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Once, when her years were fewer and her hair only making brief acquaintance with her shoulder blades, Mattie fell from a jumpy colt, mid-flight over a rocky brook, and gashed her forearm against a dagger of a stone. The cut was dirty, pebbles stuck in like nailheads to her flesh, blood and the salty earth a primordial soup. Her father was just seven strides behind her; she heard the splash of his heavy boots and the pound of his concerning heart as he lifted her, carrying her like a broken doll, but she could not feel his calloused hands nor the scratch of his thick coat itching her cheek. She could only feel the ache of her arm, overspilling with mortality, as though all her mind and body had compressed, in a single jerk, to that one smarting limb.
She remembered this as vaguely as she remembered her birth, as Cogburn carried her aloft. She fairly floated, his arms and big chest insubstantial as air; all that mattered were the five stumps of unbearable pain screwed rusty into her dying palm.
Cogburn’s footfalls were heavy as bullhooves and rocked Mattie’s aching body about like a storm-battered dinghy – though she had never seen the sea, nor traversed any great stretch of water, she imagined it to be as this, nausea and whiplash – but at that moment, he might have been a winged Pegasus. He carried her and she lay and felt her pain and remembered the gritted face of her father and confused it with Cogburn’s.
*
He laid her down gentle as a hot bit of glass, all ready to crack right through, and then he became violent. He had been a father a very long time back and had quieted his son nightly with a thumb dipped in whisky, but he knew the girl did not drink and did not want to ply her little body with sullyings and poisons when it was poisoned enough. He knelt his bulk on her arm, above the elbow, to try and stem the flow, chastised her once when she cried out with the hurt but couldn’t cuss her a second time; smothered her mouth with his dirty hand for a moment, changed his addled mind, let up off her and kicked out at the fire, the nearest living thing. The devil in those flames spit up a mouthful of ember and ash and it settled on his boot and he shook it off, drained it of colour against the cold winter floorboards.
Rooster Cogburn’s practice of compassion was to put a beast out of its misery with the barrel end of his gun. He had a distant, but not particularly strong, hope that it would not come to such.
Ice water was brought for the girl and her hand submerged in it. She hollered weakly at the sense of it, her temple beaded in crystal sweat, her mouth pallid and dry with the dust and the calling. She had a bluish twinge to her lips, not night-like but more the blue of a roped cow’s veins, bulging in its neck under thick white skin. Her Arkansas complexion was faded to some northern city cousin.
She spoke in tongues about Chaney and her father, about her horse, about three ponies, the missing California gold piece. She asked for him by name, called him Reuben, and kept asking when he went to her side.
*
Mattie was known as a logical child, but even those with a sturdy head upon their shoulders cannot dodge the bullet charge of a dream, once it has its sight set true. Most oft she had visions of Chaney, pictured herself chasing him breakneck through forests and plains and over streams and through chasms and back through forests only the trees transformed into snakes seventy foot high and Blackie became skittish, bolted her, she chased him on foot, he was only a back and the soles of two boots, she never saw his face, she chased him breathless and quick until she had no more breath to give and lay her head down upon the cold twilit grass and still she could see the bottoms of his shoes as he ran but got no further and Rooster stepped up beside her with the Ranger LaBoeuf and they tossed a cracker to see who would be the one to snub out the flame of her little life with his bullet.
This is what she dreamt of most.
Another one was that the snake bit her, and she looked at her hand, and her hand was carved not from flesh but bone, ashen and white, and as she tried to flex her skinless fingers, they fell apart like dice from a gambler’s palm.
Another one was that she had her fist in LaBoeuf’s sore, bloodied mouth, and took all of his pain, and cried for it.
Another one was that Rooster Cogburn sat at her bedside and pressed his ratty mane and dirty ear to her chest and listened to the thump of God’s will pound through her body awhile. It did not seem loud to her, and apparently to him neither.
*
The doctor was still a day out and Mattie would not be fed nor watered for her fever, and Rooster sat at her bedside some and when his legs ached with the stillness he would go out onto the creak-splintered porch and shoot at the morning migration. He hit not a single one of those damn birds. His eyesight and trigger finger were insufficiently lubricated, he felt, more sober than he had been in perhaps a decade.
He warmed a tin pail of milk and tried to spoon it between her poor reptilian lips, but she could not swallow for the drought of her throat, simply let it spill by the wayside. He drank it himself, and held her good hand as he did, resting it upon her chest at some awkward angle and stroking his thumb across it like he might the ear of a contented, fireside cat, were he the sort of man who owned cats or cared a jot for them.
