THERE · The twenty-eighth winter · thirty-five
The cough came up the valley from Ostrey with the salt carts in the first month of that winter, and by midwinter it was in every house in Hessary that had a child under the age of five. You heard it before you saw anyone. You walked down through the village at night on the frozen ruts and out of every shuttered house came the same sound, a short hard bark and then a long pull of breath with a whistle at the bottom of it, and then the bark again, as if the houses had taken in a pack of foxes for the winter and could not quiet them.
Oss was two and a half. He had been born in the summer, in the heat, the easiest of the four, and Senna had named him for the river because he had come out fast and loud and would not be stopped. He walked with his arms out, like a man on a log crossing. He liked to sit in the shavings under my bench and hold the handle of my adze while I worked, and if I took it away he would go stiff all over and scream until I gave it back, and I always gave it back. He had one word for me, which was not the word for father but the sound he made when he wanted to be lifted up, and I answered to it.
He began to cough on a night of hard frost, a little after the second bell of the dark. I heard it through the floor. I knew what it was before I was down the ladder.
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The healer that winter was Hild, from the eel sheds, who had delivered half the children she was now losing. She came up to our house on the second day and knelt by the box bed and put her ear to his back and listened, and then she sat on her heels. She had juniper in a bag, and she burned it in a dish by his head so the smoke would open him. She had a paste of onion and goose fat, and she rubbed it on his chest and on the soles of his feet. She told Senna to keep him warm and keep him sitting up and give him honey in water, and she said all of this quickly, looking at the door, because there were eleven more houses she had to go to before dark, and in two of them she had already done the washing of the body.
“He is strong,” she said to me at the door.
“Is that enough?”
She put her bag over her shoulder. “Some winters,” she said.
That night the smoke went up from the high terraces for the Tennerys’ youngest. The next night it went up for a girl from the dyers’ yard whose name I knew and whose face I could not put to it. I stopped going out to look.
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Senna did the first three nights. She sat up in the box bed with Oss against her chest, the way Hild said, and I kept the fire and heated honey water and walked the floor when she could not, and Pell, who was fourteen and thought she was a woman, took Ilse into her own bed to keep her away from the cough. Davit was eleven. He sat on the ladder with his knees under his chin and watched everything and said nothing, and when I told him to go to bed he went up three rungs and sat down again.
On the third night Senna fell asleep sitting up. Her head went down on the boy’s hair, and her mouth opened, and I took him from her before he could slide.
He was very hot. I could feel the heat of him through the wool. I walked him up and down between the hearth and the door. Every breath he took, the skin of his chest went in between his ribs, deep, as if a hand were pressing on it from inside, and came out again, and at the bottom of it was that thin high whistle that I did not like to hear. I put my palm flat on his back over the ribs so that I would feel it if he stopped.
The kettle was on the hook over the fire, and it began to boil, and the steam came off it in a white rope and spread under the beams and came down wet on my face.
And I was sitting on a woman’s knees in a small white room.
I had not known I knew it. I had been two years old, his age, and I could not have told anyone that it happened, and yet there it was, whole, as if it had been stored under a floor. There was a roar of hot water falling somewhere behind a curtain. The walls were white and slick and shone. There was a looking glass that had gone white too, so that there was no one in it. The air was so thick and wet that it was like breathing through wool, and I was coughing, barking, and a hand was flat on my ribs, and under the hand my ribs were going in and out, and a voice above my head was counting. It was counting in English. It did not stop. It went on counting, low, not afraid, or pretending not to be, and I could feel the voice through her chest into my back more than I could hear it. In the Slow Country they have a name for the deepest hour of the night, when the house is asleep and only the sick are up. They call it three in the morning.
I stood in the middle of my own house with my son on my shoulder and the kettle going and I could not move, and then I could.
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We had a washtub, a big one of coopered oak that Senna used for rinsing wool. I dragged it to the hearth. I filled it half full from the water butt, and I put six stones from the hearth-lip into the fire to heat. Then I went out in the dark to the dyers’ yard with a lamp and took two of the big copper kettles off their hooks, which was theft, and I carried them back one in each hand with the cold burning my fingers to the handles.
By the time Senna woke I had cut four hazel rods from the bundle in the lean-to and lashed them into a frame over the tub, and I was throwing the winter blanket over the frame, the heavy one her grandmother had woven, so that it came down to the floor on every side. I rolled the hot stones into the tub with a shovel and the water went up with a shriek, and I pulled the blanket shut, and I went in under it with Oss on my knees and sat on an upturned bucket, and the steam came up around us, and it was white, and I could not see my hand.
