by Sara Donati
The two youngest had the rash on their necks and cheeks, under their arms, and on the backs of their knees. Bright-eyed with fever and whimpering with headache, they let her run gentle fingers over the rash. It felt like fine sand, slightly rough to the touch. Both boys had swollen tongues, though Peter’s was more strawberry in color while Simon’s was coated white. From both boys Hannah scraped a little matter from their tongues and rashes in folds of paper, to look at under the microscope later.
The scarlet fever hit children hardest, but there was cause to worry about Molly too. She had climbed out of childbed to tend the boys, wobbling about the cabin on unsteady legs and wrapped in all the quilts and shawls she could find. When Hannah insisted on examining her, she found that Molly’s belly was tender, which was by far the most alarming thing she had seen so far this day. For one brief moment Hannah wished fervently that she would look up and see Curiosity at the door.
“I will send Willy for his grandmother Kaes,” said Elizabeth when Hannah took her aside to confide her fears. “Charlie cannot cope with this alone.”
Before they left Hannah boiled a cup of water over the hearth and added some of her precious store of powdered black cohosh root, bought at considerable expense in the city. To this she added a great deal of maple syrup to disguise the bitter taste.
Charlie saw them out onto the porch, his new daughter tucked into the crook of his arm.
He said, “Once Matilda gets here she’ll set things straight. She’s a hellion, is my mother-in-law and the boys are feared of her but it’ll give Molly some rest.”
There was a question Charlie wanted to ask but did not dare; Hannah saw that clearly on his troubled face. Charlie was afraid to hear what Hannah might say; Elizabeth was biding her time. She was afraid too, but she would come looking for the truth, no matter how it frightened her.
When they were out of Charlie LeBlanc’s hearing Hannah stopped, put down her bag and basket, and placed both hands on her stepmother’s shoulders to look into her eyes. Elizabeth was far away in her thoughts, with Robbie on the summer evening that he died. Malignant quinsy, Richard Todd had written in the record book he kept for the village. Robert Middleton Bonner, age two years. And below that: Falling-Day of the Wolf longhouse at Good Pasture, age sixty-two years.
“It is not quinsy.”
Elizabeth’s complexion, always pale, lightened to the shade of thin milk. She looked away, and back again. “You are sure?”
Hannah said, “You know that quinsy comes with swelling in the neck—” Elizabeth flinched, but Hannah pushed on anyway. “And we saw no such swelling in any of the sick we saw today. The symptoms we have seen are fever, headache, sore throat, a bright red tongue, and rash. You saw the rash yourself; it looked like a sunburn. The doctors at the Almshouse called it scarlet fever. Not quinsy,” she added firmly.
Elizabeth nodded. “Yes, I saw the rash.” There was a tic in the muscles of her jaw, as if her fear of the disease that had killed her youngest child lived just beneath her own skin.
After a moment Hannah took up her things and they began to walk again.
“You have seen this scarlet fever before?” Elizabeth’s voice was slightly hoarse and Hannah understood that she had forced herself to ask the question.
“I saw three cases in the city.”
Little girls, she might have added. All dead now, and no doubt their brothers with them. Dr. Savard had requested her help and she had followed, winding through the narrow lanes to the tumbledown houses near the East River where many immigrants lived. A cellar damp with river water and sweat and urine, so crowded that many slept sitting upright. The sick children had been shunted off to a dark corner, two girls and a boy, grimy faces streaked clean by fever sweats. A mother huddled nearby with the rest of her children pressing into her. Dr. Savard spoke to her in a combination of French and German and English, but there was no way to make her understand what he had to say.
Hannah hadn’t thought of those children for so long, and that bothered her almost as much as the certainty that none of them had survived. What did it mean that she could put those faces out of her mind so completely?
After a long time Elizabeth said, “None of the sick we’ve seen today have been vaccinated against the smallpox, did you note that?”
“Yes,” Hannah said. “I did notice.”
