The Bohemian Girl

‘Yes, I’m sure you think so. Will you talk with me?’

Denton said nothing for several seconds. ‘I can’t keep you from coming.’

‘Good. I want you to start having visitors, as well. Seeing people will be good for you.’

‘I don’t want to see anybody.’

Gallichan sighed. ‘Mmmm.’ He stood, lifted his satchel to the bed next to Denton’s leg, and put his pen and the paper into it. He replaced the tray and the pitcher and glass. He said, ‘I’ve told you the worst. This is the bottom — the abyss of illness. Now we climb out.’ He snapped the satchel with a click. ‘Do apologize to sister.’

‘I had dreams. They’re gone now.’

Dr Gallichan nodded. ‘Fever and morphine. They’ll do that. What do you remember?’

‘Nothing.’ He frowned.

‘You were violent, as I told you. You pulled out your catheter. You also shouted in your sleep, enough that you disturbed other patients on the ward.’

‘What about?’

Gallichan hesitated. ‘I think you were afraid of someone.’

‘There was somebody-With a shotgun. He shot me in the back. I died.’ He said it with wonder.

‘In the dreams, you mean.’ When Denton said nothing, the doctor went on. ‘You were shot in the back, after all. Was it the same man?’

Denton shook his head. ‘I don’t remember being shot. It’s — I’m not sure it was a man-’ He croaked out a laugh. ‘It’s like a dream.’

‘Well, the dreams. You were under a long time. What else?’

‘I don’t-I did the same things. That’s what I remember, the sense of doing things again and again. Over and over.’

‘Being shot?’

‘Ye-e-e-s, but-Boxes.’

‘Boxes.’

‘Yes, boxes. That’s all I remember.’

‘I was always looking for something in the boxes. It was horrible, but there was nothing horrible about it. It was just — the boxes. Over and over. And the person — thing — with the shotgun. Not Struther Jarrold.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘The man who shot-’ He raised himself on his elbows. ‘I remember! I think. Not in the dream, in — life. Struther Jarrold with a revolver, standing over me. Laughing.’ He put his head back. ‘He seemed so — pleased.’

‘You’re sure this wasn’t in the dream?’

‘I’m not sure of anything. Maybe you’re a dream, doctor.’

‘More a nightmare, I expect. How’s that leg?’

‘White. Dead.’

‘I was told you went down the corridor yesterday.’

‘Carried by two sisters.’

‘Mmmm.’ Gallichan pinched his upper lips with thumb and forefinger. ‘You use guns yourself, do you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Carry one?’

‘Usually.’

‘You’ve shot someone?’

‘I was in a war. Then there was the time they write all their crap about. The dime-novel hero. Three minutes that made me famous. Or infamous.’

‘You killed someone?’

‘Four men. They were going to rob people; I was a peace officer.’

‘You shot them?’

‘I did.’

‘In the back?’

‘Of course not.’

‘With what sort of weapon?’

‘A shotgun.’ Denton lay still. ‘Oh, I see what you’re getting at. No, I think you’re wrong.’

Somebody named Jack Pendry had shot the town marshal in the back with a shotgun. They gave Denton ten dollars a month and a free room in the hotel for being the new marshal. After a couple of months, when he was making his early-morning rounds of the town, nobody up yet, the town dead, he found a man with a rifle on the roof of the building opposite his office. He brought the man down and tossed him into the one-cell jail. The man told him he’ d been supposed to shoot him because Jack Pendry was coming on the train with a gang to rob the bank and tear up the town.

He’d got a ten-gauge goose gun from the rack and gone to the blacksmith’s and cut the barrels down to eighteen inches and filled his pockets with buck-and-ball loads. Then he’d waited in the shadows where he could see the railroad station. The town stood a dozen feet above it on a little bluff. A stairway ran from the wooden sidewalk by the station up to the town.

When the morning train came in, eight people got off. One of them was one of the biggest men he’d ever seen. That was Jack Pendry. Six of them gathered around him, and he sent one of them up the pole to cut the telegraph line. The others began to check guns that they had in their pockets and their waistbands and in holsters on extra belts that they took out of their carpet bags. A man and a woman hurried up the stairs and Denton let them go.

Then Denton stepped out and said, ‘Anybody else who isn’t with Jack Pendry, get out of the way. There’s going to be some killing.’

Pendry and his men dropped their carpet bags and scrabbled for their guns. Denton took out Pendry with one barrel of the shotgun and a man near him with the other. They were shooting back with black- powder pistols. He knelt and reloaded. The remaining four split two and two, two to come up the little dusty cliff at him, two to go up the stairs. He cut down the two who were coming up at him, and the other two just kept going and hid in a barn at the edge of town, and he talked them out later without firing another shot. The man who’ d gone up the telegraph pole was still up there. Denton made him throw his pistol and then climb down.

The town raised his pay to twelve dollars a month and gave him a two per cent cut from the saloon and whorehouse across from the hotel. A few months later, he drifted on to Colorado.

They allowed him to start reading the mail that had piled up at home. Atkins sorted it, he was told; Janet Striker vetted it more carefully. Nothing was to worry him.

Twice a day, a sister with a chubby, red-cheeked face raised his right foot until the leg was bent and then pushed it up until the thigh almost touched his midriff. He was supposed to push against her. When the leg was all the way up, he was supposed to push it all the way back down.

‘The mind drives the body,’ Gallichan said. ‘We want the brain to tell the nerves to move the leg. You must think the leg to move.’

‘William James would say it’s the other way around — the leg moves and the brain thinks about moving.’

‘Mr William James is not here.’

She pushed, and he thought about pushing, and so far as he could see, nothing happened.

One day, however, he could move his toes.

‘Tell me about the boxes.’

‘They were boxes. Just-Some of them were hatboxes.’

‘Were there hats?’

They had raised his torso on pillows. A window stood next to his bed, a good placement to light the room and the bed but bad for looking out; he would have had to lean far to the left, and they wouldn’t let him lean yet. By