Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [155]
So with illness. Her chilly hand was always being laid on the hot forehead of suffering. She woke you to see if you didn’t need something to make you more comfortable. She listened to your breathing, studied your clouded eyes and coated tongue, sighed and clucked and murmured, went away reluctantly and left you alone and was back before your eyes could close. The Chinese farmer who kept pulling up his rice to see how it was growing was a relaxed man beside Grandmother. It was a wonder Father survived his measles and chickenpox, much less his malaria. It was a wonder she did. After a week of crisis she was as attenuated as wire sculpture, with eyes that she would describe, looking with distaste into the mirror, as two burned holes in a blanket.
This time Ollie’s sickness was so violent, his chills so wracking, his fever so high, his sweats so profuse, that she slept only in catnaps, dozing in her wakeful chair a half hour now and a half hour then when Ollie seemed well enough to be left to Oliver or Frank. She didn’t trust them to detect danger signs. The very fact that she must leave them to do what she herself, exhausted and muddle-headed as she was, was the only person capable of doing–that woke her from uneasy sleep and set her on her feet toward the bed before she knew where she was.
She hardly noticed the routines of her house. Someone did most of the cooking, but whether she or Oliver or Frank she could not have said. Someone took furtive Pricey away, and in a lucid moment she noted that he was gone, but forgot again before she could ask what arrangement had been made for him. Someone brought the German woman around to do up washings every two or three days, for with wet sheets for the fever, and towels for the sweats, and changes of night-clothes daily, there was a linen crisis, but she hardly noticed the woman’s presence or the copper boiler steaming on the stove. She only snatched whatever she needed off the line as soon as the wind had dried it.
Like a burning glass she focused on her big-eyed child with his. terrifying pallor and his pitiful thin neck and his terrible gentleness. She sat watching by his bed for hours on end, and when he woke to himself, and neither shook nor burned nor sweated, she would coax Oliver, against his judgment, to carry him out to the hammock where he could lie and see things going on and be part of the family again and delude her with the hope that he was past the crisis; and in a few hours, or a day, she would have to have him carried back to the bedroom frozen-jawed and blue-fingered.
Six weeks of that. Everything in her life stopped but nursing. She saw few friends–even when they called she hardly saw them–and there were no evenings by the fire, not even with Frank and Pricey. In all that time she apparently wrote no letters except a note to Osgood and Company refusing a contract to illustrate a novel by Mr. Howells. She rejected Oliver’s suggestion that they telegraph one of his Guilford cousins to come out and help. Where would they put her? She would only be in the way. She herself was sleeping in the hammock, Oliver in Pricey’s cot.
Since there was no way to go but forward, that was the way she went. She never thought to inquire how things went at the mine, she forgot the apprehension that had tightened the pit of her stomach every time Oliver went to work armed like a bandit or a sheriff. All her concern now was to know when he would return to spell her or help her in the sickroom.
It was August before she was sure Ollie would get well. He had gone three days without a symptom, he was sitting up and taking an interest, he ate the custards and gruels she spooned into him, each morning he was stronger. Still she could not trust herself to sleep, for while she lay senseless, what if the chills returned, what if no one noticed and wrapped him in blankets and the wildcat-skin rug warmed before the fire?
Then one afternoon Oliver came home with a sleeping draught obtained from the polite drunken doctor whose services she had rejected. She would not take it. She