Z for Zachariah

Chapter Ten

June 3rd (continued)

That is why, after three days of being too busy, I now have time to write down all that has happened.

I do not dare to leave the house for more than a few minutes at a time. This morning I did. I ran down to the barn to milk the cow, and though I hurried as fast as I could, I was gone about fifteen minutes. When I came back he was sitting up in bed, his bedclothes on the floor; he was shivering and blue with cold. He was calling me, and had become frightened when I did not answer. The fever makes him afraid to be alone. I got him to lie down again, re-made the bed and put some extra blankets on it. I had some hot water in the kettle; I filled the hot water bottle and put it under the blankets. I am afraid he will get pneumonia.

It began last night at dinner time. He discovered it himself; I did not know at first what was happening. We sat at the table, and he ate about two bites. Then he said, in a strange voice:

“I don’t want to eat. I’m not hungry.”

I thought perhaps he did not like what I had cooked. It was boiled chiken, gravy, biscuits and peas.

So I said: “Could I get you something else? Some soup?”

But in the same voice he just said, “No,” and pushed his chair back from the table. I noticed then that his eyes looked strange and confused. He went and sat in the chair by the fire.

“The fire is almost out,” he said.

“It has turned warm again,” I said. “I was letting it die down.”

He said: “I’m cold.”

He got up and went to the bedroom. I sat at the table continuing to eat (I was hungry after the ploughing and other things). Of course it should have occurred to me immediately what was wrong, but it did not, and a few minutes later he called from the bedroom.

“Ann Burden.”

That was the first time he had ever called me by name, and he used both names. I went to the bedroom. He was sitting and looking at the thermometer. He handed it to me and I read it.

“It’s started,” he said.

Poor Mr Loomis; his shoulders were slumped and he looked very tired and frail. I realized that in spite of his calmness he was now really afraid. I suppose he had been hoping for a miracle.

“It will be all right,” I said. “One hundred and four is not so terrible. But you will have to stay in bed now, and covered. No wonder you felt cold.”

A strange thing occurred. Though we had both known the fever was coming, and I had dreaded it more than he had (or more than he had seemed to), now that it was here, and he was visibly distressed, my own fear seemed to vanish, and I felt calm—almost as if I were the older one. As if when he got weaker, I got stronger. I suppose that is why doctors and nurses can last through terrible epidemics.

Doctors and nurses! At least they know what they are doing. My own training is a one-term course in high school, “Health and Hygiene”. I wish they had taught us more. But I tried to think calmly and get organized. He had said the fever would last at least a week, and maybe two. I did not know, during that time, how weak he was likely to get. But at the moment he was still able to move around, and I thought I should take advantage of that.

The first thing was to keep him warm. I stirred the fire and added some wood. Then I went upstairs to my parents’ bedroom, and from my father’s chest of drawers got a pair of flannel pyjamas. They were soft and thick; my father used them only on cold winter nights. There were two more pairs in the drawer, and, I was reasonably sure, more still at Mr Klein’s store. The pair I took were red and white plaid.

I carried them to his room and put them on his bed.

“You should put these on,” I said. “They’re warm. And I’ve built the fire up again. I’m boiling some milk, and when it cools a little, I think you should drink it.”

“Now you’re sounding like a nurse.” He smiled. He seemed less afraid, or he was hiding it better.

“I wish I were,” I said. “I don’t know enough.”

“Poor Ann Burden,” he said. “You’re going to wish I had never come.”

I could not bring myself to tell him what I really wished. How could I tell him about the apple tree, about what I had thought that morning while I picked the flowers and the poke greens? How I felt when I ploughed the field? It all seemed remote now, and out of place; it made me sad to think about it. So I mentioned something else, something that had been worrying me.

“What I wish—"

“Yes?”

“I wish I had warned you when you… went swimming in that creek.”

“Could you have? Where were you?”

“Up on the hillside.” I still, for some reason, did not mention the cave. “I don’t know if I could have or not. I could have tried.”

“But you didn’t know the water was radioactive.”

“No. But I knew something was wrong with it.”

“I should have known, too. Don’t you see? I had two Geiger counters. But I didn’t even look. It was my own fault.”

