Carry the World

by Susan Fanetti

  Grace had been sharp as a honed blade, and sometimes she’d read to him from her little collection of books, but she’d never made him feel he was less because he couldn’t understand most of those symbols as words.

  “I don’t read,” he said again, “but I can tell you a story. That be alright?”

  Bluebird’s puffy eyes drooped as she nodded. She tucked her little bluebird under her chin and curled up to sleep.

  Jonah set his lips on her hot temple. “You be well, baby girl. You get well.”

  Jonah and Elijah stood and stared at the carnage inside the chicken coop, a mess of bloody feathers and bone. By the look of it, only two hens had survived, tucked deep in the rafters as if their fright had been so keen they’d remembered they had wings. He saw no sign of the rooster, either alive or dead. He dug around in his gut and tried to find any thread of hope. If the cock had survived, maybe the flock would, too.

  A fox had obviously got in and had himself a real feast. By the look of it, more than one. Maybe a whole pack.

  The attack would have made a huge commotion, and on a quiet night he’d likely have been able to save most of the flock, but they’d had a storm, the kind that happened when the tail end of winter lashed at the nose of oncoming spring, full of roar and flash. Jonah hadn’t heard anything but the weather.

  He had a good strong catch on the coop door, meant to be both storm and fox proof, but it hung loose at the edge of the door, as if it had never been engaged at all.

  Jonah looked down at his boy, whose face was warped with worry. His attention drew Elijah’s like a magnet, and the boy turned that fretful look up to him.

  Not yet nine years old, he was. His birthday was coming near Easter. A month or so from now, he thought. Easter was a moveable feast, so he couldn’t be sure.

  Jonah had followed the sun and the seasons as his only calendar for more than six years, but since two days before Christmas, he’d been trying to keep track. He couldn’t read, but he knew the calendar. He knew the days of the week and the months of the year, and he knew how many days in each month. He thought it was the beginning of March. The third of March, if his count was right. He’d considered asking the book woman to bring up a calendar sometime, but since Bluebird had taken ill, he now meant to drive her off for good the moment he saw her horse headed their way. He’d drive her away on the end of his rifle if he had to.

  “I locked it, Pa,” Elijah said, his voice aquiver. “I swear. I did it right.”

  Jonah believed him. Elijah was a dutiful, careful boy. And if he’d made a mistake, treating him harshly now wouldn’t undo it. Whether a mistake had been made, or the storm had simply undone the lock somehow with a freak twist of the wind, Elijah would feel the consequences. They all would.

  “Alright.” He set his hand on his son’s trembling shoulder. “S’alright, boy. But we gotta clean this up and see what’s left, and we gotta do the rest of our chores, and get back to your sister and take care of her. I need you to be strong and careful and quick as you can be, you hear?”

  “Yessir, Pa. I can do whatever you need me to do.”

  “We gotta get the mess cleaned up and cover the blood with sawdust and shavin’s ‘fore we let the goats out. Animals don’t like bloodscent, ‘less they’s hunters like foxes. I don’t want the ram going mad tryin’ to protect his pregnant ladies. Get the wheelbarrow, and fill it full from the woodshed. I’ll deal with the bodies.”

  “Can we ...” Elijah swallowed, then started again. “Can we eat ‘em, at least? What’s left, I mean?”

  The question made a little flash of pride in Jonah’s chest, and he smiled. “That’s smart thinkin’, makin’ somethin’ good outta bad, but no. They’s too tore up, and we don’t know what the foxes might had in ‘em. Germs and such. That’s why only some animals eat carrion. They got special stomachs can sort out the rot and sick from the good. Our stomachs ain’t like that.”

  “How we gonna get by without eggs, Pa?”

  “We got two hens, at least. They won’t lay for a bit, till they forget they was so scared, but they’ll lay again, give us a couple eggs a day, maybe. Until then, we’ll get by like we always do. Jus’ a little less variety in what we eat.” He thought about the biscuits he’d made up yesterday for supper, fluffy and rich—a family favorite. Those might be the last for a while. “Then in a few weeks, when spring’s full in, I’ll find somebody in Red Fern Holler who’ll trade for a few chicks, or a full-growed cock, if we need one, and we’ll rebuild the flock. We’ll make do, boy. We always do.”

