Christy

by Catherine Marshall

  “Doc don’t scare me none. Candy never hurt nobody.”

  Supper that night was hectic, with each of us eating at different times in order to feed our bed patients and get on with our own work. Gone now were the leisurely times of banter and lively discussions around the table. Though Miss Ida had relented after her initial refusal to cook for Bird’s-Eye, I noticed that she managed never to be at the table with him. David had eaten early and had gone on down to his bunkhouse. Miss Alice was at the Coburns’ to see about Bessie. Bessie—so full of promise; I had high hopes for her this next term in school.

  I had little interest in my food. I sipped half a bowl of soup, picked at the meat loaf and potato, refused the bread pudding. Under normal circumstances, this would have brought a contemptuous grunt from Miss Ida, but now she picked up the untouched dish without a word.

  The epidemic had changed everything. I thought of my school­children and of the special plans I had prepared for this term, using so many of Grundtvig’s ideas out of that book Among the Danes. Now our boarding-­school had been turned into an infirmary; there was no time to teach the other women who hoped to learn to read; no chance to develop the idea of making and selling native products conceived that day at Miss Alice’s Sewing Circle.

  Thoughts tumbled over themselves in my tired mind: that matter of Miss Alice telling me about the doctor’s marriage . . . Why? Did she think I was falling in love with him? No, that could not be; Miss Alice knew that I loved David. There was something else though. She said I looked like his Margaret. I didn’t care for that. Even if I were interested in the doctor, who wants to be a replacement for some other woman?

  What about the doctor? Stubborn, a bit of a show-off . . . Opinionated, contemptuous of Christian faith . . . It was no wonder we clashed so. Yet he was all man. He cared about the mountain people. He had compassion.

  Then that laboratory of his . . . It was typical of the doctor’s reserved and stubborn nature that he would do all that research for years and keep it a secret from most of the Cove. Yet he had wanted me to know. Why?

  I shook my head to try to clear away the mists of confusion in my mind. My thoughts went to David. Poor David. He had been so miserable since the outbreak of the typhoid. His plans for finishing the church and organizing his work had been set aside to handle the epidemic. The important jobs now were checking water supplies, trying to get the people to clean up barnyards and to build privies, burning clothes and the effects of victims. It was dirty work. David hated it, all of it—I could tell. Since Lundy’s illness had begun, he had scarcely spent an extra minute in the mission house if he could avoid it.

  My heart suddenly went out to David. He was having it harder than the doctor really. Neil MacNeill was doing what he had been trained to do: David could do scarcely anything for which he had been trained.

  Sitting there alone at the table, a great warmth grew inside me. I love David . . . Yes, I really do. And I haven’t been much comfort or help to him recently. Then the thought pierced me, Why, David asked me to marry him—a long time ago. I never have given him a clear “Yes” or “No.” For a moment I was numb with guilt. Has David been waiting all this time for me to make up my mind? Sometimes I wonder about myself. Are all girls my age often confused about love? Am I in love with David or just in love with love?

  There had been a feeling of pressure on my temples the last few days. I pressed the palms of my hands against my eyes. And he needs me. He said so, and it’s true. I can give him strength.

  Moved by a sudden compulsion, I slipped away from the table and walked out into the starry night in the direction of David’s bunkhouse. A momentary feeling of doubt was dissolved by sudden resolution.

  When, at my tap, David opened the door, he was obviously surprised. “Why, Christy! Anything wrong?”

  “No, nothing. I need to talk to you, that’s all.”

  He seemed uncertain. “Well, we could take a walk or go up and sit on the porch.”

  I was surprised at my own calm boldness. “We can talk right here. May I come in?”

  He stepped aside for me to enter. Then, obviously embarrassed at the messy room, he hastily closed the door and began trying to straighten things up. I pushed aside some books to make a place for myself on his couch.

  “David, please don’t look so startled. If we love each other there’s no reason why we have to be so stilted and formal. I think I’ve been a little childish in my attitude toward you and I came down here to tell you so.”

  “Why do you say that, Christy?”

