E. Doctorow - Welcome to Hard Times

Therefore where were my good signs? This green-eyed woman and brown-eyed boy sitting here had never done but the only thing they could do. And if I felt like believing we were growing into a true family that was alright: if a good sign is so important you can just as soon make one up and fool yourself that way.

I remembered that half-burnt old almanac we had and I thought it might be the right weather for teaching the boy to read. I could put a point on a stick and show the letters by scratching them in the floor. So we began to do that, working at it a little each day, I would have him study a letter as it was printed and then say its name and then watch me write it with the stick. Sometimes Molly watched, no expression on her face, maybe she was learning something too.

But the weather was ornery. A storm would blow up for a few days until the snow was banked high enough to keep the inside of the cabin warm. Then the sun would break through for a morning, warm winds would come down from the rocks, and soon everything was melting like a sound of crickets and water was running off everywhere. At night the ground iced up, every roof was hung with ice and the cabin walls were exposed again to the cold winds. It went on like that, every snow bringing its chinook to devil the skin, one day you stepped in snow, the next in mud, water soaked in your boots and froze them at night, it was the next worst thing to pure blizzardry, it was weather that wouldn’t let you settle.

Molly said one evening: “Here you’re going on and on with those damn letters and you don’t even see the boy is sick.”

Jimmy had coughed once or twice that I’d heard, but I hadn’t thought about it. I said: “You’re alright aren’t you Jimmy?”

“I’m alright.”

But the next day he was coughing a lot. Even in the dugout the ground was damp, at night I folded my blanket and put it under him and then sat up listening to him cough and shiver in his sleep. Molly lay on her side on the other side of the stove, I could tell by her back she was wide awake and listening each time the boy coughed.

The next morning Jimmy couldn’t get up. He was shuddering under his blanket, his teeth chattered and there was a wheeze to his breath. His face was flushed and his eyes glittery. Molly looked at me like it was my fault he had come up sick.

Straightaway I went to the Russian’s. It was a grey cold morning and there was ice all along the railing and a muddy crust of snow on the ground. Inside his place Zar was pacing up and down and Adah and the three girls were sitting on the meeting chairs and making a breakfast of flour-cakes and sardines. It was cold in there but they all had coats.

“Zar,” I said, “I’ll trouble you for some whiskey, the boy has caught something on his chest.”

“So?” He waved his hand as he paced. “Take, take, there will be no miners again this week, what for do I need whiskey?”

Adah wanted to know what Jimmy’s symptoms were like. I told her he had a powerful cough and the chills and fever.

“Well it’s the weather for it,” the tall girl, Jessie, said, “I’m feeling poorly myself.”

“Ain’t the weather’s your trouble, honey,” Mae said to her, “jes the moon.”

Adah told me to wait a bit and she went into another room. Zar had built this place not much wider than a railroad car, and there were two rooms at the end of the public room, one in back of the other.

“No customers, only that deadhead Jenks,” Zar was saying. He was vexed the way the weather closed off the trail to the mining camp.

“Hey Blue,” Mae got up from the table, “that’s a mighty fine beard y’ workin’ up there, you come over of an evenin’ and we’ll comb it for yuh.”

The Chinese had her mouth full and she had to put her hand up while she giggled.

“God’s truth,” Mae said, “all we ever see now is that Jenks and he ain’t good for much more’n polishin’ his damn guns. Beard like that’d keep a girl warm these nights.”

“And that New Englander Maple,” Zar said, “he does not drink, he does not use the women, he stays there in my tent. I buy from him I must pay money, a fine way to trade.”

Adah came out carrying two bottles. She told me there was turpentine in the little one for rubbing on the boy’s legs. In the big bottle was rum, which was better than whiskey, I was to mix it with some hot water and make him swallow as much as he could take. “Nothing like rum for the chest,” she told me.

Well I thanked her and went back and did as she said. And for a while it seemed to help. But in the afternoon Jimmy began to shiver again and he wouldn’t take any more rum. Each time he coughed his whole body shuddered. Molly fixed up some flour soup with bits of salt beef for supper but he wouldn’t eat it.

It began to frighten me hearing that boy cough away like a man, the sound came up from his bowels and pushed his tongue and eyes out and turned his face crimson. We had him wrapped in all the blankets and the fire built up high but he couldn’t stop his shivering. I began to feel the awful helpless rage. We fussed with him hour after hour — sitting him up to ease his breathing, laying him down again — but nothing comforted him and he couldn’t get to sleep.

It must have been close on midnight and Jimmy began to whimper and look up from one of us to the other. But we didn’t know what else to do. There was an unnatural burning in his eyes and his cheeks drew in with each wheezing breath. Molly couldn’t look at him any more, she walked back and forth fingering the cross at her throat. When the boy was taken with a heavy fit of coughing she stepped up into the cabin and walked away in the dark.

Then I felt a breeze at my feet and I went into the cabin after her. She had the door partly open and she was looking across the windy moonlit reach to the Indian’s shack. “Mayor,” she said, “what will you do if the boy dies, will you bury him beside his Pa?”

She didn’t wait for any answer I might have had but went out just in that dress and headed across for John Bear’s place, walking that stiff walk of hers, hugging herself against the bite. A great anger rose in me as I closed the door, I could have struck her right then, I was distressed for the boy’s illness, I damned her for the grip she had on my life, this unrelenting whore.

A few minutes later the Indian was standing in the dugout looking down at Jimmy. The boy stared back in fear, Bear wore his buffalo robe over his shirt and his black hair hung from under his hat down to his shoulders. They regarded each other and no word was spoken — and then the Indian bent down and tore the top blanket off Jimmy with such suddenness that he cried out and began to cough.

Bear went into his doctoring with a speed that was like solace. He hung the blanket across the doorway leading to the cabin. He put a pot of water on the stove and poked up the fire. When the water was boiling he threw in some herbs he had and in a few minutes the air in the dugout was sweet and steamy. We all watched his moves transfixed: he drew a tin out of his pocket and poured a handful of seed in his palm. Then he kneeled down and looked around the dugout.

“He wants a stone,” Molly said to me.

I ran outside and found a flat piece of rock and brought it to him. He began to pound the seed into a powder, when it was well ground it made the sharp odor of mustard. He took some water from our pail and spilled it over the powder till he had a thick paste of earth and mustard. Then, cupping it in one hand he went over to Jimmy and went down on his knees, straddling the boy.

Jimmy began to struggle then, kicking and throwing his arms up, but the Indian just drew back and looked at him until he quietened and turned his face away. Holding the mustard paste in one hand, Bear exposed the boy’s chest. Seeing that small white ribbed body made my heart hurt. Bear spread the medicine across from under one arm to the other, up to the throat, down as far as the stomach. Then he pulled down Jimmy’s shirt and bound the blanket tight around him.