Chapter Two

It was a tough few months for the family.  For Olive and Mary-Anne, it meant doing things they’d never imagined themselves doing, to keep the farm going.  For the farm, it meant a step back, because Olive was more certain than before that she would not have her daughter anywhere NEAR the infernal monster that had taken her husband’s wedding ring and his finger with it.  They would finish the plowing that year with horses.  For Jeremiah, it meant watching.  For Chuck, it meant hearing of his father’s injury but as he was sailing in the North Pacific, he too was powerless to help.  He tried to send home as much money as he could.

Predictably, Jeremiah had trouble holding back.  Nevertheless, his missing finger cost  him- both pain and awkwardness.  Perhaps his lack of patience that kept reopening the wound explained why it was having such a hard time healing.  It could also go some distance to explain how he eventually got an infection that nearly took his life later that month.

Olive had expected it.  You just can’t take a man who works every day of his life and tell him ‘today you sit and watch others work’.  Not Jeremiah, anyway.  He didn’t have the patience.  He was a good man.  A very good man, in his way.  But he didn’t have the strength of character to sit and watch others work.  He was a horrible manager, in that sense.  Chuck would occasionally tell stories for the rest of his life about how poor Jeremiah Book had been at telling others what he wanted or needed when it came to running the farm.  How hard he’d worked to please his father and how rarely he’d succeeded.  About the way it drove him away from the farm and into the sea.

There were a few important lessons Mary-Anne learned that month.  The first was that horses need to be warmed up to the work that they’re doing for the day.  Like people, she learned, they will work for hours and hours, but need to ease into the work gradually.  Mary-Anne learned patience in this way that she would treasure for the rest of her life. 

Many were the school reports or outings with friends that she missed because of those horses.  Those horses who had somehow sensed the urgency and run so fast when her father had lost his finger, did not seem to pick up on her own urgent needs.  Especially when they happened in the morning.  She could yell, she could plead, or do whatever else came into her head to do, but they would do the work at the speed they chose.  Jeremiah gave her advice.  He talked and talked and talked.  But when she got out there behind the horses, they seemed to sense that their true master was not with them, and moved along however they chose.  It developed patience, an ability to wait that she would need in the life that was to be hers.  But as a sort of ironic side-effect, it also grew a love of machines that no one would have ever predicted from her.  Though her mother steadfastly “protected” her, via the horses, Mary-Anne wanted nothing more than to get rid of them once and for good.  She loved the tractor from afar for the way it had simply done its work without the moodiness of the horses.  Turn it on, it worked until you turned it off.  Had it taken her father’s finger?  Yes, but it was simply because he’d put it in the wrong place.  The machine wasn’t mean tempered, hadn’t meant anything by it.  A horse would’ve.

Secondly, she learned how to grow things.  Her family’s year depended on it.  And that year, along with its felt need, taught her all that she would ever need to know about growing plants.  Give them plenty of water, plenty of sun, keep away the pests, and they’ll grow, alright.  She and Olive grew the garden that gave them a large part of their food.  They grew the corn and wheat that would put money in the bank that autumn.  In a way, they also grew the chicken, pigs, and cows, though of course they needed more than sunlight and water.  Mary-Anne didn’t realize she was learning, didn’t think about how much she was focusing on what happened that year, but for the rest of her life, she would watch people fail at their little gardens and think, “How hard can it be to figure out?  We did!”  It puzzled her when friends’ household plants died.  Wasn’t it obvious?

But the greatest thing she learned through the loss of the finger was about germs and infection.  Jeremiah’s finger didn’t seem to be healing very well, but what did any of them know about such a major injury?  Who other than doctors has experience with such things?

“Finger’s hurting something terrible,” Jeremiah said one day at dinner.  It was uncharacteristic of him to admit to his pain, thought Olive.  He went on eating and said no more about it.  But in the middle of the night, he woke her up coughing.  He coughed until it seemed he wouldn’t be able to get a breath.  Coughed until he retched.  Olive patiently cleaned it up and soothed him with a glass of warm milk.  He drifted off, and they all went back to bed.

But in the morning, Jeremiah’s condition hadn’t improved, and throughout the day, it worsened.  He began to run a slight fever.  Olive sent her daughter off to school after the early chores were done, but she never got to her own that day.  She wiped the sweat off of his forehead as the fever grew.  She tried to feed him soup, which he got down a few spoonfuls of.  She even sang him to sleep- something she hadn’t done since just after they were married.

