The Star Garden

  Cold wind assailed us through the broken-out windows and somehow I was aware that Granny was busy stuffing rags and old clothes into the holes. She stoked up the fires, too, moving around, hovering, spiritlike, more than I’d seen her move in years.

  Harland and Albert, Zack and Ezra have ridden to the four corners of the earth to find a doctor who’ll come out here. Albert’s gone to Tucson, the boys to Benson. We told them to promise any amount of money to a real doctor willing to come, as I’m sure Gilbert would not live through the wagon trip to one of them.

  Savannah said she knew of something, and she ran on foot all the way to her house. She brought back a jug of apple cider that had turned. She was keeping it to dose her chickens if they got the sheds, so Udell is helping me dose Gilbert with quinine and hard cider. I put my two best feather pillows under my boy’s head. Then I kissed his face and sat by him. From where I sat, I could see light from the window kissing his face, too. The makings of a beard formed a gold line raised just above his skin.

  Charlie and Chess have buried Elsa in our graveyard. I stepped away from Gilbert’s side for a while, to attend her. Later, they hauled the Maldonado men in a wagon to the edge of Rudolfo’s land and there they threw them out like dead animals, to rot in the desert sun. I told them that was uncommon poor to do, but Charlie’s anger is bigger than he can abide. He said he went all the way to the hacienda to kill Rudolfo, but the place was empty. It is as if Charlie could easily mow down every living thing around him, and if he’s got no Christian spirit to dig graves for them, I can hardly blame him. Yet, I am sitting at his brother’s deathbed and I won’t have him bringing anger into this kitchen. It can’t be any help to his brother.

  I sent Charlie to Marsh Station to send word to Miss Charity about Gilbert. It’s something for him to do, and I reckon we’ll see if she cares.

  December 4, 1907

  A day and a night passed. By morning, Gil had fever rages, hotter by far than Udell’s had been with the malaria. He tossed and thrashed sometimes. I held him with my whole strength, then sometimes Savannah did, too, keeping him from falling off the table, mopping his brow and holding him still until he lost consciousness.

  Charlie should have come back by now. Don’t know where Chess is, either. He must be tormented beyond all reason, thinking he’s killed Gilbert. I wakened, my arms numb and spidery-feeling from sleeping with my head upon them, stretched out onto the kitchen table, holding my boy.

  Oh, God, my spirit ached. My heart was rent in two, my mind stilled and black. As the sun rose, my son trembled and his breath rattled with his death fever. His face had grown yellow and thin.

  “Sarah?” a man’s voice said. “Sarah, wake up, please. The doctor is here. It’s a Dr. Pardee from Benson.” A young, gentle-eyed man, with a tidy swatch of beard and mustache that made a triangle around his mouth was bent over Gilbert and didn’t acknowledge me. Udell took my arms and lifted me from the wooden chair that felt as if it had grown into my bones. Then it seemed as if the room spun as he pulled me up, lifting me toward him. I reached for Udell and held his shoulders, and slid down a black, deep well, a tomb I had only thought I knew; this grief had become a newer, blacker, more menacing place than any grief I’d yet encountered. I sobbed into Udell’s shirt and he held me on his lap in a chair, like a child.

  Then I straightened my shoulders and rose from his grasp. “I’ll go back to him, now,” I said. We stood by Gilbert while the doctor unwrapped the bandages I’d made. He prodded the bulletholes, front and back, and Gilbert cried out. Udell and I held him down while the doctor pulled a splinter of bone from his back. I retched, dry, for I hadn’t eaten in days, and turned my face. Then the doctor patched his wound again with cotton lint, bales of it, it seemed, and we laid the boy on his back again.

  Pardee propped his leather bag on the sideboard and searched through it. Chess came into the room, then, standing shriveled and meek by the door. Dr. Pardee said, “Give him these every three hours. Crush one for him if he can’t swallow.”

  “Will it cure his fever?” I said.

  Ezra stood by the stove. He had ridden to Benson. He was proud of himself for getting the doctor, just he and his brother, and now he took responsibility for his cousin. Pardee shook his head, saying, “It’ll ease the pain.” Ezra’s shoulders slumped and his face twisted and grew red. He left the room, stumbling over Zachary, who just stared, wide-eyed, at the doctor.

  Udell said, “Doctor?”

