The Truest Pleasure (35 page)

“What makes the difference?” I said.

“Everybody is different, and every fever is different.”

Before he left, the doctor said to pull the curtains in the bedroom and keep the door closed. The house must be absolutely quiet. Tom would need dark and quiet. The children would have to stay away from the room. When the fever was high he could not be disturbed in any way. “Even a little commotion might push him over the edge,” the doctor said.

I shut the door of the bedroom and closed the curtains. I hung a blanket over the window to make it darker still, sealing the room like it was some kind of secret vault.

The doctor had told me to give Tom oranges, if he would eat them. Squeeze oranges and give him the fresh juice. I sent Pa to the store for a bag of oranges. We hadn't ever bought them but at Christmastime. I made orange juice and poured whiskey in it. The bedroom smelled of oranges and spirits. And there was still the smell of burned broomsedge and weeds no matter how many times I washed Tom or bathed myself. It was like the stink of the fire was in my head and I couldn't get it out.

“Play in the yard,” I said to the children. “Or stay in the kitchen and be quiet.” If Fay was crying I carried her to the porch. I took her with me when I went to the springhouse.

It would not be fair to say that I was thrilled by Tom's sickness. And yet, the worse off he got the more sweetness I found in myself. It was like a new love, to be his nurse. I scrubbed the bedroom and washed him off. I carried the bedpan out to empty and wash on the back porch. I felt alive in a new way. I was strong and quick and had a freshness flowing through me and out of me. I can't explain it, except to say it was like I was
now Tom's mother. No matter what he said in his fever it didn't rile me. When he cussed and fretted, when he repeated I was a religious fool, I let him rave. “Tom, you are sick,” I said.

“You and your land be damned,” he said.

“Tom, it is the fever talking,” I said.

Pa peeled some willow bark by the river and I tried to make tea. But the outer bark was too dry to steep, and the inner bark was too green. I don't know how the Indians made willow tea. I tried to give Tom some brewed from the green bark, but he wouldn't drink it. It did look and smell like poison.

I had never had such energy, even when I was a girl. I didn't sleep more than four hours a night, and yet I didn't seem to miss sleep. A peddler come by selling sheets and blankets from a wagon and I bought new ones for the bedroom. I washed everything in the room twice a week. It was like I was inspired.

Florrie come over one day to offer her help, and I smiled sweet and thanked her. I told her I didn't need any help. “Well if you do you can always ask me,” she said.

I found I wasn't mad at her anymore. I was too busy and strong-feeling to be mad.

“You're working too hard,” Florrie said.

Joe walked down and did the milking every day. Him and Pa finished the molasses, but they let the batch overcook, too dark and rubbery. People from all over the valley come to buy molasses and ask about Tom. They did not get near the house, but stood in the yard and handed Pa their money and took the jugs theirselves from the smokehouse. Everybody was afraid of typhoid.

It surprised me how much I wanted to do for Tom. It pleased me to bring him juice and to wait up by him. I washed
the bedsheets and the nightgown. I was completely in charge. Maybe I should have been a nurse, I thought. Maybe that's what I was called to do and never knowed it. Maybe Locke and me had more in common than I had thought. I was alert to when he started to get hot every day, and when he would cool off in the early morning. I got familiar with the small hours, which I never had before.

It felt as if the latest hours and earliest was the most sacred time of day. In the small hours it was just me and the fever awake. Sometimes I would pray, but mostly I set there thinking it was my will and work against the typhoid. We was fighting, and the fever was a mystery deep in Tom's body. I couldn't see it to attack direct. I could only give him juice and whiskey, and cool him with a washcloth, then change the bed.

But it felt like the fever saw my will pushing against it. I had to be patient and outsmart it. The sickness was evil that had got in Tom's flesh. It could see me but I couldn't see it.

Sometimes, for an instant, a lonely ache swept through me as I set by the bedside. But it was a normal loneliness that made me want to work harder than ever. I reckon if people didn't feel lonely they would get lazy. It is the ache, and the fear of the ache, that gives us starch and keeps us alert and planning. As I watched him laying there in the grip of fever I thought how lonely Tom must have been in his years on the river. When we was quarreling he didn't have any friends at all. His only companion was his work. I hated to think how hard it had been for him.

