Wings of a Dream (5 page)

Aunt Adabelle moaned, long and low, a weak cough shaking her whole body and spilling more bright blood onto her covering, this time streaming from her nose, too. Ollie didn’t flinch as I reached across to clean my aunt’s face. She only brought the waxen hand to her small lips, kissed it, and tucked it back beneath the quilt’s edge.

Muted thumps sounded overhead. I looked up, as if I could see through the ceiling. I ran my tongue over my dry lips.

Ollie slid from my lap. “I’ll get them.” She straightened her shoulders. “I put the oats in to soak last night. My mama taught me to make the oatmeal before she . . . before Janie.” Her small body bent slightly downward, like a sapling in a moderate wind, as she left the room without another word.

What was I doing here? Someone else should be in charge. Mama. The doctor. The sheriff. Not me.

“Help me, Lord.” My whispered words fluttered the stillness. Words I didn’t want Ollie to hear but needed in my own ears.

Aunt Adabelle tried to breathe, her head turning toward me. “The . . . children . . . please.” Blood gurgled from her mouth around the words.

One red spot dripped onto my hand. I stared at the crimson splotch. My aunt’s blood on my hand, the same blood running beneath our skin. Mama had long ago abandoned her sister. I couldn’t do the same.

Pushing back sweat-slick hair near her temple, I leaned close, breathing out my words near her ear. “I’ll take care of them, Aunt Adabelle. I promise.”

My aunt fought to pull in another breath. “There’s no one else.” She coughed out another flow of blood as my eyes filled with tears.

“I don’t know if I—”

“God sent you.” Her words rattled out with a heave as her spirit pushed free of her body and unabated silence covered the room.

T
he rain started between the time I closed Aunt Adabelle’s eyes and the moment I arrived in the kitchen. It was appropriate, I guessed, the sky raining down the tears Ollie Elizabeth did not cry. I could tell she knew, even though I didn’t say the words aloud. Watching her determination to be strong made me think of Mama, and made me want to weep along with the sky.

Two little boys looked up at me, too, their eager faces already smeared with breakfast. Ollie placed another bowl on the table, this one in front of a chair on the end, the place I assumed my aunt had occupied. I should have taken over the breakfasting, but I sensed the girl’s need to keep at it, so I sat. The boys stared at me with wide eyes as their spoons traveled from mouth to bowl and back again. Ollie dribbled molasses on top of the colorless blob in my bowl.

“Thank you.” I managed to pick up my spoon and stir in the thick sweetener. I wouldn’t slight her for the world, yet I had no desire for food of any kind. Aunt Adabelle lay dead in the other room. And I had no idea what to do next.

Ollie remained beside my chair. I shoved a spoonful of oatmeal into my mouth and forced it down my throat.

“That’s James and Dan.” She nodded at the boys, her brothers. “James just turned six. Dan turned four last summer.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” I said, feeling ridiculous.

They looked at each other. I could almost see the thoughts flying between them, requiring no words to be understood.

“This is—” Ollie stopped short, staring at me.

“Rebekah,” I finished for her.

A wail pierced the air. The wail of a baby. My heart leapt into my throat. How young of a baby? Could it eat? Walk? Talk?

Ollie scurried up the stairs while James scowled. Dan copied his brother’s face.

I had no idea what to say to them. I hadn’t had many conversations with little boys. Especially those bereft of both their mother and the one who had stepped in to fill her place. How would I tell them their Miss Ada was dead? Even now, did they really understand what “dead” meant?

Cold prickled my skin. I pressed my hands to my face and suggested more fuel for the stove. James and Dan both scrambled off the bench seat.

“You get two pieces. I’ll carry three,” James said.

“I can carry three.” Dan hurried after his brother, his face fixed in determination.

When they reappeared, small logs overflowed their arms. A wood stove? We used coal at home, but how different could it be? James shoved the fuel into the side of the stove, then shut the grate again as I crossed the floor.

