“No ma’am.”
“Did you isolate your dear mother as she was ill?”
“No ma’am.”
She turned to him. Her eyes seemed very large behind the glasses. “And after she passed. You’ve remained here for how long after that?”
“Don’t know.”
“Weeks?”
“Months.”
“Oh my.”
She stepped back outside, and leaned close to him. “It is all right, my dear,” she said. “I am well-trained. Open your mouth. And turn to the sun, please, so I can better see.”
Two hours later, Jason Thistledown was naked as the day he was born, up to his breast-bone in a tub of scalding hot water that Aunt Germaine had made him boil up on the wood stove and haul to a level spot in the lee of the house, and rubbing himself down with a black, stinging bar of soap from the carpet bag.
Jason tried to argue. “I’m not sick,” he said. “If I was carrying this germ, wouldn’t it make sense for me to be sick? It’s got to be gone now!”
“No,” said Germaine, “it does not. You clearly have an immunity.”
“How can you know that?” he demanded. “And how would it be on my clothes?”
She pointed back at the house. “Fetch the water, Jason. And get in it. This is not a discussion.” She clapped her hands. “Hop to it.”
Now, sitting in the water, Jason wondered how in the course of less than an hour he could have moved from contemplating shooting a woman to hopping to it when she hollered.
Part of it, he suspected, was that she did seem to know what she was doing. She examined him like she was a doctor, and when he asked about that she said that back in Philadelphia she had worked as a nurse. She seemed to know a lot about germs, and when he asked about that she made a joke about them being her namesake. “The girls used to call me Germy behind my back,” she said and laughed.
It wasn’t all that funny, but Jason laughed too. He hadn’t done that in some time, laughing aloud, and it felt good to finally clear the pipes.
“What girls?” he asked.
Aunt Germaine’s smile faded a bit. “Oh you know,” she said. “The other nurses.”
Jason hadn’t a chance to ask many more questions the next couple of hours, as he followed Aunt Germaine’s very precise instructions about how to heat the water, where to do the bath and most importantly how to wash his clothes and himself.
Finally, as he finished the last spot at the very back of his head, he started up again.
“Aunt Germaine,” he said, “how is it that I never heard of you? You and mama have a fallin’ out?”
“Not precisely that,” said Germaine. “Let us say that we married into different circles.”
“That’s how come you’re called Frost, and not Thornton?”
“Yes. That is how come.”
Jason set down the soap in the snow. It bled little spider legs through the white. “How come you’re here now?” he asked.
Germaine turned around, glancing at Jason then away. “I was—nearby, when I learned what had happened here.”
Jason gave her a look. “How nearby? Nobody’s been here all winter to see what happened.”
His aunt pulled off her gloves, and wrung them together. “Nobody has,” she said. “And you have not left the homestead, and no one has come.”
“Too much snow,” said Jason.
His aunt didn’t say anything to that. She kept her eyes down, while Jason worked it out: news had come from here that was not about his mama, but still bad enough to draw relations nonetheless.
His hand fell back into the tub, and although the water was still quite warm, he shivered.
“What happened in Cracked Wheel? More people get sick?”
Aunt Germaine looked up. Her eyes might have been big and wet again, but the sun reflected off the glass so Jason could only surmise it by the tone in her voice.
“The whole town,” she said quietly. “It is gone.”
Jason would never set foot in the cabin again, of that he was sure.
As the sun set below the mountains, the flames were already reaching higher than treetops. He felt himself hitching to cry all over again as he watched the flames take it, and the woodshed, and his mama—who was going onward with no coffin, no tombstone, no sweet-voiced eulogy from the best preacher in Montana: a quiet recitation of the Twenty-third Psalm by Aunt Germaine, a lick of flame to kerosene, and then…
Fire.
Aunt Germaine stood beside him, her arm around his shoulder as the flames went higher. “Jason, this is something no young man should have to do, but so many do. You are very brave.”
Jason coughed, to hide that he was crying. “Not my idea,” he said, quiet enough that he’d figure his aunt couldn’t hear. But her ears were better than her eyes and she answered him:
“You wouldn’t know,” she said. “You haven’t seen the town yet. You haven’t seen what this germ does.”
“I know well enough,” he said. “Mama should be buried.”
“Why’s that?” Germaine raised her voice as the flames hit the woodpile. “She Catholic? A Jewess?”
“You know she ain’t,” said Jason.
“Then cremation is still good enough for my sister. It was good enough for Mr. Frost, it’s good enough for Ellen.”
Jason swallowed hard. They had had a falling out, Aunt Germaine and his mama—that was a sure thing.
“If we do not do this,” said his aunt, “then what happens when some trapper comes by in the melt, starts rooting through the house and picks up that germ? What happens, I will tell you, is this: it is an epidemic. Like the cholera.”
“Is that what this is?”
Aunt Germaine put up her hand. “The flames are taking,” she said. “Let us pray for your mother’s immortal soul.”
“All right,” he said. “I will.”
And Jason bowed his head, and after a moment of sad quiet, he imagined a great celestial light descending over this infernal pyre. And imagining that, he thought up a prayer.
Oh Lord, he prayed, please see my mama to Heaven where she belongs. And Lord, see to it, please, that should my pa ever wish to speak with her from where he writhes and burns in that Other Place—
Jason opened his eyes and stared into the flames that consumed the cabin old John Thistledown had built the year Jason was born.
—please, Lord: see to it he stays where he is and keeps his damn peace.
A month ago, shooting the pigs might have brought Jason some measure of satisfaction. Now—somehow, the act seemed capricious; low-down cruel. But Aunt Germaine insisted.
“They are probably fine,” she said. “But who knows if whatever it was that took poor Ellen is not also somehow attached to the swine?”
“It don’t seem likely,” said Jason. “And anyhow—those pigs have value at market.”
Aunt Germaine shook her head. “There is no market,” she said. “Not close by. Go on, young man. Take your shot.”
“Well,” he said doubtfully, “they are cannibals.”
In the end, Jason was down six bullets from the Winchester, having missed with one and but wounded with another.
He made sure to gather up the casings for reuse before he and his new aunt started off, in the dawn light, toward the snow-choked pass to Cracked Wheel. Jason wondered how they were going to do it. But as they crossed a rise that had been beaten down by Aunt Germaine’s footsteps, and rounded a tree, he saw it. There, sticking out of the snow, were two pair of snowshoes.
“Have you ever walked in snowshoes?” she asked.
“‘Course,” he said. “There was a couple pair that burned up on the back of the woodshed. Didn’t think of them until now.”