A Sweetness to the Soul (9 page)

“Jane could shoot for us,” Luther said, yawning. “I hear she’s a real good shot.”

Later, I wished that I had listened to him, done something safe and simple. At the time, I shook my head. “Not today. Besides, I’m only allowed to if Papa says.”

“We could take a walk. Go to the creek and look for fish, then,” Luther proposed. He sighed and looked around.

“Yuk!” Rachel said, wrinkling her nose.

“Fish?” Loyal asked, interested.

“Papa says no sense fishing when the cows are laying down,” I said. We all turned in unison to see if the Herefords Papa had purchased
were lying, chewing their cuds. “At least we could walk that way,” I said when we noticed none standing.

I wondered idly if Fifteen Mile Creek ran swollen.

It had been a long but open winter and the snow melt might still rush down the mountain keeping the streams muddied though not flooded. A walk, though, was something we all could do, even the little ones. Surely no danger lurked in that.

Loyal reached for my free hand and slipped his stubby fingers around mine and squeezed. I remember his hand felt so warm. So smooth. So trusting.

Beatrice, Lodenma’s girl, gripped my other hand and we started off down the path. “Stay close, Pauline,” I cautioned as the girl tripped ahead of me, trying to keep up with Luther and Rachel already out of sight down the path.

Papa’s holdings had grown over the years so our birthday group walked past two large barns, a smoke house, and corrals holding several mules and horses now, too. The stock would be put on pasture soon. The spring had been late and only recently had the snow melted off the sidehills making room for the shoots of green to push through. Soon Rachel and I would begin taking the cows farther and farther from home each day to graze, watching them and bringing them back again at night. “Yes. Well. Won’t be long,” Mama’d said, “before Pauline and Rachel should be able to perform that duty, freeing you up to help more with the babies and work at home.”

I wish it had all come to pass.

We had more cows, too. Precious had several calves and Papa had traded a month’s labor and hard cash for a new, special kind of bull and two cows brought from across the ocean. This new bull we’d named “The Marshall” for his constant guarding look through brooding eyes. He watched us now as we walked past him, eyes following us like we were something good to eat as he chewed his cud and the warm sun beat on our faces. We squinted back at him.

In no time, Beatrice and I caught up with Luther and Rachel. They had already slipped off their Sunday shoes and stockings, and
with some alarm I noticed their feet already sloshed in the cold, rushing water. They squealed, jumped back, raced back along the bank, stepping into wild iris and yellow bells that bloomed in a wild bouquet beside the water. The air was crystal clear and their young and chattering voices bounced against the ridge that lined the stream. Pauline took only a moment to join them even though I yelled for her to stop, then thought better of it. What harm could come? And they’d resent my acting like their mama, making them behave. Then Loyal broke free from my hand. Not bothering to unlace his shoes nor wrench free his socks, he simply plunged past them toward the water’s edge.

I hadn’t thought the creek would be quite so rushing. Now I wondered, too, if the rattlesnakes were out easing their way beside the water.

Branches collected along the edge catching debris, creating mounds of trash beside the banks that seemed perfect places for a small child to explore and that’s where Loyal headed.

He was wet from head to toe before I even knew it. I yelled and Luther caught the alarm in my voice and seeing where I looked, headed that way, pulling Loyal farther back from the slick grass beside the banks. Pauline was not much better but at least she sat along the wet bank and darted her feet in and out of the water like dragon flies bouncing off a swirling pond.

I knew I’d best get them all away, take them back, and yelled something about “cake!” hoping they’d come running. And they did, muddy clothes, wet feet, and all.

It was only seconds, really, and away from the water, with the warm sun and grass, we dried their feet quickly. I carried Loyal since even his shoes were wet. I felt his cold feet bob lightly on my hip and rubbed one foot warm with my hand. Luther put Beatrice on his shoulders and we walked back without a care.

I never dreamed as we passed the watchful Marshall bull and ate cake later that I would remember our trip to the stream as my last outing with my sisters and brother.

Loyal began the fever first. Complaining, he pulled away from us while the party still rumbled with the voices of happy children, the men still spoke of politics, and my mother still smiled absently at Mrs. Henderson’s repetitions.

Lodenma stroked Beatrice’s hair as she curled her in her arms and even commented that she didn’t seem as warm as when she’d first gone outside. “Spring fever,” Mama said. I could tell as she placed the back of her hand on Loyal’s forehead, that she held a worry. She seemed pleased when the Hendersons and Mays took their leave at dusk.

Loyal’s voice caught in his throat and he croaked out “porcupine” and with his stubby fingers inside his mouth, he pointed to the pain. Mama put cool rags on his throat and wiped his face of the sweat and gave him juniper berry tea until he shook his head and coughed. He gasped for air each time.

“We’ll try garlic and clover honey,” Mama said while Papa went for the doctor.

What little memory I had of my older brother Ambrose came visiting that afternoon, and I believe my mother must have relived his dying in those hours with Loyal, wondering if she would ever bring any son of hers to manhood.

The room smelled of sticky bedclothes, garlic and juniper berries boiled in water in the fireplace cauldron. Through the evening, Loyal’s breathing became shallower though it seemed he worked harder and his face took on a bluish tint. I put the girls to bed and tucked them in, assuring them that Loyal would be fine by morning. I walked the floor with Baby George, talking softly, murmuring prayers, worrying, too, for him and for my mama.

