One Bright Morning

ONE BRIGHT
MORNING

By Alice Duncan

One Bright Morning

Copyright
©
1995 by Alice
Duncan

All rights reserved

Cover Illustration by Darlene Minuto

Published 1995 by Harper Paperbacks

A Division of HarperCollins Publishers

Smashwords Edition September 2, 2009

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aliceduncan.net

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Chapter One

Lincoln County, New Mexico Territory,
1880

Maggie had the blasphemous thought that God
was seriously at fault when He created women.

“
He made a mistake,” she
muttered to the rough log ceiling when she awoke for the fifth
time. Only this time, unlike the prior four, she had to get out of
bed and start her day. The cold, gray dawn was cracking.

She pushed the quilts aside and shivered as
the icy air hit her. Pains stabbed through her skull in piercing,
furious shafts when she thrust her arms into her heavy wrapper and
stuffed her feet into her slippers. Thick woolen stockings already
encased her legs; she had worn them to bed for warmth. The frigid
cold made the hurt in her skull even worse. She glanced toward the
window, hoping to get a glimpse of the day, but the glass was
frosted over.

“
Maybe it wasn’t a mistake,”
she grumbled. “Maybe He hated His mother and He’s punishing all
women in order to get back at her.”

Her teeth were chattering from the morning
chill by the time she had stumbled out to the kitchen to stoke up
the fire and heat the coffee. Every time her teeth chattered, her
head throbbed. She lit an oil lamp, hung it on the peg by the door,
and, in spite of her miserable headache, appreciated the
comfortable yellow glow it cast in the kitchen.

She realized that her earlier thought didn’t
make any sense. “I guess that’s not it. He couldn’t hate His mother
before He invented women. Could He?”

Maggie was honestly puzzled about that. But
there was nobody to ask, now that Kenny was dead. Not that he had
ever answered her when he was alive. He would just look at her with
those big, sweet calf eyes and smile at her tenderly with that big,
sweet smile. Still, she missed him terribly, even if he wasn’t much
for conversation.

“
At least Kenny loved me,”
she sniffed. “That’s some kind of miracle, anyway.” Maggie’s was a
life that had been powerfully short on miracles. “I should have
known it wouldn’t last.” Her breath hung in the morning air like a
soft cloud.

Her fingers were stiff with cold when she
cracked the ice in the bucket on the porch, put a pot of water on
to boil for mush, and set last night’s coffee on the stove lid to
heat.

“
Damn it,” she said with
rancor as she prepared to meet the day and her child. “Why would
God create a body that can’t even function for seven days in the
month, and then make her do it anyway?”

Her little daughter started to fuss in the
other bedroom, so Maggie squared her shoulders, put on a smile, and
tried to look happy when she peek-a-booed into the room.

Annie saw her mama, stopped crying,
hiccoughed, and then laughed at Maggie, who was making a silly face
at her. She pulled herself up in the crib her daddy had built for
her and held out her chubby arms, which were swathed in layers of
thick flannel.

In spite of herself, Maggie laughed when she
walked over to her little girl and picked her up. Annie looked like
a roly-poly muffin, swaddled up as she was.

“
How’s mama’s best baby this
morning?”

“
Mama’s bay,” Annie
confirmed, and hugged her mother tightly around the
neck.

“
I love you so much, I just
can hardly stand it, baby girl. And we’re going to be all right.
You just see if we aren’t.” Maggie knew she was trying to make
herself feel better with those words. The kitchen was warmer than
the bedroom, so Maggie carried Annie in there, and laid her down on
the table to change her diaper.

Annie’s sweet little face looked wet and red
and miserable. So did her sweet little bottom. Annie was just
fifteen months old. Maggie wiped the tears off of her baby’s
cheeks, kissed her soundly, changed her diapers, rubbed her chafed
behind with glycerin, tickled her tummy, and bundled her up
again.

“
I miss your papa, Annie,
honey. He loved you so much, and now you’ll never even know
him.”

Maggie shook her head sadly as she settled
Annie into the lovely high chair that Kenny had built and lowered
the wooden tray that he had fashioned on hinges so that the baby
wouldn’t fall out and hurt herself.

It didn’t look as though the water would
ever boil. Maggie and her daughter sang a little back-and-forth
tune while she poured herself a cup of not-quite-hot coffee. Then
she swallowed it with a shudder. Sometimes coffee would ease the
pain of these God-awful headaches.

She was startled when she heard a loud,
thumping bang on the kitchen door.

“
Mercy sakes, what’s that,
Annie?”

Annie offered her mama a toothless smile,
and Maggie grinned back.

“
Ozzie?” she
called.

Nobody answered.

The thumping bang came again. This time it
was followed by an odd, straggling scrape, as of wood sliding
against wood.

Maggie planted a quick kiss on her
daughter’s curly hair and headed to the door.

Somebody had told her about zombies once.
Whoever it was said that zombies were the undead, and that’s pretty
much what Maggie felt like when she trod miserably over to the
kitchen door and opened it up.

She expected to find Ozzie, drunk, propped
against it with a stupid grin on his face, and she was prepared to
lecture him soundly. Ozzie Plumb was her hired man, and if a more
useless individual than Ozzie existed on this earth, Maggie had yet
to meet him. She’d fire him and hire somebody else, but she didn’t
quite know how to go about it. Anyway, there wasn’t anybody else in
this neck of the world to hire. And even if there was, who’d work
for a woman, except another bum like Ozzie?

