“He won’t be touching me.”
The undeserved hatred directed at Stebbs made no sense to Lynn, so she sat quietly through another contraction that left Neva panting. “I’m wasting my time here with you,” Lynn informed her. “I’ve gotta get back.” She rose to leave.
“Wait! I’ll let him in,” Neva said as if granting a favor. “Just get it out of me.”
Lynn emerged into the darkness, handing the flashlight off to Stebbs. “Your turn.” He ducked into the shelter, and a murmured conversation followed, pausing whenever Neva suffered a contraction too painful to speak through.
“What do you think?” Eli asked, his gaze bouncing off Lynn’s when they met over the flickering fire. She lowered herself to the ground before answering.
“Don’t know. She’s worn out though, and that’s not good with the baby still on the way.”
Eli nodded and they sat in silence. He flinched when Neva’s cries came again, louder this time and more desperate. Lynn stared impassively into the fire, noticing that Stebbs had placed dead wood on it.
“You got to use the dead,” she said. Eli snapped out of his trance.
“What was that?”
“Dead wood.” She pointed to the fire. “You use the green, living stuff and you get more smoke than heat.”
“Okay.”
The silence fell again, but it felt awkward now that she had tried to break it unsuccessfully. “They take your blankets? Those men?”
“Yeah.” Eli’s voice caught in his throat from disuse. “Yeah,” he repeated more clearly. “Blankets and our food. I went to a house looking for more, but they’d all been stripped. Most of the clothes were gone too, except for some that were way too big for anybody I’ve ever seen. I took them to use for blankets for Neva and Lucy.”
Stebbs voice cut through the night. “Lynn, come here.”
She approached the entrance warily. “What is it?”
“Take this,” he handed her a bundle. “Bury it.”
Lynn gingerly took the dirty shirt, alarmed at the heat soaking through it. She shot Stebbs a questioning glance.
“Born dead.” He drew an arm around her shoulders, bringing her closer to him. “Take the little thing a bit aways and bury it. Mother’s not doing so well.”
“She going to make it?”
“Not doing so well up here.” Stebbs pointed to his temple, then his heart. “And here.”
Lynn tucked the small bundle under her arm. Eli followed her downstream, dazed and silent. She had no idea how she was supposed to dig a grave in frozen ground with no shovel, but Stebbs had his hands full with the mother. She climbed the bank when it rose to shoulder height and chose a small clearing enclosed by mountain ashes.
“This should be easy enough to find again, if she wants to come and see it,” she said to Eli, who only nodded. His fingers were clenched tightly around the flashlight Stebbs had handed off to him. “Plus the bank is high enough here, spring floods won’t wash it away.”
There was no response. Lynn sat the little bundle on the ground, ignoring the wetness that had soaked through the wrappings onto her clothes. “Find me a good-sized stick, pretty sharp.” Eli seemed grateful for direction; he disappeared into the darkness.
Lynn waited for her eyes to adjust to the moonlight, then went back to the streambed in search of rocks. They met again in the clearing and he began hacking at the ground with the stick, opening raw wounds in the earth. Once he had a furrow dug Lynn scraped away with a flat rock. “We won’t be able to get very deep,” she said. “But we’ll cover him with some good-sized rocks so nothing will bother him.”
“Him?”
“What’s that?”
“It was a boy?”
“Oh.” Lynn thought for a second. “I don’t really know. Stebbs didn’t say.”
Eli hesitated before unwinding the motionless bundle. Lynn looked away, intent on her task. “You were right,” he said after a moment. “It was a boy.”
She grunted in response, unsure what to say. Eli rewrapped the tiny body. “He’s cold already.” His hands hovered over the little bundle that had held warmth before the night wind had ripped it away. “My brother always wanted a son.”
“He can have more. Come help me.”
An hour later, Eli laid his nephew into the small hole they’d managed to scratch out, and they piled rocks on top of it.
“He can’t,” Eli said out of nowhere.
“Can’t what?”
“My brother, he can’t have more sons. He’s dead.”
“Oh,” Lynn said. “Sorry.”
They regarded the rocks together in silence. “I feel like we should say a prayer to God, or something,” Eli said after a moment.
“A what to who?”
“Never mind,” he said. “I just feel like I should say something, you know, over the grave.”
Lynn stood next to him in the dark, aware of the heat rolling off his body in contrast to the chill around them. “I can,” she said. “If you want.”
He nodded, and Lynn took a breath of cold air before the words spilled out.
Even in the dark of night she could feel him staring at her as she finished. “That’s William Butler Yeats,” Eli said. “How the hell do you know Yeats?”
“I can read, and I have books,” she said stiffly.
When they got back to the camp, Stebbs was sitting by the fire, warming some soup he had brought with him. “She’s all right,” he told Eli. “But you’ve got to get her some decent shelter. You two will die down here in a month.”
“What do you suggest?” Eli asked. “She won’t leave the stream, especially now.” The image of the small, lonely grave in the moonlight remained unspoken.
“Well, it’s not a bad site, really. You’ve got fresh water, and the bank is high enough that you should be safe from the spring thaw flow. It’s not something you’d know, but the stream does go dry from time to time, so a dry summer could put you in a pinch. But there’s plenty of game here, once you learn to hunt, and gathering wood’ll be a snap now you know to get the right kind.”
Lynn wondered who was going to teach Eli to hunt. She certainly didn’t have time, especially now that Lucy was her responsibility. She opened her mouth to say as much but the sight of Eli’s face—exhausted and blank— stopped her.
“Shelter’s the priority,” Stebbs continued. “As of now. She won’t move, and you won’t make her, which means bringing the shelter to you. We can throw up something quickly in a few days, get something better and more permanent for you later, if she still won’t see sense.”
Lynn shifted uneasily at Stebbs’ use of the word
“I’m already in your debt, both of you—deeply.” Eli looked intently across the fire at Lynn. “Anything you do for me, I can’t—there’s no way for me to return the favor.”
“You don’t worry about that right now,” Stebbs said, intervening easily when he saw Lynn about to open her mouth. “We’ll work things out as we go, right now keeping you and your woman alive is the priority.”
“She’s not my woman.”
