“Ringworm,” the doctor said, then looked up at Britney still holding the scissors. “Start cutting his hair and his beard as close as you can.”
The doctor listened to Daniel’s breathing and heartbeat through his stethoscope, then listened to his abdomen. He took his blood pressure with an old-fashioned aneroid cuff.
“His heart and lungs sound all right,” the doctor said. “He sure wore himself out getting here. His blood pressure’s low. He’s malnourished. We’ll get some fluid in him right away. Uh, I’ve forgotten your name,” he said to Britney. She told him. “I delivered your little girl,” I believe.
“Yes you did.”
“What’s her name?”
“Sarah.”
“Sarah,” the doctor said, “can you stuff more billets in the parlor stove? We have to get the heat up in here for this man.”
“Yes, sir,” Sarah said and proceeded to follow his instructions. Back in the old times, Robert thought, an eight-year-old would never be trusted with such a chore involving a hot stove. Sarah was quite capable at her age. Britney had finished cutting Daniel’s hair.
“Get those filthy clothes and shoes out of here,” the doctor told Robert, “and when you’re done come back and hold this IV bottle.” Robert gathered up the rags and the boots in a splint basket and put them outside on the front porch, then he returned to the doctor’s side.
The doctor took two clear glass pint bottles out of his bag, rigged one, and handed it to Robert. The doctor prepared many things himself that he’d formerly had for the asking in a hospital setting. He cooked his own solution of glucose and saline and filled sterile glass bottles with them and he had hoarded plastic tubing in the months when the economy whirled around the drain. He reused everything he could and sterilized articles in a nonelectric copper and brass autoclave of his own design. He swabbed Daniel’s forearm with pure grain alcohol and inserted an IV line.
“You can start washing him,” the doctor said to Britney.
These procedures took an hour. Daniel remained unconscious but his pulse rose as the fluids and sugar flowed into his veins. The doctor attended to Daniel’s raw, blistered feet. Sarah kept feeding billets into the stove until the room was so warm everybody perspired, including the patient on the floor.
Robert fetched all the parts of a bed from Daniel’s boyhood room upstairs—the mattress, box spring, and frame—and brought them down to the first floor. By this time gray light had seeped through the windows as Christmas Day dawned. The three adults hoisted Daniel onto the bed. Daniel groaned in the process but remained unconscious. The doctor ran a urinary catheter into an old half gallon juice bottle beside the bed. Then he departed, saying he would return before noon with more IV fluid. Robert arranged a wing chair beside the head of Daniel’s bed and sat there watching his son’s rhythmic breathing while he wondered at all the things his son had seen in two years wandering away from home. How far had he ranged? What was the country like? What had happened to its people? And what had happened to Daniel’s companion on the road, Evan Holder, son of Loren and Jane Ann?
T
WENTY-ONE
Brother Jobe entered the special chamber in the New Faith compound that had been built for Mary Beth Ivanhoe, also known as Precious Mother and the Queen Bee, the epileptic clairvoyant who was the spiritual guide of the New Faith Brotherhood Covenant Church of Jesus, the one who showed them the way out of the bloody wilderness of Old Dixie, first to Pennsylvania, which turned violent on them, and finally farther north to Union Grove in Washington County, New York, where they purchased the abandoned high school and made their stand, hoping to found here a “new Jerusalem.”
The large room was at the center of a grid of rooms framed into the school’s old gymnasium the past autumn, with Mary Beth’s chamber at top center and the women who waited on her sleeping in rooms around her. A cupola at the top of the chamber gathered just enough daylight to make things visible, while the massively insulating effects of all the rooms around it kept the temperature quite warm, as its revered occupant required. The ceiling around the well of the cupola was coffered in cherrywood. The walls of the room were intricately figured with marquetry in geometric and botanical motifs executed by Robert Earle, who was hired as well to teach several of the New Faith men the finer points of finish carpentry.
