Two nights later Claire crying woke them. The two small bedrooms under the eaves were unheated save for what came up from below but she was hot to the touch, sweating and twisted in her bedclothes. By dawn she was very still, lying as if sleeping, her breathing a wet suck, the small cup of her lips smeared. Joey sat on the bedside, dipping cloths into a basin of hot water and pressing them onto the girl’s forehead. Jamie going up and down the stairs with fresh water to replace that which cooled almost as fast as he brought it. Downstairs keeping the stoves at full force, moving the pot of broth from the hot side to the cool side and back again to keep it warm. Barking once at Foster who sat silent at the kitchen table, commanding him to watch the soup, the firebox, the supply of water in the boiler. To carry in more wood from the shed. The boy rose silent and frightened; for a brief moment Jamie saw him trying to move five directions at once. His eyes keen with some anger across his father.

By afternoon Joey was abed also. For the rest of that afternoon and through that night Jamie did not know if it was worse now than it had been for him because there were two of them or because the influenza had sharpened someway or just that he was on the other side now. He wanted to believe the last. He carried Claire down the narrow stairs and put her in bed with her mother. He could not feed them. They were hot, insensible, beyond him. He could do nothing for them because they could not answer what they needed. He switched the forehead cloths from hot to cool. He leaned over them, one or the other as the afternoon fell short to listen to them breathe, to seek breath. Down close, the gurgle of their lungs. Claire now mostly still, gone very white. Joey at times in throes, her face blotched as with a passion, her tongue out running round her lips.

At three in the morning he ran up the stairs and roused Foster from the bed where the boy was not sleeping and sent him out with a lantern to dig a path for the car to the road. The snow was stopped now and the winter starlit night was low and Jamie set the boy to the job although he knew that the road was as filled as the driveway track. He wanted evidence of some effort. For whom he could not say. With the boy out of the house he cradled the swathed girl and strode back and forth with her in the kitchen. As if waiting for something to arrive. Hours later when a pale purple predawn slid over the snow under the tamaracks he at last set the girl down in the bed with her mother and went out to find the boy. Foster a hundred and fifty feet up the driveway with a shoveled path ten feet wide, the lantern guttered out, the banks of snow reaching either side far over his head. Crying as he shoveled. His nose and mouth chapped with frozen snot. Not stopping when his father took his shoulder. The clips of snow feathering up off the blade. The boy’s body shaking when his father took the shovel away from him and drew him tight against him, the boy’s face turned away as if looking back at the job not yet done.