The rap on the door jolted her upright and awake in one motion. Hap never knocked. The rapping came again, magnified by the dark, twisted by the wind-blown rain. Loud but not regular enough to be official. As she started for the door, candle in hand, it came again, rattling the hinges in its urgency. One of Hap’s boys, was her only thought as she lifted the latch and let the door swing inward.
A man stood there blinking at the flame and the wash of interior heat over him. He was a hobo, no doubt just off the express. The rain had smeared soot into grotesque shapes over his face. He wore a battered fedora and a wool overcoat three sizes too large and soaked right through. He was holding a rumpled package in his hands as if it were fragile and some kind of offering. He stared at her as if he ought to know her and were waiting for her to confirm his assumption. For a second she was blinded by the whites of his eyes refracting the bent candle-flame.
As she started instinctively back, he stepped forward, and pulling up the canvas flap shielding the gift in his arms, Bradley said in a consumptive whisper, “It’s me, Mama. I’ve come home.”
She fell back as if struck.
“And this is Eddie,” he said, lifting the baby’s face into view.
PART THREE
Eddie
50
1
Granny Coote sat by the window looking over at the altered landscape to the west, wondering vaguely when Mr. Stadler would arrive to begin the transformation, and finally drifting into a doze. “After wars, pestilence,” Cap had told her many times. You were right, for once, she thought. She let the events of that extraordinary month in 1918 pass before her for Cap’s skeptical appraisal.
Sometime in the middle of the night of October 1, Oliver Fletcher sneezed. Just a cold but worrisome nonetheless because Ollie had been gassed at Ypres and returned home with half-a-lung. Young boys stopped him on the street and asked to hear him breathe. By mid-day he was running a fever. Five-year-old Barbie Savage, who’d survived scarlet fever and whooping cough, stopped playing with her china-head doll and asked to be put down for her nap an hour early. Chuck Simmers, delivering bread, felt a stab of pain in his lower back: lumbago. He headed for the Richmond House and some afternoon solace.
There was considerable unease along Charles Street at the sight of dear young Dr. Simon, black bag in hand, hurrying up to the Fletcher house and entering without a knock or by-your-leave. By suppertime everyone knew that Ollie had died: poison gas. A hero.
Still, no one was seen going in or out of the stricken house. It was morning before the undertaker arrived from Sarnia. Mrs. Carpenter, a lifelong friend, was observed about noon on her way to Mrs. Fletcher’s with a soup tureen, still steaming. Barbie Savage refused to get up from her nap. A fever took hold of her in the early hours. Dr. Simon rushed in. Neither of the Savage twins was seen on the streets that evening. Chuck Simmers had to be carried home from the hotel in his wagon. He swore he’d only had two drafts. By morning his wife had covered him with three blankets and he was calling for more. By the time Dr. Simon arrived, his lips were beginning to turn blue, a deep lassitude had taken possession, and he mistook the doctor for his horse. Mrs. Simmers locked the children in their rooms.
Some sort of collective distemper seemed to have struck the village. Sailors just off the boats were ordered to stay on the docks. Two who slipped undetected into the Mens at the Richmond House found themselves in a scuffle, then a punch-up in the alley, and finally were dragged to the wharf and dumped. Any stranger on the street was eyed with suspicion, rudely dealt with by junior clerks, welcomed out of town. Among friends, customers and neighbours tempers were short: a lifelong word misunderstood, taken wrongly, newly resented. “The war’s been goin’ on too long,” grocer Redmond said to his wife before bed, “people are gettin’ squirrely.” “Too many false stories about an armistice,” Maxie Wise opined to his wife already in bed, “You can’t keep raisin’ people’s hopes like that.”
Next day while the hearse carrying Ollie Fletcher’s body to the cemetery passed by a weeping crowd of mourners along Michigan Ave., news arrived of the deaths of little Barbie and Chuck Simmers. Turned blue an’ died, both of ’em, the rumour rippled west to east following the black cassion of the fallen soldier. Flu.
