60
THE PALE HORSEMAN RIDES
ON THE TWENTIETH OF SEPTEMBER, Roger preached a sermon on the text, God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. On the twenty-first of September, one of those weak things set out to prove the point.
Padraic and Hortense MacNeill and their children hadn’t come to church. They always did, and their absence aroused comment—enough that Roger asked Brianna next morning if she might walk round and visit, to see that there was nothing wrong.
“I’d go myself,” he said, scraping the bottom of his porridge bowl, “but I’ve promised to ride with John MacAfee and his father to Brownsville; he means to offer for a girl there.”
“Does he mean you to make them handfast on the spot if she says yes?” I asked. “Or are you just there to keep assorted Browns from assassinating him?” There had been no open violence since we had returned Lionel Brown’s body, but there were occasional small clashes, when a party from Brownsville happened to meet men from the Ridge now and then in public.
“The latter,” Roger said with a small grimace. “Though I’ve some hopes that a marriage or two betwixt the Ridge and Brownsville might help to mend matters, over time.”
Jamie, reading a newspaper from the most recent batch, looked up at that.
“Oh, aye? Well, it’s a thought. Doesna always work out just so, though.” He smiled. “My uncle Colum thought to mend just such a matter wi’ the Grants, by marrying my mother to the Grant. Unfortunately,” he added, turning over a page, “my mother wasna inclined to cooperate. She snubbed Malcolm Grant, stabbed my uncle Dougal, and eloped wi’ my father, instead.”
“Really?” Brianna hadn’t heard that particular story; she looked enchanted. Roger gave her a sidelong glance, and coughed, ostentatiously removing the sharp knife with which she’d been cutting up sausages.
“Well, be that as it may,” he said, pushing back from the table, knife in hand. “If ye wouldn’t mind having a look-in on Padraic’s family, just to see they’re all right?”
In the event, Lizzie and I came along with Brianna, meaning to call on Marsali and Fergus, whose cabin was a little way beyond the MacNeills’. We met Marsali on the way, though, coming back from the whisky spring, and so there were four of us when we came to the MacNeills’ cabin.
“Why are there so many flies, of a sudden?” Lizzie slapped at a large bluebottle that had landed on her arm, then waved at two more, circling round her face.
“Something’s dead nearby,” Marsali said, lifting her nose to sniff the air. “In the wood, maybe. Hear the crows?”
There were crows, cawing in the treetops nearby; looking up, I saw more circling, black spots against the brilliant sky.
“Not in the wood,” Bree said, her voice suddenly strained. She was looking toward the cabin. The door was tightly shut, and a mass of flies milled over the hide-covered window. “Hurry.”
The smell in the cabin was unspeakable. I saw the girls gasp and clamp their mouths tight shut, as the door swung open. Unfortunately, it was necessary to breathe. I did so, very shallowly, as I moved across the dark room and ripped down the hide that had been tightly nailed across the window.
“Leave the door open,” I said, ignoring a faint moan of complaint from the bed at the influx of light. “Lizzie—go and start a smudge fire near the door and another outside the window. Start it with grass and kindling, then add something—damp wood, moss, wet leaves—to make it smoke.”
Flies had begun to come in within seconds of my opening the window, and were whizzing past my face—deerflies, bluebottles, gnats. Drawn by the smell, they had been clustered on the sun-warmed logs outside, seeking entrance, avid for food, desperate to lay their eggs.
The room would be a buzzing hell in minutes—but we needed light and air, and would just have to deal with the flies as best we might. I pulled off my kerchief and folded it into a makeshift flyswatter, slapping to and fro with it as I turned to the bed.
Hortense and the two children were there. All naked, their pallid limbs glimmering with the sweat of the sealed cabin. They were clammy white where the sunlight struck, legs and bodies streaked with reddish-brown. I hoped that it was only diarrhea, and not blood.
Someone had moaned; someone moved. Not dead then, thank God. The bedcoverings had been thrown to the floor in a tangled heap—that was fortunate, as they were still mostly clean. I thought we had better burn the straw mattress, as soon as we got them off it.
“Do not put your fingers in your mouth,” I murmured to Bree, as we began to work, sorting the feebly twitching heap of humanity into its component parts.
“You have got to be kidding,” she said, speaking through her teeth while smiling at a pale-faced child of five or six, who lay half-curled in the exhausted aftermath of a diarrhetic attack. She worked her hands under the little girl’s armpits. “Come on, lovey, let me lift you.”
The child was too weak to make any protest at being moved; her arms and legs hung limp as string. Her sister’s state was even more alarming; no more than a year old, the baby didn’t move at all, and her eyes were sunk deep, a sign of severe dehydration. I picked up the tiny hand and gently pinched the skin between thumb and forefinger. It stayed for a moment, a tiny peak of grayish skin, then slowly, slowly, began to disappear.
“Bloody f**king hell,” I said softly to myself and bent swiftly to listen, hand on the child’s chest. She wasn’t dead—I could barely feel the bump of her heart—but wasn’t far from it. If she were too far gone to suck or drink, there was nothing that would save her.