Once Mary-Anne got home from school, she was quickly dispatched to deliver a message to the village doctor about her father.  She returned after a few hours, reporting that he would be by the next morning, and that Olive should try to get her husband to drink water and sleep as much as possible.  He passed another rough night, waking often but without the coughing of the night before.

After a lengthy examination the next morning, the doctor took Olive aside. 

“Has Jeremiah been changing the bandages like they told him?”, he asked.  Olive admitted that she doubted he had. 

“Not often as they said, no,” she said, “He tells me we can’t afford that many bandages.  I’ve been trying to clean them with boiling water and lye when I can…”,  she trailed off.

“Well, he should’ve.  He Should have,” the doctor repeated slowly, perhaps ominously.  “The stubborn old man.  Got himself an infection now.  Pretty serious one.”  Olive nodded her head, uncomprehending.  They’d taken him to the hospital, he’d been treated.  He kept a bandage on it.  What more could he do?

“No, you’re not understanding,” said the doctor, slowly and patiently.  He was beginning to understand who he was talking to.  “Jeremiah is in quite a bit of danger, Olive.  He’s not out of the woods yet,” and he proceeded to try to educate the woman simply yet deeply about germs and bacteria and their effects.  As he spoke on, Olive grew a decidedly lighter shade of pink.  Jeremiah had done none of the things the doctor spoke in favor of, and very many of those he spoke against.  In fact, it sounded to her like the only thing that either of them had done right was when she had boiled the bandages.  And she had only done that trying to loosen the dirt and get them cleaner looking.  A whole new world was opening up before her that morning.  There was dirt beneath the dirt.  Dirt you couldn’t see that persisted even when things looked clean.  It affected her deeply while she thought about the stain of sin, only washable with the blood of Jesus.

The patriarch avoided coma, but only barely.  And it was practically a matter of semantics.  He wasn’t able to talk very long, but he did wake up off and on throughout the day, and was able to take in some small bit of food.  He lost the weight he’d started to gain, and it was lucky for him that he had it to lose that month.

Predictably, discovering the world of germs brought out in Olive a mania of cleaning that wouldn’t really, truly go away for three generations.  Clean was never clean enough, because of course, there was dirt you couldn’t see.  Unfortunately, the doctor hadn’t the time that morning to tell Olive more about the signs of germs.  Especially about the ways you could kill them, or tell when they’d been killed.  It would have saved the women (later the men, too) a lot of trouble over the years if he’d just taken a few minutes on that morning.  A pity.

Jeremiah, for his part, took things quite seriously, though it wasn’t until weeks later, after he’d gotten better, that he understood at all what was really happening.  “Take care of Mary-Anne,” he told Olive when they spoke about the matter of his belongings, in a particularly morbid, but he thought necessary, conversation.  “Chuck will get the farm and whatever he really wants, but give Mary-Anne some property….” And his voice trailed off along with his strength, but Olive knew what he was trying to tell her.  The firstborn would be taken care of, of course.  But he wanted his daughter to have something of her own.  To not have to depend on a man with everything, for everything.  To have some tiny bit of her own.  And she loved Jeremiah like she had the day she’d married him.  If only her father had been so thoughtful, she mused.

Olive was manic with cleaning, it was undeniable.  She had germs and dirt and sin so mixed up within her by the end of that month that they’d never be fully untangled.  But Mary-Anne took on the notion with equal vigor, but in her own way.  And considering she was already in the eleventh grade, her way was considerably more scientific.  She stayed after school on the days she could, to use the library.  She wrote reports on the subject when research projects were due.  Suffice to say she devoted her considerable brainpower to comprehending what precisely was happening to her father.  And considering the times she was living in, she did a very respectable job.  Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, remember.  Mary-Anne wasn’t in the running for that honor, but neither was she particularly shocked when she heard of the discovery.  She would be both the savior and the bane of her children and grandchildren because of these months of study.  Many were the little ones who later bemoaned these studies, as they had their wounds bathed in alcohol and scrubbed vigorously.

If she didn’t make a major deciding difference in the recovery of her father, she certainly wasn’t detrimental.  Her humble hints to Olive about antiseptic procedures were short and quiet but who knows how much they really changed the balance of power within his body?

Jeremiah’s recovery was not without its pitfalls and dashed hopes, but he gradually returned to health over the coming year.  His farm-worked body was not foreign to the dirt, and neither was it foreign to him.  It was probably because of this that he had an immune system strong enough to survive the ordeal.  He had come close.  Dodged a bullet.  And it changed him.  For better.  And for worse.