The Star Garden (16 page)

I leaned toward her and softly said, “Mary Pearl, there’s work to be done. Have you saddled up your horse?” Behind me, Aubrey gasped, and Savannah sniffed and gave a slight moan.

Mary Pearl’s face moved into a tiny smile, and she opened her eyes. Her
eyes
had taken that dark look of a newborn babe’s, no color and no inner circle of black. They say a dying person is so close to heaven’s gate they see again the world of angels that they saw shortly after they were born.

Savannah had retreated from the bedside and now was leaning against the wall, sobbing into her handkerchief without a sound, her shoulders shaking hard, her face red and tears soaking the blouse she wore. As I watched, poor Savannah sank to the floor and clasped her hands. Her prayers made a sort of soft music in the room, as her voice was so faint it seemed to come from some distant place and drift around in the pall of sadness that hovered over us.

I had watched too many people die. I’ve seen it from every way there is, I reckon. It filled me with such shock and anger that old Death was now hovering at the arm of Mary Pearl. She closed her
eyes,
and I pressed the back of my hand against her glowing, fevered brow.

I turned to Albert and said, “Has there been any mail?”

He looked at me with a hurt expression. Silently, he shook his head, and turned back to his daughter.

I went fast as my shaking legs would carry me to Morris, where the children had obviously all gotten their dose and were eating licorice candy. They smiled with blackened lips, but I had no time to laugh. “Morris? Morris! Is there mail? Have you gotten any letters or notices or packages, anything at all, for Mary Pearl?”

“Surely she’s too ill to sit up and read.”

“Grandma, Grandma, watch me, I can write my own name,” Patricia said, pulling at my skirt. “I learnt while I was in sickbed.”

“But Morris, is there something for her?”

“Yes, on the receiving table by the front door.”

I hurried to the place, with Patricia tailing, saying again and again, “Grandma, watch me write my name.” There at the table, I found a note addressed to Mary Pearl. Feeling a taint of guilt, but a bigger dose of desperation, I carefully opened the paper, trying to wish the best news from it before I read it. “Grandma, come watch me,” Patricia said again. “Please?”

The note was nothing but some invitation from a friend of hers to a tea party. Nothing. I wanted to be the one to carry her the message of her longed-for schooling.

“Patricia.” I turned and lifted her in my arms, saying, “I’m very proud of you, Patty-cakes. You show me after I get done visiting your cousin.”

“She’s sick, Papa told me. We have to be very quiet.”

“Scoot along now, and find yourself a pencil while I take this letter to her. It might make her feel better.”

“I know! I’ll write my name for her. I can’t wait for her to get well and see it.”

As I returned to Mary Pearl’s bedside, the doctors and nurses retreated to another room, quietly conversing with Albert and Savannah. Aubrey was there, holding her hand, gently pressing it to his cheek. He stood and sighed, resting both his hands against his eyes.

“I’ll watch for a while,” I said. When he went to the corner and sat, I leaned in over her face. In a tone I used to tease her with when she was small, I said, “Mistress Mary P? Open your eyes, Miss Mary-Quite-Contrary. Your friend Monty Hershey wants to have a tea party and sent you a note. She’s having six girls from town in for a tea party next week. You’ll need a new dress, won’t you? That’ll make you look so smart. How about a modern skirt, with those plackets on the side?” Then I leaned down close to her ear, and whispered, “Don’t you slip out of here without getting your chance at school. You know you’ve got to try it, if you were willing to disobey your mama just to go.”

There was a glimmer of sadness in her expression though her
eyes
remained shut, and she said, “That’s why … being punished … wickedness.”

I felt as if I knew Mary Pearl as well as I knew any human being. If there was anything honest in me at all, I’d swear on the Good Book that Mary Pearl had less wickedness in her than anybody I could name. She was clever and headstrong, but being full of vinegar and spunk was never what I’d call a bad trait, when a person had their head stuck on right and their heart squared up even all around.

“Now don’t go putting that rope around it,” I said. “You aren’t wicked and this isn’t punishment. This is just illness and it comes to man and beast alike. Judgment doesn’t come this way, except in silly novels. You aren’t going to perdition on account of a wish for a grander future than what you can see before you. I’ve been wishing it all my life, and looking forward is how you keep on moving in this world. If you stopped wondering what was around the bend, why you’d just have to go sit in a rocking chair and wait for the end of your days. You think Mr. Thomas Edison is going to damnation because he wanted to read his newspaper in the evening without smelling kerosene and wondered how to make a light? Wondering is no sin. It isn’t. I know it.”

