That night I heard him argue with her. I sat hidden on the stairs and listened. It’s you ought to wear it, he said. She’s a girl, not a freak, but now she’s being said to be possessed. Is that what you want for her? How are we to get her a husband if the men think she’s cursed?
You haven’t seen the wicked pride in her, my mother said.
You haven’t seen the wicked pride in you.
My mother began to cry, which startled me.
It’s not right, what you’re doing, he said. It’s not right at all. Nothing good will come of it.
Despite my fantasies of running away, I loved them too much to do it. I made another plan.
That night as they slept I went to where my mother kept a kettle on the stove. The water in it was still warm. I walked with it to my bed and soaked my sheets, careful not to wake my brothers asleep together in the bed across from me.
Careful not to wake them until my nightgown was wet and my hair as well, I lay down in the bed and then, with great purpose, rolled onto the floor, landing heavily with a crash. My brother Frank woke, sat up, and then got down from the bed to investigate me where I lay, very still, my eyes closed. He touched my forehead, rubbing my wet hair with his little fingers.
Thomas, he said. Wake up. Wake up and get Mom and Dad. Tell them she’s got the fever.
Soon I heard my parents come in. Get her downstairs, my mother ordered my father. Good Lord, her bed is soaked. I’ll have to hang the bedding out to dry. I’ll wash it in the morning.
I kept my eyes closed as my father carried me, not wanting to let on. If he was to look me in the eye, he’d know, I was certain.
When the doctor came the next day, I pretended my voice was gone, and he determined me to have been rendered mute, at least temporarily, perhaps permanently. There’s nothing wrong with her now, he said.
Well, my mother said. This was God’s will. She surprised me then for she began to weep.
I prayed for the Good Lord to take away your pride, she said. I suppose he has taken away mine also.
Whatever shame I’d felt before was nothing compared to this. As she wept next to my bed, she asked me to forgive her. I could not decide which was worse, to continue to pretend or to reveal the pretense. I decided to take my time, to act as if the voice had returned slowly—having planned this miracle, I would plan another.
My parents, in the meantime, returned to being loving with each other; the children stopped staring; my brothers no longer feared me and played with me again. Everyone was kind and told me how much they missed my voice at church. All returned to how it had been before except for me.
Then the real fever came and took them from me, every one.
My family died the fall of that year, my mother the last to pass. Her death left me alone on our farm, far from the town and the one road that ran to it. I decided it was more trouble for me to find someone to bury her than it was for me to bury her myself, and as I’d helped her bury my father and brothers, I felt I knew what had to be done and began.
I went to what was now the family graveyard, selected a spot for her to lie in, and when I found the dirt too frozen to move with a spade, paced out a fire the length of her to thaw the ground. I tended that fire for a week, sometimes cooking and reading there through the night, the three graves a short fence against the wind. There wasn’t much wood left for fires, so I pulled boards from the house and the barn. At the end of the week I was able to dig a narrow trench through the warm dirt, but I found the ground three feet down still frozen, so I set my fire again and waited.
I didn’t want my mother washing out of the ground with the first floods of the next spring, as I had seen once, coffins swept down a river as the current left its course and ate the bank.
I took more boards from the smooth wood of the doors to her bedroom and the kitchen, and made her coffin as I had seen her do for my father and brothers. I never thought to spare the farmhouse. I knew I could not stay. The farm settlement would return to the animals and the Minnesota storms, which had always appeared better suited to it.
I could have cremated her, but my mother had been a devout Christian woman and cremation would have disappointed her as pagan, a refutation of the Last Days and the Glory. She’d want to take my hand then and she’d need a hand to do it with, would be her argument. The fires I lit never touched her.
The second fire was enough to finish the hole. The earth turned easily again under the spade, the ash blew around me as I worked and found its way into my clothes so that when I was done and took a bath dead cinders shook loose from my skirts as I undressed and the water turned as gray as the sky. The work had been cold and hard, but I was glad to have taken my time. I took note of the snow on the ground outside the window, Minnesota’s winter gathering to the north of the farm across the lake, and hurried through my cooling bath. I was not its equal.