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Tillie settled in for the latest update. She’d made sure that there were snacks for this meeting. Most of the men were still looking haggard. She was worried that there would be more collapses. Kyle was on the mend after a dozen stitches in his forehead and a day resting from the concussion. Since Ruth was still asleep, Tillie had assigned him a minder to make sure that he didn’t overdo it again.
Because of the men working double shifts, and some of the women still asleep, there were a few unfamiliar faces at the table.
“Ten more women have wakened,” Bug reported.
He was one of the new faces, looking a little nervous. Tillie thought he was young to be working on his own, but James had only good things to say about him. She glanced at the list of women that Bug put up on the livewall. Not Bridget, Jean, Nixie or Ruth, which was very worrisome, but there was one bright note. “Mary’s awake?” she said with great relief.
“Um...” Bug looked startled. “James wrote up the list. I don’t know them all.”
“That’s fine,” Tillie said to reassure him.
“He also said that we need to make a plan. That five days is too long for just a little broth.”
Tillie had worried about that. They didn’t have the supplies to put hundreds of women on intravenous feeding. “Are they waking long enough to eat?”
“I think so. I’ve only helped a few, but they’re awake long enough to swallow the broth and use the commode.”
“Can we give them real food?”
Bug looked like he was out of his depth. “I don’t know. They don’t really chew. You should probably ask James.”
Lily burst into their meeting with a happy grin on her face. “James says to tell you that they’re all waking up!”
Bug was on his feet in a heartbeat. “I’d better go.”
Tillie looked around the room at antsy men. “Angus shall we postpone?”
“Go,” he said with a smile. “We’ll adjourn for an hour. Let me know who’s awake.”
The room emptied swiftly leaving just Angus and Tillie at the table. “That’s a relief,” she said.
“I hope so.”
“What does that mean?” Tillie snapped.
“In a room full of sleepers, how many is all? If five or ten woke up, that might feel like a landslide while in reality it might only be a small percentage of those present.”
“You think he’s jumped to conclusions?”
“I think we all want to see the back of this as soon as possible. But I also think we need to plan for worst case scenarios.” He gave her his bad news face. “I’m sorry, my dear. I don’t think all of the women are going to wake today.”
“Why not?”
“Because they have continually defied my statistics. We thought it was based on age, but younger women have woken before older. I’ve made a chart of women by age, how long they slept and their general health, and it doesn’t seem to provide any answers.” Angus pulled a paper from his notebook to show Tillie.
She glanced down the list of names trying to figure out a correlation. She was glad to see some of the names because they had young children. And then it clicked. “All these women have had children.”
Angus leaned over to look at the list. “Plural?”
Tillie made a notation next to each name. They’d each had at least two children.
“Mary only has the one child,” Angus said.
“But it’s her second pregnancy. The first time her farm was attacked, she lost the baby while they were running away. That’s why the next time, they came by wagon. She and Joshua were afraid they’d lose Teresa, too.”
“How many children did you have?” Angus asked gently.
“Five.” Tillie tried not to think about the family that she had lost, but her eyes burned all the same.
“Eunice?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know if she had any children?”
“Yes. Mm, I think more than one.”
Angus leaned back. “How curious.”
A thought hit Tillie, and she was afraid to speak it aloud, but knew she needed Angus to tell her it wouldn’t matter. “Old Agnes didn’t have any children, and she was much too old to have any now. She’s the only one that died.”