Rebellion

by Molly Patterson

  “She probably has. The newspapers get the story telegraphed. How much longer won’t it take for one of her letters to reach us?”

  “I think I’ll write to Mother, anyway,” Louisa said, “and see whether they’ve got word from her recently.”

  Just then Herbert came walking through the door of the kitchen, carrying Emmaline. He had his arms hooked under hers and was carrying her front first so that her little body held against his was just a smaller version. “I don’t think Joseph liked us being in there,” he said, setting his sister down on the floor, where she blinked in confusion and then set off crawling toward her father’s leg. “He’s coughing a lot.”

  Louisa went quickly into the back room where Joseph lay on the bed. He was turned onto one shoulder, and his breath was coming in effortful gasps. Placing one hand under his chin, she turned his face from the pillow. It was hot to the touch, and his cheeks were red. “Can you breathe?” she asked, and he heaved a little and then started coughing again.

  She scooped him up in the blanket and carried him into the kitchen. It was hot near the stove and Joseph squirmed, so she sat down at the table and told Bert to bring over the honey jar. Joseph had already had a spoonful in the morning and he’d fought against swallowing it then, but now he didn’t resist. His skin was white and red, like a marble, and glassy. Once the honey was down, Louisa stuck her pinkie finger up one of his nostrils and again he barely flinched. “He still doesn’t have any muck in his nose,” she said to Bert. “You’d think if it was a cold he would, by now.”

  As the day went on, Joseph didn’t get any better, though he didn’t seem to get any worse, either. Worn out from coughing, he would sometimes fall asleep for a half hour, but then he’d wake up again struggling for breath. That night, Louisa kept him in the bed with her and it was much the same. In the morning, Bert went out to the barn and Herbert went with him; he was old enough now to help with the feeding, though not old enough to do anything out in the fields. When he came back in after his regular chores, Louisa sent him to the henhouse to collect the eggs. Normally, the henhouse was her domain. Today she was busy with Joseph and Emmaline, and she had time only to reflect that it was something to be able to count on such a young child.

  Herbert returned from the henhouse with only a few eggs. He’d found several broken ones, and when Louisa went out to check, she was greeted with more squawking than usual. A snake must have got in. She looked around to make sure it was gone and then put Herbert to the task of cleaning up and putting in fresh hay.

  She could no longer remember the time before she’d had her son. And yet she had been pregnant the summer Addie and her family came to visit—pregnant and worried that she would lose him, as she had lost all the others. Then Addie went away again and Herbert arrived, and she had thought that she’d reached the end of her losses.

  One did not need to look for bad omens, Louisa decided. A snake in the henhouse could just be a snake.

  By Tuesday morning, Louisa had resolved that they needed a doctor. She sent Bert into town and he came back with a neighbor and the promise that Dr. Reynolds would follow within an hour or two. The neighbor, Mrs. Moeller, was no substitute for the doctor, even though she imagined herself one. She had never once consulted the services of a medical man; it was a waste of money as far as she was concerned. Inside the house, she took off her jacket and hung it on a hook by the door. “You’ve gave him honey?” she asked, and Louisa told her they had. Then Louisa took her into the living room.

  Herbert was standing by the bed where his brother lay. Even from where she stood, she could see that Joseph’s lips had taken on a bluish tint, but his fever was high; she’d felt his head only a few minutes before and laid a cold cloth across it that was still in place. She stood now at a distance of six or eight feet, suddenly unwilling to go up to the bed.

  Mrs. Moeller squatted down next to Joseph, edging Herbert away. “Go on and cough,” she instructed.

  Joseph stared up at her with exhausted suspicion. No one was making him better, not even his own mother, and this neighbor was telling him to do the thing that hurt. For a full half minute he wouldn’t cough, but then it happened on its own and went on for some time. Herbert had a cloth at the ready and stepped forward to catch the globule of greenish phlegm when it came at last. “He’s been bringing up gunk since last night,” Louisa said, biting her thumbnail, “whenever he gets a fit like that going.”

  Mrs. Moeller stood. “No doubt the doctor will know better what to do. But for my part, I’d say you attend to the fever and it will take care of itself.”

