by Cat Winters
Our rowdy pack of spaniels and retrievers galloped out to the edge of the property, their barks echoing across the countryside. Birds scattered from the old maple in front of the house. I patted the dogs’ heads and snouts and told them, “Settle down, settle down. Let’s not draw attention to Father if he’s already out by the barn.”
They lowered their ears and their long whipping tails and backed away.
I walked up to the house and ventured up the groaning steps to the front porch that housed a broom, a watering can, and two sun-faded chairs made of a red-tinged wood. Cobwebs clung to the eaves, betraying a lapse in Mama’s penchant for cleanliness. Our front door—bright pippin apple green in color—stood before me in all its odd beauty. Mama had painted it that color shortly after Granny Letty died, simply because my grandmother adored that particular shade of green. Granny called it “whimsical.” Even after Father struck Billy in the head in the stables—even after Billy left home—the color always pleased me and somehow made me feel I belonged inside that house.
I opened the door and called out, “Mama?”
No answer.
I lunged for the staircase, convinced I’d find my mother lying upstairs in her bed with the flu, her skin bluish-black, her lips darker than a bruise.
“Mama!”
“Ivy?” she asked from behind me after I’d already flown up the first three steps.
I turned and lowered my shoulders in relief at the sight of her normal peaches and cream complexion.
She wiped down her old cast-iron skillet with a checkered dishcloth and wrinkled her forehead in confusion at me. Her pinned-up hair looked grayer and duller than I remembered. Her eyes lacked a spark.
“What are you doing here, darling?” she asked in a voice that struck me as nervous.
I stepped down two of the stairs. “I had an awful feeling about you and the influenza.”
“Oh, honey.” She set her pan and the cloth on the top of the upright piano. “You don’t need to worry about me. If I were meant to get that flu, I would have fallen ill when you suffered from it.”
“But”—I stepped off the bottommost step—“you don’t understand. I just saw one of them. A Guest. Eddie Dover. In the house where I’m staying.”
She straightened her posture. “You’ve been to Eddie Dover’s house?”
“I’m rooming with his widow, and I saw him—just now. I’m certain someone is about to die. Oh, God, Mama, I could have sworn I’d come back here and find you dead.”
Mama’s eyes went bloodshot. She braced her hand against the piano and looked awfully pale.
“Are you all right?” I asked. “If it’s not the flu—”
“So many people have been dying this past week, Ivy.” She lowered herself to the bench with a slow and unsteady movement. I heard her knees pop and watched the way her veined and freckled hands grappled to find support against the closed keyboard. “I’m not quite sure what we survivors are meant to do, besides keeping others from losing their lives. I’ve been helping out with the neighbors. The illness has hit everyone in this vicinity hard.”
“Polish Hall is overflowing with the sick.” I stepped toward her with my hands balled into fists, my feet triggering creaks in the scuffed old floorboards. “There aren’t enough doctors and nurses, but the regular hospital isn’t allowing Southside residents inside.”
She raised her eyebrows. “How do you know that?”
“I’ve been transporting the ill down there to a private residence in an ambulance. We’ll likely run out of room in the house soon, but the emergency hospital has so few doctors and Red Cross volunteers. Girl Scouts are risking their lives to be of use. I saw little Ruby mopping up blood in there.”
Mama cocked her head at me. “You’ve been driving an ambulance?”
“Yes, but that’s beside the point. Could you write to the city? Maybe if we both wrote, or if several of us visited the Board of Health as a group . . .”
“I could try a letter. Perhaps I’ll go visit the hall myself and—”
“No! Don’t continue going near the sick. Please, Mama, keep yourself healthy.”
She folded her hands in her lap and didn’t respond. Nothing in that house made a squeak or a grumble of sound, aside from our gold clock ticking away time above the mantel. The silence of the place suddenly struck me as unsettling.
I glanced backward toward the stairs. “Where’s Peter?”
“He enlisted.”
“What?”
“He ran off to the recruitment office the day after . . .” She rolled back her shoulders. Her voice deepened. “After the murder.”