“I’m going to die,” she said. “That’s why they’re all here. That’s why they’re shouting at me.”

For a moment I wondered if she did see angels because no one in this house was shouting, but then I reckoned it seemed overloud to her, being so sick. I lowered my voice and said, “I’ll tell them to talk softer. Shall I read something to you?”

“No, that’s all right. Mama’s been reading Psalms until I dream about turning into a deer and tightrope walking across … I wish it would rain.”

“I’m praying for rain, right now, honey.”

Mary Pearl nodded and slept. For three more hours, we took turns at the chair by her side, and she stayed deep in that sleep. I should have been on my knees praying for her. Instead, I thought about rain. Prayed for rain, wished for rain. Anything, so as not to think of her dying.

Late that afternoon, the doctor arrived again and brought a new tonic. They dosed Mary Pearl with brown syrup, and she seemed revived for about an hour, and ate soup, then sank back on the bed and slept as I must have done, feeling so close to the edge that my own breath echoed from beside my grave.

There was no sunset. Clouds that had been hovering like white swans here and there spread and thickened, grew dense and low, and a heavy rain began. It beat against the windows in the dining-room-turned-hospital. It drummed the porch roof and the gutters started funneling it to the numerous barrels at the corners of the house. The evening closed in, April and Lizzie came with lamps lit, and the night seemed for all the world like the dreary type that accompanied folks’ dying in books that I’ve read. But it’s been my true experience that folks die on any given day, sun or cloud, heat or cool. Besides, every last drop of rain that falls in the Territory of Arizona is the answer to a hundred prayers, no matter what time of year, no matter if houses washed away. Someone, somewhere, was always hurting for rain. To me, rain was not a message of gloom or despair but of bright hope. Life.

I felt almost cheerful when we went to a quiet supper of our own soup and hot biscuits. Then I went with Savannah to watch at Mary Pearl’s bedside, and again we gave her some tonic and again she revived for an hour, even talked with us, then slept. I wondered if I should tell Savannah about Mary Pearl’s letter to the school. Maybe together we would contrive to tell Mary Pearl she’d been received and was pledged to go, and that would cheer her enough to bring her back to us. We’d have to admit when she was well that it was a lie, and I’m sure Savannah would perish herself rather than do that. Savannah certainly wouldn’t propose that I lie to her daughter. But if the promise of some future could bring my youngest girl back from death’s dark portal, I’m sure I would welcome it. I couldn’t decide what to do, and because I couldn’t decide and felt so drawn myself, we listened to the rain at Mary Pearl’s bedside without speaking.

Years have passed and times have changed so much since Savannah and I were girls, when all a girl needed besides being able to shoot straight and ride hard was to sign her name and do sums. By nine o’clock, I’d begun to feel as if I had walked a thousand miles, and Savannah said I looked so faint she feared for my life and to go to bed at once, so I kissed Mary Pearl’s face and took myself to the stairway toward my own bed. “Call me, if,” I said, and she nodded.

If there was ever a time when I thought I might have seen a ghost it was in the small hours of this morning. I awoke to find Mary Pearl, pale and shivering, dressed in a white wrapper, patting my arm. “What is it?” I asked, half terrified that an eery moan would be the reply.

In a weak voice, Mary Pearl whispered, “I don’t think I want to get married, even though I let Aubrey kiss me. Mama’d never forgive me if she knew I kissed a man. If I don’t marry him, it’s better to go away to school, isn’t it? To let her simmer down a while?”

I sat up. “Honey, let’s talk about this in the morning. You have a fever. Your mind is playing tricks on you.”

“I just can’t stand the thought of having a baby. Is that so wrong? Aren’t betrothed girls supposed to
want
to have babies?” She sat on the edge of my bed.

“Did you climb all those stairs just to ask me this?” I wrapped my coverlet around her trembling shoulders.

“Aubrey’s real handsome and all. But he asked me if I wanted to have a family, and—promise you won’t tell? I told him I did, but I’m so afraid of it.”

“No need to worry about those things now.”

