Sippicon by Lois Swann

Author:Lois Swann [Swann, Lois]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504917261
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Published: 2015-07-14T04:00:00+00:00

Israel had torn himself away from his wife and newborn daughter to be of use to the village. His footsteps on the barn floor brought Hanna's face around.

She whispered, frightened, “What is wrong with him?”

Israel's heavy hands saw for him. “I do not know!”

“You must!” Hanna knelt in the straw. “Why doesn't he speak? Cry?”

Well-trained by his father, Israel's fingers explored the child's neck, tested the vertebrae, passed down his spine, his legs, spread his limp arms. They tested Lightfoot's face, his jaw, his nose, his brow. They slipped sideways and stopped. Trembled momentarily. Went damp. Lingered over the right temple. The large lump seemed precariously balanced over a cleft in Lightfoot's skull. Lightfoot's entire head had turned boggy, the warm wetness of flowing blood flooding from the wound under his scalp. His once shapely head was a grotesque tangle of black hair spiking out of bulbous softness. Israel diagnosed tersely, “Blood's spreading from a fracture to his skull.”

“Fracture! Oh, God!” Hanna breathed out. “Broken through?”

“Tis.”

She stifled a cry. “How does one fix a…fractured skull?”

“We have no way.”

Hanna cried out.

“I am afraid to move him.” Yet Israel pushed his arms under the light body, his big bones a palette for the spine, his elbow a niche to cradle Lightfoot's wounded head. “It's the nerves that worry me.”

Hanna steadied the young doctor as he rose to his feet. She shrouded Lightfoot's head and body in her shawl. Guiding Israel in her embrace without looking back, as if they were fleeing Sodom, they picked a path toward the wide doorway.

A long, dark figure filled its center and passed in. Wakwa canted the name Lightfoot, “Wautuckques!”

They had not heard him cry this way before. They had witnessed his graceful weeping in joy at Moses' birth, his scalding, self-punishing, wet-eyed hysteria at his failure to keep Elizabeth, but not this disembodied sorrow, this spiralling downward. Only his voice, plumetting, had strength. Without having seen his injured son, Wakwa seemed to replicate him, slack, powerless, desperately reduced. And broken.

Hanna left Israel for Wakwa. “Wakwa! Dear. Listen to me!”

But Wakwa kept calling, “Wautuckques!” and he struggled against the impediment of Hanna's arms.

She guided Wakwa to Israel's side and gathered the soft wool away revealing Lightfoot's head briefly visible in the carmine afterglow of the flames.

Wakwa's keening coalesced into voiceless tears that glanced off the child's immobile face. Lightfoot blinked. Wakwa leaned over him, capped the swollen mass of his child's skull with his hand, calling in his truest voice, “Wautuckques, nip-Wautuckques! Lightfoot, my Lightfoot!”

At that, Lightfoot's arms shot out hideously, his fingers rigid: he poked Wakwa away. Lightfoot remained in that living rigormortis and Wakwa fell back into the shadows.

“The child's gone mad!” Hanna called, aghast.

Israel worked with the evidence. “The brain responded!”

Moses gasped, “Shall I get Mr. Locke?”

“He cannot go on horseback! We cannot take him in the cart.” Israel was firm.

“Like this?” Hanna suggested.

“Carrying him could be worse.”

As they teetered out with their awkward bundle, they heard Wakwa hitting his own head against the silvered wood of the barn wall.

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