Man in the Blue Moon (30 page)

A broad-shouldered woman who swayed from side to side as she walked lifted the edge of the gauze mask that she wore and wiped away tears. Her soft cry echoed in the high cathedral ceiling and landed upon Lanier, filling his spirit until he trembled and wondered if he had finally caught the fever. He watched the woman wobble up to the altar, light a small candle, and cross herself as she knelt in front of the image of Jesus.

Long after the candle melted, Lanier was still there. He stayed until the church bell chimed three times.

Lanier followed a slump-shouldered nun out of the church. He stared at the tassel that was attached to the end of a rope tied around the folds of her stomach. The white ends of the tassel seemed new, crisp, and pure. The sister shoved the massive cathedral door with both hands, and the muffled cries coming from the makeshift hospital tents outside seemed louder in Lanier’s mind. He covered the side of his scarred ear with his hand and followed the tassel that flapped back and forth around the nun’s calves. It was easier to stare at the object that reminded him of a Christmas tree ornament than to look at the blood-splattered white shoes that the nun wore. When she turned left and stepped around a distraught woman holding a baby whose face was covered with a soiled handkerchief embroidered with the sign of the cross, Lanier copied her steps. There was nothing that awaited him back at Miss Prideaux’s but books and memories whose endings he couldn’t change.

When the nun flipped open the door of the tent nearest a banana tree, Lanier moved forward. The nun never noticed him as she busied herself with tying a soiled apron around her waist, covering the tassel of the rope belt she wore. The stench of human waste, alcohol, and dried blood overtook Lanier. He recoiled but never ran away. Part of him wanted to inhale the scent deep and hard. Influenza would be a destiny of sorts.

“Are you one of the volunteers?” A sister wearing a white habit and an apron printed with a red cross approached him. She held a murky basin of water like an offering. Wiry chestnut hair poked from underneath her ears. Her voice was jagged and sharp, native New Orleans. “The bishop promised more volunteers.” She handed him the basin and pointed toward the tent flap. “Toss that and fill it with fresh water.” Before she walked away, the nun snapped her fingers at pails of water that were stacked on top of a portable steel table. “Then get busy applying wet gauzes to their heads.”

The nun hovered over a boy who shook and kicked until the sheet over him balled at his waist, revealing bony knees. White sheets covered the other patients, who lay in cots lined perfectly in three rows. The placement of the cots reminded Lanier of the mausoleums placed side by side in the local cemetery. He lifted the tent flap, tossed the water, and obeyed the nun’s instructions.

Applying fresh gauze to a young woman who coughed until ligaments protruded from her skin, Lanier stared into the panic in her eyes. She reached up her hand, clawing the air with sharp, dirty fingernails. Thinking that she might cough easier if she were elevated, Lanier cupped his arm under the woman’s knotty spine. Her fingernails landed into his forearm and scratched his skin. A gurgle formed in her throat. Lanier rubbed her back until he felt her body grow limp and her hand slip away from him. Standing over the woman, now dead, whose eyes and mouth were still open, he felt the breeze of the nun as she worked around him. She yanked the sheet over the woman’s body and pointed to the next patient, a redheaded man who hadn’t yet outgrown his freckles. “Just keep moving.”

By the time Lanier reached the third row of cots, he had comforted a wailing woman who stood at the foot of the cot containing her youngest daughter, gripped the hand of a teenage boy who thought Lanier was his father, and refreshed four more basins of water. The shortest nun of the group, an older woman with protruding teeth, walked up and down the aisle carrying a red-and-white tin filled with a yellowish paste. “This will help ease the pain,” she whispered as she dipped a strip of gauze into the tin and then tried to tuck it underneath the leg of a girl who thrashed, swinging her head from one side to the other.

“Here,” Lanier said, moving to the side of the girl’s cot. He set down the basin of water and gently rolled the girl to the side. “Now see if you can get it underneath her.”

“Thank you,” the nun whispered.

Lanier was looking at the girl, trying to smile and comfort her when he heard the voice from his childhood call out.

“Get away from me, woman.”

A loud clang rang out, and the nun helping the girl stopped long enough to look toward the end of the row where the commotion brewed.

The nun who had instructed Lanier gripped a bowl filled with yellow paste. With a wide stance, she leaned over the man who flailed about in his bed. “It’s just mustard seed and buckwheat.”

The man screamed as if he were deaf.

“It’ll help with your skin blisters.”

The man cursed her, her God, and her concoction all in one ragged breath.

