THREE DAYS
THURSDAY, JULY 22, 1779
Their screams blind me. I run. Fast. So fast that I run right through my limp. There is nothing I can do for them now—not for Dr. Tusten, not for Mr. Jones or Jon Haskell, not for any of them. Even as I dodge a blur of trees and rocks and branches, the scene under the ledge replays in my mind, Dr. Tusten shouting at me to run, that hatchet …
My lame foot catches a rock and I meet the ground. Hard. The musket ball in my stomach shoots searing pain straight up into my teeth.
This can’t be happening.
I dig my forehead into the hemlock needles and suck in the familiar smell of soil—I wish I could go back three days in my life, just three days …
Something snaps.
I jerk my face from the dirt. There is an Indian half buried in the leaves, lying on his back not more than a yard from me. His chest rises and falls in quick motions. His face is wet from sweat and his clothes are stained with blood.
We stare at each other.
Then I stumble to my feet, looking everywhere at once, to make sure there are no others pointing muskets at me from behind the pines.
There’s no one else.
He raises his hand and swipes at my knees with a hunting knife. His attempt is feeble. Even now, he fights. He looks half dead and yet he lifts that knife, tries to kill. I reach out and snatch the knife away from him. An ache sprouts in my chest like a twisting black vine, wrapping its dark branches around my heart. It is hate, coiling, choking hate. I hate everything. I hate everyone. I hate Dr. Tusten with his knowing eyes. I hate Colonel Hathorn for leaving us. I hate my father for not telling the truth, for not telling me about the blood and the screaming. I hate these woods. And I hate this Indian.
Gripping the knife, I lunge at him. It seems to be what he expects, and he doesn’t move to protect himself. Instead, he closes his eyes and waits for me to plunge it into him.
“You fool,” I spit, whipping the knife into the dirt. And using my good foot, I kick him as hard as I can. Again. And again. His soft, squirming body hardens everything inside me into cold iron. In my mind I see my fellow soldiers, my neighbors, my friend Josh. I see them lying in these woods, death staring up at the blue sky through the old hemlock branches. I kick and kick and kick … Anger runs out of my eyes and nose, it steams out of my skin, specks of it spew from my mouth.
“This is it. This is what I wanted,” I cry. “Not to be digging ditches to keep in the chickens on a dusty farm, but to be in Washington’s war, to be a Patriot, to be like my father, to be killing, killing, killing.”
Dark blood spreads across the Indian’s shirt. He lies with his eyes closed, moaning for something or someone, maybe his mother, for he looks like a child curled in the leaves with his hands balled into fists under his chin. What have I done? What have I just done?
I drop to my knees and cover the bloodstain on his shirt with my hands. He moves to push me away, but he’s too weak. My head feels like it’s filled with flax. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I whisper. The blood won’t stop. It keeps coming. I press harder.
The Indian breathes in short, dry gasps. His blood oozes out around my blackened fingernails. He moans small and quiet. His eyes are tightly shut. I need the knapsack.
I stumble to my feet and spin in awkward circles, searching the ground for the doctor’s knapsack I’d been carrying before I fell. Behind the rock …
As I rip open the bag, the neatness of its contents freezes me. Dr. Tusten had placed each item in so carefully. What a waste of time. But how could he have known that he would never open it again?
I dump the entire bag onto the ground, letting the bottles of iodine and salt roll off into a patch of partridgeberry. I reach for a roll of bandage and a dressing—the very same items I’d climbed to the top of the ledge to find for the doctor. They are so clean. I hesitate, hating to soil them.
The Indian moans.
I grab the bandage and dressing, retrieve the knife, and head back to where the Indian is lying. His eyes are open now, and they follow me. He again says something to himself, like a prayer. I glance down at the knife in my hand. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I tell him, but I don’t know if he can understand me.
He lies without moving. I pull the muslin shirt from his sticky skin using the beading sewn to his collar. The smell of blood forces itself up my nose and down my throat, gagging me. His stomach is whole.
I search higher, finding the wound, a thin, deep cut of a knife running about the length of my thumb up near his ribs, almost under his armpit. The blood flows faster now that I’ve freed it.
I wad the square cloth of the dressing the way Dr. Tusten taught me and place it over the pulsing slice in his skin. I think about the iodine lying under the partridgeberry, but decide that cleaning the wound can wait; the blood needs to be stopped. I apply my weight to the balled-up dressing. “I’m stopping the bleeding,” I tell him. But I can see from his clenched teeth and tightly shut eyes that he isn’t listening, even if he could understand me.
Finally, the blood begins to darken and my dressing is holding back the flow instead of soaking it up. I wait ten counts and decide it has slowed enough that I can crawl out to where I dumped Dr. Tusten’s bag. I pluck the rest of the bandages off the forest floor, shaking off the needles and cockleburs stuck to them.
Ripping his shirt in two, I unravel most of it from his body and toss it aside, so I’m able to wrap his injury properly. His shirt resembles mine, except for the red beading sewn to his collar.
He grunts in pain when I lift him to slide the bandage around his body. I need to wind the cloth over his wound, looping it up and behind his other shoulder like a strange spider web. This will keep up the pressure so the bleeding doesn’t return. He’s looking off into the branches, but I can tell he’s watching me. I pretend not to notice as I wrap and listen to the whistles of the chickadees stripping the hemlock cones overhead. I take my time, because when I’m done with this task, I’ll have no other.
