Jason tried to argue. “I’m not sick,” he said. “If I was carrying this germ, wouldn’t it make sense for me to be sick? It’s got to be gone now!”
“No,” said Germaine, “it does not. You clearly have an immunity.”
“How can you know that?” he demanded. “And how would it be on my clothes?”
She pointed back at the house. “Fetch the water, Jason. And get in it. This is not a discussion.” She clapped her hands. “Hop to it.”
Now, sitting in the water, Jason wondered how in the course of less than an hour he could have moved from contemplating shooting a woman to hopping to it when she hollered.
Part of it, he suspected, was that she did seem to know what she was doing. She examined him like she was a doctor, and when he asked about that she said that back in Philadelphia she had worked as a nurse. She seemed to know a lot about germs, and when he asked about that she made a joke about them being her namesake. “The girls used to call me Germy behind my back,” she said and laughed.
It wasn’t all that funny, but Jason laughed too. He hadn’t done that in some time, laughing aloud, and it felt good to finally clear the pipes.
“What girls?” he asked.
Aunt Germaine’s smile faded a bit. “Oh you know,” she said. “The other nurses.”
Jason hadn’t a chance to ask many more questions the next couple of hours, as he followed Aunt Germaine’s very precise instructions about how to heat the water, where to do the bath and most importantly how to wash his clothes and himself.
Finally, as he finished the last spot at the very back of his head, he started up again.
“Aunt Germaine,” he said, “how is it that I never heard of you? You and mama have a fallin’ out?”
“Not precisely that,” said Germaine. “Let us say that we married into different circles.”
“That’s how come you’re called Frost, and not Thornton?”
“Yes. That is how come.”
Jason set down the soap in the snow. It bled little spider legs through the white. “How come you’re here now?” he asked.
Germaine turned around, glancing at Jason then away. “I was—nearby, when I learned what had happened here.”
Jason gave her a look. “How nearby? Nobody’s been here all winter to see what happened.”
His aunt pulled off her gloves, and wrung them together. “Nobody has,” she said. “And you have not left the homestead, and no one has come.”
“Too much snow,” said Jason.
His aunt didn’t say anything to that. She kept her eyes down, while Jason worked it out: news had come from here that was not about his mama, but still bad enough to draw relations nonetheless.
His hand fell back into the tub, and although the water was still quite warm, he shivered.
“What happened in Cracked Wheel? More people get sick?”
Aunt Germaine looked up. Her eyes might have been big and wet again, but the sun reflected off the glass so Jason could only surmise it by the tone in her voice.
“The whole town,” she said quietly. “It is gone.”
Jason would never set foot in the cabin again, of that he was sure.
As the sun set below the mountains, the flames were already reaching higher than treetops. He felt himself hitching to cry all over again as he watched the flames take it, and the woodshed, and his mama—who was going onward with no coffin, no tombstone, no sweet-voiced eulogy from the best preacher in Montana: a quiet recitation of the Twenty-third Psalm by Aunt Germaine, a lick of flame to kerosene, and then . . .
Fire.
Aunt Germaine stood beside him, her arm around his shoulder as the flames went higher. “Jason, this is something no young man should have to do, but so many do. You are very brave.”
Jason coughed, to hide that he was crying. “Not my idea,” he said, quiet enough that he’d figure his aunt couldn’t hear. But her ears were better than her eyes and she answered him:
“You wouldn’t know,” she said. “You haven’t seen the town yet. You haven’t seen what this germ does.”
“I know well enough,” he said. “Mama should be buried.”
“Why’s that?” Germaine raised her voice as the flames hit the woodpile. “She Catholic? A Jewess?”
“You know she ain’t,” said Jason.
“Then cremation is still good enough for my sister. It was good enough for Mr. Frost, it’s good enough for Ellen.”
Jason swallowed hard. They had had a falling out, Aunt Germaine and his mama—that was a sure thing.
