year for three years running.
By the time he had boiled the sheet and lifted it out
again with a stick of kindling, he took it outside and
squeezed out the excess water, the snow falling against
his hands. It was then he saw the woman turning her
wagon into the lane off the road.
She got down without a word and seemed to know
exactly what he was doing.
“Do you have any fresh bedding?” he said.
She nodded and he followed her inside, carrying
the balled-up damp sheet.
She removed a trunk from under the high bed and
took from it a lace tablecloth and said, “It will have
to do.”
She stripped the bed of the old bedding, all but the
heavy quilt that was only slightly tinged with the girl’s
blood, and replaced the bottom sheet with the table
cloth and set about making the girl comfortable. Then
she took the freshly washed sheet and hung it be-
tween two chairs by the stove, even as the others con-
tinued to watch, not volunteering to help.
“She’ll need fresh changing,” Jake said. “As often
as you can.”
The mother’s eyes asked the question.
“I don’t know what else I can do for her,” he said.
“This is a serious matter and . . .”
He instructed her to give the girl a spoonful of the
absinthe every few hours, and, “If the pain—her
cramping gets very worse, you can give her some of
these,” he said, handing her a tin of cocaine tablets.
He looked once more into the girl’s eyes, then went
to the door of the cabin with the woman following
him outside.
The sun burned dully behind the pewter sky,
promising, perhaps, that the weather might yet clear.
“I have no money,” the woman said.
“None required,” Jake said. “I didn’t do much.”
He felt helpless and even though he told himself
that there wasn’t a hell of a lot he could do for a girl
hemorrhaging from an aborted fetus—for such was a
common killer of women—it still had made him feel
weak and ineffectual, a failure to his training and
knowledge.
Then the woman asked him the question that had
been burning in her mind: “Is my Gerthe going to
die?”
“Yes, probably so,” Jake said. He believed it was
also part of the oath he’d taken to tell the patient, or
in this case, the patient’s family, the truth—to not
lead them to false hope.
“I could be wrong, sometimes these things stop on
their own . . .”
He saw no brightening of hope in her eyes when he
added this last comment, nor had he expected to. It
was plain to see that these were people who lived
without comfort or hope—that somehow they’d man-
aged to make it this far and realized that they might
not make it any farther.
“Over there,” the woman said, pointing away from
the house to a small lump in the earth no larger than
what you might plant a potted flower in, “is where I
buried the babe.”
She held up her fist to show him its size.
“I guess it should have had a name . . .” she said.
“But it was so small, hardly a child yet . . .”
He saw the snow mixing with the soft tears that
began to streak her cheeks.
“May I ask if you know whose child it was?” Jake
said.
She shrugged, still staring off toward the mound
with the snow landing on it, melting, more landing in
the melted snow’s place.
“I guess the boy she . . .”
Jake placed a hand on the woman’s shoulder.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “The only thing that
does is inside and at such a time, I’m sure she needs
you more than anything in this world.”
The woman turned and went back inside the cabin.
Jake saw the man looking out the small square of
oil-streaked glass. Jake had a feeling about the man
that made him feel colder than the wintry air ever
could.
He thought he would ride back to Toussaint’s place
and tell him what he knew.
Toussaint Trueblood was sitting outside his place
when Jake arrived, on a bench he’d built for the spe-
cific purpose of watching the sun come up. On the ex-
act opposite side he’d built another bench to sit and
watch the sun set.
He sipped tea he ordered special through Otis Dol-
lar’s mercantile that had a nice flowery scent to it and
held a stick of cinnamon he liked to nibble at. It was
midafternoon and no sun to be seen—either rising or
setting—but a gentle tumbling of first snow arrived
off the north plains. There was something about the
first snow that intrigued him as much as did the rising
and setting suns.
He watched with mild interest as Jake rode up,
halted his horse and dismounted.
