The Smell of Fields

I have free-time in the Present, and I cannot think of a better time to retell the Past. And so, the thread of Tale where I left off was sixteen…

On a sunny afternoon in Paris, we were girls eager for the park. We had sang and played our instruments and painted from the windows, but we craved the attention of passerby. Collecting parasols and bonnets and gloves and any number of such items, I was delivered a note by Madame. She handed it to me solemnly in the chaos, and I read it carelessly, my head filled with hopes for the day. Hopes, of course, quickly dashed away. I let out a cry at the news therein, but Madame informed me calmly that I must pack and I would leave the next morning.

“What is it?” begged Anne in the suddenly hushed hall of girls. My cry had startled all of them, and I stood in shock as Madame retreated with her stately stride.

The note contained a frantic message from my mother, informing me that my father was struck suddenly and mysteriously ill. It was so serious that they feared he would die soon. I was to make haste home, and so I left my colleagues in their own abandoned clutter to run up the stairs and immediately throw all I could get my hands on into my trunk. Later, Anne held me as I cried, and a maid from the kitchen was sent up to organize my messy packing. Anne tried to get permission to accompany me, but it was made clear that she was to remain, lest the illness be contagious. I didn’t realize, as I left Madame’s school, that no one expected ever to see me again, and that Anne cried in the doorway more for herself than even for me. I waved my handkerchief to her in farewell, and felt a boulder slowly growing in my throat.

My father was dead by the time I got home. I didn’t even get to give him one last adieu. But, even worse than that, the illness had spread. The entire town was pale and drawn; totally sleepless and totally dreamless. My family was stricken, from my mother and sisters to little Eduard and the servants. Even as I crossed the threshold, my mother begged me to leave for fear that I’d contract it, too, but strangely enough I did neither: leave nor contract the illness. As everyone around me grew progressively worse, more sleepless and weak, I remained unaffected. They lived longer than my father had, but at the same time, they were not really living: just suffering prolonged deaths.

I tried everything to take care of them. To save them. But it was no use.

Charlotte died next. She, too, had come to our father’s bedside, and she was the first in the house to be stricken with him. Her yellow hair turned brittle, like straw, and began to fall out. Already thin, she became skeletal, and her eyes, once as bright as the summer skies we played beneath, sank into the hollows of her cheekbones. I was sitting by her bedside, writing a letter to Anne by candlelight the night she died. She had finally closed her eyes in sleep, and of a sudden she gasped out, eyes wide, and grabbed my arm, which was close to her. She gripped me, and looked at me with eyes so full of fright that it was absolutely chilling… And then she fell back against the pillows, face serene and heartbeat ceased.

Marguerite died next, her death not as memorable as Charlotte’s –my favorite sister. A day later, Elisabeth, too, succumb to Darkness. Mother, of course, was valiant, for Eduard’s sake, I think. He cried and cried…endlessly. Each gut-wrenching scream making his small frame shudder and the house walls shake. Mother quickly followed my father and my sisters to the grave, leaving me with nothing but the screams, the screams which ripped my mind apart in agony.

I remember begging him to stop. To hush. To quiet. My foot would rock his cradle, I would hold him in my arms, I would do anything I could think of. The illness in Eduard was more a madness than it had been in the others, though, and sometimes I would leave the house –at that point devoid of servants –and hide in the fields, just for the silence it offered. One day, one grey day, I carried Eduard with me to the fields. In the breeze and swaying grasses. And he cried his labored breaths and beat his fists and head against me. My breastbone ached from the force of his resistance, but there was nothing I could do. I had failed, I was haunted. My childhood home, darkened by death, was no longer the haven it had once been: it reeked of death, and apparitions of my family haunted every corner of every room, and even invaded my mind. I felt the desperate need to get away, and take Eduard with me. As though it were the place and not his body that was sick.

I was holding the last hope for my family line in my arms. And when his screaming voice went out, the voice of my family, too, would be silenced from history.

Suddenly…he went still. After all my hushing, all my pleading, there was silence in the heavy air, and stillness in my heavy arms. It was the weight of lifelessness, and I didn’t even need to look down to know it. But I lifted his head from my chest, in shock more than disbelief. It lolled back grotesquely, and it was maybe even worse than the other horrors of the other deaths…

I laid him on the ground and attempted to blow warmth back into his cheeks, rubbing his hands franticly in mine. It was hopeless, and I knew it, but I couldn’t stop myself. And when I had exhausted these efforts, I unleashed my rage upon the ground, pounding it with my fists and digging into it with my nails. I screamed and cried as I had yet to do. I cursed the Lord, I cursed the sky, I cursed all manner and number of things as they came into my head. I stood and yanked the hair on my head. I ripped it out to hurt myself. I felt wild in rage and grief, ripped apart by the strength of the emotions inside of me. I paced, and then broke into a run, careening down the slope blindly, clawing at my face, as well as my hair… It’s such a blur, but also a rush of adrenaline to remember that moment: the moment that I Fell…

I tried to catch myself, when I felt it coming on. I reached out for anything, but there was nothing. And it started gradually enough, as though the ground were coming up to meet me in slow motion. But I never crashed into it, rather it felt as though I had dived through and into the ground: a deep sea of dirt and roots. Roots that grabbed me and pulled me down farther, faster, with vise-like grips. There was so much darkness, pressing my mind and body, cramming lifetimes into seconds and thereby stretching my own lifetime to an unimaginable length. My lungs filled with mud from futile attempts to scream, and my body was scratched in wasted efforts to fight what was happening. Faster…faster… My eyes burned and my skin was raw. Faster…faster…

And then, as suddenly as it began, it was over. One minute there was speed and darkness and the next I was springing back up slowly from the depths of the Earth. In retrospect, I sometimes wonder if Death tried to swallow me, and then spit me back out instead. To walk this cursed earth a cursed soul: quick to feel, slow to age, and long to live.

I woke up on the ground at the bottom of the hill, disheveled and battered. I can’t know how long it was that I lied there, and my confusion was so complete that I didn’t not even recall Eduard immediately. When I did, I scrambled to reclaim him, stopping myself from calling out his name. –He was dead, after all. After my initial search for him was fruitless, I began to become frantic, searching higher grasses than where I thought I would have been. But I had to find him. I couldn’t just leave him out there, out in the cold. He needed to be buried, with the rest of our family. I can still remember my sickening dread –it was such a day for sickening dread –when my toe struck something that seemed almost like a rock as I walked through the field, my thoughts slightly distracting me from my search. Of course, looking down, I stared into the white face of my baby brother, wrapped in a blanket and one of my old shawls. It was disgusting.

But I picked him up, gently, almost as though he were still in life, and I whispered things, as though he could still hear, and I headed back to the silent house. The next day, I buried him at the end of a row of five other tombstones. I left them there: my family. I left our town, still screaming of death, and I doubt I even cared what happened to the rest of them. I was alone. In the world. With myself and no one else. There was my inheritance, of course, and M Durant in some Paris bank, but that’s not family. I could never go back to the girl I had been: happy in the countryside, innocent at school, and brimming with romantic dreams. It all died in that tiny town. And I am glad that it is gone. Because the fields will never smell the same again.