Chapter 6 The Arm

The fever came on the ninth day, and it came the way real trouble always came in a place like that, quietly, on a morning that looked like every other morning. She had walked the trail to the bar and back twice in five days, hauling the tarp and the survey stakes and one of the avgas drums on a sled she had made from a sheet of aluminum torn off the aircraft, and she had used the tarp and the stakes to build a shelter at the bar and to lay an arrow on the snow a hundred feet long, a great pale wedge of a thing pointed at the wreck, aimed at the sky. Her arm had hurt while she did it and she had told herself it was the healing, the itch and pull of a wound closing, and on the eighth night she had woken with the arm hot under the bandage in a way that heat had no business being, in a cabin where the water froze in the bucket by the door. On the ninth morning the arm was the color of a bruise and twice its proper size. She unwound the dressing with hands that had begun, in a way she recognized from fevers she had had as a girl, to work slightly behind her own intentions. The wound had sealed at the edges and the flesh beneath it was taut and shining, and there were two red lines running up the inside of her forearm toward the elbow, thin and clean and unmistakable, the lines a person drew on a map to say that the country ahead belonged to the enemy. She pressed the skin beside the wound with one finger and the finger left a dent that did not fill in. She had seen that once before, on a man in a fishing camp who had cut his leg on a boat cleat and had been flown out nine hours later and had kept the leg. She had seen it once, and she remembered the name the doctor at Lossett had used for it, and the name was lymphangitis, and the treatment was what the doctor had done, which was a great deal of hot water and a great deal of antibiotics and a hospital bed, and she had hot water and a stove and no hospital and no doctor, and the nearest antibiotic was in the first-aid pouch in the satchel, in a blister strip of amoxicillin that Ragnhild had pressed on her years ago and that had expired two autumns since. She sat on the bench with the arm on her knee and thought about it, and what she thought was that an expired antibiotic was a gamble and an untreated infection in the bush was a certainty, and certainty in the bush killed people like her. So she took one of the pills with boiled water and then she did the rest of what the doctor had done, and the rest of what the doctor had done was to open the wound. She boiled the pot and boiled the knife in it. She laid out the cleanest cloth she had and the last of the dressing and the tweezers and the ointment, and she washed her hands until the water went cold, and then she sat on the bench with the arm over the tin cup and she cut along the sealed edge of the wound with the point of the knife, and the pus that came out was the color of old tallow and there was more of it than she would have believed, and the smell of it made her turn her face to the wall. She pressed and drained and washed and pressed again, and each press was a bright red fact and she did not stop until the pus stopped coming and the wound ran with blood that was clear and red, and then she packed it open with a strip of clean cloth so it could not close over the poison again, and taped it, and took another pill, and sat breathing. The fever owned her for two days after that. She remembered them the way a person remembers a road driven at night, as a series of moments she had fallen through rather than lived. Feeding the stove was the thing she remembered most, because feeding the stove was the thing that had to happen and her body would not cooperate, so she crawled, and she had to stop and rest on her hands and knees on the cold stones between the bunk and the stove, and the distance was four feet and it took her a long time. She remembered drinking water out of the bucket with her mouth because lifting the cup hurt too much to do more than once. She remembered talking to someone, someone in the room, and she remembered halfway through a sentence that there was no one in the room, and she kept talking anyway, because a voice was company, because if she stopped she might not start again. On the third day the fever broke. She knew it had broken because she woke in the grey light of a normal morning and found herself hungry, which for two days she had not been. She unwrapped the arm. The swelling had gone down. The red lines had retreated to a quarter of their length and the flesh had gone from the shine of a stretched balloon to the dull look of a healing bruise. She changed the packing for a dressing and took the last two pills, morning and evening, because stopping an antibiotic course early was how you taught an infection to come back with an army, and she sat with her back to the warm stove and looked at her hands, which were thin now, thin in a way they had not been two weeks ago, the knuckles standing up like something on a shelf. She had lost the days. She got out the log and found that the last entry was from before the fever and she filled the gap as best she could, dates and weather and the state of the arm, because she had begun to understand that the log was a rope she was tying between herself and the world. She was not writing for a reader. She was writing to prove to herself that the days existed, that she existed in them, that a person could fall down a hole of fever and crawl back out and still be the person who had fallen in. Then she went to the door and opened it and looked at the valley, which had changed while she lay inside. The snow was over her knees in the clearing. The creek had gone quiet under its lid of ice. The spruce had stopped moving. It was the stillness that she noticed, and the color, the sky gone to a flat iron grey she had not seen yet this year, and the air so dry and so cold that when she breathed the breath went up in a column of white and hung there, refusing to leave, as if the cold had taken it hostage. She went back in and closed the door and put more wood on the stove and stood there with her palms toward the iron, and outside the valley went on doing what it did, which was to get colder, in its patient and entirely indifferent way. ---