by Amy Lukavics
Once the meat is out of the pan, we use a little of the starchy potato water to loosen the browned meat bits in the pan for gravy.
Not even I can resist the unbeatable power of a hot, filling meal. We all listen to Ma and Pa exchange lighthearted chatter while we eat, about things like hunting some deer meat from the woods soon for stew and dumplings or attempting an apple pie in the new fireplace, since it’s so roomy and everything. Charles sucks the hot pork grease from his fingers, and Ma doesn’t even scold him for it.
Afterward we lie around with full bellies, drunk from all the food, and Pa pulls out his old fiddle to play and sing us a tune about fishing for trout with a big, fat worm. We clap along to the fast-paced jig, Ma’s hands laced over Hannah’s to guide her so she can join along, and the baby falls into a fit of giggles. Desperate not to spoil the mood, I take special care to keep far away from her so she doesn’t fall into another fit.
By Pa’s fourth song, a slow and beautiful piece about twinkling stars in a black blanket of sky, the baby is lying against Ma’s shoulder and sleeping, her thick lashes against her cheeks. I wonder if she’ll ever love me again.
Bedtime comes not long after that, and Ma gently takes the sleeping baby and lays her on the far side of the mattress they share with Pa. Joanna, Charles, Emily and I line up on our own mattress, and all face the same way so we can tickle the back of each other’s necks and shoulders until we’re too tired to lift our arms. I keep breathing, keep repeating Emily’s words to myself— everything will be all right.
The room quiets, the heavy breathing gets replaced by snores, and I find myself drifting out to the faint red glow of the dying fireplace and the lingering smell of crispy seasoned pork and freshly built floor. Maybe it won’t be too hard to ignore all that’s happened if it goes away now, fades away like a bad dream, just like Henry and my baby. My last thought before I fall asleep is, If my baby was a girl, I would have named her Emily.
* * *
Hannah is screaming.
It feels like only a second has passed, but the fire is completely dead now, and the baby’s cries tear through the pitch-black that surrounds us. They aren’t like her normal cries, either, but louder and harder than I’ve ever heard any child scream in my entire life, like she’s in unbearable pain.
“What is—” Ma’s voice is cut off when the screams intensify. The children and Emily and I all sit up in sleepy panic.
“Edmund!” My ma is suddenly screaming, right along with the baby. “Light a candle! Oh, my Lord—Hannah—There’s something all over Hannah!”
“What’s happening?” Joanna cries from my side and blindly grabs at me in the dark. I pull her shaking body close to my own.
Pa darts across the dark cabin, trips over the rocking chair, and in ten seconds more he is scrambling to light the oil lamp from the corner of the room. Suddenly the light flickers on, and the room is filled with the softest yellow glow, hardly enough to see clearly, but I tell Joanna to hug Charles while I scramble up and make my way over to the still-screaming Hannah.
She sounds to be in complete agony, and from where I stand I can see that she is flailing against the mattress, hard. The closer I get, the more confused I become; the baby appears to be covered in a shimmering black liquid.
I follow the trail of it that spills over the side of the mattress, squinting, and reach out to touch it. I poke my finger into the black just as Pa reaches the bed, and the light from the kerosene lamp shows me the truth just in time. It’s not liquid that’s covering Hannah and the bed around her, and Ma realizes this at the same instant I do. We both scream.
Ants.
Red prairie ants, the size of bullets, coming up from a tiny hole next to the mattress and covering my flailing baby sister from head to toe while she gasps for air. The crimson ants skitter over the white mattress in a panicked reaction to the light. Hannah’s violent movements slow, and she begins to twitch.
I hear myself let out a sob and desperately try to brush the disgusting things away from her chubby face while Ma does the same. They cling to her skin, eating her alive, trying to burrow themselves into her eyes and ears and mouth.
Pa nearly drops the lantern in shock. He bellows for us to move away from the mattress. My hands are on fire and dotted with the disgusting creatures, and I slap at myself wildly to prevent them from moving up my arms.
