Michelle Hoover - Bottomland

“We can handle them. It’s nothing we can’t.”

He leaned forward, his voice little more than a whisper. “I heard them. They called you Prager. Prager is dead.”

Lee enlisted the week after the next, and Governor Harding made his proclamation. Only English in our schools, in public conversations, on trains, telephones, in public or private meetings. Even in our churches. The loss of one’s native language , William L. Harding said, is a small sacrifice to make. I closed up the house and fixed locks on our doors. I would not be opening them to anyone soon. Outside by the river, Ray roamed the fields with our horses, intent more than ever on finishing the channel. I never could muster the energy to join him. I could not ask him to pocket his own. What was the answer, to press on or to change direction? Instead I kept close to my wife. She stayed to our bedroom now after breakfast and was to bed again soon after supper. As the days passed, she never left bed at all. She complained of headaches and fatigue, a fever that spiked in early mornings. I sat with her in her wakeful hours, and Nan took up the housework her mother left unfinished. When at last he came, the doctor closed the door and whispered to me in the hall. “I’ve got dozens already in this county alone.”

“What is it?”

“The flu. Mary Elliot has been sick more than two weeks. The whole house, but she’s the worst of it.”

“Is there nothing my wife might take?”

“Only rest.”

“She is not as ill as that, surely.”

The man chewed his lip. “They say it’s the boys who brought it home. Tom Elliot and the others.”

“Tom was in my house.”

“He was in many houses. Mary Elliot will die by the end of the week, if not sooner. I’d keep your children away.”

I opened the door to our room. Inside, Margrit sat propped on pillows, her eyes closed and her ankles crossed. Her chin rested on her shoulder, a blood-spotted towel in her hand. Agnes lay at her side with her drawing paper. Closer still, Myrle had curled herself up, a braid of her mother’s hair wound about her finger. At the end of the bed, Esther raised her voice and waved her arms as she read: “On whom,” Stephen said, “do you intend to seek revenge?”

“Esther, please. You will tire your mother. You will tire your sisters.”

“But they like it.”

“That is hardly material for someone so ill.”

“It’s from our primer.”

“Esther,” I spat. The girl stiffened. Margrit tapped her finger on Esther’s stockinged foot. When my wife looked at me, her eyes were stones. It was about Esther she worried. Esther she never wanted to restrain. Let her go , her look said. I could only repeat the thought for them all: Let her go. Let her go .

“Girls, you need not keep to your mother like squirrels.” I dropped my voice. “She’s not well.”

Myrle tightened her finger on her mother’s hair. Agnes never stopped her pencil. Only Esther watched me, waiting.

“Very well.” I sighed and backed out.

Over the next days, Margrit slept late in the afternoons with few hours of waking. That bloody towel she held always in her hand. With the girls at school, I had her in the mornings to myself, only to leave her when her eyes closed and only as far as the other side of the wall. There I brooded at the dining room table. My eldest brought me a plate of scrappling and toast, a cup of coffee no larger than my thumb. I had little appetite. Still I liked to watch Nan lay a place and sit across from me in her housedress and apron, her hair pinned. Often she twisted the ring on her finger until her knuckle bled. Oh, what would this girl become? She had wanted to be her mother and now she so nearly was. I gazed out the window. The girls were leaving for school. Esther and Myrle walked arm in arm, Agnes trailing. When I turned, Nan had dropped her head. My daughter sat with me only out of duty, I knew, an empty hour when she might have gone to town or finished her sewing.

“Lee sent a letter.” Nan took out an envelope. The envelope was stained, torn at the edges. As with the others, it was so heavily stamped the scrawl across the front barely was visible. Nan read:

Dear Family,

We don’t get much time to think of home, but if there’s a minute extra, we write. We have marched a great deal. The farms in France aren’t a bit like ours. The land is divvied into patches no larger than an acre, every inch plowed. This makes for hard walking what with the hedgerows, and we move like turtles. Yesterday we hit open land. I took a bath and washed my clothes in a mountain stream and it was some cold. Had horse meat for dinner. Thought that was a strange meal, but I didn’t tell. Corporal thinks I’m fine at chopping wood. We do so for as many as seven days when out of the trenches, and the others are slow. Corporal thinks I’m slow in other ways, but he doesn’t say how. He calls me Hush. The boys do the same. I don’t know what to make of that. This morning, an aeroplane battled in the air. Interesting to see, though the others say they’ve seen it by the dozens. The woods are so thick here the planes were soon out of sight. Had a sick spell a short time ago but it didn’t stick. Well, Corporal is calling for us now so I must finish this. Tell Mother not to worry. I haven’t seen a German yet.

Yours,

Lee

“Is that it?” I asked.

“It’s Lee.”

“Has your mother seen it?”

She shook her head.

“Best not, I suppose. Best not tell the boy about your mother either.”

“Mother told me not to.”

“What else has your mother said?”

Nan drew her shoulders together. “Do you want to write a note back?”

I sighed. “They will be sending him home, I would think. They cannot keep a boy forever.”

Nan made a sound in her throat and folded the letter away. “They can keep him as long as they like.”

The toast had run cold. The scrappling tasted of nothing more than skin and fat. My youngest son had long outgrown me. I hoped he would outgrow me further still. Too soft a heart never made a man any good. I prayed my son knew the same. Prayed it turned him sensible instead. Through the open window, the whine of a saw in the Elliot yard.

“Close it,” I said.

A fog of sawdust broke from their barn. Soon the beating of hammers. Nan stood and shut the pane.

“Have you heard from Carl?”

She sat again. “Nothing.” She swallowed and lowered her voice. “Mother said I should think of the girls if I think of anyone. I should think of them as my own.”

I dropped my chin into my hands. “Family is everything.”

She looked at me as if wanting more. The girls already had a mother. And Nan, she was engaged to be married. The man was miles across the ocean and not heard from in months, yet she had that.

“She thinks I might not have my own — children, I mean,” said Nan. “Why would she say that?”

“Of course you will have children.”

Nan covered her mouth. She took a breath before she spoke. “Mother said I mustn’t leave the girls alone.”

“No.” The word came more as an echo than an answer. Outside, Elliot’s saw had started up with greater force, and a thought burned in my throat. I knew at once I must speak to Margrit, no matter her sleep. I must ask her what she meant.

Nan closed her eyes. A sob escaped her. I looked to the window. When she spoke, her words were plain. “The note?”

I pressed my hand to my forehead. A note to my son, with his mother in bed. What could I write?

“Very well,” she said. On the other side of the wall, Margrit coughed and coughed again. My daughter scraped her chair across the floor and picked up my plate. Her hands had roughened, the skin chafing. She worked too hard. But I could not have her work less. She stumbled against a catch in the floor, swung out an arm for balance, and quickened her steps. When I looked again, her ring lay small and thin on the tablecloth between us.