David Nickle - Eutopia

They climbed for a short distance, then came upon a beaten path through the underbrush that followed the contour of the hillside. Andrew was glad: it helped him catch his breath, put his thoughts together.

“What’s your name?” he said then.

The hill man said something that sounded like “Ink.”

“Well, Ink,” said Andrew between gasps, “you said you had work for me. Someone sick?”

“Sick,” he said, nodding, and prodded Andrew’s back with the gun barrel. Andrew took the hint: he didn’t ask any more questions, although he had plenty.

Over his time in Eliada, Andrew had only had a little contact with the folk who lived in the hills to the west. They were old families—some of them here since the 1830s, settler families whose wagons had travelled north—and they did not come to Eliada much. When they did, the hospital would see to them; Andrew himself had stitched up a couple of cuts, splinted a fracture or two.

As they climbed over rocks, he wondered: might not some of those Klansmen who tried to hang him and Mister Juke have come from shacks up the hillside from Eliada? How did Ink know that he was the “nigger doctor?”

“Here w’are,” said Ink, and they climbed a short rise in the path, and stepped into the compound of Andrew’s captors.

It was a homestead, built on a cleared-out plateau and surrounded by tall pine trees. There were four buildings, all cut from logs with low sod roofs, arranged in a semicircle with their front doors facing downslope.

Ink hollered something that Andrew couldn’t understand, and the front doors of two of the other buildings swung open. An enormous man strode out from one, and two younger boys came out the other.

“Set your bag down,” said Ink. Andrew did, and found himself falling to his knees.

The boys took up the bag. One of them opened it and had a look inside. He reached in, pulled out a scalpel, turned it in a filthy hand and set it back. Then he pulled out a bottle of iodine, twisted off the top and gave it to the other to sniff.

“Put it back,” said Ink. “This here’s the doctor.”

The boy did like he was told, and squinted at Andrew.

“Don’t look like the doctor,” he said.

“Different doctor, but he do the job,” said Ink. He sounded irritated to Andrew. “Take his bag inside. To Loo’s bed.”

Andrew looked back over his shoulder. Ink had lifted his rifle so its barrel pointed up to the treetops. Seeing Andrew turn, the hill man nodded.

“You can get up,” he said. “Look like you’re going to wet y’ trouser.”

Andrew got to his feet. He was shaky and his vision greyed a bit, but he was feeling better. He was certainly not going to wet his trousers because this was far from the worst he’d imagined. These weren’t Klansmen.

These were hill people with a sick relation.

Ink motioned with his hand, and walked ahead of Andrew to the doorway. He disappeared into the dark, and Andrew followed.

The house was a single room, with light coming in mainly through the spacing between badly fitted timber. A little kettle-shaped stove warmed things, and next to it was a crude mattress, held in a box made of pine, like a great crib. Or a casket.

One of the boys opened the wood stove and stuck a candle in. He brought the flame near the bed, and Andrew bent down.

“Oh my,” he said softly, peering down into the sweat-covered face, the skin that even in the warm candlelight seemed deathly pale. “How long has she been sick?”

“Two week,” said Ink.

“This is Loo, am I right?”

“Loo,” said Ink.

Andrew looked close. Loo’s dark hair was thin—Andrew could make out patches of bare white scalp. Beneath it, her face was slack—so much that at first he feared that she was in a coma. But her eyes were open, and they followed him as he examined her. Andrew put his fingertips to her cheek, and found it warm to the touch. He asked if a window might be opened, and one was.

“Hello, Loo,” he said, as the girl’s eye squinted in the light. “Can you tell me how you’re feeling?”

Loo licked her lips with a tongue that seemed swollen. She took a breath. Then she closed her mouth and looked away.

“She can’t,” said a woman’s voice. “She’s too simple. She’s feeling awful though. You should be able to tell that by looking.”

She stood beside the open window, wearing long dusty skirts and her hair tied in a dark bun from which individual hairs strayed like thin branches. This woman was lean, and quick, and old. Lines were on her face like rivers.

“You are feeling awful too,” said the woman, looking at him, glancing in particular at his bad hand. “Hank do this to you?”

“I—I’m sorry,” said Andrew. “Hank?”

“Ink,” said Ink, who was standing by the door, rifle tucked away at his elbow now.

“Hank,” said Andrew. He smiled weakly and turned back to the woman. “No. He didn’t.”

“Well you’re in no shape to do us any good now,” she said. “Look at your hands. They shakin’ like a drunk’s, and one’s bound up. No cuttin’ for you, Doctor sir.”

Andrew sighed. “I know. I’m not going to do anything but look right now. Look, and ask questions. If you could tell me, ma’am, what you think’s ailing her, that would help. Then I can get a look, and we can talk about what to do next.”

“Sounds fair,” said the woman.

“Fine then. First things. This is Loo. She’s the patient. My name’s Andrew Waggoner. I’m the doctor. And you, ma’am… ?”

“My name’s Norma. I’m Loo’s cousin, let’s put it that way. And you asked what’s wrong with her?”

“Yes?”

Norma tucked her chin into her blouse.

“Raped,” she said, her face pinched angry.

“Raped,” said Andrew. “By anyone—”

He didn’t know how to put it gracefully, but Norma spared him.

“No one in this room,” she said. “No one here now.”

At that, Hank spoke up.

“She was raped by the Faerie King,” he said, standing on his toes so he could see over Norma’s shoulder. “He planted his seed, and now—now, we got to stop that.”

“That’s enough, Hank,” said Norma.

“Got to stop it,” he said, eyes wider than they should be. “Before it eats her up. ’Fore it turns us all Feeger .”

Andrew Waggoner set to work on Loo Tavish. He checked her fever, and it was a shade over 100. Her heartbeat: regular. She was breathing easily, and although she wasn’t talking, her eyes followed his fingers when he moved them and her foot jumped when he tapped her knee. He started to look under the blankets, to see about this rape, this pregnancy—the talk of the Faerie King and Feegers and everything else—but that was when Norma put a stop to it.

“No more ’til you get some food in you and your hands stop shakin’,” she said.

Andrew’s hands were shaking—and he had to admit, thinking straight about the problem was beyond him now. If he did anything, it would be as likely to harm her as help her.

So he accepted Norma’s invitation to come up to her cabin for a bowl of fiddlehead-and-rabbit stew. Apparently, the hill folk saw nothing wrong with a Negro having a meal alone with their lady cousin, because he and Norma hurried alone through the rain along a path that wound between some woodsheds and up a little slope to a small log building with a bowed roof. Even Hank and his rifle let them be.

As he stepped inside through the low front door, Andrew remarked on that fact. “Suddenly, I’m no longer at gunpoint,” he said. “It’s refreshing.”

Norma shrugged as she opened her own stove, lit a twig and brought the flame to candles mounted along the walls. “Up to me,” she said, “wouldn’t have brought you here at point of a gun. Would’ve asked nice. But Hank’s jumpy, and don’t care much for the folk in the mill town.”