Lily's Story (106 page)

E
thel Carpenter was
moving into the fever stage. Granny knew each of the stages well.
Delirium had set in. Ethel clawed at her, her features distorted,
her words jumbled but perfect couriers of rage. When Granny put a
cool cloth to her forehead and tried to get some of the quinine
down her throat, Ethel grabbed her arms, glared like a maenad, and
spat in her face. She swallowed the medicine with a shocked gulp.
Granny put the children in their room, soothing them with her
abrupt gestures as best she could, and then walked over the marsh
to the railway yard, where she got a block of ice and lugged it
back in a heavy bag. She ran the tub full of cold water, chipped
some ice in, and went to get Ethel. Her ranting had subsided but
she was shaking all over, sweat pouring over the gooseflesh, her
eyes goitered and stabbing at their tormentors.

By morning the
fever had eased off. Granny woke from her doze to the sound of the
children playing in the kitchen. She stirred some aspirin into
coloured water; Ethel was able to guide it to her own lips. By
afternoon the bloated lips were less black and the blotched skin
had regained some colour. She felt Ethel searching her face for
some sign; she hoped it was there. By suppertime when Granny
returned from the Brownings on the far side of town, Ethel was able
to take some soup. She was asking for the children. Granny shook
her head. She went out to find some supper for them. David looked
pale.
She took him quickly
into his room and then set up Flora’s cot in the parlour. Flora was
cranky. She wanted her mother. She was angry at the old woman who
refused to talk. She wanted her brother to pull her in the
wagon.

Granny went
for the doctor. He was out. The nurse, glassy-eyed herself, said he
was near collapse, please don’t bother him. Granny was back at the
Carpenter’s gate when she heard the bell over the Presbyterian
Church begin its sombre tolling, joined shortly by its sister
muses. Flora
was sitting on
her mother’s bed. Ether was in a deep sleep. Granny lifted the
child away and after much difficulty succeeded in getting her off
to sleep as well. Then she went in to the boy. The fever and aches
were upon him. When she tried to get the medicine down, he vomited
all over her. She had just got clean sheets on the bed and the
shivering lad loosely covered, when the nosebleed struck. Granny
shuddered. It took over an hour to get it stopped. Blood sprayed
over her and the bedding and the boy himself as if someone had
cracked a fire hydrant. David sobbed, then went silent with terror,
then slumped back into an incredulous semi-coma, his eyes wide
open, taking in every tick and rustle of movement in the room and
in his rebellious body. He’ll die of the fear, she thought. Like
the others. Desperately she moved about as if she knew exactly what
she was doing and every move were calculated to bring about instant
recovery. She held his hand, stroked his brow, set some kind of
hope in her face, and tried to forestall the exhaustion and the
bone-deep ache threatening to overwhelm her.

When she woke
it was dawn. She felt feverish.
Flora was tugging at her sleeve. The boy seemed to be
resting. She went across to Ethel. She was sleeping peacefully.
She’s dreaming of her husband, and the promised armistice, and
reunion. Granny went back to check on David; his fever had ebbed,
but she could not get the boy to open his eyes. Whenever she
touched him, he cried out in a shrivelled, hollow voice, moaned,
and went still.

Granny went
again for the doctor. He was exhausted and resting for the first
time in days. At the Church Mrs. Stokes begged her to take some
soup to the McLeod’s, then some quinine and camphor to three other
families – with all members stricken – along Albert Street. She
stayed on there to cook some meals, stepping over dazed or
delirious victims who had s
elected any convenient spot to lie down and rest and refuse
to move. They ogled her like a ghost or wraith whose presence was
deemed not a little malign. Their arms floated towards a soup-bowl,
then drowned in its weight. Eyeballs bulged, tightened, braced for
the siege. Eyes pleaded, called out for explanation, justice,
expiation. The children clung to their skirts, and put their
fingers against her lips’ refusal.

