Gifts of the Spirit

by Patricia Eilola

  I closed the register as quickly and quietly as I could and the door behind me, too, and went back downstairs to begin the seemingly monumental task of cleaning up after her children. By the time I got downstairs, the water was almost hot in the side-cauldron of the stove. I filled a pail with bleach and with slivers of Mother’s lye soap and attacked first the kitchen floor, and after that the stairs, changing the water with virtually every move. In between times, I carried ice cold water upstairs and did to the girls what I had done to my mother and Aini and Eino—moved them from side to side so as to get clean sheets under them with rags atop the sheets and under everyone’s backside. Then I sponged them down, one at a time, using a fresh bucket of cold water with each of them. Not that it did any good. Their fevers had risen, and they had lain on their own soil.

  Will these horrors never cease? I wondered, thinking about the boys and the ugliness of their passing: they looked as if they’d burned up—all red and filled with welts and sores from the vomit and diarrhea. At least their mother’s death had been bearable. The loss of the boys—both of them—would be devastating to Mr. Hauala. My heart ached for him—for the loss of his wife and his two boys.

  In the meantime, I did the best I could, running up and down the stairs, changing the rags, trying to get each one to swallow a mouthful or even a sip of cold water, laying cold cloths on their foreheads, and even trying to finger-back their hair so it wouldn’t be so warm on their shoulders and back—for each one had long hair. Usually it was kept neatly in braids, but at some point in their misery they had pulled theirs out, and it lay strewn across the pillows, adding to the heat.

  Every bit of clothing I collected, I threw out the window for Mr. Hauala to gather up, hopefully soon. Wondering how he was, I took a quick trek to the sauna, where he lay inside the steam room, having cleaned himself, his clothes left in a heap in the dressing room. I filled a pail with cold water from the well house because all of the water in the sauna room itself was hot.

  Thank goodness, I thought. Here at last is some hot water.

  Regardless of the time it took me to run back into the house for pails, I emptied two of them of cold water and filled them with the hot water from the kiuas and from the water tubs.

  Good, I remember thinking, I can come in here to wash the fresh sheets as they too they become soiled.

  Mr. Hauala did not even look up when I came and went. Lying on the bottom bench (the lavat), he seemed oblivious to me and to everything around him. I could see it was taking all of his energy just to continue to breathe, so I left him with a pail of cold water to use to help keep his fever down.

  Unwittingly he had done one of the things Dr. Raihala told me later had saved his life: He had stoked the fire in the sauna so hot that he actually had sweat out the flu! Little by little, he’d get better. I didn’t know that then, but I could see that he didn’t need any other help, and so back to the house I ran.

  Something needed to be done with the bodies of the boys, but I had no idea what. Until they were removed from the house, the horrible stench would remain in the air, fouling every breath we took.

  It took every bit of strength I could muster, but I was able to wrap each one of them in a blanket and a sheet from underneath them, and—warning the girls to keep their eyes closed—dragged each one into the hall and down the back stairway, their heads bumping along with every step. I had to hold back my own vomit, and the Vicks Vaporub didn’t help at all, but from somewhere I found the power to get each one outside—one at a time—and to lay them out on the lawn outside the house where Mrs. Hauala grew her lilac bushes and flowers. At least once I had them outside and had opened all of the windows—even the ones that had been painted shut—I pounded the sides until I thought the glass would crack—the smell began to dissipate.

  Then it was back to my “normal” tasks—keeping the girls wiped down with cool water, warming the beef broth Mother had wrapped so carefully in a towel, offering them sips of both although most of it—as it had at the beginning with Mother and Aini and Eino—ran down their chins. At least each one would swallow a little bit, and with each small sip I felt a sense of victory. I would beat this—what should I call it?—a plague? a disease? And finally—the “influenza” that the neighbors had been warning us about for weeks before it struck. Mr. Lofgren was the one who spread the news, thanks to his subscription to the Finnish newspaper that came out once a month. The Työmies had cited articles from newspapers that said soldiers had gotten the influenza and died by the hundreds.

