Buffalo Flats, page 17
Grippe
Philemon put down her knitting and stood as soon as Rebecca walked in. Rebecca was glad it was Philemon and not Mother, because she wouldn’t have to talk, she could just let Philemon do all the work of conversation. All Rebecca wanted to do was think about Coby and that kiss.
“Mother Leavitt wanted me to tell you that she’s gone to the Allens’. They’ve got the grippe.”
The news went down like cold water on a cold day. Rebecca knew the grippe could rage through the countryside, more devastating than a tornado. Little could be done to relieve the grippe, and certainly nothing could be done to cure it. Some years the grippe came in not much worse than a chest cold. Other years it caused scorching fevers and pneumonia and delirium and death. Often it was the very old and the very young who succumbed, but sometimes it was those in their prime. There was no one to blame but God, which challenged one’s loyalty, Rebecca thought, even knowing that death had been part of the bargain.
“I’m going to help Mother,” Rebecca said, and it didn’t even surprise her that she’d said it.
At first she worked at her mother’s side, but once she had learned what to do, and when family after family began to come down with it, she was sent to nurse them on her own. She made onion poultices and mustard plasters, and saturated cheesecloth in eucalyptus. She spooned sulfur-and-molasses tea and broth into the mouths of the sick. There was niter for fever. She emptied chamber pots and boiled handkerchiefs and milked people’s lonesome cows.
Sister Card and other sisters also nursed the sick. For some, nothing could be done. The life in them unspooled: backward they went from strong to helpless, backward from stoic courage to childlike whimpering and no control of their bowels, backward to blind infancy, backward to blue and breathless like a newborn just out of the womb. The first time it happened, Rebecca folded Sister Wixom in her arms and sang to her and held her until she was gone. “Sister,” she said when the woman stopped breathing, “sister, sister.”
She rode to Mother and told her that Sister Wixom had died, died in her very arms, and when she said Sister Wixom, when she said the word sister, she meant it, oh, she meant it.
She thought Mother would hold her and comfort her, but she said, “You are healthy?”
“My heart is sick.”
“Then you must continue as you’ve begun. You can’t go home now, Rebecca, and take it to Father and the rest. How is Brother Wixom?”
“He is up now, and taking care of the children.”
“Someone is needed at Johnsons’, for the whole family has just come down with it.”
Mother went back to work, nursing a family of eight, and Rebecca got on her horse and rode to Johnsons’.
Every person was a surprise, she was learning. Every soul never had its copy. Each one a world to itself, a world of that soul’s making, and when that soul was gone, a whole world ended. It didn’t matter if they started out old or ugly or cranky; by the end of it they were sweet and soft beyond bearing. She held the dying, each one a world, and she loved the life of that solitary world, that single bit of holy flame that birthed itself back to God. She’d thought it strange, when nursing the sick, that just when life was all but gone, just at the moment when things seemed most unfair, that was when they loved God most. Why? she had wondered. What did they see on that precipice? What view? What new world, new understanding? How did they, in the end, hand over life so simply? A breath not breathed, and peace.
Sometimes Mother came to relieve Rebecca, to let her sleep, though she wondered if there was anyone to give Mother similar relief. Rebecca asked Mother why she didn’t get sick, and she answered that it was because she went so often into the house of the sick, the grippe had given up on her. Rebecca decided that if stubbornness was a preventative, that explained why she didn’t get sick herself.
Sometimes Levi or Coby or Ammon appeared, bringing wood or coal or to do chores, but they never came inside for fear of Mother’s wrath. As the church sisters healed, they went out to help as well. Those who couldn’t help sent soup and bread.
But they were only visitors to Rebecca’s real world, which now was filled with spirits, the deathbed room crowded with spirits, like a family reunion waiting for the honored guest to arrive. She felt the spirits around her whispering, and the dying said the names of the dead, and then it was over and the house was empty of all but the living.
