Seduced (2 page)

“I did not force you to desert. You agreed to my plan and came on your own, and it’s not my fault you were stupid enough to be caught by the home guard.”

“You left me for dead. Ran away the second you heard trouble.”

“I can’t imagine you wouldn’t have done the same. There is no love lost between us, Jimmy. I gave you the means with which to escape the Confederate army. A Reb solider returning an escaped Yankee prisoner of war was a lie that most would have believed.”

Melody had learned that averting her eyes, or even closing them, did not stop anything. It made no horror disappear, no atrocity—it only made the shock of opening her eyes worse. She'd hid her head under a pillow for the first part of the war, only to emerge blinking and useless to a changed world.

She would not do that again. So she held her eyes open with such force they started to water.

Don’t look away. Don’t. Your husband will kill that man, and closing your eyes will not make that go away.

Bearing witness to it would not change it, but she was compelled nonetheless.

“This is real nice land you got here,” Jimmy said, so casual. “Read about your claim in the papers. Right next to an article about there being rock oil in these parts.”

“What is your point?” Mr. Baywood asked through gritted teeth.

The explosion lifted Mr. Baywood off his feet and threw him against the wall. His hat rolled to the door.

The sound of Jimmy shooting Mr. Baywood boomed inside the sturdy timber walls. Chinking rattled down from between the logs to the dirt floor, and blood flooded into Melody's mouth where she’d bitten her tongue. There was a scuffle she couldn’t see because of the shadows and the smoke, followed by a hard crack and a fleshy thud. Jimmy walked to the door and opened it, clearing the smoke and letting in enough light that she could see Mr. Baywood on the ground, blood oozing from a wound in his stomach. Jimmy grabbed him by the foot and dragged him out to the porch.

Gut shot.
Oh. Oh, Lord
.

Annie’s lips began to move in prayer.

Jimmy stepped back into the room and Melody lifted her head, met his eyes.

“Don’t touch him,” he said. “He's gonna die real slow.”

He grabbed his hat from the table and walked back out the door.

Melody and Annie shared a shocked look before Melody jumped to her feet. She swallowed back her bile and stepped over the shot man and the dead turkey, running after Jimmy through the forest to where they’d hidden the horses.

“Where… where are you going?”

“To find an oil prospector,” he said, untying Melody’s brother’s horse, Jacks. Jacks didn’t like Jimmy and he shook his head, shying away as Jimmy tried to mount him. “Figure out how this oil business works.”

“Where?”

“Pueblo or Denver.”

She swallowed her gasp. It had taken three days across the high plains to get to these foothills. Three days.

“How long will you be gone?”

“A week or more, I imagine.”

He was leaving her and Annie for a week, alone in this cabin, miles from anything. She was torn apart by relief and fear. A week without him. With just Annie, a gut-shot man and whatever lived in these woods.

“That man… What…” She glanced at the cabin as if it might have answers. “What do I do?”

“Leave him.”

“What about wolves? Indians?”

Jimmy looked around at the pine trees that surrounded the clearing and finally pulled his carbine rifle from the scabbard across his horse’s flank. “Don’t let them burn the cabin or take you.”

He handed her the gun, wheeled Jacks around and was gone, through the shadows in the trees, back toward the well-worn trail to Denver.

His leaving was shocking, but not all that surprising. Jimmy didn't sit still. Not since the war. She'd thought when they were married, and he'd moved into her home, that he would replant the fields. Repair the outbuildings. That he would try, as he'd promised, to rebuild her family's property. But he could not even sit at a table without being blind drunk. He roamed the house at all hours, drinking and cursing, waking her up to yell at her, about crimes he suspected her of plotting against him.

Most nights he passed out on the porch. A gun in his hand.

Within a month he'd sold her home to some Northern carpetbagger who didn't know the first thing about cotton or horses. And soon they were moving across the West without rest. Without a plan, that she could tell.

And then Jimmy found that letter in St. Louis, and he'd become a bloodhound after Mr. Baywood.

After an incredulous moment and a prayer for strength, Melody picked up her skirts to run back to the house.

