“YOU GET THE LAST ONE, Timothy,” Pa yelled as his son struggled under what the boy thought was an unbearable load of traps and the carcasses of two beavers and two otters. He loved being out with his father but always thought that Pa, in his efforts to teach him these age-old woodsmen survival skills, was really just using him as a pack mule.
“The last one should be just around this next bend if I remember right,” Jethro called back. For beaver and otter, Jethro had learned from Manfred Wilson, an old-time trapper further up the Sequatchie, to set his foothold traps at the end of the otter trails, concealing them in three to four inches of water at the base of the trail.
“Yes, sir,” Timothy mumbled to himself. He knew better than to talk back . . . at least not out loud.
As they approached a boulder-strewn stretch of the river and the large stump that marked the position of their last trap, they noticed a new sight out on one of the larger rocks in the middle of the waterway. At first, both of them thought it was just some jumbled leaves and branches that had washed down in the last storm. But on second glance, it seemed to have more of a definite shape to it.
“Pa!” Timothy shouted. “It’s a man!” The boy gladly dropped his load on the bank and splashed through the shallow water, not missing a step.
After pausing in fatherly frustration to straighten the pile of precious pelts, Jethro quickly followed a few steps behind. It was definitely a man—a fisherman, by his outfit. His clothes, though recognizably new and of the latest outdoors fashion, were torn in numerous places, one pant leg split high up on his thigh. He was mostly still soaked through but was drying in spots, causing a mottled appearance to his nearly shredded clothing.
For a moment, both of them were confused by the shape of his pale, exposed leg.
“Pa, does that man have two knees on that leg?” Timothy asked.
“Oh no!” Pa gasped.
A moment later, Timothy spun around and retched into the rushing water.
The man had fortunately been washed onto an upwardly sloping rock, but just before sliding up on it, his foot had apparently hooked under a log wedged against the leading edge of the rock. His body had then twisted in the strong eddy formed around the rock, swinging around almost 180 degrees. The resulting tenting, spiral fracture of his thigh was hideous to behold.
Jethro noticed a pair of tortoise-shell plastic, round-rimmed glasses suspended around his neck with a black elastic headband. He positioned them back on his face and then returned to the man’s neck to check for a carotid pulse. What he felt was rapid and weak. Fortunately, however—whether it was the current or some last effort by the man—at least most of his body was above the surface of the icy water. Otherwise, he would surely have died from shock.
“Son, go get that rope we tied the traps together with!” Jethro shouted, trying to snap his son out of his own shock. “Timothy! Move!” he had to yell again over the rush of the water.
The boy stumbled off backward at first, still staring at the body . . . and the odd, sharply bulging skin of his leg. Then he fully grasped his mission, turned, and nearly ran across the surface of the water. When he returned, his father was checking for any other possible wounds.
“Now grab him under his armpit and help me get him to shore,” Jethro said when he had finished scanning over the man. “Then you’ll have to run like the devil to fetch your Ma and Uncle Zeke.”
Between the two of them, they half walked, half dragged the unknown fisherman off the rock and to the nearest shore, laying him in the shade on some matted grass where a deer had bedded down the night before. Then, on Pa’s cue, Timothy was off into the woods like a rabbit, and Jethro went to work doing a more careful check of the man.
Not long after Jethro had finished checking the man over and trying to fashion dressings from strips of his shirttail and fluff from some dried cattail growing nearby, he heard his son returning, followed by Jethro’s wife Mary and a neighbor they had come to call “Uncle Zeke.”
Mary had brought an old olive-green army blanket and an equally worn quilt, along with a bottle of pump water for the return trip. Between the four of them, they fashioned a stretcher of sorts and muscled the wounded man up through the woods with adrenaline-powered strength to their cabin, hoping against hope that their efforts were not too late.
* * *
Any identification the wounded man might have had with him was either lost in the river or maybe back at some campsite or hotel. So, though the Bentons had thoroughly checked his pockets, he remained a stranger.
The anonymous fisherman lay unconscious the rest of the day and into the late evening. The family, including the two young daughters of the clan, tried to go about their business as if nothing was different but kept casting curious glances at the unknown man lying beneath the kerosene lamp on the cot along the wall. The children understood implicitly that dinner that night would consist of whatever they themselves could scrounge and prepare from the larder and root cellar. Ma and Pa had other obligations. They were raised not to question kindness shown to strangers—no matter how it might inconvenience them.
As the day wore on, Mary said, “Jethro, we’ve got to get him to a hospital.”
“I wish we could, but you know how far that would be,” he replied, a note of desperation in his voice. “The trip might kill him.”
They both stared at the stranger in helpless silence for several moments.
“Then you better send Timothy to fetch Annie Simpson,” Mary finally said. “You know how she is with tending animals and birthing babies. She might know what to do.”
“But it’s past nightfall,” Pa replied.
