Always October. C. E. Edmonson

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СКАЧАТЬ out a few minutes later and shut the door behind them.

      Annie lay somewhere inside that building.

      * * *

      After a number of silent meals with my father and a number of nights when I cried into my pillow because I didn’t want Dad to hear, I took a walk along the creek behind the house. Driven by a gusting wind, the trees edging the creek—aspens and birches for the most part—unleashed showers of butter-yellow leaves that settled about my feet. I kicked my way through them, every bit as adrift as the cascading leaves.

      October is my favorite month these days, a last glorious moment, so intense as to be almost defiant, before the time of endurance. But on that day, I was unaware of my surroundings, my thoughts all turned inside as I wrestled with matters beyond naming. I prayed in a vain attempt to balance fear with hope. The town lay to my right, its yards and buildings as familiar as the fields off to my left. I watched a doe come out of the tree line marking a faraway ridge, her two fawns trailing behind. Unconcerned with my troubles, they began to feed on shoots of alfalfa newly emerged after the last haying.

      I followed the creek, walking against the current, to the back of the school where I happened on Joseph Anderson. Joe was the older brother of Maxim Anderson, one of my playmates at the time. His family owned a dairy farm a few miles to the north.

      “My pa’s dead,” Joe told me when I squatted down beside him. He was sitting on a rock, tapping the water with a stick over and over again.

      “Annie’s dead, too,” I replied.

      Joe answered matter-of-factly and without looking up. “Annie was in my class. I went to school with her. She was real nice.”

      A minute passed before I spoke again. “My momma’s sick. She’s in the hospital. My dad’s takin’ care of her.” I hesitated, then said, “Dad’s already had the flu.”

      Joe simply nodded, unconcerned. “I got to do the work now,” he said. “I got to get the farm ready for winter.”

      Joe had cited an unwritten law in Minnesota farm country. People didn’t live as long as they do now, and there were accidents aplenty that left men disabled. The oldest boy in the family was expected to take on the burden if at all possible. Farm work never stops, not even for tragedy. A cow’s milk continues to flow. Horses can’t feed themselves. Wood for the long, cold winter doesn’t chop itself. The obligations of a farmer’s children, to the family and the land, are never-ending, and it comes as no surprise many of them fled to big-city factories as soon as they were old enough. The labor in the factories was long and hard, but it did have an end. Farmers don’t rest on the seventh day, or any other day.

      “I’d visit Momma,” I said, “but I’m not allowed.” At that moment, of course, I only had room for my personal suffering.

      “You could go.”

      “How?”

      “Just go.”

      “Won’t they stop me?”

      “There ain’t no they, Lucas. I went to the hospital every day before Pa died. There ain’t but a few people takin’ care of all those patients. They’re too busy to bother with some kid lookin’ for his ma. Just put on a mask—everybody wears a mask—and nobody will pay you the slightest attention.”

      He stood up and looked off to the north, at a flock of crows flying over a field. They called to each other, as crows always call to each other, before dropping into a harvested wheat field.

      “I got to go. I got to be a man now.” He took a step, then turned to face me, though his eyes seemed to look backward into his own mind. “When the feet turn black, Lucas. That’s when you know they’re gonna die.”

      Joe was thirteen years old. I watched him march off, his steady pace unhurried, while I processed the message. See, it was my dad who banned me from the hospital. At my age, I just assumed there’d be some authority to back him up, like Mr. Vernon, who stood in the doorway as we entered school. Joe was telling me that the world had changed in a way I hadn’t thought about.

      I went straight home afterward, following the creek to the edge of our property, then crossing the lawn to a shed. In fact, like Joe, I had new shoes to fill. We’d been fattening a piglet bought that spring, as we did every year, and it was now an aggressive pig that weighed over a hundred pounds. Whereas before I’d been instructed to stay clear, now I was to feed the pig by tossing its feed over the fence. The grunting pig banged his snout into the wooden slats as I approached, bucket in hand, like it would just as soon feed on me as on the dinner I carried. I have to admit I didn’t waste any time. I poured the feed over the fence, into a trough, and retreated with all due haste. The pig squealed once before he began to feed.

      Intimidated as I was, I continued to utter a simple prayer as I went about the task: “Please help Momma.” I repeated the words over and over again, having somehow come to believe that mere repetition would get my prayer heard. Maybe I thought the Lord responded to nagging the way my parents sometimes responded to my endless entreaties. Or maybe I just couldn’t think of another way to approach God. One sure thing, though: my prayers, muttered or not, were heartfelt, driven as they were by a mix of love and fear that threatened, almost from moment to moment, to overwhelm me.

      CHAPTER 8

      The house was empty when I got home, as it had been for days. I was a child, of course, eight-years-old, and I’d never known an empty house before my mother and sister contracted the flu. Never, not for one day, not for one hour.

      Our house was a typical wood-frame house in Louristan: two stories, a sloped roof, wooden shutters on the windows, a low porch that ran the width of the building. The house was painted white, the shutters and the front door a dark green the color of mid-summer leaves. Momma had been after Dad to add a little trim to the porch, a few scrolls in the corners, a pattern of vines and flowers across the front, but Dad hadn’t gotten around to it.

      I walked through the unlocked front door—nobody locked their doors back then; I don’t even remember seeing a key—and into our living room. I don’t have to struggle to remember the living room because it didn’t change, not for years afterward. A camelback couch and two wing chairs ordered from the Montgomery Ward’s catalog; a worn rocker with red and gold cushions; a blue Persian carpet ordered from the Sears catalog; three small tables made by a local woodworker, a Pole named Pavel Kuriansky. Our radio, a Philco, rested on one of the tables.

      A sampler hung on the pale-blue wall behind the couch, a piece of needlework executed by Momma when she was a young girl in high school. On either side of a stone house, a pair of indigo birds stood erect, their beaks pointed upward. There were clouds above the house, not so white anymore, and the sampler was edged with red hearts. Just beneath the hearts at the top, Momma had stitched a homily in capital letters: MAY THIS HOUSE BE A HOUSE OF PEACE. MAY ALL WHO DWELL HEREIN KNOW ITS COMFORTS.

      A painting hung on the wall to my left, as though to illustrate the basic principle. Cows, black-and-white Holsteins, grazed on a broad hillside, white clouds above, a red barn in the background. According to my dad, the painting was done by the same itinerant artist who created the portrait on the opposite wall. The man in the portrait had piercing, blue eyes, a prominent nose, and a gray beard that began two inches below his eyes and fell to the top of his chest. His small, narrow mouth was completely dominated by his beard and mustache. This was Ezekiel Taylor, my great-great-grandfather.

      I was on my way to the kitchen, but I lingered СКАЧАТЬ