Fever: A Novel

by Mary Beth Keane

  It had been raining in New York for two weeks. Steady, gray, wet rain that made the city wilt. In Minnesota, in the winter, Jimmy said it gets too cold to rain. The air would freeze the damp hairs inside a man’s nose, but at least the sky was blue and big.

  A train left Grand Central Terminal for Chicago twice a week. From Chicago Alfred could switch to a train headed for Minneapolis. From Minneapolis he’d just have to find his way as the days took him. It was difficult imagining there were cities so far away, cities with their own riverfronts and barges and garbage and odors. It was sobering to think of traveling so far, at such speed, and still covering only half of America. New York was not like the rest of America, not even close. Anyone who read a paper knew that. In Minnesota every farm had good water, a creek slicing through, rich earth, plentiful grazing. The people ate only white bread and meat, every day. The trees grew up straight and grazed the sky. There were people who set up their homes and didn’t see other families for all of winter, which in Minnesota lasted a full six months. In New York, there was no way to escape other people, acquaintances and strangers—they brushed by him every minute of every day, begging for coins, asking that balances be paid. They bumped him in the street without apologizing. They smelled of their kitchens, their cabbage and beets and smoked meats and spices brought all the way from the old country, sewn into the linings of cuffs and pockets. They grabbed the best of the fruit at the market and grazed his toes with their automobiles or their wagon wheels as he crossed the street. Minnesota wasn’t the only option. There were other places: Wisconsin. Wyoming. New Mexico and Arizona were said to be hot year-round, and if a man went walking in the desert he’d be tanned like leather inside an hour. There were Indians in the middle country. New York had places with Indian names but no Indians anymore. They’d all gone west.

  He told Jimmy it was a good idea. He didn’t need to think about it. He’d go. He’d build a house there, way out in the country, and send for Mary. One way or another, he’d convince her to give him another chance, to join him out west where they could truly start over again. He hated thinking about the last time they’d spoken, that morning in the vestibule of the old building, the sight he must have been after so many days drinking, sleeping here and there. And the look on her face that told him how serious she was, how desperate she was to make him go away. When he spoke to her next he’d have something to show for himself. A plan. She’d see how sorry he was.

  “Now?” Jimmy had asked. “Wait until Christmas. Wait until the New Year.”

  “Now,” Alfred said.

  He bought an honest ticket to Chicago, and an honest meal aboard the train, but for the switch between Chicago and Minneapolis he slipped onto the train and into the tiny lav until the train started moving. When he finally opened the door an attendant saw him and was about to shout when Alfred held up his hand and then with the other hand reached deep into his pocket. A dollar would shut him up, and was still less than the price of a ticket. Feeling tired, and beginning to worry that it was a terrible idea to venture so far from New York, Alfred stepped back into the lav and with one foot bracing the door, and the other on the ledge of the commode, he removed a needle from his jacket pocket, wiped it on his shirt, attached it to the delicate syringe, and pushed it into one of the small vials of morphine. He drew the plunger back as the train leaned into a turn. For the rest of the journey the young man ignored him as Alfred slept across two seats at the rear of the car, and when he wasn’t sleeping he stared out the window at the trees, which grew taller and stronger the closer he got to Minnesota. He pictured the trees in New York, imagined them gasping for air, fighting for space.

  Once in Minneapolis he found the riverfront and got a job loading sacks of flour as big as a man for the Gold Medal Factory. The boardinghouse he found was cleaner than any he’d seen in New York, the people less threatening. They all looked at Alfred with some curiosity and after a few days he realized he was the one they thought of when they locked their doors. The worst of his arm was visible only during the inside hours, when the men worked so hard they started steaming, and Alfred rolled up the cuffs of his shirt. The nuns had given him a bad haircut and he hadn’t shaved since Harlem. He needed to clean his clothes. He needed to find a doctor and a druggist. Seeing the bruises on his arm, and on the other arm, the deformed skin, a man on his shift suggested a place on Hennepin Avenue that would help him. A smoking lounge, the man called it, and Alfred went there expecting it to be run by a Chinese, but like everything else in Minneapolis it was run by a white—a lean man, once blond, with a beard and a caftan tied around the middle with a rope. The man had come to Minneapolis from San Francisco and greeted Alfred as though he might be a long-lost brother from the opposite coast. “They’re different here,” the man informed Alfred. He instructed him on how to hold the pipe, and waved a hand toward the chairs scattered around the eerie silence of the room. Alfred didn’t respond, so the man returned to the front room, and no one spoke to Alfred.

