One Bright Morning (7 page)

“
Let him find out for
himself,” she told the rifle, giving it a little pat for
luck.

It made her feel a little better to realize
she wasn’t completely helpless.

She remembered Jubal Green’s guns then, and
tiptoed into the bedroom. The rifle he had knocked at her door with
was lying across a chest against the wall, and Dan Blue Gully had
put Mr. Green’s Colt revolver there, as well, its leather holster
neatly folded. Extra ammunition was contained in a pouch next to
the weapons, and Maggie suspected there was more in Mr. Green’s
saddle bags, which were stacked next to the wall.

His pocket watch and chain also nestled on
the chest, in a tidy little coil. Maggie thought sadly that she
actually would have been able to berate Ozzie for not finishing
chopping the wood on time, after all. She didn’t allow herself to
dwell on that unhappy thought.

She gathered the weapons and ammunition
together and took them into the kitchen. She fetched Kenny’s
gun-cleaning box out of the kitchen cabinet and carefully cleaned
each gun and loaded it.

Then she took a deep, deep breath, backed
herself against the kitchen wall, and edged over to the back porch.
She held Jubal Green’s Colt revolver in her sweaty hand, and
devoutly wished the door had a window so she could peek through it
to see if someone lurked on the porch. She unlatched the door
carefully and peered into the room. No shots rang out, so she
braced herself for her foraging expedition.

Maggie had already made a mental inventory
of her needs, which she repeated over and over to herself in order
not to forget anything. Her plan was to be as efficient as she
could possibly be when she braved the porch. She didn’t fancy being
shot because she lingered over the potato barrel.

She waited until she judged the light to be
low enough to provide protection without concealing anything that
might be hunkered down outside. Then she pushed the door open,
propped it with a book so it wouldn’t slam shut and cause her to
have to fumble with it on her way back in, and dashed onto the
porch and into the dugout. In less time than it usually took her to
sneeze, she had gathered everything she figured she would need for
the night and raced back into the kitchen.

Her arms were piled full and a couple of
onions and a turnip dropped and bounced across the floor, but she
had done it. She offered up a tiny little prayer of thanks as she
plopped the rest of her armload onto the table and relocked the
door.

Working very quickly, she peeled and chopped
an onion and threw it, a couple of chopped carrots, a chopped
potato, and a meaty beef bone into a pot of water and set it on the
stove to cook up into a healing soup for Jubal Green.

Then she stepped into the bedroom to check
on her patient. He was burning up once more.

Maggie swore.

“
Oh, dear Lord, Mr. Green.
How am I supposed to tend to your soup if I have to be sponging you
off all the time?”

She removed the blankets from him yet again
and realized she needed another sheet. The one that covered him was
sopping wet, but she wasn’t about to tend him while his privates
were exposed. So, with a weary sigh, she threw the wet sheet into a
corner, fetched a clean one, covered him from his waist on down,
and began the sponging and drying ritual once more.

After she had blotted him dry, she went to
the kitchen to dish him up another cupful of bark broth. This time,
he seemed to be able to swallow it without her having to raise and
lower his head with each spoonful. Maggie took that as a good
sign.

“
I should have known
better,” she sighed an hour later.

Jubal Green might well be able to swallow
his bark tea, but his fever showed no sign of abating this
time.

“
I guess fevers are always
worse at night,” Maggie murmured to herself and the wall as she
bathed his head with cool water an hour later and tried to stop him
from thrashing about.

Forty-five minutes after that, when she was
having to physically restrain the man from chasing the demons his
fever-induced hallucinations had brought on, she grumbled, “Lord in
heaven, I hope French Jack doesn’t decide to attack us now.”

Two hours from then, when she was piling
quilts and blankets on a shivering Jubal Green whose teeth were now
chattering loud enough to wake Ozzie Plumb from the dead, Maggie
had stopped even trying to keep the tears from coursing down her
weary cheeks.

