on our way somewhere else.”
“Where?” I said.
“Just somewhere else,” he said.
“You went on and told our life story anyhow,” the woman said to the old man.
“I reckon I did,” he said, slumping his shoulders. “Reckon I did. It was just all balled up inside me.”
“It got out,” she said, then looked at Jinx. “The boy. Can he walk?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“If we could get him here by the fire, I might could look at his hand. I’ve done some patching up in my time.”
“We can try and cart him over here,” I said.
“Jud and Boone here can help you, you need it,” she said. “We can give you a bite to eat.”
“We ain’t got that much to share,” Jud said. “Some beans is all, and not enough for any more mouths.”
“Hush, Jud,” the woman said. “We’ll make do, if we all just get a spoonful.”
Jud looked at the woman, then looked back at the fire. From experience, he knew he wasn’t going to win any kind of a battle over sharing beans, or much of anything else.
“There’s also another person,” I said. “My mother.”
“Bring them both here,” she said.
Jud nodded toward the can on the fire. “You ain’t got nothing to add to the fixings, do you?”
“No, sir,” I said. “Sorry. Everything we had is at the bottom of the river, except for a couple of nonfood items.”
“All right,” Jud said, and then sighed. “Let’s go see we can get this friend of yours. But I ought to tell you, I got a gun.”
To prove that, he pulled a pistol out of his coat pocket. It was a very small pistol. It had an over-and-under barrel that rattled a little in its groove. Most likely, he shot it at you, you’d have to lean into the gun to get hit- provided it didn’t explode in his face.
“We ain’t aiming to get shot,” Jinx said. They all looked at her kind of startled. She had been so quiet up until now they may have figured her for a deaf-mute.
“Ain’t no shooting going on,” Jud said.
He put the gun back in his coat, and we started out with them toward the river.
20
It was a real job, but we finally got Terry to the fire.
We sat there while the woman-who, we learned, was named Clementine-looked at Terry’s hand. By firelight it looked bad as bad could be. It was swollen big and had gone purple and there was some dark lines moving up the wrist toward the elbow. You could smell the wound, like meat going to rot.
The men both stared at Mama. I don’t think they meant to be rude, but it isn’t every day you see someone looked like her out in the woods wandering around. Even damp as a pissed-on hen, she was still something special, and I couldn’t help but envy her. I guess I looked all right, but there wasn’t any way I was ever going to look like her.
“What’s in them buckets?” said Jud.
We had carried our lard cans with us, and I was sitting on mine, and Jinx on hers.
“It’s a friend of ours got burned up in a fire in a house,” I said. I didn’t feel too bad telling that lie, as part of it was true.
“What?” said Boone.
“She was a big friend, and she’s packed in both buckets,” I said.
“You scooped her out of a fire?” Jud said.
“What was left of her.”
I got off the lard can and used my pocketknife to open it up. I put the knife away and took out the jar and showed it to them by holding it close to the fire. It was dark with ashes.
“What in hell are you doing with her burned up like that?” said Jud.
“We’re taking what’s left to her relatives, to let them decide where she ought to be buried. We figured we ought not just let her ashes lie around and dry out and get blown away by the wind.”
“That’s something,” Boone said, trying to wrap his head around that.
“I guess that’s the Christian thing to do,” Clementine said.
“You ought to have just kicked some dirt over that ash,” Boone said. “I don’t know it’s so Christian to carry her around in a bucket. That don’t seem right, keeping a woman in a bucket, even if she is dead and burned to ash.”
“How do you know what ash is hers and what ash is the house?” Jud said.
“I reckon God can sort that out,” I said.
This seemed to end any interest in the buckets, and Jinx didn’t have to open the other, cause if they had seen that money, desperate circumstances might have changed their character.
“It’s bad infected,” said Clementine after she had checked over Terry’s hand. “There ain’t nothing for it but to let some of the poison out. I can do it, but I can’t make no promises.”
“Then you better do it,” Jinx said. She was near Terry and she was looking at his hand lying across his chest.
“It’s going to wake him up, when I do what I got to do,” said Clementine, “and it’s going to hurt like the fires of hell for a moment, but if we can let the poison out, he’ll do better, at least until you can find a doctor.”
“My Clementine was a nurse,” said Jud.
“Not official,” she said. “I just helped the doctor out until this Depression come down. He called me a nurse, but all the training I got I picked up from doing. Jud, I’m going to need your knife.”
Jud gave her a large pocketknife, and Clementine opened it up and poked the blade in the fire and held it there. She held it there a long time. We sat and watched. When the blade started to glow red, she said, “He’s going to need holding down.”
Jinx got his arm, the one that didn’t have a hand on it the color of an eggplant, and held it down. Jud came and straddled Terry and sat on his legs. I got hold of his other arm, the one with the injured hand, and held it out on a rag Clementine had spread on the ground.
Clementine wrapped a rag around her hand and pulled the knife out of the fire. I seen a whiff of smoke come off the knife, and then she went straight to Terry’s hand and poked it into his wound. Terry screamed. When she poked that knife in his hand, the pus all bound up in it from finger to wrist leaped out of the cut and hit me in the face like it was coming from a hose. It was such a surprise I almost let go of his arm.
“You got to hold him,” Clementine said.
I pulled myself together, held him tight. She cut him again, and more pus come out, but not in quite the leap as before. It was dark stuff, and thick. Terry had quit screaming, but he was whimpering like a wet kitten.
Clementine laid the knife aside. She took up Terry’s hand and stroked it with her thumb, bringing more pus out of the cuts. This caused Terry to go back to making serious noise. She kept at it until the wound was flat. Already it was less dark, having let out a lot of its coloring through the cuts she had made.
“Boone,” Clementine said, “I’m going to have to have some of your shine.”
“How much?” Boone said.
“Whatever I need,” she said. “Now get it.”
Boone grumbled a bit, went over to one of the packs, tore it open. He come back with something small wrapped in cloth. Clementine opened the bundle. Inside of it was a little jar of what I suspected was homemade hooch. She unscrewed the jar lid and poured the stuff on Terry’s hand. It made him jump. She poured more of it, and he didn’t jump this time, but lay there breathing easy.
She lifted up the jar and took a swig of it. She offered us all a sip, but we turned it down, though I saw Mama lick her lips a little. That alcohol smell was the same you could smell in that cure-all, and I know it tempted her, but she shook her head.