I grabbed hold of my head and pressed my palms against my temples, for a little hairline fracture of pain split open in the center of my skull. “I should have stayed and spoken to Peter that night. I shouldn’t have left.”
“Peter is almost eighteen,” said Mama. “He’s doing what he needs to do, and I’d much rather have him join the army than sit around here, stewing with guilt and anger.”
“And what about Father?”
Mama raised her chin. “What about him?”
“What is he doing now that he’s gotten away with murder?”
“Ivy, don’t—”
“I’ve seen Daniel Schendel, the slain German’s brother. I’ve grown quite close to him, to be most honest. I told him I’d go to the police and the newspaper and tell them the truth, but he swears it will do no good.”
“He’s right—it won’t. Our country is operating under a different set of rules right now.”
“But—”
“You read about the trial for the Prager murder. The jury acquitted all eleven defendants and said the lynching was justified by ‘unwritten law.’ A Buchanan jury would do the same for Father and Peter.” She stood up from the bench and rested her hands on her hips. Her back curved into the shape of the bowl of a spoon, and the front of her black mourning dress sagged from her chest, which looked small and malnourished—just like the rest of her.
“Your father’s been drinking again,” she said. “Hard.”
I gritted my teeth and set my own hands on my hips. “Leave this house, Mama. Please! I don’t want to have to keep worrying about you and Father’s temper.”
“You need to stop worrying about everyone in this place. That obsessive fretting has never done you a lick of good, Ivy, and it’s kept you from acting like a normal young woman.”
“But—”
“I know why you refused to leave.” She shifted her weight between her feet. “I know you tried at first to live a normal life after what your father did to your brother.” She swallowed and shook her head. “But it’s always broken my heart to see the way you gradually holed yourself up inside this house and punished yourself every time you stepped one foot off this property. Billy recovered, by the grace of God, but I always felt like you were the one who actually got hit by that shovel.”
I pursed my lips and blinked my eyes, and my throat swelled up. No words could have pushed their way out of me, even if they wanted to.
“And now—” Mama covered her mouth and muffled a sob. “You’re suffering for the sake of that German, aren’t you?”
I nodded, but I still couldn’t speak. I wrapped my arms around my ribs and squeezed down on a soreness running through the bones beneath my blouse.
“Your profound empathy”—she swallowed again—“is probably related to your sensitive nature—your ability to see the Guests. But there’s no need for it. There really isn’t. You don’t need to take on everyone else’s pain as your own.”
Again, no words formed on my lips. I felt myself shrinking down into the role of a small and unstable child, and I longed for her to hold me in her arms, to hug away the terrible hurt bearing down on my body.
“Ivy?”
I raised my eyes to hers. “What?”
“Go out there and find peace and happiness. Let their pain go. Forget the past. Please”—she clasped her hands together, as if she we
re praying—“promise me you’ll do your best to move forward.”
I managed a small nod. “All right. I’ll try.”
“Please do. It’s for the best.” She peeked over her shoulder. “Now go. Father’s coming back inside again soon. I don’t want you to have to see him.”
“I have no intention of seeing him.” I hustled closer to her. “Please be careful, Mama.”
“I will, darling.”
I kissed her cheek and left the house as quickly as I arrived.
Chapter 13
Knowing that my mother remained healthy, I next feared that my friend Sigrid would be the one to die—the one whom Eddie Dover came to warn me about. With the smooth soles and square heels of my shoes clip-clopping across more country roads, kicking up stones and dirt, I trekked out to the house Sigrid shared with Wyatt and their three children.
The young family resided on the northern edge of the Pettyjohns’ farm, near Minter Lake, in a white colonial-style house with coal-black shutters framing every window. A cluster of thick, gnarled oak trees with half-bare limbs hung over the roof and scratched at the brick chimney. A swing made from a tractor tire hung still as stone from one of the thickest branches, above piles of pumpkin-colored leaves. Silence gripped the front yard. I didn’t even hear the welcoming barks of Sigrid’s three-legged spaniel, Knut—the one she had saved from her parents’ house when her father wanted to shoot it for being a cripple.
