courage, most certainly no wisdom. She was still only a woman with dead arms and a dead husband, cuffed to the posts of this bed like a cur dog chained to a ringbolt and left to die unremarked and unlamented in a dusty back yard while his tosspot master serves thirty days in the country clink for driving without a license and under the influence.
"Oh please don't let it hurt," she said in a low, trembling voice. "if I'm going to die, God, please don't let it hurt. I'm such a baby about pain."
Thinking about dying at this point is probably a really had idea, toots. Ruth's voice paused, then added: On second thought, strike the probably.
Okay, no argument-thinking about dying was a bad idea. So what did that leave?
Living. Ruth and Goodwife Burlingame said it at the same time.
All right, living. Which brought her around full circle to her arms again.
They're asleep because I've been hanging on them all night. I'm still hanging on them. Getting the weight off is step one.
She tried to push herself backward and upward with her feet again, and felt a sudden weight of black panic when they at first also refused to move. She lost herself for a few moments then, and when she came back she was pistoning her legs rapidly up and down, pushing the coverlet, the sheets, and the mattress pad down to the foot of the bed. She was gasping for breath like a bicycleracer topping the last steep hill in a marathon race. Her butt, which had also gone to sleep, sang and zipped with wake-up needles.
Fear had gotten her fully awake, but it took the half-assed aerobics which accompanied her panic to kick her heart all the way up into passing gear. At last she began to feel tingles of sensation-bone-deep and as ominous as distant thunder-in her arms.
If nothing else works, toots, keep your mind on those last two or three sips of water. Keep re-minding yourself that you're never going to get hold of that glass again unless your hands and arm are in good working order, let alone drink from it.
Jessie continued to push with her feet as the morning brightened. Sweat plastered her hair against her temples and streamed down her cheeks. She was aware-vaguely-that she was deepening her water-debt every moment she persisted in this strenuous activity, but she saw no choice.
Because there is none, toots-none at all.
Toots this and toots that, she thought distractedly. Would you please put a sock in it, you mouthy bitch?
At last her bottom began to slide up toward the head of the bed. Each time it moved, Jessie tensed her stomach muscles and did a mini sit-up. The angle made by her upper and lower body slowly began to approach ninety degrees. Her elbows began to bend, and as the drag of her weight began to leave her arms and shoulders, the tingles racing through her flesh increased. She didn't stop moving her legs when she was finally sitting up but continued to pedal, wanting to keep her heart-rate up.
A drop of stinging sweat ran into her left eye. She flicked it away with an impatient shake of her head and went on pedaling. The tingles continued to increase, darting upward and downward from her elbows, and about five minutes after she'd reached her current slumped position (she looked like a gawky teenager draped over a movie theater seat), the first cramp struck. It felt like a blow from the dull side of a meat-cleaver.
Jessie threw her head back, sending a fine mist of perspiration flying from her head and hair, and shrieked. As she was drawing breath to repeat the cry, the second cramp struck. This one was much worse. It felt as if someone had dropped a glass-encrusted noose of cable around her left shoulder and then yanked it tight. She howled, her hands snapping shut into fists with such sudden savagery that two of her fingernails splintered away from the quick and began to bleed. Her eyes, sunk into brown hollows of puffy flesh, were squeezed tightly shut, but tears escaped nevertheless and went trickling down her cheeks, mixing with the tunnels of sweat from her hairline.
Keep pedaling, toots-don't stop now.
"Don't you call me toots!" Jessie screamed.
The stray dog had crept back to the rear stoop just before first light, and at the sound of her voice, its head jerked up. There was an almost comical expression of surprise on its face.