little powder into the two puncture wounds and the cuts. As he gently kneaded the powder down into the bloody, oozing tissues, he again instructed Flea, “Son, get me a small twig from the fire.”
“Fire on it?” he asked his father in Crow.
“Yes, a good ember on the end of it.”
Roman inched back when Flea brought the tiny branch, a small flame licking at the end. Holding his breath, Titus touched the ember to the first of the wounds. A sudden twist of gray smoke spurted from the swollen flesh as Lucas twisted violently in his mother’s arms.
“Hold ’im still best you can, Amanda,” he ordered as he pressed down on the boy’s ankle with his empty hand, then gently laid the twig against the second wound.
Another spew of sparks and a curl of smoke erupted as Lucas flexed that swollen leg grown so filled with fluid that the narrow leather strip had nearly disappeared between folds of rock-hard flesh.
“We’re ready, Gran’pa,” Leah said behind him.
“Why don’cha move him onto the pallet the girls made for him, Amanda,” he suggested quietly. “Cover ’im up too.”
“You think he’s cold?” she asked as she began to lay her son on the comforters.
“He’s awready got the fever,” Bass had said. “Gonna be burnin’ up with it soon enough.”
Once Amanda had the boy settled on the soft pallet, his head in her lap, Titus creaked to his feet and inched away. He had to find Shell Woman, to beg her to use her powerful Cheyenne buffalo medicine on this dying child.
“Pa?”
He turned there at the fire, his painful reverie interrupted by the desperation in Amanda’s call. He went over and knelt beside her in the shade of the awning again. The sun was settling toward the far western hills. West … where they had been going as a happy family out to make themselves a new home in a new land with new hopes and new, new dreams.
“Something’s terrible wrong,” Amanda moaned. “He’s been restless, real restless for the last little bit—”
Titus heard the boy’s stomach lurch, that unmistakable gurgle as he instantly lunged over Amanda to grab for Lucas, getting the youngster turned on his side just before he spilled the contents of his stomach. The child whimpered when he was finished. Scared.
Bass grabbed up the wet towel they had been using to moisten the boy’s lips and wiped Lucas’s chin and mouth, then swiped it across Amanda’s arm where it had been right under her son’s mouth. “It’s all right, Pa. This sort of thing don’t ever bother a mother.”
He looked deep into her eyes, finding himself filled with so much love for her, filled with so much sorrow for her too. “Don’t bother a father neither, Amanda.”
But he had to drag his gaze away from the pain in her face, looking now at that thin, frail leg still enclosed inside the dirty canvas britches—how vastly different that leg was in its skeletal boniness compared to the pale, red-mottled leg puffed up more than twice its normal size. On the outside of Lucas’s bare calf were those two dark incisions he had made across the fang marks, powder-burnt now, both crude attempts at frontier healing made all the more stark against the youngster’s white skin. For a moment he stared down at the slits he had cut into the muscle to suck the boy. Still a little oozy with blood and seep after the burning, those slits reminded Titus of a reptile’s eyes. Eyes filled with the black of badness, glaring back at him, mocking his inability to save the boy. Sneering at his every effort to live up to Lucas’s trust that his grandfather could make all things better once more.
While Amanda continued to gently rock the child against her, humming over and over again the same few notes of some barely remembered song as a mother is wont to do when she has to watch her very flesh and blood slipping from her grasp, Titus got down on his hands and knees to smell the drying puddle of what little had remained in Lucas’s belly before the boy heaved it across himself, Amanda, and that baby quilt she had managed to get sewn just before the birth of her youngest. Leaning back, he scooped up a double-handful of prairie sand and spilled it on the rancid puddle. Several more times he filled his hands with sand and poured it out until the whole spot was buried.
Buried, he thought. Just like this woman’s gonna have to do to her baby. Sour and sickly, that vomit’s stench clung in his nostrils—proof to the old trapper that the boy was already dying inside. Oh, how his heart ached for this mother now, knowing that all too soon she would be wrapping up her baby in that very same quilt and consigning his tiny body to a shallow hole in the ground. Burying him, the way he had attempted to bury that—
“Mama …” Lucas whimpered softly, the last syllable trailing off in a moan.
“Yes, Mama’s here.” She bent her head low across his face, brushing his cracked lips with her ear.
He croaked, “Water?”
Amanda looked up at her husband. “Row, get him some water.”
Scratch studied the child’s face as Roman fetched the canteen from the sideboard of the wagon. Lucas’s face was bathed in sweat. No longer were tiny jewels beading his forehead. Now he was in the full grip of a last, excruciating fever. Amanda took the canteen, stuffed it between her knees, and started to worry the cork from the neck.
“Lemme,” Titus offered.
“I gotta pour some water on his poor tongue,” she said in desperation while she passed her father the canteen.
“No, not that way,” he said as he pulled the cork and looked around them. “Here, I’ll use the corner of your apron.”
Picking up the corner, Bass pressed it against the canteen’s mouth as he turned it upside down. Water soaked a bit of the apron. This he brought to the child’s mouth, rubbed it across the dry, cracked lips.
“Here, Lucas—suck on it. Suck the water.”
“For God’s sake, Pa!” she whimpered. “Give him a drink of water!”
“He’ll just throw it up,” he wanted to explain. “This way his tongue won’t be so dry—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Amanda snapped, her red eyes hardened with despair. “He’s gonna … Lucas is going to … it damn well doesn’t matter anymore if his stomach don’t hold it.”
He felt shamed, chastised by her words, more so by his lame attempt to do right by Lucas when the time to do anything for the child was past them all. No longer should any of them worry about the boy throwing the water back up.
“Y-you’re right, Amanda,” he said quietly, handing her the open canteen. “Give Lucas anything he wants what’11 make him feel better. Anything.”
Her eyes suddenly softened. “I’m sorry, Pa. So sorry.” And she started to cry again, her upper body quaking with the force of her sobs.
Quickly Bass threw his arm around her shoulder, saying, “Don’t do that now, Amanda. Time enough for that later. But right now … for what time you got left … you be Lucas’s mother. You just be this boy’s mama.”
When he took his arm from her shoulder and rocked back, Amanda gently raised the child and delicately pressed the canteen’s neck to Lucas’s lips. She allowed only a dribble to pour across his tongue as he swallowed again, then again, greedily. Finally he opened his eyes into cracks and she took the canteen away.
“Mama,” he groaned, barely audible. “I hurt so much.”
“Your leg?”
“Ever’ where,” he sighed, lips glistening with the last drops of water.
Titus got to his knees, then patted the pallet next to Amanda. “Roman—c’mere. Be with your people.”
For a long moment the big, burly farmer just stood there at the edge of the awning’s shadow, staring down at his son, grief relentlessly chiseling away at his sharp, thick-boned features. His arms hung stiffly at his sides, those big callused farmer hands balling into fists with a white-knuckled intensity, then opening before they balled again with a fierce helplessness.
“Row?” Amanda whispered.
“We gonna just sit here and watch him die?” Burwell spewed suddenly, his face flushed red with fury.
Amanda glanced quickly at her father, then said, “Row, he needs you now.”
Closing his eyes, Burwell wagged his head. “I-I don’t think I can sit here with ’im, Amanda—”
“Pa—Pa.”
Roman Burwell immediately collapsed to his knees there on the pallet with that pitiful groan from his son’s
