He listens to my chest through cold metal and runs his fingers under my jaw before asking me to quit my shirt. Ma stands next to him, watching with arms folded. There’s just the barest trace of a frown on her pretty face. She’s worried.
When we first came up from the creek after getting back, Ma was fit to be tied. She’d been worried sick about us being out in the storm and the flood. Once she got over that, she was fixing on being mad at how dirty we all were. And then she saw me and all that anger went right out of her.
Funny how being sick can get you out of a lot of trouble.
“Jack, I’ll bet you spend a lot of time outside,” the doctor says to me. “That so?”
I nod.
“In the summer these boys only come inside to sleep,” Ma tells him.
“Don’t blame ’em,” Doc Mayfield replies. “A place like this at their feet. Almost paradise. I’d be out in these woods all day and all night if Marjorie would let me.”
He hands my shirt to Ma. When nothing looks out of the ordinary on my front, he asks me to roll over. Ma lets out a sharp gasp then.
“It’s how I figured,” Doc Mayfield says.
Ma sighs. “Oh Lord.”
“What is it?” I ask, suddenly fearful.
He puts a hand on my back, right between my shoulder blades. “Son, you’ve been bit by a deer tick. You have a bull’s eye wide as a dinner plate across your spine. That’s telltale Lyme disease. Judging from this, you’ve had it about two weeks.”
“Am I gonna die?”
He laughs. “Sure, in about seventy years. But not from this. Though Lyme disease is nothing to fool with.”
He looks to Ma. “It’ll be fevers off and on for the next week. And he’s going to be mighty weak. Bed rest. No running around, inside or out, for two weeks.”
“Two weeks?”
“Sorry, son. But unless you want to get real sick, you’ll do like I say.” He looks at Ma. “Adelene, if I can trouble you for a cup of coffee, I’ll take a look at those other three. If one of them has got it, there’s a chance the others do too.”
Doc Mayfield leaves a bottle of pills for me, then goes downstairs to check over Pete, Will, and Frankie. An hour later I hear his tires crunching gravel down the lane.
Left alone in my room, I stare out the open window at a sky that’s perfectly clear and blue and think how horribly unfair it is that I have to be in bed for two weeks. It’s too much to take. Our failed expedition. That awful night in the cave. Pete’s soon-to-be drafting. I begin bawling real quiet to myself.
I hear footsteps on that spiral staircase outside my room. I’ve just about stopped my crying when my father comes in, a cup of chicken soup steaming in his hands. His blue work shirt is stained with sweat and dirt. Dried mud is caked along the sides of his boots. He’s just come back from working at Mr. Halleck’s.
Dad sits next to me while I take a few spoonfuls of the soup, just sits and is quiet. His face is tight with worry. His oldest boy about to be drafted. The county trying to take his land. And me with my fever. I figure Dad has a lot to be worried about. But he ain’t crying. So I won’t neither. But when he lays a heavy hand on my knee, that’s too much and I start my blubbering all over again.
“Dad, it ain’t fair. It’s summer.”
My father is quiet for a moment. His clear blue eyes meet mine and he sighs.
“Life’s not fair, Jack. You ought to know that by now.”
For three days I battle that Lyme disease and the worst fever I have ever known. It pounces on me all of a sudden. It leaves me shivering in scorching afternoons and burning up in the dead of night. In all that time, I don’t do a thing except lie in my bed and watch the sun come up through the open window and wait for it to go down again. Then, on the morning of the third day, I beg Ma to let me sit outside on the front porch. She agrees on condition that I not set one foot off it. So I sit on our porch, wrapped in the quilt Grandma Elliot made for me just before she passed, and sip watered-down lemonade through a straw.
I’ve got aches in my arms and legs and all down my back. Just walking from the screen door to the chair takes almost all of the energy I’ve got. I am feeling pretty sorry for myself when Pete, Will, and Frankie come onto the porch. In Frankie’s arms is every board game we have.
“You feel up for playing a few?” he asks.
We burn through every last one of those board games.
Then, Pete comes up with the idea to hold contests to entertain me. The three of them start in on sit-up contests, push-up contests, chin-up contests, and then, when they really start running out of ideas, talking contests. Each one of them memorizes a speech and recites it for me, and I get to be the judge and decide who gives it best. Pete does Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” and Will does something out of Shakespeare that has a lot of old-fashioned words I don’t understand. Frankie recites a poem about baseball. I like them all, but I go with Frankie because he’s the only one who’s able to get the whole way through without having to look down at the page.
But after all that, I can tell they’re getting bored as I am, and I tell them so.
“Look,” I say. “It’s awful nice of you fellas to spend all this time with me. But just because I’m sitting here missing summer doesn’t mean you have to. I wish you’d go down to Apple Creek and swim yourselves silly.”
Pete and Will narrow their eyes at me.
“Nothing doing, Jack,” Pete says. “We like being right here with you.”
“You trying to get rid of us?” Will asks.
“God’s honest truth, you three are getting crazier than I am. I’ll be fine on my own for an afternoon.”
I can tell they really want to go and I’m glad when they finally do trot off toward Apple Creek and leave me on the porch by myself.
It’s not ten minutes later the screen door wheezes and Ma comes out onto the porch. She’s wearing her apron and there’s flour on her hands.
“Where’d those boys run off to? Did they up and leave you?”
“I told them to go swimming. I didn’t want them cooped up here all afternoon.”
“Don’t you lie for your brothers’ sake,” Ma says sharply. “They know we have company this afternoon.”
I blink. “We have company?”
“Land sakes, John Thomas, you’re not that sick. I told you this morning, I’m having the ladies from church over for bridge tonight.”
I swallow.
“Well,” Ma sighs, “at least you’ll be here. I’ll get your nice shirt for you to wear. You don’t have to say anything; just wear it and be polite and smile.”
The egg timer above the stove goes off and Ma goes back inside.
She don’t usually get to entertain on account of us living so far outside of town. When she does, she goes all out. For her friends in the bridge club, she bakes a loaf of fresh bread and then puts a pot roast in the oven to cook while she mixes a salad with those cucumbers and lettuce from her garden out back. Then she sets the picnic table and gets the duplicate bridge boards out from the cupboard under the stairs.
I’m bored being sick, but not so bored that I want to sit through a bridge party. I’d rather be in bed. I’m about to ask Ma if I can go up and lie down, but then the first car comes up our lane.
I’m too late.
And now I’m wishing like mad I hadn’t told Pete, Will, and Frankie they could go to the creek. And I got no idea when they’ll be back.
It’s dusk and the bridge ladies are long gone by the time they get back. But it’s only two boys coming slow through purple shadows: Pete and Frankie. Will ain’t nowhere in sight.
“Where’s Will?” I ask Pete as he comes onto the porch. Pete just shakes his head and goes through the screen door without a word.
That gets me spooked, so I turn quickly to Frankie and ask him the same question.
I can tell he’s been swimming. He’s got sand on his arms and he smells like the creek.
“Hard to say,” Frankie answers me, sitting down.
“Is he all right?” I ask quickly.
“Yeah, sure,” Frankie assures me. “Nothing bad happened.”
I relax some at that, but now I’m itching to know.