“If we do not do this,” said his aunt, “then what happens when some trapper comes by in the melt, starts rooting through the house and picks up that germ? What happens, I will tell you, is this: it is an epidemic. Like the cholera.”
“Is that what this is?”
Aunt Germaine put up her hand. “The flames are taking,” she said. “Let us pray for your mother’s immortal soul.”
“All right,” he said. “I will.”
And Jason bowed his head, and after a moment of sad quiet, he imagined a great celestial light descending over this infernal pyre. And imagining that, he thought up a prayer.
Oh Lord
, he prayed,
please see my mama to Heaven where she belongs. And Lord, see to it, please, that should my pa ever wish to speak with her from where he writhes and burns in that Other Place—
Jason opened his eyes and stared into the flames that consumed the cabin old John Thistledown had built the year Jason was born.
—please, Lord: see to it he stays where he is and keeps his damn peace.
A month ago, shooting the pigs might have brought Jason some measure of satisfaction. Now—somehow, the act seemed capricious; low-down cruel. But Aunt Germaine insisted.
“They are probably fine,” she said. “But who knows if whatever it was that took poor Ellen is not also somehow attached to the swine?”
“It don’t seem likely,” said Jason. “And anyhow—those pigs have value at market.”
Aunt Germaine shook her head. “There is no market,” she said. “Not close by. Go on, young man. Take your shot.”
“Well,” he said doubtfully, “they
are
cannibals.”
In the end, Jason was down six bullets from the Winchester, having missed with one and but wounded with another.
He made sure to gather up the casings for reuse before he and his new aunt started off, in the dawn light, toward the snow-choked pass to Cracked Wheel. Jason wondered how they were going to do it. But as they crossed a rise that had been beaten down by Aunt Germaine’s footsteps, and rounded a tree, he saw it. There, sticking out of the snow, were two pair of snowshoes.
“Have you ever walked in snowshoes?” she asked.
“‘Course,” he said. “There was a couple pair that burned up on the back of the woodshed. Didn’t think of them until now.”
“Well, it is a good thing I thought ahead,” said Aunt Germaine. “See? I brought an extra pair.”
“In case of survivors,” he said.
“That is right.”
“That was good thinking, Aunt Germaine.”
Aunt Germaine reached out, tossed one pair of shoes onto the snow, and stepped onto them. She motioned for Jason to do the same, and then looked at him very intently.
“I will look after you, Jason—from now on. I’ll see to you. We are, after all, family.”
“Family,” said Jason as he stomped his feet into place on the snowshoes. He hadn’t thought he’d be using that word again, but it felt good coming off his tongue.
“Let me carry your bag, Aunt,” he said as they headed off south.
Cracked Wheel, Montana, was the biggest place that Jason Thistledown had ever visited, but he was wise enough to know that didn’t mean much. From talking to others when they came to town from time to time, he understood that Cracked Wheel was but a flyspeck next to the great towns of Helena, of Butte, of Billings. He knew that all combined, they weren’t any of them a thing to compare to Philadelphia where Aunt Germaine came from, or New York, where the scale of things dwarfed whole mountain ranges.
Still . . . there were more than a hundred people who made their homes here around a main street of log-and-board buildings. There was the Dempsey store, which handled dry goods and hardware and coffee and spices and the mail. When the season was right, they’d even get apples and such in, and when it was wrong, it would be applesauce, or anything else you might imagine sealed inside a tin can. There was a saloon, which Jason had not entered since he was very small, where you could get a room as well as a meal and a whiskey. Across the road was Johnston Brothers, a little storefront that offered doctoring and barbering and undertaking depending on your needs. And next to it was the town office, a low clapboard building where the records were kept of births, deaths and land titles.
That was where Aunt Germaine led him. “It is the one building that I dared enter before I came to you. I am not dead. So I believe it is safe.”
“Safe.”