  So I had an adversary to contend with—and fight it I would, I vowed, to my last breath.

  With the boys finally outside, I suggested to the girls that if I moved them downstairs into the sunroom, they would get the benefit of the fresh cool air from all of the windows set into each of the walls, which might just help to cool them in spite of the heat. No rain had fallen in over a month, and the crops we had planted so carefully two months earlier had lain limp and dying when I had passed the garden on my way to and from the pump. But there was no time to water them. All of my energy had to go toward keeping my family alive.

  And now it was up to me to keep the Hauala girls alive. Violet was older than I and had come home from her job in Reid’s Clothing Store in Virginia when she began to feel ill. Elsie, who was almost exactly my age, seemed to be the worse of the two. Violet’s fever rose and fell. It would spike so that she turned red and full of rash and then suddenly and without warning drop so she would shiver as Ronny had. Elsie’s just kept going up and up. I had no way to measure it, of course, but her bloodshot eyes and an occasional nosebleed in addition to her constant thrashing as she sought a cool spot in the bed led me to believe that it was higher than Violet’s. Neither cool clothes nor a rubdown even with rubbing alcohol, to which I finally turned, brought her any comfort. I feared for her life and continued to boil water, to scrub the soiled sheets as I had at home, using the incredible gift that only the Haualas in our neighborhood could afford—a washing machine that had been set up in the sauna dressing room. It had a stand with room for two washtubs and in between a wringer I could turn by hand to get more of the water out of the garment or sheet or pillowcase than I could ever do wringing them by hand. Thank God the Haualas also had a clothesline—this one well-strung with white roping and, using branches topped with forked sticks I could push the middle of the line up higher to catch more of the breeze. It was a wonderful invention, one I decided I could easily copy at home… if Ronny were well enough to go into the woods to search for just the right kind of branch.

  I kept close hold on the amulet of camphor Mother had prepared for me, hoping against hope it would continue to protect me from the disease.

  All in all, once I had a system organized and the girls downstairs on sofa beds so that I didn’t have to keep running up and down, I was able to care for Violet and Elsie and to allow Mr. Hauala to care for himself as he seemed to be doing better and better when I went into the sauna dressing room to wash the bedding the girls had soiled. The girls’ vomiting and diarrhea had largely stopped before I got there, so the rags I put under them caught only streams of urine and very little of that since they weren’t taking in any liquid or any nourishment.

  That worried me, too. I had tried to get them to drink beef broth, but that had only made them gag. So, gritting my teeth, I went into the chicken coop, grabbed one of the larger hens, used the ax that had been set into a tree stump for that purpose, cut off her head, let the blood run out, and cleaned the feathers from the outside and the entrails from the inside. Mrs. Hauala had a “still room” underneath the stairs where she kept a supply of potatoes, carrots, and onions—enough for her to use in between trips to their root cellar—and so I was able to make a chicken broth the third day I was there. Both of the girls seemed to like that better, and I was delighted when each one swallowed a full tablespoon of the healthy liquid.

  The cows, the
pigs, and the chickens would have to make do by themselves, I had decided once I was aware of the state the family was in. I knew I couldn’t do everything, and the people—the sisters especially—and Mr. Hauala, too, were my main concern. I had left Mrs. Hauala in her bed with the door closed and the register closed. I knew I would have to deal with her eventually, but as the days went by and the routine I worked out became… well… routine, I almost forgot about her body.

  Mr. Hauala had not only been taking steam, but while he was in the sauna, he had been drinking large amounts of kalia (the alcoholic beer that most every family made in the spring). When I demurred, he told me that the article in Mr. Lofgren’s newspaper had suggested that alcohol might be helpful against the disease. Who was I to argue? I had no idea if what I was doing was of any real help at all. All I could do was to continue what I had been doing—scrubbing every floor with bleach and generous amounts of lye soap, opening every window to get a breeze to blow on the girls, and trying my best to keep them as cool as I could and as “hydrated” (a word I learned later but was immediately able to apply to that situation) as I could.