Two handmaidens had just finished applying soothing herbal unguents of comfrey, chamomile, rose hip, elder flower, and lanolin to Mary Beth in her bed, from which she rarely ventured. She had grown to over four hundred pounds since giving birth months earlier. The automobile accident in a Virginia shopping mall parking lot years ago that had injured her so grievously left her subject to frequent epileptic seizures as well as strange new mental abilities to “see” things distantly in both time and at geographic remove, and to sense many unseen currents of emotion and circumstance in the people around her, whether they were present or not. However, the damage to her spine from that long-ago trauma also left her in chronic pain that distracted her, roiled her temper, and appeared to provoke yet more frequent seizures when she was in turbulent spirits. She suffered as well from asthma, edema, acid reflux, alopecia, migraines, constipation, and irritations of the skin from being bedbound and encased in overlapping folds of fatty flesh.
Brother Jobe let himself in to the chamber, admiring the balance of the heavy door and the way it was figured with hexagonal inlays representing honeycomb. The heat, too, impressed him instantly and he removed his heavy wool frock coat.
“You awake there, Precious Mother?” he asked.
“If I wasn’t before, I am now,” she replied in a voice full of broken reeds and phlegm.
One of the handmaidens, Sister Tirzah, winked at Brother Jobe as she made for the door with a washbasin, signaling that her mistress was in one of her moods.
“Git that outa my face,” Mary Beth croaked at the other attendant, Sister Jewel, who had been trying to apply powder to her, and even raised a hamlike arm to bat her away. “Can’t you all leave me be for a dang moment.” Seconds later, the door clicked shut with mechanical precision and she was alone with Brother Jobe, who pulled a chair up close to the bed and sat down rather primly with a small box balanced on his lap.
“Merry Christmas, Mary Beth.”
“It’s got me all a-flutter, listening out for reindeers and whatnot.”
“Lookit here. Santa brung you something.” Brother Jobe held out the small box. She made a face and snatched it out of his hands.
“I prayed to Jesus for health. I don’t suppose he give you a portion of that for me in this itty-bitty box.”
“I wisht it was so.”
“’Cept it would take more like a truckload to git me right.” She lifted off the lid and peered inside. “Aw, ain’t that cute!” She held up a small enameled and gold-plated brooch in the shape of a bumble bee.
“Brother Axel says them stones in the eyes is real rubies,” Brother Jobe said. “He worked the jewelry counter at the Target store back when.”
“Is that a fact. I’m sure they had some fine baubles in that place. All cut glass and rhinestones.”
“Anyways he vouched for it.”
“Did you see here on the backside where it says ‘Made in China’?”
“Lemme see that!”
Mary Beth clutched the bauble tightly in her dimpled fist.
“That’s all right. I’ll keep it anyway,” she said.
“China’s up and coming,” Brother Jobe said. “Folks say they put men up on the moon not long ago.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Mr. Bullock the squire. He sends a trade boat to Albany once a week when the river ain’t froze. His boatmen heard it. That was all the news down there recently.”
“Well, somebody should tell them chinks America already done it many a year back, ’fore you and me was even born. We should charge them a parking fee for landing on it and rent by the hour. It’s our dang moon. We was there first.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“You’re well-told I’m right about it. Matter of fact, I wouldn’t let ’em stay more’n an hour. Take some snaps and clear the heck off. Why, it burns my fanny just to think of them capering on it. You let them mess around up there, they could fix things so the moon only shines down on China. Wouldn’t that be a pretty pass?”
“I’m sorry I brung it up. Obviously it rankles. How do you like your new digs?” he said.
“It’s all right.”
“All right! We spent over five hundred dollars, silver, on it. Look at all these inlays, woodwork, fine fabrics. Doesn’t it give you any pleasure to watch them?”
“I’d druther watch TV.”
“Well, there is no more ding-dang TV. We got to make do with beauty and art and such now.”
“If you felt like I do, you wouldn’t give a steamin’ hee-haw for beauty and art. I’m cursed and afflicted. This here place you put me in is just like a big wooden tomb. This is where I’m going to die. I seen it already in visions.”
