IN A HOUSE full of girls there is always disagreement about the work, about who is to do what. When Papa was too sick to do anything outside, it seemed natural they expected me to look after the stock and do the milking, as well as bring in firewood. But when Papa took bad sick and didn’t get any better, somebody had to nurse him too, cause Mama couldn’t do it all. And there was things my sisters didn’t like to do, that had to be done, like lifting him onto the chamber pot, and bathing him once a week, and rolling him over when the bed clothes had to be changed. Of course they wanted me to do it, for who wants to watch their own Papa dookie in the pot, or who wants to wash him all over with a washrag?
But somebody had to, and somebody had to help Mama, and somebody had to stay up at night. And Mama had back trouble herself that winter and was too sore to do much lifting or bending over.
SO IT FELL on me a lot to stay up with Papa, when his lungs got so bad he couldn’t breathe at night. After I’d worked all day in the fields I’d get a little sleep between maybe eight o’clock and midnight, either in bed or sometimes just dozing by the fire in a chair. Then I’d rouse myself to stay up with Papa after all the others had gone to sleep. A body can do with a lot less sleep than you might think. One of the others sometimes stayed up for a while, or got up at some point in the night. But it fell to me to be there for the longest time, on watch, so to speak.
So I kept a lamp burning in the tiny hours as Papa struggled. It was an awful thing to see and listen to, a grown man trying to get
his breath like a child with the croup. I think that’s one reason why the others wanted to get away from him. By late March Papa couldn’t halfway take in any air. He rasped and panted in his throat and coughed like he didn’t have the breath to cough and was going to break open. His face turned red and splotched like people with the hectic do.
THE NIGHT I’M talking about was windy and late in March. It had rained during the day and then turned off cold. The sarvises and the redbuds was already blooming, but I guess some of their blossoms got blowed away. It was so windy air pushed down the chimney and made the fire flutter and smoke a little. I don’t think the wood smoke helped Papa breathe no better. You could hear wind roaring on the mountain like a thousand waterfalls. Everybody else had gone to bed, and every time a gust shook the house the windows rattled.
“Papa, would you like me to heat up some water, so you can breathe the steam?” I said.
“Won’t … do … no … good,” Papa gasped. He had spit up blood earlier and there was a bloodstain in the corner of his mouth.
“Want me to heat some rocks and put them under the bed?” I said.
He shook his head. It was like after the long struggle all winter to throw off the weakness in his chest, he had just give up.
Wind hit the house like the breath had been knocked out of somebody, and I heard something fall in the attic. It was dark except for the lamp on the table by the bed.
Papa coughed so hard it looked like his eyes was going to pop out. A cough raised his back up and run through his body in waves. As he tried to cough he stared straight up like he was looking a hundred miles away.
“Would you like some syrup?” I said. “Mama has made some
soothing syrup out of honey and liquor with a little paregoric in it.”
Papa shook his head, but I got the bottle anyway and poured a tablespoon for him.
“No … use,” he gasped.
“You got to quit coughing,” I said. “You’re going to choke.” I held the spoon to his lip and tipped some into his mouth. But he coughed, and the syrup flew back out. I tried again, but he coughed that out too.
The thing about somebody with chest sickness is they don’t have any lung left to breathe with. Their chest is so eat up there’s nothing to take in and hold air. And the lungs think if they cough they can get rid of the congestion and take in more air. But the coughing don’t do no good. And more coughing just makes it worse.
Now I was getting scared. The light of the lamp was glaring and everything looked sharp, just like itself, and more like itself than usual. I shuddered with the fear of what was happening.
What can I do? I thought to myself. I’m powerless to help Papa. I was scared as I bent down over Papa’s bed and tried to make him drink some of the warm water with lemon juice in it. I knowed he was thirsty. He was dried out from coughing and from breathing so hard. He tried to drink, but he had to cough as soon as the liquid touched his throat. The warm water and lemon juice sprayed out on the bed. I had to wipe it off his face and the bed clothes. And then I tried again.
