A Death-Struck Year

by Makiia Lucier

  “No.” I held out a hand.

  “Well.” Louisa pouted and sulked. She removed the sweater and dropped it into my hand, before marching down the hall to her own room. A door slammed.

  If I were at home, no one would enter my bedroom without permission. Lucy wouldn’t steal my clothing. Or my shampoo, which had also mysteriously gone missing.

  “How do you bear it?” I asked no one in particular.

  Fanny brushed by me on her way back into the room. “My mother says there’s a history of kleptomania in that family. I told you to keep the door locked.”

  Emmaline was playing a new piece, one I did not recognize. I stood in my doorway, listening as the music reached a violent, off-key crescendo. I inspected my sweater. A button was missing.

  Jack and Lucy wouldn’t be home until the third of November.

  Five and a half more weeks.

  Chapter Three

  Monday, September 30, 1918

  Greta lay sprawled and lifeless with her head against my skirt. The rag doll was four feet tall, the same height as its owner, with red yarn hair. Her blue gingham dress looked as if it had been pulled through a dirt field. She was missing both eyes.

  Baffled, I studied the doll, then looked at the six-year-old playing at my feet. “What happened, Emily?” I asked. “Did you pluck her eyes out?”

  “Anna did it,” Emily said. “She told me Greta’s button eyes gave her the willies. She pulled them out while I was having my bath.”

  “Lord,” I said under my breath.

  Emily’s brown eyes were big and anxious. “You’ll fix her, won’t you, Cleo?”

  “I’ll fix her. Don’t worry.”

  We were in the stairway that led from the dormitories to the main floor. I perched on a step halfway down. Just below, on the small landing, Emily played with an elaborate set of paper dolls. Murky oil landscapes lined the walls above us, each painting framed in blackened wood. It was just after four in the afternoon, and most of the other girls were off finishing their schoolwork or outside. Emily and I had the stairway to ourselves.

  “Does Greta give you the willies?” Emily asked.

  She certainly did. Emily dragged her everywhere she could, and it always felt like the doll’s black button eyes watched my every move. Poor Anna. I would be tempted to yank Greta’s eyes out too, if I had to share a room with her.

  “Greta’s a perfectly lovely doll,” I said. “I’ll talk to Anna and make sure she takes more care with your toys.”

  Cheered, Emily returned her attention to the paper dolls. Her brown hair was set in two braids that looped the sides of her head like earmuffs. Emily’s roommate, Anna, was also six. The girls were among the school’s youngest boarders. Anna’s family lived in Tigard, just outside Portland. She spent weekends at home. Emily’s family was from Honolulu. She sailed back to the island once a year, in the summer.

  I rifled through my school satchel for a small sewing kit, then set one of Greta’s button eyes back in place. The grime had been rinsed off, and the black button, two inches round, was nice and shiny.

  “Cleo?”

  “Hmm?” I hunched over Greta. The light in the stairway was poor, and I wondered if I should fix the doll back in my room near a window. I dismissed the thought. Fanny was there, more snappish than usual. All things considered, I preferred the dim staircase. When there was no response from Emily, I glanced up. The child looked back at me, uncertain.

  “Did Anna do something else?” I asked, pulling the needle taut.

  Emily shook her head. “No, but I forgot Greta in the library this morning. I went back for her, and I heard Mr. Brownmiller and Miss Abernathy talking . . .”

  I paused. “What did you hear?”

  “Well, Mr. Brownmiller said that people in Phil . . . Phila . . .”

  “Philadelphia,” I prompted.

  “He said that people in Philadelphia were dropping like flies. Because of the Spanish influenza. He said they’re running out of coffins. Is that true, Cleo? And what about us? Are we going to drop dead too?” Emily’s voice quivered.

  I bit back a sigh. Mr. Brownmiller had been the school librarian for as long as I could remember. Miss Abernathy taught upper school history. I thought they should know better than to say such things in a school full of girls. Most of us had light feet. We lurked in every corner, just waiting to hear something we shouldn’t. Like the time Margaret overheard Miss Elliot say that Miss Kovich, our nurse, had been let go because she’d had an affair with a married man and was in a family way. Or the time Fanny heard Miss Bishop sobbing all over Mrs. Brody in the kitchen because her sweetheart had married someone else. There were no secrets at St. Helen’s Hall. Not one.

