The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  “I must have left the window open,” she said. “The room felt close. When I came down I forgot…” Tabitha was more apt than any of the others to forget such a thing. She seemed now to forget she was talking in the midst of her own sentence, trailing off to watch the bird with the others.

  It wheeled, brushing the windowpane. It struck the wall and careened off again. Wild motions too large and fast for this space, tracing jagged shapes like symbols from a vast, unknown language. Once the bird had gone, Caroline would have to find someplace else for Tabitha and Julia to sleep, away from the feral air it had spread through this room.

  The bird veered toward the door. Samuel shrank back, and the girls screamed. It veered away again.

  “Sanders!” Samuel called down the stairs. “There’s a bird! A bird, caught in the house!”

  But it was Mrs. Sanders who came up a moment later, carrying a blanket and a broom. “He went into town,” she said, then brushed past them, inside.

  “Oh, be careful!” said Abigail.

  “Of what?” Mrs. Sanders said. She raised the broom and knocked the bird to the floor. She threw the blanket over it. Before Caroline knew what had happened Mrs. Sanders had it pinned in her hand: a small, unfrightening blanketed lump.

  “Thank you,” Caroline said, to this woman who cooked their meals, cleaned their house, caught a trilling heart as if it could do nothing to any of them.

  “Of course, Miss Hood,” Mrs. Sanders said, and went down the stairs to dispose of the bird—living or dead, none of them asked—somewhere outside.

  * * *

  *

  On Friday morning, Samuel began his lesson on the Book of John. He asked the girls to open their Testaments. Beside Caroline against the back wall, Sophia sniffed. Caroline had heard her telling David, at breakfast, that the Lord should be worshipped and not studied.

  “ ‘Nicodemus saith unto Him, How can a man be born when he is old?’ ” Samuel read. “ ‘Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?’ ”

  He surveyed his students with the pensive expression of a man who wanted nothing more than to hear what they might say.

  Eliza said, “Of course he can. Nothing’s impossible.”

  “Nothing?” Samuel said.

  “Nothing,” Livia said, following Eliza’s lead so confidently she didn’t even need to check her face for approval.

  “You believe it to be possible, say, for a twenty-foot man to come walking down the street toward you? For a sea to rise high enough to swallow this barn where we sit?”

  “Possible,” Meg said.

  Caroline knew Samuel had intended for them to end up at this acceptance, but not in this dismissive way.

  “If I were to tell you that an enormous python had slithered down the trunk of the tree out front, you would believe me.”

  “If you convinced us,” Felicity said.

  “And how might I go about doing that, Miss Ridell? What would be convincing enough as proof?”

  Then Meg said, “I don’t believe it.”

  She was peering at her own hands, turning them back and forth in the air before her. She turned toward Livia and then Eliza, arms outstretched. Her face was afraid, wondering.

  “Look.”

  So they did, all of them. They looked at the red round spots making their way up Meg’s arms, like the marks of mouths.

  11.

  SPREAD

  When he thought of her he thought first of her graceful hands and, ah, their indescribably delicate motions.

  —MILES PEARSON, THE DARKENING GLASS (P. 292)

  After Meg, it happened quickly. Rebecca collapsed in the garden. When she came in to report this there was a streak of dirt across her cheek.

  Felicity lowered her collar to show her red-pocked neck.

  Julia shifted her skirts to show a rope-burn of red circling her ankles.

  Abigail’s sentences began to tumble into hmms, as if she were questioning or had not heard herself.

  Tabitha buckled at the knee with each step, though she kept taking them, saying, “I can’t make them hold.”

  Last was Livia, whose fingers began twitching. They spidered beside her plate at breakfast. “I can’t control it,” she said, looking down.

  They all said, I can’t control it. I’m not doing it. I don’t know how to make it stop.