Annie was already bent over the man on the porch, her sleeves rolled up, her fingers searching through the hole in the man’s stomach. A red knot had risen up on his temple.

Mr. Baywood was passed out, whether from pain, blood loss, or the wound to his head it was hard to know. But his chest was still moving, so he wasn’t dead yet.

“I can’t believe it, but he missed everything important. Leastways that’s how it feels.”

“He's not gut-shot?”

“No. Went clean through his side. Go back to the horses and get my saddlebag.”

“You think you can save him?”

“Maybe. Go get Father's bag.”

Melody nodded, but for a moment her feet didn’t obey.

“Melody—”

“If we save him, where do we hide him? Jimmy will be back in a week.”

Annie glanced up. “I’ll say it was me. That you didn’t help.”

“He’ll kill you.”

“Maybe.”

“I won’t let you die because I’m scared of a beating.”

But it wasn’t just a beating. They both knew it. And though she'd managed to avoid his bed all but three times since her wedding night a year ago—not a terribly difficult feat due to his increasing need for whiskey in order to sleep at night—the specter of it was enough to keep her living in fear. And she was ashamed of her fear. She was. But that didn’t change its presence.

“Chances are I won’t be able to save him anyway,” Annie said. “But this way, we won’t have wolves or worse all over us in the morning, because we left a dying man on the porch. Go. Get my things.”

Melody ran back to the horses and unfettered them, leading them from the copse of pines closer to the house where they could graze. She'd put them in the barn later. Snow was starting to fall. Back home, in May the last of the azaleas would be in bloom, and Mama would start napping on the porch—

Don’t. Don’t think about it.

It took her three attempts to tie the horses to the porch, her hands were shaking so hard. Once it was done, she hoisted the saddlebags up onto her shoulder and stepped back over the turkey and Mr. Baywood to get back inside, not looking at either of them.

Annie had thrown Jimmy’s newspapers into the hearth and built a crackling fire.

“I need help dragging him in,” she said and Melody nodded. “We’ll never get him off the ground, but I won’t try to take out that bullet outside away from the fire.”

Melody grabbed the man’s slack hands, Annie took his legs, and using all their strength, they dragged the man back inside through the puddle of his blood. He didn’t twitch or move.

“Why isn't he waking up?”

“Jimmy must have kicked him or hit him with his pistol. Here.” Annie touched the pronounced bump that was turning purple on Mr. Baywood's head. “Can you find some whiskey?”

Melody searched while Annie took off the man’s shirt and pulled their father’s medical kit from the saddlebags.

“You've done this before?” Melody asked, looking on the shelf over the workbench. She found a nearly full bottle behind a bag of sugar.

“Many times.”

Annie, who had no hope for a match due to her leg, the stammer she’d had when she was younger and what Mama used to call an odd nature, had followed their father into field hospitals during the war.

Before he died, Father had called Annie, with great pride, the best assistant he’d ever had.

Melody had spent that time embroidering the initials of her fiancé, Christopher, on handkerchiefs and blissfully planning a grand wedding that would never happen. Mama used to say that one of her daughters had to be a changeling. It was the only way to explain having girls who were so vastly different.

Annie took a pair of forceps from the old leather bag, poured whiskey over them and then took a big swig herself.

“Annie!” Melody cried, having never seen her sister drink spirits at all, much less right from the bottle. Mama would have fainted at the sight.

All of this—every bit of what they were doing—would have sent Mama to bed with her Bible and despair.

Annie handed the bottle to Melody. “The light in here is too poor for my eyes. I will need you to close the wound, so perhaps something to steady your hands would be a good idea.”

In the candlelight, the body between them, Melody had never seen Annie so in command of herself. Of her setting.

Her countenance, her solid and steady demeanor proclaimed that it would be okay.

This was Annie at her best, and Melody took sudden and strange comfort in it. And the ridiculousness of this situation faded away and became one more element of their survival.

Surgery was a thing they had to do to get to the next thing.

Melody needed very little encouraging, and she took her own burning gulp of the whiskey.

Finally, at Annie’s nod, she crept around to the bleeding man’s head and leaned her weight on his shoulders in case he woke up and took exception to Annie digging in his side.

