Indiana-Michigan Line, 1926
The sky had been as crisp and clean as a freshly ironed handkerchief that September day in ’26. Even with her pregnant belly grinding on her pubic bone (she should have known she was carrying twins), three burnt black coffins of bread smoldering on the stove, and her two kids crying in the house, Ruth’s heart had soared at the perfect bluebird-blueness of it as she strolled in the barnyard (well, as much of a stroll as she could muster, being more of a charger). She could actually feel her youthfulness pulsing in her twenty-two-year-old cells. She broke into the song that had been playing on the radio.
“ ‘When the red, red robin comes bob, bob, bobbin’ along. Along!’ ”
She stopped when she came to John, then shifted the basket she was carrying against her protruding stomach. “Hey, you.”
He was sitting on a bale of hay just inside the barn, his knees jutting out like a grasshopper, his dusty hat pulled low on his head. He rarely sat still—never, when he was working.
“Gorgeous out, isn’t it? Who wants cre-am?” Their private joke.
He kept his face pointed at his work boots.
He didn’t have to be so serious. He was twenty-seven years old and all sinews and muscle. Just looking at him made her blood rise.
“Oh, come on, old man!”
He looked up. Under the brim of his hat, his Abe Lincoln face, with those high cheekbones, was blank.
She raised her voice over the chickens who had spied her basket of scraps and were squabbling at her feet in a flurry of down feathers. “You okay?”
A long moment passed. “Throat hurts.”
Strange. John never admitted when he was ill.
“Why don’t you go in the house and lie down then?” She knew that he wouldn’t. “At least go gargle with some salt water. Go on in and I’ll be there in a minute.”
When she returned from gathering eggs in the henhouse, he was still sitting in the entrance to the barn.
“John, aren’t you going to get up?”
It took him a while to lift his face. “Yes.”
The rest of him didn’t move.
Unease slid through her guts, but she had to go in the house. Margaret and Jeanne were only three and two years old then and she’d left them in the playpen. Later, after she’d baked a cake, put some clothes in bleach to soak, frosted the cake, and given the girls lunch before laying them down for a nap—with the ridiculous “Red, Red Robin” stuck in her mind all the while—she went back outside with a sandwich for John since he had not come in to eat. The hair on her arms prickled. He was perched on the same bale, in the same position.
“John!”
He kept his gaze on his boots.
Her pulse thumping in her ears, she stepped closer. She thought the question bizarre even as she blurted it.
“What are the names of your daughters?”
In the distance, cowbells clunked sedately. She was aware of the acrid smell of animal drifting from the barn.
When he raised his head, his pupils were blank with fear, as if he knew what not knowing their names meant.
Terror blazed through her. “John!”
He yanked free when she tried to pull him to his feet, then he scrambled on all fours into the barn and curled up in a corner.
“John, what are you doing?”
When she touched him, he bunched tighter.
They had no phone. She ran through the yard, chickens flying up shrieking, then she snatched the girls from their bed and ran with them, still clinging to their blankets, to the Model T. They cried from the front seat as she pulled the choke by the radiator, hopped in the car to jam in the key and adjust the throttle, hopped back out to crank the car, then threw herself back inside. Cats galloped for cover as she sped from the yard and toward neighboring farms for help.
John was balled up asleep in the barn when the neighbor men came. They approached him slowly.
“Now, John.” George Squibb reached out his hand. “Let me help you.” He touched John’s shoulder.
John’s eyes flew open. He screamed like an animal that would bite if cornered.
They surrounded him warily, menfolk around a rabid dog, when Dr. Akin roared up in his Buick. He jumped out and ordered the men to lash John down to keep him from hurting himself. Upon a signal, they leaped on John and dragged him to the back bedroom, where they bound his wrists and ankles as Ruth watched, her two-year-old straddling her hip and her three-year-old burrowing into her leg.
They hadn’t needed to tie him up. He was asleep before they were done, and could not be awakened.
Five days later, Ruth had pressed Jeanne to her hard gob of pregnant belly as Dr. Akin positioned then repositioned the cupped end of his stethoscope against John’s chest. Ruth stroked her daughter’s satiny hair and grasped for any distraction: organ music, wheezing from the parlor, the wedding march that signaled the start of Betty Crocker’s radio program; Margaret in the kitchen talking to Mother, who’d come to help; Aunt Edna’s cuckoo clock yodeling from the dining room. HOO-hoo. HOO-hoo. HOO-hoo. Ruth fought the sudden impulse to jump up, snatch that little birdy, and smash it.
Dr. Akin straightened his wiry body with a sigh, then slowly unclipped his instrument from behind his ears. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Ruth, but I believe that John has encephalitis lethargica. That’s—”
Ruth had held up her hand to stop him. The newspapers had been talking about the mysterious disease that turned people into zombies since she was back in high school. When the Spanish flu came a few years later, doctors thought the ailments might be related. But Spanish flu had come and gone in two years, taking a chunk of the world’s population with it, while the sleeping sickness kept churning on. Nobody knew what caused it, nor who it would attack nor why. Not even the richest lady in America had escaped it—Mrs. J. Pierpont Morgan, Jr., had died of it last year. But it always attacked other people’s wives, other people’s husbands. Not Ruth’s.
Behind smudged glasses, Dr. Akin blinked lashes the beige of milky Sanka. “The fact is, he might not ever fully recover. Few with this type of encephalitis lethargica do. From what I’ve seen, they can go on like this for years. The issue isn’t that the patients can’t do things. John’s muscle tone and reflexes are normal. Why, he’s probably physically capable of running a mile. It’s just that they drop off to sleep before they can finish a task. As much as they might want to do something, they can’t without falling asleep.”
She pulled Jeanne’s thumb from her mouth. The baby inside her kicked. “There has to be a cure.”
Dr. Akin put his stethoscope in his bag. “At times he might be able to sustain a response. He might be able to talk to you some, perhaps take a few steps. There isn’t much rhyme or reason to this. Remember—he wants to do things, it’s just that he’s too sleepy.”
From the parlor, Betty Crocker recited a recipe in her fruity voice. What a prissy know-it-all! Why didn’t Mother turn that thing off?
“At least we can make him comfortable.” Dr. Akin shut his bag. “There are institutions that can take him if it gets to be too much.”
Ruth stared at him even as the world changed under her feet, vast stony plates grinding to a halt.
The doctor patted her arm and left.
She would make John comfortable. She would make her children comfortable. She could even make the unborn baby ramming against her tailbone comfortable. But dear God, what about her?