The Stories of Richard Bausch (83 page)

I tried to ask Anna if this was Thaddeus. She was singing low, still feverish, spooning broth into my mouth. “Hush,” she said. “Hush, child. You been dreaming.”

“Is it Thaddeus?” I said. “Tell me.”

“Thaddeus is away,” she said. “You mustn’t speak of him in this house. You must’ve dreamed it, child.” But then she put her head down and rocked slow, as if she might slump over. “My head.”

“Here,” I said. And I took the rag from her hand, and put it on her forehead. She raised her head slightly, and breathed. It was only a moment. She straightened, and took my wrist. “I’m just tired, child.”

Anna,
I tried to say. I only wanted to say her name. But I couldn’t get it out. I nodded, and felt that there must be something between us, a secret. When Livvie and I had first come to the house we didn’t even know her. She was just the next door lady’s person—kitchen help. I don’t think we had even known her name until that week.

Mother was next door, dangerously close to dying. Father’s fever had broken, but he was still very weak, and other neighbors were with them. For that strange week we were a sundered family, being cared for in separate houses. I seldom thought of my family. I spent dream hours, awake and asleep, with Anna Scott.

The worst night of my fever I thought I looked out the window of the
bedroom where I lay and saw my father in his coffin in a flickering yellow light in the next house, hands crossed over his chest. No one standing near. I felt as though I had abandoned him to that fate. I lay crying and muttering that I was sorry. I’m sure now that I dreamed this, since I know the room that I was in faced away from our house and the view out that window was of the fairgrounds, where the circus came every summer.

After the fever
passed, Mrs. Lessing returned from the country, and a day or so later, we went back over to our house. At almost twelve and fourteen, we were not quite old enough yet to understand the particulars of the social setup in 1903. Obviously it was the air we lived in, but we had no conscious sense of that. We saw Mrs. Lessing ordering Anna Scott around, making her clean the surfaces of the bedroom with strong lye soap. And the old lady shooed Livvie and me away whenever we came near. We represented disease to her. That was what Father said when we went home. He was going to work again in the mornings. He had recently been made head teller at the Union Trust bank in town. Mother was still recovering, and the heat and humidity were no help. She lay on her bed in her long nightgown, gleaming not so much with fever, though a mild one did persist through the hot days, but with the windless summer heat. Women from other houses stopped by now and then to look in on her, and to bring her iced tea and books to read. People expected Livvie and me to keep out of the way, not to trouble Mother.

We sought chances to talk to Anna Scott. She would be out in back, hanging wash.

“What do you children want with me?” she’d say, half smiling. “You’re gonna get me into trouble, sure enough.”

“In France,” Livvie said to her, “they have a thing called a gillo-teen.”

Anna corrected her. “You pronounce it ‘ghee-yo-teen.’ It’s a terrible thing.”

“It cuts off people’s heads,” Livvie said avidly. “And sometimes the eyes still look around after the head’s rolling around on the ground.”

“Who told you that?”

“I heard it,” Livvie said. “I swear.”

“The head falls into a basket,” Anna said.

I felt light-headed. I turned to Livvie. “Is that all you can talk about?”

“Tell us how it works,” Livvie said to Anna Scott.

“I don’t have any idea how it works, child.”

“Why did they only use it in France, Anna?”

“I’ve never been to France.”

“Would you like to go?” I asked, and felt as if I’d proposed that we go together.

She gave me a long look that seemed to reach down into my chest. I couldn’t breathe. “Why, John, are you toying with my affections?”

I didn’t know how to answer the question.

But then she was concentrating on her work. “Don’t you children have anything better to do than pester me? You know Miz Lessing is gonna give me grief if she sees us.”

“We don’t have anywhere else to go,” Livvie said.

This was true.
The only other child our age who lived at that end of Market Street was Dewey Dumfreys, and she could not be depended on for entertainment. Dewey was an albino but we didn’t know this. I mean no one had said anything to us about it. We just knew she couldn’t be out in the sun very much, that her skin was pale as paste, her hair a startling white, whiter than we could believe anyone’s ever was, even when we were looking at it, and her eyes were a strange looking pink the color of a rabbit’s nose. She spent a lot of time writing in a journal. She seemed never to want to do anything else. She seldom left her front porch. But when she wanted company, she would call to us when we came out of the house. It depended on her mood, of course, and she was rather inclined to fits of unsociability.

