The diary pages that follow the sap boiling shift into spring proper, when the ground opened up and the household got to work. This entry is dated Monday, May 4, 1903, and it’s the shortest clean page in the sheaf, the letters pressed harder than usual as if the man was writing after a long night with no sleep in it.
Monday, May 4, 1903
Rain since Friday fore noon, and the whole yard gone to mud but the garden’s comin. The little boy has took a fever and a cough that sounds like a hinge wantin oil. Martha’s been up two nights with him, and her face is drawn the way it gets when she aint said how scared she is. I went down to the store for a bottle of quinine and come back with my boots full of creek water where the ford’s up over the rocks.
Amos’s note at the bottom, heavier than the rest of the page: “a child gettin hot is the longest hour a man ever sets through. martha dont say the scared part and i dont say it back. we trade it back and forth quiet like a cup neither one wants to drink.”
We dosed him with the quinine in a spoon of molasses and wrapped his feet in a flannel soaked with turpentine and lard, the way Martha’s mother done. I set the kettle on and kept the broth from gettin cold all night, and along toward four in the mornin the fever broke and he slept, and she slept in the chair with her head back against the wall and her hand still on his chest.
Amos, close to the edge of the page where the pencil ran light: “the fever dont care how much a man knows. it cares how long he’ll set there. and a man’ll set there longer than he ever set for wages.”
By daylight the rain had quit and the boy asked for cornbread, which I took to be the end of it. I went out and found three of the setting hens had got soaked clean through and quit their nests, so the hatin’ we been countin on is half spoiled. I gathered what eggs wasn’t ruined and left the hens to sort it out. The garden come through the wet fine, and the beans I planted in the cold are up four inches, so there’s that.