  The doctor faced each of us and simply said, “No. There’s infection. I swabbed it with sulfur and Mercurochrome. We can’t do anything else. Eventually the infection will take his brain, and the pain will get bad. No sense in letting him go that way. I know you’re decent people, but have you got any hard spirits? That’d be good for him. Anything? Even some vanilla. There’s nothing else I can do. I am truly sorry.”

  “There’s a little of that cider left, that went hard. We gave him some before you got here.” I turned to Zack. “Boy? Go run to your mama’s pantry and bring the vanilla bottle. Don’t you drop it.” I drew a shattered breath. “Will you stay, Dr. Pardee? Will you stay with him? I’ll pay you to stay, anything you ask. Please?”

  “I have patients in town.” He looked from Gilbert, sweating, shivering, groaning, to me. Then he said, “Yes, ma’am. I’ll stay with you until it’s over.”

  “Can we move him to a bed?”

  “No. That’ll cause more bleeding.”

  We dosed Gilbert with vanilla, and then the house smelled like sulfur and cake.

  I went to make the doctor some coffee. I heard him ask Udell how Gilbert got shot. Udell told him we’d tangled with some Mexican bandidos, nothing more. While the coffee heated, I went to change my dress; I still wore the same dirty one I’d had on all these days. I heard a muffled bump of wood against wood. In Charlie’s room, I found him roughly stuffing things into two small wooden crates. I went to him and laid my hand on his shoulder. He froze stiff for a moment. Then he gasped two short breaths, hard sobs he choked down into his boots. He wiped at his eyes.

  “It ain’t fair, Mama. Should be me dead there. I as much as dared him to kill me. Walked right through every bullet. I want to be dead with my Elsa. I want to be with her.” He set one hand on mine and squeezed.

  I could only bite my lips from the inside. We stood like statues for five minutes, just aching. I glanced into a box he was loading. It was full of the baby soakers and wrappers Elsa had been knitting. I wept, too, and sat beside him on his bed.

  Finally, Charlie said, “Mama, I ain’t staying here. I can’t.”

  “Where you going to go?”

  “I’m going to go kill Rudolfo Maldonado and then run. Disappear to somewhere there’s lots of space. Montana, maybe. Argentina.”

  “Listen to me,” I said, shaking his shoulder. “Don’t you go thinking that way. That isn’t going to bring her back.”

  “It’ll put him where he belongs.”

  I held Charlie’s arm. “You’ve got to stay with me awhile. Watch over Gilbert.”

  “I’ll see Maldonado in hell. I swear it.”

  “But not today.”

  Charlie bent and tugged at his hair. Then he straightened himself. He put an arm around my middle. “Mama, you are nothing but skin and bones. Go get some dinner. I’ll sit with him awhile.”

  Granny came into his room. She said, “Boy? You listen to your old grandmother. There was a time when all this was going on, when I was a girl, and the neighbors killed each other, too. Can’t even recollect who was on whose side, now. But this here, we got the law on our side and the right, you being a Ranger and all. Don’t you go off to the Argen-tine. You catch that varmint and bring ‘im here to hang.”

  Charlie scratched his head. “I can’t stay here.”

  “You think on it, though, Charlie,” I said.

  “He’s probably gone to Mexico. I’ll go find him.”

  Granny said, “With all his army and guns? Ain’t ye’ got no sense left?
You gotta get some men to go with you. Take that Hanna feller. And that Miles.”

  I said, “Take some time, son. Catching Rudolfo isn’t our biggest worry. You’ll make the right choice. I know it.”

  I tried to rock a spell on the porch. The flies annoyed me too much. I went back to sit by Gilbert where the doctor kept watch. Now and then my eyes would flood with tears that did not flow. Heat sweats and cold shivers swept over me. Shocks like splashed cold water rolled over me every time Gil made a noise.

  Rebeccah and Savannah moved in and out of the room lighting candles. The doctor snored in the chair, his head against the wall. Harland left to fetch April.

  December 5, 1907

  In a while, Rebeccah put the candles out, and another night had passed. Gilbert still breathed, rattling and liquid. In Gil’s room Charlie leaned, staring out through the piece of broken window that was now stuffed with rags to keep out flies.

  I went to him but didn’t touch him. “You still planning to kill Rudolfo?” I said.

