I had not slept well any night since Olikea and I had quarreled. I still dreamed of her, and dreamed too of the wondrous foods from that “other side.” But I couldn’t quite reach them. I walked there, but I walked there knowing it was a dream. The food I ate in those dreams was substanceless and unsatisfying. I would see Olikea, but always at a distance. If I called to her, she did not turn her head. If I followed her, as I inevitably did in those dreams, I could never catch up with her.
The days became weeks, and then a month. We toiled on, barely able to keep ahead of the dead. The stink of decay and the burning of lye in my nostrils became one sensation in my mind. Even when I heated water and washed with soap, I could not cleanse the smells of my profession away. The lime we sprinkled in the ditch graves drifted and made raw patches on my skin. Worst of all was the terrible hunger that burned in me constantly now that I no longer had the forest foods that Olikea had brought me. The food I ate should have been enough to sustain me; instead it was not even a taunt to the deeper hunger that devoured me from within.
And in the midst of death and stench and plague, summer blossomed around us. The days were lovely, long and bright under blue skies. Butterflies danced above the flowers I had moved into the graveyard, and songbirds sang in the trees at the edge of the forest. My “hedge” flourished, and smaller bushes sprang up in the shade my little trees provided.
The bony hands of the plague respected neither age nor rank. We filled one ditch grave and started another. We buried tiny babies and old men, delicate little girls and brawny men. That long hot day had brought the body of Dale Hardy. He was the rowdy who had put himself forth as the man to give me a beating the day that Carsina had said such foul things about me. The plague had taken him down swiftly, Ebrooks told me. He hadn’t lingered to die of the fever but had choked to death on his own vomit the first day he sickened. I thought of how he had stood in the street and threatened me that day. I could have taken satisfaction in his death. Instead I only pitied him, felled in his prime so ignominiously.
It was late afternoon when we finished filling the second ditch. In an obscene way, it reminded me of watching the cook in my father’s kitchen layer ingredients into a casserole. Instead of meat and gravy and potatoes and carrots, we layered bodies and lime and earth and bodies and lime and earth until we finally mounded earth over the whole of it.
“That’s it,” I decided when the mound was patted smooth as a pie crust. I took my vinegar mask from my face and wiped my brow with it. With the last bodies covered, the air smelled almost clean. “That’s enough for today, boys. Tomorrow we’ll dig a fresh ditch and begin again.”
“Pray the good god that it’s the last pit this season,” Kesey suggested, and “Amen,” both of my carpenters-turned-gravediggers responded.
“It has to stop soon. Doesn’t it?” I asked them.
“It’ll stop when it stops,” Kesey replied. “The rains always end it. But sometimes it stops sooner. I heard a rumor in town about some special water that might cure it. Some spring water that a doctor back west has been trying on people. The courier that brought the news said he’d heard from the courier before him that they were trying to get some to us here, before the end of the plague season, to see if it really worked or not.”
“Did you hear the doctor’s name?” I asked, wondering if Spink had written to Amicas and if he had acted on it.
Kesey shrugged and shook his head. We had shouldered our shovels and were making our way back to the tool shed when we heard a sound we all dreaded: the clop and creak of a team pulling a laden wagon up the hill to the cemetery. “Can’t they just stop dying for one day?” Kesey asked me pathetically.
“I think they would if they could,” I replied, and one of my diggers smiled grimly.
“Those poor devils will just have to lie bare under the moonlight for tonight,” Kesey observed, and I shrugged. It would not be the first time that shrouded bodies had had to wait for a fresh grave. But like Kesey, I prayed it might be the last.
Ebrooks was the driver. He got down stiffly from the cart. “You boys had better help me unload if you want to ride back to town,” he suggested, and we began our grim task. There were seven of them. Ebrooks, knowing my insistence, handed me a list of names. I thrust them into my pocket and helped the other men drag the corpses from the cart. Three men, a boy, and three women we laid out side by side. Kesey had brought a fresh supply of pitch torches from town. Ebrooks helped me set up a circle of them around the unburied bodies. Then the others climbed up on the wagon, bade me farewell, and headed back to town as the long-awaited night began to flow across the land. I hoped it would bring a little coolness with it. I kindled the torches. They burned straight, nearly unwavering, in the calm summer evening.