Doc - Mary Doria Russell [184]
“Kill a chicken …” Doc remembered. “Scare a wolf …?”
“Wolf more damn smart than chicken! Me? I know what what. Now I tell George Hoover, No rent for Doc!” Dong-Sing got even quieter. “You no tell Kate! She got big mouth, tell everybody.”
“You have my word, sir,” Doc told him. “And my gratitude.”
Jau Dong-Sing stood up and made ready to go, but Doc was looking at him with the strange intensity of the very weak, and Dong-Sing was moved to add one thing more.
“I do you big damn favor,” he said, his eyes full of pride and pleasure. “This one big damn happy day for me!”
A little while later, Kate came in with a mug of beef broth. “What did the Chink want?”
Doc was looking out the window, watching a cloud move across his field of view. “Nothin’,” he said, in tones of wonderment. “Nothin’ at all.”
She set the mug down on the dresser and helped him sit up so he could drink the broth without choking, holding the cup for him, making sure he drank it all. When he was done, she fixed the pillows and bustled around, straightening the room.
“Kate.”
She stopped what she was doing and looked at him, her lovely aquamarine eyes shadowed, the skin around them spidered by fine lines of worry and fatigue.
“Viens te coucher,” he said.
She frowned, the lines deepening, but he asked again, so she came to his side and lay down, nestling under his right arm, her hand cool against his chest.
“Talk to me awhile,” he said. “Tell me about … tell me about a day when you were happy.”
For a long time she was quiet, her breathing regular and deep. Poor soul, he thought. This has been hard on her … When he felt the chill of her tears, he said again, “Talk to me. Tell me about it.”
“It was right after the baby was born. Silas was gone, that bastard.” She sat up, and reached for one of his handkerchiefs, and blew her nose, and smiled briefly. “Anyway, I was working again. The baby kept crying and crying. I didn’t know what to do! Nobody wants a whore with a crying baby,” she said wearily. “One of the girls said, ‘There’s a hospital that takes charity kids. You can bring him there, and the nuns’ll take him.’ So we went to the hospital, and I gave the baby to one of the sisters. I knew what she was thinking, but I was so tired … I didn’t give a damn what she thought of me. And it was such a relief. Somebody who knew about babies was going to take care of him!”
Her face was pale and scrubbed. Her fine, fair hair was pulled back artlessly. He could see the scared girl she’d been at fifteen, and the hard woman she would be at fifty.
“The other girls took me out drinking, after,” she told him. “We pooled our money and bought a bottle. For the first time since I was a girl—since before we left Mexico—I was happy. All us girls got drunk and we laughed and laughed, and I thought, I can’t remember when I was so happy! This is the happiest night of my life!”
Kate stopped and cleared her throat. Her voice was ordinary when she went on. “I went back to the hospital, a couple of days later. To visit him. One of the nuns came out. She told me the baby was dead. He died the night I left him. While I was having such a good time.”
Poor child, he thought. Poor child.
The baby. Kate. Either. Both.
“You did the right thing, to bring him to the nuns,” he told her. “And you were happy because that little baby stopped by to bless his mamma on his way up to heaven.”
She looked at him, and barked a bitter laugh, and wept. They slept together afterward. Side by side.
All through November, whenever anyone came to sit with him, Doc would say, “Talk to me. Tell me about a day when you were happy.”
In the beginning, nobody was sure that Doc was really listening. The lycopin kept him asleep a great deal of the time, but hearing people talk seemed to soothe him, and it seemed harmless enough. Eventually, Morg realized that Doc was saying that same thing to everyone. Talk to me about a day when you were happy.
“What did you tell him?” Morg asked Wyatt.
“Oh, hell,” said Wyatt. “I don’t know.”
He had spoken of Urilla. How she was stronger