Granny heard the church bells tolling their dark news. She saw the hearses from Sarnia passing her house en route to one of the three churches on the main street. She saw the toy coffin being carried from the Savage’s house. She saw the white wreath on the door. She tried to make room in her heart for the grief of a child’s death. It was hard.
For days no one seemed to pass by her window, at least not while she was looking. The recess bell from the school stopped ringing in mid-morning. Twice more that week she was roused by a carillon of death – all three belfries lamenting in unison. Dr. Simon went into the Savage house again. He was wearing a surgical mask. That Sunday no bells proclaimed heaven to the faithful. Two figures in white – masked – hurried past and into Mrs. Carpenter’s next door. A mother’s cry scattered the eerie Sunday silence. For two years now Granny had not ventured beyond the front gate or the back hedge. Her tongue had paralyzed itself. She had nothing to say. She had nothing to give.
On Monday morning she went out to look at the village.
The sun was bright, the air dry and warm. She was alone on St. Clair Street. Not a soul stirred on verandah or waved from hedge or fence. Not a single door or window stood open to the breeze, to the rare sweetness of autumn. As she passed familiar doorways, she felt curtains part and fall behind her. Leila Savage, eyes red-rimmed above her gauze mask, kept her glassy stare aimed straight ahead as she went by. She was carrying a crockery pot wrapped in a towel. On Michigan Ave. several figures, head down, walked briskly towards some overweening imperative, as if any contact with the streets themselves were irrelevant, hazardous even. Several women came out of the back entrance of the Anglican Church – not saying a word – reached the sidewalk and parted company silently, pretending their momentary meeting was accidental. The town gossips, she thought, amazed. She turned into the churchyard. Alien ground. A chill, all over. She was walking on the moon, the back side.
In the vestibule she heard the minister’s wife say that they had more food than they could use, wasn’t it wonderful how generous people were in a crisis, and so on, but they needed volunteers to take it into the worst houses, some of which, like the McLeod clan farther down the Lane, had not been checked at all – perhaps they were all dead. She felt the astonishment of the Anglican ladies upon her as she reached out for a tureen of soup. Mrs. Stokes handed her a mask. She shook her head no. It had begun. Without a word.
On this part of the Lane noise was usually continuous and varied: babies crying in several keys of displeasure, the shouts of unincarcerated children, the bawl of a calf or pig or battered wife. At this moment not even the chickens flicked an eyelid. Here silence had become something positive, not an absence but an embodiment of something foul oozing out of the cracks in the house, under the doors, through a fist-size hole in a window-pane, and settling over the styes and coops and hutches where animals squeezed in the darkest corners and watched, without hope.
She walked briskly. There was need. She stepped over the debris in the yard of Jessie McLeod’s shack, wishing she could call out some warning, some comforting salutation. She banged the tureen, still steaming, against the door. No sound from within. She turned the knob and leaned inward. Then she glanced down and saw the jamb that had been wedged against the world. She waited. She heard breathing on the other side of the door, shallow but quick. A child’s. ” She fought the urge to speak, knowing what chaos that would bring. Instead she began to hum, searching for a tune and keeping her voice soft and lullaby-low. Something ticked – tentatively, weakly – at the shim. It popped loose. Seconds later, still humming, she felt the door drawn backwards into whatever fear had seized the interior and its inhabitants. She saw a black-haired McLeod child. No mistake. A girl about five-years-old.
Granny
smiled or at least she thought she did because the child did too. Granny edged into the gloomy ‘front room’ of the shack.
“Mommy won’t wake up,” the child said. “We’re hungry but Pa says he’ll whip us if we go out.” She began to weep, not in the sobbing, physical manner of children but in the quiet, foreknowing way of stricken adults.
Granny put her hand on the little girl’s shoulder: the touch was electric. She strode to a table, put the food down, and went through some curtains into a bedroom. Jessie – barely thirty, one of Eddie’s playmates – lay propped up on two filthy pillows, her eyes closed, feigning sleep, feigning peace – for the children’s sake. Beside the bed was a home-made cradle. Granny reached down to grasp the baby’s hand. It was as stiff as a doll’s. Closing the curtains, she went into the next room. Three mattresses, salvaged from the dump, had been laid out on the floor. Sam McLeod – Jessie’s second cousin, sweetheart, then husband – lay naked on one of them, shivering and moving his lips in soundless, misshapen moans. His three boys were huddled under covers nearby, alive but unable to acknowledge her presence, their eyes glazed, all their weeklong aching passed into painless languor. She felt for fever, there was none. One of the boys, the youngest, let his eyes loll over to try to take her in. Through his puffed lips she heard him whisper: “Are you an angel?”
