He Paid Two Dollars for the Bride No One Would Bid On—By Winter the Whole Town Owed Her Their Lives

Chapter 5

Sadie Peavey, who had a child the color of ash lying at home and three more breathing the same air, chose her child.

That night Hannah Bowman walked into the Peavey house knowing exactly what was loose in Hardpan, and she walked in anyway. Silas stood in the yard and watched the lamp go on in the sickroom window, and he understood that the woman he had bought for two dollars was the one thing standing between this town and a row of small graves.

She took charge the way only a person who truly knows a thing can take charge.

Within three days she had done what no doctor in the county had thought to do. She moved the sick children out of the crowded houses and into the white meeting house at the edge of town, which was large and could be aired and scrubbed. She drew a line down the middle of Hardpan — the sick on one side, the well on the other, and woe to any soul who crossed it without her say-so. She boiled everything that could be boiled. She burned the rags and the bedding in a pit she made Silas dig behind the meeting house, and the smoke of that fire rose over the town day and night like a second, darker weather.

She taught a dozen frightened mothers to wash their hands in water hot enough to crack their skin, and to do it again, and again, because the disease traveled on hands and breath and she meant to cut its roads. She showed them how to keep a sick child propped so the throat could drain. She showed them what to watch for and when to send for her and what to do in the minutes it would take her to get there.

She was awake for most of three days and nights.

Silas drove her between the meeting house and the outlying farms. He hauled water until his shoulders burned. He dug the burning pit deeper. He did whatever the tall, scarred woman told him to do, without question, because it was plain to him and getting plain to everyone else that she was the only thing between Hardpan and a graveyard full of children.

Old Doc Rawley, to his everlasting credit, sobered up and stood down.

“I treated the croup I knew,” he told Silas quietly, out by the woodpile, where nobody could hear a man admit a thing like that. “And your wife’s treating the diphtheria I forgot. She’s right and I’m wrong, and I’m too old to be proud about it. Tell her I’ll fetch and carry and keep my mouth shut.” He paused. “Tell her she’s the doctor this week.”

The story of the meeting house spread through the town the way fear spreads — fast and in all directions. Some of the men muttered that it was indecent, a woman running a sick ward, and a bought woman at that. But the muttering was thinner now, and it died against the plain fact that the two-dollar bride was the only reason any of their children were still breathing, and everybody in Hardpan knew it.

Myra Crane’s youngest daughter took sick on the fifth day.

Rosalie Crane was seven years old, a serious, dark-eyed child who had her mother’s hard chin and none of her mother’s hardness, and she woke on the fifth morning with a sore throat and a fever, and by that evening the gray membrane was already creeping across the back of her throat like a slow stain.

The banker’s wife — who had stood in Peavey’s Mercantile and discussed the two-dollar bride in the third person while the two-dollar bride stood four feet away — came to the door of the meeting house at midnight with her child wrapped in a blanket and her pride in pieces.

She knocked. Hannah Bowman opened the door.

The two women stood there in the light of the lamp, and Myra Crane looked at the silvered burn on the left side of the other woman’s face, and something moved behind her eyes — something that looked, in that unguarded moment, very much like fear.

Hannah Bowman said nothing about the mercantile. She did not mention the third person, or the skirts drawn in, or the word sold. She simply took the child from Myra Crane’s arms, carried her to a cot, and looked down her throat in the light.

“We caught it early,” she said. “Help me, and she’ll live. Stand in my way, and I can’t promise. Which will it be?”

And Myra Crane, who had never in her life taken an order from a woman she considered her inferior, stood a moment with her good dress streaked with road dust and her hands shaking.

Then she rolled up her sleeves, and she did exactly as the two-dollar bride told her.

All that night, and the sixth day that followed, and the seventh, the banker’s wife and the burned bride worked the ward together — Myra boiling water and tearing bandages and learning, with the particular ferocity of a mother who has already buried one child, exactly how to hold a basin steady and a child’s head still while Hannah worked. They did not speak of St. Louis. They did not speak of anything but the work.

But on the third night, in the lamplight, with Rosalie finally sleeping — breathing, thank God, breathing — Myra Crane looked at the scar that ran down Hannah Bowman’s face, and her mouth opened, and closed, and opened again.

“I have seen that scar before,” she said. “Haven’t I.”

Hannah Bowman did not look up from the rag she was folding.

“Yes, ma’am,” she said quietly. “I believe you have.”