Christy

by Catherine Marshall

  When I returned to the bedroom, Lundy was as feverish as ever, tossing from side to side, thirsty again. I offered water, but he would not take much, so I went back to the kitchen thinking I would try lemonade. But I had forgotten for a moment that I was not at home. Of course there were no lemons here; exotic fruit like that was a luxury item in the mountains. I settled for some cold buttermilk, and sitting by Lundy’s bed, fed it to him spoonful by spoonful.

  The boy’s beard was growing out black. I must ask David to shave him. The slits of eyes looked at me unblinkingly. Once recognition flared in them. “Teacher,” he whimpered like a hurt animal, “Teacher, I be a-hurtin’ . . . Sick . . . Sick . . . Paw, where’s Paw . . . ? Teacher . . .” Each word trailed off. He pawed the air with his hands, and I saw that the palms were yellow and perspiring.

  He fell asleep then, though his legs still moved restlessly.

  Grateful for a respite, I lay down on the cot and pulled a quilt over me. But a peculiar dead-mouse odor was in the room. Now I knew! It was the odor of typhoid. Having once smelled it, how could anyone ever forget it! I turned on my side and burrowed my face in the quilt, trying to shut it out.

  The night seemed interminable. After a while, I lost track of how many times I was up and down, numbed into moving mechanically, doing whatever had to be done. Miss Ida’s clock in the kitchen ticked away, yet somehow the hands scarcely moved, creeping so slowly that half the time they appeared to be standing still.

  Sometime toward dawn it began to drizzle, the rain beating a gentle tattoo on the tin roof. The rhythm of it lulled both Lundy and me to sleep.

  I was awakened by the sound of a knocking—different from the patter of the rain. I sat up, listening, at first unable to locate the sound. Then I realized that it was coming from the back door. I lay there drowsily, hoping that since it was near her getting-up time anyway, Miss Ida would hear it. But she did not because her bedroom was at the front of the house. The tapping came again and again. Whoever it was, was knocking so softly—so hesitantly, and yet would not give up.

  At last I dragged my sluggish body off the cot and down the stairs once more. At the back door I turned the key, slid the bolt, and cautiously opened the door partway to have a look. In my groggy state it took me a moment to comprehend what I was seeing.

  I drew back, startled. It was Bird’s-Eye Taylor standing there in the rain.

  I come back,” Bird’s-Eye told us when the household had assembled for breakfast, “because I heered ’bout Lundy. Plumb tuckered out heelin’ it too. Ain’t got no stummick left for hidin’ out or being spied on. If’n we could make fair weather betwixt us—”

  Miss Ida’s response to this overture was closer to foul weather than to fair. “Mercy sakes alive,” she grumbled behind the closed door of her kitchen, “that Bird’s-Eye—creeping back here, pestering us, acting like butter would melt in his mouth. Why, if that man kissed the Bible right in front of my face, I still wouldn’t trust him. And as for dishing up any cooking of mine for that one, I’ll be blessed if I’m going to. There now! I’ve said it.” And she pursed her lips and stalked out the back door to hang up some clothes.

  David was only slightly less suspicious. “I don’t know what he’s up to,” he confided to me, “but I know Bird’s-Eye. He’s got a heart as tough as seasoned hickory. The contrite act doesn’t fool me: these mountain men just don’t eat humble pie like that.”

  Miss Alice stayed around the mission house almost continuously the first day Bird’s-Eye was back, and I noticed that she was studying him closely. She made no comments on Miss Ida’s or David’s reactions; she was also there to see the reunion between Lundy and his father. It was pathetically typical.

  “Is he took bad?” Bird’s-Eye asked at the door of the sickroom. We did not need to reply; his first look at Lundy told him. Yet he had no idea how to express his concern for his son except with the usual gruff insult: “Are ye bein’ as leather-headed as ever with these folks?”

  With heavy lids drooping over the slits of his eyes, Lundy blinked at his father in surprise and delight.

  “Why, ye’re a-grinnin’ like a possum! Made tracks to git here, son. Ought to box yer jaws jest so ye’ll know hit’s me.” Then, ill-at-ease, he backed out of the room, twisting his grimy black felt hat between his hands.

