Jagged- Chapter Four

Chapter Four
We weren’t on the road more than fifteen minutes when the trailer wheels started to slow again. The sun was just starting to peak over the rise of the land, grayish and pale in the haze that continually seemed to fill the sky. We were supposed to go forty miles that day. That’s what Mr. Elsa said after clucking his teeth at the hay supply. There was supposed to be a small town with a country store where we could resupply.
If it was still there, he added. But compared to the city, the land out here seemed relatively untouched by what had happened. At least the old barns and little country houses with their peeling paint and grimy windows still stood.
The trailer stopped. Margaret and I got on our feet. To the side of the highway was a huddled mass of blankets. Beneath the blankets were several pair of sneakers. I realized the blankets had pairs of eyes too; eyes that stared at us as wildly as if we were about to mug them.
Mr. Elsa was leaning over the edge of his seat to talk to them. I strained to hear the muffled conversation.
“Please,” I heard one of the taller ones say. Who were they and what where they doing on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere? Mr. Elsa nodded and then swung his long legs over his seat and joined us in the back.
“They’re trying to reach Hays,” his mustache twitched as he spoke. “It’s not far off of 1-70 and on our way to Ellis. Say they have family there. There’s more than enough room— I thought they could ride along.”
Margaret nodded and began re-arranging crates and blankets.
I looked back at the hunched figures. There was something off in the way they stared at the road, like they weren’t really seeing it and one of them wouldn’t stop swaying. They gave off an ere of illness. Like a diseased puppy, or the homeless man back in my city. Something I would rather avoid. But this wasn’t my trailer and I wasn’t in a position to decide. “Who are they?” I couldn’t help asking.
“Folk from Topeka,” was his only answer. He swung the back gate open and helped up a girl of not more than eight years old, huddled in a hand-made quilt that showed just her dirty nose and sharp eyes. Another girl of about thirteen scooted in next to her, was that blood trickling from her mouth? A brown-haired woman who must’ve been their mother and an elderly woman whose head shook uncontrollably underneath her shawl followed.
They gave Margaret and I a quick glance before settling in a tight bunch against the hay bales. Mr. Elsa got back into his seat and the trailer rocked forward once again. They seemed content to stare at the trailer’s wooden planks, but then the littlest one kept glancing at me.
At first, I didn’t understand why. Then I remembered the gash cutting across my face. I hadn’t re-bandaged it yet. I must’ve looked horrific.
Revolted at my own appearance, I turned my head so she wouldn’t have to see me, the freak show. But then Margaret put new bandages on it, and still the child stared.
Her eyes were like two dark stones set into her waifish face. Margaret had struck up something of a conversation with the mother. Something about the green fields of Hays during the spring. But the woman just mumbled and nodded, dabbing at her bleeding nose with a tissue. I noticed the little girl’s dirty fingers kept scratching underneath her quilt at her forehead.
“Don’t scratch it,” her mother whispered harshly.
“But it itches,” the child replied in a voice more like a squeak.
The trailer hit a bump and the blanket fell back revealing an oozing mound of flesh on the child’s scalp.
A gasp escaped my lips. The mother’s dark eyes flashed at me and in half a second, she had covered her child’s head again.
My stomach rolled and an odd gurgling came from my throat. But then the child’s sister tumbled forward and I realized the gurgling didn’t come from me. The girl’s skin turned several shades paler and then she was dry heaving, her stomach attempting to empty itself of its already empty contents. Nothing but a sting of bloody spit came out her mouth.
Her mother wrapped her arms which were a sick purple and blue around her trembling shoulders and tried to comforter her while she cried tearlessly, but within minutes, the mother herself was vomiting blood.
Something was seriously wrong with these women.
I tucked my knees into my chest and covered my nose with my sleeve, determined not to be the next victim. I tried to focus on anything but the sick travelers with their horrible wounds, but my eyes kept coming back to them. The children cried until they became too weak to do even that, their dirty bloodied heads falling into their mother’s lap. The mother stroked their sticky hair as she leaned her head back, closing her eyes. The elderly woman hardly seemed to notice the scene; she just stared blankly at the hay bales and continued rocking back and forth.
“I’m so sorry,” Margaret whispered. “I wish I could do something.” She rummaged through her tiny first aid kit. “I’m afraid I’m all out of anti-nausea medicine.” Her brows furrowed together into one red line.
The anti-nausea meds. She must’ve used them all on herself and me. That truth hit me like a rock as we bounced down the long dusty highway.
