Sweet Everlasting (8 page)

He saw that at first she’d written “ashamed,” but then scratched over it. “Because of all the people?” he guessed. “Because of what
they
were expecting, not you.”

She nodded faintly. Her cheeks pinkened, as if she were remembering the ugly scene.

“But it wasn’t
your
failure.” She nodded again—she already knew that. He was glad, but unsure now what to say to console her. A memory came back to him, a private humiliation he hadn’t consciously thought of in years.

“When I was about eight years old, Carrie, my mother thought it would be a fine idea to send me away to boarding school in France. The fact that it was the middle of the term and I didn’t know a word of French didn’t figure in the decision.” He faced her, propping his bad leg on the log between them and wrapping his arms around his knee. “On my first day, my very first day, I was late getting to class—I can’t remember why anymore. The headmaster stood me up in front of everybody and demanded to know why I was tardy. ‘My watch is slow,’ I said, or thought I said—
Ma montre retarde.
Only I forgot the word for watch and I said,
Ma morse retarde.
Know what
morse
means?” She shook her head. “It means ‘walrus.’
My walrus is slow,
I announced to all my new classmates.”

She covered her mouth with her hand, eyes wide with pity and distress—then laughter. “You think that’s funny?” he demanded, taking mock umbrage. She shook her head quickly, anxious to reassure him. He grinned. “No, and it wasn’t funny then, believe me. I’ll never forget how they laughed at me, Carrie, never, not if I live to be a hundred.”

She nodded her understanding. There was no need for him to complete the circle, explain the moral of his little story—that even though it hadn’t been in any way his fault, the childhood incident had mortified him, as Reverend Ewing and the crowd had mortified her. In all likelihood they would both take those fiery hot memories to their graves.

They fell silent. A moment later she wrote in her notebook,
Thank you.

“For what?”

Telling me that.

“You’re welcome.”

With the tablet on her knee, she wrote,
People,
then crossed it out. She wrote,
Sometimes,
and crossed that out, too. He could feel her indecision floating between them like a fog, obscuring the faint ties of trust he had thought were beginning to connect them.

She turned the page and scribbled something else.

“ ‘How are you?’ ” Tyler read aloud. “ ‘How is your—’ ” He bent closer, squinting at the last word.
Nuralja,
she’d written. “Ah!” He glanced up to see her blushing. “Much better,” he said quickly. “The neuralgia’s all but disappeared; in fact, I haven’t had a spell in weeks.” She put her hands together in a glad, grateful gesture.

“I wanted to thank you for your gift.” She wrinkled her forehead. “The flowers,” he reminded her. “I liked them very much.” Her smile was enchanting. She really was lovely. “Dr. Stoneman tells me you know everything about flowers and trees and birds and animals.”

She made a humorous face and looked up at the blowing treetops, then back at him with a rueful smile. On her notepad she scribbled,
How I wish.

“I think you’re being modest.” He glanced around. Across the path, a short clump of bluish, hairy-stalked wildflowers sprouted under a spindly laurel bush. Buttercups, he’d have labeled them, except that they weren’t yellow. “What are those?” he challenged, pointing.

She grinned.
Hepatica,
she wrote.
Easy.

“You see? You know everything. Now me, I’d rather not know what they’re called.” She arched her eyebrows in amazement. “No, I’d rather not know. I tried to learn once, but it was too depressing. Whenever I’d see a really beautiful specimen and look it up in a book, it always turned out to be called ‘dogbane’ or ‘bladderwort.’ ”

She laughed with her whole face, shoulders shaking, covering her mouth again with her hand. The uselessness of the gesture struck Tyler all at once, sobering him and turning his pleasure in making her laugh into a vague melancholy.

She wrote,
Bastard-toadflax is pretty
! She thought for a second.
So is mad-dog skullcap!
She lifted dancing eyes, and saw his expression. Her smile faltered.