But I worried about it anyway, and I still do.

That was last night. He put on the pyjamas, and after the milk had boiled and cooled he drank a cup of it, warm; I had boiled the cup, too. I will boil everything pertaining to food from now on, or bake it.

He even consented to take two aspirin tablets. Then he fell asleep. I put the lamp away from the bedside, and turned it down low. I thought I should leave it burning, but I did not want him knocking it over. I sat there, in a chair by the window, for about an hour, not doing anything except thinking.

Finally I went to my room and fell asleep. But I got up every hour or so to see how he was, and to check the fire. He slept quietly all night; I wish I could say the same for Faro, who kept dreaming and whining in his sleep. He knows something is wrong.

This morning, as I have said, I went out to the barn to milk the cow, and when I came back I heard him calling before I reached the house. I think he had been having a bad dream just before he woke up, but he did not say anything about it. His eyes looked odd and unfocused, and at first I thought he did not know who I was, he stared at me so hard.

After I got him back in the bed and covered up he stopped shivering and said: “You went away.”

I said: “I was milking the cow.”

“While you were gone,” he said, “I thought—"

“You thought what?”

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s the fever. It makes me imagine things.” But he would not say what he had imagined. I took his temperature, and it had gone up—it was a hundred and five. It looked strange to see the mercury stretched all the way to the wrong end of the thermometer, as if I were holding it backwards. It only goes to 106 degrees.

He watched me read it. “How is it?” he said.

“Well,” I said, “it’s a little higher.”

“How much higher?”

I told him. “Bad,” he said.

“Don’t think about it. I’ll get you some breakfast.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“But you must eat anyway.”

“I know,” he said. “I’ll try.”

And he did; propped up in bed, he ate most of a boiled egg, some more milk, and a bit of toasted biscuit. When he finished he said:

“You know what I would like? Some iced tea. With sugar in it.”

I thought he must be joking, but he was not. Poor Mr Loomis. I said: “I haven’t got any ice.”

He said: “I know. We didn’t get the generator going in time.”

A few minutes later he fell asleep again, and I decided to try, at least. I could not make iced tea but I could make cool tea, and I thought that what he really wanted was a sweet drink. People with fevers get hungry for odd things—with me it is always chocolate ice cream. There was a tin box half full of tea bags in the pantry—my mother’s, not exactly fresh, but they smelled all right. I boiled some water, poured it into a pitcher and put in two bags. After it had steeped a while I took out the bags, added quite a lot of sugar and put the pitcher in the basement. It will cool in a few hours, and I will give it to him as a surprise.

But now I face a problem. I have to go to the brook for more water, and some time soon I am going to have to go to the store, since I am running out of several things including flour and sugar. But how can I go when he is afraid to be left alone? And I ought to milk the cow again.

This morning I went while he was still asleep. Maybe if I go in broad daylight, and tell him while he is awake where I am going, he will be all right if I do not stay too long. I will have to try that. There is nothing else I can do.

I went, both to the brook and to the store, and it was a bad business, but I could not help it. At least I do not have to go again for a few days. But I can see that I have a very troubled time coming.

I am writing this in the living room; it is night, and I have a lamp lit. Everything is quiet now, at least for the moment.

This is what happened: At about four o’clock this afternoon I knocked on his door and went in. He was asleep (he sleeps about ninety per cent of the time now), but woke up and seemed calm enough. I explained that I had to go out, and he did not seem at all bothered or upset; in fact he was surprised that I was worried about it. (He had not asked me to stay at the house, of course; it was I who was afraid of going, after what happened this morning—which I think, in fact, he does not even remember.) So I felt a little bit silly, as if I had made too much of it. Still I said:

“I will take the tractor and the cart, so I can go faster and carry more.”

“A waste of petrol,” he said.

I had thought of that, but I decided to do it anyway. It was an emergency, and one that was not likely to happen again, after he had recovered.

