She was his legacy. His only legacy.
He bought two bottles of laudanum and steeled
himself for the journey.
Each day was to be a blessing, and a curse.
The leaves were changing in the high country. Au-
tumn was a fine time of year.
3
The girl was wan, skin the color of candle wax.
She looked at Jake with a fevered uncertain gaze.
He pulled a chair up close to her bed, laid the back of
his hand on her forehead. The skin was dry, warm.
“Your mother says you were with child?” he said
softly.
She twitched.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m not here to judge you,
just to help you if I can.”
A single tear slipped from her right eye, the one
closest to the pillow as she lay looking at him. Her
hair was damp and clung to her scalp and the sides of
her face.
“I’m just going to pull back the covers and have a
look,” he said. “Is that okay with you?”
He thought she nodded.
He drew back the covers. What he saw was dis-
couraging. The girl was hemorrhaging badly.
“I’m going to give you something to ease the dis-
comfort,” he said, then rose and went to what stood
for a doorway and drew back the blanket. The man
and his boys were still sitting there at the table, a
flame guttering in the glass chimney of a lamp threw
shadows across their faces, for the light within the
room was dim to near darkness even though it was
only midday.
“Do you have a spoon?” he said.
The man looked up.
“A spoon,” Jake repeated. “I need a spoon.”
The man nodded at the boy and said something to
him in Swedish and the boy rose and went to a wood
box there in the corner of the room and took from it
a large tarnished silver spoon and brought it to Jake.
Jake used the spoon to pour some absinthe and
held it to the girl’s pale and quivering lips.
“It’s going to taste bitter at first,” he warned. “But
once it gets down it should help the fever.”
She made a face when she swallowed it.
She was as frail as a milk-sick newborn kitten, he
thought.
He wondered if the child she’d aborted was that of
Toussaint Trueblood’s boy, wondered if he should tell
Toussaint and even more so if he should tell Karen
Sunflower, the dead boy’s mother, that there had been
a child of that union between the boy and this poor
girl.
He went out again and said to the man, “Where’s
your pump?”
The man looked toward the door that was barely
held in place by worn leather hinges.
“I show you,” he said, almost wearily, and rose
and went outside without bothering to put on a coat,
the wind tousling his rooster hair. A few snowflakes
swirled in the cold air as though lost in their journey
and fell scattered to the ground. The pump stood
around the side of the house—beyond it a privy and
some other outbuildings, one, a chicken coop with a
red rooster strutting around in the yard looking con-
fused, and two or three skinny chickens pecking the
ground.
Jake pumped water into the pail hanging from the
spout and carried it back inside.
“I’m going to light a fire in your stove,” he said,
and without waiting for an answer, began to feed kin-
dling from a small stack piled next to iron legs into
the dying fire that lay inside the stove. He stirred and
poked the fire back to life and set the pail atop a
burner plate.
The man and the boys watched him as though he
were inventing something. The room smelled of old
grease and sweat and foods the woman had cooked
over the long days—wild onions, rabbits, breads. The
walls were lined with old newspapers and pages from
magazines and here and there, where the paper was
torn away, Jake could see mud had been daubed into
the space between boards that had settled free from
one another with time and weather. The stovepipe ran
straight up through the roof like a fat black arm and
where it went into the ceiling there was an uneven
patch of black soot, and soot along the wall nearest
the stove.
As the water heated he went in and removed one of
the sheets—a worn rectangle of muslin that had
turned gray with age, and now bloody from the girl’s
body. He took it out and set it in the water and al-
lowed it to stay there until the water began to boil,
having to feed more kindling into the stove to keep it
going.
All the while the man never said anything and nei-
ther did his three young sons who sat lined up like
stairsteps, Jake thinking she must have had one every
