Deep Summer (20 page)

“Mhm.” Benny fingered the muslin of her skirt, examining the clusters of little flowers printed there.

It was nearly dark. Soon the servants would be bringing supper dishes from the kitchen-house.

“You’d better go home now, Benny,” Judith said. “Your mother will be wondering where you are. Don’t come up to the big house again.”

“Yassum.” Benny got up. He stood scratching his ankle with the toe of the other foot.

“How is your mother?” Judith asked him in a faint voice that took more strength than a scream.

“She’s doin’ pretty good.”

“She has some other children too?”

“Yassum.”

“Tell your mother I asked about her.”

“Yassum.”

“Good night, Benny.”

“Good night, missis.”

Judith watched him scamper off toward the fields. She put her arm around the gallery post and laid her forehead on it. In retrospect what she had tried to tell him sounded hollow. As if anybody could get used to a misery in the heart merely by making up his mind to do so. She knew, more strongly than she had known in all these years, that she was not used to hers, and she hoped she would never have to see Benny nor hear of him again.

A Negro man came around the corner of the house. He took off his hat and holding it in both hands he put his one foot behind the other and bowed. “Missis?”

“Yes?” She had started to go in and turned back to him.

“Dat white lady you tole me to take dem sheets and things to—”

“What did she say?”

“She say she ain’t got no use for ’em. Her li’l gal’s done died.”

“Oh,” said Judith. How the fever galloped through the bodies of children.

“But I left de things just de same, missis. I thought maybe as how she could find a use for ’em, wrappin’ up de li’l gal to be buried and all.”

“That’s right,” said Judith. She went indoors. The passage was dark but from the front rooms she could see the glow of candles.

Little Philip was calling her. The sound startled her into action. Poor child—she had forgotten sending him to his room and now it was dark and he would be wondering if he was to stay there all night supperless and unforgiven. Hurrying into the dining-room she got a candle from the table and went to his door.

“Here I am, Phil. You may come out now.”

She opened the door, but the room was big and her candle did not give enough light for her to see him at first. She exclaimed, “Phil, baby, where are you?”

There was a sound from the bed. He was a big boy to be crying because he had been punished. Judith set down the candle and pushed back the mosquito bar. “Phil, if you’re sulking I’m ashamed of you!”

He was lying across the bed, his face half hidden in the pillow. Bad boy, he hadn’t taken off his shoes and the counterpane was muddy. As she leaned over him he half raised up and made another inarticulate noise in his throat. With a little cry Judith caught him in her arms.

Little Philip’s eyes were full of blood. His lips and nostrils were almost purple. He writhed into her arms, clinging to her as if she could protect him, and she felt his face blazing with fever. He murmured thickly, “I kept trying to call you. I reckon you didn’t hear me.”

Judith felt her heart thumping. She laid his head back on the pillow.

“No, dearest, I didn’t hear you. Now lie down like a good boy and I’ll take off your clothes. How long since you began feeling sick?”

Whatever it was he said, she did not understand it. She got his clothes off and a bedgown on him, and drew up the sheets, trying to control the spasms of panic that shook her hands. It couldn’t be what she thought it was. These things couldn’t happen to people who were clean and careful and took pains with their children. When she had covered him she laid her hand on his forehead, thinking that even in this heat her fingers must be cool against such fever as his. At the door she spoke to a servant bringing in a tray of supper dishes, surprised at how level a voice could be above the fear she was feeling.

“Find Mr. Philip and tell him to come here as soon as he can.”

Philip came in a moment later. “What’s happened, Judith?”

She gestured toward the bed. Philip raised the mosquito bar, saying, “What’s the trouble, boy? Eat too much?”

The last word caught in his throat. He sat on the bed and lifted little Philip in his arms. The child’s body gave a jerk that ran from his shoulders down to his feet. His father said, “Oh my God.”

Little Philip raised his head. He groaned. There was a rumbling noise deep down in his body. He screamed again, and jerked, and there came from his mouth a black discharge that ran over the pillow and sheets in a thick stream. He retched again and vomited again, and sank back in a stupor of exhaustion.

His father stood up. For a moment he did not move. He simply stood there by the bed, and his eyes met Judith’s. She felt her face twisting. Little Philip made another retching noise, but nothing came up, and he gave a sharp scream of pain. His father put his hands over his eyes and shuddered. Then he lifted his head and said to Judith:

“Let’s get the bed clean. Have them burn up the sheets.”

