The Long Trail (The McCabes Book 1) by Brad Dennison (microsoft ebook reader .TXT) 📗

Johnny found himself yawning. “I may not be awake when you get back. I feel awfully tired all of a sudden.”

“Between the fever and the blood you lost,” Granny said, “you’re going to need a lot of sleep. If you’re asleep when she gets back, we’ll keep the water hot for you.”

“Oh, and Ginny?”

She was already at the doorway, but she turned and said, “Yes?”

“Lura says to tell you she loves you.”

PART SIXTHE LONG TRAILTHIRTY-TWO

Three years earlier, Johnny and Ginny had been sitting before the hearth. The hour had been late, and Josh and Bree had long since gone upstairs to bed. John had one of his roaring fires going, and as usual, none of the lamps in the parlor were burning, so the room was illuminated only by the leaping, dancing firelight.

Somehow, the conversation turned to death.

“If I should go before you,” John said, sitting in his usual chair with his pipe in his hand, “I don’t want my body to lay in state for days while everyone and his brother comes to stare at it and say what a great man I was, even if they felt I was really a son-of-a-bitch. It’s always that way when someone dies. More than one man becomes a saint just by dying. Me, I’d rather be a son-of-a-bitch and get to live to ride through the mountains one more time.”

Ginny had been sitting with a glass of wine, and she found herself laughing. “John, you kill me sometimes. So, what are we supposed to do with you? Just plop you in the ground without a proper send-off?”

“I want a Shoshone funeral.”

“And what, pray-tell, is that?”

“A funeral pyre. A big one. You wrap the body in buffalo robes, along with some of the deceased’s most sacred possessions, then light a big fire.”

“You’d probably still have those infernal guns around your hips.”

John chuckled. “Probably.”

Ginny wasn’t usually this glib, but she had followed her usual glass of wine at dinner with two more. “So, if you should drop dead tomorrow, what am I supposed to do? Send Joshua buffalo hunting so we can have some robes to wrap you in?”

“I suppose blankets would do.”

“Ah, a concession on your part. Minor, though it is. There’s no chance, I suppose, that we could get a bigger concession out of you, and have your consent just to be buried in the ground like everyone else?”

“Not a chance.”

“I was afraid of that.”

Now, three years later, she was in a wooden upright chair by Johnny’s bed, watching while he sat, supported by two pillows, sipping chicken broth from a spoon. He was now shaven and freshly bathed, his hair tied back in a Shoshone tail, and he was wearing a long-handled union suit.

“Not bad soup, Ginny,” he said between sips.

He was balancing the bowl in his lap. She had wanted to hold it, but he had said he wasn’t a baby who needed to be spoonfed, and he wouldn’t spill the soup. And he surely didn’t, as he took one spoonful after another.

She said, “Remember a few years ago, that conversation we had one night by the fire about that Indian funeral you wanted?”

“Came pretty damned close to getting it, didn’t I?”

“I have to ask, how did you really expect us to pull that off? Did you really expect us to cart you all the way into the mountains, build a huge bonfire and throw you into the middle of it, and just stand there and watch you burn up? We’d be lucky if we didn’t start a forest fire.”

Johnny chuckled. “I’m sure you all would have managed it.”

She shook her head. They were sitting here, good-naturedly harassing each other as though he wasn’t just back from the brink of death.

Three days had passed since he had first awakened from the fever she thought was going to claim him. She had gone downstairs to heat water for coffee, and when she returned to his room with a steaming cup of it, he was indeed asleep again. But he was sleeping peacefully, breathing deeply and evenly. His heart rate was still a little fast, but Granny figured it would be until he could build back the body fluids he had lost.

Ginny brought the cup back to the kitchen, thinking she might see if one of the men wanted it, rather than simply dump it, but when she sat at the table, the tears overtook her. She buried her face in her hands and simply cried, her shoulder’s shaking as she drew shuddering breaths, and said over and over again, “Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord.”

Granny returned home the following afternoon. “He’s out of the woods, now. I can go. I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon to check on him. But if anything happens, anything at all, send one of the boys to fetch me, and I’ll come a-running.”

Before she left, she prescribed lots of water for him, as much as he could take. But don’t force it on him. She didn’t want any of it coming back up, because the strain could further injure the bullet wounds. If he wanted something hot, tea was what she thought he should have. No coffee, even though she knew he wouldn’t listen to her and would demand it, anyway. When he started feeling hungry, he was to have chicken and beef broth only at first.

Johnny slept most of that first day, waking occasionally, and on the morning of the second day, he seemed stronger. Some of the usual resonance had returned to his voice, and his eyes no longer seemed to be sinking into his skull. He was still a ghostly pale, and she thought he seemed a little feverish again, but the improvement was noticeable. She helped get him bathed, though he surprisingly could handle most of the job himself, and got him dressed and shaved. That was when he said, “I’ve got to have a cup of coffee, Ginny.”

What the hell, she thought. One wouldn’t kill him. He