High Country : A Novel by Wyman Willard

Author:Wyman, Willard [Wyman, Willard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2009-09-27T05:00:00+00:00

Healing

There was no way Ty could foresee the bond the war would would fashion for the three of them, though there was a hint of it in the letter Walker had waiting for him at the Fort Collins hospital. It was written in Walker’s careful hand, attached to the commendations his staff had submitted for the medals.

We should offer you something more tangible than medals, Hardin. But they will have to do. The truth is that men like you and Johnson are the ones who won this war. It was a war we had to win.

I am sorry about the wound, but I am thankful it was Johnson who brought you in. He knows how to care for men as well as horses. He is the best soldier I know. You are one of the best too, even though you hated doing what you had to do.

It was necessary. Never forget that the wound you’ll live with was suffered for the right cause.You were there because the world needed you. It gives thanks.

The colonel went on to say that if the urge to sleep on the ground ever came upon him again, he intended to have Ty take him into his mountains. “I want to see if you handle mules in high country as well as you handled them in California mud,” he wrote.

He signed the letter “With admiration.” Ty slid it into the music box under the razor case, thinking he should write back. For a few days he even considered what to say. Though he never wrote that letter, it was weeks before he was free of what the colonel had written him. There was plenty of time to consider it as they put him through his rehabilitation, the nurses making him walk morning and afternoon, massaging his wound until the feeling began to come back, lifting his leg until he could lift it himself, easing him into the shiny whirlpool baths, the jets coming in above the wound, below it, the water hotter and hotter.

The cause may have been right, he would think, but wars end badly for anyone touched by them. He thought of the wounded he had patched, the dead he had waited with until the corpsmen came. He thought of the German tanker too, blown apart as he surrendered. And most often he thought of the starving wretches at Gunskirchen Lager.

He couldn’t get them out of his mind, even when the throbbing and itching would call back his own wound, making him worry about dragging a game leg behind him as he went out for his horses. He thought about the pack station every day—and about the mountains. When he couldn’t sleep he would let his imagination take him along a trail he knew, consider each camp: where to stack the saddles, put the kitchen tent, find wood and water, feed for his horses and places to sleep for his people.

And after awhile sleep would come, dulling the ache of his wound, sinking him beneath his pain.

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