Mary Pearl sent them five small drawings she had done with pencil and paper. One of them she figured was her best shot, though it was on lined letter paper turned sideways. To me, any big fancy college wouldn’t give her a second thought for sending something like that but I didn’t know if I should say that or keep quiet. I told her to ask April for a nice piece of paper, and then just take some time and draw it over again. So she spent a couple of hours, pronounced it not as good as the first one, but enclosed them both, so the teachers can choose whichever one they like.
Well, after the littlest children had been sick a week, they were starting to be well enough to be restless in bed, and we had a time corralling them. Just when it seemed the rest of us would miss the beating that half the family was getting by the illness, though, April woke one morning in a terrible state with fever. I was plenty worried about her, for I had been sick once with fever and it cost me a babe. I sat by her putting cooling compresses on her most of the morning. I felt ragged myself, but not sick, just tired, and so there was only Mary Pearl, Lizzie, and myself tending things, until that afternoon Lizzie took to her bed. Morris put on a robe and tried to help, and we made soup and boiled sheets from morning to night while he kept the children still.
By the next day, though, I reckoned I had done too much lifting, as my arms ached deep inside the bones, my head shook with misery, causing my teeth to rattle, and after fixing breakfast for those that could eat, I could barely lift a single spoon to wash it. Mary Pearl told me to go upstairs and lie down, and that she was going to send for help from the doctor who’d penned us up. I don’t know how the girl did it, but I do know that before long I heard strange voices and footsteps, and I was ordered to stay in bed by a woman in a dark blue uniform.
I could hardly argue with her. My throat burned day and night like I’d swallowed a branding iron. Every hair on my head throbbed, my eyes felt glued shut, my feet shivered and no blankets could keep me warm. In between fretting over April being tended so she’d keep her unborn child, I sank into the sickness for I don’t know how long. I had fierce dreams of being trampled by horses, having birds pick at my skin while carrying April’s unborn baby in my arms, trying to run to save it, and not able to move because my feet were clamped in leg-hold animal traps. I knew these night visions were from the bone aches of sickness, but I’d awaken feeling tortured and afraid to sleep, then immediately fall asleep and eventually drift into some other terrible nightmare. It seemed days passed, while I struggled to breathe, asking the faceless forms that passed me if others were well, but receiving no answers, and sleeping first in shallow spells and then frighteningly deep periods, as if my bed were half a step from my grave.
January 17, 1907
Seems waking from the depths of the influenza meant coughing my lights out. I couldn’t remember being so aggravated by coughing since I was little, and though the fever was gone along with the aches and stomach disorder, the need to stay absolutely still to avoid coughing kept me in bed. I tried to get information on the health of the rest of the family from the doctor and the nurse that stopped in the room, but when they said anything, it was only a few vague words clouded with sanctimony.
At last, I awakened and decided to get out of bed, driven by hunger and an empty water glass which had mercifully remained clean and filled for no telling how many days. I knew it was daylight outside, but I had slept long after dawn, and dreamed of someone calling me with a voice that echoed from a long way off. I rose and dressed myself, putting on two pairs of stockings without shoes, which seemed too much effort to bear.
As I ventured into the hallway, the house itself seemed to sigh. I tiptoed from door to door finding no one. By the head of the stairway I heard children’s voices quietly whining and someone hushing them. At the fourth step I had to stop for a coughing jag, then I headed on toward the voices. They had come from the parlor, and I made my way there, growing more troubled about the curtained windows, the fearful, unnatural silence in a house I thought was sheltering eight people.
I found Morris sitting with Vallary, Patricia, and Lorelei all in his lap. He wore a dark blue coat like I’ve seen in store windows downtown, the kind for “gentlemen of leisure” which I always thought meant rich and lazy. Apparently even a working man like Morris might own a sort of coat to wear indoors rather than putting on a shirt and collar. The children seemed happy enough, not crying or anything, although instead of April, a nurse in a uniform was standing over the trio of babes with a large spoon and a brown bottle. Morris was trying to cajole the children into taking the medicine by promising them favors and candy. He smiled when he saw me.