“What are you doing,” Senna said through the blanket.
“Heat more stones,” I said. “Keep them coming. And keep both kettles on.”
She did not ask again.
I sat in there with him all that night. I kept my palm on his ribs. I counted, because it was the only part of it I had, and I counted in English, low, with the name of a long river between every number, the way my mother had timed my brushing, and after a while I did not know if I was counting his breaths or my own.
Near the first bell of the morning, he slept. The bark did not come for a long time, and when it came it was softer, and it did not have the whistle at the bottom of it.
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I sat in the steam for nine nights.
In the days I slept on the floor by the tub for a bell or two and Senna sat inside, and at dark we changed. Pell carried water from the butt without being asked. Davit kept the stones going in the fire and rolled them to the tub with the shovel, and burned both his hands doing it, and did not say so until Senna saw the blisters on the fourth day and put butter on them and hit him on the back of the head for not saying. Ilse was five and wanted to come in the tent. She stood outside it and put her face against the blanket and asked, and asked, and one night I let her in for as long as it takes to count to sixty, and she sat on my other knee in the white and held her brother’s foot and did not cough, and was very pleased with herself.
Oss ate honey water and then barley porridge. On the fifth day he said his word for me and held up his arms, inside the steam, where I was already holding him.
Hild came on the sixth day and put her head in under the blanket and pulled it out again with her face wet. She stood with her hands on her hips and looked at my frame and my stolen kettles.
“Given nonsense,” she said. Then she said, “How long does he sit in it?”
I told her.
“Hot stones or only the kettles?”
I told her that too. She went away down the hill without saying anything else, and by the next night there were two more blankets over two more washtubs in Hessary, and the dyers’ yard had come for its kettles and gone away again without them.
On the eighth night the bark stopped.
It did not soften, the way it had. It stopped. For a while I let myself think that was good. Then his breath went fast and shallow instead, like the breath of a bird picked up off the ground, too fast to count, and the heat in him went up, not down, and he did not cough because he no longer had the strength to. I knew what it meant.
I said Senna’s name. She came in under the blanket. She took one look at him in the steam and went out again and ran down the hill in her shift for Hild.
Hild came. She did not stay long, and she did not burn anything, and she did not say he was strong.
He died in the tent at dawn on the tenth day, on my knees, with my hand on his ribs. The kettles were still going. I did not know it had happened for a while, because the steam was so thick I could not see his face, and the ribs under my hand had been moving so little for so long. Then they were not moving, and I kept counting anyway, and then I stopped.
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We sent Oss up on the fourth day, which is the custom, from the high terrace above the walnut groves where the smoke can find the Mother without trouble. He was so light that I carried him alone. Senna walked behind me, and I did not turn around, because I knew that if I saw her face I would put him down in the snow and not be able to lift him again. The wood was wet from an early thaw that had come and gone in the night, and it would not catch. There were three other pyres on the terrace that morning and none of them would catch. I knelt and blew on ours until my eyes ran and my head swam, and Davit knelt beside me with his wrapped hands and blew too, and when it caught at last it caught all at once, and we had to pull back from it.
I thought about a woman at a lake who had never been given anything to burn.
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That night the house ate because the house must eat. Pell made the porridge, with the sour cherries and the brown butter the way her mother made it, and got it wrong, and nobody said so. Afterward Senna sat on the stone lip of the hearth and did not put out her hand, and so I did it.
I held my right hand out flat over the fire, low, where it burned. It was the hand I had sworn on eight winters before, on the night I came home from the Mother, and the fire had left a shine across the palm that tightened in the heat, and I let it.
I said the names. Ines. Orrin. Orrin’s wife, who I never knew. Wenna’s sister in Sethry, who was traveling. Then I said Oss, and I waited after it, the space you leave for someone to answer from the dark.
Nothing answered. The fire made its small sounds.
Every night since I was eight I had put my mother’s name out into the dark and left a space after it. In all those winters I had never once thought of her on the other side of the dark at a fire of her own, with her hand out, saying mine, and waiting in the space after it, and nothing coming back.
I said Mom.
I said Jo, and I could not say the rest of it. I held my hand where it was. The shine on my palm went tight, and then tighter, and Pip and Dad stayed in my mouth, and I did not take my hand away.
In the corner behind me the winter blanket was still hanging over the washtub on its four hazel rods, and nobody in that house wanted to be the one to take it down.