and crossed her fingers, then asked aloud whether the wound was infected.
Click click click.
“You were lucky this time, Tara,” she said. “But what were you thinking,
putting a burn into a garbage can?”
Dad carried Luke inside and Mother fetched her scalpel. It took her and
Dad most of the evening to cut away the dead flesh. Luke tried not to scream,
but when they pried up and stretched bits of his skin, trying to see where the
dead flesh ended and the living began, he exhaled in great gusts and tears slid
from his eyes.
Mother dressed the leg in mullein and comfrey salve, her own recipe. She
was good with burns—they were a specialty of hers—but I could tell she was
worried. She said she’d never seen one as bad as Luke’s. She didn’t know
what would happen.
Mother and I stayed by Luke’s bed that first night. He barely slept, he was so
delirious with fever and pain. For the fever we put ice on his face and chest;
for the pain we gave him lobelia, blue vervain and skullcap. This was another
of Mother’s recipes. I’d taken it after I’d fallen from the scrap bin, to dull the
throbbing in my leg while I waited for the gash to close, but as near as I could
tell it had no effect.
I believed hospital drugs were an abomination to God, but if I’d had
morphine that night, I’d have given it to Luke. The pain robbed him of
breath. He lay propped up in his bed, beads of sweat falling from his forehead
onto his chest, holding his breath until he turned red, then purple, as if
depriving his brain of oxygen was the only way he could make it through the
next minute. When the pain in his lungs overtook the pain of the burn, he
would release the air in a great, gasping cry—a cry of relief for his lungs, of
agony for his leg.
I tended him alone the second night so Mother could rest. I slept lightly,
waking at the first sounds of fussing, at the slightest shifting of weight, so I
could fetch the ice and tinctures before Luke became fully conscious and the
pain gripped him. On the third night, Mother tended him and I stood in the
doorway, listening to his gasps, watching Mother watch him, her face hollow,
her eyes swollen with worry and exhaustion.
When I slept, I dreamed. I dreamed about the fire I hadn’t seen. I dreamed
it was me lying in that bed, my body wrapped in loose bandages, mummified.