Sister Yardley, when she sickened, sang in her delirium, and it was sweet angel tones that came out of her mouth. She smiled as if she’d been singing with angels, as if she’d been given her dream come true, and she began to be well.
Old Solomon Mack, who never strung more than a dozen words together, began telling Rebecca stories about princes and dragons and great battles, and Rebecca told him he must battle the grippe and live to tell the end. He smiled and said he thought he would. And he did. When he learned, however, that his brother had died, he became more silent than ever. Brother Minder got well and said of Rebecca, “There ain’t no girl with a better heart than you, dear.” Sister Shepherd, when she recovered, said to Rebecca that she was a miracle. Rebecca loved them all.
One time Rebecca prayed away all her future visits with God, or all the ones she hoped for at the Sitting Rock, if only he would come and sit with little Fanon and make her better. But he did not come, and Fanon died, and her father, when he guessed, closed his eyes and went after her. Rebecca nursed Fanon’s mother back to health, or at least to physical health. If she ever smiled again, Rebecca was not witness to it. Fanon’s uncle said it all seemed unbecoming of a merciful creator, and Rebecca seemed to have forgotten the answer to that, if she’d ever had one.
One man brought bread to the door of the sick, and Rebecca took it gratefully until the man said, “I thank the Lord that all in my family have been blessed to avoid this plague, and we are all well.” Rebecca couldn’t say why that made her want to slap him, to want him to take his blessed self out of her sight and off to his own private heaven where the good do not suffer. He and his blessed family would be alone in heaven, wondering aloud why, but secretly pleased to suspect that they must be more special and loved than the rest of God’s children. But no, she must not think critically, even of this man. She took the bread and loved him by saying, “Good brother, do shut up.”
Gradually, fewer families came down with it, and Mother had begun to hope it was all but over when Rebecca got the news that LaRue’s family needed help. The boys were coming down with it one by one, taking turns. But when baby Abigail came down with it, she died within a few hours of the onset of her fever. Sister Fletcher was too ill to cry out for her, and Brother Fletcher turned his face to the wall and wept and coughed until he was sick to his stomach. Now LaRue, who’d been caring for all of them, was sick.
Rebecca came and cared for them. LaRue couldn’t sit up long, but she obediently sipped water and broth and ate soft eggs and teaspoons of jam. “For the baby,” Rebecca would say, and LaRue would try. Her parents soon passed the most dangerous stage, but they would be a while recuperating.
“Did she suffer?” Rebecca asked, meaning of course LaRue’s baby sister.
“She fell asleep and didn’t wake up,” LaRue said.
“LaRue,” Rebecca said, “I sat on a rock with God.”
LaRue searched her face. “I know you would never lie just to give me false comfort.”
“I would not.”
“We shall not speak of it again. These things are to be kept in the heart.”
“Yes,” Rebecca said. “And you are my heart.”
Ammon came to chop wood and help with the livestock, having heard Brother Fletcher was down.
“Now see here, brother,” Rebecca said when he came to the door. “You go take care of this farm. You get that hay in. You do the chores and fix the fencing and muck out the chicken coop and the barn better than Brother Fletcher ever did. You do it until he is well enough to chase you off his property, and maybe he won’t.”
“How is LaRue?”
“She’s strong.”
He nodded. “Tell her—”
“I will.”
And so Ammon worked. He worked all day and into the evenings. He got his brothers to help, too. He fixed the fencing and repaired the corral. He mucked out the chicken coop and shoveled out the barn and polished the harness. He chopped wood and stacked it against the house. He worked and worked, and once, when Rebecca was looking out the window while washing bedding, she saw him kneeling in a field, as Father was wont to do.
Mother came to make sure Rebecca was holding up and to tell her that no one new had come down with it since the Fletchers, which was good news among the bad.
The day after Mother gave her the news, just when Rebecca thought she must perish of exhaustion, Radonna came to the door in an old gray dress and said, “I’ve come to help. I had a mild case of it, so they say I’m safe from it now. Put me to work.”