He shivers. The July sun is finally on its way down, but the air doesn’t feel any cooler.
Water. In the fading light, I remove the wooden canteen still strapped to my side that I’ve been carrying for Josh since this morning. When we were first separated in battle, I’d worried that he would need it, but the musket fire soon made me forget about Josh and his thirst. The water stings my throat and makes my eyes tear. I sit back and drink more. When I’m finished, I slide over to the Indian and raise his head in the growing darkness and bring the canteen to his lips. He tries to help by holding up his head. I push the jug against his mouth, feeling his dry lips with my fingers. He gulps at first, and then, with his thirst mostly quenched, he drinks slowly. I pull the canteen away and he draws in air with less difficulty than before. He shivers again, which makes him moan in pain.
“Are you cold?”
My voice sounds like a stranger’s. He doesn’t answer. I still have no idea if he understands English. I’m almost sure that, like his commander, Joseph Brant, this boy is Mohawk. But all I can say in Mohawk is niá:wen, which means “thank you.”
Pushing the peg back into the canteen, I set it down and remove the filthy hunting frock of my father’s that I’ve been sweating in all day, and place it over him. I see his eyes move down me, landing on my shirt. I follow his gaze. The red stain surprises me. I’d forgotten I’d been shot. But now that I’ve recalled it, I wonder how the terrible sting of the lead could have ever escaped me. I lift my shirt and run my finger over the tiny hole in my stomach where the ball gored its way in. It’s still wet in the center. I peel off my shirt and wrap it around my middle, tying it on the opposite side of my wound. The hot air folds itself around my skin. “I wish there were a breeze,” I say.
Again, he says nothing.
Moonlight begins to sprinkle the forest floor around us. He looks so small, covered in the frock with only his head and moccasins sticking out from either end. There are pieces of dead leaves and hemlock needles tangled in his scalp lock—the long, thin ponytail that is his only hair. The rest of his head is shaved clean. I can barely make out the features on his face through all the musket powder and war paint. If only my mother were here sitting next to this Indian boy, she’d wash him good.
Whenever one of us became ill, my mother insisted on washing us using her cracked leather bucket and rag while we lay in bed. She said it was proper for the sick to be washed. The night my father died, she balanced on the broken stool next to his bed with her beat-up old bucket and sang his favorite hymn, “Come, O Thou Traveler Unknown,” while she scrubbed his tan, bearded face and glowing white arms.
Come, O thou Traveler unknown,
Whom still I hold, but cannot see!
My company before is gone,
And I am left alone with Thee.
With Thee all night I mean to stay,
And wrestle till the break of day;
With Thee all night I mean to stay,
And wrestle till the break of day.
My father entered heaven clean.
I rise, ignoring the flash of pain behind my ribs, and stir up the floor of the forest searching for another dressing. Dumping water onto it from my canteen, I begin to wipe at the boy’s dirty forehead. He squirms to avoid me. But I will not be put off. I think my mother would enjoy seeing me do this. It would please her.
The Indian surrenders quickly and allows me to scrub at him without a fight. I’m more or less smearing the black powder and paint this way and that across his wide face and pointy chin. Although a bit of it seems to be sticking to my dressing. He has closed his eyes.
“It’s good to be clean.” Again, my own voice sounds so out of place here. I’m only twenty miles upriver from home. Every hemlock and birch looks the same as the trees in the small wood where I’ve lived my entire life without ever wandering farther than a whisker. But I couldn’t feel more separated from my mother and sister right now if I were sitting on one of the stars just turning up in the sky.
I draw in a long, slow breath as I work. The smoke from the musket fire still hanging in the air stings my throat. Pouring more water from the canteen onto the dressing, I wipe at the Indian’s cheek and uncover a long, jagged scar running from under his eye down to his jaw. He looks so young, maybe my sister Mary’s age, thirteen. It’s easy to imagine this boy playing hide-and-seek in the high grass along the river with the other children of his village. I used to love to do that.
I set at washing his neck, but the hooting of an owl has my eyes moving in and out among the dark tree trunks, searching for the movement of an enemy. The thought of finding a comrade doesn’t even occur to me. We lost so badly today that I know not to hope for help. Everyone I know is either dead or has long run off.
I think back over the last three days. The memory of Tuesday morning’s raid assaults me—hiding under the laurel branches while my home, with its graying pine wood and perfect mud chinking, burned to the ground. Followed by the militia’s endless march upriver after our attackers. And finally, I hear it again—that single shot of the musket that started the battle. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to drive away all thoughts of what happened next.
I guess I could have taken off with the colonel at the battle’s end, headed for the river like so many others. Why didn’t I? Again, that final scene at the ledge plays in my mind—the approaching chants, the burst of painted faces into the clearing, Dr. Tusten’s command, the screaming, that hatchet.
My eyes spring open and scour the deep blackness of the forest all around me, searching for men with hatchets. There is no one.
I breathe, trying to quiet the pounding of my heart’s blood in my ears. I look down at the Indian boy beneath my dirty dressing. He looks back at me. I can see thoughts moving through his eyes. What is he thinking? Is he afraid? Can he tell that I am? Does he know that he’s dying in the woods with only a sixteen-year-old crippled farm boy to wash his face? Can he tell that’s all I am—a crippled farm boy wondering what to do next?
I look away as the last question burns in my stomach next to the musket ball …
What am I going to do next?