She got fresh linens out of the armoire, moving mechanically without saying anything. Afterwards she remembered Philip’s gesture of helpless horror, and thought that was what had first made her understand how awful yellow fever was.

At six o’clock in the morning David came out of the main passage to where his father stood on the gallery.

“I got mother to go to her room,” said David. “She—she looks about to collapse, father.”

“I’ll go to her,” Philip said. He had walked out of little Philip’s room a quarter of an hour before, because he simply could not bear any longer to see a child of his suffer like that. “David, I won’t get down to the fields today. Will you take a look around?”

“Yes sir. Is there anything else I can do?”

“Tell the servants nobody is to leave the plantation for any purpose unless I give the order. And tell them in the kitchen not to serve any food except what’s grown on the place. Find mammy before you go out and tell her to keep Rita in the nursery or on the side gallery, and not let her come near your mother or any of the rest of us who’ve been into Phil’s room.”

“All right, sir,” said David. His voice was low, as though his first sight of the plague had scared him out of his customary self-confidence and he was glad to be told something definite to do. He went inside, and Philip hurried in to Judith. She had been working over little Philip all night, tending him with a rigid calmness and only once or twice hiding her face with a gasp when his screams were too agonized for her to endure.

He opened the door of their room. Judith had thrown herself across the bed and was sobbing into the pillow. Philip sat by her. He took off her shoes and loosened her dress.

“Won’t you try to go to sleep, Judith? Christine is taking care of him.”

“I can’t.” She clung to him, shuddering, and hid her face on his breast. “Oh Philip, if he has to die, why must it be so horrible?”

“Dearest, he doesn’t have to die!” Philip tried to speak reassuringly and not let her guess how frightened he was. “It’s not always fatal. At least half the people who have yellow fever live through it!”

Judith shook her head. “But he won’t.” She spoke with despairing conviction. “Philip, don’t you remember what I did to him?”

“Please, Judith!”

But she could not be comforted. “I killed him in my soul. God waited eleven years so I could see what I was doing. I’ve thought of it all night.”

From further down the hall they could hear faint, tired little cries. Philip shivered and Judith put her hands over her ears. Then she struggled up. “Let me go back to him.”

He tried to keep her where she was. She did look, as David had said, on the verge of collapse, and the servants had promised to call if there was any need for her in the sickroom. But she insisted.

“I can hold him up in my arms when the spasms come. Servants are no good—they aren’t his mother.”

He had to let her go back. Toward afternoon little Philip fell into a troubled sleep, and Judith went to sleep too, lying on a mattress on the floor. David called his father outside.

There were three cases of fever in the quarters, he said. He had had the Negroes moved to the plantation infirmary and had forbidden the others to go near them. Philip sent Christopher to Silverwood to ask Caleb if Rita could stay there to escape taking the fever by contact.

Christopher returned to say there had been an explosion of plague all along the bluff. Two of the house-servants at Silverwood had been stricken that morning. He had ridden from there to Lynhaven to ask Gervaise if she could keep Rita safe, only to find that Walter Purcell had come in from the wharfs with the dizzying headache and bloodshot eyes that marked the onset of the fever.

It rained that night, and the next day the air was thick and wet. Puddles stood about the soaked ground. Four Negroes collapsed in the indigo fields at noon. Philip hardly heard the report when David brought it to him, for David had come in from the fields with his face flushed nearly crimson. Philip involuntarily grasped his wrist to see if the pulse was faster. David reassured him.

“I’m not sick, father. It’s this ghastly wet heat—did you ever see such weather?”

“Never. Have you heard how Walter Purcell is?”

“Worse, I understand. And Mrs. Durham fainted in her garden this morning.”

Philip shook his head. David sat down, letting his riding-crop fall on the floor.

“Father, the fields are demoralized. The Negroes are scared to work and scared to stay indoors. Nobody’s getting anything done.” He seemed to be pleading for courage. But Philip could only say, wearily:

“I don’t wonder. It doesn’t matter,”

After awhile David went out, as though any sort of movement was a relief from the tension of sitting still. Philip was about to call Judith from little Philip’s room and make her rest when she came in of her own accord. She dropped down by the table and held her head on her hands, saying:

“Philip, I can’t stand watching him.”

He put his arm around her and drew her head back to rest against him. “How is he now?”

