She Sighed, “No One Wants A Bride With Three Kids” The Cowboy Smiled, “I Always Wanted A Big Family”

Chapter 12

It did not come for them first.

That was the cruel thing about the way it came. It came first for the McAllisters, two miles down the valley, whose youngest boy took sick at the end of August and was buried before the first of September. Then it came for the schoolteacher over in the next county, who had been visiting family and who did not come home. Then it crept up the valley, house to house, the way it had crept down the lane in Ohio, and the women of Stone Creek started keeping their children indoors and looking at one another with the particular wariness of people who know what is coming and cannot stop it.

Willa heard it first from the doctor’s wife, who stopped by with a jar of preserves and a face that did not quite hide its errand. She was a kind woman, the doctor’s wife, and she stood on the porch with the jar in her hands and she said, in the careful voice people use when they are trying not to alarm you, “Now, Mrs. Brenner, I don’t want you to worry, but there’s a sickness moving up the valley, and Doc says the children should stay close to home and the little ones should drink plenty and be kept cool if they flush up at all. You’ll watch them, won’t you?”

Willa took the jar. Willa thanked her. Willa stood on the porch and watched the doctor’s wife drive away, and she stood there a long time after the wagon had gone, and she felt the cold hand close around her heart again, the familiar hand, the old friend, the one that had been with her since the winter.

She had known it would come.

She had known, the way you know a thing in your bones, that the peace could not last. She had spent the summer waiting for the floor to fall away, and here it was, not falling away but burning up from the grass, coming up the valley toward her children house by house, the way it had come down the lane in Ohio, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

She kept the children close after that. She kept them in the house and in the yard. She watched them the way she had watched Peter, in the nine days, with the particular helpless terror of a woman who has seen what this sickness can do and knows exactly how fast it moves.

And then, in the second week of September, Ellis flushed up at breakfast.

It was a small thing. A warmth in his cheeks, a crossness he could not explain, a bowl of porridge pushed away half-eaten. Ellis, who was seven and healthy and always hungry, pushing away his breakfast.

Willa’s hands went cold around her coffee cup.

She felt the room tilt. She heard herself say, in a voice that was steady because she had spent two years learning to make it steady, “Ellis, come here, let me feel your forehead.” And she felt the warmth under her palm, and the cold hand around her heart squeezed, and for one terrible moment she was back in Ohio, in the house on the lane, with the snow on the windowsills and Peter’s eyes going wide and not-knowing, and she could not breathe.

Gideon came in from the barn and found her standing in the middle of the kitchen with her hand on Ellis’s forehead and her face the color of the dishwater, and he did not ask what was wrong. He crossed the room in three strides, and he put his own hand on Ellis’s forehead, and he said, low and calm, “He’s warm. Not burning. Just warm. When did it start?”

“This morning,” Willa heard herself say. “Just now. At breakfast.”

Gideon looked at her. He looked at her the way he had looked at her on the night in the dark — no, that had not happened yet, not in the way of this telling — he looked at her with that plain, unhurried certainty, and he said, “He’s been playing with the McAllister boy’s sister? No — he hasn’t left the yard in a week. You’ve kept them close. It could be nothing. It could be a chill from the creek. But we’ll watch him, and if it climbs, I’ll ride for Doc.”

We’ll watch him.

Willa heard the word. We. She had been watching alone for so long — watching in Ohio, watching through the funeral, watching through the cracked jar and the changed faces and the long ride west — that the word sounded foreign, like a word from a language she had once known and had forgotten.

She did not know what to do with it. So she did what she always did. She kept her chin up, and she put Ellis to bed, and she watched.

The fever did not climb. That was the mercy, the small mercy. Ellis ran warm for a day and a night, and Willa sat by his bed and wrung cloths and prayed to the God she had stopped being certain she believed in, and Gideon sat with her, and they took turns, and by the second morning Ellis was hungry again and cross again and entirely himself, and he wanted to go see the horses, and Willa wanted to weep with the relief of it.

It was nothing. It was a chill. It was the creek, or a change in the weather, or a boy being a boy.

But standing in the kitchen that second morning, watching Ellis shovel porridge into his mouth as if he had not eaten in a week, Willa understood something she had not let herself understand before.

The fever was coming up the valley.

It had not taken Ellis. This time, it had not taken Ellis.

But it was still coming.

And the smallest one, the one who was not yet four, the one who slept with a one-eyed rag doll under her arm — the smallest one had never been sick a day in her life that mattered, and Willa knew, with the cold certainty of a woman who had seen this sickness work, that it would not pass them by forever.

That night, Willa stood at Lily’s bedroom door and watched her youngest daughter sleep, the lamplight soft on her face, Winky clutched to her chest, and she listened to the wind moving around the house, and she thought about the winter in Ohio, and the nine days, and the savings jar going dry, and she thought about Gideon Hale, who had filled the wood box and sewn the doll’s arm and knelt in the spilled milk and said we’ll watch him.

She thought about how she had been so sure the floor would fall away.

And she thought about how it had not fallen yet.

It had not fallen through the spring. It had not fallen through the long gold summer. It had not fallen when Ellis knocked over the cup, or when Winky’s arm tore, or when her son had climbed the corral fence and a man she had known for two weeks had called him son.

But the fever was coming up the valley.

And the floor, Willa Brenner knew, with the full weight of everything she had learned in two years of hard living, always fell away in the end.

It was only a matter of time.