He touches McCaw’s shoulder, tries to say goodbye, but the doctor doesn’t stir. It feels strange to leave him like this. The two men made an odd team, but they did more good together in a few minutes’ time than Gilbert has otherwise done in his entire life.
“I’m down at Kemp’s smithy, on Locust Alley, if you want to send word about his condition. I’d appreciate it.”
She nods, and he turns to go, picking his way back up the aisle and trying hard not to look into the frozen faces of the dead. When he is nearly at the door of the church, he hears Mrs. Johnston call his name, and he turns to find her hurrying toward him.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Mr. Hunt, thank you. Truly. I won’t soon forget this. And neither will the rest of those women and their families, if I have anything to do with it.”
CECILY
Cecily hides in the treesbehind her parents’ cabin, listening to the sounds of the quarters.
Six cabins sit up alongside the woods in two neat rows, doors facing each other to form a short street. The arrangement is nice on summer evenings, when people stay up late, trading stories, but if there’s one thing it is not good for, it’s slipping home undetected.
Cecily can tell that everyone in the quarters is all stirred up. Constance and Millie, who sleep in the main house, must have passed what facts they know about the fire along to Woody, who works in the stables, because he’s down in the street, telling everybody about how Maria and Cecily haven’t come home and Master Price and Elliott are off looking for them. Among the people who have gathered, Cecily can make out the voices of Constance’s husband, Gregory, and Millie’s daughter, Justice, and even Rosie, who usually sleeps in the kitchen house but has come down to the quarters to see who knows what. What Cecily can’t hear is her parents’ voices, and she wonders if they’ve already been called up to the house.
She presses her ear to the slats of her family’s cabin and listens for either of them, but all she hears is her brother, Moses, telling one of their sisters to quiet down and go to sleep.
Cecily wishes she could be in multiple places at once, wants to be inside that cabin, tucking the girls into bed, and also up at the main house, where the Prices have no doubt given Della and Cecil the bad news. What she wouldn’t give to be able to whisper the truth in their ears, to save them from believing—even for an instant—that what the Prices say is true.
But it has to happen this way. She has to wait until her parents return to the cabin, until the children are asleep and the neighbors have taken themselves to bed. Then and only then can she reveal herself.
Nobody has much in the way of information, but the gathering on the street grows, until eventually just about everyone Cecily knows is standingthere, stamping their feet and blowing into their hands and trying to piece together what happened. Gregory says he heard the fire started backstage. Rosie says she heard from Old Man Sully, over at the Rutherford place, that most of the folks in the gallery made it out all right. “I don’t need to remind any of y’all,” says Constance, “that Maria’s the type to send a servant into a burning building for so much as a lost button.” This gets so manymmmmhmmms from the crowd that Cecily feels a twinge of sympathy for Maria. She’s bad, but she’s notthatbad.
It is strange to hear these people Cecily has known her whole life try to make sense of her death.Such a pretty girl, someone says. ThenCecily had it real hard, as if being burned up might be preferable to what they all know she’s been putting up with. No one says anything unkind, but something about all the theorizing and prophesizing leaves Cecily with a lump in her throat. Like she is already gone.
Cecily sits in the trees for a long time, waiting for the talk to peter out and for everyone to get back inside their cabins and put themselves to bed. Eventually, Rosie returns to the kitchen house, promising to sleep with one ear open and to report back if she hears anything. The rest of the women shoo their men inside, and Cecily listens to the groan of their rope beds as they sink into troubled sleep.
SALLY
Anyone with burns needs tobegin treatment at once,” says Mrs. Cowley to Sally and a few other women who have assembled in the parlor.
She hands out squares of linen, which she’s instructed Birdie to cut from an old tablecloth. Behind her sits a stack of mismatched bowls. She holds up a large lancet. “If the skin has begun to blister, puncture it first.” To illustrate, she pierces a large blister on a woman’s face, and Sally nearly faints.
“Use the linen cloth to press the water out. Like so. Then pour the vinegar over the burn. If you can soak the wound in a bowl of vinegar, that’s even better.”
Sally eyes the jug of vinegar Birdie clutches in her arms. “What do we do when we run out?”
A woman whose daughter has suffered a bad burn on her backside says, “My mother always swore by spirits of turpentine for burns.”
Mrs. Cowley shakes her head. “Turpentine won’t do anything for the inflammation,” she says. “I’ve got a little more vinegar in the kitchen. Then we’ll—”
“We need help!” a man yells from upstairs.
Mrs. Cowley rolls her eyes, then says under her breath, “That family has been nothing but a problem since the moment they arrived.”
“I’ll see what’s the matter,” Sally offers, then sticks her head out into the hallway. “Sir?”
On the landing is the younger of the two men who came looking for Maria Price. By some blessed miracle, they found the girl—alive—in an upstairs bedroom, and since then they’ve been up and down the stairs at least a half-dozen times, asking for one thing or another.
“What’s the matter?” she asks the man, from the bottom of the stairs.
“She’s vomiting,” he says frantically.
Sally grabs a spittoon and follows him upstairs, where Maria rests inone of two small beds in the back bedroom. The other bed is occupied by a young girl with such severe burns, she is unrecognizable. Mrs. Cowley says she is unlikely to live until morning.
The room smells of vomit and charred flesh, and Sally is desperate to open a window, but she can’t bring herself to do it, not with how cold it is outside.
