“I know, but I think he regrets that decision. And I know you do—I’ve seen the way you look at him. I’d hoped that it was over between you.” Her eyes, at the same time bright with fever and anger, narrowed into slits of rancor.
Astounded by the accusations and Amy’s dudgeon, Jess pressed her lips into a tight line. “It is over. He broke it off between us and began courting you. Your imagination is running away with you because you’re sick. Please put the thermometer back in your mouth.”
“You always got everything you wanted, didn’t you?” Amy went on, ignoring Jessica’s direction. The pitch of her voice climbed with her agitation. “You got all of Daddy’s time and attention. I was the boring daughter with more homey interests. I remember you two in his office, staring into a microscope for what seemed like hours at some disgusting blob on a slide. As far as he was concerned, I was just someone who lived under the same roof. When Mother died, I might as well have been part of the furniture. He was proud of you, he bragged about you until he died. But after you left, Cole got tired of waiting for you and he finally noticed me. He realized how much more I could offer him as a wife. At least I thought he did.” Vitriolic resentment poured out of Amy like the long-simmering infection from a lanced abscess. “I should have known you’d try to lure him away, even though I’ve loved him since I was twelve years old!”
Jessica’s heart thumped in her chest, giving her a sick, breathless feeling. Her mouth was dry with shock. This woman was not her sister. She had never heard Amy utter a harsh opinion about anything or anyone. “Maybe Cole shouldn’t marry at all,” she replied coolly, trying to maintain her composure. “Have you thought about that?”
“No! It’s not true. He should marry me. He gave me these earrings! I wish now you had never come back.”
“I’m sure you do. You probably didn’t spend any sleepless nights worrying about my feelings before you beat a path to Cole.” Jessica hadn’t meant to blurt that out, but she wasn’t going to let Amy use her as a whipping post.
Amy stood up and threw the thermometer on the floor. Shards of glass and gleaming beads of quicksilver skittered around their feet. “You didn’t deserve him. You went off and left him. I gave him a chance to understand how a real wife should behave, a doting, obedient, loving wife.”
“A real wife,” Jess repeated with no little asperity.
“I’m going home.” A sudden burst of coughing interrupted her tirade. When she recovered her breath, she added, “Mrs. Donaldson might not be a blood relative, but I’d rather have her take care of me than my own kin.”
Jessica reached out to stop her. “Amy, wait. I want to at least go back with you to—”
Amy threw off her hand. “Thank you, no. I will manage myself.” She rearranged her shawl like a queen adjusting her robes, though the ends hung limp and uneven. She walked out to the waiting room.
Jess followed her. “Amy, don’t be foolish. You could be ill, and I don’t want you walking home alone in this rain.”
A glassy-eyed, wild-haired stranger spun to face her. “I don’t answer to you, Jessica. I am my own person.”
Both distraught and insulted, Jess watched her sister open the door and walk down the street toward Mrs. Donaldson’s house.
Emmaline heard a knock on her door and caught a quick glance in her filmy mirror before she went to open it. As if her appearance mattered to them. They slapped their money on the bureau or the kitchen table and didn’t pay her much notice as a person. Truthfully, she didn’t notice them either, unless they were too awful to blank out. Or unless they were worth remembering, like Frank Meadows, or Cole Braddock, who hadn’t visited her since that brief spell when he was between sisters. But in a tiny corner of her heart, the part that remained untouched by everything that had happened to her, she still had her pride. She straightened the sash that held her worn dressing gown closed and lowered her eyelids in a practiced expression of sultry interest.
When she turned the knob and pulled open the door, though, her eyes flew wide. The man on her porch had a face she would never forget. And one she’d never expected, or wanted, to see again.
“Hi, there, little lady. I hear you entertain gentlemen.” Lambert Bauer stood there on her stoop, grinning at her with an idiotic leer that she supposed he thought was irresistibly virile.
“Gentleman! You—you a gentleman, Lambert?”