  It was midafternoon before Dr. Reynolds came rolling up the lane in his black carriage with its high, narrow wheels. He was a large man with a bullet-shaped head, who walked as if he were continually stumbling forward and whose eyebrows, naturally angled down toward the nose, gave him a look of disapproval. Children tended to be frightened of him. He’d come out to see the family once before, and poor polite Herbert had hidden his face in Louisa’s chest.

  Now the doctor took his bag from under the seat and climbed down into the yard. “It’s your youngest who’s got sick,” he said.

  “My youngest son,” she corrected. “I have a daughter who’s younger.”

  Dr. Reynolds nodded and gazed at her from beneath his bushy brows. “And where’s your man now?”

  “Working. Do you want me to get him?”

  “Oh, no, that ain’t necessary. If he’s busy, you know.” The doctor shook his head and said, “Let’s see the boy then.” Brusque, but as if it came from kindness. A doctor couldn’t afford to be tenderhearted.

  As they passed into the house, Louisa told him of Joseph’s symptoms. When she mentioned that he’d been ill since Saturday, he said, as if correcting her, “Not four days, yet.” Most of the country families didn’t call out a doctor for a child who’d been ill only half a week; most of them didn’t call out a doctor at all. Louisa had been raised in a town, and she didn’t trust the idea that you simply did for yourself. You didn’t leave things to chance and the wisdom of farmers’ wives. You went into town to get the doctor, and somehow you found the money to pay him for the visit.

  Inside the house, the doctor pulled a chair up to the bed and felt Joseph’s forehead. He listened to his breathing and when the boy began coughing, he removed from his pocket a clean handkerchief that he used to capture the phlegm. “Has there been any blood?” he asked as he examined the contents. Louisa told him no, not any that she’d seen. He nodded and then reached out and poked Joseph’s stomach. The boy yelped and began crying. “Hurts some, does it?” The crying set Joseph choking and then coughing again. Louisa swallowed hard, feeling ill herself.

  Dr. Reynolds stood and looked down on Joseph with a thoughtful expression. “It’s lung fever, no doubt about that.”

  Louisa’s heart contracted; she felt it like a thin piece of ice beneath her skin. She heard her mother, two decades earlier, saying to Louisa’s father, “They say the poor thing had pneumonia. Carried him right off.” And Louisa, a child, had gotten it mixed up, pictured the boy they were discussing with a small blocky object in his hands, something cold and bluely glowing, that he clutched to his chest as he ran away.

  “What’s your thinking for the boy’s care?” Mrs. Moeller asked the doctor. But Louisa put a hand on his arm before he could answer. “Won’t you come into the kitchen and have a slice of pie? Mrs. Moeller”—she turned to her neighbor—“could you stay here with the boys?”

  Mrs. Moeller went to the bed to rearrange the blankets tucked around Joseph’s body. There was a hint of accusation in the movement, a suggestion that the doctor had mucked things up. Dr. Reynolds stooped to take hold of his black bag, and Louisa led him through the next room and into the kitchen. Pulling back the cloth from a rhubarb pie, she cut a wide slab and put it on a plate. “I’m shaking, Doctor,” she said, pulling back another chair and sitting across from him. “I’m worried for my son.”

  He took a bite of the pie
and nodded. “You can worry, you know, not that it’ll do any good. Children get lung fever, and they get better. Most do.” He cleared his throat. “Or many do, at least.”

  Louisa shook her head. “He struggles to breathe. What am I supposed to do?”

  “I’ll give you some aspirin. That helps with the aches and the stomach pain.” The doctor took another large bite of the pie, and then another. He ate somewhat grimly, as if it were part of his job. “But truth to tell, the sickness has to run its course. It may take a little while.”

  “How long?”

  The doctor shrugged. “Hard to say. He’s got a fever right now, but you already know what to do about that, and the good news is that the fever, well, it ain’t low, but at least it’s below the point where we need to get in a panic. You worry when the boy gets delirious.” Finishing his pie, he pushed the plate an inch away from him. “No, thank you, I’ve had plenty,” he said when Louisa offered him another piece. “I’m sorry I can’t do more to get your boy feeling better. As I said, I’ll give you some aspirin. That’ll help some. But mother care really is the best treatment; you feel free to use that liberally, Mrs. Baumann.”

