The Journey Home

by K'Anne Meinel

  “FIRE!” came over the party line and a babble of voices interrupted before Cass could glean that a huge fire had erupted over in Medford and was threatening the town. Every man and woman that could be spared was heading to help battle the blaze. She knew with her doctoring and nursing skills she would be in demand and after hearing the details she hung up and told Stephanie who immediately went to where they kept linens and began ripping up the older sheets for bandages while Cass went to her doctor’s bag and peeked inside to see to her supplies. Going to the pantry she pulled out things she would need to mix salves and dress wounds. Even the butter in the icebox would come in handy. By the time she joined Stephanie in ripping and rolling bandages she had quite a stack of things on the kitchen table.

  “I’ll go out and tell the men so they can each decide what to do. Let their conscience be their guide,” Cass told her.

  “What about here? What about our place?” Stephanie asked worriedly, there were five children under this farmhouse roof.

  “I think you can take the garden hoses and water down the roofs on all the buildings as we have watered the gardens,” Cass answered but she looked worried. Just around eighty years ago the Peshtigo fire had taken two thousand lives while the Great Chicago Fire roared as well. There had been many great fires in the Northwood’s and she didn’t want to scare Stephanie. “If it comes here, go to the river, leave everything, just go and take the children. Get across it and pray.”

  “What about you?” Stephanie asked as she saw the concern in Cass’s eyes.

  “I’ll be helping over in Medford. If they can’t stop it, I’ll try to call you. But use common sense and get out! Nothing here can’t be rebuilt. We haven’t even touched that money we got, we don’t need to worry about anything other than our lives,” she said with a teasing note but it didn’t belay the note of how serious a matter this really was.

  “Cass,” Stephanie said and waited for her to look up. “Please be careful, I’ve lost you once already, I don’t know that I could lose you again.”

  Cass leaned over and pulled her close, over the bandages they were rolling and despite the fact that anyone could look through the farmhouse windows and see them. She pulled back and looking into Stephanie’s eyes she kissed her. Lovingly, longingly, and deeply. In it she hoped to convey the deep feelings she had for this woman. “What’s a little fire when you’ve lived through a volcano?” she joked with a lopsided smile. She stood up and began gathering her supplies.

  “Here, I’ll help you,” Stephanie offered to distract herself from the tears she felt threatening.

  Cass took the Model T and filled the back with extra blankets and supplies including jugs of juice and fresh well water. She told the employees they could go home and take care of their places or go with her. She soon had five men crowding into the truck with her eager to go. Her last view of Stephanie was her spraying the house with the garden hose. They exchanged a look as she drove away.

  It was midday when the call came in to fight the fire in Medford. They weren’t the only ones headed that way but not everyone owned a truck in this part of the state. They passed horses, good riders, and big plow horses heading west to go battle the large fire there. The smoke could be smelled from far away and as they got closer they could see it and occasionally they saw isolated smoke trails which meant it was hopping, the sparks being picked up on the wind that the fire was causing and starting elsewhere. It was why fires such as this were so hard to battle.

  Cass pulled up outside of Medford when she saw the Red Cross emblem. The men tumbled out of the truck and went to find out where they could be used. Cass approached the building with the cross.

  “Why Cass Scheimer, this is a delightful surprise!” a voice greeted her as she entered the building with her doctor’s bag.

  Cass looked up to see Doctor Pfennig smiling at her broadly. “Hey Doc, thought you might need some help over here,” she replied with a nod.

  “You bet we do,” he said sweeping his arm into the room. It was a large meeting room and could be set up for several hundred to sit and a platform against one end of it. Cass could see it was set up as a ward and it looked familiar, too familiar. She had thought she had left this all far behind her with the war. There were already men in some of the beds. One of the beds was surrounded by a woman and her children. “We haven’t seen everyone yet, we just got set up yesterday and we might have to move if the winds shift. That fire isn’t nearly under control yet,” he confided.

  “How are holding out with medicines and such?” she asked as she looked around.

  “We will need more so I wired Wausau, Green Bay, Madison, Milwaukee, and even Minneapolis. The fire started far west and has been roaring across carrying ashes and starting new pockets everywhere.”

  “I’ve brought butter and a few other homemade remedies,” Cass told him as she looked around curiously to see where she would be of help.

  Knowing Cass’s reputation he knew they would be of help. “Let’s get that inside out of the heat and see what you have,” he offered as he grabbed a couple of orderlies to help her unpack the truck. “You may want to park that over there out of the way and take the key out, someone would take it and use it if you don’t,” he warned.

  When Cass returned from putting the truck away it was in time to see someone brought in on a makeshift stretcher. The fireman was burned beyond recognition and she could see he was dead without examining him. The men who had carried the stretcher though had minor burns and she took them aside one at a time to treat them while the doctor examined and then covered the corpse. Their efforts for nothing seemed to depress the men. “There you go, you’ll be good as new in no time,” Cass told one of them.

  “Can I get back out there and fight?” he asked. It echoed, the men in the war had said similar things to Cass many times when she treated them.