“Has a doctor ever examined your throat, Carrie?” She bent her head; he couldn’t read her still profile. He watched her draw tight X’s around all the borders of the page she’d been writing on. “There could be any number of reasons why you’re not able to speak,” he persisted quietly. “An injury to the vocal cords or the laryngeal cartilages. A tumor, a lesion. Trauma from swallowing something corrosive.”
Hysteria,
he thought but didn’t say. “If you’d let me examine you, I might be able to help you.” She stayed motionless except for the compulsive X-making, darker now, the pencil bearing down hard. “There’s an instrument we use called a laryngoscope. It’s nothing but a little mirror mounted at an angle on a metal stem about this long. It doesn’t hurt, I promise you. It gives me a good view of the cords and the trachea, that’s all.” He waited, but she still didn’t look up. “Tell me this. Are you able to whisper?”

She ripped out the X’d-over page of her notebook in a quick slashing movement and scrawled
NO
on a new one in block letters. Then she shot to her feet.

“Wait.” He stood up more slowly, not because of his leg as much as to keep her from streaking away like a flushed partridge. “Hold on. Wait now, Carrie, talk to me.”

She looked at him for a few seconds, as if weighing the threat. Apparently he didn’t present much of one, because she looked away from him long enough to scribble in her notebook again. When she finished, she tore off the sheet and handed it to him.

Thank you for being nice to me. I can’t talk I can’t, you can’t help me.

When he looked back up, she was halfway across the yellow pasture, long legs striding away fast.

G
ENTLY—GENTLY.
D
ON’T BE
scared, little hawk, it’s all right. Easy, almost done. There!

Carrie let her breath out in slow relief and laid the panting kestrel on its side in her lap. Despite the seriousness of the moment, she almost smiled because he looked so comical, like a tiny bird-ghost, bound from his neck to his tail feathers in the foot of one of her old white stockings. She’d cut a hole in the top for his head and one in the middle for his poor broken leg, which crooked out at a pitiful angle, snapped in two between the elbow and the foot. The sock would calm him and hold him steady while she tended to his leg. Thank goodness the bone hadn’t punched through the skin; at least she wouldn’t have to worry about infection. She’d found him this morning, tangled in the burs of a burdock plant behind the springhouse. He’d probably broken his leg thrashing around to free himself. When she’d disentangled him, he’d been too exhausted to move.

Now he was breathing too fast. Using the medicine dropper Dr. Stoneman had given her years ago, she coaxed a drink of sugar water into the sparrow hawk’s beak, to settle him down. Her instruments were all ready and laid out on a towel on the flat top of the silvered chestnut stump beside her. She’d cut strips of gauze ahead of time, guessing the lengths she would need, and fashioned and fitted a tiny splint from a piece of cardboard—because wood, even matchsticks, she’d learned from experience, were much too heavy for a small bird. Now she took a thin square of gauze and laid it over the kestrel’s head—he’d be calmer if he couldn’t see her movements—and set to work.

Steady, quiet hands. Absolutely calm. Firm, but not too firm; a bird’s legs were hollow, you could snap a fragile bone yourself if you weren’t careful. Slowly and very gently she fitted her L-shaped splint along the outside of the kestrel’s leg, from shoulder to claw. He squirmed for a second; she let her hands go still. Her own steady breathing and the warmth of her body soothed him. The little tab at the bottom of the splint curled up perfectly, she saw with satisfaction—she’d wrapped it around a pencil earlier, so it would roll around the stalky leg just right.

Now the hard part: holding everything in place with one hand and winding a gauze strip around leg and splint with the other. This was where the blindfold came in handy, for she had to hold one end of the binding strip in her teeth in order to tie a strong but gentle knot.

Done. She snipped off the extra bit of gauze and surveyed her handiwork. The splint made a little cradle for the kestrel’s leg to rest in; now he’d be able to perch, sit flat on the ground, or—by tomorrow—move around without hurting himself. She slipped the square of cloth from his head.
There, that wasn’t so bad, was it? Oh, what a handsome boy you are!
The beady eye in his black-and-white face glittered up at her. Lifting him, she carried him to his box and set him on the bed she’d made out of shredded cotton. Using scissors, she cut the sock away. He fluttered his wings feebly for a few seconds, then lay quiet.

So beautiful,
Carrie thought. No bigger than a robin, but how much
wilder
he looked with his hawk’s beak, his speckled breast, and rusty-red tail. The bluish wings told her he was a male. For a moment she thought of naming him—but no. In two weeks his leg would heal, and she’d set him free. Once you named a wildling you made it yours, and that was wrong; they didn’t belong to anyone but themselves. She remembered the big crow she’d taken care of last spring, who’d broken his wing from flying into the cabin window. She’d kept him for a month and then let him go.
Tried
to let him go, rather. Three times she’d set him free, and three times he flew right back to her. The fourth time, she couldn’t stop crying. To tell the truth, if he’d come back then, she’d have had to let him stay.