It hurt to see him so hungry for air, and so parched for liquid, and unable to take either. I held the glass to his lip and he coughed again, and lemonade dribbled on his chin. His lips was chapped, the way sick people’s lips get. They cracked and bled when he coughed. It was hard to tell what was blood coughed up and blood from his lips. It reminded me of Masenier choking when he coughed. It made me sick to watch him.
Papa had been the strongest kind of man all his life. He had been able to lift two two-hundred-pound bags of fertilizer when he was young. He had once lifted a loaded wagon while his brother fixed the wheel. He could carry a deer out of the woods after shooting it. Now his chest was sunk in and pitiful. His arms was wasted, though his hands was still big and rough. It broke my heart to look at him.
There is a smell that lung sickness gives people. It’s the smell of blood and congestion and fever. It’s the smell of blood mixed with air that hangs over a bed and fills a sickroom. It’s the smell of old blood, and blood that is fresh and already old. It’s the smell of a festering wound.
Papa raised off the pillow trying to get his breath. He gasped like he was trying to swallow the whole world to get some air in his mouth, since there was no room in his lungs. He was sweating with effort to suck in more air.
“Lord,” I said without even thinking, “please let Papa get his breath. I can’t bear to watch him die.”
Papa gulped two more times and his head fell back on the pillow, like he had got some air into his chest, like he was relaxing a little. His body settled down under the quilts like somebody getting ready to go to sleep. He had fell off so much he didn’t look like a grown man in the bed. He resembled a bent old woman.
“Lord, let Papa get some rest,” I prayed. I never had been one to pray a lot on my own, but I found myself saying the words without even thinking.
I tried to think if there was anything else I could do for Papa. Surely if I thought hard enough, I could find something helpful. All I wanted was for Papa to make it through till daylight. I knowed that most people die between midnight and dawn. I went to put another log on the fire, one of the logs Lou and me had cut and drug through
the ice. The wood was too green to burn perfect, and that made the fire smoke a little. I had a few sticks of old pine, which I’d brought in for kindling, and I throwed them on the fire too.
When the new log caught it popped like a cap pistol and hissed as if there was a snake in the wood. Then it popped again. And I seen this green flame rising out of the log, and realized it must be fruit wood. It was a persimmon tree, not an oak, we had cut up. No wonder the wood was so hard, harder than oak. There was some blue in the flames too, but mostly it was bright green. Now I have never believed in ghosts and portents more than other people. I usually don’t even listen when people are telling ghost stories. But Mama had told me a long time ago, and Grandma had told her, that a green fire in a fireplace means something is ending and something else is beginning. A green flame is a sign, like a green shoot in spring, or the green light that takes over the sky sometimes after a storm.
I watched the green flame prance and strut and spread its wings. The fire twisted and beckoned as if it meant for me to follow. The fire spread on the wood like fingers on a keyboard. The log popped and hissed and then started to whine. And the wood begun to moan, like somebody that was grieved. I listened for a little bit to the mournfulness and then I shuddered and turned away. I didn’t have time for such stuff.
And that’s when I knowed I couldn’t stand to watch Papa die. I had been there when Masenier died, and I had seen it all because I had to, because I had to help Papa carry him down to the doctor’s house. And now Papa was dying, and I was the one forced to watch him.
“I won’t do it,” I said out loud and stomped my foot on the floorboards. I guess I was as much scared as angry. I had had to clean up Papa and I had had to set up with him, and I had had to wait up with him instead of sleeping. And I had sawed down and hauled in and split the very logs that was keeping the house warm and burning
the green portent. Everything that was hard fell to me, and everything nobody else wanted to do fell to me.
“I won’t do it,” I said again and stomped to the window. Wind shook the frame and trees roared on the mountain like giant animals.
“What won’t you do?” somebody said. It was Mama standing in the doorway holding a lamp.
“I ain’t going to do this no more,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Mama said.
I didn’t say nothing else. I couldn’t think of what I wanted to say. There wasn’t no words that fit how I felt.
“Somebody has got to stay up with Papa,” Mama said.
