The father's glassy eyes met Vanessa's and darted back down to the bundle in his arms. Her sensitive hearing clued her in to the hoarse, shallow breathing sounds coming from the bundle. "When did this start?" she asked, rummaging in her leather bag for a stethoscope.
"I don't know, he just, he just, he can't breathe," the poor man choked out, cradling the baby and holding it toward her. "He can't breathe!"
Vanessa pressed the cold steel button against the child's soft chest, prompting him to wail, or try to wail, in a sort of choked and shrill way. She concentrated on the thump, the windy sound of the lungs as the baby tensed between cries. Making note of a pulse, she closed her eyes and listened for a long moment, the baby's cries dying down. The woman and three teen daughters from Westwood staying with the family sat on cushions in the corner, watching, and, Vanessa assumed, waiting for their turn to be looked over as well. And they'd have to wait. The baby was in bad shape. Vanessa listened to the wheezing thing and thought about the pages in her book, wondering what would help most.
"Don't you touch him! Don't you touch him!"
Looking over her shoulder, Vanessa saw the new mother stagger toward her, face red and angry as hell. "You shouldn't be out of bed, you'll-"
"Get out you bitch!" she screamed out, batting the hands and cold metal away from her son. "Get away, you, you...you took away my...You killed my only baby, now I can't have any more, you...you..."
Vanessa stepped back, out the door, hands in front of her, bag tucked under her arm. She'd had to do a tubal ligation while performing surgery, rendering the woman unable to have another child. It was necessary, and the man had nodded approval at the time.
"If I hadn't and you'd become pregnant again-"
"Shut up!" the woman screamed.
"Get back in bed, you'll tear-"
"You evil woman!"
Vanessa became aware of the gathering crowd as she stepped back, into the main street of Bering. Bea hid behind her grandfather, whose bitter gaze fixed on the ground.
"Sir, that child has-"
"Save your breath," the grandfather interrupted, thick, white brows furrowed.
Vanessa's cheeks tinged hot. "I was asked here."
"My son-in-law's a damn naive man, and this child didn't know any better," he replied, shaking slightly as he spoke.
Vanessa took a few steps away. She was stopped by a villager and a wanderer, eager to be tended to. "My arm," one insisted, holding open a bandage on their forearm for her to inspect.
"Keep soaking in salt water, thirty minutes, three times a day. It's healing well."
"Miss, my son."
Vanessa recognized this tan-skinned woman as the mother of the young man she'd sat with the day before. "How is his recovery going?" she asked.
The woman's face was sullen.
"He's succumbing to it?" Vanessa asked, confused.
"Nobody survives stony fever," someone nearby shouted.
"Nobody."
"She can't do anything for poor Javier."
"Poor Javier."
"Well, I can do something for the pain," Vanessa offered softly, expecting the woman to usher her inside her home.
Instead, the woman stared, agape. "What'd you do to him?" she asked, weakly.
The gathering of a few was growing, now over ten, in the cooling streets of Bering. Faces peeked out from windows, and people stood in their doorways. It was a small town, one where you only had to open a window or a door to know your neighbor's secrets. Low, hushed murmurs wafted about like smoke from a small fire.
"I'm not sure what you mean. I can offer to help his pain. Would you like me to-"
"The stony fever, it went away," the woman yelped. "What did you do!?"
"I know what she did, mommy!" A small boy clutching a stuffed bear sewn from old socks tugged at his mother's dress. "Navi told me!"
The older boy nodded, fingers squeezing the crucifix around his young neck. He was not yet a man, just getting pimples. "I saw it."
The murmuring crowd gathered closer to hear. They hadn't a clue how somebody could get rid of something as deadly certain as stony fever. Vanessa resisted the urge to look about her, to see the gathering people, but she could hear the shrieking young mother behind her. Apparently no one was comforting her or asking her back into bed, where she should be.
Navi waited until the crowd quieted before he spoke. "I thought she was praying over him, but she has this book with these satanic symbols in them, and she was staring at them all crazy-like. Mumbling in tongues, putting hexes on my brother. He was about dead, and she raised him. Like she's making him her servant, you know, she raised him from the grave and she put this hex on him. God was going to take him! But she yanked him back!"
The young boy's fervor infected the crowd. More of the wanderers and townsfolk stepped into the street as the sky blackened to night.
"From the hands of God himself! My brother was in the sweet embrace of the Lord, and this, this heathen witch woman, she cursed him back, hexing him to her bidding!"
"That's ridiculous," Vanessa tried to argue, her words lost in the din of the crowd. "I don't have any control over-"
"Is he even human anymore?" the tan mother moaned.
"From the hands of the Lord..."
"Oh, God save us!"
"What have you done?"
"I'm just using medicine, okay-"
"Helen, what if Javier's got struck by a miracle?"
"Miracle?"
"Helen, maybe our prayers were answered, maybe we're taking this wrong!"
The crowd murmured on that point, and Navi, still reeling in his fervor and passion, stormed past his mother. "I'm no liar!" he screamed, fists balled at his sides. "I saw this witch woman curse my brother! Show your true self, you creature, you foul thing! Show your devil horns!" In a quick swipe, he yanked at the scarf around Vanessa's head, and her pins spun away.