“
Oh, sweet Jesus,” Maggie
breathed at the sight that greeted her eyes.

A big roan horse stood there. It seemed to
loom from out of the misty dawn, and it was peering at her with
solemn brown eyes. Astride the horse was a man unknown to Maggie.
The stranger had apparently reached out to bang at her door with
the stock of the rifle which now dangled helplessly from his
fingers. The rifle slipped out of his slack grip as Maggie stared
at him and made a dull, crackling sound as it hit the frozen dirt.
Blood dripped from the fingers that had held the gun.

Blood soaked the stranger’s long duster and
trouser leg, as well. It had begun to congeal in the icy February
dawn, and Maggie saw the glint of ice crystals where blood had
dripped down to the stranger’s boot and dribbled over the side.

“
I’m awful sorry, ma’am,”
the man breathed through white lips. He was drooping at an odd
angle in his saddle.

As Maggie watched in horror, the stranger’s
eyes slid shut. He slumped over his horse’s neck as he passed out
and would have fallen onto the frozen earth, but his duster caught
on the saddle horn and he couldn’t.

“
Oh, sweet Jesus,” Maggie
murmured again.

She swallowed the sick feeling in her gut
and reached for the man’s shoulders. The fellow was leaning
perilously, and Maggie didn’t want him to fall.

“
Ozzie,” she hollered.
“Ozzie, get your worthless butt out here right now!” The sound of
her own loud voice ripped through her pounding head like a bullet,
but she tried to ignore it.

She’d have to nursemaid this person, she
guessed, whoever he was. At least that was one thing she knew how
to do, was to nurse people. When Kenny had been kicked by a horse,
she’d had to learn. And then he had died anyway. Sometimes life
just wasn’t fair.

She could hear the baby beginning to fuss in
the kitchen, but Maggie couldn’t see to her child right now. This
poor stranger might die right here, half out of his saddle, if she
didn’t do something quick.

“
Ozzie!” she bellowed
again.

“
I’m comin’,” came a thin,
warbly voice.

Maggie had managed to prop the stranger’s
broad shoulders in her arms by the time Ozzie made it out to the
kitchen side of the house. He was a small man with a lined, skinny
face that ran towards florid. Right now he looked a little green.
Maggie figured he must have spent most of last night drinking in
town. She guessed that if it were light enough, she would have
found the whites surrounding his puffy-lidded, milky-blue eyes shot
with blood, and the thought disgusted her.

“
This man’s hurt. Help me
get him inside.”

“
Jesus H. God,” breathed
Ozzie. “Whoozat?”

“
I have no idea who it is,”
Maggie snapped. “Help me get him inside.”

Ozzie lurched over and helped her lower the
man out of his saddle. Then they dragged him inside the house. The
fire Maggie had built up in the kitchen stove had already warmed
the place up considerably.

“
Hold him there, Ozzie. I’m
going to fix my bed and we can lay him down there.”

She didn’t look to see that he obeyed her.
Fortunately, Maggie possessed a stronger will than Ozzie did, and
he generally obeyed when he was inside the house and in her line of
sight.

“
Who dat man?” Annie asked
her mama. She stopped fussing and stared at the unconscious man
curiously.

“
I don’t know, baby, but
he’s bad hurt.”

Annie eyed the stranger again. “He hurt,”
she said. Her little voice sounded sad.

Maggie raced into her bedroom and ripped the
sheets off the bed. Then she reached into the chest in the corner
and took out the old oil skin sheeting that had been used during
the two months between the time Kenny got kicked by the horse and
he had died. Quick as lightning, she swished the oil skin onto the
bed and tucked fresh linens over it, then dashed out to the kitchen
again.

“
Help me, Ozzie,” she
commanded. And Ozzie did.

They carried the stranger into the bedroom
and laid him on Maggie’s bed. Maggie wished it was warmer in the
room, but that couldn’t be helped. She’d just leave the door open
so that the heat from the kitchen would warm it up.

In the mean time, she quickly applied a
tourniquet of rolled linen to the poor man’s right arm and
determined that his left leg was also bleeding. She folded up
another pad of linen and, after a couple of exploratory prods,
discovered where the blood was seeping out of his leg. Then she
strapped the pad tightly over the leak in his thigh.

“
I’ll have to figure out
exactly what’s the matter with that leg when I have time,” she
muttered to her unconscious patient.

Then she piled him with quilts and blankets,
hoped he wouldn’t die before she could attend to him, and hurried
back to the kitchen.

She turned on Ozzie so furiously that the
man stepped back a pace.

“
You see to the stranger’s
horse right now, Ozzie. Then go run to the Phillips’ place and tell
Sadie that I need help. Then you go to town and fetch Doc
Pritchard. If you don’t do all of those things I told you to do,
Ozzie Plumb, don’t you even bother to come back here. And if you
don’t do those things and still try to come back here to get your
stupid guitar, I’ll bust it. Swear to God, I will, Ozzie. So you
just do what I say.”

An expression of practiced hurt settled onto
Ozzie’s wrinkled face. “Now, Miss Maggie, would I fail you?”

“
Yes,” Maggie said shortly.
“Now you git, Ozzie, and git now. I’m going to tend to the baby and
then tend to this stranger.”

“
Yes, ma’am.”

Maggie eyed him narrowly and decided he
probably meant it. Since she didn’t trust him out of her eyesight,
however, she quickly marched outside to the shack next to the barn
and confiscated his guitar while he tended to the stranger’s
horse.