“Don’t be morbid, now, Mary Beth—”
“Don’t you call me names, sumbitch. I got enough heartache with my lot in life. Anyways, that’s not what you come in here for.”
Brother Jobe rose out of the chair, cleared his throat, and went around to the rear of it, holding on to the backrest as if for support.
“You know we got that young woman here in custody,” he said. “The one that killed her husband and baby night before last.”
“Yes I do. And I know that Bullock aims to hang her. He might not know it yet, but he won’t see no other way.”
“I looked in on her,” Brother Jobe said. “I got inside amongst her mind the way I can. She been locked deep in there by a sickness. She ain’t a wicked person. She was just following the commands of illness.”
“I know she was. But she done the deeds.”
“Yes she did,” Brother Jobe said. “But the wickedness was all in the sickness. Anyways, we got to plead her now.”
“They got to plead her insane. There ain’t no other way. And he’ll try to hang her no matter what.”
“How’s that exactly?”
“Cuz there ain’t nowheres to keep a madwoman in the world that we become.”
“Yeah. They already saying that. Is there any way that this comes out good?”
“I don’t know yet,” Mary Beth said with a racking sigh. “I ain’t been able to see ahead that far. It gives me headaches to try. Pin this here bee onto my wig hat, would you,” she said referring to the turban she wore to conceal her hairlessness.
“Huh? I gathered you didn’t care for it.”
“Well, it’s the thought that counts, ain’t it.”
“That is exactly so, Mary Beth. It gladdens my heart that you come ’round to that view.”
“You still a sumbitch,” she said. “Want to give me a real durn Christmas gift?”
“Name it and we’ll see what we can do.”
“Send up some chicken and waffles with the sorghum syrup. And watermelon pickles. I know you can manage that.”
“I’ll bite the head off the chicken myself,” Brother Jobe said on his way out the door, enjoying her choked laughter.
T
WENTY-TWO
The doctor returned to Robert Earle’s house at ten o’clock Christmas morning pulling a small handcart through the snow with a crate of twelve additional IV bottles, attended by his son Jasper, eleven, who carried a metal IV stand in one hand and his father’s black bag in the other. They found Robert at Daniel’s bedside with Loren Holder, the Congregational minister and father of the other boy who had lit out with Daniel two years before. The patient appeared stable but remained unconscious. The receiving jug from the catheter had accumulated a few ounces of dark urine. Beads of sweat stood out on Daniel’s forehead. It was quite warm in the room with both downstairs stoves going. The doctor got more fluids running into the IV and checked Daniel’s vital signs again.
“Is he in a coma?” Robert asked after the doctor went about his business silently without explaining everything he was doing.
“I wouldn’t say so. His pulse and blood pressure are still low. Temperature’s a hundred and two. He’s still dehydrated, his electrolytes are all screwed up, he’s extremely exhausted, malnourished, probably full of parasites, his body’s been cannibalizing itself for a while to keep going. He’s young, though. They have amazing healing powers. I suggest we just let him sleep as long as he needs to.”
The doctor had to leave. He’d received a patient in his infirmary very early that morning, one Hollis Ingram, an apprentice cooper from up in Battenville, with third-degree burns on his hands and thighs from a Christmas Eve accident involving an upset pot of hot lard he was trying to deep-fry a turkey in. The doctor had to go back and administer more of the raw morphine he made himself from the opium that farmers in the vicinity grew for him, and he had to change Hollis’s dressings. He left Jasper behind in Robert’s house with the task of changing the IV bottles as required. Britney had taken Sarah first to feed their cow, Cinnamon, kept in a small paddock with a barn around the block. Then they went, at Robert’s urging, to put in an appearance when the New Faith choir staged its program of Christmas carols from the steps of the town hall, and to tell Brother Jobe why Robert, as mayor, could not be there.
When the doctor was gone, Robert put his hand on Loren’s shoulder, in the chair beside his. There was a ghost in the room: Loren’s son Evan.