Ma cries out in pain, her hands covered as well, but she lifts Hannah in the dark and stumbles over to the dish tub filled with water, still cloudy with food chunks and grease from tonight’s dinner, and dunks the silent baby completely under.
Emily leads Joanna and Charles to the corner farthest away from the mattresses while Ma tears off Hannah’s soaked clothing. There are more ants underneath her sleeping gown, clinging to her like sewing pins, and without hesitation Ma dunks the baby into the filthy water again.
I have a clean, dry rag waiting for Ma, and she snatches it from me gratefully. She rubs the baby down with it, and Pa leans closer with the lamp to inspect the damage. The baby moans and very slowly lifts her hand up, searching for someone to help her, and I take it and hold it against my neck that is covered in tears.
“Huuuuuuuuuh,” I try to hum in a smooth, calming rhythm, but I’m breathing so hard that the sigh breaks apart into a couple of panicked huffs. I want to see God’s face, just so I can spit in it.
“She needs help,” Ma says in a shaking voice. “She’s going to die, Edmund. She needs help now.”
Sure enough, Hannah’s face and limbs are so swollen that they are almost unrecognizable. The puffy skin is as scarlet as the monsters that did this to her, and completely covered in raised white bumps. Her fat little hand goes limp and falls away from my face. She isn’t breathing, really; just letting out little puffs of air in a series of quick, sharp wheezes.
“Doctor Jacobson,” I manage through my tears. “Take Hannah to the woods, maybe he can help her!”
Pa goes into action immediately, and has Rocky saddled and ready to go in less than five minutes. He promises that even if Hannah needs to stay at the doctor’s cabin, he will come back to let us know what is happening before dawn. He takes the baby from Ma, kisses her, then pulls himself up and onto the horse with his free hand.
“Stay away from the ants until I get back,” he commands. “Wait outside or in the wagon if they start to spread out.”
He is gone. The winds in the prairie are dead for once, and the only sound to accompany the shock in the air is Charles’s gentle weeping.
“Is Hannah going to die?” Joanna sniffs and pulls at her dark, curly hair with both hands. “God wouldn’t do that, right, Ma? Hannah can’t die.”
“I do not know, child.” Ma stares after Pa, her eyes lost and unblinking. “If only I did.”
I turn from the sight of Pa on Rocky, loping toward the forest line by the light of the moon. Emily looks on, wide-eyed, pale, like the time I was seven and she was five and a grizzly bear wandered, snarling, into the front clearing of our cabin. I don’t know what to do, or say, or think.
This cursed prairie.
“I need to take care of the ants,” I hear myself say. Ma doesn’t move, or speak, or turn away from the forest. “I’m going to smash every last one of them.”
“Wait.” Emily snaps into reality and grabs my elbow. “Maybe you shouldn’t. Your hands...”
My hands. I haven’t even looked at them, or felt them really, since I first realized I was being bitten. They are swollen, puffy, covered in bites, but it’s nothing compared to what Hannah is going through, and I cannot find it in myself to admit how much they hurt.
“My hands are fine,” I say.
I go into the cabin, slip on my work boots and take the abandoned kerosene lamp that is sitting by the door. Emily commands Joanna and Charles to wait at the door while she follows me slowly to the mattress th
at Ma and Pa and Hannah share. When we get near, I ready my foot to stomp down on the mass of squirming insects as soon as I see them. I lift the lantern and hold my breath.
All of the ants are gone, every last one of them. It’s as if they were never even here at all.
When Ma was six months into her pregnancy with Hannah, the snow started.
It fell in fat, fluffy flakes, the sticky kind that quickly piled up enough to make snowmen and angels and ice treats drizzled with maple syrup. At first, it was fun. Emily and I played in the powder with Joanna and Charles while Ma, swollen in the belly but rosy in the cheeks, brewed a pot of hot tea with honey for when we returned.
“Don’t stay out too late with them, Amanda!” Ma yelled from the open cabin door as Emily and I walked up the slope of the mountain with Pa’s old sled. “I don’t want you to catch your deaths out there.”