“Oh, Mama Elliot, you are up! What happy news. See, children, I told you we will all be well soon enough.” Then, with the same smile on his face, which I saw in a moment was only for the children’s peace of mind, he said, “The last and healthiest young person in this house has now been taken by the mean old influenza. They’ve set up temporary nursing in the dining room.” His face grew darkly serious and his eyes bored into mine. “If you have the strength, I’m sure Miss Mary Pearl would love to see you. She is in there.”
Dining room? What in heaven’s name was the girl doing tending someone in the dining room? Was it April? I felt the floor sway under my feet, and held on to a nearby table for strength. I didn’t ask what he meant, but immediately went to the dining room where instead of a table, a bed had been set. Thick as a fringe, a line of people surrounded it, all softly murmuring. I searched for Mary Pearl amongst the crowd, and was surprised to see Savannah, Albert, and even Aubrey Hanna and April standing in the circle of nurses and doctors.
“Savannah?” I said. “What’s happened?”
She turned and flew to my side. “Sarah, you shouldn’t be out of bed. I told them not to wake you, but Albert said she’d want to see you. Sit down here.” Albert fetched a chair and no one had to tell me again to take it, as I was purely worn out, traveling this far from my own sickbed.
“Savannah, Albert,” I said, surprised at the raspy sound of my own voice, “you and Aubrey shouldn’t be here. You’ll catch this awful sickness. Where is Mary Pearl?”
One of the doctors came and whispered with that soft, serious tone that never brings anything pleasant, “Mrs. Elliot, you may see her briefly, but it will be to her own good for the girl not to know of the gravity of her illness. We believe her passing to be imminent. Her parents have been summoned despite the quarantine.”
The bed was a pretty, four-poster arrangement with a feather bed a foot thick, quilts and lacy counterpanes piled high upon it. From that great mound of bedding a tiny head poked, resting small and dark on a pale calico pillow. It took me a moment to recognize Mary Pearl, so shrunken and drawn and pale her face had become. Her breath came slow and shallow, rattling and raspy, and each one seemed to be an effort that took her whole frame to make. She grimaced and struggled for air as if the blankets were strangling her. She couldn’t open her eyes when I spoke her name, but reached a hand from under the covers, and I took it immediately. There was no strength in her at all, and while I couldn’t believe what the doctor had said, I saw that the fight had gone out of her.
I leaned toward her and softly said, “Mary Pearl, there’s work to be done. Have you saddled up your horse?” Behind me, Aubrey gasped, and Savannah sniffed and gave a slight moan.
Mary Pearl’s face moved into a tiny smile, and she opened her eyes. Her eyes had taken that dark look of a newborn babe’s, no color and no inner circle of black. They say a dying person is so close to heaven’s gate they see again the world of angels that they saw shortly after they were born.
Savannah had retreated from the bedside and now was leaning against the wall, sobbing into her handkerchief without a sound, her shoulders shaking hard, her face red and tears soaking the blouse she wore. As I watched, poor Savannah sank to the floor and clasped her hands. Her prayers made a sort of soft music in the room, as her voice was so faint it seemed to come from some distant place
and drift around in the pall of sadness that hovered over us.
I had watched too many people die. I’ve seen it from every way there is, I reckon. It filled me with such shock and anger that old Death was now hovering at the arm of Mary Pearl. She closed her eyes, and I pressed the back of my hand against her glowing, fevered brow.
I turned to Albert and said, “Has there been any mail?”
He looked at me with a hurt expression. Silently, he shook his head, and turned back to his daughter.
I went fast as my shaking legs would carry me to Morris, where the children had obviously all gotten their dose and were eating licorice candy. They smiled with blackened lips, but I had no time to laugh. “Morris? Morris! Is there mail? Have you gotten any letters or notices or packages, anything at all, for Mary Pearl?”
“Surely she’s too ill to sit up and read.”
