The winter in which Lant turned sixteen was an unhealthy one. The weather had been unseasonable since October, when the autumn storms failed to appear. The dry heat of summer had continued on past Christmas. The mosquitoes thrived through January and February, with no rain, no cold, to kill them. It was impossible to raise anything in the garden.
Early in March the influenza struck along the river. There were a dozen deaths on the piney-woods side. Then it crossed the river into the scrub. On the morning of the fifteenth Sylvester Jacklin rode to the gate, hitched his horse and walked up the lane. Lant and Piety met him at the front stoop. They went into the front room and sat by the hearth-fire. Sylvester was ill at ease. He sat on the edge of a hickory chair, twisting his wide-brimmed black felt hat in his hands. He had not been in the house since the day he had taken away the body of Willy Jacklin. Piety was glad to be friendly with her sister's husband.
"How come you not workin' today, Syl?" she asked.
"The Comp'ny knocked off the last crew a week ago," he said. "Them scapers got enough cypress stacked in the yards at Palatka to do 'em 'til my young uns is growed."
He twirled his hat on one finger and did not lift his eyes.
"I wouldn't be to work no-ways this evenin'," he said. He blurted out, "Py-tee, no man on earth hated to ask a favour worser'n me. But I got to ask you to come nuss Marthy. Her and two o' the leetle gals has got the flu."
"I tol' you that were Doc Lorimer's mare," Lant nodded at Piety.
"I thought 'twere Zeke's Lulu had takened it," the woman said. "Kezzy were here Monday and said her Ma were down."
"Marthy takened it from her, I reckon," he said heavily. "Doc says they're all in a mighty bad fix. Thad's down, too." He looked at her helplessly. "'Tain't nobody but you to go to. That passel o' young uns o' mine, squallin' and dirty and hongry—" He wiped his forehead.
She rose quickly.
"You kin make out cookin', cain't you, Lant?"
"Shore kin. Mebbe I'll git me enough bacon for oncet."
Sylvester stood up, relieved.
"Come eat with us, Lant," he said, "if you git lonesome or hongry 'fore your Ma gits back."
"Don't you worry 'bout him," Piety called from her bedroom. "He'll go down to Zeke's and set on the back-stoop and Kezzy'll sneak him out a hull half a lard cake."
"Uh-huh!" the man laughed. "That's likely where my Cleve goes when he comes home with his belly done a'ready full."
"Kezzy spoils all two of 'em. And Lulu wonderin' where the flour and sugar goes to."
She came out with a change of clothing in a clean flour sack and fumbled on the mantel for her snuff-box.
"I'm gone," she said to Lant. "Don't you starve my cats nor my chickens."
He watched after her down the lane, crooking his neck, as long as a water-turkey's. He had grown like jimson-weed in the past year. He was stretched out almost to his full raw-boned length. His body was a jointed pole for the support of his big red-haired head. He called Red and Black from under the house, laid them on their sides in the sun and picked off their fleas. The dogs groaned with pleasure.
Red was Lant's favourite. He was a strange dog. His nature was for night hunting. He had lain in the yard all day, napping, opening one eye, friendly enough, at the cats and chickens. The youngest kitten had played around him; had chased small grey lizards across his paws; had slept with him in the afternoon sunlight, warming its back against him. Now the dog seemed to watch the progress of the sun across the sky.
Lant ate a cold supper and fed the dogs. Black lay down again. Red yawned, shook himself, stretched. When the sun dropped behind the ledge, he walked stiff-legged to the slat-fence, wormed himself through a gap and began his rounds. He followed the first track he picked up. Usually a 'possum, a 'coon, a wild cat or a skunk had passed close to the fence since daylight. Tonight when he put his nose to the tainted earth, the prey proved to be one of Piety's kittens. It leaped ahead of him and made a persimmon tree in the clearing. The bark slipped. Red was on it. He gave one prodigious shake of his head. He strode off, superbly indifferent that the same dead kitten had lain in the sun that day against his ruddy belly. Lant followed him and buried the kitten under the persimmon. Red, on his way to the hammock, rolled his eye at him.
"You better be proud Ma never seed you ketch that un," Lant called after him.
He spent the evening oiling his traps to put them away for the spring and summer. The trapping season was ended. He had done well, especially with 'coon hides. He had made enough to live on, with a few dollars left over; for three years there had been no more talk of school. He was almost a man, he thought, and the danger from that source was over.
In the morning he rolled up his last bundle of hides to take to Eureka for the itinerant fur buyer. He re-strung his grandfather's banjo and tuned it to a pitch that suited him. Towards noon he went to the kitchen and looked from the cold range to the cupboard and back again. He went whistling down the road to Kezzy.
