Suffer the Children #2
When he was a boy, he’d found a dog half-dead in an alley and though he’d nursed it back to health, it was never quite right, always wary, always expecting the worst. His mother said someone had beaten it when it was a pup, and he ought to do his best to be kind to it, but he ought never to expect too much.
It would always cower at a raised hand, anticipating a beating, no matter how often it got a pat on the head.
Addie never cowered, but she had that same look in her eyes, always wary, always expecting the worst.
“Missionaries, you said?” he whispered as he walked over to her, hiding in the forest until Millie was gone.
“Two men. I don’t like the looks of them.”
“Indigent?” he said. When she looked confused, he said, “Vagrants?”
“No, they were dressed as fine men. I just… I didn’t like their looks. They said they were coming to help us. After…what happened.”
Preacher sucked in breath. “Snake-oil salesmen.”
“Yes!” Addie said. “That’s what they put me in mind of.
Peddlers. We had some a few years back, when they were thinking of putting the railroad through here.
They sold my ma a cream that was supposed to make her look young again and it didn’t work and my pa got so mad…
” She trailed off, her gaze sliding to the side. “It wasn’t good.”
No, Preacher was certain it wasn’t. Not much had been “good” in Addie’s young life.
Sometimes, the wilderness did things to people, especially those like her folks who stayed out there, away from the villages.
People weren’t supposed to live like that.
It was as if the forest got into their blood, leached out the humanity.
He’d been there when they’d found Addie’s parents.
You’d have thought a wild creature broke in.
That’s what they told Addie anyway. Whether she believed it…
Preacher looked down at his foster daughter, holding herself tight as she peered into the forest, watching for trouble. No, he hoped she’d believed them, but he doubted it.
“I’ll go warn the mayor,” he said. “No one needs the kind of comfort they’re selling. Perhaps we can stop them before they reach the village. Can you run home and tell Sophia? She might hear a commotion, and she ought to stay inside and rest.”
“Is she still feeling poorly?”
He nodded. “But if anyone asks, she’s busy writing lessons for when school starts again.”
Addie gave him a look well beyond her years. “I know not to tell anyone she’s unwell, Preacher.”
He apologized and sent her off, watching her go, bow bobbing on her thin back. Their house was across town; it was quicker cutting through the village, but she always took the forest. Once she disappeared, he headed into town.
Sophia was indeed unwell, yet it was no grave cause for concern. Celebration, actually. After three years in Chestnut Hill, her dream had been realized. She was with child. And it could not have come at a worse time.
Preacher strode toward the community hall. That’s where the mayor and his wife would be. Where he ought to have been, even though it wasn’t Sunday. For the past month, he’d spent more time in the hall—which doubled as the church—than he had at home. Tending to the living. Tending to the dead.
So many dead.
These days, the only villager as busy as Preacher was the carpenter, building coffins. Tiny coffins, lined up in the community hall like props for some macabre play—a tragedy unlike anything the Bard himself would have dared put to paper.
Thirty-six dead in a month. One-third of the entire village.
Eight elderly men and women had passed, but the rest were children.
In September, twenty-four children had trooped to Sophia’s class for the year.
When they reopened the school, she’d have six.
And there would be no little ones starting for years after that.
No child below the age of five had survived.
Diphtheria. Not that anyone other than Preacher and Sophia used the word. Here, it was simply “the sickness,” as if there were no other that mattered.
What had Chestnut Hill done to deserve this? How had they offended God?
They had not. Preacher knew that. He’d gone to university.
He knew about Louis Pasteur and the role bacteria played in disease.
That was why Sophia had disbanded school as soon as they realized it wasn’t merely children’s coughs and colds.
That was why they had urged the town to quarantine the sick.
They had not listened, of course. Everyone knew the way to treat ailments of the chest was with hot tea, a little whiskey, and plenty of prayer.
Except that God was not listening, and the more their preacher insisted that this tragedy was not a punishment from on high, the more they became convinced that Preacher himself had done something wrong.