Even as the thought passed through my mind, I was rising, looking about the cabin. No water; a hollowed gourd lay on its side by the bed, empty. How long had they been like this, with nothing to drink?
“Bree,” I said, my voice level but urgent. “Go and get some water—quickly.”
She had laid the older child on the floor, and was wiping the filth from her body; she glanced up, though, and the sight of my face made her drop the rag she was using and stand up at once. She grabbed the kettle I thrust into her hand and vanished; I heard her footsteps, running across the dooryard.
The flies were settling on Hortense’s face; I flapped the kerchief close to shoo them away. The cloth skimmed her nose, but her slack features barely twitched. She was breathing; I could see her belly, distended with gas, moving slightly.
Where was Padraic? Hunting, perhaps.
I caught a whiff of something under the overwhelming stench of voided bowels and leaned over, sniffing. A sweet, pungently fermented scent, like rotted apples. I put a hand under Hortense’s shoulder and pulled, rolling her toward me. There was a bottle—empty—under her body. A whiff of it was enough to tell me what it had contained.
“Bloody, bloody f**king hell,” I said, under my breath. Desperately ill and with no water to hand, she had drunk applejack, either to quench her thirst or to soothe the pain of the cramps. A logical thing to do—save that alcohol was a diuretic. It would leach even more water from a body that was already seriously dehydrated, to say nothing of further irritating a gastrointestinal tract that scarcely needed it.
Bloody Christ, had she given it to the children, too?
I stooped to the elder child. She was limp as a ragdoll, head lolling on her shoulders, but there was still some resilience to her flesh. A pinch of the hand; the skin stayed peaked, but returned to normal faster than the baby’s had.
Her eyes had opened when I pinched her hand. That was good. I smiled at her, and brushed the gathering flies away from her half-open mouth. The soft pink membranes were dry and sticky-looking.
“Hallo, darling,” I said softly. “Don’t worry now. I’m here.”
And was that going to help? I wondered. Damn it all; if only I had been a day earlier!
I heard Bree’s hurrying steps and met her at the door.
“I need—” I began, but she interrupted me.
“Mr. MacNeill’s in the woods!” she said. “I found him on the way to the spring. He’s—”
The kettle in her hands was still empty. I seized it with a cry of exasperation.
“Water! I need water!”
“But I—Mr. MacNeill, he’s—”
I thrust the kettle back into her hands and shoved past her.
“I’ll find him,” I said. “Get water! Give it to them—the baby first! Make Lizzie help you—the fires can wait! Run!”
I heard the flies first, a buzzing noise that made my skin crawl with revulsion. Out in the open, they had found him quickly, attracted by the smell. I took a hasty gulp of air and shoved through the buckbrush to where Padraic lay, collapsed in the grass beneath a sycamore.
He wasn’t dead. I saw that at once; the flies were a cloud, not a blanket—hovering, lighting, flicking away again as he twitched.
He lay curled on the ground, wearing only a shirt, a water jug lying near his head. I knelt by him, peering as I touched him. His shirt and legs were stained, as was the grass where he lay. The excrement was very watery—most had soaked into the soil by now—but there was some solid matter. He’d been stricken later than Hortense and the children, then; his guts hadn’t been griping long, or there would be mostly water, tinged with blood.
“Padraic?”
“Mrs. Claire, thank the Lord ye’ve come.” His voice was so hoarse I could scarcely make out words. “My bairnies. Have ye got my bairnies safe?”
He raised himself on one elbow, shaking, sweat plastering strands of gray hair to his cheeks. His eyes cracked open, trying to see me, but they were swelled to mere slits by the bites of deerflies.
“I have them.” I put a hand on him at once, squeezing to force reassurance into him. “Lie down, Padraic. Wait a moment while I tend them, then I’ll see to you.” He was very ill, but not in immediate danger; the children were.
“Dinna mind me,” Padraic muttered. “Dinna . . . mind . . .” He swayed, brushed at the flies that crawled on his face and chest, then groaned as cramp seized his belly again, doubling as though some massive hand had crushed him in its grip.
I was already running back to the house. There were splashes of water in the dust of the path—good, Brianna had come this way, hurrying.
Amoebic dysentery? Food poisoning? Typhoid? Typhus? Cholera—please God, not that. All of those, and a lot more, were currently lumped together simply as “the bloody flux” in this time, and for obvious reasons. Not that it mattered in the short term.
The immediate danger of all the diarrhetic diseases was simple dehydration. In the effort to expel whatever microbial invader was irritating the gut, the gastrointestinal tract simply flushed itself repeatedly, depleting the body of the water necessary to circulate blood, to eliminate wastes, to cool the body by means of sweat, to maintain the brain and membranes—the water necessary to maintain life.
If one could keep a patient sufficiently hydrated by means of intravenous saline and glucose infusions, then the gut would, most likely, heal itself eventually and the patient would recover. Without intravenous intervention, the only possibility was to administer fluids by mouth, or rectum as quickly and as constantly as possible, for as long as it took. If one could.