“Just one more, Ma!” Emily yelled back through the slow-falling wall of thickened snowflakes. She set the sled down and began adjusting her mittens with her teeth. “All right, Jo. Get on.”
Joanna cautiously lifted one leg over the sled and fell onto the seat, near the back to leave the front open for Charles. I picked him up and set him on top, and Joanna wrapped her arms around his middle and pulled.
“Hold on tight, Joanna,” Charles instructed very seriously, his hands clenched around the front rope so hard that I knew his knuckles must be white beneath his mittens. Ever since he found out that he would no longer be the baby of the family, he was determined to show us all that he was indeed a big boy now. My heart warmed at the sight of such pure courage.
I planted my boot in front of the top corner of the sled, then stood to straighten my back and check out the clearing below to our left. I thought that Emily was holding on to the opposite corner with her own foot, but I realized as soon as Joanna shifted her weight that I was very wrong. The sled was sucked away from us in an instant.
The trees.
We hadn’t readjusted the sled to face the open space down the side of the mountain, the only safe place around the cabin to ride. I prayed to God that Joanna would lose her balance and fall off the back of the sled, taking Charles with her in an effort to save herself.
She didn’t. Joanna teetered for a second, giving me hope, but her back stayed strong in the end and soon the children’s screams were echoing through the icy trees surrounding them. They zoomed dangerously close past several dense trunks, and my bellows at Joanna to roll off were cut short when I realized that they were heading straight for a massive pine.
“Oh, my God,” Emily cried out and threw her gloved hands over her face. “Please, no.”
“Joanna,” I yelled, louder than I thought myself capable of. In a second, the front door to the cabin flew open, and there was Ma, wide-eyed with her hand clutched over her swollen belly.
I wondered if we would wipe the vibrant blood splatters from the trees after this terrible accident, or if we’d just let the snow build up over it all until everything was white again. I wondered how I would feel for the rest of my life knowing that my little brother and sister were dead because of me.
But by God’s grace, Joanna suddenly rolled off the sled, clutching Charles to her chest as she did. The children tumbled over one another with violent speed, but came to a sudden stop when they collided with a dense cluster of bushes. The snow from the bushes flew away from the branches and scattered quietly around their bodies.
The sled, newly free of its previous weight, veered to the right before crashing into another tree, making a horrific cracking sound and snapping itself clean in half. Shattered bark exploded away from the trunk, and then all was finally still.
Ma’s cries were ragged as she stumbled out into the snow, and I only vaguely noted that she wasn’t wearing boots. She strode through the white, her dress dragging in a soaked pile behind her, and reached into the bushes to grab Charles.
Emily cried out in relief when Ma set Charles standing upright and he stayed that way. Soon after, Joanna was at his side, shaking like a leaf but with no broken bones or blood. Ma pulled them back into the house, Emily and I trailing wordlessly behind. Once inside, Ma produced four mugs filled to the brim with steaming honey tea. Joanna was still shaking as she drank hers, but Charles was as hyper as if he’d eaten a whole package of Christmas sweets in one sitting.
“That was fun, Ma!” he chirped as Ma stepped out of her soaked dress and layers of long underwear. She carefully laid the clothing in front of the fire and stood, shivering, with a blanket wrapped around her while she waited for them to dry. Her largely swollen belly stuck out from the front of the blanket, and I drank my tea even though all I wanted to do was cry.
“Not for me,” she said softly as she bounced up and down on her toes. “You almost gave your ma a heart attack.”
“Me, too,” Emily said after a loud gulp of tea. “I really thought you were both about to be dead.”
“Emily!” I said and shook my head at her. “What a thing to say.”
“You thought so, too,” she quipped back. “I could tell.”
“Enough,” Ma said sternly, and everyone quieted. “The Lord kept you safe, and it’s all over now. We will say an extra prayer tonight in thanks of our good health.”