  He chose a rocking chair by the window, which faced the Mississippi and a little island in the middle of the river. He thought of Mary and her hut. When he closed his eyes he saw her pacing, looking out across the water toward him. He wondered if she’d gone looking for him since the accident. He assumed Jimmy Tiernan had told her what happened, and he knew he should send her a letter. He hadn’t had a drink since Christmas 1910. He would tell her that. Or maybe it would be better to wait until he’d been north, seen what it had to offer, seen what kind of life they could make there.

  After two weeks he began asking for work up north, clearing land. The men he spoke with told tales of snow that reached the tops of trees, air so cold it would freeze a man’s pecker in under three seconds if he went out to take a leak. The fish froze in the rivers. Birds that didn’t go south dropped from the trees like stones and woke up again in the spring melt to fly away. He’d have to drag his food out there and back. He’d have to pack enough for four months, at least, maybe five. He’d have to be strict about what he ate so he wouldn’t run out. “Cover up that arm when you go looking for work,” a man advised him. “No one will want to see that coming.”

  “It’s ugly but it’s fine,” Alfred said, looking at the skin of his right arm. It reminded him of candle wax, melted, lopsided, dips and ridges where the wax ran free. He couldn’t feel anything on the surface of that arm, and so sometimes he had to look down at it to see if his shirt sleeve was rolled up or down. Sometimes he dug his fingernails in, hard, but all he felt was pressure on the bone.

  “No, I mean that,” the man said, taking hold of Alfred’s good arm and holding it to the light. “What are you going to do about that?”

  Alfred pulled his arm away and, quick as a gasp, had the other man’s arm twisted behind his back. “Don’t touch me,” he growled. The man didn’t speak to him again.

  Hauling flour was exhausting work, and at night, he slept from the moment his head touched the pillow to the moment the sun reached his face. He heard of a clinic alongside Lake Harriet where the doctors understood about pain management, and gave out prescriptions for those who could pay for it. Alfred showed his injuries to a Dr. Karlson and explained his plan to go to the North Country after Christmas and work up there until spring. Dr. Karlson wrote a prescription for a winter’s worth of tablets and four large bottles of tincture, plus additional morphine, two more needles, another syringe. Alfred paid for all of it, and noted that he was going north just in time. The drugs were cheap—a vial of morphine was cheaper than a bottle of whiskey—but still, his stack of money was growing lighter every day. The doctor told Alfred to try to limit his intake or he might have stomach trouble, difficulty getting going in the morning, problems sustaining energy throughout the day. Stay out of the dens, he warned Alfred. The smoking opium was mostly smuggled, and who knew what went into it. Stick to the prescription stuff, the stuff that had been checked out by the Board of Health. He took the tincture in the mornings and felt it travel his body as he ate hi
s breakfast. The pills he kept in his pocket. The needles he saved for night. The itch that always began a few minutes after waking subsided by the time he began his walk to the riverfront, and everything seemed at arm’s-length, as if he were looking at someone else’s life. Before, in New York, he was so much a part of his own life that it nearly drowned him, but now, it was as if he floated alongside himself, and when something wasn’t quite right, he could simply lean over and make an adjustment.

  At the boardinghouse, Christmas was acknowledged with bread pudding, a round of carols, and mulled wine. A French Canadian named Luc, part Indian, sold him an overcoat from the Hudson Bay Company. From a consignment store he bought heavy blanket trousers and a shoe pack, and the patient clerk showed him how to ease them on over two pairs of socks. If he did it right, the man swore, his feet would stay warm and dry. He bought two pairs of thick wool socks, two shirts, two vests, a fur cap.