  I set Greta aside—the needle poking out of her eye—and wondered what to say. For I’d heard the same shocking stories about Philadelphia and the rest of the East Coast. And then some.

  Fanny’s sister had told her about a fine young family man in Boston who had fallen ill and become delirious. A nurse was sent to his home. But when she left his room, just for a moment, he pulled a revolver from the bureau drawer and shot himself dead.

  Emmaline’s cousin had read about a man in New York who went to help his neighbor, the undertaker, transport bodies to a warehouse once the morgue grew overcrowded. He saw the body of a friend, with whom he had chatted the day before. He also stumbled across the girl who helped his wife around the house.

  There was a shortage of coffins in Philadelphia. They were burying people in mass graves with only the clothes on their backs. Louisa’s sister had heard of a family who lost a seven-year-old boy. They were so desperate to have him buried in something, anything, that they placed him in a twenty-pound macaroni box. A little boy. Buried in a pasta box.

  I thought about these stories. Dreadful stories. And for the thousandth time, I was grateful that the entire width of the country lay between such awfulness and my home.

  “The Spanish influenza is very bad in Philadelphia,” I finally said. “But do you know what?”

  “What?”

  “Philadelphia is thousands of miles away. Which means the influenza is thousands of miles away. I can show you.”

  Emily cocked her head. “How?”

  “On a map. I’ll finish with Greta, and we’ll go down to the library. Then you can see that the flu is too far away to hurt anyone here. How does that sound?”

  Emily was quiet for a minute. Then her expression cleared and she agreed, returning her attention to the paper dolls. She danced them around on the landing and sang:

  “Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling

  Your ring?” Said the Piggy, “I will.”

  So they took it away, and were married next day

  By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

  I went back to work on Greta, knowing I would have “The Owl and the Pussycat” stuck in my head for the rest of the day. After finishing off the first eye, I reached for the scissors and snipped the excess string. The button wobbled, but it would hold for the time being. Still, I mentally crossed seamstress off my list of future occupations.

  After the second button was sewn on and a small tear in Greta’s dress mended, Emily and I gathered our belongings and trooped hand in hand to the school library. Mr. Brownmiller’s globe, along with the city of Philadelphia, held Emily’s attention for all of ten seconds before she looked out a window and spotted her friends playing tag on the front lawn. She dashed outside and joined Anna, who was apparently forgiven for Greta’s earlier disfigurement. I followed, the doll tucked beneath an arm.

  St. Helen’s Hall was a grand old building: red brick covered in ivy, with a bell tower, a curved double staircase leading to the main doors, and a second tower room that Miss Elliot used as an office. Dozens of students dotted the lawn, taking advantage of the brisk but pleasant afternoon. It was nearly October. We all knew our mild days were numbered.

  I settled onto an empty bench beneath an oak tree. The doll flopped beside me.
I took my sketchbook from my satchel and fanned the pages until I found one near the back that was fresh and new. My pencil tapped against my leg for a minute or two while I studied everything around me. I sketched the building, shading in the trees and the ivy, trying to capture the sunlight glancing off the windows. I added students to the lawn, posing Emily in a somersault with her legs kicked up in the air, underthings exposed, as she’d just been. I drew Miss Elliot, broom-thin and dressed in black, her snow-white hair piled high. She scolded Charlotte for riding her bicycle on the grass. Just as I finished with Margaret sitting on the front steps, scribbling madly on paper, I heard someone running toward me. I looked up and saw Grace.

  “There you are!” She pushed Greta aside and collapsed onto the bench. Her face was flushed and her spectacles crooked. She looked like she’d run around the entire school twice.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, alarmed.

  Grace caught her breath, and then spoke in a great rush. “I was walking by Miss Gillette’s classroom. She was talking to Miss Abernathy, and I heard her say that soldiers arrived at Camp Lewis a few days ago. Their train came from somewhere back east. Boston, I think.” Emily and Anna fell in a giggling heap nearby. Grace lowered her voice. “The soldiers—they’re all sick, Cleo. Every last one of them. They’re saying it’s Spanish influenza.”