I held my breath and knocked on the front door, not even caring if Wyatt showed up with his desperate eyes and his need to be held, as long as I could learn that Sigrid and the children were recuperating. Surviving.
She and the children have been in the hospital for several days, I remembered Wyatt telling me at the dance the night before.
I knocked again, and no one answered. The black door stared me down and reminded me that I had made myself a stranger to these two former friends who had once meant the world to me.
“Wyatt?” I called through the wood, determined not to run away—to be as nurturing and kind as the way Sigrid always treated me. “Wyatt? It’s Ivy. I’m sorry if I seemed cold and rude last night. Please, if you’re in there, open up and let me know how Sigrid and the children are faring.”
He still didn’t answer, so I turned the brass knob—so cold beneath my hand—and entered the house.
The door spilled into a wide entry hall, papered in gold and cherry red. To my left, I saw their parlor, in which a porcelain clock ticked a steady beat from a bookcase near the fireplace.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock. No-one. Is-home. Too-late. Good-bye.
A rag doll lay on the parlor floor, its arms and legs akimbo. The poor thing looked utterly uncomfortable and abandoned, as if its small owner had been forced to toss it aside in a terrible hurry. I walked over, picked the doll up, and brushed out its red loops of yarn hair. A soft trace of the scent of sugar clung to the fibers of the tiny blue doll dress and white pinafore—perhaps cookie crumbs, spilled into one of the little pinafore pockets.
“How is your owner, you poor thing?” I asked, and I kissed its cloth forehead and set it safely on the mantel, next to the framed photographs of Sigrid, Wyatt, the children, the grandparents, aunts, uncles . . .
A smaller photograph caught my eye—one that must have been taken at least fifteen years earlier. Sigrid, Helen, and I stood with our arms hooked around the backs of each other’s waists in front of Grant Street School, a two-story brick structure, institutional and enormous, attended by all of Buchanan’s school-aged children until the high school opened in 1905. The three of us wore our hair in braids and bows, and we wore ruffled dresses that hung down to our knees, over black stockings. Sigrid’s older sister, Annelie, had saved up for a Brownie camera and loved taking photographs of daily life in Buchanan. I remembered her posing the three of us on the school’s front steps and telling us to simply relax and act like ourselves. Sigrid, with her Norwegian blond hair and pretty smile, immediately threw her arms around our backs. Helen tickled my elbow, which made me laugh. In the photo, my mouth hung wide open, mid-chuckle, and my eyes were closed and squinty-looking. Not an attractive pose, I suppose, but it showed I knew how to live back then. As Robert Herrick said in “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”—
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.
“No.” I whispered, readjusting the photograph on the mantel so it didn’t sit so crooked. “These couldn’t have been our only good years. There still might be long and better lives ahead of us. This might not be the end. There still might be time.”
I swept out of the Pettyjohns’ home and shut the door behind me. Down the porch steps, I stopped and took a moment to pull three of the last scarlet blooms from one of Sigrid’s rosebushes. Red petals brushed their velvet touch across my hands and scattered behind me on the road back to town.
TWO DELIVERY WAGONS carried crude pine caskets through the streets of Buchanan, toward the Protestant cemetery in the northeast section of town. I spotted several townspeople wearing the gauze surgical masks typically reserved for doctors or Red Cross volunteers like Nela and Addie. Advertisements for anti-influenza elixirs—DR. BELL’S PINE TAR HONEY, STUART’S CHARCOAL LOZENGES, SCHENCK’S MANDRAKE PILLS, BEECHAM’S PILLS, GLENN’S SULPHUR SOAP, MILLER’S ANTISEPTIC SNAKE OIL—hung in the front display window of the Buchanan Pharmacy, next to the Moonbeam Theater. Buchanan’s green electric streetcar clattered along the rails down Willow Street but transported very few passengers within. All of them wore the white masks.