  * * *

  *

  “It isn’t an illness, whatever it is,” said Samuel. “We can feel even surer of that than before. So many maladies? There can’t be one physical cause.” Though he was not overly familiar with physical causes. He went into Ashwell and sent Hawkins a telegram this time. “He’ll be here in a matter of days.” He fixed his eyes on Caroline’s. “Days, Caroline.”

  “We can still send them home.” She pictured even as she said this a string of coaches bearing a string of limp, white-faced girls back to their families, like a funeral procession.

  “We will, if it comes to that,” Samuel said.

  He made this coming-to sound like some state clearly distinct from the one they were in. Caroline didn’t see the telegram itself. She wondered how he’d worded it.

  She went to find Eliza, because she feared talking to Eliza and she wanted the feeling of doing something she was afraid of. Eliza had returned them all to that night in the woods somehow, she knew. She had found, lifted, lit the stick again, another version of the stick, burning in some cryptic form, and this time Eliza had put it in all the girls’ hands, and every one of them had used it.

  Eliza was spread on the parlor sofa in a violet dress, reclined and reading. Romeo and Juliet, Caroline saw, and she felt as if she might cry, but that wasn’t the right sort of feeling.

  She sat at the end of the sofa by Eliza’s feet. Eliza lowered her book across her chest. She left her hand pressed to its covers as if she were shocked, though her face was calm enough.

  “Miss Bell, I don’t quite know what to say.”

  Eliza waited.

  “Tell me, do you have any insight into all this? I’m wondering if you can help us, tell us what you think of it. How it seems to you.”

  Eliza, so still, looked to Caroline like part of the sofa. The thick purple fabric of her dress, so heavy; the thick dark of her hair and lips—as if the pale girl inside all that had been brocaded into place.

  “Really, I don’t know,” Eliza said.

  Hidden between her back and the sofa cushion, Caroline’s thumb touched each fingertip of her left hand (today it was the left), trying to pinpoint where the numbness started from.

  “Well, what are your thoughts? You must see that you can’t have all caught a twitching-rash-fainting-fit illness.”

  Eliza ruffled her book’s pages. She was back in act 2. “I’ve been too busy feeling it to be able to think about it much,” she said.

  What does it feel like? Does it feel like what I feel?

  “You haven’t been indulging the feeling, have you? Encouraging the others to indulge it?”

  Eliza’s gaze sharpened. “You think we’re making it up? How could we, even?”

  “I just wanted to be certain you weren’t taking it in some romantic way. You know, being a tribe of Louisas. All of you thinking yourselves doomed heroines, imagining the birds might land all over you”—Caroline smiled a little here to show she knew she was being absurd, and couldn’t Eliza see when she herself was absurd too?—“and carry you off somewhere.”

  Eliza shifted back on her elbows, and her body in motion was a surprise, that she wasn’t sewn still after all.

  “What would you know about going anywhere?” she said.

  * * *

  *

  Snow fell that night. Since Christmas it had been cold but dry, and the new snow coated the bare ground and the trees in a thin gray layer, making them look sa
wdusted, half finished.

  The girls didn’t come into the dining room for breakfast. Instead they went down the stairs and outside, still in their white nightgowns and bare feet, and—as straightforwardly as sleepwalkers, nothing in their bearing acknowledging their own strangeness—sat in a circle on the front lawn.

  Caroline didn’t move for a moment, though she did let loose a sound, a very soft but wild-sounding gasp. Flesh pressed to snow. The bone ache of it. Their girls were punishing themselves and performing the punishment, there on that bright background like a lit stage.

  Caroline went out after and stood before them without speaking for a moment. It was a trick that worked well sometimes in the classroom: letting her wordlessness show them to themselves. Their faces were wretched and pinched. Their nightgowned bodies and feet had already melted away the snow beneath them, and these prints in the grass had the dark wet look of holes in which they were all levitating. Though no one spoke, it wasn’t completely quiet because of the hmm-hmm that Abigail couldn’t stop—and not quite still, because Livia’s hands crawled on her lap, and Tabitha’s legs bounced beneath her, a slight wave bobbing the rest of her body. Behind them, Caroline saw two trilling hearts on the stretch of dry ground under a pine tree. The birds had folded their legs up and tucked their heads into their wings for warmth. Missing their nest, perhaps.

