Three days later he was dying. He sweated the sheets through and after she stripped them and turned new linens out under him he would lie clenched with cold, his body racking and his teeth in a hard staccato ratchet. His lungs seemed to droop and grow small in his chest, as if they no longer could pull air in. Sputum always at the back of his throat, the taste in his mouth of putridity, of decay. As if he were rotting. The bedroom was kept dark and she piled blankets on him regardless if he was sweating or chilled. She would not listen to him. Later what he would remember most clearly was her seated on the side of the bed holding two fingers of one hand against his lips and telling him to hush, to hush. He would wonder what he’d tried those times to tell her that she would not hear. She’d draped a silk shawl over the bedside lamp and with the windows covered day and night all was dim, a blush of light. Time went away. Most often it seemed she was pulling him upright and forcing broth in spoonfuls into his mouth. More than once using the thumb and forefinger of her free hand to force apart his jaws. As his father or sister would do with a horse unwilling to take the bit. Other times the walls, the room itself, grew fluid and fell away before the fever. Not dreams. Visitations. His father. His sisters. His mother. A girl whose name he could never remember screaming silent at him, blood running from her nose and eyes, her hair matted with mud. Or dried blood or shit. His father kneeling, weeping, bent in prayer. As he’d never seen him. He thought. His mother laughing, dissolving, back again, turning her back to him as she opened her dress, telling him she would show him something. Racing ponies. Horses on a dirt track. The colors brilliant beyond life. His little girl, Claire, her voice high and plaintive but with some excitement at the thought also, outside his door, asking if Poppy was going to die. He could not hear the answer.

Then three weeks where he was not dying but wished he might. The fevers now just a chill and ache in his bones without the diversion of nightmare frescoes. Time returned. Lengthened and stretched; days of bedsores and racking coughs, nights of the same cough and spitting wrenches of sleep. Now also he was able to fear for his wife, children. He’d read the accounts out of the Boston papers of the hundreds, the thousands, the tens of thousands dying. Most in days it seemed, if you could believe what you read. He lay recovering in the downstairs bedroom listening to the children playing games upstairs as December shut down around them, lay with the windows no longer shrouded so some days it was bright and others dull. Lay those dull days thinking he could not only see but hear the snow falling outside. He’d not been sick like this before. Some afternoons he would rise and wrapped in a robe go to the kitchen and sit by the stove while the children whirled hectic indoor games about him. Joey tending him with hot tea. Fresh bread. Trying to hush the children. He’d flap his hand at her to let them be. He wanted to hear them.