The particular afternoon I’m remembering, we were fresh from fever, Livvie and me. That’s how it seems to me anyway, recalling it—a hot, humid cloudless day with a stillness about it, as if the earth had stopped spinning on its axis and was fixed in a searing pool of sun. Things seemed bright with an unnatural brightness, a feverish glare, perhaps because we had been ill, and were now better. Mother had told us to go outside, and to stay in the yard. We were on the porch. Anna Scott was beating the dust out of a rug in Mrs. Lessing’s side yard. The day was on fire, too hot for work. I held on to the porch post. Lines of heat rose in the air. Anna Scott turned and looked at us, her face gleaming, her eyes wide and white. In the window of the Lessing house, Mrs. Lessing stood watching her like a hawk. When Anna glanced
our way, Mrs. Lessing said something we couldn’t hear, and Anna said something back that ended in “ma’am.” She waved at us, going back in the house.

“I’m tired,” Livvie said to me.

We knew that some people had died of this fever we had survived. Livvie stared at her own hands. I think we were both experiencing the sense of how different it was to be on the other side of the sickness. Mother coughed upstairs, and I had a guilty moment of wanting to get away from the sound. The stillness carried every stirring, every breath. We went out to the end of the yard and looked up and down the street. In the distance, beyond the railroad yard, you could see the big, partially collapsed red, white, and blue tent from the circus that had always come to town from mid-May to mid-July, and that a lot of people were unjustly blaming for this epidemic of fever. That was why it was closing down early.

Dewey Dumfreys strolled over to us from her porch, wearing a floppy straw hat, a long-sleeved blouse, and a skirt that covered her feet. You couldn’t see her feet. She appeared to glide like a ghost across the grass. “Know what happened?” she said. Then didn’t wait for an answer. “My uncle Harry came in from work about an hour ago and told us there’s been a terrible accident down at the rail yard. An elephant fell off the back of the train. They were coming to catch up with the circus, all the way from Scranton, and this one named Sport got playful and he backed against the door of the car and the door broke and he went flying off and landed on the track—off a moving train car. An elephant, think of it. Uncle Harry said he screamed a terrible scream. They were bringing them—two of them to the circus.”

“The circus is breaking up,” I said. “Nobody went to it because of the fever.”

“Well, they were getting two elephants and now one of them’s dead and they’re gonna have to kill the other one to put it out of its misery.”

“What happened to the other one?” I said. “Did it fall, too?”

“No, the one that fell is still alive. But he can’t move his legs, or stand up. The
other
one just up and died. Maybe from the shock. Maybe they love each other like people. Maybe the shock of her friend falling off the train killed her.”

“You’re making all this up,” Livvie said.

“I am not. Swear on a stack of Bibles and hope to die myself.”

Livvie saw Anna Scott come from the Lessing house, wearing a white scarf like a bandanna. We ran over to her, and Dewey repeated her story, adding the one detail that the people at the rail yard had used a big freight derrick to hoist Sport back up onto the train car. “They think his back might be broken. My uncle Harry was there and saw the whole thing.”

Anna looked up the road in the direction the rail yard, and then she looked back at us. “My friend Thaddeus works there,” she said in that voice I loved. “He’ll know what happened.”

“It’s the God’s truth,” Dewey said.

“Oh, I ain’t doubting you, honey.”

We all stood there, looking down the street. You could see some of the apparatus of the rail yard, and there were tracks that led there across the road, beyond the houses. You walked between the houses and through a row of hedges, across a narrow field of tall grass. There was a raised bed that was visible in the winter months, and when a train came through you could see it going by in flashes between hedges and houses and trees. We never paid much attention to the trains because they had been there all our lives. Their sound, roaring along in the wake of smoke and the blaring of a whistle, was as unremarkable to us as the clop-clop of horses’ hooves in the street, the protesting of wagon wheels.

“I want to go see,” Livvie said.

Anna shook her head. “Honey, you know your mother wouldn’t want that.”

“She’ll let us if you take us,” Livvie said.