“Grandma, Grandma, watch me, I can write my own name,” Patricia said, pulling at my skirt. “I learnt while I was in sickbed.”
“But Morris, is there something for her?”
“Yes, on the receiving table by the front door.”
I hurried to the place, with Patricia tailing, saying again and again, “Grandma, watch me write my name.” There at the table, I found a note addressed to Mary Pearl. Feeling a taint of guilt, but a bigger dose of desperation, I carefully opened the paper, trying to wish the best news from it before I read it. “Grandma, come watch me,” Patricia said again. “Please?”
The note was nothing but some invitation from a friend of hers to a tea party. Nothing. I wanted to be the one to carry her the message of her longed-for schooling.
“Patricia.” I turned and lifted her in my arms, saying, “I’m very proud of you, Patty-cakes. You show me after I get done visiting your cousin.”
“She’s sick, Papa told me. We have to be very quiet.”
“Scoot along now, and find yourself a pencil while I take this letter to her. It might make her feel better.”
“I know! I’ll write my name for her. I can’t wait for her to get well and see it.”
As I returned to Mary Pearl’s bedside, the doctors and nurses retreated to another room, quietly conversing with Albert and Savannah. Aubrey was there, holding her hand, gently pressing it to his cheek. He stood and sighed, resting both his hands against his eyes.
“I’ll watch for a while,” I said. When he went to the corner and sat, I leaned in over her face. In a tone I used to tease her with when she was small, I said, “Mistress Mary P? Open your eyes, Miss Mary-Quite-Contrary. Your friend Monty Hershey wants to have a tea party and sent you a note. She’s having six girls from town in for a tea party next week. You’ll need a new dress, won’t you? That’ll make you look so smart. How about a modern skirt, with those plackets on the side?” Then I leaned down close to her ear, and whispered, “Don’t you slip out of here without getting your chance at school. You know you’ve got to try it, if you were willing to disobey your mama just to go.”
There was a glimmer of sadness in her expression though her eyes remained shut, and she said, “That’s why … being punished … wickedness.”
I felt as if I knew Mary Pearl as well as I knew any human being. If there was anything honest in me at all, I’d swear on the Good Book that Mary Pearl had less wickedness in her than anybody I could name. She was clever and headstrong, but being full of vinegar and spunk was never what I’d call a bad trait, when a person had their head stuck on right and their heart squared up even all around.
“Now don’t go putting that rope around it,” I said. “You aren’t wicked and this isn’t punishment. This is just illness and it comes to man and beast alike. Judgment doesn’t come this way, except in silly novels. You aren’t going to perdition on account of a wish for a grander future than what you can see before you. I’ve been wishing it all my life, and looking forward is how you keep on moving in this world. If you stopped wondering what was around the bend, why you’d just have to go sit in a rocking chair and wait for the end of your days. You think Mr. Thomas Edison is going to damnation because he wanted to read his newspaper in the evening without smelling kerosene and wondered how to make a light? Wondering is no sin. It isn’t. I know it.”
“I’m going to die,” she said. “That’s why they’re all here. That’s why they’re shouting at me.”
For a moment I wondered if she did see angels because no one in this house was shouting, but then I reckoned it seemed overloud to her, being so sick. I lowered my voice and said, “I’ll tell them to talk softer. Shall I read something to you?”
“No, that’s all right. Mama’s been reading Psalms until I dream about turning into a deer and tightrope walking across … I wish it would rain.”
“I’m praying for rain, right now, honey.”
Mary Pearl nodded and slept. For three more hours, we took turns at the chair by her side, and she stayed deep in that sleep. I should have been on my knees praying for her. Instead, I thought about rain. Prayed for rain, wished for rain. Anything, so as not to think of her dying.
Late that afternoon, the doctor arrived again and brought a new tonic. They dosed Mary Pearl with brown syrup, and she seemed revived for about an hour, and ate soup, then sank back on the bed and slept as I must have done, feeling so close to the edge that my own breath echoed from beside my grave.
