As Bright as Heaven(49)

“Uncle Fred is coming,” I say to Mama, patting her shoulder gently.

A moment later Uncle Fred is in the room wearing his bedclothes. He has a blue plaid kerchief in his hand that he ties around his nose and mouth as he comes toward me.

“Move out of the way,” he says, and I scoot to the side, raising my arm so that the sleeve of my nightgown now covers the bottom half of my face.

Uncle Fred hoists Mama into his arms as if she weighs nothing. He is out the door with her in a blink, and I scurry to follow him into her and Papa’s bedroom. Maggie, who has sprinted up the stairs behind Fred, stands helplessly at the top step watching while downstairs the baby starts to wail.

Mama hasn’t been in her own bed for three nights, and all the covers and pillows are neatly in place. I yank back the coverlet, wool blanket, and sheet, sending the decorative pillows flying. Uncle Fred lays Mama on the mattress. She curls into a ball and begins to shiver. Uncle Fred pulls up the covers.

“You’re bleeding,” Fred says, and his voice sounds strange. He is frowning at the little cut on Mama’s forehead. It is nothing compared to the flu now furious inside her and he knows it. We all do.

“It doesn’t hurt,” she murmurs, and then she turns her head so she can see me. “Willa needs you right now, Evelyn. She’s past the worst of it, but she’s weak. She can’t be allowed to get up yet.”

“I’ll take care of her, Mama. Don’t worry. You just rest.”

“Don’t come in my room again,” she continues. “Do you hear me? You girls stay out.”

“But, Mama . . .” I can’t finish. How can we stay away when she will need care just like Willa had? Does she really expect us to do nothing for her? It is an impossible request.

Uncle Fred doesn’t like that idea, either. “I can’t be running up here all the day to look after you, Pauline. It’s like a madhouse downstairs.” Now Uncle Fred sounds as if he is about to cry. Maybe he is. Maybe after days and days of sorting out the dead by the dozens, some of whom were friends and neighbors, he is past the point of being able to shoulder the terrible weight of the situation. Maybe what he is really saying is, “I can’t do this anymore.”

Suddenly I understand how his occupation had a measure of sacredness to it before the flu, almost as though Uncle Fred was as much a minister to the living as an embalmer to the dead. I’d seen the way he cared for the bodies when I happened upon him as he brought a cadaver in or carried one out. He treated them as if they could still see, hear, and feel. And I witnessed many times his care over the mourners who wept in his funeral parlor: how he spoke so gently to them about the glories of heaven, the gates of pearl, and the absence of pain and suffering and tears in that bright place where their loved ones had flown.

The flu had taken all that from him. He was at the moment charged merely with getting the ghoulish victims into the ground as soon as he possibly could.

“I don’t need you to look after me,” Mama replies, but she barely whispers this. “Just bring up the aspirin bottle and some water. And then leave me. All of you.”

She closes her eyes and is asleep in an instant. I motion for Uncle Fred to follow me.

“Maggie and I will find a way to take care of her,” I say, when we are on the landing outside Mama’s bedroom. “And we’ll be careful. You don’t need to worry about this.”

But Uncle Fred points a finger at me and works his brow into one long line. “Don’t tell me what I don’t need to worry about,” he growls, but his voice is riddled with emotion, not anger. “You girls don’t have any idea what you’re dealing with.” He moves past me but turns his head in my direction when his foot is on the first stair. “You need to get that baby out of this house. He never should have been brought here. I’ve got more bodies piling up beyond the kitchen door than I know what to do with and you girls bring home a baby!”

Deep down I know he is probably right. I think I have known since the moment the child arrived and Willa was already sick that our house isn’t safe for a baby. But I shout something entirely different as Uncle Fred takes the first step. “What else could Maggie and Mama have done?” I say.

He starts down the rest of the staircase and I follow. Maggie is at the bottom step with the crying baby in her arms, a look of dread on her face.

She’d heard what we’d both said. The thought of sending the baby away is a crushing thought. He’s only been with us for four days, but already he has woven himself into my soul. Maggie’s, too. He is, at this moment, our only thread of evidence that the entire world isn’t collapsing into itself in ruins. This child is perfect and beautiful and innocent and fully alive. In the middle of all the death surrounding us, he seems our last grip on life.

As Uncle Fred passes Maggie at the foot of the stairs, he again says, this time to Maggie, that the baby needs to go.

“But the orphanages are full!” Maggie protests.

“That’s not my problem,” he says as he heads toward the small hallway that leads to his rooms. “This is a funeral home. And we’re in the middle of a plague.”

“But he has nowhere to go,” Maggie implores as she follows him, with me right behind her.

Uncle Fred stops and turns to us. “This is not the place for an infant,” he shouts. He sounds mad, but I see the shimmer of tears in his eyes. “You know it’s not.”