My anxiety quickly turned to pleasure, at least on this front. Six burners and a teapot or coffeepot warming stand in back. A warming shelf above and a hot water reservoir, too. A larger and newer range than Mama’s. I could manage this, even with the different heat source. Maybe I’d like it so much I would ask Arthur to buy one for our home.

Ollie returned carrying a round-faced, golden-haired baby.

“Oh!” I folded the cherub-like child—seven or eight months old in my estimation—into my arms. The baby grabbed my finger and pulled it toward her pink mouth. “And who is this little darling?”

“Janie.”

I bounced the dimpled girl up and down. She giggled and clapped her hands. I pulled her cheek to mine, inhaling her cotton-warmed-by-the-sun scent. The next moment she turned outstretched arms to her sister, aware, suddenly, that I wasn’t someone she knew.

“Does she eat oatmeal, too?” I asked.

Ollie cocked her head at me. “Of course.”

My cheeks warmed. I should have known. “I’ll fix hers.”

“Not too much.” Ollie pulled the high chair close to the table and plunked her sister inside its confines. “And no molasses, just a dab of milk.”

I nodded and went to work, but when I pulled a pitcher of milk from the evaporative cooler in the corner, I stopped.

Milk. From a cow.

I tried to keep the wariness from my voice. “Ollie, honey, do y’all have a cow?”

“Yes’m. Ol’ Bob.” She took the bowl from my hand and began to feed her baby sister.

“Bob?” Maybe she’d misunderstood my question.

“James named her that when he was just little. He didn’t know milk cows were girls.”

“I see.” I rubbed away the wrinkles I felt on my forehead. Was this my aunt’s home or the children’s? Had Aunt Adabelle taken them in or come to stay? I really needed some answers. Pulling a large shawl from the row of hooks on the wall by the door, I flung it over my head and shoulders. The only thing I could be certain of now was that cows had to be milked. Every day. Twice a day. I assumed someone else had been tending to that task, but if they knew I’d arrived, the job would likely be left to me. I readied myself to plunge into the muddy yard.

“Can we come, too?” James’s eager eyes slammed into mine.

“Miss Ada always lets us help.” Dan nodded along beside his brother.

How could I resist? They didn’t know yet that Miss Ada had flown to heaven.

“Ollie, take care of Janie.” I opened the folds of the heavy shawl and gathered the boys around my legs before we plunged into the curtain of rain. We splashed past the gate and the garden, moving as fast as their legs would carry them. Ol’ Bob’s bawling grew louder. I swooped Dan under my arm and carried him the last little way.

By the time we pulled open the barn doors, our clothes hung heavy with water. The agonized plea of the cow spurred me onward. I knew how to do this. I’d been milking since I wasn’t much older than Ollie. I grabbed a pail from the wall and found a stool near the stall.

Ol’ Bob gazed at me with grateful eyes as I pulled her teats in a steady rhythm. With each stream that hit the bucket, questions swirled in my head. What connected my aunt to this family? How had the children’s mother died? When would their father return?

Finally, I stripped the last of Ol’ Bob’s milk, patted her rump, and stood. A large, empty barn met my gaze. Several stalls. Empty stalls. And double doors at the opposite end.

A whinny cut through the air.

“What’s out there?”

James and Dan stopped their game of tag, cheeks red and chests heaving. James managed to push out his words. “Tom and Huck. They’re our mules.”

“And Dandy,” added Dan.

“That’s Daddy’s horse.”

Daddy’s horse. “So this is your daddy’s farm, then?”

James nodded. Dan joined him.

One question answered. A thousand more to go.

Thunder rumbled outside. I led the mules and horse into empty stalls and gathered my shawl again for the return trip through the rain. The boys’ clothes still dripped from our first excursion. Oh, well. No harm done going back through the rain, then.

I let them run ahead, though I didn’t linger far behind. “Stop on the porch,” I called as they bolted through the gate and up the back walkway. Then I spied a blanketed horse tied to a fence post.

I left the milk bucket on the porch and sprinted past the boys. “Strip off your wet clothes and run upstairs for dry ones,” I called as my wet shawl slapped against the board floor of the porch. I followed watery footprints exactly where I knew they’d lead—Aunt Adabelle’s bedroom.

