Chapter 10
Clara lifted the wash-boiler lid and the steam went up into her face, and she stood in it a moment with her eyes shut because it was warm and because for that one moment she did not have to look at anything.
Behind her a child was breathing wrong. She had learned to hear it now the way she had once heard a flat note across a schoolroom — she could pick the tearing breath out of a full room without turning her head, and she turned her head anyway, and it was the Purcell boy, and he was no worse than an hour ago. She let the lid down.
Boil, wring, hang, carry, boil again. Nobody kept the days by the calendar anymore; they kept them by the boiler, which ran dawn to dark and was the nearest thing the town had to a clock.
The steam never left her hair. She slept two hours and woke with it still in her clothes, and could not, when she tried, call up what the town had been a month ago — a place that fretted over the price of nails and whose sow was in whose wheat — or believe it would ever be that place again.
Most days now Clara worked without Calder.
She came in gray at dawn, looked down the throats that had turned in the night, gave Clara her orders for the day, and was gone again to the far houses before the kettle was filled — one house past the ford, another out at the county line, wherever the word said it had struck worst. The church she left to the Reeves.
She realized one morning that she had been sleeping on the cot in the vestry and he on the pew outside its door, close enough to hear each other breathe, and that neither of them had arranged it or remarked on it.
In April they had drawn a line down the middle of the cottage and guarded it like a border.
Now they slept ten feet apart in a cold church and it meant nothing, or meant everything, and there was no hour in the day to decide which.
She got up and stirred the fire and filled the boiler.
He was awake and reaching for the axe before she had the lid off.
Neither of them said good morning; the morning was already going.
Deep in one night a mug appeared at her elbow in the dark.
She drank without looking up, and it was sugared right — three weeks of sharing a wash-boiler and he had it exactly, and she had never once told him how she took it.
She looked up then. He was already gone back to the fire.
She drank the coffee and said nothing, and it sat warm in her a long while after the cup was empty.
Later that same night she caught him with a hand braced on the pew-back, his color gone bad.
She cut bread and carried it down and stood over him until he ate it.
Near morning she fell asleep on her feet against the wall between one child and the next, and woke with his coat over her shoulders and him nowhere in sight.
She wore it till dawn and gave it back without a word, and he took it back the same way.
Once, lifting a sick child between them onto a clean pallet, their hands landed on the same small back at the same moment, his over hers, and stayed a breath past the lifting. Then the child cried and they let go and it was gone, back into the work with everything else.
There was never a quiet minute to stop and say any of it. It surfaced in the dark and sank again unsaid — a look held a beat long, a hand not pulled back as fast as it might have been. Clara was glad of that, or told herself she was.
The Garretts' little girl died in the second week, carried off in a night.
Cole read over her in the rain with his voice coming even and steady, the thing he was for.
Her mother stood at the head of the hole with her hands hanging at her sides and would not be got away from it.
It was after, when the yard had emptied and he believed himself alone, that Clara saw the steadiness go — not loudly, only his shoulders coming down and his hand going flat to the churchyard fence as though the fence were the thing holding him up.
A month back she would have gone to him bright and filled the air and spared them both.
She did not. She had learned better, and only just in time.
She went and stood beside him at the fence and said nothing at all, and after a while his breathing came back level.
"She never could carry a tune," he said, to the fence and not to her, "and it never once troubled her.
" "I know," Clara said. And that was all of it, and it was more than the two of them had said to each other in a month.
It came for her in the night, in the third week, just when she had let herself stop expecting it.
She woke before dawn on the cot in the vestry with her throat closed to a straw and a heat in her that was not the stove.
She lay still. She put her hand to her own neck, as she had put it to a hundred small necks that month, and the glands stood up under her fingers, swollen and sore.
She swallowed, and it was like swallowing a live coal.
So this was it, then.
There was nobody to be bright for. She understood that first, lying in the dark — no room to fill, no face across a table to keep from the fear, only herself and the thing in her throat and the long gray stretch before anyone would come.
She had spent her whole life making certain she was never left alone in a room with something hard.
Now she was alone in the plainest way there was, and the brightness was not even there to reach for.
It had gone where the carefulness had gone.
There was nothing left to meet the fear with but the fear itself.
So she lay in it. She did not talk herself round it, or make a story of it, or hunt for the funny side, because there was no funny side to this, and no one to perform for if there had been.
She was eighteen and she believed she was dying, alone, in a church that smelled of lime, and she let herself believe it all the way down to the bottom of the thought — and then she stayed there with it, awake, until the window went gray.
It was the longest she had ever sat still inside her own fear.
Nobody would ever know she had done it. She did it anyway.