  “Because I think it’s true. I was hurt by Fairlight’s death and somehow expected you to make the hurt well. That was asking too much. I know that now.”

  “I knew you felt let down. But I don’t think there are any really satisfactory answers for a situation like that.”

  For a quick moment I wanted to argue the point, but I pushed that aside. “Anyway, David, I realize there has to be both give and take in real love. I guess I’ve been mostly a taker.”

  A light came into the brown eyes. He relaxed and moved closer to me. “Christy, I never know what to expect from you.” He kissed me softly on each eyelid and then drew me to him with sudden intensity. There was such urgency in his lips now that I drew away.

  David looked at me in surprise. “You’re not sure what it is you want to give, are you, Christy?”

  “Yes, David, I do know. That’s what I came to tell you—what I want to give. But you never want to talk. I need to know what you’re thinking.”

  “Well, if you really want to know what I’m thinking,” he said lightly, “it’s how soft your hair is against my cheek.”

  The boyish look in his eyes and the banter silenced me for a moment. In an instant he had me in his arms again. Yet all my questions were still there between us. “David, please . . . can’t we talk for just a minute?”

  “All right. What about?”

  I drew a deep breath. “Do you remember the night you asked me to marry you?”

  “Sure, I remember.”

  “It was so sudden, the last thing I expected to hear from you right then. So I told you I needed time to think it over.”

  “I was impulsive, I suppose.”

  “It didn’t seem that way to me. I was—well, flattered. Any girl would be.”

  David did not respond to that. After a pause he said, “Well, maybe. But there’ve been times in the past few weeks when I wasn’t sure how you felt about me.”

  “But, David, you’ve never asked me how I felt. You’ve never tried to find out.”

  There was an awkward silence. David seemed to be struggling within himself. All at once I was aware again of the half-made couch-bed, the litter of books and clothes scattered around the shabby little bunkhouse. “David, do you think it’s all right for me to be here?”

  “But why not? You certainly didn’t hesitate to go by yourself to Dr. MacNeill’s cabin.”

  The words had come out abruptly. For a moment they hung there in the room as if suspended. I tried to understand this new thought, but my temples were throbbing again. There was an air of unreality. Was this really me sitting here in David’s bunkhouse? It did not feel like me.

  Perhaps I had not heard correctly. Was David accusing me of something involving the doctor? Surely he knew that my visit to Dr. MacNeill’s cabin had been to get medicine.

  I started to say these things, but no words came. I got up from his couch and walked out the door.

  David apologized the next morning. “Christy, I’m sorry about last night. I don’t know why I acted the way I did. Will you forgive me?”

  “Of course, I forgive you.” But on the inside something was crying out, Oh, David, what’s wrong? Why can’t you receive love? I’m afraid to admit it even to myself, but you don’t love me. You don’t really want me to marry you or you would have said so last night. I gave you every chance. You only want me in your arms, with my body against yours. Oh, David . . . David, somehow you can’t give love,
you only want to make love. But it was no use. How could I say such things to David? So aloud I only added lamely, “It’s all right. We’re all worn out, not like ourselves at all.”

  It was true. Total weariness had caught up with us. It was into the bloodstream and the bone marrow, behind the eyes, befogging the brain. Nor was there any respite. East Tennessee was having a mild late autumn. Here it was into November, and still no freezing ground. The plague spread and spread.

  What do you do when strength is called for and you have no strength? You evoke a power beyond your own and use stamina you did not know you had. You open your eyes in the morning grateful that you can see the sunlight of yet another day. You draw yourself to the edge of the bed and then put one foot in front of the other—and keep going. You weep with those who gently close the eyes of the dead, and somehow, from the salt of your tears, comes endurance for them and for you. You pour out that resurgence to minister to the living.

  At night in my room, I would look into the darkness and see all around me faces with eyes glazed with fever and unrecognition, and hands picking, picking at bedclothes. I would turn over and bury my face in the pillow to shut out the phantasm of the freshly dug graves on the hillsides and that vacant desolation on the faces of the children left, and the look of the women with empty arms.

