by Noelle Carle
“Yes, ma’am,” he yawned. “Miss Naomi lets me do it almost every day. But isn’t it too early?” His eyes were heavy and he leaned against her.
“A little bit, but Stevie will need something to eat before he goes to town. We’ll make some coffee, too, a little bit later.”
Inside her, as she spoke calmly to Donnie, a prayer was unraveling from her pounding heart that consisted of three words, “Help us, God, help us God,” over and over.
For years afterward, Ruth would look back on this day as the day when God showed himself strong on her behalf. She would face other struggles, she would know times of fear and discouragement, but on that day, she knew beyond any doubt that God was walking with her.
First, calmness descended on her heart that helped her to put everything unnecessary out of her mind. She stopped worrying about Naomi; she got Stevie fed and sent on his way and she tended to the sick while she waited for the doctor.
Her first priority was to get them all together in one place. In the dim but growing light of morning, she gently woke those who were still sleeping and moved them out of their beds. She brought the babies’ cribs right into the bigger boys’ room and thanked God that they stayed relatively calm while she did so.
The sick boys huddled in their beds, shivering despite their fevers. Ruth prepared one of the empty beds for Riley, instructed all the well boys to get dressed and go down into the kitchen, and then took a few moments to get dressed. As she splashed her face with the cold water in her basin, she decided that, for once, she wasn’t going to wear her corset. She simply pulled on her chemise and stockings, a petticoat over those, followed by a blouse, skirt and her apron. She took a glad deep breath and smiled at the freedom she felt without the heavy tight garment underneath everything. She almost skipped down the stairs.
The sleepy boys had gathered in the kitchen around the table where she found Donnie already dishing up their oatmeal. “Good, Donnie. Now who will slice the bread so I can make some toast? Big Jon, will you go into the pantry and bring out a few apples and slice them up to go on the oatmeal?”
Everyone was compliant and uncomplaining as she explained that Miss Naomi was away this morning and Mr. Moore was ill along with the others. “I want you to consult the chart for your morning chores; then go into the school room and begin your studies for the morning. Since Miss Naomi is away, I expect that you will do your reading on your own and as much of your work as you can without my supervision.”
The boys began doing as she asked while she checked on Riley. “I don’t think I can lift you,” she murmured as she thought about trying to move him up to the room with the sick boys. She was carrying a cool cloth to lay on his forehead and approached his bed. His breathing had quieted and she felt a frisson of alarm until she saw that he was indeed still breathing. She laid the cloth over his forehead and tiptoed back out. Perhaps it was just a short-lived illness and he was going to be up in a few hours.
Ruth calculated how long it might take Stephen to run to Vay and then added time to it, knowing his propensity for comfort. But she reckoned without his sensitivity and was happily surprised when she heard a wagon pulling up the road two hours later. As she hurried outside, she was confused to see her own horse and buggy, driven by Dr. Cobb, and a grinning Stephen beside him. Tied to the back was the doctor’s horse.
“Doctor, how did…what are you…” She had trouble framing her question, but took one look at his grim face as he climbed down.
He pointed with his thumb into the back of the wagon. “Your sister,” he said shortly.
Naomi lay on a makeshift bed, wrapped in a quilt, obviously ill. Ruth was so relieved to see her that she started to climb up onto the wagon. Dr. Cobb’s hand on her arm restrained her.
“I wouldn’t get near her,” he said. “The whole town is quarantined.”
“That’s ridiculous, Doctor. I’m the only one who can care for these children, and her.” Ruth climbed onto the wagon and gazed at her sister. More pale than usual, yet with bright spots on her cheeks, she rolled her eyes and her brow was hot under Ruth’s cool hand. “How did you find her?” Ruth questioned.
“She came in the middle of the night and tried to take the train but they stopped her at the station. This influenza is spreading out from the cities and travel is restricted everywhere. She wandered around for a while I guess, then I found her on my doorstep early this morning, just before your boy Stevie showed up.”
