Frank De Felitta - For Love of Audrey Rose

To her left Janice saw the doctors operate on a man whose arms beat wildly into the air. They had no anesthetic, and it took three villagers to hold his feet and two more to hold his other arm. Finally the doctors found a piece of rope and lashed the punctured arm to a beam in the wall, where they quickly began their incisions. Janice turned away and stared at the ceiling.

Already the dead woman next to her had been removed. Another body, this one making tiny gasps like a frightened rabbit, took her place. Janice knew where the old woman had gone. She heard the villagers throwing sticks onto the fire. Janice stared up continually at the ceiling. She had difficulty remembering who she was, or why she was among these dark people. The ceiling rose and fell as she breathed, her fever making it almost glow.

Through the day she slept, woke, watched the ceiling, and slept again. She did not turn to look when the body next to her was removed and another put in its place. Vaguely she wondered why she did not die, why they did not drag her out to the huge bonfire. She turned. In the same fire that burned the bloated bodies, the doctors were sterilizing instruments in cans of boiling water.

Night came, and the steady rain kept up. The doctors did not sleep. Janice remembered how she had been pulled from the mud. She remembered the mud swirling through the village. But only gradually did she remember why she had been in the village. She craned her neck, looking for orange robes. There were only the dull, matted clothes of the villagers, many of whom slept against the walls.

This was a chamber of death, Janice thought. They had all been pulled from the mud, and those who survived at first nevertheless died later. Maybe the soldiers had shot them. Maybe they had the cholera. But they were all thrown onto the twelve mattresses until they could die and be burned.

She raised herself to an elbow, looked all around the dark room. A chorus of heavy breathing, whimpers, and grunts of pain came back to her. A primeval fear of doctors overwhelmed her and she became frightened that they would come to her with their lethal scalpels. She sank back onto the mattress.

The soldiers on the porch to the long room, their arms in slings, argued loudly. The doctors remonstrated with them and stalked off. Janice wondered if the sergeant was there, or the officer who had been so unfriendly at the crest of the hill. She saw only the unkempt, wild-eyed soldiers, who bore not the slightest trace of being disciplined.

A warm hand soothed her forehead with a damp cloth.

“Elliot?” she asked, startled, looking up.

Two pale blue eyes looked down at her from a thousand miles away. A rough face, a familiar face, grizzled, drawn from lack of sleep, with a small scar on the lower lip. The hand wiped away the sweat, the mud and the confusion. Her eyes blurred in hot tears.

“My leg…” she whispered.

There was a general flow of pain through her left leg, clear to the hip, and a sensation of rough hands under her. The leg was straightened and the pain became diffuse again. The sheet, dirty and bloodied, was tucked under her shoulders. The face began to swim away from her, and she reached for the hand that had soothed her forehead.

It was not there. No one was there. Only the wall, where flies had gathered, anticipating death.

She blacked out, feeling the familiar sheet of oblivion cover her.

Days seemed to pass. Gradually voices became more distinct. In the front room the soldiers barged in, pushing the doctors aside. Janice recognized the officer from the crest of the hill. He was angrily pointing and shouting orders. The soldiers dragged a sick man from a mattress and dumped him in the rain. A wounded soldier was gently laid in his place. All this Janice saw through a feverish haze like a movie in a hot theater.

More soldiers were brought in, more villagers dragged out. Then the soldiers shouted in surprise, discovering Janice. Grizzled faces peered into her eyes. Hands poked and prodded her in amusement. The officer shouted and Janice felt rough hands pull her up. The room jostled, she cried out in the shock of pain shooting up from her hip, and then she was outside.

The soldiers carried her like a dead log. The mud slopes were visible again: a few clots of grass, but mostly the rivulets of rainwater and mud trickling down the morass of tangled logs, boulders and dead animals far below. Janice had never seen death on such a scale. It was the earth itself that had been mortally wounded. Hills were gouged out, roads dislodged, and whole forests cracked and rubbed away.

They lowered her to the ground next to the rusted canister in which the doctors sterilized their used bandages and knives. The rain came softly, cooling her forehead. Moans rose like the sound of distant barges. A sick cow, the huge rump in the air and the forelegs buckled, lowed pitifully.

“I’m burning… burning up…” Janice heard herself say.

No one turned to look at her. An ox was brought up slowly through the rain, pulling a small cart. A tall man, head lowered, led the ox. Villagers lifted two shivering children into the cart, then Janice, and then the cart jolted, she gasped, and the landscape began to recede.

The cart brought her higher into the hills. The field hospital became smaller, and the soldiers like tiny tin figures. Smoke rose without a waver from the fire. As she watched, another small body was placed onto the fire. The villagers hardly stirred. The entire slope of the hill, the valley floor, even the higher hills where the forest had been, was mud, still slithering occasionally in sudden spurts downhill — a foul landscape, viscous with disease.

So this is death, came the thought. It’s like a fever and it looks like mud.

The cart jolted regularly as the ox found its footing in the wet earth. As they went higher, bits of dead root and choked pools of black water went by. With each step four points of pain stabbed into Janice. The cart stopped. The man stepped down, examined the faces of the shivering children, and covered them with a thick blanket.

“Elliot—” she whispered. “Is it you?”

A voice came from the other end of the earth, gentle and kind, but almost broken by the exhaustion of suffering.

“Yes,” he said distinctly.

Astounded, Janice wiped the rain from her eyes. She blinked rapidly, and her hands groped toward the hallucination. But the hallucination took hold of her hands and gently pushed her back down against the children and the blankets.

“I heard from Mehrotra,” came the voice. “I went to the outpost at the river. They said I’d just missed you.”

“Is it really you?”

“Lie down, Janice. We have to get away from the soldiers.”

He went back to the front of the cart. The ox exhaled a steamy breath and pulled. The landscape began juggling again. A child whimpered. Janice pulled herself backward, wondering if she were dreaming. By instinct her arm went around the child; a small boy nestled against her chin, and the eyes began to close in sleep.

Janice craned her neck, staring at the driver. Now he did not look like Hoover. He was squatted down, with the posture of inexhaustible patience that all the farmers showed. Nothing moved except his chest as he breathed. He coughed, sending small puffs into the chill atmosphere.

He did not turn around. Janice sank back and huddled against the children. One of them asked her a question. She could only smile and caress the feverish cheek. It was getting dark, and the landscape was dissolving into a heavy gloom. The cart rumbled up, up to the crest of a hill, then it wound along a path that snaked its way across a green plateau. Night came, and the cart still moved on. Janice kept waking up to different patches of black earth, to different dead trees, and finally the cart began going down the other side. The trees here were still alive. Grass glittered in the moonlight, rain-wet but alive. Water trickled everywhere, a musical, pleasant sound that made sleep easier.