He peered at her, slack-jawed with surprise and looking worse for wear. His clothes were muddy and he had a few days’ worth of patchy beard growing on his narrow, angular face. Time had been no friend to his features.
After gawping for a moment, he found his voice. “Emmaline? Well, by God, Tilly didn’t tell me he was sending me to my own wife for a roll in the hay! What do you think you’re doing, a married woman turned whore? I’ve been looking up hill and down dale for you.”
“Why?”
The question seemed to amaze him. “Why! Because. You’re my woman. That’s reason enough.” He might as well have said that she was his saw or his pocketknife—just another possession. He gripped her forearm with a dirty hand.
“You mean you’re down on your luck and broke again.”
“No, that’s not what I mean.” His whiny, mimicking words dripped with sarcasm, but she could still read him. “Who are you to talk, anyway?” He gestured at her and her little shack. “What the hell do you think you’re up to, turning into a trollop?”
“An abandoned woman has to earn a living. No one died and left me a gold mine or a big inheritance.”
He didn’t look the least bit ashamed or seem to realize he had a thing to do with her present circumstances. “Well, I’m sure not going to pay you for my husband’s rights.” He began to push his way inside. “I’m getting what I came for, so you just go on in there and—”
In an instant, she recovered from her paralysis and pulled her arm away. Memories flooded back, of beatings and cheatings, of arguments and belittling, threats and intimidation. In a surge of anger, fear, and astonishment, she grabbed the loaded shotgun she kept beside the door. She was a fair shot, too. Living in this remote place, if a customer turned mean or a coyote got into her tiny henhouse, no one was going to come to her rescue.
She aimed the double barrels at him. “You get off my porch and keep on going, Lambert. I ain’t your wife anymore. You slapped me around for years and then left me in Parkridge. Our marriage ended that day. I’m long done with you.”
“Is that so?” He straightened, full of righteous indignation. Far too much for a man on the business end of a gun. “Well, I’ve got news for you, missy. You can’t just decide—”
She raised the weapon to her shoulder and pointed it at his weaselly mug. “You git, and don’t come back here again.”
Popeyed, he finally backed down the two rickety steps that led to her door and stood in the yard. His mean face was flushed with rage, but he kept his gaze on the barrels of the shotgun. “I know my rights. I didn’t get no dee-vorce papers and you’re still my wife. I’ll bet that thing ain’t even loaded.”
With hands that were much steadier than her insides, Emmaline aimed at a pinecone hanging from a ponderosa branch above his head and squeezed the trigger. The blast flushed out dozens of birds, and sulfurous blue smoke filled the air. A shower of pulverized seeds rained down on him, making him jump as if he’d been hit by lightning.
“Goddamn it!” He danced around like a man who’d stepped in a hornet’s nest. “Are you crazy?”
“Want me to blow off your hat next?”
“You’ve gotten pretty sassy in the last few years. Well, this isn’t over, Emmaline!” He thumped his chest with his forefinger. “I’ll be back, and I’ll bring the county sheriff with me.”
“Whitney Gannon? He visited me just last month. Give him my regards.” She blasted a branch off the same tree, which missed him by an eyelash when it crashed to the ground. Lambert swore a blue streak, and she got a lot of satisfaction watching his skinny shanks trot him down the d
rive that led to the road.
“This ain’t over!” he shouted again from the edge of the property. He launched this last threat from behind the safety of the overgrown blackberries and weeds before he took off down the road.
Em slammed the door, threw the slide bolt, and sank into the closest kitchen chair. Her heart galloped in her chest so fast and hard, she felt it was all her ribs could do to contain it. Her hands turned cold and shaky. Tremors spread through her limbs, and she shivered on the hard chair. A faint wave of nausea rolled through her. Oh, God…dear God…
She reached for her pack of Lucky Strikes on the table—one of the few luxuries she permitted herself—and lit a cigarette with a hand that held a shaking match. Drawing deep on the tobacco, she sought to calm her frazzled nerves.
