout, but always incoherently and seldom with tenderness. Most of
what he said was unintelligible to her, since he spoke in an odd
foreign tongue she did not recognize. But sometimes his words were
in English, and she caught wild mutterings about guns and amnesty,
a place called Mountjoy, and a man named Sean Gallagher.

By the dawn of the fourth day, his fever had
still not broken. Olivia dipped her rag in the bucket of cold water
beside her chair, for perhaps the hundredth time, and wrung it out,
watching him and wondering again what horrors he dreamed about.
Suddenly, he lashed out with one arm, and Olivia jumped out of the
way, watching as he knocked over the china figurine on the bedside
table. It teetered, then fell. Olivia made a grab for it, but the
china statue fell off the table and hit the floor, smashing into
pieces.

Olivia stared down at the fragments of what
had been a shepherdess. It was one of a pair that had belonged to
her great-grandmother, brought from the woman's native Scotland and
passed down for three generations. Since the war, Olivia had been
forced to sell nearly everything of value to make ends meet, but
she had not been able to part with the pair of figurines. The
delicate shepherdess had survived travel, time, war, and poverty,
only to be destroyed by a violent man's dreams.

Olivia felt for the chair behind her and sank
into it wearily. She stared at the broken pieces around her feet,
too tired even to sweep them up, and she fought back the sudden
urge to weep.

***

Conor didn't need to open his eyes to know
that he was no longer lying in the road. He caught a luscious
scent, an enticing mixture of freshly baked bread, hot coffee, and
clean sheets that told him he was in either heaven or somebody's
house, and heaven wasn't likely. The thought of fresh bread made
him realize how hungry he was. He inhaled deeply, an action that
sent a wave of pain through his midsection and made him feel as if
iron bands were wrapped around his torso. His hunger vanished.

He opened his eyes, blinking against the
bright sunlight that filled the room. Pulling back the sheet, he
saw that someone had removed his clothes and bound his ribs. He
frowned, unable to remember anyone doing such a thing. He
remembered the fight and the men who'd beaten him, but everything
after that was a blur of distorted yet familiar images—people
dying, Sean's murder, blood and guns and prison guards, Delemere's
voice in his ear, and a strange woman bending over him. Oh, Christ.
He'd been having the dreams again.

He remembered the woman. She had found him in
the road, and he'd gotten into her wagon. He must be in her house.
He lifted his head and caught a glimpse of a plain and colorless
room, but then everything began to spin. His head fell back against
the pillows.