Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [527]
“Putting maggots in the wounds,” I said, intent on my work. “I learned it from an old Indian lady I used to know.”
Twin sounds indicative of shock and nausea came from the bedhead, but I kept a tight hold on his foot and went on with it.
“It works,” I said, frowning slightly as I opened another incision and deposited three of the wriggling white larvae. “Much better than the usual means of debridement; for that, I’d have to open up your foot much more extensively, and physically scrape out as much dead tissue as I could reach—which would not only hurt like the dickens, it would likely cripple you permanently. Our little friends here eat dead tissue, though; they can get into tiny places where I couldn’t reach, and do a nice, thorough job.”
“Our friends the maggots,” Brianna muttered. “God, Mama!”
“What, exactly, is going to stop them eating my entire leg?” Roger asked with a thoroughly spurious attempt at detachment. “They … um … they spread, don’t they?”
“Oh, no,” I assured him cheerfully. “Maggots are larval forms; they don’t breed. They also don’t eat live tissue—only the nasty dead stuff. If there’s enough to get them through their pupal cycle, they’ll develop into tiny flies and fly off—if not, when the food’s exhausted, they’ll simply crawl out, searching for more.”
Both faces were a pale green by now. Finished with the work, I wrapped the foot loosely in gauze bandages, and patted Roger’s leg.
“There now,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ve seen it before. One brave told me that they tickle a bit, gnawing, but it doesn’t hurt at all.”
I picked up the saucer and took it outside to wash. At the edge of the dooryard I met Jamie, coming down from the new house, Ruaidh in his arms.
“There’s Grannie,” he informed the baby, removing his thumb from Ruaidh’s mouth and wiping saliva from it against the side of his kilt. “Is she no a bonny woman?”
“Gleh,” said Ruaidh, focusing a slightly cross-eyed look on his grandfather’s shirt button, which he began to mouth in a meditative fashion.
“Don’t let him swallow that,” I said, standing on tiptoe and kissing first Jamie, then the baby. “Where’s Lizzie?”
“I found the lassie sitting on a stump, greetin’,” he said. “So I took the lad and sent her off to be by herself for a bit.”
“She was crying? What’s the matter?”
A small shadow crossed Jamie’s face.
“She’ll be grieving for Ian, won’t she?” Putting that and his own grief aside, he took my arm and turned back toward the trail up the ridge.
“Come up wi’ me, Sassenach, and see what I’ve done the day. I’ve laid the floor for your surgery; all that’s needed now is a bit of a temporary roof, and it’ll do for sleeping.” He glanced back toward the cabin. “I was thinking that MacKenzie might be put there—for the time being.”
“Good idea.” Even with the additional small room to the cabin that he had built for Brianna and Lizzie, conditions were more than crowded. And if Roger was to be bedridden for several days, I would as soon not have him lying in the middle of the cabin.
“How are they faring?” he asked, with assumed casualness.
“Who? Brianna and Roger, you mean?”
“Who else?” he asked, dropping the casualness. “Is it well between them?”
“Oh, I think so. They’re getting used to each other again.”
“They are?”
“Yes,” I said, with a glance back at the cabin. “He’s just thrown up in her lap.”
67
THE TOSS OF A COIN
Roger rolled onto his side and sat up. There was no glass in the windows as yet—none needed, so long as the summer weather kept fine—and the surgery was at the front of the new house, facing the slope. If he craned his neck to one side, he could watch Brianna most of the way down to the cabin, before the chestnut trees hid her from view.
A last flick of rusty homespun, and she was gone. She’d come without the baby this evening; he didn’t know whether that was progress or the reverse. They’d been able to talk without the incessant interruptions of wet diapers, squawking, fussing, feeding, and spitting up; that was a rare luxury.
She hadn’t stayed as long as usual,