36. Take it Easy
Lighten up while you still can
don't even try to understand
Just find a place to make your stand
and take it easy*
She greeted him with a kiss on the cheek. "Hello, cousin," she whispered.
They met at the apothecary, like young folks courting. She'd had to send word through "Doc" Appleby, who had told Miz Tisdale who had passed the information on to old Tom McDougall, and it had gone on from there until it made its way to Cletus then Bo. Didn't sound like much to most people, and she figured she was lucky enough that the message for "Babe" to meet "the girl from the hill" at the apothecary for a fountain drink on Saturday evening had gotten through at all. And been understood.
Maybe she should have found a gentler way to break it to him. There for a second she was sure she'd killed him. Blank staring, no movement, not even—"Breathe, Babe,"—she suggested, because a body needed to do that if nothing else.
He didn't take her advice, but he did offer her a breathless smile, trembling at the edges. Pulled out a chair for her to sit in, but that was all under the pretense of being a gentleman. What he really wanted was an excuse to find his own seat.
Daisy wasn't as good at being a lady as she'd once been. She'd forgotten the small things, like being ushered into establishments ahead of her companion and clinging demurely to his arm. But she remembered how to sit quietly and fold her hands in front of her while Bo worked around to whatever he was going to say.
"Your papa said I was?" he finally managed to get out, his eyes glowing.
"He didn't have much of anything to say at all," she started, then got interrupted when Bo had to order them both a lemon soda-water.
"Unless you want orange or cherry?" the boy paused long enough to ask her.
"Lemon's fine," she answered, making sure to soften her smile with a shade of shyness. She'd honestly never had a soda-water and wasn't sure she even wanted one at all, but the charade she and Bo were presenting to the town required her to sip at something. A young couple out together for the first time, and she was supposed to be nervous.
The skinny youngster who had interrupted their conversation to find out what they wanted to drink moved on in awkwardly heavy footsteps that marked him as still figuring out his growing body. She guessed him to be a year or so younger than Bo, and wondered how long it would be before she saw his face, heavily marked by the blemishes of adolescence, on one side of the feud or the other.
"You was telling me about your papa," Bo prompted. Which was a perfectly reasonable thing for a beau to say to the girl he had intentions toward.
Daisy kept her own voice low, almost at a whisper, because what she had to say didn't exactly fit the courtship script. "He said you couldn't belong to Isaac, because he and Emma had a girl. Both she and her papa died of scarlet fever in seventy-nine."
"Oh," Bo answered, his eyes losing their glow and his face falling out of the smile he'd been wearing. Their lemon soda-waters arrived, and Bo dug around in his pockets for a few cents to pay the youngster who'd delivered them. Daisy had some money that she'd been given by her papa, but she couldn't pull it out. Not when she was acting the part of the girl, the one being treated to a special delicacy. No matter, she'd pay Bo back later. For her own drink at the very least.
They were alone again, with glasses of cool, fizzy liquid in front of them. Bo sipped at his and despite himself smiled a little. Daisy tried hers and understood why; it was good.
"He said if you was anybody's, you had to be Albert's. Katherine is childless, but Albert might have had a child. He don't know, because the last letter he got from him was back in seventy-six."
"So," Bo concluded, half-smile still on his face, but his eyes were sad. A little tired, too, and she was going to have to start looking out for him. The lad clearly had no sense of how to take care of himself. "Then it's a maybe."
Dang, the boy was really good at pretending to be on a date. He looked every bit like she was breaking his heart. (Maybe she was. She didn't mean to be.)
"Well, that's what he said. But then he showed me a tintype that he had of grandpa Jedediah from just before the war. I guess he had it made up for grandma Martha, so's she could look at him every day even if he wasn't there or something." She took another sip of her soda water and figured she and Bo needed to have dates here more often. She'd never tasted the like of this. Much better than what they all wasted time drinking at the saloon, and it was quieter here, too. "He could be your brother. Except I figure he's your grandpa, too."
There it was, the glow back on the boy's face, that grin popping out like a flower after the rain.
"He ain't as blonde as you, and papa said he probably wasn't as big across the shoulders," because she'd described Bo in every excruciating detail. And it had only been after her father initially rejected the notion that she'd realized how much she wanted it. Wanted Bo to be her baby cousin, to belong to her every bit as much as Luke did. To make his upbeat, trusting personality and sunny smile a part of her daily life. "But I can't see how two people could look so much the same and not be kin. So I don't know about Isaac or Albert or even Katherine, but I figure you're a Duke no matter how you look at it."
Bo was too big for this space. The chair under him looked thin and inadequate for the task of holding him still, the table between them could hardly bear the weight of his elbows. His arms were long and she could see that they just about itched to reach across the table and pull her into a gleeful hug, and his mouth wanted to holler out a happy yip or two.
