Doc - Mary Doria Russell [182]
Hugging herself, Kate doubled over with a little moan of fear.
“Jesus, McCarty!” Morgan cried. “He’s sitting right there! He can hear you!”
“He knows what’s going on as well as I do—better!” Tom said. “I’m just telling you people what’s happening, so you will shut up, and get out, and let him rest! Am I making myself clear? Everybody! Get the hell out!”
Over the next couple of hours, the bleeding started up twice more. Kate was banished to Bessie Earp’s house. Morg and Wyatt and Mattie stayed at Doc’s. Around three in the morning, Chuck Trask came by to tell Tom McCarty he was needed to sew up a knife wound.
“Spurting or oozing?” Tom asked.
“Just kinda leaking,” Chuck said. “Wyatt? Morg? Are you coming to work? We’re real shorthanded.”
“I quit,” Wyatt told him. This was news to Morg, but Wyatt said, “Nothing to do with you. Go on.”
So Morgan left with Chuck, but before Tom McCarty followed them, he took Mattie and Wyatt to the kitchen and showed them how to measure out four grains of dried lycopin extract and stir it into a glassful of water.
“It’s effective against the cough and mildly narcotic,” he told them, pulling his coat on. “When he wakes up, you make him drink a glass of the mixture, but no more than one glass every two hours. Mattie, can you write?”
She nodded and shrugged: A little.
“Well, try to keep track of when you give him a dose, so he doesn’t get too much. If he’s cold, cover him. If he’s hot, open the window again. I don’t think he’ll be hungry, but I’ll stop by Delmonico’s and have them send over some beef broth with plenty of salt. If he asks for anything, offer that.”
Mattie said she’d keep watch the rest of the night. Wyatt knew he ought to stay, but this was so much like when Urilla was dying … So he went home and slept at last, but poorly. He was already up and dressed when Mattie came in a few hours later.
“Kate came back after McCarty left,” she told him, hanging a damp shawl up on the peg next to the door. “Morg’s back, too. He’s staying with Kate so she won’t be alone when Doc dies.”
“So, you’re sure? He’s …?”
“Never saw anybody that sick who didn’t. Why’d you quit?”
He almost said, Because you were right about George Hoover. Because my father is right and I’ve got shit for brains. Because I don’t know who my friends are. Because I don’t know who to trust anymore, except my brothers.
What came out was “Politics.” Which was true enough.
For the first time since she moved in, he wished that Mattie would talk more, for his own thoughts were loud in his mind. Maybe McCarty was right. Maybe what happened to Doc wasn’t Wyatt’s fault, just like it wasn’t really Wyatt’s fault when Urilla got typhus, but it sure felt like it was, and Mattie wasn’t one to tell him different.
“I’m going next door,” he said.
Morg answered the knock. Kate was slumped at the table, her head in her hands, too weary to look up. Wyatt’s eyes went to the bedroom where Doc lay, dead white and so motionless beneath the covers Wyatt thought that he’d been laid out. It took a moment to see that Doc was breathing in shallow little gasps, but breathing all the same.
Morg said, “If you can stay with him awhile, I’ll take Kate back to Bessie’s so she can get some sleep.”
Probably the first time a woman ever got any sleep in that place, Wyatt thought, but he told Morg he’d sit with Doc, and that Morg should get some rest, too.
“You know about the medicine?” Morg asked.
“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “Go on.”
“Wyatt … you really quit?”
“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “Go on.”
For the rest of the day, he kept watch by himself, listening to the clock tick, dozing sometimes in the chair. Late in the afternoon, there was a short, quiet dream about Urilla, probably brought on by sitting in a