Calder found her at first light, come to wake her for the shift, and did not fuss.
She laid the back of her hand to Clara's forehead and her thumb to the swollen glands.
She took up the lamp and tipped Clara's chin and looked a long time down her throat — longer than Clara could hold her jaw open — and then she sat back on her heels.
"There's no membrane," she said.
"My throat?—"
"Is a bad throat. Red as fire and swollen and hurting like sin, and not a thread of gray in it anywhere.
If the diphtheria had come for you there'd be a skin building at the back by now.
There isn't. I've looked down enough of them this month to know the difference in the dark.
" She sat all the way onto the cot, which Clara had never once seen her do.
"It's a quinsy, or the near cousin of one.
You've worn yourself past standing, and a throat took the chance.
You'll be wretched three days and then you won't."
Clara began, to her own disgust, to cry — not the pretty kind. The kind that came up out of the floor of her and shook her.
"I thought?—"
"I know what you thought. You had the look of it on you.
" Calder let her cry and did not pat her.
"Some take this sickness and some don't. And the some that don't — half of them had it once already and never knew, a bad throat in childhood that nobody put the right name to.
" She got up, her knees cracking. "Were you ever down like that as a girl? A throat so bad they feared for you?"
"I don't—" Clara stopped. "That whole winter's a fog to me. The winter Mother died. I was eight. I remember being sick, and I remember the house going wrong, and I couldn't tell you now which was which."
"Then it's your sister who'll remember, not you." Calder was already at the door. "I'll send word across to the Holt place. Not near it. Word." She looked back. "You lie there and be sick and be no good to anybody for three days. It'll do you good. You've forgotten the way of it."
The answer came the next day, left on the church step by a well child who did not wait. Clara read it on the cot, propped on the vestry pillow, her throat a banked coal.
You were eight. It was the winter we buried Mother, the worst this family ever had, and in the middle of it you took a throat, and by the third day you could not swallow and your neck swelled so I could not do up your collar, and you burned.
I was a grown woman and holding the whole house alone, because Father had gone off somewhere inside himself and did not come back for the better part of a year.
I sat up with you nine nights and did not once put you down.
I thought I would lose you on top of losing her, and I never told you how near it came.
I am telling you now because Mrs. Calder says it may matter.
Whatever it was, you had it, and you lived, and I am the one who held you through it.
I would come and hold you through this if they would let me within a mile of you.
Since they will not, I am sending Nathan to leave a thing on the step.
Get well. Come and let me look at you with my own eyes.
Folded inside the paper was a twist of waxed cloth, and inside that a spoon of sugar and a short stick of peppermint, the striping worn pale where a thumb had rubbed it soft on the long walk in.
It was for a throat that could not swallow — the comfort they must have given her, that winter she could not remember, when she was eight and burning and Lydia would not put her down.
Nathan must have walked into the store and bought the nearest thing to it, on Lydia's saying, because Lydia had remembered what a burning eight-year-old could be got to swallow when nothing else would go down.
She held the soft peppermint and did not eat it and cried again, quieter now.
Then she slept — the first true sleep in three weeks — and woke past noon knowing that she would live.
She was three days wretched, as promised, and then she was not. She went back to the wash-boiler thinner and slower and harder to knock down.
The sickness was burning itself out by then.
Fewer new throats each week; the ones that had it were mending or were past mending, and the ones past mending were carried out quiet, at the early hour, with only Cole and the family at the hole.
The town began in small ways to be a town again.
A man mentioned his oats. Two women fell to arguing over a receipt at the store, a receipt being once again a thing worth the breath.
The church, stripped down one side for a month, had empty pallets in it for the first time.
Calder was away past the ford, at a place where the whole family had gone down at once and someone had to sit them, and so it was Clara and Cole at the wash-boiler late on what they would afterward know was the last hard night, feeding the fire low because there was little left to boil.
Neither of them said the thing was ending; saying it felt like daring it back.
They stood in the smell of steam and lye with the paddle between them, worn down to almost nothing, and he looked at her — straight on, none of the polite angle he kept for everyone else — and she looked back, and neither of them had a bright word or a careful word left to put between them.
For a moment it would have taken almost nothing to say the true thing. Neither of them said it.
Then the church door banged.
One of the Ott boys, run the whole way, no wind left in him and his face all wrong.
"Reverend — Miss — you're to come. It's Willie Pritchard. It's took him, and his gran says it's bad, she says his throat's near shut — will you come?—"
Clara had her shawl before the boy was done, and the open space between her and Cole had shut like a door, and three weeks of almost were gone. There was only the road, and the dark, and the boy who could sing.