Free A Timely Concerto by Lee Ann Sontheimer Murphy Page A

coughing so much that I just couldn’t work any longer. I often came through the kitchen so I could slip up the back stairs to clean up. When I walked in here, Shugie was rolling out pie crust but she stopped when she heard me cough.”
    Now he mimicked the brown sugar sound of her voice, “Miss-tah Howard, that cough sounds bad. Are you poorly?”
    “I was and I admitted it,” Howard said. “I was never sick very often and so she knew that I could not be at all well. She mixed up some concoction with whisky, peppermint, honey, and tea. I drank it down and it helped, a bit. I made it through dinner and retired early. I thought the rest would be enough.”
    “Was it?” Lillian filled his cup and her own.
    “No. I felt just as terrible, worse when I woke but all I could think about was the farm. I stumbled downstairs, drank some coffee, and grabbed two biscuits to eat while I rode over there. I fought being sick for two days, in the hopes that I would get better but I just became worse. Finally, there came a day when I felt so terrible that I decided to stay home. I felt like my skin was on fire and I could feel the fever heat. Even so, I shook with chills and felt too sick to eat much of anything. By then when I coughed, I brought up nasty mucous streaked with blood and green chunks. My chest ached as if someone had piled rocks on it so I decided to stay home.”
    Howard drank the rest of his coffee and spun the empty cup on one edge. Talking about your own death would be trying, Lillian thought, and reached out to touch his fingers. It might have been the coffee but this time, she could touch them and they didn’t go cold or evaporate.
    “Howard, if this is too much to talk about, we can finish tomorrow.”
    “No.” He wound his fingers around hers, a simple gesture that was much more intimate in his time than now. “I would rather finish the story. I don’t want to do this more than once. I took to my bed and Mother came in, looking fussed and worried. She touched my forehead and cried out that I was burning up. Father did not care much for doctors so he suggested that Mother and Shugie nurse me. Moreover, they sent for Miss Julia, a neighbor we had known since we first moved here from Illinois. She was a maiden lady, a spinster who nursed the sick around town. Everything gets confused after that. I remember lying in bed coughing, so miserable, and sick that I could not think straight. Fever dreams tormented me and I suppose I was delirious.”
    She wanted to say something, a word of comfort but Lillian could not thing of anything to say so she nodded.
    “They bathed my face with cold water and put mustard plasters on my chest. Someone sat with me at all times, I think, and tried to get me to drink water or other concoctions. Breathing became more and more difficult so Dr. Lamson and his son operated on me, there in the bedroom.”
    “Operated? They did surgery in the house?” Lillian’s shock was real. “Oh, Howard. What did they do?”
    “It was an effort to drain the pus and fluid from my lungs. Because I was already so very weak, they could not use an anesthetic of any type.”
    “Wasn’t that painful?” She could not imagine enduring surgery while so seriously ill.
    He shrugged his shoulders. “I hurt so much already, you see, that it wasn’t so bad. I improved a little, enough that I remember looking down at my hands, so weak and white, and being ashamed. My illness was the first time I had not worked since I was a little boy. After some time, I truly do not know how long, my condition worsened and the doctors performed a second surgery. I recall hearing Miss Julia say that it was the fifty-third day that I had been ill and that something had to change because I was so weak. I recall the preparations but I don’t remember the surgery at all. “Later, sometime later, I woke weak and soaked with sweat. My fever had broken.”
    She didn’t understand. “But, how could that be?”
    Howard