  The book woman came, as usual, in the afternoon. All day long, Jonah had meant to tell the children that the woman couldn’t come in today, that Bluebird was too sick for visitors, and he’d never found the strength to do it. These days were their favorite days, and his little girl had perked up a little as the day went on. She wanted ‘Mizz Ada,’ wanted new stories, wanted the company of this woman who was, it pained Jonah to realize, the closest thing to a mother she’d ever had.

  She was not Bluebird’s mother, however, and she had made his little girl sick.

  Elijah sat at the window, on the lookout, since lunch. When he called out, “Here she comes!” Jonah still had not told them the book woman couldn’t come in.

  But he grabbed his jacket and did something he’d never done before. “Wait here,” he ordered his son, and he went out to meet the woman himself.

  She pulled up as he came toward her, and he saw wary surprise in furrows of her brow. “Mr. Walker, hello.”

  “You need to turn around, go back down, don’t come back. We don’t want you here no more.” He’d reached her horse, and he took hold of the reins near the bit and tried to turn the horse himself. Henrietta liked him fine, but she didn’t take orders from him, not when her rider was mounted on her. The mare dug her hooves in and tossed her head.

  “Excuse me?” the woman asked. “What happened? Is something wrong? Are Elijah and Bluebird alright?”

  “Bluebird’s ailin’. She’s real poorly with a fever, and you brought it to her.”

  Her hand went to her chest in that feminine show of shock that came to all women naturally. A leather riding glove, rough and sturdy as a man’s work glove, covered her hand, but he knew the slim, elegant fingers inside it, the way light freckles sprinkled over ivory skin.

  “Oh no. Oh, I’m so sorry. Yes, I did have a cold. I had to stay home a day with a fever. There’s something going around, a lot of people have been feeling low, but I didn’t know I was ill myself when I was last here. It’s not deadly, except for the weakest people, the old and infirm. It makes you feel slow and sore for a few days, but most people have gotten well.”

  “She never was sick a day till you brought sickness up here.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Walker. I don’t know what to say. There’s a tonic people are taking, to ease the symptoms. It helps. I have some with me. May I give some to Bluebird?”

  “Who give you the tonic?” In his mind, doctors and healers and witchy women were all alike, but he was curious nonetheless.

  “Doc Dollens. He has a practice in Barker’s Creek, where I live. He takes care of me and my parents, and all our neighbors.”

  Barker’s Creek was farther up the foothills than he’d thought she lived—far enough up that he’d actually heard of it and knew where it was. He’d been that far down himself, when he was younger. She truly was a mountain girl, no matter how she talked.

  “Doctors brought medicine when the sickness took the folk here in the holler. My ma and pa and sister, too. Didn’t help ‘em none. They all died anyway.”

  “You’re talking about the influenza outbreak, about ten years ago.”

  Jonah didn’t answer; he couldn’t remember if that was what it had been. His life had shrunk to a tiny point since then, and old memories languished in the shadows, but the word ‘influenza’ seemed familiar, and the time was right.

  She didn’t need him to speak to know his answer. “I’m sorry. That was very
bad, all through the county. My best girlfriend died then, too. There was no cure for it. What’s going around now isn’t nearly so bad.” She leaned back and dug in a leather pouch hanging from her saddlebag. When she sat straight again, she had a small, dark bottle in her hand. “This isn’t a cure, either, but it will help her sleep and make her feel more comfortable, so she can rest and let the cold run its course and leave her. Then she’ll be well.”

  Jonah stared. From the moment Bluebird had first shown illness, he’d decided to get rid of the book woman once and for all. Even as he’d been unable to tell his children in advance, he’d meant to send her away and figure out the explanation later. Now he had hold of her reins and had told her to go, but he couldn’t follow through.