  In mid-January, Luc told him about a pair of brothers who’d purchased several acres on the cheap, and needed a pair of good axmen. “Are you handy with an ax?”

  “Sure,” Alfred said.

  “I’ll bet you are,” Luc said, but told him to meet him in a few days. When the day came, Alfred showed up wearing all the clothes he owned to find Luc had organized everything they would need onto two toboggans. When Alfred tugged his he guessed it weighed three hundred pounds. They had cornmeal, flour, lard, butter, a variety of smoked fish, ham, rice, molasses, axes, matches, picks, spades, hoes, sugar, guns, powder, and shot. Alfred had a season’s worth of medicine buttoned into his interior pockets, and could hear the faint rattle of the tablets as he moved. Luc had arranged for a wagon to carry them to the crossroads nearest to the brothers’ camp, and then they went the last twelve miles on foot, their toboggans sliding so easily along the crust of ice on the top layer of snow that they left no tracks.

  They came upon the brothers after four hours of walking. Gustaf and Eric had made their camp on the edge of a pine grove, against a fallen tree trunk almost six feet thick. When they saw Luc and Alfred they stopped their work and walked over to pull the toboggans the rest of the way. The camp was as clever as Luc had described—poles cut neatly and laid sloping from the snow to the top of the tree trunk, topped with layers of spruce boughs and covered over by a rubber blanket. The brothers had banked the snow on the back and sides of this little structure, and built a fire in front. Each man had two blankets, and there was a pot slung over the fire.

  It was a clean place, as sterile as white cotton, and Alfred felt his lungs growing stronger, his body becoming cleaner. Luc showed him how to wield the ax, how to bend the saw, and he got faster at it every day. Gustaf and Eric saw his burns and didn’t question him when he administered his medicine at night, nor in the morning when he washed the pills down with black coffee. His body worked like a machine and there was peace in the sweating, the breathing, the aching at night that was so completely different from the ache of his hips after lying in a hospital bed for almost a year. He ate more in one sitting than he used to eat in New York over an entire day. The older of the brothers commented that Alfred was getting stronger, and Alfred knew it was true. He held one side of the saw and Luc or one of the Swedes held the other, and where it used to take fifty passes to cut through a trunk, now it took a dozen, sometimes less. Back and forth, back and forth, the teeth of the saw bit deeper into the pale interior of the trunk and he’d feel his heart throbbing when the Swede pulled for the last time, held up his hand to watch the tree fall. They dragged the timber to the river where, in the spring, they’d trade it for meat and fresh fruit.

  The sun went down early, before four o’clock, but the moon was so big and the stars so bright that Alfred realized nighttime meant something else that far north. There was no wind, nothing to stir the trees, and everything was so still and silent inside the warm cocoon of his woolen knits and oilcloth that he forgot the temperature. Minnesota was something to experience, and Alfred thought of Mary, how she’d have liked to see the sky so clear. The tent was as warm as any house, and Alfred wondered at his old self, always searching the corners of his pockets for a coin to put in the gas meter, how every person in New York was a slave to what he earned. Out in the cold wilderness, he’d have no need of money until the spring. He wanted to tell Mary about it. He wanted her to see.

  Then one morning after Luc headed off to the crossroads on an errand to trade timber for a stump extractor, and as the brothers were halfway through a trunk as thick as a man laid on his side, they could see that the tree was leaning in the wrong direction and beginning to tip. They shouted to each other in their own language and quickly, foolishly, Gustaf, the older brother, threw his hands up and put his shoulder to the bark as it began to fall. From across the cleared space, a distance of seventy-five yards or so, Alfred watched in dumb silence. He saw Gustaf make a sudden move, and then the tree was down, and Eric was shouting. Alfred stared for a second longer and then realized Eric was shouting at him.