“That boy can find his way; he knows these woods like a fox.”
Jethro nodded. “I s’pose you’re right,” he said. “Timothy,” he called.
The boy stood across the room, leaning his six-foot frame against the mantle, staring into the coals of the neglected fire before looking at Pa and saying, “Yes, sir?”
“Come on over here,” Jethro said. “We got another job for you.”
About two hours later, Timothy came back up the path, followed by an older lady, both burdened with several canvas bags of supplies. She looked more like a homeless beggar than a nurse/midwife.
“Oh, Annie, I’m so glad you could make it!” Mary called from the glow of the open cabin door.
“Well, almost didn’t,” Annie answered. “Sarah Henderson up Baker Ridge had a false labor, which almost kept me there overnight.” She stepped over the threshold. “Now, where’s the patient?”
Within moments, the woman had the blanket peeled back and was examining the man’s wounds, gently pulling away the packing Jethro had fashioned by the river.
“I’m mighty thankful you got to him when you did, else he’d be too far gone to save,” Annie said, raising his eyelids and checking his pupils. “But we have to get his wounds cleaned out and redressed with some proper material before he gets infected. Then we’ll talk about resetting that fracture while he’s still out cold, lest his entire thigh literally fill with blood, and then he’d bleed out inside his own leg.”
In no time, they had boiled water over the fire, cleansed his wounds, and now Annie was palpating the grossly disfigured thigh, trying to evaluate the broken femur. Shortly afterward, Jethro and Timothy positioned themselves at the end of the cot per Annie’s instructions. Then, on her command, they were to pull straight down on the leg as hard as they could to separate the thigh bone far enough for her to try to realign the broken ends. Lying nearby were two strong birch staves Timothy had carved to tie on each side of the leg as splints once the bone had been set.
“Okay, get ready,” Annie said. “He may still scream if he’s not completely unconscious. Don’t let that alarm ya none. We gotta do this careful but quick-like. . . . Now, straight down—no twisting, or you’ll tear him all up inside.”
The scene was a strange one. Dim light shone down from the overhead lamp. The two young girls huddled in the shadows, their eyes glinting in the lamplight but their bodies invisible in the gloom. The two women stood at the head of the cot, the two men at the foot, half-hunkered over to keep from bumping their heads on the beams above but with eyes glued on the midwife-turned-medic in their midst. They awaited her signal.
Annie nodded briskly at them and arched her shoulders upward to give her better purchase over the protruding bone. The men went suddenly shoulder to shoulder as they hauled straight back on the fisherman’s ankle, nearly pulling him off the bed. But Mary had already braced herself and clutched the fisherman under the armpits to keep that from happening. The medicine woman quickly thrust both hands deep into the wound.
As she held him tight, Mary glanced down at the stranger’s closed eyes and thought she saw a slight muscle twitch in his eyelids. But other than that, thankfully he made no other movement or sound—other than a deep, low whimper. With what they were doing to his leg, Mary had expected to hear the cabin echo with agonizing screams.
Annie, on the other hand, knew that the silence meant the man was in a deep coma, one that might be hard for him to rise from.
* * *
After the makeshift operating table was cleared and cleaned, and their patient was made as comfortable as possible, Annie and Mary bunked down near the head of the bed on a couple of straw ticks and blankets for a night of shallow, watchful sleep. The men did likewise across the room by the chimney. Meanwhile, the girls had already been in dreamland for several hours. For them, it had been a day of unusual excitement, but they were blissfully unaware of the concern haunting the minds of the adults lying in the dark nearby. Annie had informed them that the fisherman should be waking soon; otherwise, she feared the possibility of an unseen brain injury or shock, resulting in the loss of her patient.
The next morning dawned cold, damp, and cloudy. Ma was up early, as usual, to make coffee and prepare the chicken feed for Timothy to take outside. The son’s first chore, after visiting the privy out back, would be to round up eggs from their ragged assortment of reds, leghorns, and Wyandottes for their breakfast.
“When you’re done with that,” the father called out the door to the boy, “be sure to go get those pelts we left down by the river yesterday. They’re worth three month’s groceries at least!”
The midwife was up with the dawn as well. Annie had already checked the man’s forehead for fever, examined the dressings for oozing, and repositioned the leg with some pillows to keep it raised, immobilized, and to reduce the swelling. Fortunately, she saw no sign of fever. That was her main concern. Mostly from here, it would be a waiting game. She and the Bentons had mostly to wait and pray the man would regain consciousness soon and begin to eat and drink. Otherwise . . .
The day dragged on with the usual chores for the family. There was more trap setting for Pa and the boy. The girls helped Ma in the garden—most of the plants had germinated and were nearly ready for thinning. Their little flock of goats needed milking.