She was just wiggling back into her dry clothes when Pa came through the door, home from hunting much earlier than usual. His beard was flecked with snow, and when he pulled his hat off, he sent icy water flying over the table where we sat.
“The storm isn’t stopping,” Pa said in a deep gruff. “And the mountain is becoming unsafe for travel. It’s a good thing we have enough supplies to last us for a good few months. We’re not going anywhere for a while, at least.”
“Oh, my,” Ma said and rushed over to pour Pa some tea. “What a harsh winter this has been.”
But it turned out harsh wasn’t the weather, and harsh wasn’t eating nothing but fried cornmeal cakes for days, and harsh wasn’t having to stay inside at all times with three other children and two adults. Harsh was the cough that fell upon Ma only a few days after the sledding incident, innocent enough at first but as persistent and increasingly damaging as the storm outside. Harsh was when Ma became so delirious with fever that she started calling us by different names.
Pa was able to shoot a deer and store the body just outside the front door, embedded in snow and frozen solid until it was time to cook it up, chunk by chunk, in either hot water to make broth for Ma or fried in a pan with gravy and potatoes for stew. Pa hoped that the storm would let up a little bit by the time we needed more meat. Ma’s cough deepened into a harsh bark that racked her body from the inside out.
By the time a fortnight had passed, the deer was gone, and the steady downfall had transformed into an angry, nearly horizontal monster of whistling winds and bitter cold that was sharp enough to cut straight to the bone. Ma’s fever was still raging by then, and we all knew it wouldn’t be good for the baby. A miscarriage was suddenly a very real possibility, as was death.
It carried on for three months.
Three months of changing sheets, soaked yellow with perspiration, and hallucinations and forcing broth made with roots or herbs down Ma’s throat. The days bled into each other, and one early evening as Emily went to check on her, she noticed that Ma’s water had broken and the time to deliver the baby boy or girl had come.
After Hannah was born, I developed a terrible fear of dying in the winter. Of being buried in a wooden box, six feet beneath a small knob of a headstone, embedded in the frozen ground like a maggot in flesh. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than lying there in the dark, wishing for a candle or a blanket or my ma.
Above the ground, things would be silent, except for the icy wind shrieking through the trees of the mountains that would be my final resting place. But below the surface, in the frigid blackness, there’d be sounds. Squirming
. Clawing. Biting. Insects and worms would make their way in, make a nest of the inside of my head, and I’d hear them even more then. I wouldn’t be able to scream. I wouldn’t be able to fight them off.
How much time will pass before I find myself there? Hannah and my baby were proof that age means nothing, that even the youngest can dance with death before they’ve had the chance to really live in the first place.
Am I there now?
As soon as it is light out, Emily and I hand out jerky strips to the children for breakfast, then take them outside to sit on the front bench of the wagon while we wait for Pa and Hannah to return. Ma has been waiting inside since dawn came, sitting without a word as she rocks gently in her chair before the fire. Whenever one of us tries to approach her, she waves us off weakly, tells us to keep an eye out for Pa.
The hole in the floor that the ants came up from was tiny, a split in between two boards that was otherwise unnoticeable, but after we saw that the terrible things were gone, we poured hot wax over it to harden anyway.
There are dozens of them still in the dish tub, bloated and shining like red marbles. Most of them were dead last I looked, but some were squirming weakly across the surface of the dirty water in an attempt to cling to the side and each other. I hope they all die slowly.
We sit arm to arm on the wagon bench, with Emily and me on the ends and the children in between us. Nobody speaks. We all concentrate intently on the forest line a mile ahead of us, squinting into the sunlight to search for any sign of life.
I feel as if I should have known something was coming, like the cries in the night were warnings that I did not heed. But how was I meant to prevent the miscarriage, or the ant attack? How was I meant to keep my wits when Hannah transformed into the baby that I saw standing in the prairie that night, with her dead-fish eyes and her ear on my womb, before she nearly flung herself into the fire?
This isn’t a test, or a challenge, or a puzzle to be solved and defeated. It’s just happening.
