Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [149]
“He’s a little cold, I guess,” Oliver said. “He’s shivering.”
“Why didn’t you get him a blanket?”
“And interrupt a song?” He laughed and bent over the top of Ollie’s head to look at him. “You cold, boy? Want a blanket, or are you ready for bed?” Ollie made no answer. “Hey,” his father said, “you are shivering. It’s not that cold.”
Tense with premonition, Susan was on her knees. “Maybe he got too much sun, he looked quite pink.”
“I think he’s playing jokes. Come on, Old Timer, you don’t have to shake as if it was thirty below.”
He lifted the boy to his feet and turned him around, peering at him in the dusk. He shuddered and shook in his father’s hands, his teeth clacked. Even before Susan could scramble across to feel his cold face, before she got him inside and lighted the lamp and saw his fingers fish-white, his nails blue, she knew. The ague fit, the return of the old Milton curse. In a few hours he would be burning with fever, in another few soaked with sweat. It would go on that way for weeks, ague fit, fever fit, sweating fit, a few days of delusive well-being, and again the ague fit, the whole cycle, every cycle leaving either the disease or the patient weaker, until one or the other wore out. And nobody to take him to in Leadville except the drunken doctor from whom she had rescued Pricey.
10
I can remember from my childhood how uneasy Grandmother could make a sickroom. “Let the child alone,” Grandfather would growl at her. “Let him sleep it off.” That was his way–turn his face to the wall and turn down his metabolism until something inside told him he was well enough to get up. But Grandmother treated illness the way she treated her insomnia. She could never simply lie still until she fell asleep. There was always some last-minute adjustment, some final arrangement for relaxation–a glass of water, a little bicarbonate to settle her stomach, a fresh pillowcase, a pulling-down of the blinds to shut out a crack of light, the checking of the front door lock or the drafts of the stove. By the time she got fully ready to sleep it was time to get up.
So with illness. Her chilly hand was always being laid on the hot forehead of suffering. She woke you to see if you didn’t need something to make you more comfortable. She listened to your breathing, studied your clouded eyes and coated tongue, sighed and clucked and murmured, went away reluctantly and left you alone and was back before your eyes could close. The Chinese farmer who kept pulling up his rice to see how it was growing was a relaxed man beside Grandmother. It was a wonder Father survived his measles and chickenpox, much less his malaria. It was a wonder she did. After a week of crisis she was as attenuated as wire sculpture, with eyes that she would describe, looking with distaste into the mirror, as two burned holes in a blanket.
This time Ollie’s sickness was so violent, his chills so wracking, his fever so high, his sweats so profuse, that she slept only in catnaps, dozing in her wakeful chair a half hour now and a half hour then when Ollie seemed well enough to be left to Oliver or Frank. She didn’t trust them to detect danger signs. The very fact that she must leave them to do what she herself, exhausted and muddle-headed as she was, was the only person capable of doing–that woke her from uneasy sleep and set her on her feet toward the bed before she knew where she was.
She hardly noticed the routines of her house. Someone did most of the cooking, but whether she or Oliver or Frank she could not have said. Someone took furtive Pricey away, and in a lucid moment she noted that he was gone, but forgot again before she could ask what arrangement had been made for him. Someone brought the German woman around to do up washings every two or three days, for with wet sheets for the fever, and towels for the sweats, and changes of night-clothes daily, there was a linen crisis, but she hardly noticed the woman’s presence or the copper boiler steaming on the stove. She only snatched whatever she needed off the line as soon as the wind had dried it.