Neither of them said aloud what they were thinking. If any of the villagers got the idea that the vaccinations to prevent smallpox had caused canker rash, there would be panic—and worse—to deal with. Hannah should have been reassured by the fact that thus far scarlet fever had shown itself only in those who were not vaccinated, but instead she felt only a deep unease.
“The two things are completely unrelated to each other,” she said, to comfort Elizabeth and herself too. “But I suppose that won’t be obvious until someone who has been vaccinated comes down with scarlet fever too. It is a very strange thing to hope for.”
They had come to the orchard that surrounded the Wildes’ cabin. As they passed through neat rows of trees, a small herd of sheep shied away, stumbling away to graze at a safe distance. Bees hummed lazily around their heads, and Hannah would have liked to sit down right where she was and sleep.
But she could see Nicholas sitting on the porch waiting for them. As they got closer she catalogued the things that could not be denied: a face flushed with fever, a rash that covered the wide neck where it rose from the collar of his shirt, and sorrow too heavy to bear.
When they stood in front of him, he swallowed and the muscles in his neck spasmed.
“Your sister?” Elizabeth asked softly.
He blinked hard. “The doctor said for you to come right in, Miss Bonner.” His voice was rough with the effort of speaking. “He said he can’t start the autopsy without you.”
Thank God, Elizabeth repeated to herself again and again. Thank God Lily stayed on the mountain. Thank God the boys are safe away. I must get word to Many-Doves.
To Nicholas Wilde, newly bereaved and in the first stages of scarlet fever, she said other things; she asked him questions about Eulalia’s last hours, and listened as he wept and talked and wept again. She thought of giving him willow bark for his fever; she knew where it was in Hannah’s bag, and it would allow him some relief, but she stopped herself because she understood that what he wanted from her at this moment was nothing more than her willingness to listen.
What Elizabeth wanted was Nathaniel. The urge to get up and begin walking until she found him was so strong that her legs trembled, and it took a conscious effort to make herself stay seated on the neat porch, recently swept. Eulalia had planted lavender along the walkway, reported Nicholas; she took such pleasure in the lambs; she had never thought of herself.
When the first furious tears had been shed he wiped his face on his sleeve and looked at her with bloodshot eyes. “How long will it take?”
Out in the orchard his apple trees bent and flexed under a rising wind.
I have children, Elizabeth wanted to say. I cannot comfort you as you need to be comforted. I should not even sit here with you.
Instead she said, “An hour, or a little more.” And then: “You should be in bed, you are fevered. There is a tea you should take for your throat. I can get that ready for you while the others are—” She broke off. “Come, we must see to your needs. When did you last eat?”
He looked at her in surprise, raised a hand to his own brow and touched it thoughtfully. “Bump gave me some broth. He told me to go lie down in the barn and wait until he came for me.” He stood, and steadied himself on the post. “But I have to dig her grave. My sister’s grave.”
Elizabeth stood too, ready to support him if he should fall and hoping fervently that he would not. She said, “You have neighbors to help you, Mr. Wilde. What you must do now is to follow Dr. Todd’s orders and take your rest.”
Nicholas Wilde could not be left alone, and Hannah knew without asking that Elizabeth could not be prevailed upon to sta
y with him. As soon as she was able, she would fly away up the mountain to warn Many-Doves to keep the children at Lake in the Clouds.
Maybe Bump understood too, because he offered to stay behind and nurse Nicholas. Hannah would have hesitated to accept without explaining to him first what it meant to say that scarlet fever was contagious, but Richard Todd was not concerned.
“I’ll send somebody down to dig the grave,” he told Bump. “And most probably Anna McGarrity will see to the laying-out.” He turned to Elizabeth. “You won’t be any help here, and Hannah and I have work to do. Go home to your family.”
Even Richard understood, but Elizabeth’s expression was equal parts frantic need to be away and concern for the situation at hand.
To Hannah Elizabeth said, “Send for one of us when you are ready to come home to Lake in the Clouds. Do you understand me?”