There was no sunset. Clouds that had been hovering like white swans here and there spread and thickened, grew dense and low, and a heavy rain began. It beat against the windows in the dining-room-turned-hospital. It drummed the porch roof and the gutters started funneling it to the numerous barrels at the corners of the house. The evening closed in, April and Lizzie came with lamps lit, and the night seemed for all the world like the dreary type that accompanied folks’ dying in books that I’ve read. But it’s been my true experience that folks die on any given day, sun or cloud, heat or cool. Besides, every last drop of rain that falls in the Territory of Arizona is the answer to a hundred prayers, no matter what time of year, no matter if houses washed away. Someone, somewhere, was always hurting for rain. To me, rain was not a message of gloom or despair but of bright hope. Life.
I felt almost cheerful when we went to a quiet supper of our own soup and hot biscuits. Then I went with Savannah to watch at Mary Pearl’s bedside, and again we gave her some tonic and again she revived for an hour, even talked with us, then slept. I wondered if I should tell Savannah about Mary Pearl’s letter to the school. Maybe together we would contrive to tell Mary Pearl she’d been received and was pledged to go, and that would cheer her enough to bring her back to us. We’d have to admit when she was well that it was a lie, and I’m sure Savannah would perish herself rather than do that. Savannah certainly wouldn’t propose that I lie to her daughter. But if the promise of some future could bring my youngest girl back from death’s dark portal, I’m sure I would welcome it. I couldn’t decide what to do, and because I couldn’t decide and felt so drawn myself, we listened to the rain at Mary Pearl’s bedside without speaking.
Years have passed and times have changed so much since Savannah and I were girls, when all a girl needed besides being able to shoot straight and ride hard was to sign her name and do sums. By nine o’clock, I’d begun to feel as if I had walked a thousand miles, and Savannah said I looked so faint she feared for my life and to go to bed at once, so I kissed Mary Pearl’s face and took myself to the stairway toward my own bed. “Call me, if,” I said, and she nodded.
January 19, 1907
If there was ever a time when I thought I might have seen a ghost it was in the small hours of this morning. I awoke to find Mary Pearl, pale and shivering, dressed in a white wrapper, patting my arm. “What is it?” I asked, half terrified that an eery moan would be the reply.
In a weak voice, Mary Pearl whispered, “I don’t think I want to get married, even though I let Aubrey kiss me. Mama’d never forgive me if she knew I kissed a man. If I don’t marry him, it’s better to go away to school, isn’t it? To le
t her simmer down a while?”
I sat up. “Honey, let’s talk about this in the morning. You have a fever. Your mind is playing tricks on you.”
“I just can’t stand the thought of having a baby. Is that so wrong? Aren’t betrothed girls supposed to want to have babies?” She sat on the edge of my bed.
“Did you climb all those stairs just to ask me this?” I wrapped my coverlet around her trembling shoulders.
“Aubrey’s real handsome and all. But he asked me if I wanted to have a family, and—promise you won’t tell? I told him I did, but I’m so afraid of it.”
“No need to worry about those things now.”
“I can’t wait until morning. Mama will be up. You know I can’t talk to her about this. She won’t listen. If they don’t let me in that school, I’ll have to marry him. I’m a coward.”
I’d kissed Aubrey’s father. Did I have to marry him? I patted her hands. “Babies,” I whispered, “and the getting of them, are a different matter altogether. You aren’t being a coward. But, I reckon if you aren’t looking forward to nursing and diapering and three-day crying jags, you oughtn’t to marry yet. You might feel different after a year or two. No harm in that. Even if you don’t go to school, you can let off courting with Aubrey for now. I kept Jack Elliot waiting nearly five years. If they’re worth having, they’ll keep. As for your mama, tell your papa first. Let him break the news. Ready to go back to bed?”
“Yes’m.” She pulled the coverlet around her and stood.
We tiptoed down the stairs and I tucked her in. “Want some sugar water?” I asked.
The Star Garden Page 15
