II
Dr. Charles Zimmerman’s eyes felt raw, full of sand, and in the mirror earlier this morning they had been scarred by red. He wondered if he would weep again as he placed fresh handfuls of spring wildflowers over the two dirt mounds. Dew glistened on the fresh, wooden crosses at the head of each mound. At least some tears would fall on the graves today.
He tried to pray, as he had every morning for the last several weeks. But his thoughts of God still felt hollow and bitter, like begging mercy from an unjust tyrant who sentenced two little girls to death.
Did measles obey the will of Heaven? How many others in the town of White Pine had prayed and prayed? How many special prayer services at the town churches had been called to beg for the end of the outbreak? Now that it had ended, petering out in the weeks since these graves had been dug and filled, the Reverend Caldwell said that their prayers had been answered. But why had they been answered too late to save Eva and Josie? How were Charles’ daughters somehow unworthy to live?
The interior of his torso was a vast cavern. What kind of doctor could not even save his own children? How many times since December had he written a Death Certificate? Pulled a shroud over a dead child’s face? Offered his hollow condolences to grief-shattered families? And every single time coming with a stab of guilt that he could not save them.
How many? Too many for a newly hatched frontier town like White Pine to easily withstand, or forget, or forgive.
Moreover, those tragedies were not only among the white population. The graves before him called forth the memory of the great mounds of funeral earth, the mass graves and blood-stained snow near Wounded Knee Creek. The succession of fear and horrors of the last six months would never leave him.
The prayer snagged behind his lips.
His children not yet one month in the ground. Was the ground still too cold for the worms to have taken them? The earth looked as if the graves could have been filled yesterday.
Charles had carved the inscriptions himself in the crosses. “In loving memory. My beautiful daughters.”
From the kitchen window, Charles felt Amelia’s eyes like cold spears on his back. This morning had begun like most others, with tears and silence. All he felt nowadays from her was resentment and blame, and he wondered when he would reach his limit of sufferance for that or when he would cease to notice.
His eyes instead meandered over the grass, and the fence, and the patches of bare dirt, and the swing he had made from a rope and plank and hung in the old cottonwood. The plank swayed gently in the morning breeze.
The girls’ voices scampered through his memories—their laughter, the sounds of their play. “Not very lady-like,” Amelia would remark whenever they took off their Sunday dresses and played in the prairie dirt. “Josephine! Eva! Stop that!”
But Charles had never cared to stop them. There were enough dour, unhappy people in the house without trying to turn angels into two more.
What could he have done differently?
He remembered his words to Amelia. “I can save my daughters.”
And he remembered how her face had turned to granite when he could not.
Two pale little girls, lying in their beds under mounds of covers, their faces splotched by raging red freckles, too sick even to ask questions anymore or to ask for reassurance.
Eva had managed a tiny voice near the end. “Will Josie be all right, Daddy?”
“Of course, sweetheart.”
“Will I?” The eyes of an old woman should never reside in an eight-year-old face. They glimmered with fear. And then the glimmer died.
That was the image he could not shake.
Finally, there it was, the trickle.
Like a baptism.
He wiped his cheek.
A flicker of motion behind him bespoke the kitchen curtains falling closed. Doubtless she was wearing the same black dress again.
He jammed his hat on his head, tugged absently at his vest, tucked his medical bag under his arm, and walked to the livery stable to prepare his wagon.