When she got
back to Carpenter’s it was almost dark. David’s lips were swollen
shut, his skin was scorched, and his eyes were squeezed tight
against all the terrors the night would bring, but one. He opened
them once, saw the dark angel bending down, then closed them for
good. When the sun nudged her awake in the morning, Granny looked
upon the dead boy, then his mother – awful in the doorway. Ethel
Carpenter sta
red not at her
son but at Granny; her look said: what right have you to save me
and not him? Who are you anyway? When Flora came skipping up behind
her and grabbed her mother’s skirts in play, Ethel whirled and
slapped her across the face. Granny started towards the stunned
child, and Ethel glared again at her as if to say:
there, you see, you don’t have it
all to yourself
. The child’s
scream was piercing enough to startle the dead.

O
n the third Saturday
in October the pestilence reached right into the heart of the
village. Within an hour everyone who could listen heard the news
that young Dr. Simon had succumbed to the disease he had helped so
many to survive. The funeral was held on a Sunday, an unprecedented
event. The cortege included most of those who could still walk, had
already recovered, or were brave enough to venture out at any cost.
The Methodist bell tolled for an hour. The other two bells had been
struck dumb by the plague itself.

Granny did not attend the
graveside ceremony. She was busy nursing Rose Underhill through the
critical period of her delirium.

A
s she watched young
Rose sweat out her fever, she felt the desperate need for speech.
She had begun to realize that it was the fear – the unmasked,
tongueless, viral fear of death, that tic under the heart’s shadow
– that was most hazardous, especially at the point just after the
delirium panicked and fled, and the victim gazed into a mirror or a
loved one’s anguish and saw reflected there the bloated flesh, the
charred skin, the frog’s-stare that they had become – then was the
danger most severe. Then came the lapse into the lethargy and ache
of the final stage, out of which only the strongest climbed.
Afterwards Sunny told her it was because she was unable to speak
that so many people claimed she had saved their lives – people who
did not even know who she was or whence she had come.

More recently
he had told her that many victims still swore she had appeared to
them out of nowhere like an apparition. Her silence served only to
convince them even more of her incorporeal origins. Whereas they
normally looked up into faces full of grief or shock or morbid
foreshadowing, they were able in her case to fix on a face that was
impassive and yet remotely beneficient with not a hint of fear for
itself or the stricken one. With her as miraculous visitant, they
had no call for a brave front nor would their
cowardice, their pleas for mercy or a warm death,
their last-second repentances – none of these be necessary or
expedient. Indeed, she would respond to nothing but the courage
they needed for the effort at hand – to survive or bear it out to
whatever end this spirit from the earth’s pantheon had foreordained
but would not give away by nod or wink. Sunny had convinced himself
that all this was true, that it really happened that
way.

Sitting in Rose’s bedroom, not
knowing then that Wilf would outlast his wounds and return here to
give her a son, Granny simply wished she could once again speak to
her friend with a woman’s compassion: once she had begun, the words
would surely fall into place. Instead, she held Rose’s hand like
the others, and winced at the fever’s tremor. I’m as helpless as
she is, was her thought. After all these years, I still know
nothing.

G
ranny had watched
four people die – close up, and each different. Young David had
opened his brave eyes, stretched out a hand to the comforting one
offered him, and, released from his pain, walked towards the warm
sunshine he sensed in the valley just over the hill. Mrs.
Thibeault, who hadn’t missed a Sunday school class in thirty years,
sang hymns in her delirium, refused to believe her nurse wasn’t a
seraphic envoy, and shut her ears to her husband’s cries of rage
and despair in the adjoining room. Moments before the light dimmed
in her eyes, though, she’d looked straight at Granny and said,
“Cora, I’m sorry for what I done to you; can you forgive me?” A few
minutes later she whispered, “Will you come with me? I’m scared of
goin’ alone.”