  “Won’t right nothing.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  “Mama?” he said. But it seemed as if he knew I could see the trembling in his lip, and that was enough talk for him. He just shook his head and bit the inside of his jaw.

  “I know,” I said. “I know.”

  From somewhere in the house I smelled coffee. Rebeccah brought me a cup and I tried to sip at it. She fetched more wood for the stove, and I let her fill it without lending a hand, just watching and drinking coffee, lost in a twelve-foot-square room. I’d lost track of everything and everyone. As she finished, Dr. Pardee leaned over Gilbert, rubbing his chin. “That right lung is gone, I think. But he’s still holding on. I’ve got an idea. I can’t tell you whether it’ll help. It’s just an idea.”

  “What?” I said. “I know some doctoring. Whatever it is, we’ll do it.”

  He said, “I was watching a hot air balloon one time at a fair. The thing accidentally landed in a duck pond. The picture of it made me wonder. Your boy here is strong, and hanging on, but he’s drowning. I’m guessing pooling blood is crushing the lung like that balloon, so he can’t breathe. I am wondering if a simple surgery might drain that out.”

  “We’ll do whatever you say, Dr. Pardee.”

  He rushed to the water pump and washed his hands, using nearly half a cake of lye soap. “Wash your hands, too, Mrs. Elliot. I shall need a nurse.”

  I scrubbed my hands, shaking hard, weak in the knees, trying to hold my stomach still. My heart pounded in my ears so loud the room seemed filled with drumming. Dr. Pardee rummaged through his leather bag. He pulled out metal instruments and gruesome things I never laid eyeson before that looked like the inventions of a tormentor. He started fixing some things together, making a metal cylinder and fixing a large needle to it. He stropped that needle several times and then rinsed the whole thing in grain alcohol. The smell of it filled the room and made the floor lift and turn. “I had morphine in here,” he said. “Have you seen anybody get into my bag?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “No one would take it.”

  He scrambled through the satchel again, impatient as a schoolboy going through a lunch. He said, “We haven’t got time to mess with that. Hold him over, then. I’m going to try from the back.”

  We rolled Gilbert on his side and Udell and I held him down. He moaned when Pardee stuck him. I turned my head away. The sounds of liquid dripping were all I could take; I could not look at what Dr. Pardee was doing. After a bit, Pardee said, “All right. Lay him back.”

  When we laid him down to rest, Gilbert drew a deep breath. A flush of red came back to his face for a few seconds, then left. Pardee said, “I will do that every hour or so. It does look as if it helped.”

  With that, though, I nodded and stepped away from Gilbert’s side. Then my eyes caught on the blood-filled bowl.

  I awoke in my bed with Savannah seated at my side, slowly and gently brushing my hair. I tried to get up and she pushed my shoulders back to the bed.

  Savannah said, “Albert has gone with Charlie to look for Chess.”

  “Where is he?” Chess? Gone to murder Rudolfo?

  As if she heard me thinking, Savannah said, “Well, to tell you the truth if he’s gone to kill Rudolfo I would gladly load the pistol for him. Your hair needs tending, honey. Just lie back. Rebeccah is here and she’s drawing you a bath. You need to eat, too.”

  “Gilbert?”

  “Gilbert’s still with us. He’s improving. Dr. Pardee is a good doctor. Becca is helping, good as any nurse.”

  “My boy,” I said, and closed my eyes. I could feel her cooling hands through my hair. I could feel every thread on the bedclothes through my skirts and camisole. I could feel the grain of the wooden floor coming through the ropes that held me above it. “Not like this. Not like this.”

  Dr. Pardee tapped on the door as he entered the room. “Mrs. Elliot? Mrs. Prine? You should call your family. I believe Gilbert’s turned a corner.”

  I nearly sprang up from the bed.

  “Go,” said Savannah. “I’ll fetch the rest.”

  Dr. Pardee held up one hand, a motion of gentle pause. “I didn’t want you to think … falsely. He seems a bit more lively, ma’am, but there is a revived state that often comes just before the end.” I glared at him.

  I rushed to Gilbert. Albert, Clover, and Rebeccah were there. Harland, too. Even Zack and Ezra and all the littler fellows. Zachary and Ezra looked as if they had aged ten years, both boys gone old before being grown. I heard Savannah’s voice calling from outside, and pretty soon Charlie came in.

  “Where are Chess and Udell?” I asked him.

  “Working.”

