Revolt of the Rats - Reed Blitzerman (early readers txt) 📗
- Author: Reed Blitzerman
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He’d been up here at least a week. A week too long, she thought. He’s certainly going to die. “Oh, not sure,” she lied. “He come from out of town.”
“Water,” her patient rattled, and then, “Burn. I burn.”
Steiner finally turned to look at her after remaining motionless this long and nodded once, “yes”.
Unconsciously she touched her smooth high cheekbones with both hands and shuddered.
Steiner read her then, read her true. She would not help this man without some prodding. He looked back at the salesman, barely seeing him there as the blinds were mercifully closed, and paused, seemed to be unsure of something. He placed his hand on the man’s forehead, absorbing a gratitude that floated through the air like silk and was gone. “It’s just a fever, it’ll pass.”
Anise got the water, placed in on the bedside table and smoothed her dress. “Well, alright then. I’ll send my boy if we need any more help. Thank you for coming.” She nodded and turned slightly toward the door. Eli took the hint, made a final glance at his charge and departed with a nod.
For once Eli Steiner was wrong. Anise stayed on, staring at the guest in her ten-room bed and breakfast like he was a serpent. When Winston turned fitfully in the bed, she noticed what she should have seen before, had missed because of the darkness in the room, the blotchy puck-shaped red swellings that were a sure sign of the pox.
Smallpox.
Certain death.
Anise blanched, still bolted to the floor. The stranger was done for, water or not. Her fear of contagion consumed her, ran its way up her spine to tingle behind her eyes. She thought, “If I hand him the water he’ll get pox on the glass. If I touch the glass I could end up like him.”
She fidgeted, her hands turning summersaults at her waist. She started to run them through her hair, remembered the pomade that held it carefully in place and stopped. If word got out she had a sick renter she’d never be able to keep the place full. She was already a month late on the note. The hogs she raised wouldn’t be enough to close the gap, even if she sold them all. The bank would call her mortgage and she’d be out on her fanny.
She would do what was right; hide the body and burn the sheets. Ten days later, after sunset, she took the body out to the edge of the forest in a wheelbarrow and buried him deep beneath the pine needles. She hid his car in the barn, under some sailcloth. Later she sold it two towns over.
By then, Eli Steiner was home in bed, delirious, watched over by his wife, Judith. She was more handsome than beautiful. Eli hadn’t said it like that when they were dating, though she knew that it was true. What he’d noticed first wasn’t her face, (which was broad-cheeked and round), nor her stature, (broad shouldered and thick), it was her aura. She radiated faith.
She had read the Bible and embraced its tenets, but her true cathedral was the ceiling of branches in the woods behind her house. She witnessed faith in action in the birthing of a calf. She saw faith rewarded in the new spring of water they found in their pasture.
Her home reflected her sense of order. It was spare but clean. A clapboard two-story with the front painted crisp white and doors in careful red. She had a small art studio in the sunroom on the back where she occasionally closeted herself or taught her young son.
There was a kitchen table, a couch, a two-hole sink in the kitchen and a second simpler sink in the mudroom. The couch, the table, and cabinets were a simple Jesuit style, clean and functional. She decked the walls in bead board, protecting the plaster from the activity of her two menfolk.
Judith had grown up on a farm. She knew what it took to plant and bring in a crop. She understood that you leveraged everything for tools and seed in the spring, hoping the migrant workers came north to help with the planting, knowing that the fall would bring forth a harvest to make it all worth it. She saw farming and life as being the same: a series of seasons that rose and fell with a rhythm, with structure, with order.
All things and all people had a place in the universe. Things happened, but they happened for a reason, to achieve something better. But the crop last year had not been good. It hadn’t been good the year before that.
So, faith or not, she could not understand how a generous God in a rational universe would bring her home a sick husband at the beginning of planting season. Eli Steiner, who had never been sick in his life, never complained, now had taken to bed with a headache and a fever.
Everett was strong for his age, had the work ethic too, but he was no match for his father, a full grown sunrise to sunset working man. She would be the only able-bodied working adult in the household. Judith could keep pace with her husband, but to plant one hundred and sixty acres alone? She could hire help, but every farmer and migrant worker in her town knew you paid out weekly or not at all. And she would have to leave her sick husband alone. All her family was either dead or estranged. Eli and Everett were the only family she had left.
Eli slept soundly. Everett was at the creek. Judith stepped out onto the porch, smoothed her dress and sat in the porch swing. Away on the skyline, the sun was setting. The clouds were shaped like white hooks shot through with yellow and blazing red. She imagined herself there, in the sky, impaled on those hooks, impaled by fate.
