The Mill Town Plague

Chapter 1: The Soldier's Homecoming

The October wind came down through the notch in the hills carrying the smell of wet leaves and woodsmoke, and Agnes Dalton stood on her front porch with a jar of blackberry preserves in each hand, watching the road. She had seen the telegram boy that morning—not for her house, thank God, but pedaling fast toward the Fentons' place on the upper road—and the sight of him had put a cold wire through her chest that hadn't loosened since.

But it wasn't death that the telegram carried. It was leave. Private Robert Fenton was coming home for ten days, and the whole town of Harwick was buzzing with it. He was the first of their boys to return, even temporarily, and his mother had already been to three houses that morning spreading the news like a woman distributing communion wafers.

Agnes set the preserves on the porch rail and wiped her hands on her apron. She was forty-one years old, lean and sharp-featured, with dark hair she kept pinned in a practical knot at the base of her skull. Her hands were rough from work—garden work, kitchen work, the particular work of catching babies and setting bones and brewing tinctures from the plants she grew in the long beds behind her house. She was not the town doctor. She had no degree, no license, no shingle. But when someone in Harwick needed stitching at midnight or a breech birth turned or a child's fever brought down, it was Agnes Dalton's door they knocked on, and it had been that way for fifteen years.

The door behind her opened and her daughter stepped out. Mary was twelve, tall for her age, with her father's sandy hair and her mother's watchful gray eyes. She had a book in one hand—she always had a book in one hand—and she squinted at the road as if she could see what her mother was looking at.

"Is it true Robert Fenton's coming home?"

"That's what I hear."

"Is the war over?"

"No, sweetheart. He's on leave. Ten days."

Mary considered this. "Will they have a party?"

"I expect so."

"Can I go?"

"We'll see."

Mary knew what "we'll see" meant. It meant her mother was thinking about something else entirely. She went back inside without pressing the question, and Agnes heard the screen door bang shut and then the sound of her daughter's feet on the stairs, retreating to her bedroom where she would read until supper.

Agnes picked up the preserves again. She had promised them to Edna Fenton as a welcome-home gift for Robert, and she meant to walk them over this afternoon. But she stood on the porch a moment longer, looking at the town laid out below her.

Harwick was a place of perhaps eight hundred souls, strung along a river valley where the Westfield River's north branch cut through granite hills. The town had one main street—Front Street—with a general store, a post office, a church, a schoolhouse, and a barbershop that also served as a dentist's office when old Virgil Pease could be persuaded to pick up his pliers. The lumber mill sat at the river's edge, a long wooden building with a tin roof that caught the light on clear days and threw it back like a signal mirror. That was Joseph's mill—her husband's—though he didn't own it. He managed it for Harlan Griggs, a man from Boston who had bought the operation six years ago and visited perhaps twice a year to inspect the books.

Above the town, the hills rose in long folded ridges covered with hardwood forest that was just now turning. The maples had gone first, blazing out in reds and oranges, and the birches were following with their quieter gold. Below the color, the understory was already bare, and you could see deep into the woods in a way that was impossible in summer. Agnes had always thought October was the most honest month. It stripped things down. It showed you what was really there.

She walked down the porch steps and took the path that led along the ridge toward the Fenton house. The path was well-worn—Agnes had delivered both of Edna Fenton's children, Robert and his younger sister Constance, though everyone called her Connie—and she knew every root and stone. The preserves clinked gently in her hands as she walked.

The Fenton house was a white clapboard farmhouse with a wide porch and a barn that hadn't held animals in years. Edna was out front, hanging wash despite the threatening sky, and she turned when she heard Agnes coming with a face so bright it made Agnes's heart ache.

"Agnes! Did you hear? He's coming tomorrow on the evening train!"

"I heard. I brought these for him." She held up the jars. "Blackberry. From the bushes along the south fence."

Edna took the jars and clutched them to her chest as if they were made of gold. She was a small woman, round-faced and cheerful under ordinary circumstances, but the war had carved lines around her mouth that hadn't been there a year ago. Her husband, George, had died of a stroke the previous winter, and Robert's departure for France three months later had nearly undone her.

"Come in, come in. I've got coffee. Well, I've got that chicory business they're calling coffee now. Come in anyway."

Agnes followed her inside. The kitchen was warm and smelled of bread—Edna had been baking since dawn, Agnes guessed—and they sat at the table while Edna poured the chicory coffee and talked without stopping.

