Дэвид Балдаччи - Wish You Well

Lou folded the letter and looked at Louisa, hoping she had done the right thing by reading the words to her. Lou wondered if the young Jack Cardinal had noticed that the story had become far more personal when it addressed the issue of a crumbling marriage.

Louisa stared into the fire. She was silent for a few minutes and then said, “It be a hard life up here, ’specially for a child. And it hard on husband and wife, though I ain’t never suffered that. If my momma and daddy ever said a cross word to the other, I ain’t never heard it. And me and my man Joshua get along to the minute he took his last breath. But I know it not that way for your daddy up here. Jake and his wife, they had their words.”

Lou took a quick breath and said, “Dad wanted you to come and live with us. Would you have?”

She looked at Lou. “You ask me why I don’t never leave this place? I love this land, Lou, ’cause it won’t never let me down. If the crops don’t come, I eat the apples or wild strawberries that always do, or the roots that’s there right under the soil, if’n you know where to look. If it snow ten-foot deep, I can get along. Rain or hail, or summer heat that melt tar, I get by. I find water where there ain’t supposed to be none, I get on. Me and the land. Me and this mountain. That ain’t prob’ly mean nothing to folks what can have light by pushing a little knob, or talk to people they can’t even see.” She paused and drew a breath. “But it means everything to me.” She looked into the fire once more. “All your daddy say is true. High rock be beautiful. High rock be cruel.” She gazed at Lou and added quietly, “And the mountain is my home.”

Lou leaned her head against Louisa’s chest. The woman stroked Lou’s hair very gently with her hand as they sat there by the fire’s warmth.

And then Lou said something she thought she never would. “And now it’s my home too.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Flakes of snow were dropping from the bellies of bloated clouds. Near the barn there came a whooshing sound and then a spark of harsh light that kept right on growing.

Inside the farmhouse Lou groaned in the throes of a nightmare. Her and Oz’s beds had been moved to the front room, by the coal fire, and they were bundled under crazy quilts Louisa had sewn over the years. In Lou’s tortured sleep she heard a noise, but couldn’t tell what it was. She opened her eyes, sat up. There came a scratching at the door. In an instant Lou was alert. She opened the door and Jeb burst in, yipping and jumping.

“Jeb, what is it? What’s wrong?”

Then she heard the screams of the farm animals.

Lou ran out in her nightshirt. Jeb followed her, barking, and Lou saw what had spooked him: The barn was fully ablaze. She ran back to the house, screamed out what was happening, and then raced to the barn.

Eugene appeared at the front door of the farmhouse, saw the fire, and hurried out, Oz at his heels.

When Lou threw open the big barn door, smoke and flames leapt out at her.

“Sue! Bran!” she screamed as the smoke hit her lungs; she could feel the hairs on her arms rise from the heat.

Eugene fast-limped past her, plunged into the barn, and then came right back out, gagging. Lou looked at the trough of water by the corral and a blanket hanging over the fence. She grabbed the blanket and plunged it into the cold water.

“Eugene, put this over you.”

Eugene covered himself with the wet blanket and then lunged back into the barn.

Inside a beam dropped down and barely missed Eugene. Smoke and fire were everywhere. Eugene was as familiar with the insides of this barn as he was with anything on the farm, yet it was as though he had been struck blind. He finally got to Sue, who was thrashing in her stall, threw open the door, and put a rope around the terrified mare’s neck.

Eugene stumbled out of the barn with Sue, threw the rope to Lou, who led the horse away with assistance from Louisa and Oz, and then Eugene went back into the barn. Lou and Oz hauled buckets of water from the springhouse, but Lou knew it was like trying to melt snow with your breath. Eugene drove out the mules and all the cows except one. But they lost every hog. And all their hay, and most of their tools and harnesses. The sheep were wintered outside, but the loss was still a devastating one.

Louisa and Lou watched from the porch as the barn, bare studs now, continued to burn. Eugene stood by the corral where he had driven the livestock. Oz was next to him with a bucket of water to dump on any creep of fire.

Then Eugene called out, “She coming down,” and he pulled Oz away. The barn collapsed in on itself, the flames leaping skyward and the snow gently falling into this inferno.

Louisa stared in obvious agony at this ruin, as though she were caught in the flames herself. Lou tightly held her hand and was quick to notice when Louisa’s fingers began to shake, the strong grip suddenly becoming impossibly weak.

“Louisa?”

The woman dropped to the porch without a word.

“Louisa!”

The girl’s anguished cries echoed across the stark, cold valley.

Cotton, Lou, and Oz stood next to the hospital bed where Louisa lay. It had been a wild ride down the mountain in the old Hudson, gears thrashed by a frantic Eugene, engine whining, wheels slipping and then catching in the snowy dirt. The car almost went over the edge twice. Lou and Oz had clung to Louisa, praying that she would not leave them. They had gotten her to the small hospital in Dickens, and then Lou had run and rousted Cotton from his bed. Eugene had gone back up to look after Amanda and the animals.

Travis Barnes was attending her, and the man looked worried. The hospital was also his home, and the sight of a dining room table and a General Electric refrigerator had not comforted Lou.

“How is she, Travis?” asked Cotton.

Barnes looked at the children and then pulled Cotton to the side. “She’s had a stroke,” he said in a low voice. “Looks to be some paralysis on the left side.”

“Is she going to recover?” This came from Lou, who had heard everything.

Travis delivered a woeful shrug. “There’s not much we can do for her. The next forty-eight hours are critical. If I thought she could make the trip, I’d have sent her on to the hospital in Roanoke. We’re not exactly equipped for this sort of thing. You can go on home. I’ll send word if her condition changes.”

Lou said, “I’m not leaving.” And then Oz said the same.

“I think you’ve been overruled,” said Cotton quietly.

“There’s a couch right outside,” Travis said kindly.

They were all asleep there, each holding the others up, when the nurse touched Cotton’s shoulder.

She said softly, “Louisa’s awake.”

Cotton and the children eased the door open and went in. Louisa’s eyes were open, but not much more than that. Travis stood over her.

“Louisa?” said Cotton. There was no answer, not even a hint of recognition. Cotton looked at Travis.

“She’s still very weak,” Travis said. “I’m amazed she’s even conscious.”

Lou just stared at her, more scared than she’d ever been. She just couldn’t believe it. Her father, her mother. Diamond. Now Louisa. Paralyzed. Her mother had not moved a muscle for longer than Lou cared to think about. Was that to be Louisa’s fate too? A woman who loved the earth? Who cherished her mountain? Who had lived as good a life as one could live? It was almost enough to make Lou stop believing in a God who could do such a terrible thing. Leaving a person with no hope. Leaving a person with nothing at all really.

Cotton, Oz, Lou, and Eugene had just started their meal at the farmhouse.

“I can’t believe they haven’t caught whoever burned the barn down,” Lou said angrily.