  Zady’s fever was going down; the crisis was over. We permitted Clara into the sickroom briefly to see her sister, and I used the opportunity to inquire about Bessie Coburn. Clara and Bessie had been inseparable at school last term.

  “She’s up and around,” Clara answered, “but even more puny than Zady here. Most too drug out for onything. Worst is, her mama’s took with the miseries now.”

  “Miseries? You mean typhoid, Clara?”

  “Reckon so. Mistress Coburn’s ailin’ right bad.”

  “Is she in bed?”

  “Yes’m. Bessie’s jest one big bundle of worry for her mama. Says she has fearful dread in her heart.”

  “Aren’t the neighbors helping?”

  “No’m—only one neighbor’s in hollerin’ distance. They can’t pitch in and help do because some has had to drap into bed themselves and the rest are plumb give out.”

  “If things are that bad, I’d better go up there tomorrow.”

  “Bessie’d be obleeged to ye for that. Says sometimes she’s a-feelin’ like to die and no one to holp a-tall.”

  That decided it. The next morning early I started for the Coburn cabin on the back side of Coldsprings Mountain, taking with me some eggs, a ­bottle of tonic for Bessie, and a jar of broth. As I climbed the hill I saw a tall thin figure in the distance toiling up the slope carrying a bucket. It was ­Bessie, coming back from the spring at the bottom of the hill. Every few steps she would shift the pail from one hand to the other, then straighten up to catch her breath.

  I wondered if, all unknowing, Bessie was carrying more typhoid germs up the hill in that pail. Dr. MacNeill never had ceased talking about the necessity of cleaning out all springs, of being sure that no human waste washed into them, of being certain that no pig pens or barnyards were adjacent to a source of water. Yet even with so much dramatic evidence spread before the eyes of the highlanders, little that the doctor said about sanitation had any effect. Few people had changed their ways.

  I made my way across the brown stubble field at the top of the knoll and reached the weathered fence surrounding the Turner yard. No picket fence this, just unpainted pieces of board and some split logs nailed together hit-and-miss. Bessie had reached the porch but had still not seen me.

  I paused for an instant at the gate and let my eyes take in the scene: a hog pen on one side with pigs confined to be fattened for butchering; the yard so hard-packed that even in the summer-time no grass could grow, “swept clean” except for some islands of butterfly bushes and pretty-by-nights—scraggly now, bent over by frost; the iron wash pot swung under a tripod with the battling block and soap trough nearby—all mute evidence of Lety Coburn’s work-worn hands.

  This one-room cabin was smaller than most because there were only three Coburns. A fieldstone chimney poked into the sky. There was a tiny porch across the front of the cabin, its ugliness softened by a dried gourd vine trailing across it. Close by the porch was a single ancient apple tree, partly dead now, broken limbs silhouetted against the soft blue of the November morning. Kyle Coburn’s two limp-eared hound-dogs saw me and ambled over to investigate, though they looked almost too lazy to make that effort, much less bark.

  At the two puncheon steps up to the rickety porch, as Bessie tried to step up, her right leg collapsed under her. She put the bucket on the ground and, taking both hands, was resolutely lifting the leg onto the step—her face set in grimly determined lines—when I called out to her and started running. “Hi, Bessie. It’s Teacher. Let me help.” I grabbed the pail. “You’re too weak to be carrying water.”

  “Howdy, Teacher.” It was a wisp of a voice. “Plumb tuckered out, I reckon. The water’s for mama. She’s bad off.” Her voice broke. The blue eyes looking at me were pools of misery.

  This was my first glimpse of Bessie since she had recovered, and I was shocked to see how emaciated and hollow-eyed the girl was. In the aftermath of the disease she was losing most of her blonde hair. It gave her a picked-chicken look.

  A man’s voice, high-pitched and almost shrieking, came through the open door, though the words were garbled. “That’s Paw,” Bessie explained, nodding toward the door, “a-tryin’ to git some toddick down Mama.”