Many of them gasped, some cried out in surprise. They shouted that the boy was right!
"Witch!"
"...killed my grandbaby, took the womb from my only daughter!"
"...why my cat died, she..."
"Demon!"
"These things aren't true! Let me alone; I'm no harm to you!"
"See, I knew she was evil from first sight!" a man called out, whose voice Vanessa recognized as one of the men of Westwood, one of the first to grab a canteen from her belongings. "I couldn't put my finger on it! But you knew! You knew she was a devil woman! Look at her!"
"Sold her soul for beauty!"
"Witch!"
A small rock flew past her side. She noticed a few men walking out of their homes with shotguns and pistols. Women were clutching at their children who wept aloud. Grabbing her shoulders to position her sleeves at a distance easy to see, Vanessa looked down at her embroidery. The threads' sheen stood out in the moonlight and she concentrated on its patterns, the quick pace of the heart drumming at her arms.
"Look at her! The evil in her!" the Westwood man continued, jabbing a finger toward her angrily. His face grew slack, and he gasped in a breath, then another, and fell weak onto his hands. "My...my chest..." he stammered.
An armed man, near him, fell as though fainting, into the arms of a couple of women. A strong young man to her left also fainted onto the sandy ground.
"Oh, God, she's hexing us, too!" someone cried out, as the crowd as a whole boiled into chaos. The accusations of "Witch!" and "Demon!" and such blended together into a roar of fear and anger, spat out of fearful and angry mouths on sweaty faces.
Vanessa stared at her sleeves, panting from effort but standing her ground, and as another man's knees buckled a few more rocks flew at her. One cracked her temple, and in a dull, soundless blast of light, her focus was lost. The fabric of her dress was a blur of gray. Looking up, she saw the splotches of light and dark that were the surging crowd, but couldn't make out the faces.
OOO
Meryl stared down at her half-eaten dinner, sure she heard something that time. This was not good; not good at all. "Vash, it's late, can you please escort us home?"
"Esh-cort..." Vash repeated through a mouthful of rice. He saw the look on Meryl's face, which surely spoke volumes, and Millie's expression became serious all of a sudden as well. A shout on the wind was hard to miss. "Okay. Knives, I'll be back in a few minutes."
Knives looked up from where he'd moved his chair, into a corner away from the table. "I don't see why-"
Vash swallowed his food, wincing. He pulled on a coat weighed down heavily on one side by steel. "Just this time, that's all. I'll see if Vanessa's done in town. I'll walk her back."
Grunting in reply, Knives ceased arguing.
OOO
Vanessa stared down the barrel of a shotgun, the man holding it growling for her to stop hexing people, that he wouldn't miss. Calm as she could muster, Vanessa implored him, "You don't have to do that." Her hand went over the end of the barrel gently. "This is a mistake."
"Thou shall not suffer a witch to live!" someone shouted. Others agreed.
"A trial!" an older woman cried out. "Give her a trial! We're good Christian people!"
Some, including the eagerly watching young children, looked deeply disappointed by that, but a few adults nodded that, yes, that was reasonable.
OXO
Vash and the girls rounded the corner that put them out of sight of the little clay house. Their pace quickened, and they stopped pretending everything was fine.
"I've got a bad feeling about this," Meryl mumbled. "Can you hear it?"
"Yeah," Vash responded, referring to the sounds of shouting and such that he couldn't hear very clearly yet. The clamor was somewhere in the south of town, on Bering's main street, which they would have to walk a ways yet and round another corner to see. "Listen. I want you to go straight home and stay there till everybody calms down."
"We're coming with you, we can-"
"No, Meryl," Vash interrupted, "No, you have to go home and...and you should lay flat on the floor. Just in case."
"Okay, Mr. Vash." Millie nodded, grabbing Meryl's hand.
Vash jogged away from them, trusting they would do as he'd asked. Finally rounding the corner to main street, Vash saw the crowd, heard the angry buzz. He walked up to them as casually as he could muster, tapping someone on the shoulder and asking what was going on.
"We've got a bona fide witch on-" The man stopped, shoving the shoulder of the woman near him. "Hey, it's one of the gays!"
Smirking, Vash moved past him and wedged himself deeper into the crowd.
"Shoulda known, the witch and the sodomites!"
Heart sinking, he gazed over the shoulders and heads of the crowd to see Vanessa in the middle, blood trickling down her nose, grasping at a shotgun a man was aiming her way. "What...What'd she do?" he croaked.
The reply came in clashing shouts about evil and hexing and spells upon them, gestures made at ears, 'keep out of it, sodomite,' and the like. He surveyed the crowd, guessed that most of the town population was present, saw the sheriff's badge on a man brandishing a revolver and looking mad. A couple of men were being carried away, limp as ragdolls. "My son! My son!" a woman was wailing, and a young boy near her threw his hands up in the air and yelled out gospel.
He couldn't let his twin hear this commotion, come to join this fray, else everyone in Bering would surely die. Vash opened his mouth to yell something, but stopped when he saw an older man with tear-soaked cheeks approach, holding the hand of the little girl who'd run to get Vanessa that night. The man's lip trembled, and many in the crowd hushed and stared on to see what he'd say.
Vash's hand moved away from the Colt within his clothes. He hoped he wouldn't need it, after all.