She came to the back door with red rims around her eyes.
"Lant," she said, "I'm feered ain't none of 'em goin' to make it."
He had not been concerned with his ailing kin. Because Kezzy was distressed, he became leaden. He was not even hungry any more.
"Ary thing I kin do?" he asked.
She shook her dark head. At eighteen, she had unplaited the smooth braids and coiled them loosely at the nape of her white neck. He missed seeing them shake when she moved her head.
"Jest come down ever' day to see," she said. "You'll belong to go for he'p if things goes the way I figger they're goin'."
She did not offer him dinner and he went home and cooked an unpalatable corn pone. In the late afternoon he took Red and Black and went hunting in the scrub. His whole family faded from his mind.
In the morning Zeke was again a widower, for Lulu was dead. Through the rest of the week the others died who had been stricken; Martha and two small girls, and Thaddeus Lantry. Piety thought that it was strange her grief for them should be so thin. Perhaps death could only do great damage once. After the pain of Lantry's going, sorrow for these others was a harmless shadow. She saw them buried under the blackjacks; saw the Lantry settlement dissolve out of the scrub within a few short weeks.
She half expected that Zeke or Sylvester Jacklin would marry Thad's widow, Nellie. If Kezzy would stay and keep house for him, Zeke said, he could get along without a wife.
"Take a heap more'n you, Zeke, to drive me outen the scrub," the girl said.
Nellie and her children moved back across the river. Sylvester Jacklin moved back too. On the first of June he married a woman with children of her own who would have nothing to do with his motherless brood. Nellie took his girls to raise with her own. Piety agreed to take Cleve, a lazy fellow of eighteen, until he should find steady work. She came away from the family meeting at Abner Lantry's house in the piney-woods to tell Lant, waiting with the rowboat, what she had done. He frowned.
"We'll be feedin' the scaper longer'n you figger on," he said. "What with Kezzy stayin' on in the scrub, and Cleve hatin' work the way he do, he won't find nothin' to do. You watch and see."
"You jest don't want nothin' around but a mess o' dogs," she said indignantly. "Cleve'll tote my stove-wood and he'p in the garden."
"Yes," he said, "and he'll set on the stoop and swop lies with you like ary woman."
They rowed across the river in silence. Half-way up the ledge to the clearing, Piety asked:
"You reckon Cleve's courtin' Kezzy?"
He said, "Cleve's jest natchelly the courtin' kind."
Cleve was to move his clothes over the following week. He would sleep in Lantry's bed in the front room. Piety spent a day sorting her bedding to find quilts for him. Her eyes burned and her neck ached. She emptied a shelf over her trunk to make a place for his belongings. The next morning she had a hard chill and could not get up. In the afternoon a high fever set in. Her back ached as though she would break in two in the bed. She had had malaria before, but it had not struck so viciously as this.
"I'll take me a leetle dose o' asafoetidy," she said to Lant. "You better take one, too, to clear your blood."
"I won't touch the stinkin' stuff," he said. "I been takin' my medicine."
"What you been takin'?"
"I've done carried a piece o' prickly ash in my shoe all spring to chew on."
"Did you make a soap and honey poultice for that risin' on your arm, like I tol' you yestiddy?"
"I made better'n that. I made a prickly-pear pad and its drawin' fine."
"You'll take them wild things," she complained, "and not doctor yourself fitten."
"You're down and I'm up, ain't I?"
The asafoetida, she admitted the next day, had not helped her. The rest of the week she took Black Draught and Pierce's Chill Tonic. The fever grew worse. Lant brought Kezzy to see her.
"Ma used to tie nine knots in a string," the girl told her, "and dip it in turpentine and wear it nine days around her waist, to cure the fever."
"I done that the first day I knowed 'twas chills and fever," the woman said. "I takened it off and had Lant dip it agin jest today."
"Maybe that's what's the matter," Kezzy said. "Ma never takened it off. The string keeps its strength a long time. When you take it off, it's that strong to where you can tie it around a tree and it'll give the tree chills and fever."
The girl bathed her and put a fresh sheet on the bed and a clean quilt over her. She baked cornbread and biscuits and swept the house. Lant followed her about.
"If 'twas you, would you load Ma in the wagon and carry her to Doc?" he asked.
She stood in the bedroom doorway studying the sick woman.
"She ain't fitten to carry. You go tell Doc what ails her and leave him send her medicine."
Piety roused from her stupor.
"Lant needs medicine, too," she said. "He's got a humour in his blood and he'll eetch and eetch until he'll scratch his back agin a post like ary hog."
Kezzy said, "'Pears to me like not havin' no fresh greens in so long is what ailded ever'body."