The nun looked at Lanier and twisted the side of her mouth. “That man has been nothing but trouble. Out of his mind by the time they brought him in here. Not only does he have the flu, but he’s coming off dope too.” The nun gritted her oversized teeth and then turned her attention back to the girl.

After Lanier had picked up the basin of water, he moved slowly to the last cot. The nun was looking at the remaining paste in her tin and mumbling words Lanier could not understand. When he stepped closer, Lanier saw the gaunt, sore-riddled face of the man who had once mesmerized him as a boy. “Harlan?” Lanier said, once in a whisper and then louder.

“He’s talking out of his head,” the nun said in her nasal voice. She stopped worrying over the ointment and studied Lanier. “Do you know this man? The police brought him here yesterday.”

Lanier stared at Harlan’s thick-bearded face. Bloody red sores grew from the sides of Harlan’s mouth. They were similar to the sores that Lanier had healed on his youngest son. “Harlan Wallace?”

Harlan’s coal-colored eyes stared up at the ceiling of the tent. His shaking fingers clawed the seam of the sheet. Thin skin revealed bluish veins along the base of his neck.

“Do you know this man?” the sister asked again.

Shaking his head, Lanier turned to leave. A priest was standing at the end of a cot, making the sign of the cross and mumbling last rites. Lanier never apologized for bumping into him. The wife of the redheaded man reached out to him as he passed by and requested a fresh towel. By the time he’d made it to where the fresh water was kept, Lanier tossed the basin to the side without looking to see if it landed on the table.

“Will you come back?” the nun called out, trailing him to the door flap of the tent. “The bishop promised us volunteers. Do you hear me? I’ll be praying for you to come back.”

The nun’s words and the vision of Harlan tormented Lanier long after he had locked the door to his room at Miss Prideaux’s and turned out the flame of his lamp.

In the Apalachicola cemetery, heaps of freshly tilled dirt took the shape of giant ant beds. Keaton held on to the side of the wagon that Samuel drove and noticed two men with gauze masks digging one more. Pressing his nails into the plank of wood where he sat, Keaton looked down the empty Main Street and out toward the water. At least the steamboats still bobbed at the dock with clouds of black coming from their stacks. Watching the boats and the few men who paraded around the dock carrying crates of supplies, Keaton felt relieved at some sight of normalcy.

The wagon Samuel drove made its way through the downtown that was cleared of people. The only person in a block’s radius came out of the pharmacy. Examining the bottle of tonic in his hand, the man never looked up as he crossed the street. If Samuel hadn’t stopped the wagon in time, they would have run over him.

At the dock three colored boys, younger than Keaton, made straining faces as they carried crates stamped with the logo of a supply company from Atlanta. He nodded at them and planted his hands deep in his pockets outside the warehouse where Samuel paid for the stock for the store. The steamboat that looked like it was bowing in half, with the end portions rising higher out of the water than the middle, blew its whistle. Keaton jumped at the sound, and the colored boys laughed. The water splashed when an olive-skinned man cast a fishnet from the pier. His long, skinny arms stayed in the air, frozen in the position until the weighted net floated deeper into the water.

Keaton inhaled the scent of salt, sweat, and seafood that lingered. Then he held his breath, hoping that by doing so he could filter out the flu that kept most of the town behind secure doors. He should have worn the mask like his mother wanted him to.

A bowlegged man with gray hair parted down the middle stared at Keaton from the bow of the
Crescent City
steamboat. Then he bounded down the plank that was secured to the dock. Keaton looked back toward the net that was flying in the air again.

“You the one they told me about?” the man asked. He raised his leg and brushed away the bits of cotton that clung to his pants.

“Sir?”

“You the one they hired to be my boy?”

Keaton looked around the dock and shoved his hands inside his pockets again.

“My other captain’s boy is eat up with that flu. They told me they had me another lined about and I was figuring . . .”

“No, sir,” Keaton said before looking at the cans of oysters that were stacked at the end of the boat under a blue awning that was tattered and faded.

“Well, you have any experience on the boats?”

Keaton studied the way the smoke from the steamboat danced in the breeze. The colored boys walked back by him, and one of them snickered. Keaton waited until they had passed before he answered the captain. “I, uhh . . . I rafted wood downriver.”

“Is that so?” The man picked at a fresh scab on the side of his chin. “That’s hard work. Man’s work.”

Keaton nodded and then glanced over his shoulder toward the warehouse, wondering how much longer Samuel would take inside.

