Always October. C. E. Edmonson

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СКАЧАТЬ to tend those chickens, you’re too sick to go out and play.”

      I didn’t argue. The hay in the nesting boxes needed changing, and I would be the one to do the job. But I did manage to fire off a parting shot before I closed the door behind me.

      “Boy, I sure hope Dad gets better soon. He’s not so bossy.”

      * * *

      Dad did recover. He returned to the Taylor Farm Equipment shop a week later. A week after that, the flu was gone, moving west to California, then jumping the Pacific Ocean to Asia, where it disappeared into the vast reaches of India and China. The disease had done some damage in Louristan, no question, taking a few of the oldest residents and one newborn. In that, it resembled a blizzard or a summer hailstorm. Barn roofs occasionally collapsed after blizzards, and crops were damaged by hailstorms. Nothing we couldn’t handle, though—nothing we hadn’t dealt with many times before.

      Two months later, with the wheat still in the field, the flu reversed, moving from China into South Asia, then to Europe and the United States. The Clarion reported its progress country by country, and with good reason. This time the flu brought death.

      Nowadays, folks don’t even remember the Spanish flu; it’s like it never happened. But while World War I took the lives of twelve hundred Minnesotans, the flu killed fifteen thousand. That’s in one state, right? Worldwide it killed between fifty and a hundred million. For many, the dying was unbelievably fast, the end coming within a few hours, so fast it was nearly impossible to comprehend. Others appeared to be recovering only to fall back into illness where they lingered for days or even weeks. Whichever way, they suffered tremendously as their lungs filled with fluid and they slowly drowned.

      My dad and me? Well, I guess you could say we were lucky. Having caught the flu the first time around, we were immune. That wasn’t so for—

      You have to excuse me. I know there’s nothin’ uglier than watchin’ an old man tear up. But I’m telling you, sure as the sun rises in the morning, those were some hard times. Harder than hard. First thing, Bear County had no regular hospital. Not that a hospital would have done us much good. The flu that came back to kill us was just as catching as the original flu. One week we were all healthy. The next, every bed in every hospital in the state was filled, and people were being treated in tents. Only there wasn’t any treatment, no medicine or surgery that had any effect on the Spanish flu. Care in this case was simple kindness. You could wipe a patient’s brow, offer a plate of food or a glass of water if they could still eat or drink. You could pray alongside them.

      Man or woman, you needed the courage of a lion to do even that. See, there was one thing we all knew, and I mean the whole world knew: you caught the flu by breathing it in. Most folks wore masks.

      We began using the courthouse as a makeshift hospital in the last week of September. It filled within days—people were already dying by then—and rows of brown tents covered the adjacent lawn, which we called the Square, by the following Monday. One of our two doctors, Doctor John Odell, caught the flu in the second week and didn’t live to see the sun go down. That left Doctor Martin Jackson to bear the load by himself.

      Doc Jackson was closing in on seventy, while Doc Odell had been barely into his thirties. See, that was another thing about the Spanish flu. Mostly, flu carries away the very young and the very old. The Spanish flu carried off even the strong and the healthy.

      Now here’s the thing about heroes: you can’t pick ’em out in advance. I saw that on the field of battle and I saw it in 1918, when my mother volunteered to tend the sick. I’ve already said comfort was all the care anyone had to offer. But who was to do it? Doc Jackson’s nurse was nearly as old as he was, and there were two hundred patients in need of tending. Plus some of the sick were trapped at home, too ill to get to Louristan, or too scared. In one case, volunteers entered a farmhouse to find both parents dead and an infant crying on the floor.

      To my mind volunteer is just another way of spelling hero. Most everybody stayed as far away from the hospital as they could. Volunteers were commonly thought to be fools. Some of our most respectable citizens refused to care for their own kin. Others, like my mother, rose up even though nobody in her own family was ill.

      My father stood against Momma’s going into that hospital, but he couldn’t match the force of her argument. Patients kept arriving day and night, many on foot. They staggered past our house, gasping for breath, their plight so obvious and so desperate it nearly tore your heart out. They needed tending, and so Momma went. She wasn’t the only one. The women in town were already organized through the Red Cross. They rolled bandages and such to aid the war effort, so turning to face the new threat when the flu came around was only natural. Not all of them, by any means, but enough to make a difference.

      “Not everyone dies of the flu,” Momma reminded my father as we ate breakfast on the day she made her decision. “If they get care, they might recover.”

      “Care is the family’s job.”

      “Sometimes the whole family’s sick. And sometimes family members just won’t do what the Lord set them on the earth to do. But I’ll tell you this, Samuel Edward Taylor, people running high fevers sweat out their bodily fluids. If they don’t get water, they can die of thirst. And those folks who start to recover need food to get their strength up.”

      I think Dad knew he was beaten when Momma addressed him as Samuel Edward Taylor. Or maybe he just didn’t have an answer. Only the day before, I’d left the house to find a woman lying dead near our front lawn. Her lips were dark blue, her feet and her face nearly black. A small pool of blood extended from the corner of her mouth, a testament to her last breath. And that was another thing: our undertakers couldn’t handle the bodies. Too many people were dying. We’d turned our school into a morgue but that wasn’t enough either, and bodies were stacked on top of each other like firewood. School had been cancelled, of course, on account of the flu and the simple fact that two of our six teachers had already died.

      Was I scared? Well, at that time no one knew you couldn’t catch the same flu twice. So yes, I was worried, for myself and my family, for Eddie and my other pals, and for the community as a whole. At age eight, I naturally favored a world I could comprehend, a world that didn’t change much from day to day or even year to year, a world I could get my little mind around.

      I remember sitting on the porch swing after that breakfast, rocking back and forth, the chains squeaking overhead. Our house fronted Main Street. On a normal weekday, the town would be up and about. From my vantage point, I’d see Louristan’s shopkeepers opening their businesses, hear the rattle of wagons, and the clop of horses’ hooves, smell the comforting fragrance of bread baking in Mrs. Riley’s little café. Only a single wagon moved along Main Street on that morning, and the grim-faced man who urged the horses on wasn’t intent on doing business. He was headed for the courthouse. A woman propped up in the wagon bed gasped for air. The bodice of her white dress was spotted with bright-red blood.

      I was nearly overcome by fear. My world was turnin’ much too fast. Whereas before I’d just assumed tomorrow would be like today, as today was so much like yesterday. Now it seemed we—and I mean the whole community—were under mortal threat minute by minute.

      On that morning, as my mother walked off toward the hospital, and on many a morning afterward, I did the only thing I could think to do: I prayed. Talk of the last judgment filled Louristan’s many churches, drawing on Revelations. The pale horse had come, bearing a rider called the plague, with hell following at its heels. We were being punished for our sins. I didn’t know exactly what sins I’d committed to bring this on the world, but I prayed anyway.

      I begged the Lord to protect my family СКАЧАТЬ