Granny set about her work, little ‘Claire’ at her heels. Pillows were improvised so the boys could be propped up, washed and fed a drop or two of soup. Sam was made warm and as comfortable as possible. He couldn’t take any food. Claire ate ravenously, and turned chatty. Granny sent her in to cheer up her brothers while she washed and wrapped the bodies in the other room. Then she went next door to Katie McLeod’s. Katie’s face appeared in the window. “We’re all right,” she mouthed. “Go away, please.” Granny gestured and pointed towards her sister-in-law’s place, trying to convey with her eyes the dread news. The curtain was whipped shut. Moments later a male voice said: “Get out of here, old woman, an’ leave us alone!”
She walked all the way back to young Dr. Simon’s house on Alfred Street. She sat on the stoop and waited for him to return. Out of the surgery window his nurse glanced from time to time, not unkindly. Young Dr. Simon, the first physician ever to have his residence in the village, pale and solemn, followed her to the Lane. When he had finished inside, he said to her, “We need you very much, Mrs. Coote. You come to my office in the mornings if you can, and I’ll tell you where to go and how to help.” He touched her hand, the way Eddie used to when he needed her approval.
People entered the shops singly – no more than one or two or three at any one time in the baker’s or grocer’s or post office. No one deemed a haircut necessary. The clerks stayed behind their barricades, pointing and giving directions. When Granny entered Redmond’s, unmasked and brisk, the few customers trapped there dissolved into shadow behind the pickle barrel or a stack of canned goods, giving out tiny warning coughs every few seconds. Any movement quicker than the cautious, underwater strokes of the fear-struck was enough to send panic rippling through a store or along the fringes of a street. When people did talk, as those in charge had to, they spoke in slow-motion, in tune with their hushed gestures. Still, rumours managed to slide freely along an edge of communal fear, snuffling at doorways, abbreviating gossip, waylaying the weak and faint-of-heart.
It’s the Gerries, that’s what! It’s them new-fangled electrical lights, interferin’ with Nature. It’s the foreigners, we never should’ve let them in. It comes in on the trains, like all our trouble – goddamn the railways! It floats in on the wind: close your windows, close your mouths, close your hearts.
On Sundays the bells held their peace. During the week the whole village waited in dread for their sombre pealing. In Sarnia they had run out of coffins before the ides of the month.
Mrs. Stokes had everything ready for her at the Church each morning, afternoon and evening: food, aspirin, quinine, clean bedding. Dr. Simon was too busy now: he left instructions and disappeared. He looked sixty-years-old, and haunted. One by one the volunteers themselves went down. More were needed; few could be found. Neighbours lived in fear not only of the pestilence – now spread to every street and lane – but of the cry from the door or a child with a name on the verandah begging help, the dreadful decision to be made in an instant and unretractable. Mrs. Carpenter walked down to her sister’s with a bundle of food, and stood for ten minutes on the front porch before entering the diseased rooms within. The next day her whole body went numb. She lay helpless while six-year-old David and the three-year-old peered at her with puzzled faces. Eventually David started to cry; Flora wandered into the shed and began to play with her doll. It was still light when Granny came by – her day spent in ceaseless walking, washing the living and the dead, holding the children stiffly in her arms, and bearing the useless medicines of the day – unable to utter a single word of comfort or goodbye. Flora’s face was pressed against the front window. Granny turned and went in.
