Page 11

Nell Yarbrough is somewhere past fifty, with a gray braid down her back, sunburned forearms, and reading glasses hanging on a cord next to her stethoscope. She came into the feed store every week for fly spray, paid cash, and never asked me anything but what was on sale.

I sit on the edge of the bed and set Royce's knife down within reach.

Nell sets her kit on the foot of the bed and looks at the bruises on my face. "Delilah King. Whole county heard you ran off."

"Whole county heard wrong."

"Seems like." Her eyes go to the knife on the quilt beside my hip, then back to my face. "You keep that on the bed where you can grab it. I won't touch it."

Knox stands outside with his back to the door, the way I asked. Through the gap, I can see a strip of his black vest and one shoulder. He never turns around.

Nell has me unbutton the shirt and hold it open while she works. When she presses along my left side, the pain is so sharp that I let go of the shirt and grab the edge of the mattress.

"Breathe for me," she says. "Deep as you can stand."

I can't stand much. She listens through her stethoscope on my back, then my front, and she doesn't say anything until she's done.

"Feels like a couple of cracked ribs, maybe more," she says. "Your lungs sound clear. Past that, I can't tell you a thing without an X-ray."

She looks at the roll of wide tape in her kit and leaves it there. "Knox told me to bring tape. He's wrong. Taping ribs keeps you from breathing deep, and that's how you end up with pneumonia. Breathe deep a few times an hour, even when it hurts."

She doesn't ask who hurt me. She takes my right hand and turns it over in hers. "What'd you hit?"

"Shower wall."

She settles her reading glasses on her nose and cleans the splits with antiseptic that burns worse than the shower. She closes the worst of them with thin adhesive strips, the way I once watched her patch a cow dog's torn ear on her tailgate outside the feed store.

My right thumbnail is ridged and ragged, and she trims it with little curved scissors.

That nail hasn't grown back right since the barn on the Thornton routes. I used it to scratch a mark into the plywood floor for every day, in rows along the base of the wall where we slept with our wrists zip-tied in front of us. The men had laid the plywood over concrete, and the cold came right up through it at night. When the new girls started crying at how many rows there were, I quit counting.

Nell lays a gauze pad over my knuckles, pulls a roll of purple vet wrap from her kit, and winds it around my hand to hold the pad in place. She stops short of the flannel cuff at my wrist.

Then she reaches for my left wrist to take my pulse. I pull my arm back before her fingers touch the sleeve. I'm not letting anybody see the scars the zip ties left on my wrists.

She doesn't reach again. She lays her fingers against the side of my throat instead and counts by her watch.

When she's done, she pulls the chair over from the little table, sits, and studies me over the top of her glasses. "I'm going to ask you one thing plain," she says, keeping her voice low. "You can tell me to go to hell. Did they rape you?"

"Ribs and hand," I tell her. "That's what you came for."

She waits a while longer before she nods. "If you ever want a doctor for that, you have Knox call me. I'll find you one who doesn't need your name."

She leaves a bottle of ibuprofen on the table by the bed and tells me to take it with food. If I run a fever or cough up blood, I see a real doctor, and she'll tell Knox to drag me there if he has to.

"He would," I say.

"That's why I'll tell him." She snaps her kit shut and goes out.

Through the gap in the door, I hear her talking to Knox on the porch. "Ribs feel cracked. The hand will heal ugly. She needs food, sleep, and nobody standing over her."

I get up and pull the door open wider. Knox has both hands on the porch rail, knuckles white, and the wood creaks under them.

Then he asks, calm as he's been all morning, "What's going in your book?"

"A mare that got kicked by a gelding. Cleaned her up and turned her out." Nell snorts. "Anybody ever asks, I'll swear to it."

I've been called a lot worse than a mare lately. Coming from Nell, it almost sounds kind.