Promise Bridge by Eileen Clymer Schwab Read Free Book Online Page B

path in the meadow. What are you doing up here?”
    “Marcus came down the mountain last night. Livetta is sick.”
    “I know,” he said, nudging through the gap in the rocks. “I was here before dawn.”
    Taken aback by the thought of Colt initiating such action, I helped him push his hefty sack through the hole and followed him in. Entering the cave on my hands and knees, I looked up and found myself surrounded by a sea of black faces. From my crouched position, I watched as they parted for Colt to walk toward the rear of the cave. There, Livetta shivered in Marcus’s arms as he stroked her forehead with a wet rag.
    The group turned their guarded eyes back to me. There were seven new runaways in all, including a stern boy who looked to be a few years younger than I, and a proud, glaring woman with a motherly arm around his shoulders. Fidgeting in the shadows to my left was a sad and weary mulatto woman with two quadroons clinging to her waist, and a robust, gray-haired mammy with her stocky son propping her up at the elbow. Thoughts of the previous day played out in my mind, when unseen companions had scattered away through the tall grass, leaving Marcus and Livetta to face their fate alone. I had assumed they were long gone, but obviously they had stayed near enough to return once it was deemed safe. Now, in an air of bitter scrutiny, not one among them moved to assist me as I hoisted myself onto my feet.
    “Hannah, come and give me a hand.”
    I straightened my disheveled dress, and as I passed through the united front, I handed my small bundle of griddle cakes to the young mother. The older of her two children, a girl, pulled at her mother’s blouse with desperate hunger shaking her small, frail body.
    “Lillabelle,” the woman said gently. “We is all like kin now, together like this. So we gots’ta give up some to feed t’others.”
    With that, the attention on me dissipated into a tangle of hands reaching out to the woman who shared the modest meal equally among them.
    Marcus looked over at me when I knelt down between him and Colt at Livetta’s side. Her dark skin was taut and ashen. Her marble eyes stared blankly, focused on nothing. It was clear the germ had taken hold of her. The gentleness of Marcus’s brotherly comfort wobbled my heart. I could barely take my eyes from his tender intent, until Colt opened the wooden box tucked under his arm. He ran his fingers across the sleek, shiny knives glimmering in the sunbeams that pierced down through the rocky ceiling.
    “Gracious be, Colt. What are you doing?”
    “I boiled them at the house. I must open her wound and remove the pellet.”
    Marcus’s face clouded over as Colt’s words sank in. “You mean you is fixin’ to cut Livetta open?”
    “I will make a small incision to remove the ball and flush the wound.”
    “Can’t let you do that,” Marcus said. “Jes’ fetch some powerful medicine from the big house to rid Livetta of the fever. Don’t want no cuttin’ and bleedin’.”
    Sensing more fear in Marcus’s resistance than I did blatant refusal, I offered what encouragement I could. “Colt knows what he’s doing, Marcus. He spent nearly six months in Richmond as an apprentice with Dr. Winford LaValle, one of Virginia’s finest.”
    I didn’t mention that Uncle Mooney had little respect for Colt’s compassion and desire to help others. He had agreed to the apprenticeship solely because he felt whatever medicinal training Colt brought back to West Gate could be put to use in tending to lame horses and containing any disease that threatened the hog population. Beyond that, it was not an endeavor he encouraged his son to pursue. Colt had been quite impassioned by it, but upon his return, at his father’s insistence, the small box of medical utensils and elixirs was regretfully tucked away. Uncle Mooney wanted all notions beyond the business of West Gate to be cast from Colt’s mind. Now and again, though, an urgent situation would