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.