Jason kicked off his snowshoes at the edge of the sidewalk and looked around uneasily. Huge drifts licked up the sides of buildings and swelled over the eaves of rooftops, from which icicles the size of men dangled and dribbled into icy pits in the snow. The wide street was nearly trackless—but for the oval scratches of their own snowshoes, and some older ones that maybe Aunt Germaine had made when she’d headed out.
“This ain’t safe,” he said. He pointed at a hole in the glass of the front window, big as a thumbprint. The panel had been covered with a little wooden board, but no one had cleared the glass. “Look. Someone’s been shooting.”
Germaine didn’t hear him. She pushed open the front door to the town office. “Come inside,” she said. “Help me start a fire in the stove.”
Jason had to wait a moment for his eyes to adjust to the scant light. He had been inside very few times. He knew there was a long, dark wood counter in the front and a few desks behind it, with some wooden cabinets and a big wall of tiny little shelves for notes. It was all shadows now, musty smells of paper and dust, an uneasy chill left from colder days.
“Come on in,” said Aunt Germaine. “I’ve told you, it is safe. There are no dead in here.”
Germaine struck a match and set it to lamp wick. It illuminated her face for an instant before she moved away, scraped a chair across the floor and set down.
“Start a fire in the stove,” she said, “and I shall make some tea.”
Jason stepped around the counter. “Are we staying here?”
“Until there is more of a melt on the road,” said Germaine, “yes, I believe so. It’s all right. The clerk here went to his own bed before he passed. And there’s a fine store of tinned food I found last time I tarried. Come. Bring my bag. I will busy myself with my own work.”
Jason hefted her bag onto a clear space on the desk, which was otherwise covered in a stack of leather-bound ledgers.
“Thank you, Jason,” she said, and dug into the bag until she found a long wooden box. She set it in front of her, turned a latch and pulled from it a neat drawer, with white paper cards lined up. Then she opened a ledger, and, noticing that Jason was still watching her, repeated: “Thank you. Now start the fire. When it is going, we shall find some tea—and perhaps something to eat.”
A meal of tinned ham and pears in his belly, teacup only half-drunk beside him, Jason slept for he didn’t know how long next to the roaring fire he’d stoked in the wood stove. When he woke, it was darker than before—the lamp was doused and somewhere in the Cracked Wheel Town Office, he could hear Aunt Germaine’s rhythmic snores.
God, he must have been tired. Thinking through how the last day had gone, Jason could see how he’d get that way. It was amazing that he hadn’t burned the whole town down, starting the stove fire, like he’d burned down his mama’s homestead.
He got up and stretched. His eyes were accustomed to the dark, and he could see Germaine stretched out on a wooden bench on the customer side of the counter. It was hard to tell for sure, but he thought she had the Winchester cradled in her arms.
Jason looked over to the last place she’d been—the desk, next to the ledger. That had been something else he’d wanted to ask her about—exactly what it was she was doing there.
But every time he tried, she’d tell him to go do something else for her until he got so tired he fell asleep. Aunt Germaine was no fool, that was true.
Well
, he thought,
now the tables are turned, Aunty. Can’t fib when you’re asleep. Let’s see what you been up to.
He didn’t want to wake her, so Jason took some care. He lifted the ledgers off the table, and set them on the floor behind the counter. Then he did the same thing with her box of cards—which was still unlatched and open. And finally, when all that was in place, he took the lamp, and a box of matches, and with them crouched down behind the counter, next to the book and the box, and started checking through it.
He looked at the ledgers first. They were pretty easy. Stamped on the front were the words “Births & Deaths,” and inside were lists of names, set down by the year and the month and finally the day. They listed parents in some cases. Further along the page, there was sometimes another date—sometimes not. It wasn’t hard to figure it out: the first date was a birthday; the second, the date of dying. The earliest date for either, Jason saw, was 1844, which was, he suspected, the year that some fool settler had broken his wagon wheel and given the town its name. Subsequent years took up more pages, and as it moved on through boom and back to bust, far fewer. 1892 through ’95 all fit onto one page, with two or three lines to spare.