  I prayed that Dr. Raihala would return… or that Sally Rahikainen, a noted healer and kuppari, would decide to visit her relatives and stop on the way because again I had a sign at the end of the road that led to the house—“Sickness here.”

  Once I had every speck of floor in the house scrubbed and everything in the back bedroom that was disposable thrown out and everything else scrubbed within an inch of its life, I felt good. A clean house, Mother often said, was a happy house.

  This house was still far from happy, but I had done my best and would continue as long as I was needed.

  I felt that someone should bury the bodies of the brothers and approached Mr. Hauala about doing that. At first he refused to consider it, but once the smell reached even him, he reconsidered, and I found myself with a new task—the digging of a grave large enough to hold the two brothers, who were both teenagers.

  Mr. Hauala suggested I use a part of the garden he had dug up ready for a planting that never happened so it wasn’t as difficult a job as one would suppose. The ground was soft for about a foot down. From there on, I had to use a pick and sometimes an ax to cut roots before I could use the shovel, but eventually that task too had been completed. I tried to fashion a cross with sticks of wood to put at the head of the grave but wound up piling rocks to form a kind of cairn to mark the spot. The Haualas could mark it as they wished once they were well again… if they got well again.

  I was so tired after a couple of days, I almost fell asleep on my feet. But I kept myself awake with strong coffee. Thank goodness the Haualas had a coffee grinder on the wall, which made coffee-making much easier. They seemed to have many things around them to ease their daily lives, none of which was present at our house. It was hard sometimes not to feel envious in spite of the girls’ condition. They had so much! But then I remembered how much they had lost—their mother and their two brothers—and I thanked God again for my blessings, and the envy disappeared.

  Finally, one day when I went to the sauna to begin the part of my daily routine that consisted of washing the clothes the girls had soiled the night before and the sheets and pillowcases they had lain on (for even the Haualas’ store of both was running low), Mr. Hauala was sitting on the bottom lavat (bench) washing himself. He told me where to find his clothing inside, and I brought him a new set of one-piece underwear, a shirt, a pair of trousers, and stockings. (He had cleaned off his shoes.)

  For a while as he dressed, he kept to himself, not asking any questions of me. But finally the questions spilled out as if he had been holding onto them for dear life:

  “How’s my wife?” was the first question. “And the girls?” was the second.

  When I told him that his wife had died, he almost fell over. I knelt down in front of him, put my hands on his shoulders, and explained to him how I had found her and that she had been spared the worst of both the knowledge and the illness. I later learned that she must have gone quickly from coughing into pneumonia and died quickly and quietly. It seemed to ease him to hear that. At any rate, he thanked me for all I was doing for the girls and tried to get up, saying that barn work had to be done. Once he stood up, however, his strength left him, and he fell back onto the bench, holding his head in his hands, and grieving.

  I felt awful for him. To have lost his wife and his two sons in just the space of weeks must have been a terrible blow. I prayed he would find the strength to recover and begin to live again for his daughters, who, I hoped would live.

  Later, when he was able to make it to the house and the kitchen, we sat down together. He had a headache, he said, mainly from the alcohol he had imbibed, but otherwise, except for weakness and some coughing, he told me he would be all right and that I should concentrate on the girls.

  After drinking a cup or two of coffee and a cup of broth, he told me that he actually felt hungry. I hurried to the chicken coop, grabbed as many eggs as I could hold in my apron and scrambled him a batch. He told me that it was the best meal he had ever eaten!

  I’d found time to make bread so he had that, too, and the butter from the still room was still edible as was the jam I took down from a high shelf where Mrs. Hauala had stored dozens of jars she had put up the previous summer.

  I wondered who would replace them that year and how it would be done, and then forced those questions from my mind.

  The girls still needed me, Elsie more than Violet, whose fever seemed to be lessening. When I got to the sunroom, she was leaning over her sister trying to reach the pail to put a clean cool cloth on Elsie’s head.

