Bronwyn Williams - Longshadow's Woman

She was smiling when she happened to notice the way her prisoner was walking. He was exhausted. They both were. His stride was hampered by the heavy irons, but it was more than that. Her smile gave way to a look of concern. He was limping. If he was injured—if he could no longer work, she would have to return him, and then she’d be right back where she’d been before, only now she owed Emma two dollars which she was fairly certain the jailer would refuse to refund.

Biting her lip, she shifted the heavy rifle to her other shoulder. She no longer even attempted to keep it turned on him. It was almost impossible to manage when they were working together, anyway. They both knew that.

He was definitely limping. It had to be the leg irons. The heavy things allowed him to walk, but not to run. If the jailer hadn’t warned her not to remove them, she’d have been tempted to unlock them before this. He could work twice as hard if he could clamber in and out of stump holes more easily. But in that case, she’d be the one who was handicapped, with the gun in one hand and a bandage on the other. Besides, she suspected he knew she would never shoot him.

By then they had reached the yard. Uncertain how to proceed, Carrie came to a dead halt. “Whoa, there—you, too, Sorry.”

Jonah winced from the indignity of being addressed in the same manner as she addressed her mule. At least she hadn’t sworn at him the way she did Sorry. The mule was neither deaf nor stupid, but somewhat slow to make up his mind whether or not it suited his interests to obey.

Scowling, she stared down at his feet. Pride would not allow him to acknowledge his pain, just as pride would not let him reveal his understanding of her language. Caught in a trap of his own making, he had endured days of pain and humiliation, wondering why the stubborn woman couldn’t see the truth before her eyes—that a man couldn’t work in irons. That if she wanted to get her money’s worth before his parole ended, she’d do better to release him, sit on a stump with her rifle pointed at his head, and let him get on with clearing her field. If he had to follow the Plow Road, he’d as soon get it done as quickly as possible.

“Leg, um—hurt?” She pointed to his ankle, her pale eyebrows knotted in concern. Jonah had heard the jailer tell her she must return him in good condition. She was obviously worried about her investment.

He knew she carried the key in her pocket, along with the napkin in which she had wrapped two chunks of bacon and cornbread, which they had devoured at noon, sitting in almost companionable silence in the shade of the hedgerow. For a few moments he had felt almost as if they might be…not friends, yet not quite enemies.

To his astonishment, she dropped to her knees before him. When he felt her hand on his foot he stopped breathing, but he couldn’t restrain a soft oath when the irons dug into his raw flesh as she folded the two halves back on their hinges.

Seeing the blood caked with dust until it looked like mud, she crooned in dismay. “Oh, my mercy, oh, sweet Jesus, you’re torn all ragged.”

Closing his eyes against the fresh pain, he willed his mind to escape to another place, another time. For once, it didn’t help. With harsh, shallow gasps, he waited for the pain to recede. Yesterday he had torn strips from his shirt and tied them around his ankles to pad the irons, but the cloth had only stuck to his blood and dried, tearing away still more flesh when he moved. Crossing her line in the dirt floor of the barn, he had found a jar of hoof dressing and plastered both ankles with that.

“You’ll have to let me wash it and dress it with turpentine and sugar. Emma—that is, my friend who knows about these things, says that’s the best medicine.”

Still on her knees, she gazed up at him, her eyes dark with concern. Jonah felt as if he’d swallowed a fish bone. It had not yet pierced his gullet, but he was afraid something irreversible had just happened.

Her hand was still resting on the top of his dusty bare foot. Her own feet were bare, too. He had seen her wearing boots but once. They were worn through on the bottoms, good only for trapping rocks and sharp pine seeds against her naked feet.

His own feet were bare because the men who had come to arrest him had not allowed him to take away anything, not the papers that would prove his innocence, not his boots, not even the freedom papers he had received from Lieutenant Pratt.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I know you can’t understand me, but I’d never have had this happen, not even to a wild animal. I saw a wolf once that chewed his foot off to get free of a trap, and…”

A wolf. He was no more than a wild animal, caught in a trap. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but he did know that if she didn’t take her hand off his foot, he might do something they would both come to regret.

Leading the mule into the small fenced paddock, Carrie forked him a ration of hay and then led her prisoner toward the cabin. He was no longer shackled or chained, which meant that if he were going to escape, it would be now. He could knock her on the head, grab the rifle from her hands and take off through the woods.

Yet, something she’d seen—or fancied she’d seen—in those clear gray eyes of his, told her he wouldn’t try to escape. Not yet, at any rate. Without thinking, she had knelt in the middle of the lane to examine his injuries, just as she would have stopped to examine any wounded creature in her care. But the instant she’d touched his warm flesh, the strangest sensation had come over her. She had looked up—he had looked down—and for one brief moment something tangible had passed between them. Her only comfort was that he’d been as startled as she was.

Now she tried to think of a way to make him understand what needed to be done. “Now listen carefully,” she said in slow, measured tones. “I will help you.” She placed her hand over her heart. “You must not try to escape.” She pointed to the road and shook her head vigorously. “If you run away, you’ll die.” And then, all in a rush, she blurted out the fearful consequences. “You’ll end up with the blood poisoning and die out there in the woods all by yourself, and then the jailer will come after me and hold me responsible, and I’ll end up in jail in your place.”

But of course he couldn’t understand a word she said. Shaking her head, she said, “You sit.” She pointed to the three-legged milking stool she’d brought inside when the cow had gone dry and she’d traded her to a farmer in Snowden for a rooster, two hams and a side of bacon, and said, “You sit.”

He sat. They were both dirty after a day in the field, but he had rid himself of vermin. She’d broken off branches of wax myrtle and told him in words a child of three could understand how to use them to keep the fleas from his straw bedding. Evidently, he had taken her meaning.

“This is going to hurt,” she muttered. Lifting his foot in her hand, she felt again that peculiar awareness—like the quivery feeling of the air just before a lightning storm. Embarrassed, she glanced up to see if he had noticed anything.

He felt something, all right. His lips were clamped together and his eyes had the strangest expression. Maybe this was the way Indians looked when they were hurting. She’d never seen one up close before, not since the night they had come a-whooping and a-hollering into the settlement near Redwood Falls. Those had been Sioux. The sheriff had called this one a Kie-oh-way heathen. It had been more than ten years, but he looked different from the Indians she remembered. He was taller, for one thing, and his features were…

“Well. Enough about that,” she said decisively, earning a puzzled look from the man whose ankles she had just cleaned, treated and wrapped with strips of an old bed sheet. She was tempted to see what he would do if she asked him to help her rebandage her hand. Some things were hard to do one-handed, and the old bandage was in tatters after a day’s work. “I don’t reckon you could…?” Shaking her head, she answered her own question, “No, I reckon not.”