It took a moment for Hannah to make sense of the warning. The mill, she remembered suddenly. The robbery. Manny Freeman. Ambrose Dye. It seemed very long ago and very unimportant. But she nodded anyway, because it made no sense to give Elizabeth new cause for worry. “I will send word.”
With an impatient toss of his head Richard said, “We have to visit every family in Paradise. God knows how far it’s spread already. It may be full dark before we’re done. She’ll sleep at the house where I can call on her if I need her.”
Irritation and indignation flickered in Elizabeth’s eyes, and Hannah was almost glad to see evidence that she was not completely overwhelmed by her fear.
“Hannah will come home to her family to sleep in her own bed,” she said, looking Richard Todd directly in the eye. “Or, if she chooses, she will stay here in the village. She is not an indentured servant to jump at your bidding, and I will thank you to remember that.”
“Christ save me from the Bonner women,” Richard muttered, turning away. “How Nathaniel lives with more than one of you I’ll never know.”
When Elizabeth came home, breathless and so overwrought that it seemed she would never be able to speak again, the men were gathered around the cold fire pit between the cabins. All the men: Strong-Words, Strikes-the-Sky Hawkeye with Lily in his lap. Runs-from-Bears with his two youngest. Ethan, Blue-Jay. Daniel. Nathaniel.
With such elation and fear all at once, Elizabeth wondered if it was possible for a heart to shatter like cold glass dropped into boiling water. What she wanted more than anything else in the world and what she feared: all her people together here while in the village sickness took hold. Again. Like a snake uncoiling itself from a winter’s rest. This time it called itself by another name (different names, she corrected herself: scarlet fever and canker rash and strawberry tongue), but she was not fooled.
Daniel reached her first, his joyous expression replaced by hurt when she stepped away from his reaching arms. She had spent the day comforting sick children, wiping their faces, spooning tea and broth onto tongues swollen red and rough; how could she embrace her son? But he did not hear her warnings or did not want to understand them. He was enough of a boy to want his mother’s arms, and something small and tender broke in Elizabeth when she had to refuse him.
Nathaniel came running to scoop him up, a boy too tall to be held like the child he was and would always be to them.
“Let your mother get cleaned up,” he said. “And then we’ll sit together and talk.”
Nathaniel followed his wife into the cabin while the boys went to draw water for the bath she must have. She paced up and down while the buckets came and went and the cold water rose in the hip bath, refusing to wait for it to heat, refusing to speak at all until the task was finished and the door had closed behind them.
“Whatever it is, Boots, spit it out before you burst.”
Generally Elizabeth tended to underplay her worries, maybe because she thought if she could convince other people things weren’t so bad she’d start to believe it herself. But she was scared to the bone and whatever tricks she had to calm herself were no good at all: the story poured out of her while she stripped to the skin and climbed into the cold water. Young Eulalia Wilde dead, Molly LeBlanc down with childbed fever, the names of the children sick with canker rash: Joseph, Solange, Emmanuel, Lucy, Peter, Simon, Mary, Faith.
Not quinsy. She said it so often that he wondered if she even heard herself.
In the full heat of a summer afternoon she shivered and shook, gooseflesh rising across her chest and arms. She asked for the common soap but he gave her one of the fine bars scented with lavender that her cousin had sent from the city. It slipped from her fingers once and then again until Nathaniel took it from her.
While he washed her back and rubbed soap into the sodden masses of her hair she talked and talked through chattering teeth and he listened.
When she had finally used all the words she had and he had finished rinsing her—more cold water—he helped her up, wrapped her in a blanket, and carried her to their bed.
The last thing she murmured to him before she fell asleep was the thing he feared most. She said, “We have to go away from here. We have to take the children away from here. I’m so sorry, Nathaniel, I’m so sorry but I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”
For all the years since Elizabeth had agreed to be his wife and raise a family at Lake in the Clouds, Nathaniel had waited for the day she would have enough of such a rough life. There had been times when he could not keep this to himself and she had always laughed at him, hushed his worries with kisses or gentle ridicule or irritation. She missed nothing at all about England or the grand house where she had been raised; she wanted no finery or carriages; her books were better than theater or opera. She had her family, her friends, her school, more than she had ever imagined. What place had more to offer? she demanded to know. The only person in all of Paradise who would argue this point with her was Kitty Todd.
