Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,39

which I chose to ruin—and used them to bind up the wound, to keep it closed.

Oddly, it was only after we had finished, after the part that was hardest for someone awake, that Cate fainted. It was as if she had managed to be strong while she had to be strong but gave in to weakness as soon as she could.

And I felt much the same as we finished our work and finally sat down on the floor to rest.

Chapter Thirty

“We’ll keep them, just in case, though they’ll turn to flies soon,” Larkin said, peering into the maggot jar at the terrible little nurses in their white uniforms. How odd that creatures so mixed up with mess could be so clean and tidy. “We can always get more if we need them later on.”

“How do we do that?” I asked, watching Cate’s face as she slept. I hoped she was dreaming about something pretty.

“We’ll kill something—a rabbit maybe—and wait for the flies to find it. Lay their eggs. Wait for the eggs to hatch. It takes no time at all.”

I imagined that. Cate, alone on the mountain, doing that.

“She said those weren’t her tools.” I nodded toward the workbench.

“They aren’t,” he said. It wasn’t a sad thing to say, but it sounded sad.

“Then why are they here?”

He didn’t answer for a long moment. “They were her son’s.”

“And he . . . ?”

“He died.” Larkin looked away.

“Oh. Now I know why she didn’t like it when I heated up a chisel.”

He looked back at me curiously. “Why did you do that?”

“I thought I might try to kill the infection.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You were going to burn her?”

“She was unconscious when I found her. I didn’t know the maggots were there on purpose.” I thought back to how it had felt to stand in that dim cabin with no one to teach me what to do. “I figured I would burn the cut clean.”

He opened his eyes wide. “Do you think you could have done that?”

I lifted one shoulder. “I don’t know. But I meant to try.”

He seemed to like that. But he said, “Burning can lead to infection. You shouldn’t try that unless someone’s bleeding to death.”

I thought back to my father, burning the cut on his hand. I remembered how he treated it afterward with vinegar. “I’m glad she woke up when she did. So, what now?”

Larkin used his knife to stab a hole in the lid and then put the jar of maggots on the shelf next to the one with the blood-fat tick. From the books on Cate’s desk, he chose one as thick as three Bibles. “She likes this one.”

I carried a lantern to the desk. “Health and Longevity,” I read. The cover was chapped and raw with handling.

“You know how to read?” he said.

I nodded. “Of course.” But then I realized that not everyone had started life in a town. “I went to school before we came to live here,” I said. “And my mother was a teacher, so we still have lessons every day.”

Larkin stared at me. “Every day?”

I nodded, though lately I’d had lessons of another kind. “You can come down and get some whenever you want.”

He thought about that. “If she’s teaching you lessons, why did you say she was a teacher?”

I thought back. “Is, then.”

He made no answer except to turn again to the book, which he opened to a section near the end. He turned the pages slowly, his lips moving, until he stopped and said, “‘Poisoned wounds.’” He stopped again and read to himself, then aloud: “. . . ‘wounds sometimes received by butchers, cooks and fish-dealers, who handle—’” He paused. I looked over his shoulder.

“Putrefying,” I said.

“. . . ‘putrefying animal matter,’” he continued. “‘Such wounds are particularly—’” He paused again.

“Virulent,” I said.

He looked at me. “I’m not a very good reader.” He tipped his head at Cate. “She’s been teaching me.”

“It will get easier, the more you do it.”

He nodded. Turned back to the book. “‘A wound of this . . . character should be thoroughly washed,’” he read, “‘opened and swabbed with pure carbolic acid, then washed with’”—he skipped a word or two—“‘mercury solution, and wet antiseptic dressing. Bites by animals should be so treated, the human bite being one of the worst.’” He took a deep breath, as if he’d climbed something steep.

I thought about how snippy Samuel became if I helped him with a tough word. “I hope you don’t mind that I helped