  Louisa was supposed to smile here, and she did. But resented it, a bit.

  The doctor left, and Mrs. Moeller stayed on another hour. They fed Joseph some aspirin and Louisa sat by him and stroked his arm. “Have you heard lately from your sister in China?” Mrs. Moeller asked. Louisa waited to hear if she was asking because of some new report. But it seemed her neighbor wasn’t aware of any news at all, at least none having to do with a part of the world that far away. Louisa told her she hadn’t heard from Addie in months and kept quiet about the reason this was so concerning.

  After their neighbor had gone, Louisa left Joseph in the care of his brother and took Emmaline into the kitchen, where she set her daughter down on a rug in the corner and gave her a stuffed rag toy to play with. Somehow the noon meal had been prepared and eaten, but there was supper to think of. Left over from dinner were chicken and gravy, and peas. She would do a meat pie. As Louisa began mixing lard into the flour, she tried to turn her ear from the sound of Joseph coughing in the other room. Out the window, she saw Bert come out of the barn swinging a pail, on his way to the well. He had his head down. Who knew what he was thinking of. Joseph was coughing and coughing, and Louisa could hear it become a cry. She didn’t put down her spoon and go to comfort him. Instead, she voiced a silent prayer: Dear God, take my sister and leave me my son.

  A minute later, Bert crossed back into view, the pail now filled. This time he did glance up at the window. He didn’t nod or acknowledge her in any way, and Louisa felt a shock go through her. It was a punishment. He couldn’t know what she’d done, the deal she’d made with God in the silence of her own heart—and yet his look was a judgment.

  After he’d gone away again, she remembered that the sun was shining on the windows. So maybe he’d looked up only to see the glint of light on the glass.

  Within a week, Joseph was mending. His cough lingered for some weeks, but he was up and wobbling around, and Louisa knew that the deal she had made with God would be honored. She knew it without feeling it. Once, years before, while peeling a potato, she’d sliced the flesh at the base of her thumb with the paring knife. It was a deep cut, down through the skin to something more elementary. She’d seen the knife go in and come out again. Then came the narrow line of blood that became a gush, but it took a moment for the pain to arrive. Before it did, during that period of shock, she’d experienced a strange kind of relief. You could be hurt without feeling it, at least for a time. And she’d been thankful to her body for the ways it had of protecting her from its own terrible understanding.

  The news from China came, but in dribs and drabs, and it wasn’t always clear what any of it meant. The Newark was sent to Taku under Admiral Kempff. There were other foreign warships at Taku. But where was Taku? Was that near where Addie lived? Louisa never did write to her mother, but her mother wrote to her. She wanted to know if Louisa had heard from Addie any more recently than they had. The last letter they’d received was from last summer, and they were worried, but they put their faith in God, didn’t they, and that’s exactly what Addie had done as well. The letter swung between worry and complaint. Louisa put it away, telling herself she would answer it when she found the time.

  Her mother had become more religious over the years. Because Louisa hadn’t been there to see it, she couldn’t quite believe in the transformation. Nearly a decade before, when Addie announced that she was going to China on a mission, their mother had been as baffled as the rest of them. They were all good Christians. Still, there was a limit to what was required of them; crossing a distant ocean to an even more distant land, staying among a strange people in difficult and terrible conditions—this was such an extreme demonstration of faith that it seemed almost unbecoming. That was what their mother had felt at the time; now, she seemed to have reversed her thinking. She had grown more religious even while Addie seemed less and less certain of her faith. Well, belief had its basis in distance. Abstraction is almost always better than proof.

  Proof—that was what Louisa was waiting for and dreading. Proof that her sister was doomed, killed. The foreign warships at Taku were attacked from Peking. Eight foreigners from a mission in Shansi went missing. Shansi! That was the region where Addie lived. The mission named in the paper was a place called Pao-ting Fu, which sounded familiar but was not the name Louisa remembered. Did she remember it? She went to check the letters. Yes, she was right: Lu-cho Fu.

