IT WAS ANCIENT and had risen from the boiling earth. It had slept, falling dormant in the dust, rising in mist. Tuberculosis had flown in a dizzy rush to unite with warm life. It was in each new world, and every old world. First it loved animals, then it loved people too. Sometimes it landed in a jailhouse of human tissue, walled off from the nourishing fronds of the body. Sometimes it bolted, ran free, tunneled through bones, or elaborated lungs into fancy lace. Sometimes it could go anywhere. Sometimes it came to nothing. Sometimes it made a home in a family, or commenced its restless touring in a school where children slept side by side.
One night after prayer at the mission school, where the first LaRose, the Flower, slept with other girls in rows, in a room coldly bitter except for their plumes of breath, tuberculosis flew suddenly from between a thin girl’s parted lips. In the icy wind that creaked through a bent window sash it drifted over Alice Anakwad. Hovered over her sister Mary. It dipped and spun toward the sloping bump of LaRose under a woolen blanket, but the current of air dropped it suddenly. The old being perished on the iron railing of her bed. Then a sister being tumbled explosively forward in a droplet of Alice’s cough, vaulted over the railing of LaRose’s bed, swooned downward in the intake of her breath.
WOLFRED WAS WAITING to greet her when she stepped off the wagon that brought her down to St. Anthony. She had left the missionary house for the mission school six years ago, wearing a shift and blanket.
Now behold!
A tight brown woolen traveling jacket, kid leather gloves, a swishing skirt, and underneath it stockings, pantaloons trimmed in lace she herself had knitted, bone corset, vest. She had been paid for years of hard labor with old clothes. She wore a shaped felt hat, also brown, decorated with a lilac bow and the iridescent wing of an indigo bunting. Her shoes had a fashionable curve to the heel that had nearly lamed the mistress of the house.
Exactly as she hoped, Wolfred did not recognize her. He gave her an appreciative glance, then looked down, disappointed. His gaze gradually returned to her. After a while, his look cleared to a stunned question and he stepped forward.
It is I, she said.
They smiled at each other, unnerved. His face reflected her glory with a satisfying humility. She stripped off a glove and extended her hand; he held it like a live bird. He hoisted her trunk on his shoulder. They walked the dusty margin of the road. Wolfred showed her the cart, his Red River cart, two-wheeled and hitched to a mottled ox. The cart was made entirely of wood, ingeniously pegged together. Wolfred put her trunk in back and helped her up onto the plank seat beside him. He snapped his whip over the bullock’s right ear and the beast drew the cart onto the road, which became a rutted trail. The wheels screeched like hell’s millions.