As he spoke, he moved Naomi to the edge of the wagon, then lifted her in his powerful arms and headed for the house. Over his shoulder he said, “I suspect your kids and Riley have the same thing. It’s spreading fast and hitting hard.”
“What can we do?” she questioned, hurrying behind him.
“Keep the other kids apart; keep the sick ones warm and comfortable. I’ve brought a supply of aspirin if they are having pain, but there’s not a whole lot we can do. People are trying all sorts of ignorant cures but it’s all in the hand of God.” The doctor sounded angry as he proceeded up the stairs with Naomi bouncing in his arms. He stopped at the top and asked, “Where do you want her?”
Ruth pointed to the sick room, and watched him lay her gently on the bed she’d prepared for Riley. He then went from bed to bed, lifting eyelids and checking ears, laying his big hand on their foreheads. She followed him downstairs and showed him into Riley’s room. Before he entered he turned back to her. “I can’t stay, Mrs. Hudson. I’m sorry that I haven’t more help for you. I know I’m leaving you with the burden of their care, but the whole town seems to have come down with this illness.”
Dr. Cobb was Tom’s age, but looked older. He had black hair peppered with gray streaks, a long moustache that he sometimes curled with wax, and usually vibrant blue eyes that relayed a sense of intelligence and compassion. He was strong and sometimes jolly, but not this day. She noted the dark skin like bruises under his eyes, and his shoulders drooped with weariness.
“It’s all right, Doctor. We’ll manage,” Ruth told him. Somehow she knew they would. The hammering of her heart had calmed and she sensed a presence with her that had nothing to do with the doctor.
Chapter Twenty
The Hour of Deliverance
Mary Reid was recovering. She knew she would get better the day she could actually lift her head without getting dizzy. Compared to what she’d seen in this sick room, she had not suffered much. When she could start keeping her eyes open, she watched Dr. Granger as he worked among them. His manner was always kind and gentle. His concern for each patient was genuine, yet he had an air of distraction, as if he were puzzling over something. One night she heard him weeping in the room across the hall and she knew that his two younger sons had died. What a terrible, terrible plague had swept over them.
One day she was well enough to sit up out on the porch. He joined her for a few moments. He sat in a rocker and leaned his head back. He had lost weight and acquired more gray in her dark hair in the past few weeks. He closed his eyes.
“Doctor?” She didn’t know if he might have fallen asleep that quickly.
“Dan,” he replied, opening one eye to squint at her.
Mary smiled. “Dan. I want you to know how glad I am to be alive.”
A slow smile spread across Dan’s face. “Me too,” he answered.
“I mean it. You saved my life and the lives of so many here. If it weren’t for you and your family, many of us would not have made it.”
His smile faded. “Many did not make it. Mary, the papers are reporting a staggering number of fatalities in just this country. I’ve never seen such a thing. So many different symptoms. So many sudden deaths. My Owen…in the morning joking with his brother, dead by nightfall. I’ve never…” His voice grew husky and he stopped speaking.
Mary reached over and took his hand. He grasped onto hers, holding it tightly and cleared his throat.
“So many gone,” he murmured. “The young strong ones too. Usually the elderly and babies are most at risk. I
wish I had time to research it more.”
He continued on about advances in medicine that he’d read about; how things had changed so much in the last thirty years. He seemed oblivious to the fact that he was still holding her hand, but Mary was not. She closed her eyes and listened, a comfortable smile on her face.
This time it was Sam holding vigil at Tom Hudson’s bedside. His reckless, heedless chaplain had taken off his gas mask to give to a soldier who’d lost his own. Now his eyes were covered with bandages. The skin on his cheeks and lips was red and blistered from the gas. Sam sat with several others from his unit, waiting to see him stir, or better yet, speak. Frankie was there, the one who lost his mask and he felt the most miserable and guilty. Anthony Cilley, who had snatched the mask off a man who’d been shot dead to help out their chaplain sat there too. He’d run after Sam to enlist his help carrying Tom back to the trench. It was the first time Sam had turned his back on the front, had left it, like he’d thought about often but never done. George Gage and the old man, as they called Paul Fowler, were with him. The hospital was full, even after the armistice had been enforced.
