by Leah Weiss
When we girls bout freeze on the porch, Grady and Mr. Brown work their way back across the icy yard with buckets of warm milk steaming and a basket of eggs. We come inside and I find Lucy at the kitchen table looking sick green. I don’t want to hear bout what she witnessed. She says, “A baby has come into this world. It’s a girl.”
Poor thing.
I peek in the bedroom. Bloody sheets soak in the washtub, and Irene washes Helen lying on the bed. I stand in the corner and put my eyes anywhere cept on Helen. After another clean gown is worked over Helen’s head, Lydia and Cora are called to come in to meet their niece. They count her fingers. They pull back the blanket Aunt Fanniebelle made and count her toes. They’re all moony-eyed over the red-faced thing mewing like a kitten.
Miz Brown straightens the edges of the blanket over Helen. “Thank you, Bert, for taking such good care of the little ones. We had our hands full for a while.”
Her goodness can’t wash away my selfish sin. I was worthless birthing this child.
“What’s its name?” I say to be polite but keep my distance.
“Helen’s calling her Baby Girl until she gets a formal name from Wade,” she says, like Wade’s gone fishing and will be home tonight and they can decide.
I take tiny steps toward the two of them in bed. Helen’s eyes are dull, her face as pale as smoke. I step closer. She looks out the window into the world of ice. Miz Brown says, “Let me take Baby Girl so you can rest, honey. Her granddaddy wants to meet her. Come on, girls.” The little ones bustle out of the room like a brood following the hen.
I turn to follow when Helen whispers, “Stay.” She reaches out for me, and when I step closer, she clamps down on my wrist. I lean in to hear. “Need you to do something.”
“Now?”
“No but soon as you can.” She pauses to catch her breath. “I need to know bout my Wade. If he’s alive.”
“How would I know such a thing?”
“Trula Freed.”
I glance at the door to see who looms nearby. We’re alone. I turn back to Helen.
“She knows?”
“I can only hope.”
“Your mama won’t like it one bit.”
“She doesn’t believe in knowing things, but I’m sick with worry. I don’t even want to name our baby till I know her daddy’s coming home.”
“You and Wade didn’t decide names?” I try to wiggle my way out of the situation.
“Nothing final enough to lay on her for life.”
“Why don’t you ask Lu to help? She knows the old woman more than me.”
“I want to leave her out of this. I want you to do it. As soon as the ice melts.”
I never been to Trula Freed’s place on my own. I remember the scare of that shock that run through me when she took holt of my hand. And what if she says Wade Sully is dead? Can I deliver that truth to Helen? And if I lie to her and say he’s alive, can she forgive me when she finds out different? And if Helen dies of a broke heart cause of bad news I bring, will the Browns still want me? And is Lu gonna tan my hide when she finds me going to Trula’s place without her? What Helen is asking can change my world.
She reaches on the side table for the telegram and presses it in my hand and says, “Give this to Trula Freed. Please, so I know for sure. I’m counting on you.”
I don’t have a choice but to put the telegram in my pocket and pray for ice to stay forever. My belly aches over what I got talked into, and the weight of that telegram grows heavy in my pocket. On the third day, the sun shines and the warm air comes, and the ground switches from slippery to sludge, and I pick a fight with Lu helping me with my numbers at the kitchen table. I say loud enough for Miz Brown to hear, “My head hurts from all this stupid learning. I hate numbers,” then I grab my jacket off the peg, stomp out the door and down the steps, buying space to do Helen’s deed.
Nobody comes after me. We been cooped up too long and tempers are flinty. Before I leave the yard, I head for one of the hives and put my ear on top of the box, scared I won’t hear nothing like angel wings, but I do. Wings hum and they whisper. That hum turns my heart light while I cross the field and go through the pines to Trula Freed’s red door, but the whole way I pray, Don’t be home. Don’t be home. Please don’t be home.
I knock, and Biscuit whimpers inside. I call out, “Miz Trula, you in there?” and I look in the window and see her on the floor. The door with a lock ain’t locked and I open it. A chair is turned over beside the woman on the floor. She has blood at her temple and one leg cocked funny. When did she fall? The cup of tea on the table is still warm.