“Captain Marcum,” the man said.

Keaton stuck out his hand and gripped the captain’s hand before the man had a chance to initiate the handshake himself. “Keaton Wallace.”

“I pay three dollars a week. Not a cent more. You clean my quarters, run messages back and forth between me and the engine room. . . . We don’t need business spread all over the boat, so you have to be discreet. . . . You get to see new places and so forth and so on.” The captain reared back so that his stomach protruded forward. He looked Keaton up one side and down the other. “And just so you know, I got no use for know-it-alls.”

“Yes, sir,” Keaton said.

“Let me know if you’re interested, or if you’re not, pass the word on. I got no use for lollygaggers.” Before the captain walked back to the boat with his knees turned out to the sides, he said, “You’d think there was a plague around here. I never seen such a racket made over a bad cold.”

When Samuel came out, Keaton gripped the side of the crate containing the supplies needed for their store and shuffled with the others who carried the crate to the wagon. Keaton gritted his teeth and stared at the colored boy who held the box on the opposite side.

On the ride home, he never mentioned meeting the steamboat captain to Samuel. He kept his eyes away from the gravediggers at the cemetery and wondered if his father had ended up doing that sort of work—steamboating, not gravedigging. Maybe Lanier was riding the boats up and down the river too. Maybe he had never left at all and was living on the boat, waiting for the right time to come back.

After they had returned to Dead Lakes and put the sacks of grain, cans of seasonings, and boxes of gauze masks on display in the store, Keaton walked toward the school that had been turned into a makeshift hospital. Easing around to the side where he had once smoked a cigar he had snuck out of the store with his friends, Keaton peeked in through the open window that had been cracked by a rock thrown by a girl who moved to town.

Inside the classroom the desks had been stacked in the back next to the coat closet. Cots lined the side of the wall nearest to the blackboard that still had the numbers that Miss Clarkson had written for their math quiz. The doctor who shuttled around the area counties tending to the sick was bent over from exhaustion as much as from bad posture. His thin white hair stood out from his head like he had been shocked. There was a shortage of doctors in the area. The younger, more adventurous, and some said more patriotic doctors had joined the war effort overseas and on military bases.

Miss Clarkson, Mrs. Pomeroy, and Ella circled around the cots, dabbing mouths that foamed with blood and saliva. Coughs from the patients jarred the opened windowpanes from where Keaton watched. The door to the school swung open, and Keaton saw Reverend Simpson straining to carry his wife, Myer, into the room. She was stretched out on a cot. It was the first time that Keaton saw the grayish-brown hair that up until then was always kept under a hat and tied up in a neat ball.

The sound of tapping and laughter caused him to move from the window and to the back of the school, where wildflowers grew. Next to the outhouse painted with a half-moon over its door sat five caskets stacked on top of one another. Macon and two of his friends, two fair-haired boys who belonged to the owner of a fish camp down the road, climbed up and down the caskets like they were stairs leading to a magical kingdom. The youngest boy stood on the highest one and smiled so wide that he showed two missing teeth. “Walk the plank,” Macon shouted and sliced the air with a stick as thick as a sword.

“What are you doing?” Keaton yelled as he ran toward them.

Macon was standing at the bottom casket, waiting his turn. He was wide-eyed and seemed intrigued rather than scared.

Before Keaton could reach them, the boy lost his balance. He landed against the casket and then fell like a domino down the rest of the stack. The top casket fell sideways to the ground. The swollen body of Grayson Marshall, the blacksmith, rolled out onto the grass.

Keaton slapped Macon across the back and shook the wonder out of his eyes. “We were just playing,” Macon kept crying. “We didn’t know.” Before Keaton could grab the Wakefield boys, they scattered, running back toward their home.

Four days later the younger of the two would be placed in a casket half the size of the one that he had pretended was a pirate’s plank.

In her dreams Ella would find herself standing in the middle of the classroom, surrounded by cots. They grew until they were stacked on top of each other like bunk beds. “Where’s the man?” a man with yellowed teeth would ask and reach up to Ella from his cot with bloodstained fingernails that were turning black at the tips. Turning in circles, Ella would call out for Lanier to come and save them. Every time she had this dream, she would see him standing outside the door next to the place where the undertaker stacked the caskets because room at the funeral home had become scarce. He would look at her with serenity that she thought no one was any longer capable of possessing. Pulling the gauze mask from her face to yell to him, Ella would only find another mask and then another. She would jolt awake clawing at her face until scratches lined her cheeks like acne on a teenage girl.