  In the hallway he appealed, “With Lundy fast to his bed like that, I’d like to stay and help for a span.”

  It was Miss Alice who answered. “Bird’s-Eye, we appreciate your offer. We could use some help. But I must tell you this. We can’t harbor you here to hide you from the law.”

  “I knowed that when I snuck back.”

  She looked at him closely. “You’re willing to have us contact the officers? They still want you for Tom’s murder, you know. You would stand trial?”

  He looked at the floor, then into her eyes. “I’ve mom-micked things up good. Ain’t no use a-runnin’. ”

  To our surprise, Bird’s-Eye followed his words with deeds. Without complaint, he helped with the menial chores: taking the ashes out of the kitchen range; chopping and carrying in firewood; emptying chamber pots; bringing water from the spring to boil for drinking water and to Lundy’s room for bathing; boiling the boy’s bed linens in a black pot in the yard and then scrubbing them in lye soap; and that task that David found most repugnant of all, burying the patient’s body wastes with lye in a trench four feet deep.

  Although David was glad for the help, he appeared to find this new Bird’s-Eye harder to bear than the old one. At least he had understood the old Bird’s-Eye and had felt justified in a kind of righteous indignation against him and all he represented.

  One morning as I was sitting on the front steps to rest my feet and enjoy the mountain air, I heard David remonstrating with Dr. MacNeill. “Who does he think he is, putting on this big act? Why should we be taken in by a murderer? Or his no-good son! It kills me to see all the women nursing Lundy. Even Opal McHone’s been coming to help.” The voice coming through the open window from the parlor was rising with emotion. “You’d think he was the Prince of Wales! Lots of other people are down with typhoid in this Cove and none of them are getting bathed three times a day and fed every thirty minutes. And Lundy Taylor of all people!”

  There was a long silence. Then the doctor’s voice: “I understand how you feel, David. But when I was about to begin practicing medicine, I took an oath. The Hippocratic oath. I can’t forget it. Therefore I have to do my utmost to save lives, any life, all lives. So—” There was a pause, then the voice went on “—we do the best we can for Lundy. Unfortunately, we can’t nurse them all. Three more deaths this week.”

  David must have swallowed his protest. The voices ceased.

  Indeed, before the weekend was over there were so many new cases of typhoid that we had no choice but to cancel the opening of school and hope that it was merely a postponement. Every one of us was needed now for nursing or to prepare food or carry it to the sick. By the end of that week a total of fifty-four cases had been reported.

  I would not have believed that the base of our lives could change so quickly, but then neither had I known before what the dread word “epidemic” stood for: scarcely a family left untouched by the disease, sometimes with no one left to cook or care for them; a soup kitchen set up at Miss Alice’s with every man who owned a horse or mule pressed into service to carry pails of soup to this cabin and that; the bone weariness of never getting a full night’s sleep and the raw nerves and the snappish tempers that followed; the interminability of the nursing with the soles of one’s feet sore from standing and walking and running; above all, living with so many unknowns in connection with the disease: What caused it? . . . What was spreading it? . . . How to protect ourselves? . . . Always with the specter of fear hovering over us, forever wondering where the pestilence would strike next.

  In one week Dr. MacNeill brought in on his saddle hump the pathetic surviving children of a mother who had died two days after her husband i
n a cabin in Raven Gap: first little Eli McDade and his older brother, Holland, and then three days later ten-year-old Nora.

  In the midst of circumstances like these, viewpoints and values were shifting too. For example, one of the peculiar by-products of the epidemic was that every blockading still began producing to full capacity and many new ones were set up. The mountain people had the fixed idea that homebrewed liquor killed the germs, that to drink some liquor each day kept up strength, and that no herbs or medicine could be taken without it. We all realized what was going on, and to David it was one more frustration to bear.