And then, before Papa and the doctor could return, Loyal’s fever deepened and he died.

It was a Monday, early in the morning, before the meadowlarks would sing.

On Tuesday, with Loyal laid in his small bed, all freshly washed
by the Ladies’ Aid Society women, but not yet put to rest in the ground, Rachel began to rub her throat and complain and Papa, still grieving for a second son, went immediately for the doctor.

A big man who looked always as though he’d slept in his dark brown suit, Dr. Jessup wasn’t far away this time and when he arrived, he poured laudanum from a vial dwarfed by his large hands. Rachel opened her mouth like a baby bird and took the stuff, grimacing as the liquid hit her throat and seemed to swell her tongue. Then the doctor conferred with Mama about herbs to ease the throat pain, help the labored breathing that had begun. He said to keep the juniper tea coming. “Think it’s the mucous sickness they call diphtheria,” he told us. “Keep her swallowing, Elizabeth. That’s what matters.”

And then he asked what both Loyal and Rachel might have done in recent days together that could have caused the sickness.

I heard that question; knew the answer. The weight of it burned my stomach like a hot poker from the fireplace stabbing me inside: a walk to the water, shoes off, toes dipped inside.

Mama said nothing. She looked at me and I knew we shared the thought.

Then Pauline took ill.

The house became awash with steam and rags and bloody phlegm and sweat; and it was as though I began to die myself watching these little ones I once could comfort without effort slowly slip away. Mama and Papa were tireless at their babies’ sides, taking only the short time it took to lay Loyal to rest to leave their bedsides.

At Loyal’s funeral, Mama and Lodenma talked of Beatrice’s health and Lodenma reported she was fine. I remember feeling both relief and a sense of jealousy all at once and then guilt for having such a thought.

“Why not let me take Baby George with us?” Lodenma offered. “Keep him from harm’s way until the girls are better. Free Jane up to help you more and you won’t worry so about the baby.”

Mama cried, her faced pressed into Papa’s chest after she sent Baby George home with Lodenma.

There was never any question that I would stay.

All through the night, whenever I awoke, I saw Mama in the shadows of the oil lamp, leaning over Pauline or wiping Rachel’s perspiring brow or heard Papa scrape his chair as he moved closer to the bedside, pulling blankets up, pressing hot rags to their throats to push the swelling down. Their breathing rattled like branches scraping the isinglass windows in a wind storm and while it sounded wretched, I was relieved each time I woke to know they both still breathed.

Pauline did not awake on Wednesday.

She still gripped the tiny carving I had placed inside her hand hoping it would keep her safely. Mama took it from her, saw the baby’s face carved with the open mouth, and wept as it dropped from her hands. I put my arms around her and she stiffened, just so slightly before she set her shoulders solid as a granite rock, withdrew, and pulling the hankie from her sleeve, tended next to Rachel.

Mama began dying that day too, I think. What mother wouldn’t? She whimpered when she thought me sound asleep and Papa held her till she dozed. Then he’d leave, go out into the cool night, and I could hear him cleaning stalls in the barn by oil light until all hours, then come in, the scent of pain and manure dripping from him as he tried to work his grief out through his pores.

Doctor Jessup returned, exhausted as he went from house to house, an epidemic in the making now, he said. He listened to Rachel’s breathing, and we all hovered over her, the sassy one we hoped would spit in the Grim Reaper’s eye.

He checked Rachel’s wheezing. He told of many children dying. Grown-ups too, in Fifteen Mile Crossing, some on the reservation. No one seemed to know the reason. Some said once the fever broke, the sickness went away. It was keeping the air open to the lungs that mattered. Said he’d heard of folks sticking reeds down, breathing like a man was underwater, but he didn’t hold with that approach. “Have to cut the throat inside and could just bleed to death,” he told us. “Best to keep the fever down with cool baths.” He felt my cool forehead as he added: “And pray.”

Sunmiet told me later that many died on the reservation. More were saved by desperate mothers poking sticks of fat-slicked cockleburs down their children’s throats, poking air holes in, pulling the mucous and the breath of death out beyond their children’s reach.

Rachel fought hard, she did, but her future lay in the memories of those who loved her, not in the vivid enchantment that had been her promise.

She died on Friday, the third within five days; my mother’s fourth. Only Baby George and I remained.

Of course, it was not the creek nor the cold nor the wet that really did it. I know that now. Medical science pushes forward with its explanations I could have used then, though it would not have changed the end result. But for years I did not know. I blamed myself, as did another.

Neither did I understand why God spared me. What could be so important that God would let me live?

I consider that dreaded time in 1860 as though preserved in brine—meant to look at every now and then but to never know the sour taste again. Only recently, with the words of Reverend Doctor Thomas Condon of the Congregational Church have I had reprieve.

“Each dark place has God in it,” Reverend Condon assured me. “God promised he will never leave us or forsake us no matter how deep we sink or how heavy the burden we are asked to bear. And there is purpose in that darkness, some plan God is working out. We will recognize the light the better for having seen the dark.” He patted my shoulder gently as he added, “We must trust his wisdom that when his time is right, the plan will come to light.”

I would have gone with them, Loyal, Rachel, and Pauline. Ambrose too—all of them—to the quiet, peaceful place they must still be in, if only to save myself from the hole left in my heart and the guilt I knew would live within my soul, forever.

And so it almost did.

A P
LACE OF
B
ELONGING