We make fairly quick progress from thereon, my legs obviously not hurt, and Sal further helps when we reach the steps leading up to the French windows. When we enter the house I am rushed to nearest fireplace and fussed over with towel and hot water, brandy and some sort of broth, all before the doctor even arrives.
Dr. Ferguson washes the wounds once more and dresses them with bandages, and instructs Sal as he does for future reference. He tells me he’ll be back tomorrow to make sure there’s no major damage to my senses or pneumonia but that he doesn’t feel unduly worried at the moment, and I must simply let the other injuries heal and lead a sedentary life - I tell him not to worry on this account.
After he has left I take more of Dr. Sal’s prescribed brandy and make an attempt at some of the broth but nausea makes this too much of a challenge. In the subsequent hours I drift in and out of a deep sleep, next to the fire in a semi-comfortable armchair, wrapped in a blanket like a hapless newborn and with Dutch a lump of limbs and ears at my feet; Sal and Pete check on me every so often, when they do, and I am conscious, they then intrude on my canvass of dreams and memories, appearing in past events where they don’t belong – such as Sal as the cook at camp around the time Walt died. Gradually this seems to become a more and more convincing fit, but how could she still be that old all of those years ago?
A clock in a near hallway chimes twelve times and this brings me into something approaching consciousness. Sal sits on a stool by the other side of the doorway, I glance back at her for a moment and then into the fire and I remember; I was right, that girl was Sal. I croak her name through my dry mouth, then coughing I repeat it more clearly.
‘Yes, Mr. Burke,’ she says as she waddles over and leans over me.
‘Do you remember when you first worked for me, in the camps?’
‘Oh, yes sir, of course I do, damned cold on those desert nights,’ she says nodding, then admonishes herself, ‘Excuse my cussin’.’
‘Of course. Do you remember Mr. Haines?’ I ask and her eyes drop, ‘Walt Haines?
‘Mr. Haines, why yes, terrible, just terrible,’ she says and fiddles with her knitting, still clasped between her stumpy fingers.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Sir?’
‘What’s terrible?’
‘Well, sir, why what happened to him, of course, the demon alcohol took him too soon,’ she shakes her head disapprovingly, despite forcing brandy down me like cough syrup earlier on.
‘The demon alcohol,’ I say in agreeable tones, ‘I’ve never been able to remember exactly what happened that night,’ I say, pausing at Sal’s increasing reluctance, ‘I mean, how much I was… involved, say.’
‘Oh, you, sir? No, no. Not you, you were asleep after the fight, why I –‘
‘Fight?’
‘You and he, Mr. Burke that is, you two did quarrel that evenin’, and you were both drunk, forgive me for saying so, but you went back to your tent and Mr. Haines, well, he went back to his.’
‘Then how did he-?’
‘Bad peaches,’ she says, interrupting me as if I should know what exactly she means, after a few moments my blank expression coerces more from her, ‘Mr. Haines, I told him I didn’t have none, but he insisted and I had to give him a can I knew weren’t no good. Lord, if I’d’ve known then…’
‘Bad peaches,’ I say matter-of-factly and then, after a brief moment, nod reassuringly to her as I settle back into my chair, Sal taking this as a signal to leave.
I cannot resist a light smile over my weather-cracked lips both at the very idea of an old can of peaches being the end of someone and of the guilt Sal has obviously been carrying around with her all these years over her perceived crime. I stoke the fire and am then abruptly distracted away from all the events of the past by the physical onslaught I have put my weary old self through today. And all for a horse.
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