“It isn’t?”
“No. It’s the draining and disinfecting that will hurt.” I glanced up at Bree. “Go take hold of his hands, please.”
She hesitated no more than a second, then moved to the head of the couch and held out her hands to him. He took them, his eyes on her. It was the first time they had touched each other in nearly a year.
“Hold on tight,” I instructed them. “This is the nasty part.”
I didn’t look up, but worked quickly, opening the half-healed wounds cleanly with a scalpel, pressing out as much pus and dead matter as I could. I could feel the tension quivering in his leg muscles, and the slight arcing of his body as the pain lifted and bent him, but he didn’t say a word.
“Do you want something to bite down on, Roger?” I asked, taking out my bottle of dilute alcohol-water mixture for irrigating. “It’s going to sting a bit, now.”
He didn’t answer; Brianna did.
“He’s all right,” she said steadily. “Go ahead.”
He made a muffled noise when I began to wash out the wounds, and rolled halfway onto his side, his leg convulsing. I kept tight hold of his foot and finished the job as quickly as possible. When I let go and recorked the bottle, I looked up toward the head of the bed. She was sitting on the bed, her arms locked tight around his shoulders. His face was buried in her lap, his arms around her waist. Her face was white, but she gave me a strained smile.
“Is it over?”
“The bad part is. Just a little more to do,” I assured them. I had made my preparations two days before; at this time of year, there was no difficulty. I went outside to the smoking shed. The venison carcass hung in the shadows, bathing in clouds of protectively fragrant hickory smoke. My goal was less thoroughly preserved meat, though.
Good, it had been out long enough. I picked up the small saucer from its place near the door and carried it back to the house.
“Phew!” Brianna wrinkled her nose as I came in. “What’s that? It smells like rotten meat.”
“That’s what it is.” The partial remains of a snare-killed rabbit, to be exact, retrieved from the edge of the garden and set out to wait for visitors.
She was still holding his hands. I smiled to myself and resumed my place, picking up the wounded foot and reaching for my long-nosed forceps.
“Mama! What are you doing?”
“It won’t hurt,” I said. I squeezed the foot slightly, spreading one of my surgical incisions. I picked one of the small white grubs out of the stinking scraps of rabbit meat and inserted it deftly into the gaping slit.
Roger’s eyes had been closed, his forehead sheened with sweat.
“What?” he said, lifting his head and squinting over his shoulder in an effort to see what I was doing. “What are you doing?”
“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, though—he could feel the presence of the child pulling her away, as though she were tethered to it by a rubber band. He did not resent the little bugger, he told himself grimly. It was only that…well, only that he resented the little bugger. Didn’t mean he didn’t like him.