Main Street Part 61

While she was busy with the activities her work-hungry muscles found--was.h.i.+ng, ironing, mending, baking, dusting, preserving, plucking a chicken, painting the sink; tasks which, because she was Miles's full partner, were exciting and creative--Bea listened to the phonograph records with rapture like that of cattle in a warm stable. The addition gave her a kitchen with a bedroom above. The original one-room shack was now a living-room, with the phonograph, a genuine leather-upholstered golden-oak rocker, and a picture of Governor John Johnson.

In late July Carol went to the Bjornstams' desirous of a chance to express her opinion of Beavers and Calibrees and Joralemons. She found Olaf abed, restless from a slight fever, and Bea flushed and dizzy but trying to keep up her work. She lured Miles aside and worried:

"They don't look at all well. What's the matter?"

"Their stomachs are out of whack. I wanted to call in Doc Kennicott, but Bea thinks the doc doesn't like us--she thinks maybe he's sore because you come down here. But I'm getting worried."

"I'm going to call the doctor at once."

She yearned over Olaf. His lambent eyes were stupid, he moaned, he rubbed his forehead.

"Have they been eating something that's been bad for them?" she fluttered to Miles.

"Might be b.u.m water. I'll tell you: We used to get our water at Oscar Eklund's place, over across the street, but Oscar kept dinging at me, and hinting I was a tightwad not to dig a well of my own. One time he said, 'Sure, you socialists are great on divvying up other folks'

money--and water!' I knew if he kept it up there'd be a fuss, and I ain't safe to have around, once a fuss starts; I'm likely to forget myself and let loose with a punch in the snoot. I offered to pay Oscar but he refused--he'd rather have the chance to kid me. So I starts getting water down at Mrs. f.a.geros's, in the hollow there, and I don't believe it's real good. Figuring to dig my own well this fall."

One scarlet word was before Carol's eyes while she listened. She fled to Kennicott's office. He gravely heard her out; nodded, said, "Be right over."

He examined Bea and Olaf. He shook his head. "Yes. Looks to me like typhoid."

"Golly, I've seen typhoid in lumber-camps," groaned Miles, all the strength dripping out of him. "Have they got it very bad?"

"Oh, we'll take good care of them," said Kennicott, and for the first time in their acquaintance he smiled on Miles and clapped his shoulder.

"Won't you need a nurse?" demanded Carol.

"Why----" To Miles, Kennicott hinted, "Couldn't you get Bea's cousin, Tina?"

"She's down at the old folks', in the country."

"Then let me do it!" Carol insisted. "They need some one to cook for them, and isn't it good to give them sponge baths, in typhoid?"

"Yes. All right." Kennicott was automatic; he was the official, the physician. "I guess probably it would be hard to get a nurse here in town just now. Mrs. Stiver is busy with an obstetrical case, and that town nurse of yours is off on vacation, ain't she? All right, Bjornstam can spell you at night."

All week, from eight each morning till midnight, Carol fed them, bathed them, smoothed sheets, took temperatures. Miles refused to let her cook.

Terrified, pallid, noiseless in stocking feet, he did the kitchen work and the sweeping, his big red hands awkwardly careful. Kennicott came in three times a day, unchangingly tender and hopeful in the sick-room, evenly polite to Miles.

Carol understood how great was her love for her friends. It bore her through; it made her arm steady and tireless to bathe them.

What exhausted her was the sight of Bea and Olaf turned into flaccid invalids, uncomfortably flushed after taking food, begging for the healing of sleep at night.

During the second week Olaf's powerful legs were flabby. Spots of a viciously delicate pink came out on his chest and back. His cheeks sank.

He looked frightened. His tongue was brown and revolting. His confident voice dwindled to a bewildered murmur, ceaseless and racking.

Bea had stayed on her feet too long at the beginning. The moment Kennicott had ordered her to bed she had begun to collapse. One early evening she startled them by screaming, in an intense abdominal pain, and within half an hour she was in a delirium. Till dawn Carol was with her, and not all of Bea's groping through the blackness of half-delirious pain was so pitiful to Carol as the way in which Miles silently peered into the room from the top of the narrow stairs.

