Read Online Wildwood Boys by James Carlos Blake - Free Book Online Page B

whole.
    The men cheered and whistled, stomped their boots on the
planks. Behind them the Anderson girls had come out to watch and
they applauded wildly while their mother stood in the shadowed
doorway behind them unsmiling and with her arms crossed tightly
over her breast.
    Bill Anderson swept off his hat and bowed like a cavalier, then
grinned around at them all and intoned, “The Holy Order of
William T. Anderson welcomes ye one and all.”
Requiescat
    Came an April daybreak when Martha Anderson was beset by a pain
in her stomach and the affliction worsened through the morning. In
the late forenoon Mary noted the strain in her mother’s face and
asked what was wrong. Martha gestured irritably and said she felt
like she had a big bubble of gas in her belly she couldn’t get shed of.
Josie joked that she sure hoped for a warning before that gas came
loose so she could quick scoot out of the kitchen. Mary gaped and
said, “
Jo - sie! You aw ful thing!”
    Young Jenny giggled and Josie grinned at her and then said to her
mother, “You reckon all that gas might come busting out so loud
Daddy and the boys’ll hear it at the corral and think it’s a Yankee
cannon firing at them?”
    Jenny squealed with mirth behind her hands and Martha gave
Josie a look of mock outrage and took a playful swipe at her with a
dishrag and they all giggled even as they blushed.
    Martha’s pain persisted and by that afternoon she was sick at her
stomach and began to feel weak and feverish. Her joints hurt. She
had never been ill in her life and was as much vexed as distressed by
this sudden malady. At supper that evening she ate but two bites
before rushing from the table and out the door to throw up over the
porch rail. The girls put her to bed and bathed her face by candlelight with a cool washcloth. Jenny offered to read to her from the
Bible or a volume of poems but Martha waved away the idea. They
placed a bowl close to hand and she was sick into it several more
times that evening before she finally fell into a sweaty and fitful sleep.
    They could fix on no cause for her sickness but the cup of milk
she had taken that morning shortly after rising. No one else had
drunk of that morning’s milking. Now Will Anderson wondered if
their cow might have fed on snakeroot.
    “We ain’t hunted out that damned snakeroot in a while,” he
said. “Could be some sprouted since we last cleared it. Son of a
bitch !”
    He went out to the barn and closely inspected the cow by the
light of a lantern and determined that the animal was indeed
infected, its milk poisoned. In the house they heard the shotgun
blast. Will reappeared at the door and told Bill and Jim to bury the
animal first thing in the morning. In order that his wife might rest
more comfortably with the bed to herself he would sleep in the barn
that night.
    Martha began to moan in the later hours and the girls took turns
sitting at her bedside and mopping the fever sweat off her face and
neck. When Bill and Jim came into the room at daybreak she looked
ghastly. Her mouth was tight with pain and she lay with her eyes
closed and her hands pressed to her stomach. Her breathing was
strained. The girls were redeyed and Bill and Jim offered to tend their
mother through the morning so they might get some rest but the girls
said they could manage all right. Will Anderson came in the house
and stood over the bed and looked down at Martha for a time without saying anything and then he went out again.
    She nevermore opened her eyes nor spoke another word. Just
before noon she died.
     
Will took the front door off its hinges and set it on a pair of sawhorses in the center of the room and the brothers raised their
mother’s body from the bed and gently laid it on the cooling board.
The men then went out and the girls set to washing and preparing
their mother. They put her best dress on her and smoothed her features and brushed her hair and folded her