  Cass was amazed but understood. She nodded. “Just be careful and don’t end up like him!” she warned ominously and then grinned, “I don’t mind treating you guys but I want to see you here alive you hear me?”

  They grinned at her good natured kidding. There was nothing funny about the burns they had received or the cuts and scratches but her salves, bandages, and teasing made it better. They both ‘promised’ to the best of their abilities that she would see them again. They were eager to get back and help and left as soon as they could.

  “Think we will see them again?” Cass asked Doctor Pfennig after they left.

  He nodded. “Yeah and I hope we see them alive.” He knew that the fire was out of control and these kind of men would fight not only for the town but for the farms and homes that meant that people who had so little would be able to continue to fight the elements to scratch out a living. Some of them would lose their lives in the fight.

  Over the next few days Cass treated burns, trauma, dirt, scratches, fear and many other ailments. She even managed to deliver a baby in the chaos having to do so in a small room off the main ward as it was segregated by sex and there was no room for the new mother. Doctor Pfennig had full confidence in her and the other doctors that came to help soon were appreciative of her skills as well. Many of them had the same sort of skills that she did, no degree but plenty of good down home backwoods knowledge and training. Cass, with her Army training even had more ‘education’ than some who arrived to help. She helped unstintingly. was knowledgeable and with the skills she had learned from her mother, her training in the Army, and her innate skills she was a valuable asset and was treated as a colleague by most.

  “Shh, shhh, shhh,” she consoled a little boy who had tried to stop the fire from burning down their little house. His mother had tried to carry him into town herself but exhaustion had made her fall down in a ditch and they had been lucky to have been found as the firefighters retreated. Smoke inhalation and exhaustion nearly claimed them both. His wracking cough from the smoke in his lungs tore his little body apart and Cass had given him a cherry infusion for his throat and chest. Sh
e plastered a menthol paste on his chest to make it warm and soothe it. She coated his burns with butter and a paste to soothe and numb the pain.

  “Will he be okay?” the mother, herself looking like a skeleton with the dark circles that were her eyes asked.

  “We will do the best we can,” Cass assured her as she made sure the bandages on his burned hands were well wrapped. Anything could happen, infection could set in, that cough could lead to many things. She didn’t know though. She gave hope wherever she could but there had been so many already. She despaired of seeing an end to it all and still didn’t know what would end the carnage she had seen. The smell of burned flesh was again in her nostrils, she had thought the clean, crisp, Northwood’s air had cleared that from her senses forever, the war was long past in her mind but now it all was back and it wasn’t pleasant, it wasn’t forgotten, and seeing the suffering on these people’s faces was heartbreaking.

  “Cass, I have a surgery, will you assist?” Doctor Henkle asked her. She was exhausted he could see but getting doctors here much less qualified nurses was proving impossible. Only those who had headed here directly by their own means had made it. The trains had stopped running in this section since the railroads didn’t want to lose their trains to the roaring forest fires in the various sections across the Northwood’s. They were running dangerously short on supplies, medical, blankets, cots, food, anything and everything was being utilized and rationed.

  “Of course,” she answered without another thought.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Cass stretched as she came out of her third surgery that day. The depressing part was he would probably die and there was nothing they could do about it. There was only so much the human body could weather. She looked outside hoping to see something besides the never ending stream of patients. She glanced out a west facing window and saw the huge clouds of smoke that covered the horizon and blocked out the sun. Only a rainstorm could save them now. The pockets of fires were all over.

  “Cass?” she looked up to see Doctor Pfennig. “You need to sleep, don’t make me give you something. Go now! Before someone else needs you.”

  Cass had to agree with him. In the last three days she had maybe three hours of continuous sleep. She headed for the small room that had been set aside for the doctors to rest in and fell into a bunk. She slept a whole hour, in her dirty clothes, before someone came to wake her again.

  She had to wonder what was happening east of here, how Stephanie was holding up, how their own farm was faring. She couldn’t help but worry, she didn’t dare call her, everyone on the party line would listen in and it wouldn’t be private in the least. She also didn’t want to start a panic but news from the east was scarce. As far as they knew the fires were all around them now, carried on the wind by sparks to start again and again in a fresh spot, dry tinder just waiting to explode into flames. Just when the men thought they had one part contained it would flare up again in the dry woods and would soon be a raging inferno again. Miles and miles of precious woodland was being consumed to feed the angry fires. No one was safe before it.

  She went to check on her patients, doing her rounds, and then stole a few minutes to sit on the porch before she was called back to her work and to worry about Stephanie, the children, and the farm. It was as though her thoughts conjured her though and she rubbed her eyes at what she saw. The two farm wagons with the Scheimer farms logo on it and several others were coming in a long line down the road and stopped when Stephanie saw Cass.

  “Hello there, we thought you might need a few things!” Stephanie greeted her. She noticed Cass’s exhaustion immediately. She looked beyond worn.

  “What are you doing here?” Cass asked surprised, she didn’t need cheering up and Stephanie’s voice grated on her nerves.

  “We brought supplies,” Hank spoke up from the truck he was driving as one by one the wagons and other vehicles began to park along the makeshift hospital building.