  Perhaps the most amazing shift of all was that everywhere in the Cove, folks who had seemed lackadaisical and without incentive rose under the crisis to almost unbelievable heights of performance. Whenever I could pause long enough to think about it, I found myself wondering wistfully what had been the missing factor in the mission’s presentation of religion in ordinary times that the motivation of disaster now provided. Was not our faith meant to build a fire under people, to provide an equal incentive for the rooting out of apathy and evil and unforgiveness, and to help us get on with the job of becoming the kind of people and the kind of community Cutter Gap was surely meant to be? Did people always have to wait for pestilence or war or tragedy to be shocked into forgetting about themselves?

  Of course, chief among those for whom the typhoid plague called out epics of selflessness were Miss Alice and Dr. MacNeill. They seemed to be everywhere—doctoring, nursing, comforting, cheering, ministering. But I saw surprising tensile strength in Miss Ida too. The more pressured things became, the more the complaints and dark looks fell away and in their place stood a determined, cheerful presence.

  David too was doggedly giving his all, only not—I noticed when I began to watch for it—with the invalids themselves. It became apparent that he disliked being with anyone infirm or crippled or sickly. Bedside scenes made him so uneasy that he would go to almost any length to avoid them. Perhaps, I thought, it was because David had always been such a vigorous and robust man that he had no basis at all on which to understand the plight of the sick. So he stayed on the road almost ceaselessly, carrying soup or fetching medicines and food back from El Pano or off the train at the Fairview Flats flagstop, usually accompanied by Isaak McHone, who reveled in being David’s chief helper. The new telephone saved many a mile’s travel since we could ring up El Pano and have necessary supplies brought in by train.

  As the situation worsened, it got so that I hated to see David and Isaak come in the front door since then we would hear about the latest case or yet another death. It was a black day when they reported that Zady Spencer had a fever and rose spots on her body.

  “David,” I asked, “don’t you think you should go up the mountain and bring her here before she’s too sick to be moved?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Christy, you can’t take on any more.”

  “But Clara won’t know how to take care of Zady. She’s just a child herself. You know how important good nursing is in typhoid. Life or death—that’s all.”

  David did not seem to be listening to me. He had a letter in his hand which he was folding and unfolding.

  “Christy, I’ve been bothered by something for days now. You need to get out of here, to get back home. This is no place for you now.”

  “David, I’m talking about Zady Spencer!”

  “But I want to talk about you. You’re in danger.”

  “No more danger than you or anybody else.”

  “Yes, you are. You’re pushing yourself too hard. Besides, young females your age are more susceptible than anybody.”

  “Who says so?”

  “Neil.”

  “Do you mean to stand there and tell me that I should run away? That I shouldn’t think about anything or anybody but my own skin?”

  “I wouldn’t put it like that.”

  “Well, I would, and I just can’t do it.”

  David suddenly looked so frustrated and tired that I felt a pang of guilt. “You see, David, it’s just that when I volunteered to come to the mountains, I thought it was from really lofty motives—because I loved people and wanted to help them. But now I know that wasn’t the reason at all. I came for me. So—well, I can’t turn around and leave now for the same reason.”

  A long silence fell between us. Finally, David said carefully, “There’s another reason why I had to bring this up.”

  I waited.

  “Your parents are frantic with worry about you. I had a letter from them.”

  “So that’s it! What did the letter say, for you to ‘use your influence’?”

  “Something like that.”

  “That’s like Dad . . . ‘My girlie—take care of my girlie.’ I guess if I were in their place, I’d be worried too. I love them and I understand how they feel, but David, there comes a time when you have to do what you feel is right. And right now I owe it to Fairlight to take care of her child.”

  We stared at each other. We’re too tired to be arguing like this. When we’re this exhausted, quarreling is so easy . . . So I said nothing more.

  “Do what you want to do then,” he shrugged—and left.

  At first Dr. MacNeill gave us a ringing “No,” saying that whenever ­possible it was preferable not to move a typhoid patient. Then he weighed the danger of this against the superior nursing Zady would get at the mission house, and finally decided to wrap her up and bring her himself. I knew that he and David had agreed between themselves that I would expend more energy riding back and forth to the Spencer cabin than in nursing Zady close by.

  With her coming, our big back room began to look like a small hospital ward. Sheets were hung to divide one patient’s bed from another’s. And everywhere in the house there were the strong odors of carbolic acid and alcohol and the semi-cadaverous taint of typhoid.

