To my mind volunteer is just another way of spelling hero. Most everybody stayed as far away from the hospital as they could. Volunteers were commonly thought to be fools. Some of our most respectable citizens refused to care for their own kin. Others, like my mother, rose up even though nobody in her own family was ill.
My father stood against Momma’s going into that hospital, but he couldn’t match the force of her argument. Patients kept arriving day and night, many on foot. They staggered past our house, gasping for breath, their plight so obvious and so desperate it nearly tore your heart out. They needed tending, and so Momma went. She wasn’t the only one. The women in town were already organized through the Red Cross. They rolled bandages and such to aid the war effort, so turning to face the new threat when the flu came around was only natural. Not all of them, by any means, but enough to make a difference.
“Not everyone dies of the flu,” Momma reminded my father as we ate breakfast on the day she made her decision. “If they get care, they might recover.”
“Care is the family’s job.”
“Sometimes the whole family’s sick. And sometimes family members just won’t do what the Lord set them on the earth to do. But I’ll tell you this, Samuel Edward Taylor, people running high fevers sweat out their bodily fluids. If they don’t get water, they can die of thirst. And those folks who start to recover need food to get their strength up.”
I think Dad knew he was beaten when Momma addressed him as Samuel Edward Taylor. Or maybe he just didn’t have an answer. Only the day before, I’d left the house to find a woman lying dead near our front lawn. Her lips were dark blue, her feet and her face nearly black. A small pool of blood extended from the corner of her mouth, a testament to her last breath. And that was another thing: our undertakers couldn’t handle the bodies. Too many people were dying. We’d turned our school into a morgue but that wasn’t enough either, and bodies were stacked on top of each other like firewood. School had been cancelled, of course, on account of the flu and the simple fact that two of our six teachers had already died.
Was I scared? Well, at that time no one knew you couldn’t catch the same flu twice. So yes, I was worried, for myself and my family, for Eddie and my other pals, and for the community as a whole. At age eight, I naturally favored a world I could comprehend, a world that didn’t change much from day to day or even year to year, a world I could get my little mind around.
I remember sitting on the porch swing after that breakfast, rocking back and forth, the chains squeaking overhead. Our house fronted Main Street. On a normal weekday, the town would be up and about. From my vantage point, I’d see Louristan’s shopkeepers opening their businesses, hear the rattle of wagons, and the clop of horses’ hooves, smell the comforting fragrance of bread baking in Mrs. Riley’s little café. Only a single wagon moved along Main Street on that morning, and the grim-faced man who urged the horses on wasn’t intent on doing business. He was headed for the courthouse. A woman propped up in the wagon bed gasped for air. The bodice of her white dress was spotted with bright-red blood.
I was nearly overcome by fear. My world was turnin’ much too fast. Whereas before I’d just assumed tomorrow would be like today, as today was so much like yesterday. Now it seemed we—and I mean the whole community—were under mortal threat minute by minute.
On that morning, as my mother walked off toward the hospital, and on many a morning afterward, I did the only thing I could think to do: I prayed. Talk of the last judgment filled Louristan’s many churches, drawing on Revelations. The pale horse had come, bearing a rider called the plague, with hell following at its heels. We were being punished for our sins. I didn’t know exactly what sins I’d committed to bring this on the world, but I prayed anyway.
I begged the Lord to protect my family and all the other families. I promised to do my chores on time, never again to sneak cookies from the cookie jar, to obey my parents faithfully, even to obey Annie. I begged and I kept on begging as the days passed, as I watched my mother when she came home, her eyes red-rimmed and tired yet somehow carrying the sum total of all the suffering she was forced to witness.
“There’s nothing we can do,” she told us again and again, sounding as if she were trying to explain it to herself. “All we can do is wait.”
CHAPTER 7
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.”