Despite his reassurance, I rushed to the barn and hitched the cart to the tractor as quickly as I could; fortunately it is an easy hitch, with just a single six-inch pin to slide through the shaft. The cart is a two-wheeled steel trailer, square, and has a capacity of one ton. When I had it hitched I put on to it three fifteen-gallon milk cans; I had not used these when I carried water by hand, since they are too heavy, but with the tractor that did not matter, and they would hold enough for two weeks or more. I put the tractor into high gear (it can go about fifteen miles an hour in top gear) and headed first for the brook. The empty milk cans rattled very loudly, the pasture being bumpy.

I filled them (or nearly—about two-thirds full is all I can lift), went on to the store, and loaded a lot of food supplies, including tinned stuff, dehydrated soup, sugar, flour, cornmeal, dog food and chicken corn. Before leaving I also refilled the tractor’s petrol tank from the pump. After all this, including the ploughing, it had only used about two and a half gallons, not too bad. As I started back up the road towards the house I looked at my watch. I had been gone forty minutes.

I was hurrying towards the house, still in high gear, and was perhaps a hundred and fifty yards away when I saw it. The front door flew open and Mr Loomis came out, trying to run but staggering. I could not see his face but the red and white pyjamas were unmistakable. He crossed the porch, stopped at the railing and held on a few seconds, then stumbled down the steps and across the yard towards the tent and the wagon. Faro ran up, tail wagging, and then backed off, staring at him doubtfully.

By this time I had reached the driveway, ! turned in and shut off the motor. Mr Loomis, running in a groping kind of way, as if he could not see well, had not gone to the tent but to the wagon. He opened the end, reached inside, and when his hands came out, to my horror, he was holding the gun, the big carbine. I jumped down and ran towards him, but before I reached him he had fired three shots. He aimed them at the second floor of the house, at my father and mother’s bedroom, and I could see puffs of white paint and splintered wood fly off where the bullets hit. The gun made a terrible noise, much louder than the .22.

I shouted—I may have shrieked; I cannot remember—and he turned towards me, swinging the gun round so it was aimed at me. To my own surprise I stayed calm.

“Mr Loomis,” I said, “you’re sick. You’re dreaming. Put the gun away.” His face suddenly looked incredibly distressed and twisted up, as if he might cry, and his eyes were very blurred. But he recognized me and lowered the rifle.

“You went away,” he said.

Just as before.

“I told you,” I said. “I had to go. Don’t you remember?”

“I went to sleep,” he said. “When I woke up I heard—" He did not want to tell me what he had heard.

“Heard what?”

“I thought I heard… somebody in the house. I called you. He was upstairs.”

“Who was upstairs?”

But he was being evasive. “Someone moving.”

“Mr Loomis, there was no one in the house. It’s the fever again. You must stay in bed.” It was terrible—standing outside in pyjamas with a fever of a hundred and five. I took the gun from his hands and put it back in the wagon. He did not resist, but began to shiver violently, and I saw that both he and the plaid pyjamas were soaked with sweat. I got him back into the house and on to the bed. I pulled the blankets over him and went upstairs to get him some dry pyjamas.

In my father and mother’s room I saw where the bullets had gone. Fortunately except for knocking plaster all over the floor they had done no real damage; they had gone through the wall and almost straight up into the ceiling, and hit nothing on the way. I would have to plug the holes up somehow, and sweep the floor.

I got the clean pyjamas and gave them to him to change. He can still do that himself; I suppose if he gets so he cannot I will have to do it. Also I will have to get him a basin to use as a bed pan since he should no longer get up to go to the bathroom.

It was after he had changed pyjamas that I realized that he had still not quite lost his illusion. I went into his room to get the wet pyjamas, to take them to the laundry room. He was lying in bed with his eyes closed, but when he heard me he opened them and said, sounding very tired:

“Is he gone?”

I said: “Is who gone?”

“Edward,” he said.

“You were dreaming again.”

He shook his head, and then he said: “Yes. I forgot. Edward is dead. He couldn’t have come all this way.”

So it was Edward again. But I am worried. If he is dreaming about Edward, who was, I suppose, a friend of his, why does he want to shoot him?

I think I had better sleep in here, on the sofa. He sleeps very restlessly, muttering and groaning.

I forgot all about giving him his tea, but it will still be good in the morning.