  The news that came was horrible, horrible. Priests doused in kerosene and burned alive. Missionaries beheaded with swords. The deaths of native Christians weren’t tallied up with the same exactness as those of foreigners. They seemed to be far more numerous and were noted in passing. Louisa felt very little, considering them. It was their country, after all. Christian or not, it was their kind doing the killing.

  On his weekly trip into town, Bert now made a point of purchasing a newspaper to bring home. Louisa skipped over everything but the report from China, which was only ever a paragraph or two. When she’d finished reading it, she put the whole paper in the stove and watched it catch fire, glowing and smoldering and turning to ash. Bert never stopped her. Once, he tried to reassure Louisa of her sister’s safety by pointing out that some of the foreigners had got out, fled to T’ien-chin, boarded ships. “Addie might be crossing the Pacific right now,” he said. Louisa only shook her head. Her sister was not on any ship home. Her sister was in China, waiting for her fate to claim her.

  Then came the news that T’ien-chin itself was under attack. Louisa remembered the first letters she’d gotten from Addie nearly a decade before, when she’d been stuck in the coastal city for more than a month, waiting to start the next stage of the journey to her new home. Everything had seemed utterly civilized—too civilized for Addie’s taste. Vast portions of T’ien-chin were taken up by foreign concessions. The streets and houses were no more Chinese than Marietta’s had been. “It’s a strange feeling,” she’d written, “to cross from China into Britain only by walking a block.” She’d written of the foreign community, how large and prosperous it was, and of the invitations she had for dinners where duck à l’orange was served on white china plates, with red wine and cognac and delicate fruit tarts. There had been performances of Brahms and Italian librettos. Once, she’d been invited to go to the races. The city had a giant dirt track a mile and a half in circumference, built by two German brothers, and they had two seasons for racing, one in the autumn and another in the spring. The British, in particular, Addie said, were mad for horse racing. On race day, the grandstands were populated by any number of white faces, men and women and children, and Chinese as well.

  Louisa wondered now about the fate of that racetrack. She imagined a lone horse running over the dirt without its rider, around and around. She imagined the grandstands empty. It was not a comforting image, but it was better than mos
t of the alternatives.

  Eventually, the news she was waiting for did come. It was not until the fall, however, when the harvest had begun and she was busy every minute of every day, putting up vegetables, wrapping apples in paper to store in the cellar, taking over nearly all the care of the livestock, since Bert was in the fields from morning to night. Milking was the never-ending chore, and every day she had three large meals to prepare, too, for both the family and the two boys they hired to help. The kitchen was never cool. The house was never clean.

  The letter must have come one of these days when she was so busy that she barely had time to sit, a day when it wasn’t until she lay down at night that she realized her muscles had been throbbing for hours, that her bones now seemed magnetized to the stuffed mattress. The letter was written and sent on one of these days, and it arrived on just another. She didn’t know which one because it was safely tucked into a box at the post office in Edwardsville, where it remained for a longer time than their mail usually did. They were too busy for the weekly trip into town. All their neighbors were too busy to make the trip, either. Two weeks passed. Three.

  They ran to the bottom of their supply of soap and then salt, and at last one morning Bert saddled up Prince and went into town. He was back before the morning was out and found Louisa outside digging beets from the ground. Handing her a letter, he said, “You don’t have to look at this, you know, just yet.” Bert wasn’t a great reader, but you didn’t need to be a great reader to see that the envelope was edged in black. Louisa glanced at the letter and quickly turned away again. Her hands were covered with dirt, she said. She asked him to take the letter inside and leave it on the table, and as he walked away, she went back to her work.

  It took her another half hour to finish the row of beets. When she was done, she tied them up in an old cloth and brought them to the side of the house. She would bring them down to the root cellar later. Now she went into the house. Now she took off her shoes. Now she washed her hands and scrubbed at her fingernails, rimmed with purple as the envelope on the table behind her was rimmed with black. She dried her hands and turned around.