I lean over her. “Miz Trula, it’s Bert. Can you hear me?”
She moans. I dip a clean rag in the pot of warm water on the stove and hold it at the blood on her head. She opens her green eyes and whispers, “Bert, my good friend. Tis my knee. It sprain, not break.”
“Want me to fetch the doctor?”
“No. We manage. You help.”
“Me? I got a weak constitution.”
But there’s nobody here but me and the yellow dog, so Trula Freed talks me through the steps. I kneel beside her, slide my fingers under her head, and put a pillow for comfort. She keeps her green eyes mostly closed, but when they open and look for me, they don’t look at me straight on. They flit around the walls, searching. My hands shake, and the air in my chest rattles being this close to a witchy woman who knows things. “You do good,” she says, and I wrap her hurt knee tight to keep down swelling.
“Help me up,” she says, and she uses my arms to sit and struggle into her chair. This time, I don’t feel the shock at her touch. I pull her cup of tea beside her.
I say, “How’d you fall?” and tuck a soft blanket around her legs and under her feet.
“Reach too high. Up there,” she says and points to a silver baby’s rattle.
I get the footstool so I can reach it. I pick it up, and the sound is a tinkling bell.
Trula Freed says, “Put this under Helen’s pillow. It’s for Baby Girl.”
I want to ask Miz Trula how she knows such things since she got no telephone and no neighbors close by. I don’t smell anything special in the air she breathes. But I don’t ask. I do say, “Helen wants to know bout Wade. Bout him being alive and safe.” I hold out the telegram and she takes it from my hand.
I come in the Browns’ back door, take off my muddy boots, and don’t even get to hang up my coat before Helen calls out for me, and I go to her. Baby Girl is being loved on in another room, and it’s only me and Helen.
“Well?” she says without giving me time to catch my breath. “Did you see her? Did she tell you?” There is a glisten of mad fever on her cheeks.
“I saw her.”
“And? And?”
I never saw eyes that hard or hopeful.
“I give her the telegram like you wanted. She said Wade Sully is alive, but he…”
Helen’s face crumples in relief, and her narrow shoulders shake as she turns to cry into the pillow. She don’t give me time to say bout the old woman’s fall and the bloody knot, the twisted knee and the green eyes looking wobbly. I don’t say that believing what Trula Freed said today ain’t the smart thing to do. Helen hears what she wants. I got no choice but to let it be. I slip the silver rattle under her pillow.
Chapter 21
Lucy: Gall-Double-Dang
On the heels of the bizarre ice storm that held us captive, a heat spell arrives. We open windows wide and kick the quilts off our beds and the shoes off our feet. It’s week three since we heard Wade is missing, and Helen grows frail, and the fretful baby with no name gives none of us a night’s rest. There’s been no letter from Everett for a week of Sundays, and everybody is flushed and lethargic with no appetite.
On Sunday afternoon, Uncle Nigel and Aunt Fanniebelle show up for visiting day. Their chatter coming into
the house carries too much energy. Their words are like broken glass to my ears. Uncle Nigel says, “David, I’m reading an interesting book about antigravity and can’t put it down.”
Daddy chuckles.
Aunt Fanniebelle says, “Had to lay eyes on Betty Gail to see if her colic is getting better.” She calls Baby Girl by a real name no matter how many times we try to honor Helen’s wishes for neutrality. Today, she brings more baby clothes too prissy to be practical, a fruitcake, and a jar of pickled beets. Her words clack against my brain like a train run off its track. My eyeballs pulse and feel bruised behind paper thin lids.
Aunt Fanniebelle stops talking and looks at Mama up close. Passes her eyes over all our silent faces. “None of y’all look good,” she says and puts a cool hand on Mama’s forehead, then on mine. She yells to Uncle Nigel in the parlor. “Go fetch Doc Robertson—and drive like a maniac.”
“On Sunday? Can’t you let Doc and the Lord rest? The baby’ll be fine.”
“It’s not the baby. The whole gall-dang bunch is sick.”