“He—he was delirious all night, but now he’s quiet—horribly quiet. And he’s yellow and splotched and hideous—last week he was so round and rosy! Why don’t we take it with him?”

“I don’t know,” said Philip. “I wonder too.”

They said nothing else. There was nothing to say.

David and Christopher came in together. They shut the door softly behind them and stood just in front of it, looking at their parents and then at each other as if each were wishing the other would speak first. Judith stood up slowly and her hands sought Philip’s as if she already knew what they had come to tell her.

David said, “He—he’s dead, mother.”

Philip put his arms around her, but she did not scream or sob. She only said, “Yes, I knew he was going to die.”

She was almost rigid in his arms. He motioned David and Christopher to leave them, for he knew a shock first made Judith numb and then brought a fierce reaction. The boys went out. Judith put her hands up to her temples. “Oh please, God, I didn’t know what I was doing!”

She went limp against him, a flood of sobs tearing through her. Philip held her, feeling as helpless as a slave tied to the whipping-post.

Chapter Fifteen

T
hree days after little Philip died a servant brought a letter from Caleb Sheramy, saying the fever had struck Roger. Too distracted to look for a fresh sheet of paper, Judith wrote across the bottom of the page, “I shall remember you in my prayers,” and sent it back.

The next day they heard Walter Purcell was dead. Philip sent David to Lynhaven with a note of sympathy for Gervaise.

When David had delivered the letter he rode to the wharfs to countermand the order for boats that had been engaged to ship the Ardeith produce down the river. The indigo was rotting on the ground for lack of harvesters. Judith had pled with David and Christopher to take Rita and go to a safe place while
they
were still well, but David’s questions to boatmen on the docks convinced him there was no safe place. The men said New Orleans was a charnel-house; the west bank of the river was reeking with pestilence and so were the towns above Baton Rouge. One was as safe here as anywhere else. Everything possible was being done to drive the fever out. On the corners pine and pitch torches burned day and night to destroy the poison in the air, and every ten minutes guns were fired over the river to shake the atmosphere. The taverns near the wharfs were gay and noisy, as though men were trying to drown the rattle of the coffin-laden carts on the road. One of the wagons moved along in front of David, the body-collector walking at the head of the mule. He rapped on the door of each house as he passed.

“Any dead here to be carried off?”

If the answer was yes he dragged the body out and dumped it into a coffin already holding two or three others, shoved down the lid and went on. A little Negro boy sat on a coffin to hold the reins.

David managed to pass the wagon and turned his horse into a better part of town, where well-to-do families lived in houses of cypress or moss-plaster. These people had slaves to make coffins for their dead, and they could order hearses to carry them away, but even these had to wait their turn and the coffins were piled on the galleries, sometimes three or four at a single house. Here and there was a note on a gate, asking that any clergyman who passed would come in and say a prayer with someone who was dying.

David shuddered and felt sick. Smoke from the pitch torches got into his eyes and made them burn. The gardens around the houses were flowering with ironic splendor. David loved growing things, but this mad blooming struck him today as repulsive, almost obscene, as though the plants were laughing at weather that was killing the men and women who tended them. There were a few cases of yellow fever every summer, and he had heard old people speak of a “fever year,” but David had never imagined anything like this. He remembered the hopeless sound of his mother’s sobs when she cried all night after little Philip died, and wondered if every one of these houses held as much grief as that.

As he slowed his horse again to let a boy cross the street in front of him, a woman ran up from behind and caught the bridle. David stopped with an impatient exclamation.

The woman stood at the head of the horse, panting, “Don’t you be David Larne?”

She wore a faded dress from which one sleeve was tearing at the shoulder, and a hat tied with a soiled pink ribbon. It had fallen off her head as she ran after him and hung now on her shoulders, letting him see her streaky black hair. Her eyes were beautiful, soft as black velvet, but her skin had withered and her little dished-in nose had grown rather flat.

“Why yes,” he said, “I’m David Larne. What did you want with me?”

“I reckon you’ve forgot me, ain’t you?” she asked him. She was catching her breath. Her dress was open at the throat for coolness, and there were lines of perspiration down her neck. “I’m Dolores.”

“Dolores?” David frowned, then his face cleared with astonishment. “My Aunt Dolores?”

“You remember?” she asked with a faint one-sided smile that made a crease down her cheek.

“Of course I do.” David smiled back at her, trying to hide his surprise at her present appearance. He got off his horse and stood holding the bridle. “I remember you very well,” he added. “You used to play with Chris and me and teach us voudou songs.”

