“In My Father's house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you."
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He sat there alone on the hot steps, head lowered, sun baking down on his dusty hair. He was waiting. He wasn't sure yet for...what. All he knew was that he had this vague sense of expectation gnawing in his gut...worse than hunger. Licking his lips, he wondered how long it had been since he'd had a drink.
No matter. A drink was not going to alleviate this particular need. He buried his face in his hands then slowly spread his fingers apart just a fraction, just enough so's he could study the broken edge of the step his boots rested on. So concentrated was he on this activity, he failed to note her shadow as she approached and stood about 5 feet out from him, studying the way his hair swung down over his cheek.
"She left quite a large mess, didn't she?"
Cort looked up to stare at a petite woman in green calico shading with one hand her eyes from the glare of the morning sun, a splash of color in the haze of smoke still drifting from Ellen's explosions. In the other hand, she held a glass of water - blessed water! He felt his face crack into a smile, wanting to leap up and swing her about; but already his muscles locking up, as if he had spent a week galloping over the Arizona desert, feeling the Devil himself. The rancid wood-smoke leached away the last reserves of his will. He hoped the figure before him was not a pain-induced mirage, one last swipe by Satan.
When he didn't readily respond, staring at her with the uncertain look of a starved man, she sat down next to him and handed him the glass, tucking her legs up under her voluminous skirt. He examined the glass of elixir for a moment and then swallowed the contents with greed.
"I've been wanting to bring that to you for so long," she murmured as Cort held the empty glass to his forehead in silent prayer. "God knows Ellen never thought of you."
God, but he was tired!
The glass pressed to his skin felt cool and damp beads of its condensation dripped toward his eyebrows. He made no move to wipe them away, but simply closed his eyes, not wanting to see the soot, the smoke that still hung heavily in the air. He wanted to say something to her, to thank her. The sense of her presence, even with his eyes shut, filled the air beside him and some deep part of him wanted to know why that should be so. What had she said? She'd been wanting to bring a drink to him?
He squeezed his eyes more tightly closed, trying to think, but even his brain felt dusty and too worn to make connections. Then sudden pain shot through his right hand and he jerked his whole body in response.
Rachel caught the glass as it tumbled from his grip, hoping he wouldn't see the hot tears of anger in her eyes as she set it down to take his trembling hand. She bent her head over the mangled wrist, avoiding his gaze as she reached for his left hand as well to examine the damage. Both wrists were raw and black, fingers gnarled, deeply bruised, broken.
Ratsy. That bastard had crushed at least one finger.
"You need looking after," she said, not as successful in keeping the emotion from her voice. "Can you stand and walk inside? Just ... hold on a second, okay?"
He watched her get up, liking the swish of her green skirt. It was so blessed...female. His instinct was to rise when she did, but he couldn't seem to get his legs to lift his body. When she asked him to hold on a second, he just nodded weakly and leaned his temple against the rough wood railing, closing his eyes again, concentrating on breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth. It helped settle the pain a little. Not much. But a little, and even that was good.
He hadn't slept, really slept, in days now, and he felt a gentle fog coming, trying to wrap itself about him. The pain in his hand kept piercing through, though, like some blasted searchlight, keeping him from slipping into the comfortable grey clouds. Vaguely, he heard the footsteps of people beginning to pass by, checking on what was left of Redemption. Someone even paused, speaking to him, but the words seemed to come from far away, muffled by the fog, and he kept his eyes closed...just breathing.
The man needs medicine and seclusion and fast! Rachel thought, wiping away the moisture in her eyes as she marched into the saloon behind them. She needed her satchel for the items she had packed in it before she came here, before the Warp gave her access to Redemption.
She came to a dead halt in the doorway of the saloon, finding that the owner stood at the window to her left, looking out at the devastated town with a mixture of satisfaction and grim fatalism. His daughter sat at a table nearby, her own face hardened by a reality almost too much for a fourteen year old to bear.
"I need water," Rachel announced, not caring who decided to pay attention, just so long as one of them did. "I need water in a pan and towels."
The saloon owner turned to look at her as if she had risen up from between the floorboards. The girl stared at her, eyes half lidded with disdain.
"I need water in a pan," Rachel repeated, biting back an urge to scream at them both. A mad thought that maybe the reason why Herod so successfully took over the town was because of the utter lack of incentive in its residents. “There's a man out there who helped save your town. Now he needs your help."
"Yes!" Horace said, coming out of his reverie at last. "Water. Towels. I'll go get some." He disappeared into the back.
Rachel turned to the girl, trying not to let her latent hostility cause her to lose her own temper.
"I need your help, too, Katie," Rachel intoned, flatly. As if to emphasize her urgency, she turned to look out the door. She could see Cort's back still hunched over, pain and exhaustion radiating from him. Hold on, Cort, hold on!
“I have a satchel iup in my room. Would you please go get it for me? I'd get it myself, but I want to watch over him so he doesn't collapse or decide he doesn't need help."
The footfalls kept passing by, gentle thuds in the deep dust of the single street in Redemption. Soft as they were, the sound of them knocked hard against the cells of his brain and he turned his head more toward the railing. The young woman had been gone for...how long? He had no idea. He wanted to wonder what she was doing but it was too much effort to focus in on any single thought.
So he let his mind drift, floating like the ash motes in the hot air, and found himself settling somehow in the cool shadows of the small chapel he'd come to know so intimately the last few years.
The edges of his mouth curved into the slightest of smiles. Ah, quiet, shade...peace.
"Let me stay, Father," he mouthed. "Please...let me stay."
