The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [200]
It grew late. She yawned and told him, “I aint got a spare bed. You’d be welcome to mine if this weren’t jist the first night and I hardly know ye. Tomorrow night maybe we could jist sleep together.”
“That’s all right,” he said. “I’m much obliged. I’d be jist fine on a pallet on the floor, and tomorrow I’ve got to be gittin me a soon start on back up home.”
But the next morning, before breakfast, after a whole day of not bothering him at all, the chill hit him again. It shook him, and kept on shaking him violently for nearly an hour, although the woman piled up every quilt she owned on top of him, after getting him up off his pallet and into her deep, warm featherbed. At first she blamed and berated herself, thinking the chill had been caused by his sleeping on the floor, but soon she saw it was something much more severe than any lack of hospitality could have been blamed for.
“I do believe you’ve got the swamp fever,” she told him, and then, after the chill had ceased and the burning fever had started, she was confirmed in her suspicion: “No doubt about it, you’ve got yoreself the bad malaria.” She became almost happy at the prospect of keeping him another day, or longer, tending his fever with towels soaked in cold well water, and later, when he began to sweat profusely, lovingly blotting it all up with rags. She sent the girl, Betsy, down the trail to the neighbors’ to see if she could borrow a little bit of whiskey, and the girl returned carrying the glass jar as if it held frankincense or myrrh.
Mary Jane put something into the whiskey; she refused to tell Nail what, but he, who could judge whiskey well enough to smell the feet of the boys who’d plowed the corn, knew the whiskey was adulterated. “I aint sposed to tell ye,” she insisted, “or it would take the spell off.” Whatever she put in (and I can only guess it probably was three drops of the blood of a black cat; Nail had observed a number of cats around the place) helped, although it tasted so awful he nearly gagged on it. He could not eat the fine dinner, or the leftovers at supper, but she forced him to drink some boneset tea, which is also very good for malaria, and to have another dose of the whiskey-with-cat’s-blood every two hours, or as often as he could stand it. And at bedtime she crawled in beside him. “Do what ye want,” she told him, but he had no strength to do anything, although he appreciated her closeness and softness and willingness.
Early the next morning, while she still slept, he awoke to find that enough of his strength had returned that he could take her if he wanted, but he had made his choice: whatever strength he had, he would use for the hike. He was fully dressed and ready to go before she woke up, blinking at the sight of him in her late husband’s clothes in the pale light of dawn, and he protested that he didn’t need any breakfast, but she begged him to stay and have a big plate of bacon and eggs and biscuits and jam, and the first real coffee he’d had in nearly a year.
And while he was pausing to eat before departure, the two children appeared and watched him eat, and Betsy asked him, “Don’t ye wanter be our daddy?”
He could not finish eating. “I don’t know how,” he said. “I aint got any experience in that line.”
“You’re a fool,” the woman said to him. “You don’t know a good thang when it’s lookin ye right squar in the face.”
“I’m a fool, I reckon,” he admitted.
“Have you got a woman waitin fer ye?” she asked.
“I shorely hope so,” he said, and thanked her for everything and several times protested her insistence that he stay.
When it became apparent that she could not persuade him to stay, she gave him one more thing of her late husband’s: a .22 rifle and a box of bullets for it. Nail had declined, but the woman had displayed her late husband’s entire arsenal: two