31 Deep interval
Of the first horrible siege I remember little: interludes of ague, hard on the heels of consuming fire, when the sweat froze on my body, the muscles jumped on my bones, and no matter how many covers were piled on the bed, the cold of the grave shook me to the marrow. Half-hour interludes when I was conscious that a million devils plucked my brain, beat on my skull, pricked my eyeballs, and chewed along the edges of my spine. Then, back to the hell of flame, where the only reality was the shrieking voice of an everlasting thirst. A tortuous, inescapable frenzy, that nothing quieted. Whatever liquid passed the lips dried on the swollen tongue; boiled away with the boiling blood that hissed in the writhing veins and threw up a sickening odour more hideous than all the rest. This nauseating reek that clung to every breath was what finally drove me nearly crazy. It is no exaggeration to say that the thought of death seemed a blessed escape without terror of any kind.
Swift as its rushing crisis, the fever broke, one strange morning. The sunlight streaming under the lowered blind was sweet to see, comforting to follow on its wavering quest through the ugly room. There, like old familiar faces, were the few sticks of furniture mamma had salvaged. The sober bureau, in whose mirrored eye I had measured the progress of my graduation dress; that had so often witnessed the struggle of putting up my hair. The battered chair, that seemed to give back mamma’s voice reading some ancient tale. Even the stiff enlargements of infant pictures were welcome sights. When mamma herself stepped in with a bowl of steaming soup I could have wept with happiness, only, somehow or other, I had no tears. I felt as dried up as a withered stalk of corn. And what a sight to behold!
Yellow as a hoe-cake, the skin on my bones like sandpaper; even my hair a lustreless mop! It came away in dead tufts under mamma’s gentle fingers. Secretly grieved, she comforted me. It would grow back in no time, beautiful as ever. She had lost all her hair when she came to this country, and mark what a decent recompense she had.
That was the least of my worries, my hair. Hairs I could spare by the millions, but oh, what a face to bare to the merry glance of the spruce young doctor who came to dose me with quinine and cod-liver oil! How on earth should I venture past the door with a complexion like a cracked egg?
La, what a dither! All forgotten in a twinkling, the sunny day I shamedly set forth with smiling Mr. Bannister to see the famed plantation.
It was a sad old house, sitting disconsolate amidst neglected fruit trees, dead as joys long fled; cotton-fields slipping back to wilderness; sagging slave quarters settling to ruin. The sole survivor of the family was in Mobile, penniless, as lost in the new world as the ghostly house in this kingdom of decay.
Other scenes, though less romantic, raised a host of questions in my mind. The small tenant farms with primitive cabins that often lacked even window-panes and the furnishings of which reminded me of the makeshift equipment of the first Icelandic settlers. The more thrifty had a grist mill or a cotton gin to supplement the meagre living, for meagre it must be, despite the fertile soil and semi-tropical climate, if appearances might be trusted. I had seen more hope in the faces of Norwegian women hoeing their bits of field among the tree stumps of northern Minnesota, than here, where listlessness and apathy seemed to have reduced every one to the same ageless antiquity. A dry rot of indifference cast a blight everywhere. And this was the Eden of papa’s hopes!
If such cheerless thoughts intruded upon my happiest hours, what must mamma have suffered, shut up with despair for everpresent company! With not even a house of her own to occupy her restless energy, and utter ruin ahead, what chilling anxiety she bore with silent fortitude. How good she was to urge me out into the sunlight, to the small gaieties that came my way!
Simple pastimes. A visit to Bannister’s sister, whose house was a little oasis of comfort in this comfortless place. Walks through the woods, pungent with the scent of pine after the sheets of rain that washed the world clean. We spied on Hell’s Half-Acre; hung on the fringe of the Negro quarters, listening to plaintive spirituals and old familiar hymns jollied up to revival glee. Sometimes we went to the meeting-house, where an earnest mortal exhorted us to forgo the flesh and the devil. Nothing unusual or startling, except the wake to which I went, with a jumbled feeling of curiosity and distaste.
From the look of it, all the village was there. Every Jack and Jill in Sunday best and blameless humour. How carefully they kept the proprieties: turn and turn about, gravely keeping watch with the dead, then back to the moonlit porch to whisper discreet nothings to the enheartening thrill of clinging hands.
Queer, thought I, and hypocritical. Others besides myself were strangers to the dead man. Then why were they here? To relieve the family, Bannister informed me, a little shortly. There was no hypocrisy in shouldering this responsibility for the worn-out family who had to face the terrible to-morrow.
How soon and sharply this truth was borne home to me! Without warning of any kind, my little brother Stanley woke one morning with a strange, restricted feeling in the throat. Poor mamma, who had herself just come down with the fever, was terrified, her thought flying back down the years to that dark morning when I had suffered a similar experience.
The doctor was instantly called, but neither he nor his young assistant could do anything. In spite of their frantic efforts, the child was dead at four o’clock. Of all the cruel blows life had dealt my dear mother, this was most insufferable: to lie fast to her own bed, watching her little one die in frightful agony.
Then it was we came to know how much beauty of human kindness dwelt in this ugly village. Women whose faces were strange and names unknown to this day were suddenly in quiet possession of our shattered house. Without question, or a single futile word these gentle Marthas set about the sad task that must be done. With the deftness of long experience they cut and fashioned the shroud from a length of soft white flannel. A young woman, with a sweet, sensitive face, cut lacy patterns into borders with which to line the small coffin their men were making. Others, dim shadows in my mind, washed the little tormented body, now so terribly still.
Every detail of the funeral was assumed in the same devoted spirit, with the unaffected manner of folk steeped in golden deeds. Except for this inestimable kindness, I cannot think that mamma would have survived. She had lost so many children in the starved days on the prairies.
It was like a paralysing dream to be standing in the depths of a pine forest, remote and still as some land of tragic allegory, watching the small casket lowered in the earth; seeing papa weeping; knowing that now the mainspring of his heart was broken. The spirit of hopeful yearning that had kept him young, his eyes on the far horizon, no matter what the blows of circumstance, dead, with the dear, small son whose death lay on his conscience. Terrible to feel these things, to know them without shadow of doubting, and to have no ease of tears. Bitter beyond telling, to read in papa’s grieving glance a hurt rebuke for my hard indifference. How insensitive! How poor in spirit! This, his thought. This the thought of others, whose tears fell lightly to the rhythm of volatile emotion. Ills that shake the roots of thought link themselves with an eternity of human woe for which no redress is possible, have always frozen my heart, turning inward the shock of feeling, so futile in the face of endless pain.