“Here,” Rebecca said, handing her a rag. “You can clean up the floor by Ormus’s bed. And when you’re done that, there is bedding to be washed.” Rebecca didn’t tell her the state of the bedding—best not to deal with some afflictions before they presented themselves.
Together Rebecca and Radonna worked. Radonna sang to the little boys and rocked them in her arms. Rebecca thought she had never seen Radonna so beautiful, but she wouldn’t tell her so.
When they had a few moments, Rebecca said, “I wish to be friends now, Radonna.”
Radonna said, “We shall, but anyway we are more than friends. We are sisters.”
“And so we are,” Rebecca said.
The Fletcher family began to recover, and one day Brother Fletcher found the strength to get out of his sickbed to take a look at his farm. Rebecca followed him out the door.
He walked like an old man to the barn and stared around at it—everything clean and orderly, and the horses polished up like show horses. The hay was fragrant and bountiful in the loft.
Ammon came riding in from checking on the livestock.
He dismounted and he and Brother Fletcher looked at each other across a bit of a distance.
“It’s Ammon as did all the work,” Rebecca said.
“I had some help,” Ammon said.
Brother Fletcher said, “Aren’t you scared to be on my land, young man?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, I’ll tell you something, Ammon,” Brother Fletcher said in a different kind of voice. “I was scared. The whole time I was sick, when I was in my right mind, I was scared that I was going to leave my family without someone to provide for them, and that I was going to meet my God with a cold and unforgiving heart. Now, my daughter is still in her bed, and I don’t think she’ll get well until she sees you. So you’d best go to her.”
Ammon seemed to be going over this speech as if to be sure he had understood it.
“Git!”
“Yes, sir!”
Ammon got.
Day after day, no new sick were reported, and Mother said it was over. They went home. Father looked thin, though Philemon and Florence had done their best to cook and care for him. Father kissed his wife in front of everyone.
Then he turned to Rebecca and said, “You did good, my brave daughter.”
This from a man who was highly suspicious of the effects of praise on the young soul.
Rebecca replied, “I wouldn’t take a million dollars for this past time, Father, and I wouldn’t give you two cents for another just like it.”
Funerals were held, and people came fasting, hungry and heartbroken. Those who had lost loved ones awakened to a new world, one that was less kind than the old one. But they had lived and they would live.
Rebecca had decided, while she spoon-fed broth and emptied chamber pots and applied poultices, that people were miracles. They woke up each day swimming in their sorrows and fears and got up and braved the day and cared for their little ones and had a thought for others. They planted the land and babied their crops so they could live. They hurt and they yearned and they hoped, and nobody could stop them. God never came, and they prayed. He took their babies away, and they worshipped. They suffered, and they served. They were beautiful as an idea, and they were beautiful in the particular. And Rebecca could never unknow it.
Ammon and LaRue were married at the Leavitts’ house with only their families and Coby and Levi in attendance. There was neither wedding breakfast nor wedding dress, but Ammon and LaRue seemed not to mind or even to notice. LaRue got busy turning her little house into a perfect nest, for she knew how to work all the livelong day, and their baby would arrive very soon. LaRue had become Rebecca’s sister in deed. She was grateful to Ammon for this one good act of eternal import.
The Sunday after they were married, which was the first Sunday that people felt safe to attend church again, LaRue and Ammon went to church on their own, as did Gideon with Philemon and Zach with Florence. All the family waited and entered together, with LaRue in the middle. It was the first LaRue had been seen at church since May. All eyes were upon her and Ammon. They could have guessed what people may have been saying, or at least thinking about them. But before they got to the pew, LaRue stopped beside Sister Shuling, put her hand on her shoulder, and said softly, “How did your roses fare this year, Sister Shuling?”
Sister Shuling put her hand over LaRue’s and said, “Well, dear, and come summer I’ll have cuttings for you for your little home.”