  She should have called for the other teachers before coming out here. It hadn’t even occurred to her, she’d moved with such panic, but it didn’t work well to have no plans when standing in front of one’s students. The derangement of all this skin on snow made her dizzy. This was a thing only diseased girls would do.

  At last she said, “Really, what is this? Look, even the birds know to keep out of the snow.”

  Now the other teachers had seen. Samuel was running down the front steps and across the grass, David and Sophia behind. “Girls!” Samuel was shouting. “Girls, what are you doing?”

  Less than ideal that all the teachers were outfitted in their heavy brown and black day clothes, their good warm boots, when there sat the barefoot girls in their thin nightgowns. Julia tried to tug the hem of hers over her toes. Where it had gone damp it clung, almost transparent, to the pink domes of her knees.

  “We felt too warm,” said Meg.

  “We thought the cold, some air, might help,” said Rebecca, hugging her arms, showing the backs of her hands, raw and bitten looking.

  “How could it?” said David.

  Caroline stepped forward to lay a hand on Rebecca’s forehead. The skin there did have a hectic heat, more like heat from running than like a fever, as if inside her, unseen muscles worked.

  “All of us just felt all of a sudden that we were choking,” Eliza said. “We thought out here we might breathe easier.”

  “But it isn’t helping,” Felicity said. She looked around at the other girls, and fear pulled her mouth wide. “Is it? Does anybody feel like it’s helping?”

  “I can’t breathe!” cried Rebecca. “I still can’t breathe!”

  Caroline was still standing close enough to touch Rebecca—she put her hand to her shoulder and gripped, because she had the idea Rebecca and then the rest might spring into terrified flight.

  Samuel gathered himself and stood straighter. “Girls, this is foolishness. You’ll make yourselves ill.”

  Eliza laughed. “We aren’t ill already?”

  “I meant—”

  “Do you think we’re choosing this?”

  “Of course not,” Samuel told her. “Of course you wouldn’t. But it can’t be healthy out here for you. I’m sure you must understand that now. It can’t feel the way you’d hoped.”

  Under his gaze they shifted, changing the places where, against the snow, their flesh would be screaming.

  “Oh, girls, let us bring you back in,” Samuel said.

  “It’s too warm, all the bedclothes, the fires,” said Livia.

  “We don’t want to be put back to bed,” Eliza said. “We want the snow.” She sounded unsure now, and so heartbreakingly young.

  “Well, we could take off the heavy quilts,” David said.

  “Tamp the fires,” Caroline added, watching them waver.

  “You can even have the snow,” Samuel said. “We’ll bring you some, with water, in cups. Why not? For the most cooling, lovely drink.”

  Eliza sighed. Then she nodded and extended her arms so David could lift her. He bent and scooped her up as if the problem she posed were only one of relocation: Let me put this here. The other girls got to their feet, wincing, hopping from foot to foot, and followed them back in. Beneath the tree, the birds slept on—if sleeping was in fact what they were doing.

  After the girls were settled in their beds Samuel sent Mrs. Sanders upstairs, bearing to each her own cup. He sat at his desk to work but kept his door open, listening, Caroline knew, for the arrival of Hawkins’s return telegram. In their separate rooms, the teachers read the medical textbooks he’d given them, searching for descriptions of conditions that might apply. “Mental disarrangement,” “menstrual hysteria,” “migraine,” Caroline read. Tapping her fingers on the page, again trying to determine that origin point. Her fifth finger, she thought. The tingling seemed to begin there, spread from there.

  Samuel appeared in the kitchen that afternoon, where Caroline was drinking tea and Mrs. Sanders was working. “If you would,” he said to Mrs. Sanders, “please go up and make certain they’re dressed enough for visitors.”