Carol slept three hours next morning, and ran back. Bea was altogether delirious but she muttered nothing save, "Olaf--ve have such a good time----"

At ten, while Carol was preparing an ice-bag in the kitchen, Miles answered a knock. At the front door she saw Vida Sherwin, Maud Dyer, and Mrs. Zitterel, wife of the Baptist pastor. They were carrying grapes, and women's-magazines, magazines with high-colored pictures and optimistic fiction.

"We just heard your wife was sick. We've come to see if there isn't something we can do," chirruped Vida.

Miles looked steadily at the three women. "You're too late. You can't do nothing now. Bea's always kind of hoped that you folks would come see her. She wanted to have a chance and be friends. She used to sit waiting for somebody to knock. I've seen her sitting here, waiting. Now----Oh, you ain't worth G.o.d-d.a.m.ning." He shut the door.

All day Carol watched Olaf's strength oozing. He was emaciated. His ribs were grim clear lines, his skin was clammy, his pulse was feeble but terrifyingly rapid. It beat--beat--beat in a drum-roll of death. Late that afternoon he sobbed, and died.

Bea did not know it. She was delirious. Next morning, when she went, she did not know that Olaf would no longer swing his lath sword on the door-step, no longer rule his subjects of the cattle-yard; that Miles's son would not go East to college.

Miles, Carol, Kennicott were silent. They washed the bodies together, their eyes veiled.

"Go home now and sleep. You're pretty tired. I can't ever pay you back for what you done," Miles whispered to Carol.

"Yes. But I'll be back here tomorrow. Go with you to the funeral," she said laboriously.

When the time for the funeral came, Carol was in bed, collapsed. She a.s.sumed that neighbors would go. They had not told her that word of Miles's rebuff to Vida had spread through town, a cyclonic fury.

It was only by chance that, leaning on her elbow in bed, she glanced through the window and saw the funeral of Bea and Olaf. There was no music, no carriages. There was only Miles Bjornstam, in his black wedding-suit, walking quite alone, head down, behind the shabby hea.r.s.e that bore the bodies of his wife and baby.

An hour after, Hugh came into her room crying, and when she said as cheerily as she could, "What is it, dear?" he besought, "Mummy, I want to go play with Olaf."

That afternoon Juanita Haydock dropped in to brighten Carol. She said, "Too bad about this Bea that was your hired girl. But I don't waste any sympathy on that man of hers. Everybody says he drank too much, and treated his family awful, and that's how they got sick."

CHAPTER XXVII

I

A LETTER from Raymie Wutherspoon, in France, said that he had been sent to the front, been slightly wounded, been made a captain. From Vida's pride Carol sought to draw a stimulant to rouse her from depression.

Miles had sold his dairy. He had several thousand dollars. To Carol he said good-by with a mumbled word, a harsh hand-shake, "Going to buy a farm in northern Alberta--far off from folks as I can get." He turned sharply away, but he did not walk with his former spring. His shoulders seemed old.

It was said that before he went he cursed the town. There was talk of arresting him, of riding him on a rail. It was rumored that at the station old Champ Perry rebuked him, "You better not come back here.

We've got respect for your dead, but we haven't got any for a blasphemer and a traitor that won't do anything for his country and only bought one Liberty Bond."

Some of the people who had been at the station declared that Miles made some dreadful seditious retort: something about loving German workmen more than American bankers; but others a.s.serted that he couldn't find one word with which to answer the veteran; that he merely sneaked up on the platform of the train. He must have felt guilty, everybody agreed, for as the train left town, a farmer saw him standing in the vestibule and looking out.

His house--with the addition which he had built four months ago--was very near the track on which his train pa.s.sed.

When Carol went there, for the last time, she found Olaf's chariot with its red spool wheels standing in the sunny corner beside the stable. She wondered if a quick eye could have noticed it from a train.

That day and that week she went reluctantly to Red Cross work; she st.i.tched and packed silently, while Vida read the war bulletins. And she said nothing at all when Kennicott commented, "From what Champ says, I guess Bjornstam was a bad egg, after all. In spite of Bea, don't know but what the citizens' committee ought to have forced him to be patriotic--let on like they could send him to jail if he didn't volunteer and come through for bonds and the Y. M. C. A. They've worked that stunt fine with all these German farmers."

II

She found no inspiration but she did find a dependable kindness in Mrs.

Westlake, and at last she yielded to the old woman's receptivity and had relief in sobbing the story of Bea.