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64
THAIS & (ATTICUS)
The carriage driver talked too much as he carried on about a million unimportant things I could not bother myself with: his dead sons, his long-lost wife, the state of things in Kentucky, his run-ins with bandits and thieves, his aching hip, his self-diagnosed throat cancer which gave him a voice as rough as an un-oiled engine—all I could think about was Atticus. His wounds were not life-threatening insofar as I could tell, but they needed to be cleaned and stitched and cleaned again or else the infection would become life-threatening. I shook my head thinking to myself how I’d warned him about this a long time ago, before we’d found the cabin. But it wasn’t his fault he was wounded now. I just wished it was as minor as it had been before. These wounds were deep, and he’d already bled a lot before I’d tied them off with pieces of my skirt. He was alive, and he wasn’t feverish yet, so that gave me some relief.
But why was he not waking up?
Atticus going in and out of consciousness worried me the most. How much blood had he lost? Concussion? His face had been beaten badly—severe head injury? It could be several things, and all of them I knew there wasn’t anything I could do for. But he could’ve been just exhausted, too. I hoped that was all it was.
“Do you know where I can get medical supplies?” I asked the man, knowing it was a longshot.
“Nah,” the man answered, glancing back at me. “No such thing. Not way out here anyway. Now in the Big Cities, you can find just about anything. Of course, you’d fare better without it than risk going to the Big Cities. Nothing but madness in there. You know I always knew this’d be how things turned out if the world ever ended in my lifetime. I used to tell my…”
I let his words fade on the warm night air.
I laid down beside Atticus, as closely as I could without touching the visible injuries, and careful about the ones I could not see. And as I lay there on my side watching him, stroking his forehead with my fingers, I fought the urge to cry like I always did.
“I’m going to take care of you,” I whispered. “I’m not going to let you die—God won’t let you die; He needs you here as much as I do”—I traced his eyebrow with my fingertip—“You’re going to be all right. You have to be…you have to be…” I swallowed, and sniffled back the sting in my sinuses, and then lay my head beside his bare arm and watched the stars move across the sky as we traveled beneath it.
I fought sleep, but sleep won.
The popping of gravel beneath the wheels of the utility trailer as it veered off the smooth road and went into the woods woke me in the morning. And it woke Atticus—he moaned through the pain, and tried to reposition himself on the wooden trailer floor but could barely move, and the tires going over rough, uneven surface made the whole thing shake and jolt, sending shockwaves of pain through Atticus’ body.
“Ahh! Damn…” he called out, his face contorted.
“Stop the horse!” I told the driver; I sat up beside Atticus—relieved he hadn’t fallen into a coma while he slept—and tried to hold his hand, but he winced and grunted when I touched his fingers.
I jerked my hand away and looked down at his; his middle and index fingers were swollen like sausages, and I was sure they were broken. Why didn’t I notice that before?
In the daylight, I saw the extent of his injuries: red-black bruising went around his right elbow and traveled up his arm—dislocated elbow, I was sure of that too, judging the awkward angle. There were three stab wounds—left arm, right thigh, right hip—and although they were deep, the blade had only cut through flesh, leaving veins and arteries untouched; he would have bled a lot more, and already be dead by now if otherwise, I assumed. On one side of his face he didn’t look like Atticus: his left eye was swollen shut, discolored by bruising and blood blisters. His lips were twice as big as they were supposed to be, and blood continuously trickled from the bottom lip where the split flesh was stretched too tightly by the bruising to close properly; every movement he made with his mouth just split it further.
And there was blood in the white of his right eye, I saw when he pried it open and looked up at me.
“Stop the horse!” I shouted once more.
The driver looked back. “All right, all right,” he said, and pulled on the reins. “This is about where you get off anyway.”
The horse came to a stop, and I stooped next to Atticus to help him up.
“I’ll…ve…fine,” he said, his voice muffled, his words altered by his swollen lips.
“Oh, don’t be so manly,” I scolded him, positioned one arm at his back. “Now you have to get up; it’s going to be painful, but you have to walk.”
“Ivcanvalk,” he insisted.
He was coherent, and talking, and that was a good sign—his head injury likely was not as serious as I’d feared.
With terrible effort, the driver and I helped Atticus down from the trailer. He was standing up better than I thought he could, but I had to wonder how much of it was forced and only making his injuries worse. We helped him over to sit with his back against a tree.
“Do you know anything about a raft nearby?” I asked the driver.
He pointed. “If it’s where it’s supposed to be, it’s usually under some brush just over that way, close to the riverbank. Keep in mind, crazy people always watching the river. My advice is stay close to the bank and don’t float off on any creeks. They’ll look invintin’ and all that, being off the big river, but trust me it’s dangerous down them creeks. After that I don’t know what to tell you. Where are you goin’ anyway?”
“Thank you for your help,” I told the man, and left him standing there.
As I helped Atticus to his feet again with his arm over my shoulder, the driver got back on his horse; I heard the familiar tap of his boots against the horse’s sides, and the click-click of his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Let’s go!” he called out to the horse; the trotting of hooves and the crunching of the trailer wheels on the gravel faded as they got farther away, leaving only the sounds of the behemoth Mississippi River nearby. I could see the brownish water through the trees, I could feel the openness beyond them, the vast space between both sides of the river where there were no trees to break the wind that had picked up the moment I stepped off the trailer. The sky was getting darker in the early morning as thick clouds moved in from the west; the smell of rain lingered on the air; low rumbles of thunder kneaded the clouds in the distance.
I contemplated the driver’s warnings about the Mississippi, and although I was sure Atticus would still want to take the raft if we found it, I decided that until the rain passed we would stay on land.