Dolores shrugged. “Well, I want to ask you something but I won’t be holding you here long. I don’t want to embarrass you, honey.”

“You aren’t embarrassing me,” David assured her. Friends of his father’s might be surprised to see him standing in the street talking to such a dilapidated woman, he thought sadly, except that in times like these nobody paid much attention to anybody else.

“I heard today Roger is got the plague,” said Dolores. “Is it so, David?”

He nodded.

“Is he took bad?”

“I don’t know. We only heard it ourselves yesterday, and my father hasn’t let mother go there. She’s worn out with nursing my youngest brother who died of it.”

“Mhm, I know,” said Dolores. “Tell her I’m mighty sorry. And tell her I’m sorry I yelled so at that nigger of hers that brought me some things, but I was so distracted with my little girl just dead. David, is there any woman looking after Roger?”

“There’s a couple of good nurses at Silverwood.”

“Niggers!” said Dolores. “I’m going over there. Thanks, David. That’s all I wanted to know.”

“Wait!” he exclaimed as she started off. “How are you going to get there? It’s a long way.”

“I reckon I can walk. I don’t be having the fever.”

“In this heat? You’ll never do it.”

“Oh yes I will, honey. I kept off that boy long as I figured he was better off without me. But I reckon if he’s got the fever there’s nobody can say his mother should stay away and let him die with a pack of slaves minding him. I’ll get there.”

He was holding her arm. “Get on this horse. Can you ride?”

“I used to could. I guess I haven’t forgot. Won’t the horse drop dead toting us both, though?”

“Horses aren’t as important as people,” said David shortly. “Get on.”

She sighed. “You’re pretty good, David. I’d have thought you’d be ashamed to ride with me.” She mounted the horse and smiled at him as he got up in front of her. “You look just like your father.”

“That’s what everybody says.”

“Living image. That’s how I could tell it was you.”

They rode slowly, without talking much. David wondered what his Uncle Caleb was going to say when he saw Dolores. But it really didn’t matter. If the poor woman wanted to nurse her son through the fever not even rock-minded Uncle Caleb could refuse to let her in. He would probably welcome any one who could ease his son’s suffering now. David asked about her children. They were well, she said. Her husband could take care of them.

She was silent after that and he did not try to make her talk. The sun or something was beginning to make his head ache. Ordinarily he paid no attention to the heat—in fact, he liked the summers—but he had never known such weather as this.

At the steps of the Silverwood manor David gave his head a shake to clear his brain. The horse stood drooping with weariness as he and Dolores dismounted.

Dolores stood a moment on the steps. “Funny,” she said, more as if speaking to the house than to David, “I used to live here.”

David rapped on the door with the butt of his whip. “Where is Mr. Sheramy?” he asked the Negro boy who answered.

“Why howdy, Massa David. He’s back in de room wid de young master, sah.”

“How is Mr. Roger?” Dolores demanded.

“Ma’am? He mighty sick, ma’am.” The boy looked at her curiously, wondering what so bedraggled a woman was doing at the front door with Master David.

“Tell him—” David began, but Dolores interposed,

“Don’t tell him anything. He won’t throw me out. I reckon,” she added with an oblique glance at David, “I know him better than you do, honey child.” She started in. “Thanks for bringing me, David,” she said over her shoulder.

A door in the hall opened and Caleb came out. He had heard their voices, but they stood with their backs to the sun and for a moment he did not recognize them. Then he said, “Why hello, David.” He walked with a stoop, and his face was haggard. Dolores took a step nearer.

She said, “Caleb, don’t you know me?”

Caleb stopped. He put out his hand and touched her. He said, “Dolores!” in a strange far-off tone. From the room he had left came the sound of Roger’s voice calling him.

“I’ve come to look after him, Caleb,” said Dolores.

He took her hand in his and without saying anything else they went together into Roger’s room. For a moment David stood where he was. He could hear Roger groaning and the other two speaking in blurred phrases. He wondered if his Uncle Caleb had loved her. He did not know, but he felt curiously young and inadequate. There was nothing wanted of him at Silverwood. Ahead was the journey home, which seemed long and wearisome before him. His bones ached and his headache was growing harder. He went out and mounted his horse.