“Typhoid gets in you and likes to sleep for a while,” Dr. Johns said. By the fourth day after the fire I saw how right he
was. “Pneumony will build to a crisis and then either break or kill you. And the bad kind of flu will do the same. But typhoid will build up to a crisis and seem to go away. Some people have light cases and get well in a few days. And some die after three or four days. And others have it a month and then get better.”

There was a night—I think it was the fifth night after the fire—when Tom got worse than he had before. It was the night the weather changed and you could hear wind in the hemlocks and feel cold soak through the walls and window. The house creaked and was quiet. I tried to give Tom water, but he was too weak to drink. He was way out of his head. I wet his lips with my finger.

“The molasses are dark,” he muttered. I leaned close to him. “The river field . . . hawks,” he mumbled. I couldn't make any sense of what he said. I reckon he was dreaming something terrible.

“Tom,” I said. But he didn't hear. He was way off in the fever.

Something creaked way up in the top of the house, like there was a nail giving way. And then a weight fell in the attic right above, as if a piece of ham meat or even a body had slammed on the floor where Tom's pallet was. I felt I had been shoved by the noise, and listened to see what happened next. Had Pa or Jewel gone up to the attic? Had a big animal climbed up there? Had we hung something from a nail that give way in the middle of the night? I tried to think what was hanging up there between Tom's pallet and the chimney. There was some tobacco that was curing.

For some reason I thought of all the people that had died in our room. Mama had died there when I was a girl. And Grandpa
and Grandma Peace had died there too. And the little baby born before Muir had died there. Other people had died in other parts of the house. The Revis boy died in the kitchen after he got shot on the mountain and they brought him in to operate on the kitchen table.

While I was thinking such mournful thoughts something knocked on the side of the house. It sounded like a fist hit the weatherboarding. It was loud as if somebody with a stick had slammed the wall. And nothing will get your attention like a knock. It was a little after two in the morning, for the clock on the mantel had just chimed. I set bolt upright and listened. Had somebody come and tried to get in? I almost hollered out, “Who is there?” I looked at the window but the blanket was over it.

Was somebody playing a trick on me? It was close to Halloween. Maybe it was Halloween? I had lost track of the days. But everything was quiet except for the wind. I thought maybe the house had cracked because it was turning colder. You know how a house will groan and snap when a freeze comes. That has to be it, I said. I turned to Tom and wet the rag again in cold water.

Just then a knock come from further down the wall, about where Pa's room was. It was not so loud a knock, just an easy knock like somebody had arrived and politely rapped on the boards. And while I listened another come from still further down, toward the corner of the house. And then there was a tap from the end of the house. Whatever it was was going around the house and tapping on the walls. The clapboards rung as if struck by a silver-headed cane. Knock, it went, and then knock, and knock again.

The fact the knocks was so regular made them more scary. I tried to imagine why somebody would walk around the house hitting the wall. Was it just a silly prank? Was it Florrie doing something to spite me? It didn't make any sense. Halloween stopped at midnight, if it was Halloween.

The knocks kept going around the house. I heard them on the porch and then on the kitchen wall. Whoever it was kept going. Could it be an animal jumping up on the wall? I thought it might stop at the door, but whatever it was didn't pause at all. The knocking went on regular as clockwork.

“I'm getting to the bottom of this,” I said. I put the washcloth in the pan and took up the lamp. Quiet as I could I rose and eased toward the door. But just when I twisted the doorknob Tom mumbled something. I stopped to see what he said. He murmured so low it was hard to make sense of it. I walked back to the bed and listened. “Don't,” he whispered. I leaned closer to him. “Don't,” he said again.

“Don't what?” I said. But I couldn't tell if he was talking in a dream or to me. His eyes was closed and his face red as a coal. “Don't go,” he said. It was as if he knowed about the knocking, though he hadn't showed any sign of awareness before.