Before leaving the house to relieve Neva for the early-morning shift at the makeshift clinic, Ella opened the door and peeked at Macon, who was sleeping with his back to her. She counted the breaths that he took as his back rose and contracted. After the casket had overturned and the Wakefield boy had died, Ella quarantined Macon to his room. His constitution was weakened enough from respiratory ailments. But from the accounts of all the healthy who passed her way, the concern was unwarranted. She heard their speculations in clipped whispers. “You’re lucky you let that man stay with you,” Mr. Pomeroy finally said right to her face at the entrance of her store. “I just imagine he put a shield of protection around your place before he left. Maybe that’s why the rest of us who did him wrong are suffering,” Mr. Pomeroy said in a hiss. Ella ran her hand through her hair and could think of nothing to say. Watching Mr. Pomeroy walk across the road to his home, shuffling his bag of goods from one arm to the other, she started to call out to him but returned to her sweeping. Dust flew up from the porch steps. She only paused long enough to remind Samuel, who was now running the store, to put on a mask.

At the schoolhouse door, a nurse wearing a stained apron came out carrying a bedpan. Ella didn’t recoil the way she had when she first came to help. She stepped to the side, held her breath, and entered the place that was now haunting her nightly dreams.

Neva Clarkson wrung a hand towel in a tin dishpan filled with murky water. She placed it on the head of the beekeeper’s daughter. When Neva looked up at Ella, her eyes were cradled above dark purplish circles and her face was flushed. The gauze mask she wore was turned sideways.

“You need to go on and get some rest,” Ella said and then placed a mask over her own face.

“Bonaparte was here a moment ago,” Neva said.

The girl with the towel on her head coughed, and the others on the cots followed. Myer Simpson’s eyes turned red, the blood vessels bursting from the constant strain of coughing and gagging. The girl next to her called out for her father, but Neva and Ella paid her little attention. There were too many scattered about the room who were worse off, and fever caused most of them to hallucinate.

“It seems the doctor set off to Bay County without going to the salt mines like he told me he would,” Neva said.

“Are there many sick out at Bonaparte’s place?”

“His wife,” Neva whispered and pulled off the apron that, once pristine white, was now splotched in aged blood and gold-colored mucus.

“What about the daughter? What about Geneva?”

“Healthy as can be. Running and playing. What to make of it?” Neva gave Ella a knowing glance. Ella hoped that she would not mention Lanier and question whether or not his blessing rendered the girl immune.

“I’m going out there this afternoon,” Ella said.

“Ella, you can’t . . .” Neva’s words softened. She folded the apron and put it in the barrel with the rest of the dirty sheets and used masks that were burned every evening in a sand pit that had been dug behind the school. “You can’t be doing that.” She started to leave and then spun around. The bright sun streamed in from the tall windows and illuminated blue veins in Neva’s neck. “I’ll go with you,” Neva said.

By the time Myer Simpson left this world, her mouth gaped open like she had one last word to say. Lines of phlegm zigzagged the corners of her mouth like a perfectly shaped spiderweb. Ella tried not to stare, but she couldn’t help but wonder if the caked mucus on Myer’s lips trapped parting words asking forgiveness. Ella pondered whether she would have given it to her.

Before Myer’s body could be wrapped in a sheet and removed, Ella felt the start of a slight headache. “Just a bad case of nerves.” Neva repeated reassurances and fanned her fingers across her back. “Your head hurts, and my back is in knots. It’s nervous strain. How much can one person take, I ask you.” Neva turned to place a damp cloth on the forehead of the next patient, but Ella didn’t move away from the spot where Myer lay. She was paralyzed not by the tension that Neva reasoned, but by a dizziness that caused her ears to ring.

Ella didn’t mention anything the next day when stiffness settled in her neck. Going to bed that evening, she held on to the words spoken over her by Mr. Pomeroy and pictured a net, the type that kept mosquitoes away, hanging in all corners of her property and draping the top of her roof. When the sun rose and sunlight stretched like fingers across her bed, Ella tried to get up, but the chill of a fever kept her pinned down.

Outside Ella’s bedroom window, at the corner of the store, girls whose brother had just died skipped the new jump rope that their mother had bought them out of guilt for believing she never showed the son enough love. Their singsong chant tickled Ella’s ears and tormented her mind:

I had a little bird.

Its name was Enza.

I opened up the window, and in-flu-enza.