She got up again.
« Now I’m going to set that leg and it’s going to hurt worse than anything you’ve ever felt, and you’re going to cuss. I don’t mind cussing, I mind kicking. If you kick me, I’ll put you back in the woodpile. »
Earl had been told about Frieda Haas before he ever laid eyes on her. Everybody in Larkin had a story: she’d run off a preacher with a broom, told the mayor’s wife her pound cake could caulk a cabin, turned down three proposals before twenty-five and none since. She came down twice a year with her mule loaded with goat cheese, sold it in an hour, and left without speaking to a soul.
Sharp as a tack and twice as prickly. Nobody had ever said she had hands like that.
He lay on her rug while she set the bone, cussing in two languages, and her hands were sure, quick, and astonishingly careful. When the splints were bound with strips of an old petticoat, she wiped her forehead, and her fingers were trembling. He saw it. She saw him see it and scowled.
« You did fine, » she said gruffly.
« I thought about biting you, » Earl admitted through his teeth.
« I’d have bitten you back. »
He laughed, and for one second the corner of her mouth twitched.
She gave him the bed and made herself a pallet of quilts by the stove. She fed him goat stew and willow bark, then sat reading her father’s books by the lamp. Earl lay under the blue quilt, ashamed of himself, because he had not been crossing Snowbird Pass by accident.