“
Lordy, Mr. Green, if you
can just lie there and not die until I can get back from the
kitchen, maybe I can get some hot broth down you. That might warm
you up some.”

Maggie didn’t stop to consider if she should
try to do anything for herself. Her limbs were aching and stiff
from exhaustion, and her eyes felt as though they had been glued
into their sockets and then had sand thrown into them. She knew she
had to eat something or collapse, so she drank a cup of the same
broth she brought to Jubal Green, and grabbed a hunk of stale bread
to chew on her way back into the bedroom.

Slowly, teaspoonful by tiny teaspoonful,
Maggie trickled nourishment down the wounded man’s gullet. She was
so exhausted and sore that she didn’t even notice the fact that
tears still leaked from her eyes. It was almost as though she had
stopped feeling anything. The tears she shed meant nothing to
Maggie; they were just her body’s way of telling her that this was
the end of the road, that it couldn’t hold out much longer against
nature, and that Maggie had better give it a rest soon.

She didn’t have time to listen to her body.
She just kept lifting the spoon to Jubal Green’s mouth. Every
swallow was a victory, every dribble a defeat.

An hour and a half after that, Jubal Green’s
soul began a slow, slogging climb through a painful, mysterious,
sucking, black morass into semi-consciousness. For some time Jubal
had been dimly aware of a struggle going on around him and in which
he was tenuously involved, but only from a vague, far distance.
That struggle somehow seemed not to involve him directly, but was
one that was being waged valiantly around him and on his behalf.
Sorting it all out was too confusing to him, so he decided not to
bother right now.

When his eyes slowly cracked open, they saw
nothing that was familiar to them. He was also in excruciating
pain.

Maybe I’m
dead
, flitted vaguely through his mind,
only to be immediately rejected.

Too much pain. If you’re
dead, you don’t hurt
, he
decided.

Then he frowned and wondered how he knew
that. After all, he’d never been dead before. And to the best of
his knowledge, no other living soul possessed any first-hand
knowledge about whether or not pain persisted after life ended. All
Jubal Green knew for sure that there was an inordinate amount of
pain during life itself. If he was still alive.

His thoughts began spinning around and
making him dizzy, so he decided to stop thinking. He concentrated
instead on seeing.

When his eyes had had a chance to focus in
the dimly lit room, he was too weak to lift his head, or even turn
it so that he could check out his surroundings. Instead, he took a
painful survey of the length of his body which seemed to stretch
out forever in front of him.

He was surprised to find that he was naked
and had a bandage wrapped around his chest. He couldn’t see too
much of that particular bandage because it was so close to his
chin, and he didn’t have enough strength to raise his head. There
was more white linen encircling his thigh. The idea that he was
being wrapped for burial crossed his mind, but he rejected it with
a weak scowl.

The entire right side of his upper body hurt
like fire, and the whole left side of his lower body felt as though
somebody had beat him with a steel mallet. The rest of him didn’t
feel too good, either. He couldn’t have moved even if he’d been in
the mood to, which he wasn’t. He felt remarkably lazy. Jubal Green
had never felt lazy before to the best of his recollection, and he
hoped it wouldn’t become a habit. He was used to getting things
done. Jubal scorned lazy people.

He couldn’t remember what he had been doing
before he woke up in this strange place.

He became slowly aware that there was a head
resting on his belly. He frowned. That didn’t seem right,
somehow.

He squinted down what seemed like miles and
miles of his own naked flesh to concentrate on the dark, tousled,
honey-blond head that lay there. The head was actually butting up
against his waist, in the little crook there where it joined his
hip. Jubal Green didn’t think that was quite proper and he wondered
if he’d been sporting with a whore before he went to sleep. He
couldn’t quite remember but, if he had been, it seemed somehow out
of character.

He had a foggy recollection that he and
somebody—oh, yes, he and Dan Blue Gully, it was—had been doing
something important. Jubal Green never sported with whores when he
and Dan Blue Gully were doing important things. They were always
very single-minded when they were working.