"He says in his letter he's fine, just fine, but you know how they are. They wouldn't tell you if they'd lost an arm. George was the same way—never complained about anything until that last day when he couldn't even stand up. Men. You'd think the army would teach them to speak plainly, but I suppose it teaches them the opposite."

"How long has he been overseas?"

"Four months. He's at a camp near—well, he can't say where, can he? Somewhere in France. He says the food is terrible and the mud is worse and he misses my pie. Can you imagine? All of France, and what he misses is pie."

Agnes smiled. "That sounds about right for a boy his age."

"He's nineteen now. Nineteen." Edna shook her head. "I still see him at six years old, running through that door with a frog in each hand. Do you remember? You were here that day. You were checking on Connie's ear infection."

"I remember."

"Now he's in France with a rifle." Edna's voice thinned, and she looked down at her coffee. "But he's coming home. Ten whole days. I'm going to feed him until he can't move."

They talked for another half hour—about the mill, about the war, about the price of sugar and the difficulty of getting lamp oil—and then Agnes walked home through the first drops of rain. She was thinking about Robert Fenton, but not in the way Edna was. She was thinking about the camps. She had read the newspapers. She knew what was moving through the military bases back east—Fort Devens, Camp Funston, the naval yards in Boston. They were calling it Spanish influenza, though it hadn't started in Spain. It had started, as far as anyone could tell, in the crowded barracks of American training camps, and it was spreading with the speed and efficiency of a military operation itself.

The papers said it was bad. The papers said hundreds were dying every day in the cities. But the papers also said the war was nearly won, and Agnes had learned to read newspapers the way she read weather—looking not at what was being said but at what was being left unsaid, at the gaps between the words where the real information lived.

She reached home just as the rain came in earnest. Joseph was in the kitchen, his boots by the door, his hands washed but still smelling of pine sap. He was a big man, broad-shouldered and deliberate, with a face that looked like it had been carved from the same wood he spent his days cutting. He was forty-four years old and had been managing Griggs's mill for five years, turning out crates and pallets for the war effort at a pace that kept him at work from dawn until dark most days.

"Edna doing all right?" he asked.

"She's over the moon. Robert's coming tomorrow."

"Good. That's good. She could use some happiness in that house."

Agnes hung her coat and went to the stove, where a pot of soup was simmering—she'd started it that morning before her rounds. She stirred it, tasted it, added salt.

"Joseph."

"Hmm?"

"Have you been reading about the influenza?"

He looked up from the newspaper he'd been scanning. "Some. It's in the cities. Boston, Philadelphia."

"It's in the camps too. The army camps."

He was quiet for a moment. Joseph was not a man who spoke before he'd thought, which was one of the things Agnes loved about him and one of the things that occasionally drove her to distraction.

"You're worried about Robert bringing it here," he said.

"I'm worried about a lot of things."

"He's been cleared to travel. The army wouldn't send a sick man home."

"The army would do exactly that if it meant one less body in an overcrowded infirmary."

Joseph folded the newspaper and set it aside. "What do you want to do?"

"I don't know yet. I want to talk to Dr. Boland."

"Fred Boland can barely hear you when you talk to him."

"He's still a doctor."

"He's sixty-three years old and he drinks."

"He's what we have, Joseph."

They looked at each other across the kitchen. It was the kind of look that married people develop over years—a whole conversation compressed into a glance. Joseph saw the worry in his wife's eyes and knew it was real, because Agnes did not worry lightly. Agnes saw the steadiness in her husband's face and knew he would support her, even if he didn't fully understand what she was afraid of.

"Talk to Boland," he said. "See what he thinks."

"I will. Tomorrow."

Mary came downstairs for supper, and they ate together at the kitchen table while the rain hammered the windows. Mary talked about the book she was reading—something about a girl detective in New York—and Joseph talked about the new order of white pine that was coming in from a lot up near Colrain. Agnes listened and nodded and laughed at the right moments, but part of her mind was elsewhere, running calculations she couldn't quite articulate. How many aspirin tablets did she have in her cabinet? How much dried elderberry? How much willow bark? How many clean sheets could she gather if she needed to?

