I came back with the first aid kit. When you lived as we did, the distance from town and undrivable roads, you had to be prepared. The usual gauze, butterfly bandages, disinfectant, and aspirin. But also glucose, sutures, nasal airway tubing, a clotting sponge, rehydration salts. A bag of solutions to our bodies, even the secret parts of them. So that if I needed to I could pull Agnes’s skin together, reach down into her lungs or her bloodstream. I had added, lately, atropine, which is an antidote for muscarine, penicillin for amatoxin, activated charcoal, and an emetic to induce vomiting.

Arthur had raised his foot on the arm of the couch, but had not put the dishrag down. Instead, he was wiping the sweat from his face. I tucked my fingers under the lip of his sock, and peeled it back, against the resistance of scabs loosening from skin. He shouted, and tried to pull away from me, so I caught his ankle and held him while I finished it.

I cleaned the sole of Arthur’s foot with wet wipes, blood and dirt coming away in quick, neat stripes until I could see the hole clearly, narrow and deep. “Stay still,” I said, but he wouldn’t, kept squirming and shifting his leg, a muscle spasming in his thigh. I let the wet wipes fall in a crumpled pile on the floor.

“You need to come forward.” I pulled him so that his foot was off the fabric of the couch, while he hissed at me. I could see the smear of blood and dirt where he had been.

“Jesus.” His eyes were closed, his mouth pulled into a thin wince. “Sadist.”

I dribbled disinfectant over the wound, watched it puddle on the floor. The only satisfying part was the bandaging, blinding that little bloody eye with cotton, and then circling all his skin around and around in the white gauze.

“What’s your name?”

“Geb.”

His laugh sounded like a branch being stepped on. “Were your parents hippies or something?”

I tightened the bandages, and taped them closed.

“My parents were hippies,” he said. “Reformed hippies.”

When the bandages were done, I gave him two Advil from the first aid kit, and went and sat in the wicker chair. The cushion was starting to spit up feathers, which poked into the bare skin beneath my shorts. Agnes and I always used the sofa. The wicker chair was for guests, but we hadn’t had guests in a while.

“Do you have someone who can come and help you?” I didn’t think that, even with Agnes’s help, I would be able to carry him as far as the road. A little distance, maybe, but it was more than a little distance.

“I was hiking alone.”

“There isn’t a hiking trail near us.”

His left shoulder crept up toward his ear. “I must’ve gone off.”