Читать книгу Always October - C. E. Edmonson - Страница 9

The October days, as they passed, were beautiful. Blue skies without a hint of rain, the trees ablaze with color, the mornings cold, the afternoons cool, the night skies spattered with stars from horizon to horizon. I wasn’t allowed to leave the yard, not to play with Eddie or anyone else, and I was never to approach a passerby. I watched them come, though, as I sat on the front porch or on the swing in a sugar maple that fronted the house. I remember the leaves above me were a fiery orange and the noon sun filled them with light and they rattled in a slight breeze. And I remember church bells ringing on weekdays and on the Sabbath, in the morning and in the afternoon, the funerals coming one after another.

His twin baby brother and sister cradled in his arms, Eddie Enstrom passed my perch at the end of the second week. He was sitting next to his mother, who held the reins that guided the massive farm horse pulling their wagon. His father was lying in the back, already gone. Eddie didn’t look at me as he passed, just looked straight ahead, staring into a distance unmarked by any horizon. I shook while watching him, my whole body trembling, but I didn’t call out. I was too scared to open my mouth.

* * *

The next morning, as we sat in the kitchen eating breakfast at eight o’clock, Annie began to cough. By nine o’clock she was in bed, delirious with fever, her body soaked with perspiration though she shivered as though lying on a bed of ice. Her breathing was wet and ugly and ragged, her entire body straining with the effort to fill her lungs with air.

At ten o’clock Momma began to cough. A half hour later, too weak to stand up, Momma collapsed. Weak and barely conscious, she told me to run and get my dad from the store, and I did so, just as fast as my small feet would carry me. By the time we got back home, Momma had dragged herself to bed and just lay there in a pool of her own perspiration. I was scared. I had never seen her so helpless. Never in my life.

Though now I know Dad probably recognized how serious the situation was, he didn’t let it on to me on that day. He simply went about the business of tending to the sick—bringing in wet towels for their heads, taking their temperatures, rubbing their backs or arms as they coughed. He did all this quietly, with the patience of a saint, and to me that’s what he was at that moment. Without his steady hands, his caring touch, I don’t know what any of us would have done.

Two hours later, just before noon, Momma finally fell into a fitful sleep. Annie, on the other hand, was restless. She tossed and turned in her bed, whipping her head from side to side, eyes closed tight as if trying to block out the pain she felt. Annie’s room was forbidden to me, but I lingered in the upstairs hall, right outside the door, my ear practically pressed to it.

I heard her crying, and I heard Dad murmuring to her. I imagined him putting a cold cloth on her brow and telling her to relax, it would be okay—all the things he told me whenever I was sick. But unlike any upset tummy or case of the sniffles I ever had, this flu was bad news. Bad, bad news. And I feared from the noises in Annie’s room it would not end well.

Eventually, after what seemed like an eternity crouched out in that hallway, leaning up against the door, I heard Annie take what I learned to be her last breath. It was an ugly rattling gasp, and it gave me goose bumps. Just the sound of it—well, I knew it meant something bad. And when my father, the rock of our lives, filled the ensuing silence with a howl that echoes in my mind to this day, I knew she was gone. Annie, my big sister, my beloved tormentor, had died.

Though I wanted nothing more than to run out of the house and keep on going until I finally awakened in a familiar world, I couldn’t move. I just slumped back on the floor and stared at the door until Dad came out and took me in his strong arms.

“We need to see to your mother now,” he told me. “Annie’s gone.”

The words he said were calm, but the tears streaming down his face told another story. This was not an event that passed, an event you ever got over. When Dad entered Momma’s room, I stood in the doorway and stared at her in the bed. Momma’s lips were blue, her face the color of slate. She flailed about when dad pressed a cloth to her head as if she were trying to fight him off. Words came from her mouth, something about an escaped horse that had to be found before the onset of a blizzard. Then she stopped fighting and fell back on the pillow, unconscious. Her breath gurgled in her lungs as if she were trying to breathe underwater.

Two hours later, Dad loaded Mom and Annie in the back of his truck. “I’m going to take your mother to the hospital,” he said. “I want you to stay here.” He didn’t tell me where he was taking Annie. He didn’t have to. Annie was going to the death house that had once been our school.

As I already said, the flu took its victims in two ways, and they were quite distinct. Some, like Annie, passed within hours of the first symptoms. Some, like my mother, lingered for days, even weeks, fighting, fighting, fighting. This was the hardest, of course—the hardest on the families, because many people who survived the first few hours finally recovered. But there was no predicting. The fight was solely between the victim and the illness.

I think my father’s taking Momma to the hospital was an act of kindness aimed at me. I was to be spared the ordeal of my mother’s illness. I was not to bear witness. But as the days went on, Dad spent more and more time at the courthouse. True, I was given strict orders not to leave our property. But there was no one to enforce ’em. Everything had changed.

The next two weeks, they’re scrambled eggs, blended together and poured into a hot pan. I think of them now as a single day, a period of time unmarked by the rise and fall of the sun and the moon. Each day had a single highlight, a clarifying moment, when my dad returned from the hospital to tell me Momma was still alive.

Eventually I began to roam. On the first day? The second? The third, fourth, fifth, sixth? I don’t remember when I went off down the road or even what I expected to see. I passed Martz’s feed store, Grund’s slaughterhouse, Doc Jackson’s office, Hank Paulson’s clothing store, and a dozen others. Every establishment was locked tight, sometimes because the store owner was sick or dead, sometimes because nobody in the community wanted to get too close to their neighbors. I only came across one merchant: Aksel Tingelstad, proprietor of Louristan Groceries. He sat on a chair outside his store, his face ashen, his body gaunt.