  By the third week, Lundy’s temperature was dropping toward normal and his appetite had returned. In fact, he was ravenous all the time.

  Once again, Dr. MacNeill gathered all of us into the parlor—including Isaak and Bird’s-Eye—this time to talk about how to handle typhoid convalescents. “Lundy’s lost sixteen pounds,” he began, “so naturally his body craves food. But this is the trickiest stage of all. Typhoid’s one disease you can never relax over. Even when the fever’s gone and the patient’s up and about, there’s still grave danger.” He lit his pipe, then hunched forward.

  “Let me explain it this way,” he continued. “The walls of the intestinal tract of a typhoid patient are thin, with sloughs or what you would call ulcers. If the patient eats bulky or solid foods too soon, they can perforate the intestinal wall, sometimes with hemorrhaging—depending on how deep the ulcers are and whether or not they involve blood vessels.”

  He glanced at Bird’s-Eye who was looking puzzled. “In other words, Bird’s-Eye, if Lundy eats any solid food too soon, holes can be torn inside him, perhaps with bleeding.”

  Bird’s-Eye wagged his head, clearly pleased at being singled out from the rest of us.

  “Perforation is always serious, in most cases fatal. That means death, Bird’s-Eye. So the only safe rule is to stick with soft foods until a full ten days after temperature drops to normal. Women, give Lundy thick soups with lots of nourishment—like potato, pea. Milk-toast, mashed potatoes, a boiled or poached egg—but very soft. You’re to stick to this soft diet no matter how much Lundy clamors for solid food. Got that, Bird’s-Eye?”

  “Doc, I’ll lay it by in my mind. But that young’un’s always been a rapscallion. He can carry on like a wildcat to git what he craves.”

  “Sure, he can—and will. But I called you in here with the rest to enlist your help in keeping your son in line. As he begins to get up, he’s going to want to eat everything in sight. If we let him eat what he wants to, he may die. Think you can handle him, Bird’s-Eye?”

  “Shore, Doc. If’n he gits rippin’ around, I’ll smack the fire out’n him.”

  Dr. MacNeill had spo
ken none too soon. Two mornings after that I was in Lundy’s cubicle of a room tidying up. Now that he was feeling better, he acted as if I were a combination mother and best girl. He was always reaching out to touch my hand or trying to detain me under any pretext. “I ain’t restin’ easy,” he complained.

  “You look fine to me, Lundy.”

  “You don’t pay me no mind. Always a-pullin’ out’n here.”

  “I have things to do. Zady and Nora and Eli have to be nursed too. And Zady’s the sickest now.”

  “Girls shore take on a sight.”

  “She doesn’t complain half as much as you do, Lundy.”

  “Why don’t you rest yerself on that settin’ chair thar and talk to me? You ain’t bashful, are you?”

  “No, Lundy, I’m not bashful.”

  “Wal, it’s not like I was gonna ask you to shoot yer granny.”

  “Naturally not. Tell you what—you sit in the chair and we’ll talk while I put fresh sheets on your bed.”

  He snickered and climbed out of bed. “When’s me and Paw a-goin’ back home?”

  “I don’t know. Not until you’re well, anyway. Hey, what’s this!” In tucking in the bottom sheet, my hand had bumped into something under the mattress. I pulled out a sack of hard candy.

  “Where did you get this, Lundy?”

  “Ain’t a-tellin’.”

  “You know you’re not supposed to have it. Dr. MacNeill told you why.”

  He ignored that. “Vittles here don’t suit me. Lady-cookin’, that’s what it is. Onyway,” the whine crept into the voice, “jest look how I’ve fallen off.”

  I set the candy outside the door in the hall and went on making the bed.

  The plaintive voice went on, “Bin a-lyin’ thar smacking my mouth thinkin’ of hot corn pone and a thick piece of ham-meat. Crave licorice sticks too.”

  I looked at him in alarm and pity. “You’ll get all that soon enough. But what Dr. MacNeill told you is important. He’s thinking about you, Lundy. You’d better heed it.”