  She was able to help me change the sheets and to strip off her own nightgown. She said she needed a sauna, a clear indication she was doing better. I told her it was hot and I would help her down to wash her as soon as she felt strong enough. It wasn’t going to be that day, for once she was ensconced in a fresh nightie and was able to lie back on a clean pillowcase, she collapsed. And I attacked Elsie with a vengeance. Before I changed her side of the bed, I gave her a sponge bath in the coldest water I could draw from the outside pump, forced a sip of water down her throat followed by a sip of broth and laid a cool cloth on her head.

  Only then did I move her over to get the soiled sheet from under her to add to my pile of washing. But then, like Ronny, she began to shiver.

  Enough cooling, I realized, and on to the warmth. I asked Mr. Hauala where to find some bricks. He had some piled in front of the house, intending, as he said with a tear, to make an edging for his wife’s flower bed. I ran into the sauna, set the bricks on the rocks of the kiuas, and threw steam until I was sweating. Once they were hot as I could get them, I wrapped them in towels and brought them into the sunroom, where I surrounded Elsie with them and covered her with not only the sheet but all of the blankets I had washed from the boys’ room and dried on the line and all of the blankets I could find in the storage closet upstairs.

  The shivering continued until Violet curled up next to her, adding her body heat to Elsie’s. That seemed to help as much as the bricks, for Elsie turned her face into Violet’s shoulder and cuddled into her like a baby.

  Tears ran down Violet’s face as she held her sister, afraid it would be for the last time. And I have to confess I broke down, too. Nothing I had done had seemed to help—in fact, in retrospect I seemed to have hurt Elsie more than I had helped her.

  That night I spent sitting next to the sofa-bed where the two sisters lay, curled up together. Alternately I tried to keep Violet’s fever from rising and Elsie’s body warm enough so that she didn’t develop pneumonia. Thank God she wasn’t coughing a great deal, not the lungfuls that Ronny had drawn up, so I had hope.

  When I awoke from a doze myself the next morning, both Violet and Elsie were asleep, but the sleep seemed natural and healing. I felt their foreheads. Neither one seemed to
have a high fever. And Elsie wasn’t shivering. In fact, she had moved away from the bricks onto Violet’s side of the bed, which was cooler.

  “Thank God,” I said to Mr. Hauala, who had kept watch with me through the night from a big chair in the corner of the living room right near the sunroom door. “I think they’ll both live!”

  In spite of my exhaustion, I wanted to sing and do a real Finnish polka, including the hops. Mr. Hauala was almost as happy as I was—in spite of his obvious sadness. Having his girls would help to compensate for his other losses.

  Mrs. Hauala was buried in great state at the Alango Hall. Everyone who was well enough, including Mother and Aini and Ronny but not little Eino, who had been slower to recover his strength and, of course, me. Her coffin, made by Mr. Leinonen, who had a hand with making things out of wood, was covered with wildflowers. Mother made a wreathe out of them to lay next to her gravesite. Mr. Hauala used his horses to lead the wagon where the coffin lay in state, surrounded by the branches of the balsam trees she had loved (which also helped to mask the smell). The rest of us who were able to walk followed the coffin the five miles or so to the Alango cemetery, where she was buried with great pomp and circum­stance in a ceremony led by Mr. Hokkanen, who had aspirations of being a minister and had often been called upon to lead the group in prayer and singing.

  Those of us who were “Hall Finns,” unlike the ones who belonged to the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church as they had in Finland, had worked through our own ceremonies until they seemed fitting with readings from the Bible (although the verses were carefully selected) and the singing of hymns. Mr. Hokkanen spent a good deal of time relating Mrs. Hauala’s prowess with the needle: She was well-known for her beautiful hand-made quilts, and new brides coveted her sheets and pillowcases with tatted or crocheted borders. The antimacas­sars on the backs of the chairs in their living room were masterpieces of intricate crocheting, and everyone who was close to her was grateful for the hand-knit woolen socks and mittens she gave away during our Christmas party at the Hall.