Displeased the Lord. Failed to make some proper…
Well, they weren’t sure what—only heathens offered sacrifices, but they were convinced he’d failed to do something.
Or perhaps he had done something…for his own child.
For his foster daughter. Addie had lived, hadn’t she?
Preacher could point out that Addie had been on one of her hunting trips when the diphtheria broke out, and as soon as she returned, they’d sent her back into the woods with supplies, to stay another week.
Also, she was twelve, past the age of most victims. It didn’t matter.
The preacher’s daughter had lived where their children had perished.
And now his wife was pregnant? That would only seal the matter, which was why Preacher and Sophia had agreed to not breathe a word of it until they had to, hopefully months from now.
“Preacher?” a voice called as he stepped into the village lane. “Where are you off to in such a hurry?”
He turned. It was Mayor Browning, helping his wife into the community hall, where their son lay in one of those small coffins, the last victim of the outbreak.
“May I speak with you?” Preacher said. “I know it couldn’t be a worse possible time but—”
A commotion sounded at the end of the road. Someone calling a welcome. Someone else ringing a bell, telling the town that visitors had come, an occurrence rare enough to bring everyone out, no matter how dark the mood.
He was too late. The strangers had arrived.
Addie
Addie raced home through the woods. As she did, she tried not to look at the houses that backed onto the forest, tried not to remember the children who’d lived there.
She hadn’t known most of them very well.
She’d not even gone to school until her parents passed and she came to live with Preacher and Sophia.
Still, she had known the children, and there’d been many times she’d come this way and seen them.
Sometimes, if Addie felt Sophia’s invisible hand prodding her, she’d even call a hullo.
When she reached the mayor’s house, she circled wide into the forest, so she wouldn’t need to see it at all.
Not that it helped, because her path ended up taking her by the fallen oak tree where she’d last seen Charlie Browning, the mayor’s son.
They’d been tramping around in the woods before her hunting trip, before the sickness came.
Just tramping around and talking, as they usually did.
Then they came to the fallen oak and sat and kept talking.
It’d been night, and she’d leaned back to look at the stars, her hands braced against the log.
Her hand had brushed his, and he’d laid his on hers, and when she’d looked over, he’d given her a smile that was shy and nervous and not like Charlie at all.
She’d seen that smile and she hadn’t pulled her hand away, even if she thought perhaps she ought to, and now…
Now she wasn’t sure if she wished she had or not.
She thought of that summer night, and she was glad he’d been happy that last time they’d been together, but…
perhaps it would have been easier if he hadn’t been.
If she hadn’t been. If they’d fought and now she could look back and say she hadn’t liked him very much, that they hadn’t been very good friends after all. It hurt too much otherwise.
They hadn’t even let her see him after he’d gotten sick.
Preacher and Sophia said it would have been all right, if it was a short visit and she didn’t touch him.
But Mayor Browning and his wife wouldn’t let her, not even when she heard Charlie in the sickroom, coughing and calling for her.
Perhaps tomorrow, they said. When he was feeling better.
Only there was no tomorrow. Not for Charlie.
Addie circled the mayor’s house and continued on until she reached the little clapboard cabin she shared with Preacher and Sophia.
It was one of the smallest homes in town, only four rooms. Addie had her own bedroom, and it didn’t matter if it was half the size of Charlie’s; it was hers, something she’d never had at her parents’ house, where she’d slept by the fire.
Sophia assured her that when the baby came, it would sleep in their room, and they’d build a new house before it was old enough to need its own.
Addie had said it didn’t matter, not really.
It did, though, and she was glad they understood.
Addie went in the door and found Sophia at the kitchen table, composing lessons.
Sophia wanted to reopen school in a week.
She said the children needed to be reassured that life would return to normal.
But Addie had heard people saying they weren’t going to send their children back.
Perhaps next year. Getting an education wasn’t all that important in Chestnut Hill.
It wasn’t as if you would do anything with it.
Wasn’t as if you were going anywhere else.