Nobody thinks to call the doctor on the phone. We’re too fuddle-brained to register efficiency or our situation. We thought the malaise came from strange weather in December and worry over the war that won’t stop. Or is it simply something we ate? We can’t think straight.
Doc Robertson comes with his black bag and a linen napkin stuck cockeyed in his shirt collar. We line up like school children. Only Daddy, Cora, and Baby Girl have no symptoms. The rest of us have high fevers, sore throats, body aches, and stomach pains. Maybe we have the scarlet fever Margery Williams wrote about in The Velveteen Rabbit. Pint-size Aunt Fanniebelle stands by the tall doctor’s side, peering around him moving from one of us to the next, her concern growing.
“You think it’s the influenza?” she whispers with a catch in her voice.
Mama repeats, “Influenza?” while the doctor fingers her swollen neck. “You mean like the one back in 1918?”
Daddy has been leaning against the kitchen wall, but at the mention of the epidemic that changed his family tree, he stands upright. He doesn’t have to look it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica to know that influenza killed as many people the two years after the Great War ended as were killed in the war. Daddy’s people paid dearly. Overnight, the plague took the lives of his parents, two younger brothers, and a string of cousins. There’s a box of old photographs in the attic. In the box is a faded picture of my daddy taken in April 1919. He poses with a dozen school friends on steps. They wear muslin facemasks, hoping the material would keep the plague away, but their fear of the Spanish flu is evidently unstoppable: from the nose up, the children are scared. I can pick out Daddy by the cowlick at his hairline and his perfectly arched eyebrows only Grady inherited. Daddy says one of the things he remembers is the hammering of nails in coffins. The hammering went on all day and all night.
Today, I don’t say what’s niggling in the back of my mind: Maybe a world-killing disease comes when a war has gone on too long. Maybe the Brown family is the starting point this time.
Doc says, “Let’s not borrow trouble yet and make it bigger than it is, Minnie, but we’re gonna take precautions since it’s affecting so many of you. First thing, we need to check your food to make sure nothing has spoiled in this heat. We can bring down the fevers with ice baths. Then all the surfaces need to be scrubbed with hot water, vinegar, and baking soda. Bed linens need to be changed often. Bottom line: I need to quarantine everybody here except the baby and Cora, who show no signs of sickness. And you, David.”
Aunt Fanniebelle says, “Nigel, you take the well folks to our place. Bring back a stack of clean sheets and towels and put em on the porch. Don’t come inside. And, David, do you think the Mayhews would mind helping out? They’re close by, and Gertie is kind.”
“I hate to expose them to sickness.”
Doc says, “You need more help than the Mayhews.”
My brain has a hard time figuring out who’s sick. Mama and me. Bert and Irene. Helen, who we thought was brokenhearted, but it’s more than her heart that ails her. Grady and Lydia, too? I use my fingers to count seven. I don’t remember Nancy Drew ever being sick in all her escapades. She got kidnapped, hijacked, locked up, poisoned, knocked unconscious, and almost drowned, but I don’t think she ever got sick.
The doctor goes on, “Seven beds in seven separate spaces. Seven pans of chipped ice. Clean towels. Air the pillows and blankets several times a day.” Aunt Fanniebelle writes down the list he rattles off too fast for me to hold on to. She is one little lady with purpose who rides bravely on a sea of sickness. She rolls up her sleeves. Then I faint.
I come to lying on a narrow pallet without a stitch of clothes on. I’m so cold my teeth hurt. The light in the room is low. The bookcases rise up and around the room and swim in my murky vision. I shiver, and my joints clack like a bag of marbles. Wet towels lie on my naked body. I try to call out, but no sound comes. I’m too weak to cast off the wet towels when Sugar Mayhew comes into view. She says too loud, “Mama, she got her eyes open.”
Gertie comes in on soft feet, making soothing sounds. “Hold yourself together, Miz Lucy. Your teeth is rattling cause your fever’s rising.” She strips off the wet towels and sheet and wraps me like a baby in a warm, dry blanket. She raises my head. “Sip this tea. Trula Freed made it special for y’all. It’s got purple honey in it. Said it holds a world of cure.”
