The great after war pestilence called "flu" swept across Scott County
that fall and winter, sparing neither the old men nor the young
virgins. It knocked at many doors, and often where its knuckles had
rapped the undertaker hung his bunch of crape. Sometimes the crape was
a rusty black, often a rather soiled white. It took away Uncle Jonah
Cobb and left Aunt Selina alone with the bees and rabbits. It took one
of Joe Barnaby's children and Aunt Abigail's son, Noey, and Evalina,
Aunt Maggie Slatten's second youngest girl. It took babies in arms and
young men that the war had spared and women with child. It took Uncle
Sam Whitmarsh away from his cheerful traffic in dogs and horses.
"It's allus this way," said Jabez Moorhouse. "War an' pestilence goes
hand in hand. The bigger the war the bigger the pestilence. The Bible
says them that's near at hand'll fall by the sword an' them that's afur
off'll die o' the pestilence. We're a hell of a long ways off, but
we're a-dyin' o' the pestilence jes the same."
He hunched his shoulders over the stove, feeling suddenly cold.
Once again winter settled down on the wind-shaken little house on
the ridge. Judith, peering from the window at the mud and clouds of
December, felt the old oppression sink upon her, heavier because so
drearily familiar. How many years would it go on, she caught herself
wondering.
It was nearly a year since the quarrel. Since then they had treated
each other with the chilly politeness of strangers who do not much like
each other's looks. In summer when life dragged less oppressively it
was not so hard to bear. But now that winter was come her heart sank
within her.
Christmas came and went and there was no change.
It was not until after Christmas that the flu came to them. Jerry had a
light attack which kept him away from the stripping room for two weeks.
Then when he was almost ready to return to work, Andy got it and was
followed in a few days by Billy.
"If Annie gets it, it'll likely go hard with her," said Jerry, looking
anxiously at the pale, self-contained little girl who was his favorite
among the children. "We can't take her to mammy's 'cause dad's got it."
"An' I can't take her to my folks, 'cause Luelly's jes a-gittin' over
it."
Judith did what she could to keep Annie away from her sick brothers.
But one morning about a week after Billy had been taken sick, when she
went to dress the little girl she saw that her cheeks were flushed with
fever.
"I knowed there was no gittin away from it," she said grimly to Jerry,
as she mixed a dose of castor oil with warm coffee.
On the third day Annie was so much worse that Jerry rode over to
Clayton for Dr. MacTaggert.
It was late that night when the doctor's mud-spattered Ford came
panting up the long hill and stopped before their door. The little man
looked haggard and hollow-eyed from his constant attendance at sickbeds
and his long hours of bumping over rutted roads and up and down steep,
perilous trails to the tobacco growers' lonely shanties.
"It's pneumonia," he said, as he straightened up from his examination
of the child's chest.
The blood sank away from Jerry's face, leaving it a sickly gray color,
and he grasped the bedpost to steady himself.
"Can't you see your shakin' the child's bed," said Judith crossly in a
grating voice.
The doctor said that she would have to be watched and tended carefully
both day and night. Jerry let the tobacco stripping go and stayed at
home to help with the nursing. The boys were now well on the way to
recovery and beginning to be fractious and noisy. The father and mother
took turns at nursing the little girl and trying to keep the boys
quiet; and through the night one watched while the other slept.
As Judith sat by the bedside of the sick child that she had begrudged
to life before it was born, her heart failed her at the thought that
the little one might die. She felt that to see her die, to have her
cold little dead body put into a narrow coffin and laid in the frozen
ground would be more than she could bear. Her thoughts skirted these
images and fled away aghast not daring to face them. Keenly she
suffered with the sufferings of the child. When she anxiously watched
her breathing hard she felt her own chest racked by tearing pains.
She had to summon all the courage that remained to her to enable her
to bear the sight and touch of the limp and wasted little body. Never
had the child seemed more inextricably bone of her bone, flesh of her
flesh. She felt herself eager to make any sacrifice if only it would
bring the little one back to life and health.
And yet at the same moment that she yearned over the sick child,
another set of thoughts, strange and sinister, came forward with
startling boldness, thoughts that had come to her at other times and
before which she had quailed, as, in the darkness of a wakeful night,
one quails before thoughts of approaching death.
Of what use after all that this baby should live? She would live only
to endure, to be patient, to work, to suffer; and at last, when she
had gone through all these things, to die without ever having lived
and without knowing that she had never lived. Judith had seen grow up
in the families of the neighbors and among her own kin dozens of just
such little girls as this one that had come out of her own body: skimpy
little young-old girls, with blank eyes and expressionless faces,
who grew into a prim, gawky, old-maidish girlhood and passed quickly
from that into dull spinsterhood as Luella had done, or to the sordid
burdens of too frequent maternity. Little Annie was just such a one.
In every way she was a product of the life that had brought her into
being, and that life would claim her to the end.
Why had she been given such a child? It seemed the cruelest irony of
chance that had bound her by this strong added link to the sodden life
of the soil.
Sitting by the sick child through the long vigils of the winter
night, the mother dwelt upon these thoughts, facing them squarely.
And following them out to the end they brought her relentlessly to
the conclusion that it would be better that the child should die.
But having come within sight of this conclusion, she turned with
instinctive horror and fled away from it. No, she could not have her
baby die. She must not die. And yet better children were dying on every
side. Why not hers as well as another's? The mother shrank and quailed,
feeling her burden greater than she could bear.
As she struggled with these bitter thoughts, the moon, which had passed
the full, looked palely into the lamplit room through the tracery made
by a dead grapevine against the uncurtained window and saw her sitting
gaunt and hollow-eyed, her sharp elbows propped on her knees and her
chin in her hands. Again she restlessly paced the floor or stood by the
window looking out and taking no comfort from the dumb stretch of hills
and valleys that lay dark and lonely under the waning moon.
When it came Jerry's turn to watch by the baby, he was troubled by no
such conflict of feelings. His one thought was that the child must be
saved. He loved her with all the tenderness that fathers of his nature
give to an only daughter, and he saw in her no defect nor resemblance
to any other child. She was his girl and she must not be allowed to die.
For nearly a week the child lay tossing and moaning, seeming to be kept
alive more by the hectic flicker of fever than by any more stable vital
throb. The mother and father alternated in watching over her, silently
doing what they could. They grew pale and red-eyed from lack of sleep,
frowsy and unkempt. Above the tense strain of the anxiety that held
them in grip, the dark cloud of their estrangement hovered with cold
oppression. They rarely spoke except when they had to. At meals they
sat opposite each other in gloomy silence. When, as sometimes happened,
their eyes accidentally met across the bed of the sick child, they
turned hastily away with mutual aversion.
At last, after a long night of feverish tossing, there came a morning
when the little one seemed somewhat better. She breathed easier and the
fever had sunk away leaving her pale and weak but more like the child
that her parents knew. Was this a change for the better? Or might it
possibly be one for the worse?
About the middle of the morning Dr. MacTaggert came. As he made
his examination of the child the parents stood behind him watching
anxiously, but never once casting a glance at each other.
"Why, she's a heap better," he said at last, turning around to them.
"There's not much of her, but she seems to know how to hang onto life
better than some of the stouter ones. The worst seems to be over now,
and I reckon you'll raise her yet if all goes well."
"Judy!" said Jerry, when the doctor had closed the door. The one word
was full of many things, like a bubble drifting through sunlight.
She fled to him and fell sobbing into his arms.