  A tight, unpleasant feeling gathered inside me. “It could just be regular old influenza,” I argued. “It’s almost October. How do they know for sure?”

  Grace looked frightened. “Miss Gillette says it’s not like any influenza they’ve ever seen. And two of the men have died already. Died, Cleo! You don’t just die after two days of the flu!”

  I gripped my pencil. My mouth felt, suddenly, as if it were filled with ashes.

  “Cleo.” Grace wrung her hands. “Oh, Cleo. Camp Lewis.”

  I stared at Greta. She looked up at me with her two button eyes. It struck me that I would have no comforting words to offer Emily now. Because Camp Lewis wasn’t thousands of miles away, in some godforsaken part of the country. No. Camp Lewis was an easy train ride north. In Washington.

  Only one state away.

  I sidled around a corner, quick as a cat. Past the music room, the art studio, the science laboratory, the library. I crept by the teachers’ parlor, where muffled conversation rose and fell behind thick doors. Dinner was long over; the halls were empty. Thankfully. It would not do to be seen wandering about at this hour. I should have been in my room, finishing my homework and preparing for bed.

  Not helping a friend with a ghastly, ghastly task.

  At the end of the hall, I slipped into the dining room. Moonlight filtered through the diamond-cross windows, casting shadows onto long, wooden tables. Usually, the chatter of one hundred and fifty girls filled the space, along with the clink of silverware and the scraping of chairs against the floor. Tonight the silence swallowed me up. I made my way to the far end of the room, where the teachers’ table stood upon a slightly raised dais, and opened the door.

  Margaret stood in the center of a sizable kitchen, swimming in one of Mrs. Brody’s aprons. She jumped at my entrance, her blue eyes wide. A scrub brush clattered onto the countertop.

  “It’s just me,” I said, apologetically. I walked into the room, careful not to trip over the apple crates scattered across the tiles. I could guess the menu for the week: baked apples, apple dumplings, apple stuffing, apple cider, applesauce. With the food shortages and inflation caused by the war, Mrs. Brody, the school cook, had grown especially careful. We would be eating apples every day until the last one was gone.

  Margaret pressed a hand to her chest, leaving a damp imprint on the white cloth. “Honestly, Cleo,” she said, glowering. “I thought you were Lizzie Borden.”

  Two metal buckets had been placed on the counter before her. I peeked in one of them, recoiling when I saw it was filled with discarded nectarine pits, chunks of slimy fruit still hanging from most of them.

  “Ugh,” I said. “How much longer?”

  Margaret made a face. “Ten days.”

  “What rotten luck.”

  Last weekend Mrs. Brody had caught Margaret trying to sneak in through the kitchen well past curfew. Her hair was mussed and her blouse misbuttoned, though she refused to tell anyone where she had gone. Or whom she had met. It was not hard to guess. Her parents were away, so Margaret’s true day of reckoning was postponed. In the meantime, she was to collect the fruit pits from our plates and scrub them clean before they were delivered to the Red Cross.

  The pits were needed for carbon. The carbon was needed for gas masks.

  I watched as Margaret scooped a pit from one bucket, scrubbed the flesh free with her brush, and tossed it into the second container. I glanced around. Another, equally enormous apron hung from a hook beside one of the iceboxes. I put it on, wrapping the belt three times around my waist before securing it behind me. I slid onto a stool and reached into the first bucket. Saliva and old fruit coated my fingers. Ghastly. Swallowing hard, I fumbled with the slippery pit, scrubbed the offending flesh off, and tossed it into the second bucket. It was trickier than it looked, and a thousand times more disgusting.

  Margaret watched my struggle. A small grateful smile replaced her frown. “Thanks, Cleo.”

  “Humph,” I replied, though her smile made up for it a little. Margaret rarely smiled these days. It was more common to see her sitting at her desk, staring off into space, twisting the gold locket Harris had given her for her birthday. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her look anything other than miserable.