"Ol' Doctor Kezzy—" he taunted her. He reached for her hair. "Dog take it, since you put them braids up I cain't get me no handful to pull."
"Mebbe that's why I put 'em outen the way."
He walked with her to the gate.
"Cleve's movin' over Monday, ain't he?" she asked. "You and him come down to Zeke and me for your dinners. Don't you set up to the table and wait for your Ma to git outen the bed and cook for you. I declare, men-folks is a sight."
He left her and went to the river to row to Eureka. Doc Lorimer prescribed heavy doses of quinine and sent back as well a dose of his special liver-twister.
"This'll scrape that scrub sand out of her guts," Doc said. "Carry her down here when the fever leaves her."
In a week she was free of fever; weak and light-headed, but able to go in the rowboat to Lorimer's one-room office in Eureka. Lant joked outside with crazy Ramrod Simpson while she made her call. Old Doc wrapped up her medicines.
"How much do I owe you, Doc?"
"Nothin' but sixty cents for the quinine. Don't enough stuff go in these here other things to matter. My treatments ain't worth a cent when it comes to anybody I've doctored long as I have you. I know too much about you to charge you. I know your gizzard forrards and back." He handed her the package. "Take one of them big pills in the morning. I'm wormin' you for luck."
He walked with her towards the door.
"I mistrust the hookworm," he said, "where folks has got no outhouse. Modrun science," he said, lifting his snow-white eyebrows over his steel-rimmed spectacles, "modrun science figgers not havin' no outhouse has got somethin' to do with it."
Piety agreed with enthusiasm. Old Doc was deaf and she lifted her small voice.
"That's what I tells Lant," she said shrilly. "I keep a-tellin' him and a-tellin' him, but boy-like he's heedless. I've purely begged him to build us an outhouse, he's got the lumber, right there on the place he's got the lumber, and he won't go to the bother. I tell him I'm ashamed when the Wilsons and the Jacklins comes a-visitin', but what's shame to him?"
She had no strength. She was still faint and dizzy. Sitting idly in the breezeway through long afternoons of summer sun, she had a heightened perception of the changes that had swept across the Lantry settlement like a storm. She was conscious, as she had not been before, of the thinning out of the scrub of its human inhabitants. Her father, she thought, had lived not quite long enough. He had died with the noise of timbering in his ears; the sound of boats on the river; in the swamp the voices of men. Under the blackjacks he had no ears to prick up in gratitude for the new peace.
The fading away of human life was taking place all over the scrub. She remembered as a girl a settlement of English people and Yankees at Riverside. The Big Freeze of '95 had sent them scuttling away like rats, abandoning their homes and clearings. Stray settlers on the small scrub lakes had lost heart and moved away. The lumber company had taken the river cypress and had gone. Towards Riverside men had boxed the long-leaf yellow pine; had sent out rosin and turpentine, leaving the great trees to rot before their time. A small mill at Cedar Landing had sawed out most of the swamp cedar. Turpentine still and cedar mill now lay abandoned. Men had reached into the scrub and along its boundaries, had snatched what they could get and had gone away, uneasy in that vast indifferent peace; for a man was nothing, crawling ant-like among the myrtle bushes under the pines. Now they were gone, it was as though they had never been. The silence of the scrub was primordial. The wood-thrush crying across it might have been the first bird in the world—or the last.
It seemed to Piety that human habitation kept a house standing. Through the summer she saw Thad's and Martha's empty cabins sag a little at the corners, the roofs begin to cave in like battered hats. The rain pipes rusted through, so that the cisterns went stagnant, then dry. Oak snakes took up residence along the beams. The hammock crept in from one side and the scrub from the other. Wild grape vines began to lace themselves up the trellises where coral vines had been, and seedling pine trees sprang up between the steps. She saw with a strange clarity that it did not matter. Even Lantry did not matter, for her son walked long and brown across the clearing. The dead were the dead and the living were the living. The growing uncertainties of a daily existence absorbed her.
Cleve moved in with his small bundle of belongings. He was a quiet fellow and often sat so long without moving that Lant and Piety sometimes forgot at first that he was there. He was inert and pasty, with a round full face. His mother's sandy colouring had come to him still further faded. His hair was fine and light like corntassels. He had pale sulky eyes. Sometimes he grinned broadly and exposed his gums.
He helped Piety with the small chores of the place; talked cosily with her on the stoop, bringing gossip from across the river. Lant was away a great deal, gone like a lean red cat into swamp and hammock and scrub. She enjoyed the company of the older youth. She could not understand Lant's vague hostility to his cousin.
"If 'twas a 'coon with one toe gone, I'd takened in," she said to her son, "you'd jest think it was perfectly fine."