I headed northward on Farnsworth and walked three more blocks until I reached Buchanan Hospital, a stone castle of a mansion with turrets, square windows, and three brick chimneys breathing smoke into the bright morning air. The place was once the private residence of the owner of Buchanan’s printing press, but he donated the building to the city when he died ten years earlier. A lush garden of coralbells and ivy grew around the edges of the structure, and wrought-iron benches nestled inside vine-covered alcoves every six or so feet along the walls.
I walked up the front steps to an arched entryway that led to a solid front door with a black metal latch. The sound of running feet pattered up from behind, and a young woman in a mink stole and a feathered hat sprinted up the steps beside me. She yanked open the door with an unladylike grunt, her arm shaking, teeth bared, and I entered behind her into a cavernous dark-wood lobby that smelled dank and feverish. A weighty lantern with orange glass hung from the ceiling on a thick chain. Closed doors—one of which was guarded by an orderly in a plain black coat—sealed off the rest of the hospital, but I heard footsteps echoing beyond. And coughing. A cacophony of coughing.
The woman in the stole flew at a nurse who stood behind an admissions desk.
“I need to see my husband!”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” said the nurse in a no-nonsense tone as crisp as her white cap and apron. “We’re only allowing the sick into this building. You’ll need to leave immediately.”
“You don’t understand.” The woman slammed the palm of her hand against the desk with a startling thwack. “My husband is a highly important man at the Buchanan Sentinel. His secretary told me an ambulance rushed him here this morning, but I want him transported to our home right now.”
“No visitors,” said the nurse. “I’m sorry. It’s far too dangerous to expose outsiders to the germs.” She nodded to the orderly, as if to signal him to step closer.
“Can we at least find out if certain individuals are still alive?” I asked, inching forward with Sigrid’s roses in hand.
“This isn’t right!” cried the woman in the stole.
“No visitors,” said the nurse again, and the orderly tromped toward us with his hands clenched into two meaty fists.
The woman backed away, nearly treading on my foot. “I should be allowed to see my husband.”
&nb
sp; “You heard the nurse.” The orderly opened the door. “No healthy people allowed. Out you go.”
The woman huffed, and we both scuttled back out into the daylight, which blinded my eyes after the stark dimness of that dungeon of a lobby. The orderly whisked the door shut behind us.
“This isn’t right,” said the woman again from the top of the front steps. “I should be able to see him. I should . . . oh, God . . .” She clasped her hand over her mouth and squeezed her eyes closed.
“I’m sure they’re treating him well,” I told her, and I almost felt as though I should give her Sigrid’s flowers to help her feel better. “I know how hard this is, but the care in this hospital is top-notch.”
The woman burst into tears. The feathers on her hat shook with the sorrow trembling through her, and her nose ran.
“I’m so sorry,” I said—the only thing I could say.
She turned and staggered down the stone stairs to an awaiting black Cadillac with polished wooden spokes. I considered reentering the hospital without her to see if they’d allow a woman who had already survived the flu to inquire about a patient, but a distraction stopped me: the rustle of leaves, as well as Wyatt’s voice, from somewhere nearby.
“Ivy?”
I pressed my hands against the iron handrail and discovered Sigrid’s husband journeying through the garden from the north side of the hospital. He took off his brown cap, which made his dark hair stick up, as usual, like a duck’s tail.
I walked down the steps and joined him on the front sidewalk.
“They won’t let you in to see Sigrid and the children either?” I asked.
He shook his head and pressed his cap over his heart. “I’m just going crazy wandering around out here. I could really use another drink from that party last night.”
“Here.” I handed him the roses. “I picked these for Sigrid from your garden. I thought she might want to see the last blooms of the year.”
“You were at our house?”
“I worried about her after talking to you last night. Be careful of the thorns.”
He tugged a handkerchief out of his breast pocket and wrapped up the stem with a delicate movement of his large hands. His gentleness stirred up more sadness and regret inside me. I should have been kinder to him years ago. I should never have led him to believe he might experience love and affection and physical pleasure with me.