I started to say I wouldn’t watch Papa suffer no more, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I had always done what Mama had told me to, and Papa had told me to. I had always done what was expected. I grabbed my coat from the peg by the door.
“Where you going?” Mama said.
“I’m going to split more wood,” I said.
“In the middle of the night?” Mama said. “We’ve got plenty of wood.”
“All the wood you have is what I brought in,” I said. I couldn’t say to her I would rather die myself than watch Papa die.
“It’s too dark,” Mama said, “and windy.”
Rosie appeared in the door with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl. “Where is Julie going?” she said.
In the kitchen I jerked the barn lantern from its nail and lit the wick. I made the flame high as it would go and closed the glass globe before stepping out into the wind on the back porch. I shivered as the blast hit my face and swirled up under my dress. The flame shuddered in the lantern but didn’t go out. The gust felt like lips blowing cold air all over me.
The woodpile and woodshed was around the side of the house. I set the lantern down on the chips not too far from the chopping
block. There was half a moon overhead and clouds churning and chasing theirselves around its light. The ridges looked like black waves raring up.
From the woodpile you could see the lighted window of the front room where Papa was. I turned away from the house so I could get my night eyes. Didn’t want to see what was going on there. I had never refused what Mama had told me to do before, but I couldn’t help myself this time.
The lantern throwed its yellow glare over the chips on the ground. The chips appeared to be floating like some kind of foam. I thought there was one chip there for every single lick of the axe on the chopping block. The chips was different colored, maple, oak, pine and hickory. The chips had stayed there like echoes from every chop.
Lou and me had piled the sections of logs in the woodshed, and I took one out to the chopping block and set it on its end. Wind pushed into my face except when I bent over. If a log is less than eight inches thick you can usually split it without a wedge. I raised the axe up into the wind and swung where I thought the wood was, but the blade glanced off. The light only showed the outline of the piece of persimmon. I raised the axe again and it sunk into the meat of the wood and wouldn’t let go. Took me several yanks to pull the blade loose.
“Julie!” somebody was calling in the wind. I looked around but didn’t see nobody on the porch. There was only the light in the window of the front room. I lifted the axe again and sunk it even deeper into the wood. This time the log split, the splinters tearing from each other right down the middle. It was a satisfying sound. I brought the axe down again, and with a crackle the wood separated into halves and fell apart.
“Julie!” somebody called as I turned around toward the house.
But there was nobody in sight. The voice seemed to come from out of the woods, or maybe up on the ridge. Maybe it was just the wind, but it sounded like somebody accusing me.
I laid the two halves of the split stick aside and got another piece from the woodshed. The torn wood smelled fresh and sour. I could smell the sap on the axe blade. I set up the new log and got the wedge from the woodshed. Much as I hated to split wood, here I was doing it. I didn’t know what else to do.
Instead of going to the porch for the sledgehammer I just used the back of the axe head to pound the wedge in. When the wedge was set I brought the axe down hard, but my aim was off, and the wedge jumped out of the log to the ground. I hated the ring of steel on steel. It was a ring of pain, of bones breaking. There is a sourness of doom in the ping of steel driving steel.
I was so mad I kicked at the chips before picking up the wedge again. The iron was cold as a fish. But this time I set the wedge deeper before swinging down on it. The wood cracked and I knocked the wedge loose and set it again. When the log fell in two I split each half again.
“I won’t do it,” I said under my breath, and the wind sucked my words away. When the moon went behind a cloud I found I had got my night eyes a little. In the splash of lantern light I could see the ground and the log I had set up. As I got into the motion of splitting I found I could feel my way to the wedge with the back of the axe head. I hit the steel and hit the steel and hit it again. And the pieces of log fell apart like cracking shingles. As I worked I missed less and less.
“I won’t do it,” I said again. I was beginning to sweat, and my dress was sticking to my back under the coat. The wood fell apart like I knowed where to touch the nerve at its center with the blade. I aimed for the heart of a cut end and hit it. The wood cracked itself, and cracked again.