Still, he couldn’t account for that
head.

Maybe I am
dead
, he thought.
Maybe that’s an angel
.

That didn’t make sense to him and his frown
deepened.

Just then Maggie gave a deep sigh in her
sleep and turned her head over. She had finally fallen asleep
sitting beside the bed. She had been holding Jubal Green’s legs
down when he was thrashing so hard that she was afraid he’d reopen
his thigh wound and bleed to death.

When his struggles had gradually ceased, her
exhaustion overcame her and her eyes had just shut as she sat
there, arms still draped over Jubal’s right leg, and with her head
lying practically in his crotch. By that point in her life, she
hadn’t even noticed the impropriety of her position.

When he saw Maggie’s face, Jubal immediately
rejected his angel theory. Angels didn’t have tangled, dirty blonde
hair, huge dark rings around their eyes, smears of blood and sweat
on their faces, and look as though they had been dragged, kicking
and screaming, through the fires of hell.

Maybe this is
hell
, he thought then. That would certainly
account for the pain.

He tried to concentrate on Maggie’s
face.

Can’t be
hell
, he decided.

Because that face was a good one, even if it
was dirty and tired-looking. And, while he wasn’t all sure about
himself, he didn’t figure a face that good would have made it into
hell.

His right hand, the hand that was attached
to the shoulder which was presently being consumed by a raging
inferno, was resting near that good face, and Jubal found the
strength to lift a hand and place a finger on its cheek. His finger
gently stroked Maggie’s soft cheek twice. That activity took every
single remaining ounce of his energy. Jubal Green’s illness
overcame him again, his hand fell, and he slept once more.

It was the sound of gunfire that woke Maggie
up. She was jolted awake and up onto her feet in one jerky motion
that was too sudden, and she nearly blacked out and toppled over
onto her patient. She managed to keep upright by clinging
desperately to the table beside the bed. Then she was horrified at
what might have happened had she actually fallen onto the invalid.
It didn’t bear thinking of.

“
Oh, my God, I’m sorry, Mr.
Green,” she whispered.

She was trying to chase the black fog,
sprinkled with shooting stars, away from in front of her eyes where
it gyrated in sickening waves.

When she could move without falling down,
she dashed into the kitchen to try to figure out where the gunshots
were coming from and where they were being aimed. She picked up
Kenny’s Spencer rifle just in time to hear a bullet slam into the
side of her house. She briefly thanked God that Kenny had built the
house out of thick piñon logs.

Then she got furious.

“
How dare those bad men
shoot at my house?” she stormed. “I didn’t have anything to do with
their problems. I’m just trying to keep one of them
alive.”

Maggie couldn’t remember ever feeling such a
combination of rage and indignation before in her life. She crept
over to the kitchen window and peeked outside, making sure she
didn’t give anyone who was out there enough of a target to aim
at.

Daylight was just beginning to creep over
the forest. The trees still looked black, but their pointy tops
could barely be perceived outlined against the gray sky. Maggie
strained to pick out men in the trees and then gave up the effort
in disgust.

“
My eyes are so blamed bad,
I couldn’t see anybody in those stupid trees in broad daylight,”
she grumbled to herself.

She saw the flash of light just before the
sound of the shot reached her, and a tiny split-second after the
sound of the shot came the noise of the bullet thunking into the
wooden log siding of the house. Maggie smiled a nasty smile.

“
You son of a bitch,” she
said to her unknown adversary, and she aimed as well as she knew
how to aim and pulled the trigger.

The rifle’s recoil nearly knocked her across
the kitchen floor and the sound almost deafened her. That startling
result of her self-defense, however, was not enough to block out
the satisfying cry of pain that wailed across the clearing from the
woods. She grinned triumphantly.

Then another flurry of shots assailed her
ears, followed shortly thereafter by the thundering of hooves. She
was shaking with terror when she heard Dan Blue Gully call out to
her.

“
Mrs. Bright! Mrs.
Bright!”