15. Linnea
Linnea
In a matter of days, Linnea turned into a living corpse.
Eyes sunken, dark and soulless. The lines of her face so deep and stark she looked like a woman three times her age.
When she did move, it was the slow, shuffling steps of an old, broken woman.
But even that became too much, and she collapsed with nary a whimper.
From there she was picked up and carried to the bed, her body hot as a furnace.
Her fever raged for nine days. Nine anxious, fraught days.
Maretta was sent for. She took one look at the burns on Linnea’s hands and declared them pestilent. Maggots were fetched and applied to the wounds. Over the next few days various broths and tonics were force-fed to her as she slipped in and out of consciousness.
I watched helplessly.
Maretta came and went, came and went, her manner growing grimmer with each visit.
Isak and his sister kept watch and tended to her. Linnea’s mother was fetched and carried into the house by one of her burly nephews. Left in a chair beside her daughter’s bed, she did very little beyond sitting and weeping into her hands.
“Come, Linny,” I whispered beside her ear. Her body radiated heat. Sweat dotted her skin, and I could feel that, too—the moist boil of her as her fever raged. “You can’t give up. You have the children and Isak . . . so much to live for.”
My words never reached her. No one and nothing did.
Her breathing slowed, thinning and fraying like the threads of a rope coming undone until she slipped away. Until she was gone.