Page 42 of Head Room

After that she hadn’t spoken Gaelic.She hadn’t spoken English, either.She hadn’t spoken.

“Doesn’t she have people we can send her to?”

That was a new voice, one that sounded eager to wash its hands of her.

Head bent, Maggie stared at her own hands, and wished she could wash her hands of herself, too.

Oh...she wanted to wash her hands.There was dirt and blood and meat and ground berries and other material she didn’t want to think about packed under her nails and caked around them.The knuckles on her right hand were still cracked from that ill-judged attempt to fight off the beating from the chief’s woman.She couldn’t flatten her hands beyond a half-cupped position as they rested on her thighs because of the welts on the palms from another punishment.

She couldn’t remember the last time they’d been truly clean.

She concentrated, drawing down her brows, to haze out reality.Images came.Fresh soap, a soft towel and clean hands.She tried to pin them down.

A faint, misty image of a woman smiling, her hands gentle on a child not much more than a babe.Was that her?Was that the last time she’d been clean?That long ago?What had happened to the woman?Where had she gone?

She opened her eyes wide again, sharpening their focus on the reality of her dirty, damaged hands.The images hurt too much.

“No, no people, Captain.”That was the tall one, the one who frowned when the others called him “sir.”Except Peter.He never frowned at Peter.

His response recalled the question asked by the other soldier — the one called Captain by the tall one.Her thoughts had traveled far in the normal span between question and answer.

“Don’t you remember what those folks at the road ranch said?”the tall one continued.“She was bound over to Gregson when the cholera wiped out her people on the wagon train.Then she married him.”

“Lost her people, then had her husband and those little girls killed in front of her, then captured by the Indians...”Peter must be very young indeed.Under his horror, she caught a hint of thrill, yet also sympathy.

“Well, maybe this’ll give us ideas...”

Rough hands grabbed at the buckskin bag she had tied to her waist.Try as she might, Maggie couldn’t stop the instinctive flinch.

“Viess!”The tall one’s voice was like a whip — these men had cause to call him “sir.”

The rough hands released her bag and she heard the mumblings of the bearded one — Stelmen Viess — as he withdrew.Footsteps sounded startlingly loud against the wooden floor, so much louder than moccasins against earth or skins spread down for warmth.Someone crouched beside her.She kept her eyes on her hands.

“Mrs.Gregson?”The tall one used his other voice, not thesirone, but the soft one.The one that seemed to linger on words like it liked them.“Maggie?”

Her eyes almost flickered at that, but she caught the reaction in time.

“I guess this is your medicine bag, like we’ve been hearing about that the Indians carry.And I know that’s powerful, and no one else should be looking at it.But we need to do this to try to help you now.I’m going to take this bag, and look in it to see if there’s anything there that’ll give us ways to help you.Do you understand?”

“She don’t understand nothing,” came the grumble of the one called Stelmen Viess.“Medicine bag — didn’t take her long to become as much a heathen as they are.”

The tall one ignored that.His hands didn’t snatch at her bag, but patiently unworked the knot that attached it to her belt and slipped it free.

She didn’t fight him.It wasn’t, after all, a true medicine bag, not like the members of the tribe had.Chumani, who had been kind to her, had given her the bag to hold her few possessions.It offered no protection as Chumani had conveyed with gestures that her own bag did, but it was all Maggie had.

Yet she didn’t fight, for it would do no good.The tall one, the bearded one called Stelmen Viess, the young one called Peter, any of them could take from her all that she had, and she would not fight.

He didn’t take it away.Instead, he remained crouched at her side, where she could see, from the corner of her eye, the buckskin bag and his long hands as he opened it and delved his fingers inside.

First he drew out a piece of calico, no bigger than his palm, the colors forever stained by long-dried dirt.He laid that on the floor, not heeding someone’s recommendation from behind her to throw it in the fire.Then his hand brought out a bit of gold chain, about as long as her fist was wide, the links at either end broken off.He put that on top of the cloth.Next came a length of hard wood, the workings on it still rough — she’d had to be so careful.

“Good God, she was attempting to make a knife!”That was the voice of the wash-his-hands one.

“Wasmaking a knife, Captain,” corrected the tall one.“It would cut.”

Her third.The first had been found and taken away from her.The second, she’d been smart enough to hide in her medicine bag where the Indians wouldn’t look, and it had been sharp enough to bite through the rawhide they used to tie her each night.But she’d gone barely one day’s walk in the wilderness before they had found her, returned her to camp and taken that knife.

Last, the tall one drew out the remaining two slips of paper, and the pencil no longer than her thumb.