Read Online In Open Spaces by Russell Rowland - Free Book Online Page A

teeth. I felt my own teeth clench together. One of Katie’s knees rose and fell time and again, thumping softly against the mattress. Her eyes, when they were open, darted around the room, without focus. It looked as if she could die at any moment, and I couldn’t imagine that life could be so cruel as to take another of us on the very day we’d found our brother’s body.
    “How long has this been going on?” I asked.
    “A couple hours,” Dad said. “We heard her moaning, and we came in to see what was wrong. She started screaming about a half hour ago.” Dad looked completely beaten down.
    Katie screamed again, her head bent so far back that it looked as if it could break off. She panted frantically, her chest as busy as boiling water.
    “Easy, baby,” Mom said softly. “Where does it hurt?”
    But Katie couldn’t hear her, and I realized that her condition was worse than I thought. She repeated a staccato “oh, oh, oh” between breaths.
    Katie screamed at regular intervals, her voice weakening each time. Dad brought a pot of steaming water from the kitchen. Mom dipped acloth into the pot, wrung it, and laid it across Katie’s forehead. Mom tried to feed Katie a spoonful of hot tea with whiskey and honey, but she wasn’t conscious enough to drink. She knocked the spoon from Mom’s hand with a jerk of her chin. The sheets had turned gray with sweat.
    The fits eventually drained Katie so that she fell into an exhausted sleep between each spasm. Her eyes would close peacefully, sending a shiver of fear through me each time. But after a minute or two the pain would wrench her from slumber, back to the struggle, and the pain in her face made me wince right along with her.
    At four in the morning, she uttered her first words of the night. “Pull ’em in, pull ’em in,” she pleaded.
    Mom panicked, trying to figure out what to pull in, what she could do to ease her daughter’s misery. She tugged at the blankets, then looked at Dad, puzzled and scared. Then she turned back to Katie and pulled her lips inside her mouth. Her brow pinched. Dad and I studied the floor.
    “The fish?” Dad said. “She probably means the fish.”
    “Or George,” I offered.
    One of the last times that Katie and I played homesteader in our little prairie house, Katie approached me with her arms wrapped around the blanket-swathed figure of her favorite doll.
    “Blake, honey,” she announced in a strong, steady voice, a voice very much like my mother’s. “We need to get ahold of the preacher.”
    “Oh?” I answered. “What for?”
    “The baby’s dead,” Katie said matter-of-factly. “We need to bury the baby.”
    Katie was six years old at the time.
    “I’ll put the baby in the barn,” she told me. “And I’ll send a note to the preacher. And then I’ll get some supper ready. Can you start on a coffin, honey?”

    I guess we all knew, or suspected, how the night was going to end, although we tried to hope otherwise. We looked to the door whenever any small sound echoed through the night’s silence. But soon after she spoke, the final gripping vise squeezed the life from Katie. She died eyes, mouth, and hands open to the ceiling, her last sound so weak that it was little more than a groan, followed by a sigh.
    Jack and Doc Sorenson arrived an hour later to find us in a silent vigil around the body. Mom wept, while Dad and I simply sat in exhausted amazement at what had taken place that day. I hurt so bad inside that I couldn’t hold my head up. It seemed that I’d been awake forever, and that a year’s worth of life had been packed into the past twenty-four hours.
    Jack barely responded when he learned that Katie was dead. He turned and left the room, going directly to bed. Doc Sorenson examined Katie and determined that what we thought was the flu was actually spinal meningitis. He said that he couldn’t have done anything even if he’d gotten there sooner, which was a very small consolation at the time. But