Tom Hudson sustained his injuries two days before when the hostilities were at some of their fiercest. Some one knew, they said, that the Huns were going to surrender, and they were getting in their final licks. The old man said they were using up their ammunition and gas cartridges just for the fun of it.
When the armistice went into effect at eleven in the morning of November 11th, the fighting stopped. In the ringing silence, Sam sat down where he was and cried. He was not alone. Numbness soaked into his bones and he went back with the others to their trench and slept for close to twenty hours. Then he came to the hospital and waited.
“Why don’t he wake up?” Frankie asked in a worried voice as he paced back and forth in the tiny space between the beds.
“Sit down!” George barked.
“Sure! Where?” The rest of them were all parked on a spare stretcher close to the bed. When the influenza was at its worst they had rigged sheets to make partitions between each patient, turning the hospital into a bewildering maze of tiny white rooms.
“You can sit here,” came a hoarse croak from the patient.
“Oh, Chap! You’re awake!” Frankie exclaimed.
“I think I am,” was the strained reply. “I know I’m not dead ‘cause you’re the worst sounding bunch of angels I’ve ever heard.”
Frankie fervently spoke. “I’ll never forget what you done for me, Chap. Never! You saved my life.”
The figure on the bed was silent for a moment. “Well, someone saved mine too, or we wouldn’t be talking about it.”
Frankie said, “Tony got a mask off a dead man and he and Sam drug you outta there.”
“Thanks, guys. And thank God.” He was silent for a long time, clearing his throat and moving his hands restlessly.
“The war is over, Chap. Can you believe it?”
“When?”
“The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,” said the old man. “Just like somebody planned it that way.”
“Oh, thank God. Thank God it’s over, boys,” croaked the chaplain.
A nurse approached them then, looking exhausted and gray faced. “Clear out, gentlemen,” she said genially enough. “Time for a clean-up.” They filed out. Sam took a long look back and saw Tom’s head moving towards the sound of their retreating voices. The nurse said something to him and he turned his head back. She began removing the bandages around his eyes.
“Go ahead, you fellas,” he told his friends. He went back to sit by the bed. He slipped his hand into Tom’s and said quietly in his ear, “I’m still here, Chap. I won’t leave you alone.” He nodded at the nurse who had stopped her ministrations with her eyebrows raised. “I’m staying,” he said firmly. She resumed tiredly, more interested in finishing her task than enforcing a senseless rule.
Tom Hudson drew in a shaky breath and his grip was strong. “Thanks, Eliot. Are…are the bandages off now?” he asked the nurse. She only made a small sound and continued her work.
With each layer of bandage that came off, more of the damage to Tom’s eyes was revealed. The gas, a harsh chlorine mixture, caused blisters on any exposed skin and Tom’s was no exception. Ulcers covered his cheeks and his eyes oozed with greenish pus.
“They’re off,” Sam said, forcing himself to look for his chaplain’s sake.
The nurse gently swabbed Tom’s face with a pungent smelling solution that caused him to wince. “Don’t even try to open your eyes,” she instructed. “It’s too soon.” She wound some fresh bandages around his head and carried away the basin full of dirty ones.
“Will you do something for me?”
“Anything, Chap. What is it?” Sam asked.
“Pray for me, son.”
Sam gulped. “Me?”
Tom Hudson sighed. “I have…I’m.” He left off, for once unable to bring words to bear on the situation.
“What, Chap?” Sam asked.
“I’ve never been afraid of dying, Eliot. Not since I was young, about fifteen, and I thought, ‘what’s the very worst that could happen to me? I could die, and my soul would be in God’s hands. That’s not so bad.’ But, it’s the not dying…” He swallowed. “It’s being maimed. I can’t even think about it. How can I live like this? How can anyone live with such problems? I’ve never been able to think about that in a rational way.” His hands plucked at the graying sheet covering him. “I’ve always been good with other people and helping them work through their fears; helping them figure out how to find God. But with purely physical things, I’ve never been much help. I found the thought…so disturbing.”