  I picked up the bucket, crossed the porch and stood in the doorway, only to be met by the odor of typhoid. I can’t abide any more of it. So long as I live, I’ll remember this peculiar smell. At least the pungency of the carbolic acid dumped into tubs of water standing in the sickroom helped a little. The carbolic acid was supposed to cleanse the air and eliminate the smells or “funks,” as the people expressed it.

  Ordinarily Mrs. Coburn was a heavy woman, which had always made her seem older than she was. But looking at her lying motionless in bed, I could see that she had lost many pounds. Not even the soiled chenille robe she was wearing fastened across her ample bosom with a huge safety pin could hide the wasted flesh. On her the weight loss looked worse than on Bessie, who had always been thin.

  Mr. Coburn was standing by his wife’s bed shouting into her face, but the sick woman neither moved nor opened her eyes. Kyle had a jelly glass in one hand, a spoon in the other. I knew that the “toddick” would be whiskey in water with a little sugar—if any was available—or else honey mixed in.

  “Good morning, Mr. Coburn. How is she?”

  He looked at me briefly, his forehead creased with worry, fear in his eyes too. “Howdy do, Ma’am. Lety’s taken a turn. Every bit and grain of her be on the go-down.” He paused for no sympathy from me, but returned to the task at hand. “Lety, do you hear me? Open yer mouth, Lety. This’ll pearten you up. Lety . . .” His voice was like a trumpet blast in the patient’s ear.

  “Paw, don’t beller so. You’re jest a-plaguin’ mama that-away.”

  “Hunh! Lety, I’m a-talkin’ to you. Can you hear me, Lety? Confound it all, woman.”

  Finally Mrs. Coburn stirred slightly. Her husband took quick advantage of this to force the spoon between her lips. “Right betwixt yer lips spang in yer mouth, Lety. Thar now.”

  Miraculously, the muscles of the sick woman’s throat contracted and she swallowed involuntarily. I hoped that the liquor was diluted enough so that she would not cough and choke.

  The patient had no sooner swallowed that spoonful than her husband, encouraged, began shouting at her to “peart up” and take some more. But not even the few drops of whiskey had revived Lety Coburn. She looked to be in a deeper stupor than when I had entered the room, her features pinched and drawn, her lips so parched that patches of dry skin stood up like blisters.

  “Lety, one more swig,” the raucous voice boomed out. “Open up, Lety. Lety, you hear me? Le-ty!” But the sick woman did not
stir.

  I sank down on a homemade bench pushed back against the wall.

  “Paw sounds like a pond full of screechin’ geese.” Hearing the apologetic note in Bessie’s voice, I deliberately withdrew my attention from the scene at the bed. But when the girl saw me looking at the room, she was even more embarrassed. With Bessie and her mother ill one after the other, it was scarcely surprising that dirt and disorder were everywhere, dust bunnies under the bed and in the corners, unwashed dishes on the single table, flies over everything. Even with the door open, the ventilation was not good either. The cabin had only one small window, propped up now with a stick.

  Indicating the room with a sweep of her hand, my young pupil tried to sound cheerful. “Ain’t it a sight in the world! House all gaumed up—I’m still so weak I can’t do much more’n piddle at housekeepin’. Aimin’ to git the dishes washed up today—”

  “Don’t apologize, Bessie. But what about food?”

  “Well’m—” she hesitated. “Rations air runnin’ low.”

  “Then I can do something about that. I’ll find somebody to carry some food up from the mission house.”

  “We’d like that the best in the world,” she said gratefully.

  I glanced back at the bed. Suddenly the sick woman’s jaw sagged open and she began breathing through her mouth. It showed her teeth and the tip of her tongue covered with brown fur. Immediately, Mr. Coburn thrust in the waiting spoon. But this time the liquid trickled across her tongue and splashed out the side of her mouth and down her cheek.

  “Blame! Made a bobble of that ’un.” Kyle wiped his wife’s face with a far from clean rag and set the glass down.

  “Mr. Coburn, has Dr. MacNeill seen your wife?”

  “No’m. Put hit off. Bessie gott along without. Figured Lety would too.”

  I knew that I had to be cautious. “Mr. Coburn, I think your wife is really sick. When he gets back to the mission, could I ask the doctor to come up here?”