  “Working? At what, in heaven’s name?”

  Zachary came and took hold of my hand. He tugged me down and when I leaned forward he whispered in my ear, “Aunt Sarah, they are digging a grave.”

  I bit into my finger so hard it left a mark. I couldn’t feel it. Watching Gilbert sleeping there, looking gently at rest instead of fevered and tormented with pain, he seemed so regular, so natural, except that he was still stretched out on the kitchen table.

  Like a spark lighting dry brush, the thought came to me that I had to find Chess before Gilbert was gone. That quiet but rumbling desperation that I’d lived in for so many months suddenly drummed in my head. The air swirled with banging louder than cannonfire. My eyes saw everything at once and all around me creation flowed like a river of sights and sounds.

  From the front porch, I heard water being poured. I stumbled off the last step and hurried toward the splashing at the outdoor pump. Udell was there with his shirt off, soaking wet, just wiping the last of the soap off his arms. “Udell,” I called, “where’s Chess?”

  His somber face instantly changed, mirrored the panic I felt. “I don’t know, Sarah. We finished a while ago; he said he had something to do.”

  I put my hands on my hips. “Did he go to the barn? Something with the saddle? I’ve got to find him.”

  We both started walking when he said, “I thought he went down by the crick. Reckon he might have gone to the barn.”

  “You go. Hurry,” I said. He went to the barn. I took off toward the stream. Breaking through shady brush where I usually hunted quail and dove, the shade and sound of water were wasted on me. My heart shouted, Gilbert, stay alive until I get back, Wait for me, boy. Wait. “Chess? Chess!” I yelled.

  A cardinal startled me with his curlicue chirp. Coming as if he’d answered my call, the bright red bird swooped toward me, cut a couple of looping strides in the air and flew on, chirruping loudly. “Chess!” I waded across the flowing stream at a shallow spot to a mossy bank where I used to send the boys to fish to keep them out of my way, when they were smaller.

  I saw a pair of old boots. “Chess, I’ve looked everywhere,” I said breathlessly, gasping. “Get on home. Gilbert needs you. The doctor says he’s turned a corner. Chess? Wake up, Chess.”

  Chess was stretched out ful
l, his head on Gilbert’s new saddle, his feet a few inches apart. His eyes were closed. A fly poked along on his lower lip. “Chess?” I knelt by him. I gritted my teeth together and touched his arm. It slid from his chest. His right hand had gripped something that let go. A brown vial with a cork in it rolled toward my feet. Dr. Pardee’s morphine. I took it up and squeezed it and beat on his chest, crying out, “Don’t you do this to me, old man! You rotten old cuss. Get up from there. Don’t you leave me like this. Chess! Don’t die, Chess. Oh, God, don’t let this be happening. I need you, Chess. Get up.”

  “Sarah!” Udell’s voice called.

  “Here,” I hollered back. “I’ve found him.” I put my head on Chess’s still warm body and listened until Udell came. “Why would he do this, Udell? Why? He knows I’d never blame him. Make him stop, Udell.”

  Tears slid from his eyes, too, making a wet film on his face. “I didn’t know what he meant. One last thing to do. He didn’t say much while … while we dug. I thought he had a sick stomach.”

  “Help me carry him to the house. I’ve got to see Gilbert one last time.”

  “It’s a long piece, Sarah, I’ll get one of the boys …”

  “Help me!” I ordered. Then I picked up Chess’s legs and waited. Udell nodded. He put the brown vial of pills in his pants pocket and took Chess under the arms, moving his head to where it rested easy, not hanging down. Charlie and Clover saw us and ran to help. We got him laid on the floor in the parlor. Dr. Pardee hurried in and bent over Chess’s still body.

  “How’s Gilbert?” I said.

  “Still here, Mama. He’s good,” Charlie said. “Did Grandpa Chess fall again?”

  I told how we’d found him. Shocked looks painted every face. Charlie bent over his grandfather, patting him, and hearing a crinkling sound, he pulled a note from Chess’s breast pocket. “It says,” he said, “ ‘I never was so sorry. I can bear it no more. You will all be a sight better off, shed of a nuisance that’s outlived any good use or sense. I never loved any boys more than Charlie and Gilbert, so I’m gone to clear a path for my fellow. Lord love you, Sarah. You’re better than a daughter. Forgive this damned old fool.”