Read Online Country of the Bad Wolfes by James Blake - Free Book Online Page B

barely conscious, stewing in his own filth, unable to speak for the burning rawness of his throat.
    â€œMerciful Jesus.” She hastened to give him water, then opened the windows to air the room. Then cleaned him and dressed him in fresh nightclothes and helped him to sit in a chair so that she could change his bedding. Then fetched him a measure of whiskey and told him to sip it slowly. His eyes flooded at the burn of it.
    Over the next week she several times a day gave him spoonings of various nostrums. Each morning she changed his bedding and bore away his slops, then brought a breakfast of honeyed tea and parboiled eggs and soft breads. She brought dinners of mashed and buttered vegetables, supper broths of mutton and beef. In the first low raspings of his returning voice he told her of the recent notification that his brother, the last of his living kin, had been lost at sea. Her commiseration was tearful. She well knew the pain of losing loved ones, the loneliness of being without family. She had buried her only child, a month-old daughter, twenty-three years ago, and it was eighteen years now she had been widowed.

    He was physically recovered by the beginning of the academic year, though his voice had been permanently deepened to a raspy bass. His emotional recuperation took a while longer, but nothing else could have served it so well as the resumption of university life. His freshman year had been a notable triumph—he’d made the dean’s list both semesters, and his essay on the merits of Hamiltonian economics was published in a university review.
    His successes continued through the rest of his student years. He studied Spanish in ancillary courses and while still a sophomore became fluent enough to read Don Quixote in the original and write a monograph on it in Spanish. He had always enjoyed numbers but in college they became a passion and he dazzled his instructors in mathematics. Accounting was child’s play. His studies came to him with such ease that he had time for extracurricular pursuits. He joined the debate club and became a redoubtable adversary, winning the annual New England competition with a rousing defense of President Polk’s war in Mexico as essential to America’s Manifest Destiny. At the urging of a professor who admired his forensic flair, he auditioned for a junior-year production of Henry the Fourth and won praise for his rendition of Hotspur, and then as a senior he played the lead in Marlowe’s Faustus . On a dare, he enrolled in a fencing class and was as surprised as everyone else by his swiftly acquired proficiency with a foil. His style was unaggressive and lacked finesse but was marked by an impenetrable defense, relying on clockwork parriesthat inevitably frustrated his opponents into rash moves that left them open to counterthrust hits. He was recruited for the varsity team and within a year became its ace. In his junior year he was narrowly defeated by his Princeton opponent in the interscholastic finals, and then as a senior he beat the Brown University ace for the championship.
    All the while, through careful observation of his classmates, he learned the bearing of a gentleman. In emulation of his favorite professor he took up smoking a calabash pipe. He was popular among his fellows, a convivial companion who relished political argument and an occasional wager on a horse race, who enjoyed a pint and a ribald joke as well as the next man.
    And yet, for all his friends, he did not truly confide in any of them. He was amiably chary in all reference to family. The adventurous sire he’d admired as a boy had become a secret to guard against the social exclusion he was sure would befall him were it known he was son to a murderer. As far as anyone at Dartmouth knew, his parents had died when he was a young child and he and his brother had been raised in Portsmouth by a maiden aunt, the aunt now also deceased. He had admitted to a living brother only