But in the main it was no good to try to keep wildlings, no matter how much you wanted to or how lonely you might be, because they were happier being free. You could be as kind and gentle as a lamb, but there was no substitute for Mother Nature, and trying to hold on to a wildling could turn out hurtful and not at all what you intended.

She straightened, and covered the hawk’s box with a cloth, for warmth. She would come back in a few hours to check on him, give him some water, and try to get a little food into him. If he wouldn’t eat tonight, he surely would tomorrow. She couldn’t see anything wrong with him except for his broken leg, and she’d fixed that. She had high hopes for his full recovery.

She kept her wildling care log with her other notebooks—her
Record of Specimens of the Wiggins Museum of Natural History,
her bird identification ledger, and her personal journal—wrapped in a piece of canvas and stowed under a corner of the big weathered boulder that made up one whole side of the hospital. With her usual care, she wrote down the details of her discovery of the kestrel, his injury, her treatment and expectations for his recuperation. After that she tidied up, putting things away in the watertight boxes she’d made and fitted into rough, hand-stacked stone shelves.

Even though it was only April, the late-afternoon scent of wildflowers was strong enough to make her pause, closing her eyes on a deep, dreamy inhale. This year she’d worked harder than ever on her flowers, and it had been worth it. She gazed about at the clumps of white Quaker ladies and trillium, heavy-headed and nodding, the low bed of rue anemone, the far-off spread of bloodroot and spring violets. She’d transplanted a tub of yellow wood betony from the patch near the cabin, because thinking of its other name—lousewort—always reminded her of Dr. Wilkes. She smiled now, remembering how he’d tried to make her laugh with his talk of “dogbane” and “bladderwort.”

She didn’t really need flowers or anything else, though, to make her think of Dr. Wilkes. She’d thought of him every day in the three weeks since the revival meeting, and she knew a lot more about him now than she had then. She’d only been sixteen when the war with Spain broke out, but she remembered the sinking of the battleship
Maine
in Havana Harbor and how it had outraged everybody in Wayne’s Crossing. She’d heard of the Rough Riders, too, and she recalled little boys in town brandishing stick swords and shouting, “Rough, rough, we’re the stuff, we wanna fight and we can’t get enough! Whoopee!” But now that she had met Dr. Wilkes, she wanted to know more—
everything—
about the war, and especially the First United States Volunteer Cavalry.

So she’d gone to the library, where Miss Fuller had taught her how to look things up in old copies of
The World
and the New York
Journal
and the
Post.
Terrible stories of Cuban peasants starving and dying in the
reconcentrado
camps had made her cry.
Cuba libre!
She remembered the slogan, and wished now she’d been more aware of the war when it was going on. She might have done something to help—although exactly what, she couldn’t think.

But the most interesting stories in the old magazines and newspapers to Carrie were the ones about Dr. Wilkes’s famous regiment. Twenty-three thousand men had applied for it, she read, but only a thousand had been chosen. Theodore Roosevelt was their leader, and the paper said it didn’t take him any time at all to learn every one of their names. They’d come from all walks of life—lumberjacks, college athletes, frontier outlaws, high-society polo players. They’d trained in Texas for weeks, until Roosevelt bragged his regiment could whip Caesar’s tenth legion. Carrie loved to look at the photographs of the troopers, posing on horseback in their slouch hats, leather boots, and low-slung gun belts. In one, she thought she saw Dr. Wilkes, looking rugged and nonchalant on a big black horse, in the third row of an endless line of soldiers spread out across the San Antonio plain. She’d stared and squinted, peered and gaped, but she could never be sure if it was really him.

If she could’ve had one wish, it would’ve been that she could keep the photograph for her own, whether it was him in it or not, and tack it up on the wall behind the curtain in her sleeping place. But Miss Fuller said it was forbidden to even borrow the old newspapers, much less keep them. So she contented herself with going to the library as often as she could, to read about the Rough Riders and gaze at the grainy smudge of hat and handsome face and wide shoulders that might or might not be Dr. Wilkes.