Always October. C. E. Edmonson

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СКАЧАТЬ to obey my parents faithfully, even to obey Annie. I begged and I kept on begging as the days passed, as I watched my mother when she came home, her eyes red-rimmed and tired yet somehow carrying the sum total of all the suffering she was forced to witness.

      “There’s nothing we can do,” she told us again and again, sounding as if she were trying to explain it to herself. “All we can do is wait.”

      CHAPTER 7

      The October days, as they passed, were beautiful. Blue skies without a hint of rain, the trees ablaze with color, the mornings cold, the afternoons cool, the night skies spattered with stars from horizon to horizon. I wasn’t allowed to leave the yard, not to play with Eddie or anyone else, and I was never to approach a passerby. I watched them come, though, as I sat on the front porch or on the swing in a sugar maple that fronted the house. I remember the leaves above me were a fiery orange and the noon sun filled them with light and they rattled in a slight breeze. And I remember church bells ringing on weekdays and on the Sabbath, in the morning and in the afternoon, the funerals coming one after another.

      His twin baby brother and sister cradled in his arms, Eddie Enstrom passed my perch at the end of the second week. He was sitting next to his mother, who held the reins that guided the massive farm horse pulling their wagon. His father was lying in the back, already gone. Eddie didn’t look at me as he passed, just looked straight ahead, staring into a distance unmarked by any horizon. I shook while watching him, my whole body trembling, but I didn’t call out. I was too scared to open my mouth.

      * * *

      The next morning, as we sat in the kitchen eating breakfast at eight o’clock, Annie began to cough. By nine o’clock she was in bed, delirious with fever, her body soaked with perspiration though she shivered as though lying on a bed of ice. Her breathing was wet and ugly and ragged, her entire body straining with the effort to fill her lungs with air.

      At ten o’clock Momma began to cough. A half hour later, too weak to stand up, Momma collapsed. Weak and barely conscious, she told me to run and get my dad from the store, and I did so, just as fast as my small feet would carry me. By the time we got back home, Momma had dragged herself to bed and just lay there in a pool of her own perspiration. I was scared. I had never seen her so helpless. Never in my life.

      Though now I know Dad probably recognized how serious the situation was, he didn’t let it on to me on that day. He simply went about the business of tending to the sick—bringing in wet towels for their heads, taking their temperatures, rubbing their backs or arms as they coughed. He did all this quietly, with the patience of a saint, and to me that’s what he was at that moment. Without his steady hands, his caring touch, I don’t know what any of us would have done.

      Two hours later, just before noon, Momma finally fell into a fitful sleep. Annie, on the other hand, was restless. She tossed and turned in her bed, whipping her head from side to side, eyes closed tight as if trying to block out the pain she felt. Annie’s room was forbidden to me, but I lingered in the upstairs hall, right outside the door, my ear practically pressed to it.

      I heard her crying, and I heard Dad murmuring to her. I imagined him putting a cold cloth on her brow and telling her to relax, it would be okay—all the things he told me whenever I was sick. But unlike any upset tummy or case of the sniffles I ever had, this flu was bad news. Bad, bad news. And I feared from the noises in Annie’s room it would not end well.

      Eventually, after what seemed like an eternity crouched out in that hallway, leaning up against the door, I heard Annie take what I learned to be her last breath. It was an ugly rattling gasp, and it gave me goose bumps. Just the sound of it—well, I knew it meant something bad. And when my father, the rock of our lives, filled the ensuing silence with a howl that echoes in my mind to this day, I knew she was gone. Annie, my big sister, my beloved tormentor, had died.

      Though I wanted nothing more than to run out of the house and keep on going until I finally awakened in a familiar world, I couldn’t move. I just slumped back on the floor and stared at the door until Dad came out and took me in his strong arms.

      “We need to see to your mother now,” he told me. “Annie’s gone.”

      The words he said were calm, but the tears streaming down his face told another story. This was not an event that passed, an event you ever got over. When Dad entered Momma’s room, I stood in the doorway and stared at her in the bed. Momma’s lips were blue, her face the color of slate. She flailed about when dad pressed a cloth to her head as if she were trying to fight him off. Words came from her mouth, something about an escaped horse that had to be found before the onset of a blizzard. Then she stopped fighting and fell back on the pillow, unconscious. Her breath gurgled in her lungs as if she were trying to breathe underwater.

      Two hours later, Dad loaded Mom and Annie in the back of his truck. “I’m going to take your mother to the hospital,” he said. “I want you to stay here.” He didn’t tell me where he was taking Annie. He didn’t have to. Annie was going to the death house that had once been our school.

      As I already said, the flu took its victims in two ways, and they were quite distinct. Some, like Annie, passed within hours of the first symptoms. Some, like my mother, lingered for days, even weeks, fighting, fighting, fighting. This was the hardest, of course—the hardest on the families, because many people who survived the first few hours finally recovered. But there was no predicting. The fight was solely between the victim and the illness.

      I think my father’s taking Momma to the hospital was an act of kindness aimed at me. I was to be spared the ordeal of my mother’s illness. I was not to bear witness. But as the days went on, Dad spent more and more time at the courthouse. True, I was given strict orders not to leave our property. But there was no one to enforce ’em. Everything had changed.

      The next two weeks, they’re scrambled eggs, blended together and poured into a hot pan. I think of them now as a single day, a period of time unmarked by the rise and fall of the sun and the moon. Each day had a single highlight, a clarifying moment, when my dad returned from the hospital to tell me Momma was still alive.

      Eventually I began to roam. On the first day? The second? The third, fourth, fifth, sixth? I don’t remember when I went off down the road or even what I expected to see. I passed Martz’s feed store, Grund’s slaughterhouse, Doc Jackson’s office, Hank Paulson’s clothing store, and a dozen others. Every establishment was locked tight, sometimes because the store owner was sick or dead, sometimes because nobody in the community wanted to get too close to their neighbors. I only came across one merchant: Aksel Tingelstad, proprietor of Louristan Groceries. He sat on a chair outside his store, his face ashen, his body gaunt.

      “No reason to look at me thataway, young Taylor,” he wheezed. “I’m not catchin’. I’m gettin’ better.”

      I hadn’t known he was sick, or that he was recovering, and I didn’t know how to answer either, so I just nodded before moving on. Aksel had nothing else to say, but if he’d asked me where I was going, I don’t think I could have named the place. Only my feet seemed to know. They carried me to the northern edge of Louristan, to the school I’d been attending, and once again the familiar, the knowable, was now beyond recognition. I watched farm wagons pull up, one every fifteen minutes or so, watched the bodies taken down, carried inside.

      Through the open door I saw bodies lying atop bodies right there in the main entrance hall, stacked like carcasses in a slaughterhouse. The men who handled them wore surgical masks. Their eyes, above the masks, were very dark and they seemed to look right through me. Under ordinary circumstances, in the world I knew, a world now seemingly gone, I would have been in for a scolding. Not this time. The two men inside spoke briefly with the farmers, or СКАЧАТЬ