Margaret and I made a meal of more saltines and a packet of applesauce when the sun reached its highest point. The food seemed to bring some of my energy back. Margaret offered the women some water, but it only made them vomit more. When Mr. Elsa pulled the trailer to a stop and told us he was going to go water the Mules down at a creek he saw, I jumped to my feet and offered to help. Mr. Elsa’s bushy eyebrows rose, but he didn’t refuse me and I was grateful. I would’ve done anything to get away from the old, shaking woman and the children with their tearless eyes, even if it meant getting near the mules.
I stumbled after him, my legs wobbly from sitting so long, down a ditch and into a brown field. Connie, his little speckled dog ran circles around us, causing me to jump every time he leapt at my legs.
Mr. Elsa told me to hold the rope of one of the mules, Briggs, he called it, while he took the other down to the creek. I hadn’t noticed I’d been shaking until I reached out to take the end of the rope.
“You ok?” he asked.
I didn’t think I was, but the only other option was to go back to the trailer. So I just nodded and took the rope hoping the grunting animal beside me wouldn’t decide to make me its mid-day snack.
Images of the vomiting girls, blood dripping out their mouth and noses kept flashing in my mind. By the time Mr. Elsa’s worn hat appeared over the ridge, my body was convulsing as badly as the old woman’s. Tears streamed from my eyes, and my chest heaved for breath.
Mr. Elsa’s arm was around me. “What’s wrong?” he tried to soften the gruffness in his voice.
I tried to answer, but only more sobs came out. How was I supposed to tell him that I couldn’t go back there? Couldn’t face those eyes, that smell? But I didn’t have to answer, because as in-between one of my sobs, a scream that seemed to stab my very heart came from the trailer.
Mr. Elsa gave me one bewildered look. “We need to go back there. Can you manage?”
“Yes,” I chocked. He took the lead rope back from me and I staggered after him back up the ditch as another shrill cry rippled across the ground.
The mother was standing. I could just see the top of her head over the trailer’s side. We ran around to the back gate and then I nearly collided into Mr. Elsa’s stopped body.
Clutched in her mother’s arms, was the limp body of the child. Her blankets had fallen, revealing her thin limbs, her brown hair falling over her mother’s arms. Those dark eyes that had stared so intently at me were now closed, she could’ve been asleep, but her mouth hung open.
“My baby,” the mother wailed and then collapsed into a heap, cradling the child in her arms. “She’s gone. She’s gone.”
The sister and elderly woman behind her, were like me, too shocked or numb to move. After giving her some time, Margaret and Mr. Elsa seemed to be the only ones with any sense at all. Margaret wrapped her arms around the mother, crying tears of her own. Mr. Elsa offered to help bury the girl. He set off with a shovel into the brown field. It took a while, but then the mother finally released her clenched embrace on her child.
“Goodbye my sweet love,” she whispered through chocking moans and then kissed the girl on the forehead. Mr. Elsa took the body from her arms, wrapped it in the hand-made quilt and disappeared into the ditch. The mother, Margaret and the others fumbled after in a procession of grief and tears.
I probably should’ve followed but found myself rooted to the pavement like one of those big trees that rose up out of the flat land.
Their wails washed over me with the wind. I found myself crying again too. But it wasn’t for the death of the child. It wasn’t for the mother who was now watching dirt fall onto the body of the girl she had given life too. It wasn’t for the empty whole that soul would leave in the lives of all those who knew her.
No, my tears were for myself. Hotly and stupidly. My knees hit the pavement, my head bent. I grieved the death of my own life. My lungs burned. My lips rattled and shook as tears and snot dripped off them.
It’s all over. There’s nothing. Nothing left.
A hand touched my shoulder some time later. I didn’t have to look to know it was Margaret. She rubbed my back and stroked my tangled hair.
I was vaguely aware of Mr. Elsa’s boots on the road, the knickers of the mules, but I couldn’t find the strength to move.
Margaret’s arms were under me. “Come,” she said, heaving me up. “Come.” Half-standing she walked me to the trailer gate, then climbed up herself.
“Catherine, come,” she called, her eyes urgent, almost pleading.
“I can’t,” I mumbled, spitting out hair stuck to my lips. I was aware that the mother and other women weren’t in the trailer either. “I can’t do this anymore.”
“You can,” Margaret stretched her arm out to me. “You just have to get up into this trailer.”
The gate seemed impossibly high.
The mother’s keening in the field reached my ears. “Oh God, there’s nothing. Just death. Everyone’s died. We’re all dead.”
Nothing. That was the word I used.
“Catherine. Now.” Margaret’s words plowed into my thoughts. Somehow I pushed my hands onto the wood planks and Margaret helped pull the rest of me up. “We’re good,” she called to Mr. Elsa who cracked the reins and the trailer moved forward away from the creek with water for the mules, away from the dead girl and her family.
“They’re not coming,” I stated the obvious.
“No.” Margaret’s single word answer was like closing a casket.