  “What visitors?” Mrs. Sanders asked.

  “Their teachers.”

  “Why?” asked Caroline, as Mrs. Sanders left to do as requested, as always, her face closed as a stone.

  “Oh good, come, listen,” Samuel said when David and Sophia entered the room. “I’m starting to see what the trouble is. Or rather the trouble with finding the trouble. We’re looking in the wrong places. We need, I think, to look first, quite thoroughly, to the girls themselves, since the difficulty lies somewhere in their own minds. It’s only in sounding those minds that we’ll begin to understand. Perhaps we can help them to inspect their thinking for themselves, find its flaws.”

  “You think they’ll contain their own cures, somehow,” said David.

  “Likely, don’t you think?”

  Caroline expected them to begin pacing, as if it were August again and they were still only dreaming about this school.

  “Both of you—this isn’t teaching,” she said.

  “It might prove not to be so different,” said Samuel.

  “If you think that, I still don’t see why we need Hawkins at all.”

  “Well, we aren’t physicians, of course, Caroline,” her father said, with irritation. “He’ll be able to help us know we’ve found the right way.”

  “Who is he, this Hawkins?” said Sophia.

  “I told you,” said David.

  “But why are you all so sure he can fix this?”

  “He is an impeccably educated—an excellent—” Samuel sputtered.

  “You’d prefer we sent for Reverend North, I know,” said David, his voice rising.

  So Sophia was not present but lying down when the teachers made their first visit, to Meg and Livia in their room.

  Samuel sat on Livia’s desk chair, and David on Meg’s. They pulled them toward the girls, closing in. They were determined to miss nothing. This left Caroline to the foot of Meg’s bed.

  “We’re trying to understand how best to help you,” Samuel said patiently. Caroline placed his posture—the slight lean forward, the tip of the head, the calmness—from the scenes of her disciplining as a child: after she’d once thrown a beloved book of his to the floor in a fit of pique, after she’d spoken rudely to Mrs. Wilmer. “We need to know, first, exactly how you were feeling when all of this began.”

  Livia said, “Oh, dreadful. I’ve neve
r felt worse.” Her twining fingers, at her hairline, seemed to be signaling something. Listen or Stop, Leave or Stay.

  “Dreadful how?” said David.

  “It’s as if my hands aren’t mine somehow.”

  A cold thread slipped down Caroline’s throat. She rubbed that fifth finger with the pad of her thumb.

  “And there’s a weakness at the very center of me. That came first. If you asked me to stand right now I’d fall at your feet, I swear I would. So even before my hands started I knew something terrible was coming.”

  Samuel wrote something in the notebook on his knees. “And you, Miss Sawyer? How did you feel just before?”

  Meg seemed to weigh her words. “For me it was different,” she said. “I felt just the same as always, until I looked down at my arms.”

  She held them up now: that angry red, not raised, its pattern like lichen.

  David leaned closer. “What does the rash feel like? Does it hurt? Itch?”

  Meg shrugged. “A little.”

  Samuel wrote some more. The motion of his hand was jerkier than when he wrote his own words. He looked up. “Girls, this is very important. I would like you to consider how the appearance of your symptoms has made you feel. What particular mental attitude toward them you have been taking.”

  “Mental attitude?” Meg said.

  “Just so. As you saw with the struggles of Christian to comprehend the trials of his journey, the view we take of our obstacles often shapes our path more, even, than those obstacles themselves.”

  “I don’t know,” said Meg.

  “This isn’t like a book,” Livia said.

  “Of course not. But books do reflect our lives back to us.”

  Caroline herself had said that sentence and meant it at other times, but this did not seem like its moment. Even Samuel felt the thud of its landing. “At any rate,” he said, and stood. “If there’s anything more you can tell us about what’s happening to you, tell us, please. We want to be able to help you as best we can.”