Everything came together in that moment. The trains, the big city, the crowds on the streets and the crowds in the stands, even the bright, June sky and the cotton-white clouds overhead. Never in my young life had I dreamed such a wondrous thing was possible. And I tell you this, tell you from the bottom of my heart: in my mind, despite many decades since my first trip to Chicago, Max Flack is still running.
CHAPTER 6
The Spanish flu came to Bear County in the spring of 1918. They called it the Spanish flu because it first popped up in the Spanish town of San Sebastian. Didn’t stay there long, though. The war to end all wars—World War I—was raging by then, with troops moving back and forth across Europe and across the Atlantic Ocean in troop carriers. A month later, the first cases appeared in France. By June, the disease reached the United States.
Of course, I was only a young fellow at the time, and though I considered myself knowledgeable—after all, I’d survived some time in grade school—the Spanish flu, or even the existence of flu, was beyond my horizons. The war held all my attention and the attention of my companions. Once a week, the Bear County Clarion posted the names of the county’s dead and wounded on a board outside its offices. And while the Army buried most of its dead near the battlefields, the wounded came home to us, some missing arms or legs or both.
Still the best of friends, Eddie and I considered these men heroes, and we considered the battles they fought heroic. To an eight-year-old there’s no glory like the glory of war. Later on I learned better—learned the hard way.
Two things about this particular flu were apparent from the outset. First, it was very contagious. “Catching” was what we said back then. Second, it didn’t seem to be all that severe. I caught the flu in June, my father a week later. For me, the illness was a minor and temporary misfortune, like the chicken pox or the mumps, both of which I’d already suffered through. I got sick alright. Sick enough to run a fever that climbed near to the top of Momma’s thermometer. My body ached all over and my head felt like it was ready to imitate the artillery shells falling on the soldiers in the trenches. Altogether I suffered for three days, with Momma tending me near every minute. Then the fever broke and I commenced a rapid recovery.
No, what I remember most about that spring was Dad’s illness. Dad never got sick, never missed a day’s work. Seeing him flat on his back, his body covered with sweat, muttering to himself, shook me.
“Dad’s gonna get better, right?” I remember asking Annie, who was charged with his care while Momma ran the store.
“Course he is.”
“How do you know?”
“Lucas, don’t you have something else to do?”
“No. I’m hungry.”
Annie put her hands on her hips and shook her head, sending her auburn braids whipping back and forth. “You’re eight years old, too old to be a baby. You can fix your own lunch.”
The comment didn’t surprise me. I shifted from baby to adult whenever it suited Annie’s intentions.
“What about soup?” I asked.
Annie didn’t answer. She walked over to the sink—yes, we did have indoor plumbing, another modern convenience denied to farm families—and filled a basin with cold water.
“If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to nurse our father. He’s sick, in case you’ve forgotten.”
I had no answer to Annie’s charge. I never had an answer to Annie’s criticisms. Why bother? When it came to her little brother, Annie was always right and she knew it. So what I decided to do, as any intelligent boy would have under the same circumstances, was jam my Cubs cap on my head and go out to look for Eddie. I was mighty proud of that cap, with its logo of a bear cub holding a baseball bat, and I held on to it long after it ceased to fit my head. How I came to lose that cap is a story I expect to tell later on. Assuming you decide to stick around that long.
“Lucas?” Annie’s voice stopped me before I got through the door. “I do believe if you’re too sick to tend those chickens, you’re too sick to go out and play.”
I didn’t argue. The hay in the nesting boxes needed changing, and I would be the one to do the job. But I did manage to fire off a parting shot before I closed the door behind me.
“Boy, I sure hope Dad gets better soon. He’s not so bossy.”
* * *
Dad did recover. He returned to the Taylor Farm Equipment shop a week later. A week after that, the flu was gone, moving west to California, then jumping the Pacific Ocean to Asia, where it disappeared into the vast reaches of India and China. The disease had done some damage in Louristan, no question, taking a few of the oldest residents and one newborn. In that, it resembled a blizzard or a summer hailstorm. Barn roofs occasionally collapsed after blizzards, and crops were damaged by hailstorms. Nothing we couldn’t handle, though—nothing we hadn’t dealt with many times before.
Two months later, with the wheat still in the field, the flu reversed, moving from China into South Asia, then to Europe and the United States. The Clarion reported its progress country by country, and with good reason. This time the flu brought death.
Nowadays, folks don’t even remember the Spanish flu; it’s like it never happened. But while World War I took the lives of twelve hundred Minnesotans, the flu killed fifteen thousand. That’s in one state, right? Worldwide it killed between fifty and a hundred million. For many, the dying was unbelievably fast, the end coming within a few hours, so fast it was nearly impossible to comprehend. Others appeared to be recovering only to fall back into illness where they lingered for days or even weeks. Whichever way, they suffered tremendously as their lungs filled with fluid and they slowly drowned.
My dad and me? Well, I guess you could say we were lucky. Having caught the flu the first time around, we were immune. That wasn’t so for—
You have to excuse me. I know there’s nothin’ uglier than watchin’ an old man tear up. But I’m telling you, sure as the sun rises in the morning, those were some hard times. Harder than hard. First thing, Bear County had no regular hospital. Not that a hospital would have done us much good. The flu that came back to kill us was just as catching as the original flu. One week we were all healthy. The next, every bed in every hospital in the state was filled, and people were being treated in tents. Only there wasn’t any treatment, no medicine or surgery that had any effect on the Spanish flu. Care in this case was simple kindness. You could wipe a patient’s brow, offer a plate of food or a glass of water if they could still eat or drink. You could pray alongside them.
Man or woman, you needed the courage of a lion to do even that. See, there was one thing we all knew, and I mean the whole world knew: you caught the flu by breathing it in. Most folks wore masks.
We began using the courthouse as a makeshift hospital in the last week of September. It filled within days—people were already dying by then—and rows of brown tents covered the adjacent lawn, which we called the Square, by the following Monday. One of our two doctors, Doctor John Odell, caught the flu in the second week and didn’t live to see the sun go down. That left Doctor Martin Jackson to bear the load by himself.
Doc Jackson was closing in on seventy, while Doc Odell had been barely into his thirties. See, that was another thing about the Spanish flu. Mostly, flu carries away the very young and the very old. The Spanish flu carried off even the strong and the healthy.
Now here’s the thing about heroes: you can’t pick ’em out in advance. I saw that on the field of battle and I saw it in 1918, when my mother volunteered to tend the sick. I’ve already said comfort was all the care anyone had to offer. But who was to do it? Doc Jackson’s nurse was nearly as old as he was, and there were two hundred patients in need of tending.