Free Fever Season by Eric Zweig

the next year.
    After the chemical tanks burst, the force of the detonation blew out the brick walls of the Arena. The steel girders holding up the roof were still standing, but not for long. They were soon so hot that they began to bend. The roof fell in with a loud rumble. Then the flames leaped to the six buildings across the street, but the firemen were able to bring those blazes under control quickly. Still, the heat from the fire broke the windows in many of the homes along Wood Avenue. There was nothing the firemen could do to save the Arena. Within an hour nothing was left but burning rubble.
    The day after the fire the Canadiens announced they would move their home games to Jubilee Rink. With only 2,633 seats and standing room for only a few hundred more, Jubilee was less than half the size of Westmount Arena. It did have one advantage for the Canadiens, though. It was in the east end of town where most of their French-Canadian fans lived. Most of the Wanderers fans were English and lived in the west end.
    After the fire, the Wanderers made one more plea to the other NHL teams to loan them players. When they didn’t, the Wanderers decided to drop out. The league would carry on with just three teams.

    About a month after the Arena fire, David and Alice came home from school to find their mother already there waiting for them. She had gotten a telegram. Their father was dead.
    For the longest time it hardly seemed real. Eventually, the army sent home some of David’s father’s things, but there was never a proper funeral. “Body unrecovered for burial,” the telegram had read. David was afraid to ask his mother exactly what that meant. He had a pretty good idea, though. His father’s body had been so blown apart by shellfire that there wasn’t enough left to bury.
    Although she tried her best to hide it from him and Alice, David could tell that their mother was sad. She looked older now. There were streaks of grey in her brown hair. But the strange thing for David was that so little seemed to change after his father was killed. He had already been gone for close to two years. David had stopped expecting him to come home soon a long time ago. And there was still school, work, and sewing to help out with. Just as there was before.
    By the end of the summer in 1918, it was starting to look as if the war might actually be near its end. More and more wounded soldiers were returning home. David noticed the way his mother gazed at the men in uniform when she passed them on the street. It was as if she were searching for something in their faces, as if the army had made a mistake and one of these men would turn out to be her husband. That was when it finally became real to David. Unlike these men, his father was never coming home.

C HAPTER 8
    Soon there was something new to worry about. During the summer of 1918, a different kind of war story was sneaking into newspapers. There wasn’t much written about it, so it was easy to miss.
    Since the spring, more and more of the soldiers in the hospitals of Europe weren’t suffering from battle wounds. They were ill with some kind of sickness. It was like the flu — with a runny nose, cough, aches, and a fever — but it was much worse. Men were coughing up blood, and they seemed to be choking on the fluids that filled their lungs. The disease struck soldiers in England, France, and Germany. Civilians, too. Soon people were sick all over Europe.
    Although it was a serious problem, very little about the disease was reported in the newspapers. There was enough bad news from the war already. But Spain wasn’t fighting in the Great War. During the month of May, eight million people were sick in Spain. The newspapers there printed plenty of stories about the sickness. As a result, the disease became known as Spanish Influenza … or Spanish Flu for short.
    Near the end of the summer of 1918, soldiers returning home from the war brought the