My ears must not be working right to hear Trula Freed’s name spoken under this roof along with purple honey, but the tea is a comfort. I sleep.
I wake burning up, parched, trying to unwrap this shroud that has me in its grip. The blanket and pillow are soaked with sweat, and I try to find the edge of the blanket so I can pull it back. I gasp for air and raise my head, and the bookcases swim again before my blurry vision. Why is Sugar Mayhew still here? She calls out loud, “Mama, she got her eyes open again,” and I think I heard her say that before but can’t be sure. I try to turn off my ears to find quiet, but I hear “Nancy Drew” being called in hard whispers, needing help, needing hot water, needing chipped ice. Or was Gertie calling her husband, Yancy Mayhew? I never realized my Nancy and her Yancy sound close. I need to tell him of my amazing discovery when I can rise from this soupy depth and my tongue works again.
An angel with white cotton hair and green eyes leans close to my face with a cool washcloth and more “tea to make strong, purple honey to cure” and comfort in her voice. She lifts me like I’m a twig or a dried cornstalk and washes me with water that smells of mint. Fresh air fills my lungs and takes me under to a quiet place.
I open my eyes and keep them open, and my first words from my arid throat are, “How long?” I hear soft voices down the hall in the kitchen. “How long?” I croak again and hear a heavy rustling off to the side. I smell pungent Vicks VapoRub.
Daddy comes into view. “Hey, Lucy,” he whispers so my ears won’t hurt. “It’s been eleven days you’ve been in and out of fever.”
“It felt longer. Like a year,” I croak.
“No,” he chuckles. “It’s been eleven days. Long enough.”
“Others?” Stingy words come out.
“Everybody’s fine. Everybody’s thin and weak but fine. Thanks to a lot of saintly people working to bring you through. I’ve never been so scared or so grateful for kindness. This thing was big, but I don’t want to tire you. Lie still. I’ll be right back. I gotta get your mama. She’ll need to see you with her own eyes.”
I want to ask Daddy what day it is. Did we miss Christmas? Did the lot of us sleep and shiver and sweat through it all? Did Cora stay well and the baby get over the colic? Has anybody heard from Everett and Wade? I stepped outside time long enough for so much to have happened.
There is a flurry of energy coming, shuffling feet growing closer. Daddy says from far away, “Only a few at a time. Don’t crowd her.”
Mama comes in fi
rst, and I gasp. Her hair is white. As white as Trula Freed’s. Her cheeks are sunken. Her navy housedress hangs from her shoulders, but the eyes belong to Mama. She takes my hands and kisses them over and over until we giggle. Then Bert steps forward, a shocking image honed bone thin, the gold in her skin and hair like burnished copper. She looks like a Greek goddess. She holds a walking stick. Helen, tiny Lydia. Such changed faces. What do I look like?
“Help me sit, Bert,” I say, and she piles pillows behind me and scoots me up so I don’t have to hold my head up. “What happened to us?”
Mama says, “The best Doc Robertson can say is that we had our own brand of strange sickness. Nobody else in the county has had it. At least none reported. Your daddy’s been calling it the Brown influenza, but I don’t like our name attached to something sinister. Aunt Fanniebelle took to calling it the gall-double-dang flu. Whatever the case, we made it through. Every one of us.”
“How’d we do that?”
“With help.” Mama reaches over me, raises the window shade an inch, and lets in a slice of afternoon sun that makes my weak eyes squint against the bright. “Let me get you broth so you can start recuperating. You hungry?”
I nod. Mama and Daddy leave, and Bert helps Lydia up on my makeshift bed.
“You look terrible,” Lydia says, grinning. “And you stink.”
“Mirror, please,” I say, and Bert takes the framed mirror off the wall and holds it up to reflect a stranger, a waif I’ve read about in English classics, with sunken chest and eyes burned deep, who has flown close to the sun and been spared. I pull back my parched lips and try to grin, but I forgot how.
Mama returns with a steaming cup of something that smells delicious and looks pale purple. My stomach rumbles. She orders Bert to put away the mirror. “We all look a fright, but we’re here and we’ll heal.”