  Gustaf was unconscious when they carried him into their shelter, and when they opened his shirt they could see right away that his shoulder was dislocated. “He’s alive, thank God,” Eric said, and Alfred nodded. It was true, but what did that matter now, when they were in the middle of nowhere with an injured man. Luc was not due back for several days and neither Alfred nor Eric had any idea what to do.

  “Should we try to get it back into place?” Eric asked.

  “I don’t know,” Alfred said.

  Eric took hold of his older brother’s arm, and after dipping his head for a moment and drawing his breath, he placed a knee on his older brother’s chest to keep him still, and tried to shove the arm back into the socket. He tried again, roaring as he did so. Now Gustaf was awake and also roaring. Eric tried again. Again. He tore off his brother’s shirt to get a better grip. He gave his brother a spoon to clamp between his teeth. As Alfred held Gustaf’s legs, it occurred to him that they’d want his medicine. He’d told them it was for pain, and Gustaf’s pain was clearly worse than his own. He’d have to give it. If he didn’t give it they’d take it from him. They were peaceful men but they were brothers and they’d sooner kill him than have one of themselves harmed. He calculated how much was left from the clinic that overlooked Lake Harriet. He’d been disciplined about his dosage, treating himself to extra only a handful of times, and then only when the air was so cold and the skin over his wounds grew so tight that he was afraid it would crack open again.

  He offered before they could ask, and they took it gratefully. Days went by. A week. Luc had not yet returned, and Eric wondered out loud if he should go to the crossroads himself, or send Alfred. Alfred understood the dilemma: with just three of them at camp, and Gustaf too injured to move, the one left behind would have to put caring for Gustaf above all things, and only Eric would do that. On the other hand, electing Alfred to go to the crossroads meant trusting a virtual stranger to do what he’d been asked to do, to find help, send it back to the woods to the brothers. The brothers didn’t trust him, Alfred saw now. Eric took and took Alfred’s medicine for his brother, and when Alfred suggested that he’d given enough, that he had to save some for himself, Eric looked at him so coldly that Alfred knew his first instinct had been correct. Better to keep giving than be killed. His dreams grew terrifying and he found he couldn’t sleep at all. His body hurt. He became nauseated. There were no odors in the North Country except pine and cold. The inside of his nose felt raw and he imagined a frozen path from his nostrils to his lungs.

  He woke up one night to Eric shaking him awake. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked and Alfred realized he’d been shouting, thrashing. There was no sympathy in the question, only accusation. It wasn’t Alfred’s fault that Gustaf had miscalculated the tree. The Swedes talked all day long and sang songs, and where before their red faces had seemed so merry now they seemed to Alfred to be part of their selfishness. They were monsters, the two of them. Who but a monster would choose to live so far from civili
zation, would dig a hole in the snow and call it a place to live? There were strange animals in the North Country, tracks he didn’t recognize, and he knew they were all gathered somewhere deep in the shadows of the pines, waiting to see what he would do.

  He would always be the odd man out, even if he handed over every single drop, every pill. Gustaf didn’t seem to be getting worse, but he wasn’t getting better, either, and now when Eric gave him more of Alfred’s medicine, Alfred felt his blood rise. He doesn’t need it, he said, and Eric looked at Alfred like he’d stepped out naked from behind a curtain. Alfred took bigger and bigger doses at night, and again in the morning so that he could get his share before the Swedes took everything. No more trees were cut. Where before the days had been full of the sounds of work—cutting, cracking, splintering, chopping—now the days were as still and silent as night except for the occasional sound of the skillet on the fire, the pop and crackle of bacon meeting the hot pan, Eric’s boots crunching the top layer of snow outside their tent flap, and finally, ten days after the accident, the sound of cracking on the river, like a volley of gunshots every few minutes, a racket unlike any Alfred had heard in his life.

  “You have to go to the crossroads,” Eric told him one morning, two weeks after the accident. “Luc should have been back days ago. Send him back and bring help as well.” He put his hand on his brother’s head. “I think there’s something broken inside. Not just the shoulder. A few bones maybe. I don’t know.”

  “I’m not sure I remember the way. Did we pass one other clearing or two? Can I take the compass?”