They pounded on the door together, louder now, hollering out for Crockett to awaken.
Emmy turned, looking for Jacob, Rebah, and Tom.
“Hold on! Who the hell is it?” Ben called from inside.
When he opened the door, he had a big knife in his hand, and Missy Crockett stood behind him with a twenty- gauge shotgun pointed at them.
“My God, it’s Emmy and Sarah!”
He pulled them into the house, peering past them into the darkness.
Sarah cried out, “Northerners! Father was fighting them, and we had to run.”
“My God!” Crockett blurted out, looking down at Emmy. “Em, you’re wounded!”
Emmy thought he was talking about her foot and then looked down to where he was staring. Her nightgown was covered with blood from the waist down and was dripping all over the rough-hewn floor.
Missy looked at Emmy’s white face, handed the shotgun to Crockett, and said, “Ain’t a wound, Ben.”
Chapter Nineteen
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Emmy
The bell rang louder now. It had a name finally: “Nagger,” she wanted to call it.
Emmy had slept hard, and it took hours, it seemed, to wake fully again.
When she came about, the room was still, but she could hear voices quietly talking.
Moving in the bed, she caught her wretched toe again, and the dull pain brought her back to herself. She felt a bandage covering it, dulling its sting.
She wondered if she were dead because the morning nausea that had bothered her for the past several weeks was gone, now replaced with a weakness that went all the way down into her bones, pushing her right through to the floorboards.
The whispers continued, heated now, it seemed, but too muffled to understand.
Was it Northerners?
Did they just come to pay respects and negotiate a deal for the cattle?
Where was Isaac and her children?
This mattress was softer than hers, and she knew from the embroidered, quilted cover that she had to be in Missy Crockett’s home, maybe her bed, even.
She was embarrassed not to be in her own bed and felt like an intruder, like someone who, just to get a moment’s rest, might have slipped through the window in the night.
She needed to get out of there.
Where was Isaac, and why weren’t the children up running about and fussing as they always did?
She was wearing a different, clean nightgown, but she was wet hot. She threw the quilt off and pulled at the gown. The bell clanged outside again, longer now.
The bell clanged again, insistently. Nagger!
She called out to the voices, which stopped abruptly.
She sensed someone outside the door. After a few moments, Missy Crockett pushed it open and entered with Joseph Edwards. Both wore concerned and sad expressions that cut right to her chest.
Missy immediately sat down at the bedside, took Emmy’s hand, and smoothed her damp hair. She was holding back tears, Emmy could tell.
Joseph Edwards had a gruff, clumsy way of saying things for a doctor, but she always knew he meant well. He knelt down at eye level with Emmy and reached over to touch the top of her hand hesitantly.
“Emmy, it is so good to see you awake. I was beginning to worry that the combination of the ether and sedatives I used might have been too much.” Then he touched her forehead. Turning to Missy, he said, “She’s burning up. Get some rubbing alcohol and water and wet her down.”
He paused, seeing Emmy struggling to understand. “Dear, you lost the baby. And now you’ve got an infection that’s going to put you to the worst test you’ve ever had.”
What was he saying? She tried to form words but her mind seemed full of cotton, then slowly, around the edges, the terror returned. Everything was coming at her at once and she wasn’t even sure where she was. The baby?
As she stammered out “the baby?” Edwards interrupted her. “You have to preserve your strength and rest. Please drink this down,” he said, lifting a cup of apple juice to her mouth.
Emmy then remembered she had been pregnant, and the misery pounded her down harder than when she had lost the first baby two years ago.
Somewhere from another room she heard a man’s baritone laugh.
Isaac?
Edwards paused, watching her closely, “Isaac and Jacob are fine. Now rest.”
But she hadn’t asked Edwards about Jacob, she thought, as the drift from the laudanum overcame her, she heard a crow cawing and the flutter of wings outside the window, and she was in a field by herself, counting and losing count.
Chapter Twenty
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Joseph Edwards
A practitioner familiar enough with the benefits of ether surgery, Dr. Joseph Edwards had put Emmy under when her miscarriage was inevitable and she needed help clearing out the clots that followed the small stillborn fetus.
With the bleeding stopped, he was now worried about the morbid fever that followed bloody miscarriages like this. Sometimes the woman survived, but so much depended on her residual strength. Frail ones passed in a swift night, shaking and melting away in front of the bereaved. But Emmy could beat this; he knew because of the temper of her mettle.
He had been called on the morning of the awful attack, after Ben Crockett, Winfield Evers, and a few men from the east side of the island had ventured out together to be certain the marauders had cleared. When they went to the Evers’ homestead, they had found Isaac’s headless remains.
Edwards had gone to the Evers home before attending to Emmy because it was on the way to Ben Crockett’s house. But just for a few minutes, because he hated violent death scenes. The men had brought the broken carcass into the ransacked house to keep the crows away.
He had seen decapitations before. Felt it was such a robbery of a body’s dignity.
On Elliott Bay where Edwards had first started practicing, before Evers convinced him to move to Whidbey, there had been several decapitations