  That bottle might make Bluebird feel better. The woman had brought the sickness, but she might also have brought wellness. And the children wanted her.

  “I can’t lose Bluebird.” He hadn’t meant to speak. He certainly hadn’t meant to say those words to this woman, in that tone, so full of fear and weakness.

  A spasm of emotion turned the compassion and concern she’d shown since he’d told her his little girl was sick into something like sorrow. She dismounted and landed on the ground right in front of him. Turning her head up to meet his gaze, she set her gloved hand on his chest. “You won’t, Mr. Walker. She will be well again. May I see her?”

  He’d meant to send her away. Instead, he nodded and walked with her toward the cabin, still leading her horse.

  Bluebird had been happier and more energetic from the moment the woman had walked into the front room. She’d sat right on the floor, keeping his daughter tucked snugly in her covers while she drew her close, and they’d read together for most of a book. Bluebird tried to read for a bit herself, but after a few pages, she lost the energy for it, and the woman held the book while Elijah read to his sister. Then she’d given Bluebird the tonic. His little girl had twisted her little face into a knot of disgust at the taste, but she’d taken it all at the woman’s sweet urging.

  Now she slept deeply, in calm repose, her breaths deep and slow, without the awful rasp she’d taken on in the past two days.

  The woman and Elijah sat side by side near her and talked about the book Elijah had chosen. They weren’t really reading, as far as Jonah could tell. Their talk was different, more like a conversation about what the book said. It was something about steam trains—how they worked, and how the rails were built. Didn’t seem like a storybook at all.

  In all the months of the book woman’s visits, Jonah had never spent so much time in the same room when she was with his children. She’d always made him uncomfortable, though the reasons had changed in some way he didn’t care to understand, so he’d always found work to do that kept him at a distance. Today, his worry for Bluebird had held him close. But he was still uncomfortable. Even more, in fact. He felt like an interloper in his own house.

  When he ran out of things to do in the front room, he sat at the table and simply watched the woman with his children. Bluebird slept comfortably for the first time in days, curled at the woman’s side. Elijah leaned against her as they studied that book. They spoke quietly together, making a cozy closed circle.

  She’d emptied her saddlebags when she’d come in, and made neat stacks of the books so Elijah could choose his next one and she could record as returned those the children had borrowed before. Jonah contemplated those stacks. Some of the books were small, hand-sized, and shaped like bricks. Others were more flat, though the covers were bigger. He knew that the brick-shaped ones were for grownups, without many pictures, and the bigger, flatter volumes were picture books for children. Every book looked like it had been read hundreds of times and didn’t have many more times left in it.

  There were also a few tattered magazines and some folded newspapers. And her ledger book, where she wrote in pretty, curlicue writing with an ink pen. Jonah guessed his children’s names were in that book, but he didn’t know the letters of that kind of writing, so he couldn’t recognize Elijah’s name, and he’d never seen Bluebird’s name in any kind of writing at all.

  But there were two other books that caught Jonah’s attention. They were bigger, with covers done in fabric. One had a binding of leather lacing, and a simple burlap cover, and the other had metal rings through it, with a flowered cover. Those, he couldn’t make sense of.

  He picked up the topmost one, with the leather lacing, and flipped open the burlap cover. A piece of white paper was pasted to the first page, with a lot of words, like the printing in books. He flipped to another page and found two pages of a book pasted there. For the next several pages of this strange book, another book’s pages were pasted there. And then a picture from a magazine, showing a smiling woman holding a tray of cookies. Under that picture were more words, and numbers, too. He thought it might be a recipe. Probably for the cookies.

  Every page had something pasted to it, either a page from something else, or an artfully cut picture, or something printed on white paper like the first page had been, or something written in the woman’s pretty writing. There was a smear of red on one page that Jonah first thought was blood, but it was another pasted-on picture of food with writing underneath. He didn’t know what kind of food it was, but there was red glop on the top of it, so he decided it was a recipe, too. He put his nose close and sniffed the smear. A faint hint of tomato.