“I won't,” I said. I didn't know what else to do. If he didn't want me to leave him I couldn't, much as I needed to find out what was hitting the side of the house.

Tom's lips was dry and I had to give him more water. Once he drunk I'd go refill the pitcher and see what was making the noise. I put the lamp down and poured cold water into the cup. The knocking was coming on around the house, first at the back porch, then the living room. It went past the fireplace chimney.

“Drink this,” I said, and held the cup to Tom's lips. His lips looked like old paint that was scaling off. Some of the cracked skin had turned black as if he had been eating huckleberries. I was careful not to let the water spill on his chin.

The knocking come around the corner of the house on the eastern end. It had not speeded up or slowed down, but was steady as a bell tolling. It knocked on the living room wall.

Tom's mouth wasn't really open, but I poured in some water anyway. A trickle run down each side of his chin. I think he got a little of the water on his tongue. I poured in some more, and then a little more. He was so hot his face looked swelled up. I didn't know a body could stay that hot and live.

A knock rung on the wall by the window, a single rap, like somebody wanted to remind they was there. Just a firm reminder.

I put the cup down and pulled the covers back. I unbuttoned his nightshirt and put the wet cloth on his chest. The water steamed off his skin. I washed his shoulders and his neck and tried to wet the back of his neck without turning him over. I wet his temples and I put his hand into the water. Last I pushed the covers all the way down and rubbed his legs with cold water.

Tom had fell off a lot since he got sick. His legs looked almost skinny. I washed him around his navel and private parts. But he didn't seem to have cooled any. Suddenly his legs started jerking, his arms twitching. His eyes was open and his face had this awful look, like it was pulling away from something. I thought he must be dying. His mouth made gagging, spitting noises. It sounded like he was going to choke. And then it come to me he was having a seizure. He was so hot he was having a fit.

I grabbed the whiskey and poured some on the cloth. I rubbed the liquor on his chest and throat. The fumes filled the whole room so strong they seemed blinding. I rubbed his legs and belly, his chest again. Some splashed on the bed but it didn't matter.

When I finished Tom felt a little cooler, and the jerking had stopped. He laid still and his eyes closed. His forehead wasn't burning so bad. Of course it was getting up toward four o'clock in the morning, the time when the fever usually started down. It was hard to guess how much good the rubbing had done.

I don't know when the knocking stopped. I was so busy trying to cool Tom off I forgot about it. But the knocks must have gone away while Tom was jerking, though I couldn't be sure. Just then wind shoved against the house and the ceiling creaked, and I saw it had been nothing but the old house getting cold. The knocks was boards shrinking. I wrapped Tom up in the blankets, and laid down myself. The house still creaked in the wind.

The next day it was cold and clear. The Indian summer was over. It looked like every leaf had been stripped off every tree during the night. The kitchen fire felt good. Pa already had a fire in the fireplace, and I put some rocks on the hearth to heat. When they got real hot I would put them under Tom's bed.

After I nursed the baby and washed up the breakfast things I went back to look at Tom. At first I couldn't see anything in the dark room, after the bright light of the kitchen. Mixed with
the whiskey smell and the fever smell was another scent I couldn't describe. It was like the smell of musk and rotten leaves. I had kept Tom clean and didn't think it could be any dirty smell. It was a deep, dank smell, like straw that has been in a ditch a long time. It come to me that was the smell of the typhoid.

Tom was sleeping now, but I knowed the fever was waiting its time. The room was so still you could hear his faint breathing. I took his wrist and it was a second before I could feel any pulse. He was sleeping somewhere far away from me, floating in deep darkness, completely still. I went to the kitchen and squeezed an orange. There was almost a cup of juice, and I broke a raw egg into it. When I had mixed it all up I took it to Tom.

“Tom,” I said, “you've got to drink this.” But he was too weak to have much interest. He took a little juice between his lips and swallowed. I poured more in his mouth, and juice run down the sides of his chin. I knowed he couldn't go on like that. Either he was going to get better, or he was going to die. It seemed the fever could hear me think, and I could feel it listening.