A man in a dark suit stood over the bed. Ollie watched from behind him, Janie quiet in her arms. I took the baby from her as the man—the doctor, I assumed from the black bag he carried—turned. Ollie threw herself at his middle. His heavy gray moustache twitched as the girl’s sobs broke the unnatural quiet.

I blinked back tears. Tears of grief and relief. The doctor looked at me from under scruffy brows before he turned his attention back to Ollie.

“Hush now, child.” He knelt down. Her head moved to his shoulder, her arms stealing around his neck. “Miss Ada isn’t sick anymore. Ye didn’t want her to be sick, remember?” His r’s rolled slightly, hinting of a homeland beyond American shores.

Ollie shook her head as he lifted her. I hushed a whimpering Janie. His gaze moved past me, to the doorway. I whipped around. James and Dan stood naked and unashamed, their eyes big in bloodless faces.

My cheeks warmed. “Clothes on, boys.” I shooed them from the room, blocking the doorway with my body. They ran up the stairs. I bit my lip and turned back to the old man.

He returned Ollie to the floor. “If ye’ll see to the little ones,” he said to her, “we’ll tend to things here.”

She nodded and took Janie from me. I stepped aside. After one long look at the still figure on the bed, Ollie retreated to the chaos upstairs.

The man nodded at me after Ollie disappeared. “Sheriff told me ye’d come.”

“Yes, but not soon enough.” I glanced at Aunt Adabelle’s waxen face, a face that resembled the doll Daddy bought me for my tenth birthday.

“T’wasn’t much to be done. The Spanish flu hits hard and quick. But at least ye can care for the children.”

“The children.” I felt my whole face crinkle with a frown. “I understand this is their daddy’s farm?”

He lifted one of Aunt Adabelle’s cold hands, laid it gently across her chest. “Frank Gresham. His wife, Clara, didn’t make it through her last birthing.”

“Janie.” My whisper faded amidst the thumping overhead.

“Frank’d already been shipped to France. Adabelle moved in. She’s been helping out around here since they were babes, all three. Took to them as her family, seeing as she had no one else.”

My face crumpled with sadness instead of confusion. My aunt had no one else because Mama refused to speak to her. How could Mama have let it come to this?

The thumping from upstairs calmed a bit, the quiet silencing my questions.

“Ye’ll want to dress her, I think.” The doctor’s words broke through my musings and stole all moisture from my mouth. Did he think I knew how to do what he asked of me? Weren’t there women in this town—Aunt Adabelle’s friends—who would be better suited to such tasks?

He walked from the room. I followed, shutting the door behind me. “Ye won’t have time for laying her out. We need to get her buried. Likely there’ll be few who can leave their own to attend.”

I didn’t know which disturbed me more: his reading my mind or his intimation that Aunt Adabelle wasn’t the only fatality. I knew influenza could take the old and the young and the ones already sick with other ailments, but my aunt didn’t fit those descriptions.

“Will someone come for her?” croaked from my throat.

The doctor scratched behind his ear, agitating a tuft of hair that afterward refused to lie flat again. “Tomorrow morning. Early. Can ye have everyone ready?”

“Yes.” But could I really ready a woman for burial? Then a more terrible thought struck. Could I prepare these children to witness it?

“I guess the children have to be there.” I ventured the words past my fear, hoping for a tiny reprieve.

He answered in a grunt I interpreted as agreement. “No one else to care for them. Everyone around here has their own to tend.” Did I read fear in his face, too?

My fingers curled around one another as I gathered my courage. “We’ll be ready.”

His eyes turned stern before he spoke again. “And there’s to be no church or school until ye hear further. Don’t want this spreading any more than it has.”

His words sank deep and heavy, like a boulder dropped in a pond. He opened the back door to leave.

“Wait.” I followed him out onto the porch, the boys’ wet clothes tangling my feet. “Will you please send a telegram to my mother? Margaret Hendricks in Downington, Oklahoma. Could you tell her . . . what happened?”