She told herself she was being foolish. Harwick was small and remote, tucked into its valley like a seed in a furrow. The influenza was a city disease, a camp disease. It needed crowds. It needed the close-packed bodies of tenements and barracks to do its work. Surely it would pass them by.

But she had been a healer long enough to know that diseases did not respect geography. They respected opportunity. And a soldier coming home on a train, breathing the same air as a hundred other travelers, touching the same door handles, sitting in the same seats—that was opportunity enough.

She cleared the dishes and washed them while Joseph read to Mary by the fire. It was their evening ritual, one of the small domestic ceremonies that gave shape to their days, and Agnes could hear Joseph's deep voice rising and falling in the next room, reading from a volume of fairy tales that Mary claimed to have outgrown but still loved. Agnes dried the last plate and hung the towel and stood in the kitchen doorway, watching them. Joseph in his chair, Mary on the rug at his feet, the firelight making their faces warm and golden.

She memorized the scene without knowing why.

The next day, Agnes walked down to Front Street to see Dr. Frederick Boland. His office was above the barbershop, reached by a narrow staircase that smelled of hair tonic and antiseptic in equal measure. She found him at his desk, peering at a medical journal through spectacles so thick they made his eyes look like pale blue marbles.

"Agnes." He looked up and smiled. He was a thin man, stooped, with a fringe of white hair around a spotted scalp. His hands trembled slightly—not from drink, as Joseph suspected, but from a palsy that had been creeping up on him for years. He was hard of hearing in his left ear and getting worse in his right, and he had been talking about retirement for as long as Agnes could remember without ever actually doing it. There was no one to replace him. The young doctors went to Springfield or Worcester or Boston, where there were hospitals and salaries. No one came to Harwick.

"Frederick. Have you been following the news about the influenza?"

"What's that?" He cupped his right ear.

"The influenza," Agnes said, louder. "The Spanish flu. In the cities."

"Oh, yes. Terrible business. Terrible." He shook his head. "I've read the reports from Camp Devens. Lungs filled with fluid. Hemorrhaging. Young men drowning in their own beds. It's unlike anything I've seen in forty years of practice."

"Robert Fenton is coming home today. On leave from the army."

Boland's expression shifted. He understood immediately what she was suggesting, and she saw both the recognition and the helplessness move across his face like clouds across a hillside.

"You think he might bring it."

"I think it's possible. I think we should be prepared."

"Prepared how? Agnes, I have aspirin, quinine, and prayer. That's the whole of my arsenal against influenza. There's no treatment. There's no vaccine. You know that as well as I do."

"We could quarantine him. Ask him to stay home for a few days before mixing with people."

"Ask a soldier home on leave to lock himself in his mother's house? The selectmen won't support it. Ned Prouty is already planning a welcome-home dinner at the church."

Ned Prouty was the chairman of the board of selectmen, a self-important man who ran the general store and considered himself the unofficial mayor of Harwick. Agnes had tangled with him before—over the need for a town nurse, over the condition of the well water on the east side of town, over a dozen small public health matters that Ned considered outside the proper concern of a woman who was not, after all, a real doctor.

"Then we should at least warn people," Agnes said. "Tell them the signs to watch for. Fever, body aches, cough. Tell them to stay home if they feel ill."

"I can do that. I can put a notice in the store window." Boland paused. "Agnes, I want to be honest with you. If this thing comes here—the real thing, not just a few cases of the sniffles—I don't know what I can do. I'm not the man I was. My hands shake. I can't hear half of what my patients tell me. I'm slow."

"You're experienced."

"Experience doesn't count for much against a disease no one understands." He looked at her steadily. "If it comes, I'll need your help. Officially, not just the way we've been doing it. I'll need you beside me, not behind me."

"You have me. You've always had me."

He nodded. "Good. Let's hope we don't need it."

Agnes left his office and walked down Front Street toward the general store. The town was going about its ordinary business—women with market baskets, men loading wagons, children chasing each other around the horse trough. She stopped at the store to buy gauze and a tin of mentholated salve, and Ned Prouty rang her up with his usual air of mild condescension.

"Heard you were up at Boland's," he said. Harwick was a town where nothing stayed private for long. "Everything all right?"

"Fine. Just discussing the influenza situation."

"Influenza." Ned said the word as if it were a foreign dish he'd been asked to try. "That's a city problem, Agnes. We're a long way from Boston."

"We're a train ride from Boston. And Robert Fenton is arriving on that train tonight."