But he didn’t even twitch and Annie made quick work of getting the bullet.

“If he was trying to kill Mr. Baywood, your husband is a terrible shot,” Annie said, holding the bullet up to the firelight.

“It’s the brand. He's nearly blind in his right eye.”

“But he was standing about five feet from him.”

“Are we grateful he’s a bad shot or not?”

Annie smiled and then did her best to flush out the wound with the water from the bucket they’d found by the fireplace, until the both of them were kneeling beside Mr. Baywood, in a lake of bloody, muddy water, their skirts sodden. Annie moved out of the way, and Melody stepped in with the surgical needle and silk thread from Father's bag.

But faced with a bloody gaping hole in a man’s side, she suddenly doubted the strength of her embroidery skills.

“How do I...?”

“Pretend he's silk on a hoop.”

“My imagination isn't that strong.”

“You just do it,” Annie said, level and brave. “We have done worse.”

If she can take out a bullet, I can stitch him up.

Melody took another swig of whiskey and pressed Father's heavy surgical needle through Mr. Baywood's flesh. It did not give easily, and she had to
push
the steel through the skin. It pulled and tugged as she shoved it through the flesh.

Bile filled her throat, but she fought it down again and again until she was done.

“You did it!” Annie said, her pride a lovely thing.

“I suppose I did,” she said, grateful that something from her empty and useless life before the war had been repurposed into something of value.

JUST AFTER DAWN, Melody woke Annie from the bed in the corner where she’d collapsed not too many hours ago.

“I need to find water,” she whispered. “A fever set in.”

“How is the swelling around his eye?” Annie woke up quickly, her mind immediately back to worry.

“Worse. It’s spreading across his forehead.”

“Do I need to bleed him?”

She could not even begin to answer that question, no matter how badly her sister needed the reassurance of a knowledgeable opinion.

“Annie, I am no doctor’s assistant. I’m sorry. That decision is yours and I'm sure whatever you decide is the right answer. I’m to fetch water.”

Annie fumbled for her spectacles and pushed herself off the bed. Her brown hair was a wild mess of dandelion fluff, and Melody smiled and patted it down like she would have years ago.

It was a luxury to touch someone with kindness, instead of in fear or desperation. She'd forgotten what that felt like. How it breathed air into her dark and fearful spirit.

Annie grabbed her hand, her eyes a hard brown beneath the glass. “We’ll be fine. As long as we’re together.”

“Yes, we will.”

They said it to each other every morning. A pact started that first morning after her wedding, when Annie had found her so bloody and battered on the floor beside the bed in their parents’ old bedroom.

Melody gently curled her fingers with her sister's.

Calm
, she thought.
Soft. We need not grab onto each other for life right now.
With one last ineffective pat to her sister's hair, Melody took the bucket and stepped outside, hoping to find a well or stream in the clearing.

The turkey was still on the porch. She sniffed it but didn't smell any rot. The cold overnight had worked in their favor.

The clearing was a sea of white, blue, purple and pink blooms, their petals open to the bright sunlight. Lupines and columbine, she'd heard them called.

If she'd had any wonder left in her, it would have been stirred by such a sight.

But no matter how beautiful the setting, no one built a cabin far from water.

There was no other well-worn path into the woods, besides the one that led toward Denver. No sound of a stream either.

She crossed the clearing to the barn. Last night, after Mr. Baywood had been stitched up, she'd taken their horses, Lilly and Rue, inside and removed their saddles. It was tight in the barn, which now held three horses, a goat, two chickens and a bossy rooster. But it was warm and cozy. When she entered, Lilly and Rue lifted their noses in welcome.

Mr. Baywood's gray horse was in the far stall, its back to the room. Put out, perhaps, by the sudden company.

It was one of those sturdy mountain horses they’d seen more and more often since crossing into Colorado. On the ground in front of it she noticed a pail half full of water.

There must be water close, she thought. The goat stood in the far corner of the barn, where the air was the coolest. But there was something odd about that wall, and as she walked closer she realized the stone wall wasn’t whole, it was actually two walls. One in front of the other. Between the two there was a crack, nearly impossible to see in a passing glance.