“To the rail yard? Me? Young lady, you sure you still don’t have fever?” She put her dark hand on Livvie’s brow, which was almost as pale as Dewey’s.

“Can we ask her?” I said. I was speaking with the confidence of the one who was close enough to her to know about Thaddeus Marcus Adams.

Anna frowned. “I think you best let her sleep, don’t you, John?”

My name on those lips thrilled me. I felt the blood rush to my face. “Yes,” I said, being responsible.

“Well, tell you what,” Anna said. “I’ll go on down there this afternoon and see what I can, and I’ll come back and tell y’all about it, how’d that be?”

Livvie wasn’t impressed. “It’s not the same as seeing it.”

“There’s probably nothing to see, honey. It’s over, whatever it was.”

From the Lessing house, just then, came the voice of Mrs. Lessing. “You! Anna! What’re you doing talking to those children! I asked you to go get some tonic for me.”

“Yes’m,” Anna called back.

“I don’t have all day to wait for you.”

“No’m. I know. I’s going jes’ as quick as I can, Miz Lessing.”

By this time Livvie and I were accustomed to the difference in Anna’s speech when she spoke to Mrs. Lessing. I considered it part of our special relation to each other.

Anna murmured to us: “I’ll see if I can’t find out something. Y’all stay here. And Dewey, you better not stay out in this here sun too long.”

“Yes’m.”

We watched her cross the street and go up the block, away from the direction of the rail yard, and toward the old part of town, where the dry goods store and the pharmacy were. She waved to us just before she went out of sight.

“My mother says Anna’s a faithless heathen,” Dewey said. “I think she’s nice.”

“I wish Mrs. Lessing would go back to Frederick,” said Livvie.

We wandered over to Dewey’s house and onto the porch, where we sat in metal chairs. Nothing moved. There wasn’t a breeze anywhere in the world. The leaves hung on the trees, wilting. The hottest day in the history of summer. Dewey’s uncle Harry was on the back porch of the house, talking to her mother. We couldn’t make out the words through the open windows, and we wanted to, so we said nothing, trying to hear. But they were two rooms and a corridor away. Finally we went down and around the house, to where they sat, with a pitcher of lemonade on the little table between their chairs.

“Hey, kids,” Dewey’s uncle Harry said. “Hot enough for you?” He took a sip of the lemonade, and made a face.

“You kids stay close,” Dewey’s mother said. “There’s trouble, serious trouble.”

“We know all about it,” Dewey said.

Uncle Harry sat forward. “What do you know, little girl?”

“About the elephant.”

“Oh,” he said. “That.” He sat back. We waited for him to say more, but he sipped the lemonade and stared off. Dewey started talking about the circus. She had been twice, she said, her uncle Harry had taken her. She went on about what she’d seen there.

I heard her mother say to Uncle Harry, “I think he’s got himself a lady friend in the next house,” and I stopped listening to Dewey.

“You’re kidding me,” Uncle Harry said.

“If I’m not mistaken. I’ve seen him at the back door over there, hanging around her. You know what kind of friend I mean.”

“Of course.”

“They’re all so highly … they have no inhibitions where—well, I mean I think it’s frightening.”

Dewey’s Uncle said nothing for a moment. Then: “Does Mrs. Lessing know?”

“She’d fire her in an instant.”

“Well, it’s a small world.”

“What do you think they’ll do with him?” Mrs. Dumfreys asked, and I understood, with a shock, that they must be talking about Thaddeus Marcus Adams of Pratt Street in the city of Baltimore.

I said, “What did he do?”

Uncle Harry looked at me.

“Uncle Harry,” Dewey said. “Tell us about the elephant.”

He shook his head. “I’m trying not to think about the elephant.”

“Please?”

He turned to Mrs. Dumfreys. “I’m not kidding you, the worst noise I ever heard, that scream. I never thought an animal could make such a sound. I mean there was something
intelligent
about it.” He sat there, with the glass of lemonade held to his lips.

Mrs. Dumfreys poured more lemonade and said, “Can’t you children find something to do out in front?”

“What did he do?” I repeated.

“Who?” Uncle Harry said. Then: “Don’t be impertinent, young man.”

I started to say the name Thaddeus, but thought better of it. I was afraid I might get Anna Scott in trouble.