How hot it was, though before he was halfway home the clouds had thickened over the sun. He thought yearningly that as soon as he reached Ardeith he would have his boy bring him a cold bath. His throat was burning with thirst. The pain shot through his head till he could scarcely see, and it was hard to hold his seat in the saddle. His hands on the bridle were shaky. Queer what this wet heat could do. It made him ashamed of himself. You’d think he was one of these greenhorn Canadians who’d never felt real sun before.

Here were the orange groves of Ardeith. What a long way it was from the oranges to the house! David made himself straighten up. If his mother saw him exhausted like this she’d think he was sick and she had all she could bear now without getting worried about him. He was perfectly well, of course—or wasn’t he? To be sure he was well, only this weather was enough to give anybody headaches. Thank heaven the horse turned of its own accord into the road leading through the flowers to the house. He was dizzy, and saw two oleander bushes where only one was growing; ahead of him the pink house swayed and elongated and shortened as though he were looking at it through a pane of faulty glass. The horse was stopping at the steps. David roused himself with a great effort and got off, and caught at a post of the gallery to keep from falling. He must get inside in a hurry, and get some rest before his mother saw him. In just a minute when his head had cleared and he could walk, he would go in.

She came out on the gallery with his father. He heard her cry out, “David! What’s the trouble?” He felt her hands on his face. How cool they were. He tried to answer, but when he let go the post he felt himself falling.

He did not know just what happened after that, but he had a vague sense of lying across the gallery with his head on his mother’s lap. There were servants about to carry him indoors. He heard his father say something and then, because her head was bent so close to his, he understood when he heard his mother answer.

“No. No, Philip. Please don’t make me do anything. Can’t you see I’ve got no fight left in me?”

In the manor at Silverwood Caleb and Dolores sat facing each other across the bed where Roger lay. Dolores reached over now and then and stroked his forehead with a damp cloth. Caleb could see her in sharp outline by the light of two candles burning steadily in the windless air. How tired she looked, and how old, though she was only about Judith’s age. He had made her look like that by driving her away.

He had loved her so desperately in those old days, though he had persuaded himself during these years that he had not. But if they could ever have any peace about that tormented child between them he would tell her he wished he had been more forgiving. Maybe she would not care about knowing. But she loved Roger so; she must be glad to hear that Roger’s father wished he could take back his harshness to her. How she worshiped that boy! He would perhaps be dead now but for what she had done for him, twenty times a day washing him clean of the fever discharges, and holding him up in her arms so he could breathe when the spasms came. She had hardly slept at all, and the candlelight showed him the rings of exhaustion under her eyes.

Roger moved uneasily under the sheet and tried to throw it off. Caleb drew it up again.

“Won’t you rest a little while, Dolores?” he asked. “I’ll stay with him.”

She shook her head. “You wouldn’t know what to do. I’ve nursed it before. It gets down below the wharfs a lot, summers.”

He went around the foot of the bed to her, and stood with a hand on her shoulder.

“He was so handsome before, wasn’t he?” said Dolores without looking up. “I was watch him sometimes, riding on the levee with Judith’s boys, all elegant in fine clothes and such a gentleman.”

Caleb’s hand tightened on her shoulder. “Dolores, I’m sorry I took him away from you.”

He spoke stiffly, for he had not known how to say that, or whether she would believe him. For a moment she did not answer. He saw her holding Roger’s wrist, feeling for a pulse. When she had found it she said slowly:

“He’d have got the fever just the same, Caleb. Maybe seeing him have it would be worse for me if I’d had him all along.”

“Let me fetch you some clean water,” said Caleb.

He took the basin and emptied it into the slop-jar and filled it again from the pitcher on the washstand. She took it from him and set it on the table. Roger was tossing and talking in broken words. With a convulsive movement Dolores sprang up and went to the window, hiding her face in the curtain. Her shoulders quivered with voiceless sobs.

Caleb went and put his arms around her.

But she did not want him to hold her, and moved away. It was Roger for whose sake she had come to Silverwood, and not his, and he could not help but know it. Caleb went back to the bed and looked down at his son. He wondered if Roger was going to die.

Dolores pushed back the wisps of her disordered hair. “There’s no more water in the pitcher,” she said. “Can you get some? I’m burning up with wanting a drink, besides him needing it.”

“All right,” said Caleb. He picked up the pitcher and went out to the rain-barrels behind the house. There was a light in the kitchen, and two or three servants sitting about, but he did not call on them. Giving what services he could made him feel less futile.