Lambert Bauer.
How—why—after all this time, why would he turn up around here? Why wasn’t it over? What could he want with her now? And damn that Virgil Tilly for sending him to her place. Of course, he hadn’t known the connection between her and Lambert.
What about the kids? Lambert hadn’t even mentioned them. Did he know about the boys? She raked a trembling hand through her hair. No, he couldn’t. No one knew about them. Only she and one other person knew where they were. Not that Lambert had ever been a father to them. What kind of man could leave a wife with two little boys and still call himself a father?
It was the hardest thing she’d ever done, letting them go, but it was a decision she’d made with love. Most of what she earned went into a bank account in Twelve Mile to pay for their keep. Sometimes she let herself dream of a day in the future when the three of them would be together again. But Em was nothing if not practical. It wasn’t likely to happen, and pretending that it might only made her heart ache.
She stared at the sagging iron bed on the other side of the room. She’d made that bed many times.
And she’d learned to lie in it.
Over the next few days, Jessica tried every remedy she could think of to treat her patients. In desperation she employed plasters, elixirs, tonics, extracts, and distillations of various sorts. She also dispensed aspirin, over Granny Mae’s objections that it was poisonous. Though everyone received the same diligent treatment and conscientious nursing, some lived, but many died. For all her training and experience, Jessica had no idea why. She’d never seen anything quite like it, but she took to heart each life lost or saved.
Those who clung to life, she silently cheered on, seeing each as a victory over death. Those who did not survive gave her a gloomy sense of defeat. Death vanquished her frequently.
Adam spent much of his time at the infirmary, visiting each sickbed, offering comfort and prayers to the afflicted. She heard him recite the twenty-third psalm so many times, it seemed to have worn a groove in her tired brain. More often than not, though, when she looked up, she caught him watching her expectantly, as if waiting for her to accept his proposal, right then and there. In the midst of this pandemonium, he arrived each day with some small gift for her, a handkerchief, a volume of poetry, a lace doily that had been his mother’s. None was too personal, yet given the circumstances, she found his attention annoying and inappropriate.
Added to all this was the memory of her recent horrible conversation with Amy. Jess tried to console herself with the reasoning that her sister’s words had been flung in haste, and that she was overwrought. But even that wasn’t much comfort.
Late one afternoon, she decided she had to get away for a few minutes, away from the rows of cots with their tossing, delirious occupants. She’d had about five hours of sleep in the past three days, and those hours hadn’t been contiguous. “I’ll be outside, Mae,” she said quietly.
The old woman nodded as she sponged Helen Cookson’s brow with a damp cloth. Horace had delivered her in his wagon when she collapsed at home. Mae stepped in to care for her. Jess didn’t mind. She had enough patients of her own. In any event, some of Mae’s hostility had withered after she’d seen for herself the influenza’s devastation of bodies—the ruptured eardrums, the broken ribs, the hemorrhaging, the indigo pallor.
Still wearing her stained apron, Jess stepped out the back door of the school and massaged the tight muscles in the back of her neck. She pulled down her mask and took a breath of clean, crisp air, trying to clear the sickroom stench from her nose and lungs. The rain had stopped earlier in the day, and now the sky was sharp, crystalline blue, the color that only autumn could produce. Boiling kettles of laundry stood in the grassy area to her left, filled with soiled bedding and gowns. To her right, a galvanized stock tank burned the contents of chamber pots that had been carried outside and set afire with kerosene.
But the universe continued about its business, the sun rose and crossed the sky, and the earth settled down for the peace of winter, completely untouched by the doings of the humans who lived and died upon it.
The moon did not care that men were making war on each other in the trenches in France.
The stars that would appear in a few hours had no concern for those whose lives were being snuffed out like candle flames by an organism no microscope could see.