Ethel Carpenter was moving into the fever stage. Granny knew each of the stages well. Delirium had set in. Ethel clawed at her, her features distorted, her words jumbled but perfect couriers of rage. When Granny put a cool cloth to her forehead and tried to get some of the quinine down her throat, Ethel grabbed her arms, glared like a maenad, and spat in her face. She swallowed the medicine with a shocked gulp. Granny put the children in their room, soothing them with her abrupt gestures as best she could, and then walked over the marsh to the railway yard, where she got a block of ice and lugged it back in a heavy bag. She ran the tub full of cold water, chipped some ice in, and went to get Ethel. Her ranting had subsided but she was shaking all over, sweat pouring over the gooseflesh, her eyes goitered and stabbing at their tormentors.
By morning the fever had eased off. Granny woke from her doze to the sound of the children playing in the kitchen. She stirred some aspirin into coloured water; Ethel was able to guide it to her own lips. By afternoon the bloated lips were less black and the blotched skin had regained some colour. She felt Ethel searching her face for some sign; she hoped it was there. By suppertime when Granny returned from the Brownings on the far side of town, Ethel was able to take some soup. She was asking for the children. Granny shook her head. She went out to find some supper for them. David looked pale. She took him quickly into his room and then set up Flora’s cot in the parlour. Flora was cranky. She wanted her mother. She was angry at the old woman who refused to talk. She wanted her brother to pull her in the wagon.
Granny went for the doctor. He was out. The nurse, glassy-eyed herself, said he was near collapse, please don’t bother him. Granny was back at the Carpenter’s gate when she heard the bell over the Presbyterian Church begin its sombre tolling, joined shortly by its sister muses. Flora was sitting on her mother’s bed. Ether was in a deep sleep. Granny lifted the child away and after much difficulty succeeded in getting her off to sleep as well. Then she went in to the boy. The fever and aches were upon him. When she tried to get the medicine down, he vomited all over her. She had just got clean sheets on the bed and the shivering lad loosely covered, when the nosebleed struck. Granny shuddered. It took over an hour to get it stopped. Blood sprayed over her and the bedding and the boy himself as if someone had cracked a fire hydrant. David sobbed, then went silent with terror, then slumped back into an incredulous semi-coma, his eyes wide open, taking in every tick and rustle of movement in the room and in his rebellious body. He’ll die of the fear, she thought. Like the others. Desperately she moved about as if she knew exactly what she was doing and every move were calculated to bring about instant recovery. She held his hand, stroked his brow, set some kind of hope in her face, and tried to forestall the exhaustion and the bone-deep ache threatening to overwhelm her.
When she woke it was dawn. She felt feverish. Flora was tugging at her sleeve. The boy seemed to be resting. She went across to Ethel. She was sleeping peacefully. She’s dreaming of her husband, and the promised armistice, and reuni
on. Granny went back to check on David; his fever had ebbed, but she could not get the boy to open his eyes. Whenever she touched him, he cried out in a shrivelled, hollow voice, moaned, and went still.
Granny went again for the doctor. He was exhausted and resting for the first time in days. At the Church Mrs. Stokes begged her to take some soup to the McLeod’s, then some quinine and camphor to three other families – with all members stricken – along Albert Street. She stayed on there to cook some meals, stepping over dazed or delirious victims who had selected any convenient spot to lie down and rest and refuse to move. They ogled her like a ghost or wraith whose presence was deemed not a little malign. Their arms floated towards a soup-bowl, then drowned in its weight. Eyeballs bulged, tightened, braced for the siege. Eyes pleaded, called out for explanation, justice, expiation. The children clung to their skirts, and put their fingers against her lips’ refusal.
When she got back to Carpenter’s it was almost dark. David’s lips were swollen shut, his skin was scorched, and his eyes were squeezed tight against all the terrors the night would bring, but one. He opened them once, saw the dark angel bending down, then closed them for good. When the sun nudged her awake in the morning, Granny looked upon the dead boy, then his mother – awful in the doorway. Ethel Carpenter stared not at her son but at Granny; her look said: what right have you to save me and not him? Who are you anyway? When Flora came skipping up behind her and grabbed her mother’s skirts in play, Ethel whirled and slapped her across the face. Granny started towards the stunned child, and Ethel glared again at her as if to say: there, you see, you don’t have it all to yourself. The child’s scream was piercing enough to startle the dead.
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