At one point, Ma stopped for a moment, straightening up, facing the sun as it rose higher between the trees. She tucked a stray, graying hair up under her headscarf and prayed silently, “Lord, you’ve given us a good life up here in the hills. Good sturdy children. Food in our stomachs. And we’re very thankful. Now you’ve brought this stranger in need into our home. Lord, please give us the wisdom to tend to him right and get him back on his way. Keep away the fever and just help him to wake up. And we’ll give all glory to you, Father.” Then she bent to pick off a hungry caterpillar headed for her cabbage plants.
Sensing the waiting game in progress, the two girls set up their own board games around the base of the stranger’s bed. Ma didn’t mind really. She figured they’d be the first to know if he stirred, and they’d come a-running to fetch her. And though Annie had other “patients” in the surrounding hills, she kept vigil as well.
Finally, approaching noon, the family heard a slight groan and a stirring from the far side of the cabin as they prepared their midday meal on the trestle table by the fire. At first, Ma thought it was just her youngest complaining under her breath about the vegetables she had to eat before her dessert. Then, when they all heard it again, forks and spoons clattered to the table, and food was abandoned. Pa held the children back from rushing to the man’s bed, even as the midwife and Ma moved swiftly to his side, checking him over, reaching for a cloth to mop his brow. Perhaps this was the sign they’d been praying for.
* * *
The dreams had been beautiful. Larry had been floating in a cool lake, surrounded by water plants like lily pads and such. Crickets and frogs sang in wonderful harmonies around him. He even saw—or rather sensed—mermaids gliding through the clear water a fathom or two below him.
Then, like a rotting fruit in time-lapse, the sun overhead faded to an orange-red, then dark-ale brown, then to near blackness with only a faint, throbbing, ebbing glow to the side of his field of vision. His dreamy yet fearful reasoning thought the vague light was coming from some kind of fluid fire, some lava flow, though he could feel no warmth. Then the throbbing would fade again to blackness. Was it the breathing of some infernal beast—slowly in, slowly out?
Then there were the occasional sounds. High, chittering tones. Low monotonous drones. They danced in and out of the syrupy glow like some continuo part played one moment on cello, the next on piccolo.
Blowing through the scene were autumn leaves that tickled his ears like strange birds. During one such whispery rush, he heard what he thought were words, but they made no sense. His mind captured a pattern: “My Ford is a leopard,” mixed with other word-tones, repeated in a soothing, lilting rhythm. His dreams created the combination, though strange, and his rational mind made no rebuttal.
Suddenly there came a sound he could identify. A little girl’s voice, nearly piercing his left eardrum: “Ma! Pa! He’s waking up! He’s waking up! His eyes are moving!” He heard little feet bound across a wooden floor, then quickly merge with vague shapes situated between him and the now familiar orange glow on the other side of the mystery space he floated in.
Within moments several dark shapes crowded over him. Then he felt hands on his shoulders. It hurt to try and focus his vision, so Larry let his eyelids fall shut.
“Sir?” came the authoritative voice of what sounded like an older woman. “Young man? Can you hear me? Can you squeeze my hand?”
Larry sank back into the dark waters of his dream for a few more moments, then felt the unwelcome shaking again. He almost reached the point of irritation, but even his annoyance receded as fast as it came. Then, as he rose to the surface again, he became aware of an extreme dryness in his mouth and an even deeper emptiness in his stomach.
“Waaaa-terrrr,” he croaked, keeping his eyes closed.
No response.
“Waaaaterrr!” He tried to make it louder this time but wasn’t sure of his success.
Within moments, though, he heard a harsh, rhythmic squeaking of metal on metal back over his left shoulder, accompanied by the glorious sound of splashing water. The next thing he knew, strong, calloused hands were behind his neck, raising his head to meet a cold tin cup full of wetness. Larry gulped and gasped and soaked the front of his muslin shirt and the rough blanket tucked under his chin.
“Whoa! Slow down, stranger!” he heard a male voice above him.
Larry rested again and tried again to tense his front neck muscles to raise his head. The effort felt Herculean; his head weighed a ton! But the unknown hands once more directed his mouth toward the cup.
He tried to open his eyes again, but his vision was still blurry so he shut them once more. The blankets suddenly seemed sweltering, and then as if someone had read Larry’s mind, they were drawn back from his torso. Then he could feel his thigh being probed by another set of strange hands. Stabbing, searing pain was his next known sensation. He hissed out loudly, and the hands withdrew.
“Make sure those splint wrappings are tight,” the authoritative female voice said. “We don’t want that bone shifting as he starts moving.”
Then a different female spoke: “Son, get a clean set of sheets from off the shelf there.”
“Yes, ma’am,” a husky male voice responded promptly.
After a day where the clock seemed frozen, the whole house seemed to be suddenly animated with a new mission, as each family member found some effort to contribute. And, admittedly, their curiosity was also revived as to who this strange, ill-fated sportsman actually was.
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