Rooster sang the girl a lullaby. “Nearly lost my son in the winter of seventy six,” it went, “took the little feller out ice fishing down in Montrose visiting my first wife’s ma and paw but it weren’t nowhere near cold enough and that boy was unsturdier on his feet than a hooked trout flappin about all over the damn place. Well it weren’t so cold that the ice could prop up his bulk and mine and I have never been stringy I certain have not so soon as we chipped the ice it cracked something almighty and dragged him down like Satan’s own talon had aholda his ankles. I got him by the scruff and pulled him out him being down there but a second or four but it seemed enough to set him shiverin and quailin and prone to fits of tremors and I did wonder if I had birthed a son or an earthquake but nonetheless I took him back to my first wife’s paw’s abode and they all hollered so like the boy was the blessed Christ and I was damn Judas for letting him out where harm could catch him. What boy doesn’t ice fish, holy hell, what boy doesn’t wanna ice fish when there’s fish and there’s ice and his father’s showin him how? My first wife threatenin me with a bottle and the father all his fists flyin and the mother weepin in the pantry about how I was a drunkard a good for nothin and a drunkard and I could not take it I tell you and I went out into that wintry forest for three days and three nights and slept in my coat with my horse’s hind for warmth and drank whiskey and ate whiskey too and when I did return that boy was fit as a damn sapling knocking about the place like he did not recognize his own feet as per the usual. That boy never did like me much. I reckon I told you as much.”
Mattie had no answer for this, but shifted mournfully in her sleep. Rooster made a noise of dissent and adjusted her blanket so that her ghoulish hand no longer stuck out from under it, as though a corpse shared her same thin mattress. He made a noise of dissent, and then one, somewhat, of satisfaction.
*
She barely slept and was barely lucid but Mattie had a good grip, even one-handed, and clasped onto what sanity she could. She asked of Cogburn if would he tell her mother and young siblings what befell her, for he was so good at spinning yarns when he had his wits about him. He said, very gruffly, that he would try. She appreciated that he not once tried to coddle her like a babe, wrap her up in swaddling strips of reassurances and gentle lies.
Second, she asked if he would write to her lawyer, of whom she was fond and had unconcluded business with. He replied that he could not write well – words were to him as guns are to an educated lady: understandable, but ever so coarse – though he would try his damnedest.
Third, and last, because she had begun crying and she was loathe to cry and had strived not to do so since infancy, she asked if he would bury her and send up a prayer for her, whether he was a man of god or not.
Cogburn waited a long time and then nodded briskly, and it was in the pause, the binding silence of a decision difficultly made, that Mattie knew his promise wasn’t empty.
*
The doctor came in and took one look at the girl and asked for space, please gentlemen, but Rooster said he could go to hell and planted his wide feet on the floorboards like two thick tree trunks that wouldn’t be moved for flood or fire. Bill, who owned the store, was sent to see to his weary horse, and Rooster was set to task helping lift the child upon the table. Her head lolled nauseously, a screw come loose, and the tendons of her neck looked scrawny as chicken feet. Her clothes, already sewn far too big for her little frame and come looser what with all her scrapes and tumbles, now drowned her. Rooster laid her out like a sheet. The doctor took a little pocketknife out of his breast and Rooster made towards him and the doctor slit the sleeve of her coat so he could see her arm more proper and Rooster halted.
The old medicine man murmured that he might’ve hoped to save her wrist at least, but his horse had lost its race against the snake wending its way up Mattie’s flesh, and he was going to have to take the whole arm.
They used Rooster’s bootlace as a tourniquet, washed the mud off it in a bucket that itself was not entirely clean, and the doctor wiped his sawblade on the inside of his jacket. He held it in the fire, said it may start to cauterize the wound if it were hot enough. He had a broken stump of wood that he offered for Mattie to clamp down on like a horse, and Rooster swore at him and knocked it out his hand and took the child’s sweat-molten face between his earthen hands. She might have been conscious or might not, but he spoke to her on the assumption she could hear.
He told her he’d not think less of her. He didn’t clarify the circumstances.
Mattie sputtered bile and spittle as the saw bit through her arm in jerks and shudders, and Rooster kept her face on his; her eyes were closed besides but he felt it important she didn’t see. She had seen enough now, she had seen enough death for a few years or more. Her blood was very bright and young and spilt from her stump into a pail under the lip of the table. She cried out, and he leant into her, and pressed his brittle, chapped lips to her temple, as fierce a kiss as any he’d given (and it was a small number in recent memory), and when he stood up straight again, her face was slack. He rubbed a few tears dribbled from the corners of her eyes with the heel of his palm, and stayed touching her face until the doctor was done his work.
He admired his stitching, and then asked if the girl was still alive.
Rooster punched the man squarely, not as soused as he was used to. His fist hit harder than he might have meant, and cracked the doctor’s glasses in twain, and knocked him to the floor. Still, he did not feel obliged to help the old man up.
*
Sleep wiped her memory clean as a vulture-picked bone.
*
Rooster sent Bill out the next morning to ask about a good path to Yell County. He stayed behind with Mattie.
*
And when she woke, she woke alone, with one less arm and dirty fingerprints upon her soft cheeks.