Sam sat beside him without saying a word. His chaplain appeared so fearless and so invulnerable. It scared him now to see this fear in him, this weakness.
“How will my Ruthie bear it? How can I help run the home if I can’t see? How can I watch my boys grow?” His voice died away.
“Aww, Chap. Your wife loves you. I seen the look on her face when you left. It was like she was praying; please God, just let ‘im come home again. She won’t care whether you can see or not!” Sam declared, forgetting his grammar for a moment as he spoke what he had witnessed on their parting.
Suddenly the nurse loomed behind Sam. “Please keep your voice down, sir. And I believe you should let our patient rest now.” She placed a firm hand on Sam’s shoulder, giving him no choice but to rise and move away from the bed.
“I will pray, Chap. And I’ll be back in a while.” Sam went back to the trench that had been his home for the past few weeks and prayed with fervency he’d never felt before, even when he himself lay dying.
Chapter Twenty-One
I Can See Peace Coming Now
Alison had shadows under her eyes and a knowing look that came from bitter sorrow. “Do you think people change much, Mrs. Reid?” she asked her teacher as they sat on the porch steps.
“Which people?” Mary questioned, thinking even as she asked, about the change that had occurred in her very self.
“I’d like to think that Aubrey Newell was sorry for what he did.” Alison said. “I’d like to think he had changed.” She had told Mary how he’d saved Sam’s life, not once but twice.
“I don’t know, dear. Sometimes they seem to change. The real question is, have you changed? Are you willing to forgive him, like Pastor Whiting says we must do? Whether or not he’s sorry?”
Alison leaned her head back after shrugging. She gazed up through the now leafless branches. “I don’t know what to think anymore. I’m grateful for Sam’s life. I prayed every day that God would protect him. And God did. Do I owe Aubrey anything for all that?” The cat Maggie came nudging her back, and Alison lifted her onto her lap and stroked her. Sorrow lay like a stone in her chest, for Maggie was Owen’s cat and she seemed to have lost her animation since he died.
“Pastor Whiting also says unforgiveness hurts you more than it hurts Aubrey.”
“I wanted to hurt Aubrey. If I ever saw him again, I wanted to kill him myself. I wanted him to suffer too.” Alison’s eyes flicked sideways to catch the look on Mary’s face, anticipating shock there, but seeing only sympathy.
Mary noted her use of the past tense but made no comment. “Probably Aubrey has suffered a great deal. He has seen horrible things and lived through the nightmare of this war.”
Alison resisted any feelings of sympathy for Aubrey. “Well, so did Sam and Remick. Why did they have to suffer too?”
Mary laid her hand on Alison’s back, rubbing away the tension she felt there. “I would never try to defend Aubrey Newell to you. Don’t misunderstand me. But Sam and your brother have both lived in loving families. They’ve the promise of a loving future. It seems to me that Aubrey, in comparison, has lived a rather blighted life. That’s no excuse for evil, but it may help explain it.”
Alison was silent, but nodded her head. Maggie closed her green eyes and purred faintly.
There was scarcely a family in Little Cove untouched by the influenza. It was a near miss with Aunt Pearl, who survived. Davey and Owen left a hole in their lives that they were only able to fill up with work, until now.
Both the baby Caroline and little Isabella were taken by the illness. Cleo died the day after Alison saw her, and their younger brother Richard, who had been outside playing with gusto one day, also succumbed two days later. Another of the Ouellette girls died. Annie Bell, Robbie’s sister, lay ill for days, recovering to discover that all her hair had fallen out. Mrs. Whiting, who had been expecting, lost her baby although she herself was recovered.
One of the three Kens succumbed after being sick one day, while Ken Alley lingered on for two weeks before dying. Alvie Cooper, keeper of the lighthouse, died. Because there was no one to keep the light, Remick moved out to the point, until the Coast Guard found someone to replace him.