He was going into shock, all the adrenalin that it had taken to get through the morning spent. Rachel could see it before she rounded him and knelt down in front of him to let him know it was time to move.
"Cort? Cort, you have to hang on just a bit more...please, just come with me and let me clean you up a bit. Just a few steps," she pleaded with him, taking him by the upper arms to coax him up. He opened green eyes that were fast losing their lucidity, but he seemed to be holding onto an amazing reserve of strength.
With a nod, he pushed himself up to a standing position, allowing Rachel to slip an arm around him and lead him into the saloon.
She guided him to the chair she had set up for him at a table just as the saloon keeper waddled in with a large ceramic bowl, a pitcher of water, and a few towels that had seen better days, but were crisp and clean. The young girl sidled in as well as Rachel propped one hand across the lip of the bowl and took a towel to wet one end and began bathing the misused wrist.
As gentle as she was, the touch of the towel hurt. Despite all his willpower, he winced. There was too little of him left now not to let the pain show. He felt a groan rising up his throat and pressed his lips tightly, trying vainly to contain it. The walk to the chair had been short, but had taken the little that remained of his strength. Neck muscles no longer able to support his head, he let his chin drop to his chest and would have slid sideways off the small chair were it not for a sudden reaching out of someone's arms.
"Please," he whispered into the darkness. "Let me stay."
“Lady, he's not doing so good," the saloon keeper's daughter informed Rachel and just as she turned to confirm that, Cort's head bowed forward until it fell onto the table. At least, it did so because she was able to catch him from a trajectory towards the floor. Rachel heard him mumble as she put him aright, letting his head rest on the table as she repositioned his hand over the basin and continued her ablutions. He was out cold.
It was just as well. The next step of this triage was not going to be pleasant for him anyway.
"Hand me my satchel," she told the girl, who did so with more interest than she let on. Rachel could feel the fourteen year old assessing her: did she measure up to Ellen?
You just watch what I do to Ellen if I ever get a chance to speak my mind to her, Rachel silently told the girl, digging in her bag for the items she knew would ultimately help Cort.
Bandages, ointments, a dark brown bottle filled with an oily substance, pungent with the fragrance of herbs and camphor; another dark glass bottle that she opened and poured from it a viscous liquid into the wash water. Swishing the water around, foam sprung up. Rachel returned to washing Cort's hands.
Despite the abuse they had suffered, she couldnt help noting the sturdy strength of his fingers, the broad palms that could be as gentle as they were deadly. For a brief, wildly perverse moment, she had a vision of those hands about her waist, picking *her* up, pulling her to him....
"What are you going to do with him once you do that?" the girl asked, now intent in watching Rachel clean away the grime. "It looks worse than it did before," she added, her freckled nose wrinkling.
Now came the tough part: realigning his broken fingers. Finger braces, bandages, a splint to hold his hand straight. With a deep sigh of trepidation, she acted quickly. Cort jerked with pain, even cried out, but never woke up. Soon, he had three fingers wrapped into splints, his entire hand secured to a larger one. The oil from the bottle she smeared as gently as she could into the wounds of his wrists, turning them deep red as blood rushed to confront the insult of the oils. Rachel knew it would have a burning sensation, but that with its use, the pain would eventually go away. She wrapped one wrist, then the other, when she was certain they were clean and free of debris.
"Can I put him in a room upstairs, somewhere that will be private, where he won't be disturbed? And where he can get a bath when he wakes up?" Rachel asked when she knew she had finished the first aid. The young teenager, having endured the whole spectacle, now dashed up the stairwell to determine just that.
Rachel couldnt resist looking down at Cort, his cheek resting on the wood table in the deepest slumber an exhausted man could have, an almost angelic face lurking beneath the soot and stubble clouding his face. Her heart hurt to see him so. Whatever his past, he didnt deserve this.
"A room is ready, miss," she heard Horace say. He had been behind his bar, watching Rachel, watching his daughter. He stood off to the side, as if he was ashamed to be so close to someone who had done what he could never do, yet anxious to repay Cort in whatever small way he could think of. Rachel noticed that he and his daughter walked wide circles around each other.
"I...I think I can carry him on my own, if'n you think you can't..." he said, as Rachel paused, trying to figure out how she, a five-foot-two lightweight, was to carry the six-foot gunfighter up a flight of stairs without injuring him further. Nodding, she followed him up the stairs to a large room in the back of the saloon - a veritable presidential suite by Redemption standards she thought as they eased the unconscious Cort into the bed. Suffice it to say, the gun-slinger priest could have all the sleep he needed until he was ready to deal with the rest of his injuries - physical and otherwise.
Hours flowed into one another, circling around, making patterns...never with any real awareness of their passage. Sometimes he dreamed, others he was in some place too deep for dreams to follow. Once, he roused enough to be aware of softness under him. How long had it been since his body had been embraced by a bed? But, no, he was wrong, and he smiled as he realized he was lying atop a bank of clouds that stretched from horizon to horizon with only the bluest blue above him.
Raising his hand, he intended to fill it with the blue, let it sift through his fingers...but, instead, there was sudden, searing pain as flames shot out of his flesh and his skin began to melt. He moaned, twisting, trying to get it to stop and began to sink into the clouds. Everything about him became misted grey, the fire subsided, replaced by a sense of great...lostness. He ran through the grey...looking for something. What? Something he had to find! Where had it gone?
He stopped, unable to remember what it was he was looking for, what it was he had lost. A bullet zinged past his ear and he ducked, tripping, falling into the depths of the grey, arms flailing. There was nothing to hold on to! Nothing to stop his plunge.
"No," he moaned as he fell...over and over and over. “Noooo."
Endless, weary no's.