Gladys Monk, a preacher’s
daughter, stared at her with the same unspoken questions any
thoroughgoing pagan might have raised: Why me with three children
and a one-legged unemployable husband? Why Dr. Simon, a saint? Why
not you, withered and without speech, feeding on misery, without
faith? Granny wiped her brow tenderly and trusted that Gladys’ god
was strong enough and forgiving enough to absorb the curses these
wretched hypocrites intended for the heathen and the lost. When
Gladys died, Granny closed her eyes as quickly as she could. “She
looks so peaceful,” Herb said, hobbling over to her.

In the last shack on the
Lane, just before the dunes, Granny found the Wollochuk brothers,
come here from one of the innumerable pogroms of Europe to work at
the new foundry. They spoke little English. Both were down with the
flu. The youngest was in the last stage, but some colour had
returned to his cheeks and there was a glint of expectation, of
astonishment, in the general glaze of his eyes. His brother, a year
or so older, strapping and exuberant only a week ago, lay on the
dirt floor, burning with fever. Alien syllables spurted from his
lips in a frenzy, wild and sing-song and manic – like a holy-roller
speaking in tongues with the devil half-a-note behind him. At the
height of this babble, everything stopped. He lay ominously still,
the death-rattle beginning to leak up his throat. Granny stood
horrified, unable to believe such a powerful man would not make it
out of the second stage. Afterward the recovered brother said to
her, “Yevi die with the Black Death.” His own recovery was deemed a
miracle. It had to be.

“
The plagues
that followed a war,” Cap said, “were not unlike the year-long
sieges of an enemy castle in the late Middle Ages. The shells or
missiles or fireballs or arrows fell at random in no fixed
sequence. People died under them regardless of the precautions they
took, the prayers they incanted, or their own self-evident
worthiness. In such cases over a prolonged period of time, the
random marauding of Master Death often cause the victims to blame
themselves and prompt the survivors to look for new configurations
of the heavens or new canons of blessedness to explain their own
good fortune. A plague is a devilishly unsettling
affair.”

Rose Underhill got well.
Flora searched in the garden for her brother. The bells tolled
twelve times in all during that month. Five of the souls were
Anglican.

Granny returned to the
sanctuary of Arthur’s shack. But not before she overheard, on her
final trip to the Church kitchen, this one-sided ‘conversation’
between the Reverend Stokes and several senior churchwomen.

“
She may be a
bit queer – who isn’t at her age – but I tell you, ladies, she’s a
candidate for sainthood, if you’ll pardon the expression. You saw
the way she worked throughout this dreadful month. A hundred times
she risked her own life, going right into the dens of disease where
no one else but dear Dr. Simon would venture. It was as if she knew
that god Himself had chosen her for this mission of mercy and would
offer her all the protection she needed. Rarely have I seen such an
example of God’s love and the spirit of Christianity ‘bodied forth’
in the actions of a single parishioner. My own feeling is that the
dear soul, even though she’s not attended service these many years,
decided that during the few months remaining before her own
imminent entry into paradise, she would bear witness in a way that
would atone for a lifetime of neglect or perhaps even rejection. We
must find a way of honouring such valour, such selflessness, such
preeminent charity.”

S
afe in her own
kitchen, Granny curled her hands around a cup of tea and said
softly into the glow behind the stove: “I’m sorry, Arthur. I’m
still here. You’ll have to wait a little while yet.”

W
ith more than
three-hundred-and-fifty thousand German troops incapacitated by the
Spanish influenza that had already killed more than twenty million
people world-wide, a halt was called to the mutual slaughter in
Europe. On November 11, shortly after noon, Granny heard the bells
ringing out the news.

2

A
cross the street a
battered, lime-encrusted pick-up farted and coughed to a standstill
in front of the vacant lot. A middle-aged fellow, swarthy and
lithe, jumped from the open cab and, hands on hips, surveyed the
site for the monument. Out of the passenger’s seat hopped a very
old man, who scuttled over to the younger man’s side. They were
both smiling.