As she stood there, she wished she’d gone to the front door instead. From this spot she could see the old graveyard that had been here before the school was built. The two were separated only by a baseball field and the low, wrought-iron fence that enclosed the place where so many were now being laid to rest. Every family member she’d ever lost slept beneath its turf—her grandparents, her mother, her father, who’d been her rock and her inspiration. She’d never realized that Amy had so resented it…
As if pulled by an unseen hand, Jess left the back porch and strode across the grassy field toward the cemetery. In a distant, less populated area of the acreage, she recognized Winks Lamont and that dreadful Bauer man, both plying shovels to move mounds of dirt beside a large willow tree. Only their upper torsos were visible as they worked in the graves they dug. Nearby sat three coffins, waiting.
Traditional funerals, with mourners and dignified, elaborate ceremonies, had by necessity turned into assembly line affairs. Those families who wished for a few words to be spoken over their departed loved ones often could not attend because they were sick themselves. The dead had to be buried as soon as possible because it would be so easy for them to stack up, as they had in other cities. So they were put in the ground, their location noted, and plans for more formal rites were put off till some time in the future.
Jess averted her gaze and made her way down the rows to a granite headstone that was newer than many of those here. Just two years old.
Benjamin Andrew Layton, MD
Born July 3, 1860
Died January 15, 1916
Beside his grave was her mother’s. She missed her mother, with her wry humor and loving common sense, but losing her father had affected Jessica most. Fallen leaves fluttered over the graves, driven by a brisk wind, and she wished more than ever that she could talk with him. What would he do, faced with this catastrophe? Was there a treatment, a remedy that she’d overlooked? With her crushing responsibilities and no one to turn to, she had never felt more alone in her life.
Her legs shaking with fatigue, Jessica dropped to her knees beside her father’s grave. “Daddy,” she murmured, reaching out to touch his headstone as if it were a shoulder. “Daddy, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to help these people. They’re dying horrible deaths, no matter what I try.” She talked to him for several moments, telling him of her trials with the epidemic. Then, more haltingly, she whispered the private things in her heart. She rested her forehead on the hand that gripped the stone, and as she spoke in a hushed, almost prayerlike tone, tears spilled down her face.
“I hate Cole for giving up on me. But, God help me, I still have feelings for him.” There. Amy had not been wrong about that. Jess had admitted it, if only to the silence of a grave. But just as it would not repeat her secrets, neither did it give her the counsel she so desperately sought.
“Jessica!”
Hastily, she wiped her tears with the back of her sleeve and looked up. Cole, of all people, trotted toward her with quick, long-legged strides. She frowned. Didn’t he realize he was intruding on her privacy? Despite his other failings, it wasn’t like him to be so dense. As he drew closer, though, she saw that his face was the color of cold ashes.
He stopped on the opposite side of her father’s headstone. “It’s Amy. I drove her here in the truck. She’s got it, Jess, she’s got influenza.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Cole paced the front end of the gymnasium while Jessica and a couple of other clucking, fussing volunteer nurses put Amy to bed in a recently-vacated cot. Though the walls and high ceiling echoed with the harsh, wheezy coughing of those patients who languished behind the curtained-off area, to Cole’s ears Amy’s hack seemed louder and worse than the rest.
He hadn’t been here since the morning he’d helped Jessica move in. Now fully occupied with the sick and dying, the place had the quality of a waking nightmare. God, just the smells of sickness, disinfectant, camphor, and eucalyptus were enough to drive a person out into the street. He’d tied his bandana over his face, more to filter out the odors than to protect his own health. And with the coughing he heard the same awful sound he’d heard the morning that Eddie Cookson died, a peculiar crackling noise some of the patients made as they moved. Before she’d gotten sick herself, Amy had told him the cause was air trapped in the patients’ tissues.
“‘…restoreth my soul…’”
Adam Jacobsen’s voice drifted to him like a distant sound picked up on a windy day.
“‘…the shadow of death…’”
Cole winced at the words.
“‘…thou has laid me in the lowest pit…thou hast afflicted me…’”
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