Judith rang the bell on the porch to call Everett home and began to get ready for bed. She would stay up as long as she could and nurse her husband. Tomorrow she would have to go to the bank for their seed loan, without him.
––––––––
EVERETT AVOIDED THE inevitable. He was down at the creek, the legs of his coveralls rolled up to the knees, stepping from round stone to round stone, looking for frogs. He heard the bell on the porch, cocked his head and continued his hunt. He knew at some level that danger was near, that his father was sick, but he was only a child and his child’s mind was blind to the weight of what was at stake.
Yet his intuition gave impressions that left him wary and moody. What he did know was that Dad could not come out and play. Dad would not be going into town. He spent nearly every waking moment with his father, at his side in the car, riding with him on the tractor, reading in the evening until the sunlight was lost.
His father was his best friend. Farm life was lonely. He looked forward to the occasional festival or visiting relative with an anticipation he admitted to no one. Standing at their wooden fence, looking down the windblown dirt road, he felt an overwhelming ache to see someone, anyone pass down the roadway toward him. His father was kind but taciturn, his mother likewise, so the silence in his home left him perpetually restless.
“What’s wrong Everett?” Mom would ask. “You look like a groom that’s been left at the altar.”
Her light brown eyes and round forehead would gently bob. She would place a coarse hand on the side of his face, sometimes on both, and look him in the eye, unblinking. Her skin smelled of soap and lavender perfume.
“My little dervish. You will find your place in this world, child. The Steiners are a force of nature, boy. Always have been, and you are no different.” Her words would placate him for weeks, sometimes even months, to be replaced with a longing that approached sickness.
His only respite had been reading. Everett Steiner could and did read everything he could get his hands on. He read the Farmer’s Almanac. He read the newspapers, comic books, the bible, and everything available at the small library in town.
Riding with Father, Everett would make him slow down the car so he could read the billboards. It’s as if he’d been born burning, like he’d come from his mother’s womb hungry for knowledge. He had questions about the stars, the livestock, steam engines, and weather. Everett would ask his mother who quickly become impatient, “There’s work to do, boy. I’ll answer any question you like once all them cows are milked.”
Father had patience to spare. Regardless of what they were doing, he explained the answer in a warm, steady voice. He would even ask at the end if Everett understood the answer. Father likewise had read the Farmer’s Almanac, the newspapers, the comic books and the bible, all the books in the library, and a whole lot more.
Sitting beside him, sometimes with a warm hand on his shoulder, his father spoke of places and countries Everett had never seen. Stories so vivid he felt that he was there. With his father nearby he was not just on a farm. He was in a vineyard in Italy or walking fertile fields in Germany.
So the possibility of losing his father was unbearable. He refused to contemplate that besides his mother, he would be alone. The window into the giant world that existed when his father spoke would be gone forever. Everett sighed, picked up his shoes, and began the walk back to the house as fireflies descended with the darkness.
JUDITH ENJOYED A FRIENDLY game of poker with the ladies, by and by. More interesting than knitting, her father had done likewise in the church basement for trifling stakes: an ear of corn, a day of setting fence posts, the recipe to a much desired dish. Always with Judith at his side; tallying the favors, recording commitments.
Her sister nicknamed her “Daddy’s Little Foot Soldier”, and maybe she was. More than that, I was Daddy’s Little Adding Machine. She could retrieve it all: Sunday morning collection, the price of corn last week, time till harvest, the balance on the mortgage. It was a skill that tested her, tied her to the worldly things around her. A little bit of poker, what was one more thing? He’d called it a necessary evil, but instructive in the nature of others. And so it was.
Faith hadn’t made her blind. She learned to look for the tell. She played the ladies for buttons, pennies, laudanum, information; her favorite mark was Ruby Creel, banker’s wife. Judith knew as much about her and her husband, Carter, as his wife, wagging tongue and all. Maybe more.
Carter Creel was the senior loan officer at State Street Bank on Crestview Row. Thin and high strung, he was a balding man in a brown suit with a bristle-brush moustache. He hadn’t slept well any nights recently.
Before the Great Depression, he’d somehow convinced a headstrong, vivacious dancer that he was flamboyant and fun. She’d since married him and found out the truth. As a form of revenge, she had proceeded to burn through every penny he’d saved and almost everything he’d made; her love a gentle riptide, slowly pulling him under.
The distraction of those first
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