LaRue stopped beside Sister Doxie as well. “How is your star quilt, sister?” she asked.
“It turned out beautifully, LaRue, and it will make a wonderful wedding gift for you.”
That evening, bundled against the cold, Rebecca rode to the tor—the first time since she’d given her money to her parents.
She felt the sadness all over again, that she wouldn’t have her land. Coby had been seen at the land office; Gideon had told her gently. Of course, his preemption rights were expiring, and he had to buy the land now or lose his right to buy it. He would be putting his ten dollars down on the land she had longed for. Land, she thought. It never broke your heart in all the thousand ways a heart could be broken. It just sat there and let you satisfy yourself in its dimensions, let you gaze at it and name it and never asked a thing of you. But no, that wasn’t right. It asked a very great deal of her father and her brothers and her people. This land, it had to be negotiated with every day, as if it were a small god that wanted to be served, appeased, with no promise of rewarding the faithful. What had she been thinking, anyway? You couldn’t live on scenery. Father had been right about that. But then, she thought, she couldn’t live without it, either.
All her hoping had come out of love. Oh, she loved this place. She wanted the buffalo grass to live, in case a buffalo ever wandered out of her dreams and on by.
She could hear Coby coming up, heard his steps coming closer.
But then it wasn’t Coby. It was Levi.
“Your mother told me where I could probably find you,” he said. “May I?”
She nodded, and he sat beside her on the rock.
Levi.
He talked about the grippe and the sorrows of it.
He talked about his horse ranch and how well it was doing.
He talked about perhaps selling out and starting again somewhere south, somewhere that had better weather in the winter. She nodded and murmured and continued to gaze at the mountains while he talked.
He fell silent for a time.
He took off his hat and raked through his hair with his fingers. It was a fine head of hair.
She wished she could tell him that this rock he was sitting on, oh so casually, so loosely and comfortably, as he was loose and comfortable everywhere, was a place for watching sunsets, a place you came where you could watch the sunset all alone and yet never be alone.
“Levi,” she said slowly and carefully, “isn’t this a place where God would come to sit and look out and take his rest?”
He laughed softly, then sobered when she glanced at him. He smoothed his mustache.
“Don’t you think,” he said, “that God would go to many places before he came here?”
She was silent for a time, and then, “Perhaps he did.”
“May I speak seriously for a moment, Rebecca? I have come to ask—”
He gripped his knees. “It’s just that...I’ve watched you over the past year, and I’ve come to admire you, Rebecca—very much, really. And I would like to court you.” He took her hands in both of his and kissed them.
Well.
There was once a time when she would hardly have dared dream of a moment like this.
She did love him, in a way, in one of the ways of loving. He was a good man, but did she see the world the way he saw the world? If she tied her life to his, they would look out the same window every day, and every day he would explain to her what he saw. He would be patient. And one day, either out of weariness or out of compassion or on a whim, she would say, “Yes, I see what you see.”
But Coby—he saw an elk, and she had seen it, too, and they both knew it had been a miracle. For right or wrong, she never had to struggle to see what Coby saw, or if she did, she ended by being glad of it. She never had to forget herself.
“I’m sorry, Levi,” she said.
He looked surprised. She had never seen him look surprised before; he looked completely different when he was surprised. He let go of her hands.
“Are you rejecting me, then, Rebecca?”
“I have saved you many griefs by doing so,” she said.
He laughed, one short cough of a laugh, and then he coughed some real coughs. After it stopped, he said, “There is no one like you in the world, Rebecca Leavitt.”
“And every day the world is grateful,” she said.
“I—I am suddenly not feeling well,” he said. “I hope we can continue this conversation at a later time.”
He stood and walked away.
The next day she heard that Levi had gone down with the grippe, surprising everyone, for they had assumed it was done with. Rebecca determined she would go to him the next morning, no matter how awkward, but the next morning she also came down with the grippe, down and down and down.
