Chapter 70: Wounded

The fight had been short and vicious, and when it was over, I lay in a ditch of muddy water with a searing wound in my left shoulder and an ankle swollen to twice it usual size. I smelled smoke and levered myself up to see that off to the east, the woods were on fire. Screams told me that wounded men were being burned alive, and the smell told me that human flesh was roasting, dead or living. I sat up, found the tampion in my pocket and shoved it into the muzzle of my filthy musket. Then I got going, away from the spreading flames, using my weapon as a crutch when there was no tree to grab. I might have fainted once or twice, but the fire's smell roused me and drove me on.

I came to a fast running creek and stopped to soak my foot for a bit as the wind shifted to move the fire away from my path. My foot was purple and bloated, and my toes looked like toadstools. I discarded my boots and moved on. The cottage I found was the home of two women, sisters, who took me in despite their obvious misgivings. They fed me, cleaned and sewed up my shoulder wound and looked at my grotesque foot in wonder. I slept fitfully and woke wondering if my right foot was going to explode. The swelling was now well up my leg and reddish green and well as bluish purple.

Annabelle was twenty or so and Cissy was about sixteen I suppose. Pleasant looking young women in homespun and wooden clogs, poor frontier farmers on a hardscrabble piece of land. They had a few goats and some chickens who lived in a lean-to attached to their board house with its stone and wattle chimney. Since I had taken over one bed, they slept huddled together on the other, covered with worn quilts, and when I opened my eyes, and the pain returned, I admired their courage and stubbornness as they rose to stir up the fire and face another day.

I hobbled out to share their gruel and then get myself outside to their privy. They told me, more or less, where I was and said they had heard some gunfire recently but were not able to say how close it was. The British and Germans had not bothered them, but some militia had visited a while back so they told me, glancing at each other and saying no more about that. I assumed it had not been a polite visit. Two women alone in the woods were seldom safe when soldiers were about.

The second morning I was with them, all three of us were jolted awake by someone pounding on the door and cursing. Annabelle got an old blunderbuss from next to the fireplace, and I roused myself to prime my carefully-cleaned musket. The door splintered and two large Redcoats burst in, tore the gun from the frightened woman and clubbed me upside the head before any of us fully were awake.

I dragged myself up to consciousness, aware of a girl screaming, "Don't, don't, don't." Across from me on the other bed a redcoated soldier with his buff britches down about his knees was thrusting himself into Annablle who was kicking and struggling beneath him despite having her shoulders pinned under his outstretched hands. The man grunted and clenched his jaw as he finished what he was doing and then clambered off and glanced at me while he pulled up his trousers and looked for his belt. I kept my eyes half-closed and tried to figure out why my body was not doing what I asked of it.

The Redcoat stumbled out the broken door where the girl as still tremulously pleading, "Don't, don't." Annabelle sat up, pulled down her torn shift and looked at me. I opened my eyes and she scrambled to my side.

"You're not dead," she whispered, a trickle of blood pulsing from her torn lip. "We've got to help Cissy."

I just stared at her, and she felt around under the bed, found my big bayonet and cut me loose. I sat up and shook my head and then wished I had not done that. I touched my cheek and felt the swelling alongside my eye.

"Help her," Annabelle pleaded, kneeling before me. I found my musket, checked the priming and clamped on my blade, a bit unsteady but upright, all my weight on one foot and not seeing very clearly.

"How many?" I asked, leaning beside the open door.

"Three or four," she whispered, arming herself with her carving knife.

"Get the girl back in here if you can," I said. "Ready?"

She nodded, and I wondered if I was. I swung my leg, stepped outside and saw the girl kneeling at the well, nearly naked and down on all fours, blood on her white thighs. The man who had been raping her was just standing, putting his limp member away when I stumbled toward him and thrust into his back. I steadied myself as he screamed and twisted, pulled my blade loose and turned to face the soldier I had seen rogering the woman in the house. I shot him squarely in the chest, blowing him right off his feet as two more Redcoats came running from the back of the house, neither of them armed. I smashed one in the face with the butt of my gun and tore the other's throat open with a slash of my big blade. Then I skewered the man I had knocked down and except for the sobbing girl in her torn shift and bleating goats, it was suddenly very quiet. I put some weight on my injured ankle and collapsed by the bleeding bodies in the dirt. Everything hurt.