“No reason to look at me thataway, young Taylor,” he wheezed. “I’m not catchin’. I’m gettin’ better.”

I hadn’t known he was sick, or that he was recovering, and I didn’t know how to answer either, so I just nodded before moving on. Aksel had nothing else to say, but if he’d asked me where I was going, I don’t think I could have named the place. Only my feet seemed to know. They carried me to the northern edge of Louristan, to the school I’d been attending, and once again the familiar, the knowable, was now beyond recognition. I watched farm wagons pull up, one every fifteen minutes or so, watched the bodies taken down, carried inside.

Through the open door I saw bodies lying atop bodies right there in the main entrance hall, stacked like carcasses in a slaughterhouse. The men who handled them wore surgical masks. Their eyes, above the masks, were very dark and they seemed to look right through me. Under ordinary circumstances, in the world I knew, a world now seemingly gone, I would have been in for a scolding. Not this time. The two men inside spoke briefly with the farmers, or with their wives or sons or daughters, then took a few notes before carrying the bodies inside. I couldn’t see where they went, but they always came back out a few minutes later and shut the door behind them.

Annie lay somewhere inside that building.

* * *

After a number of silent meals with my father and a number of nights when I cried into my pillow because I didn’t want Dad to hear, I took a walk along the creek behind the house. Driven by a gusting wind, the trees edging the creek—aspens and birches for the most part—unleashed showers of butter-yellow leaves that settled about my feet. I kicked my way through them, every bit as adrift as the cascading leaves.

October is my favorite month these days, a last glorious moment, so intense as to be almost defiant, before the time of endurance. But on that day, I was unaware of my surroundings, my thoughts all turned inside as I wrestled with matters beyond naming. I prayed in a vain attempt to balance fear with hope. The town lay to my right, its yards and buildings as familiar as the fields off to my left. I watched a doe come out of the tree line marking a faraway ridge, her two fawns trailing behind. Unconcerned with my troubles, they began to feed on shoots of alfalfa newly emerged after the last haying.

I followed the creek, walking against the current, to the back of the school where I happened on Joseph Anderson. Joe was the older brother of Maxim Anderson, one of my playmates at the time. His family owned a dairy farm a few miles to the north.

“My pa’s dead,” Joe told me when I squatted down beside him. He was sitting on a rock, tapping the water with a stick over and over again.

“Annie’s dead, too,” I replied.

Joe answered matter-of-factly and without looking up. “Annie was in my class. I went to school with her. She was real nice.”

A minute passed before I spoke again. “My momma’s sick. She’s in the hospital. My dad’s takin’ care of her.” I hesitated, then said, “Dad’s already had the flu.”

Joe simply nodded, unconcerned. “I got to do the work now,” he said. “I got to get the farm ready for winter.”

Joe had cited an unwritten law in Minnesota farm country. People didn’t live as long as they do now, and there were accidents aplenty that left men disabled. The oldest boy in the family was expected to take on the burden if at all possible. Farm work never stops, not even for tragedy. A cow’s milk continues to flow. Horses can’t feed themselves. Wood for the long, cold winter doesn’t chop itself. The obligations of a farmer’s children, to the family and the land, are never-ending, and it comes as no surprise many of them fled to big-city factories as soon as they were old enough. The labor in the factories was long and hard, but it did have an end. Farmers don’t rest on the seventh day, or any other day.

“I’d visit Momma,” I said, “but I’m not allowed.” At that moment, of course, I only had room for my personal suffering.

“You could go.”

“How?”

“Just go.”

“Won’t they stop me?”

“There ain’t no they, Lucas. I went to the hospital every day before Pa died. There ain’t but a few people takin’ care of all those patients. They’re too busy to bother with some kid lookin’ for his ma. Just put on a mask—everybody wears a mask—and nobody will pay you the slightest attention.”

He stood up and looked off to the north, at a flock of crows flying over a field. They called to each other, as crows always call to each other, before dropping into a harvested wheat field.

“I got to go. I got to be a man now.” He took a step, then turned to face me, though his eyes seemed to look backward into his own mind. “When the feet turn black, Lucas. That’s when you know they’re gonna die.”

Joe was thirteen years old. I watched him march off, his steady pace unhurried, while I processed the message. See, it was my dad who banned me from the hospital. At my age, I just assumed there’d be some authority to back him up, like Mr. Vernon, who stood in the doorway as we entered school. Joe was telling me that the world had changed in a way I hadn’t thought about.

I went straight home afterward, following the creek to the edge of our property, then crossing the lawn to a shed. In fact, like Joe, I had new shoes to fill. We’d been fattening a piglet bought that spring, as we did every year, and it was now an aggressive pig that weighed over a hundred pounds. Whereas before I’d been instructed to stay clear, now I was to feed the pig by tossing its feed over the fence. The grunting pig banged his snout into the wooden slats as I approached, bucket in hand, like it would just as soon feed on me as on the dinner I carried. I have to admit I didn’t waste any time. I poured the feed over the fence, into a trough, and retreated with all due haste. The pig squealed once before he began to feed.

Intimidated as I was, I continued to utter a simple prayer as I went about the task: “Please help Momma.” I repeated the words over and over again, having somehow come to believe that mere repetition would get my prayer heard. Maybe I thought the Lord responded to nagging the way my parents sometimes responded to my endless entreaties. Or maybe I just couldn’t think of another way to approach God. One sure thing, though: my prayers, muttered or not, were heartfelt, driven as they were by a mix of love and fear that threatened, almost from moment to moment, to overwhelm me.