  I held my hand over the trash bin. Fruit slithered from my fingers into the receptacle. “Grace told me about Harris,” I said. “I’m sorry, Meg.”

  Margaret’s eyes flickered to mine, then dropped. “His mother had a fit when she heard.” There was a slight catch to her voice. “Harry says she won’t leave her room, not even to eat.”

  I reached over and squeezed Margaret’s fruit-coated hand, near tears myself. Last year, only months after we’d entered the war, a draft had been passed, requiring the enlistment of all able-bodied men aged twenty-one to thirty. Harris was nineteen. But recently, the draft had been extended to those aged eighteen to forty-five. The first to be called up were young men without wives or dependents. Grace’s brother, Peter, had already left the University of Oregon for training. So had Fanny’s brothers, James and Robert. They were boys we knew. Brothers and chums. I thought of Margaret’s good-natured Harris Brown. And sweethearts.

  My stomach knotted again, but this time it had nothing to do with pits. My own brother was thirty-four years old.

  “Will he have time to come home?” I released her hand. “Or will he leave straight from school?”

  “He’ll take the train home next week.” Margaret sniffled, then dashed away a tear with her sleeve. “He can stay a few days.”

  “Where will he go? Not Camp Lewis?”

  Margaret shook her head. “Fort Stevens,” she said, naming the military base at the mouth of the Columbia River. “Harry thinks there’ll be an official quarantine announcement at Camp Lewis soon. Only doctors and nurses are being allowed through the gates.” She gave up on the pits, staring down at her reddened hands. “At least he’ll be close by. Some of his schoolmates are being sent to California.”

  “Maybe he won’t have to leave Oregon at all.” I tried to sound reassuring. “The newspapers are saying it won’t last much longer. I heard it could all be over by Thanksgiving.”

  “You don’t believe that, do you?” Bitterness crept into Margaret’s tone. “How long have they been saying that? ‘The war will be over by Thanksgiving. Our boys will be home by Christmas.’” She flung a pit into the bucket so hard it thwanged against the metal side. “The newspapers say lots of things, Cleo.”

  Stung, I said nothing. The silence stretched on for a time, broken only by the sound of pits hitting metal. I glanced at Margaret. A question hovered on the tip of my tongue. I hesitated, because I
knew saying the words aloud would only make them harder to ignore.

  “Camp Lewis isn’t very far.” I wiped my hands on Mrs. Brody’s apron. “Do you think we’ll see it here?”

  Margaret didn’t answer at first. “My father says we won’t,” she finally said. “He says the influenza never lasts this long. That it’s bound to run its course before it reaches Portland.” She lifted a handful of pits and studied them, though I had the feeling she saw something else entirely. “I think they try to pretend that we’re still children. That we won’t figure it out for ourselves.” She opened her hand, allowing the pits to slide back into the bucket. She looked at me across the countertop, her blue eyes dark and sober. “But it’s everywhere else, Cleo. Why not here?”

  It was midnight. The witching hour. I lay sleepless, listening as Grace’s snores filled the room. My mind whirled. I thought about the soldiers at Camp Lewis. About coffin shortages. About Jack and Lucy, hundreds of miles away in San Francisco. I tossed and turned, pounding my pillow into a shapeless lump. Finally, I gave up.

  Carefully, so as not to wake anyone, I reached for my wrapper. I slipped out of the room and crept down the hall in bare feet. A single table lamp provided the only source of light. I gripped the banister and descended the staircase, wincing as the old steps creaked beneath me.

  The library was located on the main floor just beyond the staircase. I felt my way about in near darkness for the door. Mr. Brownmiller never locked the room. I switched on a lamp, illuminating mahogany shelves that rose from floor to ceiling. Study tables were scattered about, along with wing-backed chairs the color of rubies. Mr. Brownmiller’s giant globe stood beside his desk. The library smelled faintly of lemons, reminding me, though I wished it didn’t, of home.

  I wandered over to the closest shelf, one finger trailing along the spines as I searched for something to bore me into unconsciousness. Meditations, The Muse in Arms, Ethan Frome. Just as I was about to tug Richard III free, another title caught my eye. I reached down and pulled Aesop’s Fables from a low shelf.