  “What is this?” Doctor Henkle came out washing his hands on a towel. By the smell Cass could tell it was full of alcohol.

  “Supplies,” Hank told him.

  Doctor Pfennig came out to see what the commotion was and at the word his bushy eyebrows rose in surprise. He turned back to get orderlies and anyone else to help unload the wagons and trucks.

  “What in the world?” Cass asked Hank as she tiredly watched people popping off of wagons and out of trucks and begin unloading and carrying things into the buildings they were using.

  “It’s Stephanie. She was sure when they stopped the trains that you would need things beyond the bandages you took,” Hank told her.

  Cass looked to where Stephanie was herself carrying a pile of blankets into one of the tents.

  “She bought out what she could at several of the stores in town and made a few phone calls down to Wausau and around town. People started showing up and packing up and here we are. Why she knows more people…” he laughed shaking his head in amazement.

  Cass stared stupidly at the generosity that people were showing. It became like a party as people who knew nothing about nursing were asking to be shown and how they could help. They soon had people being given the first baths they had been able to manage in days. Wiping their dirty bodies down with clean washcloths, water, or alcohol, cleanliness went a long way to peoples healing both mentally and physically. People chattered sharing news and their lives with others making it lively, entertaining, and a better atmosphere for the patients.

  “You need to sleep,” Stephanie ordered Cass when some of the commotion died down.

  Cass nodded in agreement but didn’t stop her work, more men had been brought in from the lines and she had been busy treating them, the doctors taking the worst cases.

  “Go with Stephanie,” Doctor Pfennig ordered when he heard Stephanie. “We can manage for a while without you.”

  Cass allowed herself to be led to a tent that was now set up instead of one of the many town buildings they had confiscated. “Where’d this come from?” she asked knowing it wasn’t there before.

  Stephanie shrugged. “Just something someone brought in case it was needed, apparently it was.”

  “You did this didn’t you?” Cass asked as they went in to see the many cots set up and ready. Blankets, sheets, and mattresses all ready to let a body lie on them.

  “I just put out the word,” Stephanie said as she led Cass to one. A basket next to it yielded apples, fresh water, and sandwiches that Stephanie had packed.

  “Oh that tastes heavenly,” Cass sighed as she sat on the cot and ate and ate and ate. It had been a long time since remembered eating more than a bite here and there and it tasted delicious.

  Stephanie watched her concerned. Cass needed to sleep more than eat and the circles under her eyes were something to behold. She had seen more death and destruction than Stephanie could even imagine and she had to wonder how like the war this was.

  Cass fell asleep in the middle of a sandwich and Stephanie pulled it from her lax hand to put back in the basket before she unlaced her boots and swung her onto the cot. The full stomach had Cass deeply asleep and she never felt it as Stephanie covered her and then lay on the cot next to her to ‘guard’ her.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Cass woke up a full twenty-four hours later puzzled to where she was. For a moment she thought she was back on the island but the tent, while not exactly government issued, reminded her enough that she confused. She saw people she didn’t know in the various cots around her and as she dressed she wondered that she hadn’t heard any of the commotion around her. Tying her laces she stomped into the army boots she had brought along and worn and realized they had blood and gunk on them, not for the first time either. She looked around the cot to see if she was leaving anything and quickly remade it for anyone else to use as she left the tent.

  “Oh Cass, thank God you are up, we need you!” one of the doctors greeted her as she entered the makeshift hospital and returned back to work.

  It
wasn’t until late that night that she saw Stephanie again and then only for a minute as she was dealing with patients and Stephanie was carrying in supplies. She wondered about that but her work kept her busy and she couldn’t ask what was going on. She briefly worried about the children but then the press of patients pulled her away.

  “The fire has started on the other end of town!” someone shouted and they began to evacuate patients and people. A massive undertaking for everyone involved. Every truck, car, and wagon was utilized. Horses neighing, people shouting, and general chaos ensued as people headed out of town away from the smoke, the fire that was raging behind them.

  Cass found her truck and Stephanie who helped her load two patients in the back of the truck but not before loading up the bed with supplies that would be necessary at the next location wherever that would be as the fire headed determinedly towards them.

  “You think we will make it back to Merrill?” Stephanie asked as they loaded a couple of people in the back seat of the truck.

  Cass glanced to the west where a wall of fire and smoke could be seen and shrugged. She didn’t know, she didn’t care. She just wanted to get out of the path of this fire. She saw where Stephanie was talking to the two men who were driving the Scheimer farms wagons and where Stanley and Stella were hooked up, their eyes rolling at the flames that were creeping up across the town. She went over to calm them, her soothing hands, her familiar voice, all of it helped calm the horses.

  “Come on!” she called to Cass who had parting words and then waved the wagons on as she ran to get in the truck.

  “Ready!” she said as she slammed the truck door as she got in.

  Cass let out the clutch and they lurched forward. It reminded her when she was learning to drive back in Pearl and she found herself giggling.

  “What?” Stephanie asked as she looked around to see the source of Cass’s amusement.