  “It’s a scrapbook,” the book woman said, and Jonah sat back so hard the chair rocked. He looked around, and gathered his bearings, wondering how long he’d been studying the book. Bluebird slept quietly. Elijah sat near the fire, close to his sister, reading. The book woman stood so close to Jonah he could smell her. Under the scent of the fire she’d been sitting near, and the horse she’d been riding all day, there was something with flowers.

  “Huh?”

  She smiled. “That’s a scrapbook. All we librarians have been making them. Our books are being read so much they’re falling apart, and there’s no money to buy more, so we’re trying to make books of our own. We take pieces of books that have fallen apart, or old magazines we can’t circulate any longer, and save what we can by pasting them in books like this. Some of us write our own stories, or retell fairy tales and folk tales, and type them up, too. One of my colleagues is a lovely artist, and she illustrates her books. I’m not very good at drawing, but I try to find pretty pictures. We also add helpful things, like important news stories, or sewing patterns, and household hints, and recipes. That there,” she tapped the page with the red smear. “I cut that out of a magazine. It’s a recipe for spaghetti sauce.”

  “Spaghetti?” He’d never heard such a word. It felt alien in his mouth.

  She nodded. “Noodles. They come from Italy. The sauce is good, and not hard to make, and you don’t need spaghetti noodles to do it. If you’ve got canned tomatoes, it’s easy. I’ve made it and put it on chicken. It’s delicious.”

  Jonah thought of the dead chickens he’d spent his morning cleaning up and disposing of. He’d found most of the rooster some distance from the coop. The old boy had put up a fight.

  They didn’t eat chicken here, unless a hen stopped laying. He couldn’t afford to keep a meat flock. He hunted for their meat. “How ‘bout grouse? Would it work on grouse?”

  “I’m sure it would. Would you like to borrow this book?”

  He stared at the page, the tiny black symbols that meant so much to others and nothing at all to him. He closed the book. “Nah.”

  The woman surprised him by pulling out a chair and sitting at the table with him. “I can teach you to read, too, Mr. Walker.”

  A refusal leapt immediately to his tongue, but it got stuck there. Jonah sat in place, his jaw locked on the word no, and considered the woman before him. With her hat, scarf, gloves, and coat off, and the cardigan sweater she wore beneath it as well, she looked like the small, pretty young woman she was. Not even her mannish clothes, the plaid shirt and the heavy trousers, could camouflage her f
emininity.

  Slim shoulders and a long neck. Pale skin, dusted everywhere with faint freckles. Soft, small mouth, the bottom lip fuller than the top, like a pout. Big green eyes, warm with kindness and compassion. Her red hair was in its usual braid, loosened by the hat and the wind and a long day so that its natural wave puffed lightly around her head. The firelight behind her made it glint and shimmer like a halo.

  Bluebird thought she was an angel. Right now she looked like one. So beautiful and sweet.

  As Jonah comprehended where his thoughts had taken him, and what feelings those thoughts had enlivened, shame crashed down on him with the buffeting force of a thunderclap.

  The word he’d needed to say finally came free. “No.” He shoved the book away and stood. “Time for you to pack up.”

  He’d hurt her again with his brusqueness. Her warmth cooled, and she began to gather her things without another word to him. When she had her books and papers packed up in her bags again, and she’d said goodbye to Elijah, she came back and set the medicine bottle on the table. “Give Bluebird a spoonful when her cough or her fever is bad. It’ll ease her pains and help her rest. But no more than one spoonful, nor more than twice a day. Too much could make her sleep so deeply she forgets to wake up.”

  “Don’t you need it?”

  “I’m well again. But should I need more, I can get more from the doctor.”

  Jonah couldn’t bring himself to thank her, but he wrapped his hand around the bottle and managed a nod.

  He let her go to her horse on her own, her heavy saddlebags slung over her shoulder. When she stepped through the front door, bundled up again against the last of the winter cold, she turned back. “Am I still welcome here?”

  A beat or two passed before he could make himself answer. “For the children.”

  His children needed her. But there was nothing in himself that needed her. Not her.