Ned's face hardened. "Now, I won't have you spoiling that boy's homecoming with scare talk. His mother has been through enough. The whole town has been through enough, with the war and the rationing and the mill running double shifts. People need something to celebrate."

"I'm not trying to spoil anything. I'm trying to be sensible."

"You're trying to practice medicine without a license, is what you're trying to do. Leave the doctoring to Boland."

Agnes held his gaze until he looked away, which took about four seconds. She took her gauze and her salve and walked out without another word.

Robert Fenton arrived on the 6:15 train from Springfield. Half the town was at the depot to meet him, and Agnes watched from the back of the crowd as the young man stepped down onto the platform. He was thinner than she remembered, with a new sharpness to his face that came from having seen things no nineteen-year-old should see. But he was smiling, and when Edna threw her arms around him, he lifted her off the ground and laughed, and the crowd cheered, and for a moment it was possible to believe that the world was a place where boys came home from wars and everything was fine.

Agnes watched him carefully. He looked healthy. His color was good. He wasn't coughing. She let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding.

The welcome-home dinner was held at the Congregational church the next evening. Agnes went, because not going would have been noticed and commented upon, and she brought a casserole and sat with Joseph and Mary at one of the long tables while Ned Prouty gave a speech about patriotism and sacrifice that went on for twenty minutes. Robert sat at the head table with his mother and sister, looking uncomfortable in his dress uniform, and when it was his turn to speak, he stood up and said, "Thank you all. It's good to be home. I missed the pie," and sat down again. Everyone laughed. It was the best speech of the evening.

Mary was enchanted. She had never seen a real soldier up close, and she peppered Agnes with questions on the walk home. "Did he fight the Germans? Did he get shot at? Does he have a medal?"

"I don't know, sweetheart. Those aren't things you ask a soldier."

"Why not?"

"Because sometimes the answers are things they'd rather not remember."

Mary thought about this. "Is the war really almost over?"

"I hope so."

"When it's over, will everything go back to normal?"

Agnes looked at her daughter's face in the moonlight—so young, so certain that normal was a place you could return to, like a house you'd left for the afternoon. She put her arm around Mary's shoulders and pulled her close.

"I hope so," she said again.

Three days after the dinner, Robert Fenton developed a fever.

Edna came to Agnes's door at seven in the morning, still in her nightdress with a coat thrown over it, her face white and terrified. "He's burning up. He can't stop coughing. Agnes, please come."

Agnes grabbed her bag—the leather satchel she kept packed and ready by the door, the way a fireman keeps his boots by his bed—and followed Edna up the road at a near-run. The morning was cold and clear, frost on the grass, the hills blazing with color against a sky so blue it hurt to look at.

Robert was in his childhood bedroom, under a quilt his grandmother had made, and he was very sick. His temperature was a hundred and three. His face was flushed a deep, unhealthy red, and his cough was the wet, rattling kind that told Agnes his lungs were already filling. He was nineteen years old and strong as a young horse, and the disease was hitting him like a train.

"How long has he been like this?" Agnes asked, pulling back the quilt to listen to his chest.

"He said he felt poorly yesterday evening. I thought it was just tiredness from the travel. Then this morning—" Edna's voice broke.

Agnes listened to his breathing. The left lung was congested. The right was clear, for now.

"Edna, I need you to do exactly what I say. Keep him in this room. Keep the window cracked for air. Give him water—as much as he'll drink. Broth if he'll take it. I'm going to make a steam tent with mentholated salve to help him breathe. And I need you to keep Connie away from him. Away from this room, away from his dishes, away from his bedding."

"Is it—" Edna couldn't finish the sentence.

"I think so. Yes."

Edna sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. Agnes watched the knowledge settle into her face—not just fear for her son, but the understanding of what this meant for the town. For everyone who had been at that dinner. For everyone who had embraced Robert on the platform, shaken his hand, sat beside him in the warm, close air of the church.

"Oh, God," Edna whispered.

"We'll get through this," Agnes said, because it was what you said, even when you weren't sure it was true. "But I need to go see Dr. Boland. I'll be back within the hour."

She walked down the hill to Front Street with the cold air burning in her lungs and a feeling in her stomach like a stone dropping into deep water. She had been right. She had known she would be right. And being right felt like the loneliest thing in the world.