“But he’s dead,” he said, and pointed a shaking finger toward a small rocky outcrop near the edge of the saddle, maybe fifty yards away.
“He’s bloody not!” I said, and slapped him. I shoved past him, hobbling—his kick had bruised my shin, though I didn’t feel pain—leaving Bill Amos to deal with whatever he felt like dealing with.
I found Jamie lying in a patch of dry grass, just behind the outcrop. There was a lot of blood.
I FELL TO my knees and groped frantically through his heavy clothes, wet with sweat—and blood.
“How much of this blood is yours?” I demanded.
“All of it.” His eyes were closed, his lips barely moving.
“Bloody fucking hell. Where are you hit?”
“Everywhere.”
I was deeply afraid he was right, but I had to start somewhere. I could see that one leg of his breeks was sodden with blood. No arterial spurting, though, that was good … I started feeling my way down his thigh.
“Dinna … fash, Sass …” He wheezed deeply. With tremendous effort, he opened his eyes and turned his head enough to look up at me.
“I’m … no … afraid,” he whispered. “I’m not.” A bout of coughing seized him. It was nearly silent, but the violence of it shook his whole body. He wasn’t coughing up blood …
Why is he coughing? Pneumothorax? Cardiac asthma? His shirt was sodden. If a ball had touched his heart but not penetrated …
“Well, I’m bloody afraid!” I snapped, and tightened my hold on his thigh, digging my fingers into his unresisting flesh. “Do you think I’m just going to sit here and watch you die by inches?”
“Aye.” His eyes closed, and the word was no more than a whisper. His lips were white.
He sounded completely certain about it, and the fear that was swarming over my skin burrowed suddenly inward and seized my heart with its claws.
His blood was spreading slowly, dark and venous. I was kneeling in the blood-soaked mud and there were huge splotches of it on my apron, black-red; it felt warm on my skin, though that must only be the heat of the day.
“You can’t,” I said, helpless. “Jamie—you can’t.”
His eyes opened and I saw them look past and through me, as though fixed on something far, far away.
“For … give me …” he said, his voice no more than a thread, and I didn’t know whether he spoke to me or to God.
“Oh, Jesus,” I said, tasting cold iron on my tongue. “Jamie—please. Please don’t go.”
His eyelids fluttered, and closed.
I COULDN’T SPEAK. I couldn’t move. Grief overwhelmed me and I curled into a ball, still grasping his arm, holding it with both hands, hard, to keep him from drowning, from going down into the bloody earth, away from me forever.
Beneath the grief was fury, and the sort of desperation that lets a woman lift an automobile off her child. And with the thought of a child and the reek of blood, I was for a split second not kneeling in Jamie’s blood on a blistering plain of surrender but on splintered floorboards by a sputtering fire, hearing screams and smelling blood, with nothing to hold on to but a wet scrap of life and that one phrase: Don’t let go.
I didn’t let go. I seized him by the shoulder and managed to roll him onto his back, shoved the soaked coat back, and ripped his shirt down the middle. The bullet wound in his chest was evident, slightly left of center, welling blood. Welling, not spurting. And I didn’t hear the distinctive sound of a sucking chest wound; wherever the ball was, it hadn’t—yet—penetrated a lung.
I felt as though I were trudging through molasses, moving with unutterable slowness—and yet I was doing a dozen things at once: yanking tight a tourniquet around his thigh (the femoral artery was all right, thank God, because if it wasn’t, he’d already be dead), applying pressure to the chest wound, shouting for help, palpating his body for other injuries, one-handed, shouting for help …
“Auntie!” Ian was suddenly on his knees beside me. “Is he—”
“Push on this!” I grabbed his hand and slapped it on the compress over the chest wound. Jamie grunted in response to the impact, which gave me a small jolt of hope. But the blood was spreading under him.
I worked doggedly on.
“LISTEN TO ME,” I said, after what seemed a long time. His face was closed and white and the rumble of the crowds reached me like distant thunder from a clear blue sky. I felt the sound move through me and I fixed my mind on the blue, vast and empty, patient, peaceful—waiting for him.
“Listen!” I said, and shook his arm, hard. “You think you’re going to die by inches, but you’re not. You’re going to live by inches. With me.”
“Auntie, he’s dead.” Ian’s voice was low, rough with tears, and his big hand warm on my shoulder. “Come. Stand up now. Let me take him. We’ll bring him home.”
I WOULDN’T LET go. I couldn’t speak anymore, I hadn’t strength for it. But I wouldn’t let go and I wouldn’t move.
Ian spoke to me now and then. Other voices came and went. Alarm, concern, anger, helplessness. I didn’t listen.
BLUE. IT’S NOT empty. It’s beautiful.
I FOUND FOUR wounds. A ball had gone clean through his thigh muscle but missed both bone and artery. Good. Another had scored his right side, below the rib cage, a deep furrow, bleeding profusely, but it hadn’t penetrated his abdomen, thank God. Another had struck him in the left kneecap. Fortunate as to minimal bleeding, and as to his walking in future, that could take care of itself. As to the chest wound …
It hadn’t penetrated his sternum entirely or he’d be dead, I thought. But it might have gone through and torn his pericardium or one of the smaller vessels of the heart, its momentum killed by the sternum but still allowing damage.
“Breathe,” I said to him, realizing that his chest wasn’t rising noticeably anymore. “Breathe!”
I didn’t see any chest movement, but when I held my hand in front of his mouth, I thought I could detect the faint movement of air. I couldn’t do chest compressions, not with a cracked sternum and an invisible ball in or under it.
“Breathe,” I said, under my breath, as I pressed a fresh dressing onto his knee and wrapped it hastily with a length of bandage to give light pressure. “Please, please, please breathe …”
Young Ian had materialized again at some point and was squatting beside me, handing me things from my pack as I needed them. He seemed to be saying the Hail Mary, though I couldn’t tell whether he was speaking Gaelic or Mohawk. I wondered vaguely how I knew it was the Hail Mary and realized slowly that I had the vision of a vast blue space in my mind. “Blue, like the Virgin’s cloak …” I blinked away stinging sweat and saw Jamie’s face, composed and tranquil. Was he seeing Heaven, and I seeing it through his closed eyes?
“You are losing your mind, Beauchamp,” I muttered, and kept working, willing the bleeding to stop. “Feed him honey-water,” I said to Ian.
“He canna swallow it, Auntie.”
“I don’t bloody care! Give it to him!”