And still sometimes he saw something in her expression that he could not explain away. A yearning, a curiosity about the world. When Hawkeye spoke of going west she listened with eager eyes; when she read the papers from the city to them at night a new light came into her face. Nathaniel was not the only one to see this or even to point it out to her, but her shock was always genuine. The endless forests were enough of a frontier for her; she had no urge to take her children west, or anyplace else for that matter. All of them had been born at Lake in the Clouds and here their youngest child was buried; this was where they belonged.
Now Hannah stood on the cusp of leaving them, and Hawkeye would take that opportunity to leave them too. He would follow his granddaughter west but when she settled with the Seneca he would walk on, walk west until he came to the end of the world. An itch deep in the bone was how he put it when they talked about it in the last few days. Walk or die, he had said in the language of his childhood, a language he spoke now only when he had things of the greatest importance to share.
Nathaniel had gone to Many-Doves with this, as he had gone to her mother before her when he needed that particular kind of wisdom. Many-Doves had once been his sister-in-law, but she would always be the daughter of Falling-Day and the granddaughter of Made-of-Bones; had she chosen to leave this place and go live among the Kahnyen’kehàka who had made a new home for themselves in Canada, she would be a clan mother by now, a woman with the sight, his mother would have said. A dream-walker.
At thirty she was beautiful still, so much like Nathaniel’s first wife that sometimes when he caught sight of her unexpectedly he felt a twist in his gut. If Sarah had lived. Sometimes the sentence presented itself to him, but he could not think beyond those few words. Could not think away the life he had now, because he wanted no other.
Many-Doves had listened to his worries, and when he was done she had taken some tobacco from the pouch around her neck and thrown it into the fire. While she watched it burn she said, “They will go, and you do not want to stop them, not in your heart. The time has come.”
A truth as hard as a hickory nut. And now another: sickness in the village, and E
lizabeth in a restless sleep where she searched for a safe place to raise her children. A place that must exist, because she would have it so. Because she had such faith in him, that he could find that place.
Elizabeth woke to the sound of children laughing in the dusk.
She pulled a dress over her head and went bare-legged out to the porch to watch them under the falls. The heat of the day had begun to give way, and she was glad of the breeze on her bare skin.
The children—her own, Many-Doves’, Ethan—were shouting above the noise of the water, calling out dares to each other in English and Kahnyen’kehàka. Their joy was as clear and palpable as the cool air that came off the falling water.
The men crouched around a new fire, deep in conversation. All of them turned watchful eyes to the children, calling out easy words of encouragement now and then. Other men—white men, Elizabeth corrected herself—would shout warnings, directions, commands. She herself had called out such things. Over time she had come to understand that her fear prevented nothing, achieved nothing useful.
Ethan climbed up on the boulder the children called Hump Nose, the highest point from which they were allowed to dive. From there he waggled both hands frantically in her direction until she raised her own hand in response.
He went into the water as naked and slink as mink, browned skin glistening and his water-darkened hair streaming behind him. Blue-Jay followed with a screeching whoop with his little sister close behind. Then Lily, her hair a wild fury trailing around her head, over her shoulders to the small of her back. Daniel stepped into place and paused to look out, naked but for a breechclout, fists on his hips. Surveying his kingdom.
What Elizabeth saw was this: Nathaniel’s face raised to watch his son, as he might watch the moon rising, unable to hide his wonder.
As if he heard her thoughts he got up from the fire and came to sit behind her on the porch, wrapped his arms around her and rested his chin on her shoulder. She could not see his face like this but she didn’t mind, as long as she had his voice at her ear, low and sure.