And somehow, this oversized fellow managed to contain himself down to the smallest gesture, just a hand coming across the table to pat her much smaller one. She willed herself to blush like a proper lady, but it just wouldn't come. She diverted her eyes anyway, the way she'd seen girls do when they were supposed to be much too reserved to admit to liking a boy.
"Now I got something I got to tell you," he said. "You want another soda water?"
Yes, she did, but she didn't figure he could afford it, so she shook her head. "No, I just want to hear what you got to say."
He nodded, like he was resolving himself to something. "Our friend, the one that's been ailing?" Oh, he was so clever. There weren't any Hickorys anywhere in this place, just a few pairs of youngsters. But she knew better than anyone the way words could travel around the town until they fell into the wrong ears and caused irreparable damage.
"What about him?" probably came too quickly. Bo was turning out to be a better actor than she was. Maybe it was the dress. Or the corset or the dang shoes. She did a much better job of this as Yellow-eye.
"He got a fever. Doc said it was infection setting in."
"What?" she blurted, and he took her hand in his. Carefully, tentatively, like he wasn't sure he was allowed to. Patted it with his other hand as she lowered her eyes again. Forced herself to smile, crooked and nervous, and put on the airs of being a girl who was shocked by a naughty suggestion from her beau.
"He's going to be all right," Bo assured her, quietly. "Don't fret. Doc opened him up again—"
"No," she moaned.
"Yes, but it's all right, at least Doc thinks so. He didn't have to do nothing more than clean out the wound," that last word was a whisper, and maybe it was so they could keep their secrets to themselves and maybe it was because it was such an ugly word, and they both knew it. "Our friend seems to be doing better."
She wanted nothing more than to run out of here, to head straight to Doc Cooter's and see Luke. She wasn't sure whether she felt like hugging him or hitting him, but it didn't matter. She wasn't going to do either, not yet.
Because she'd already figured out the risk to Luke if she came and went from Doc Cooter's office. Bo could get away with it; he'd been a patient and friend of the doc his whole life. The town knew them to have spent time together since the child called Babe had been knee high to a boll weevil. But as a virtual stranger to town, Daisy had no excuse for a daily walk up Possum Hill. And if she went as Yellow-eye, there'd be immediate trouble.
"He'll be okay, sweetheart," Bo assured her. "You got to have faith in that."
She nodded, but felt tears come to her eyes anyway.
"Come on," Bo whispered, standing and stepping around to take her elbow. Somehow or other, she found her feet and let him lead her to the door. "I'll walk you home."
"Home?" she whispered after they had passed through the apothecary door into the late afternoon light. "I ain't got no home." Unless Bo planned to take her back up the hill to her parents' house.
"I know," Bo answered, leading her down the steps to the street. They crossed over to the other side with the dust kicking up at their ankles, to where there were fewer people that might overhear what he was going to say. "I know all about not having a home." Of course he did. It made her flush up in embarrassment to realize how silly she must sound, complaining to an orphan of having no home. "The way I see it, you got about three choices. First, we can go up to the old school and get you changed into your other clothes."
"No." She was in no condition to go back to camp and face the men that she and Luke had abandoned. They'd have questions of the unanswerable nature. "That don't seem like a good idea."
"Well then, you can bunk in with Miss Mabel over the saloon. She'll let you stay there one night before she puts you to work."
"Bo," she snapped, "I ain't that kind of a girl." No, she was an entirely different kind of girl. The sort that would dress up like a boy for three years so she could shoot guns at other boys.
"All right, then, we got to go this way." And Bo made a left turn towards Daniel's Creek.
Luke was what—sick? Infected, and she knew a little about that. Gangrene could set in and then it would just be a matter of time. If it was his finger or even his hand, she'd figure he could do without it, and the doc could just cut it off. But his shoulder; she wasn't sure there was anything to be done. Bo said he was going to be okay, but what did the well-meaning boy know? He was too kind, too gentle to even imagine the kind of mutiny that Luke's body was probably committing against itself.
Tears crowded into her eyes again, and she watched the dirt under her feet grow blurry, felt the track of one in the breeze across her cheek. Felt Bo pat her hand, heard the voices of people passing by and hoped none of them were looking too closely at two lovers strolling the streets together. Stepped up when she felt Bo's arm raise under her fingers, stepped up again and again and again. Heard the door open, and then the voice.
"Pastor Jesse, this is Miss Daisy. She's in town visiting afflicted kin and can't stay with them because they're too sick. Can you take her?"
And felt herself get folded into heavy arms, her breath coming in gasps as she was held against a warm, soft chest.
"She'll be safe with me, Babe," Pastor Jesse's voice said as he held onto her.
* "Take it Easy" © 1972, music and lyrics by Jackson Browne and Glenn Frey