“I can’t wait until morning. Mama will be up. You know I can’t talk to her about this. She won’t listen. If they don’t let me in that school, I’ll
have
to marry him. I’m a coward.”

I’d kissed Aubrey’s father. Did I
have
to marry him? I patted her hands. “Babies,” I whispered, “and the getting of them, are a different matter altogether. You aren’t being a coward. But, I reckon if you aren’t looking forward to nursing and diapering and three-day crying jags, you oughtn’t to marry yet. You might feel different after a year or two. No harm in that. Even if you don’t go to school, you can let off courting with Aubrey for now. I kept Jack Elliot waiting nearly five years. If they’re worth having, they’ll keep. As for your mama, tell your papa first. Let him break the news. Ready to go back to bed?”

“Yes’m.” She pulled the coverlet around her and stood.

We tiptoed down the stairs and I tucked her in. “Want some sugar water?” I asked.

“What I really want is a baked potato and corn relish.”

“Must be feeling better. Maybe in the morning.” As I poured water for her, I saw by the kerosene lamp that the dark hollows had left her eyes.

“Don’t tell Mama.”

“I won’t tell anything you ask me not to.” I kissed her goodnight, though I felt shaken as I made my way past the parlor. Halfway up the stairs, I stopped. Could that have been only an apparition of Mary Pearl, coming to say farewell? I’d read of such things. I returned to the dining room and raised the lamp while I touched her forehead. She was warm. Satisfied, I wrapped myself in the coverlet and sat in the rocking chair, watching over her until I fell asleep.

I have sent Morris straight to the post office to check for a letter from the folks in Illinois State. Nothing has come from Wheaton or anyplace else. I have questioned myself whether or not to discuss it with Savannah, wondered if it would matter or only cause discontent. Then I decided if the folks in Illinois State had a-wanted her to come, they’d a-said by now.

Mary Pearl has been having her tonic every three hours, and someone must provide it, so while she was wakeful, I sat with her, reading aloud. After hearing about her sickness, Mary Pearl’s town friend Monty Hershey sent over a book she loved, so Savannah reads her the Psalms and I read often to our little patient from Elizabeth Browning’s
Sonnets
—a book which her mother would have none of, if she knew, but it cheers Mary Pearl, and I will do all I can for her. Savannah and I take turns waiting at her bedside with the Coca-Cola syrup.

It was while we were changing the watch before dawn this morning, that she began a coughing spell.

“Mama?” Mary Pearl said. “Do you think you could make me a baked potato?”

Savannah grasped her hands to her own throat and then touched Mary Pearl’s forehead. The fever had broken. “Oh, thank heaven,” Savannah said. “Now, now, all will be well.”

“Go on and rest, Savannah,” I said. “I’ll stay. It might spread to you with her coughing, and you need some sleep.”

“I haven’t slept in three days. But I’m not really tired.”

With that, I had my own short coughing jag, and it reminded me just how badly I had felt. The sun broke over the Rincon mountains and suddenly I saw Savannah’s face more clearly. Her eyes were weary in a way I’d never seen before. If there was ever anyone who was weakened enough to ride this influenza to its last depot, she might be the one. “Go on, I’ll stay.” I said it forcefully, not as a suggestion. Savannah left the room, feeling ordered out, I suspect, but it was for her own good.

We coughed so much that by lunchtime, Savannah said Mary Pearl and I sounded like two coyotes barking at each other. Terrible as it was to hear, it signaled her returning to us, so I welcomed her coughing as if it were a song. I said nothing about the letter writing, because it seemed a lost cause and not near as important as the victory we’d won over that old Specter.

On the twenty-fourth of January, our quarantine was lifted, and the children were running us ragged, having recovered too soon for the rest. For myself, I am coming back to health. Best of all, Mary Pearl is being more ornery and feisty than the littlest children, and plum full of herself like a yearling colt, so that we constantly remind her to sit still, take time, not wear herself out and risk a relapse.

It seems the fog of illness has not drifted to the lungs of those newly arrived, Savannah and Albert and Aubrey. The smells of the sickroom have been replaced with the smells of barley and pea soup, roasted chicken, glazed vegetables, and risen bread. The rain continues to fall yet the feeling in this house is one of hope and happiness, as we have weathered the worse storm indoors.