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 with their wives or sons or daughters, then took a few notes before carrying the bodies inside. I couldn’t see where they went, but they always came back out a few minutes later and shut the door behind them.
Annie lay somewhere inside that building.
* * *
After a number of silent meals with my father and a number of nights when I cried into my pillow because I didn’t want Dad to hear, I took a walk along the creek behind the house. Driven by a gusting wind, the trees edging the creek—aspens and birches for the most part—unleashed showers of butter-yellow leaves that settled about my feet. I kicked my way through them, every bit as adrift as the cascading leaves.
October is my favorite month these days, a last glorious moment, so intense as to be almost defiant, before the time of endurance. But on that day, I was unaware of my surroundings, my thoughts all turned inside as I wrestled with matters beyond naming. I prayed in a vain attempt to balance fear with hope. The town lay to my right, its yards and buildings as familiar as the fields off to my left. I watched a doe come out of the tree line marking a faraway ridge, her two fawns trailing behind. Unconcerned with my troubles, they began to feed on shoots of alfalfa newly emerged after the last haying.
I followed the creek, walking against the current, to the back of the school where I happened on Joseph Anderson. Joe was the older brother of Maxim Anderson, one of my playmates at the time. His family owned a dairy farm a few miles to the north.
“My pa’s dead,” Joe told me when I squatted down beside him. He was sitting on a rock, tapping the water with a stick over and over again.
“Annie’s dead, too,” I replied.
Joe answered matter-of-factly and without looking up. “Annie was in my class. I went to school with her. She was real nice.”
A minute passed before I spoke again. “My momma’s sick. She’s in the hospital. My dad’s takin’ care of her.” I hesitated, then said, “Dad’s already had the flu.”
Joe simply nodded, unconcerned. “I got to do the work now,” he said. “I got to get the farm ready for winter.”
Joe had cited an unwritten law in Minnesota farm country. People didn’t live as long as they do now, and there were accidents aplenty that left men disabled. The oldest boy in the family was expected to take on the burden if at all possible. Farm work never stops, not even for tragedy. A cow’s milk continues to flow. Horses can’t feed themselves. Wood for the long, cold winter doesn’t chop itself. The obligations of a farmer’s children, to the family and the land, are never-ending, and it comes as no surprise many of them fled to big-city factories as soon as they were old enough. The labor in the factories was long and hard, but it did have an end. Farmers don’t rest on the seventh day, or any other day.
“I’d visit Momma,” I said, “but I’m not allowed.” At that moment, of course, I only had room for my personal suffering.
“You could go.”
“How?”
“Just go.”
“Won’t they stop me?”
“There ain’t no they, Lucas. I went to the hospital every day before Pa died. There ain’t but a few people takin’ care of all those patients. They’re too busy to bother with some kid lookin’ for his ma. Just put on a mask—everybody wears a mask—and nobody will pay you the slightest attention.”
He stood up and looked off to the north, at a flock of crows flying over a field. They called to each other, as crows always call to each other, before dropping into a harvested wheat field.
“I got to go. I got to be a man now.” He took a step, then turned to face me, though his eyes seemed to look backward into his own mind. “When the feet turn black, Lucas. That’s when you know they’re gonna die.”
Joe was thirteen years old. I watched him march off, his steady pace unhurried, while I processed the message. See, it was my dad who banned me from the hospital. At my age, I just assumed there’d be some authority to back him up, like Mr. Vernon, who stood in the doorway as we entered school. Joe was telling me that the world had changed in a way I hadn’t thought about.
I went straight home afterward, following the creek to the edge of our property, then crossing the lawn to a shed. In fact, like Joe, I had new shoes to fill. We’d been fattening a piglet bought that spring, as we did every year, and it was now an aggressive pig that weighed over a hundred pounds. Whereas before I’d been instructed to stay clear, now I was to feed the pig by tossing its feed over the fence. The grunting pig banged his snout into the wooden slats as I approached, bucket in hand, like it would just as soon feed on me as on the dinner I carried.