The night it happened it was just the two of them alone in the cabin as a terrible howl of a blizzard ran outside. The blizzard was bad for the pigs, and as it turned out one of them died because Jason would not go outside and see to them. He knew the risk in leaving the pigs out like that, but sometimes a man’s got to decide, and if there’s no man about, the decision falls to a boy. To Jason’s way of thinking, when the choice is between standing by your mama and a seeing to a sty of swine, there’s no choice at all.
He sat there and gave her water until she stopped taking it. He tried singing to her like she used to sing to him, but that felt foolish, so he said he was sorry but he was going to have to stop. He thought she might like to hear a story so he told her the one about Odysseus and Polyphemus, until he realized it became too terrifying in the middle part where Odysseus’ men were one by one devoured by the terrible Cyclops. His mama (lying on her bed, unable to move or speak, with blood welling at the base of her fingernails; brown, putrid fever-sweat accumulating in her bedclothes) didn’t need more terrifying. So he said he was sorry and tried to think of a less frightening tale. At length, Jason had to admit he didn’t know many stories that weren’t upsetting in some way or another, so he said he was sorry.
“I guess sayin’ sorry’s one thing I can do fine,” he said and tried to laugh at his little joke but wound up crying.
He cried a long time, but managed to get his wits about him before the germ delivered its coup de grâce.
Later on, Jason was glad for that. He was sure his mama wouldn’t have liked to have had the last sight of her son being him blubbering like a baby.
At that hour, however, Jason had not yet seriously entertained the notion that his mama was going to be having a last anything of anything. She was just poorly. She was quite poorly, sure, but she hadn’t been that way for so very long. The coughing started up on the way back from the store at Cracked Wheel, and that was just a day ago. It was probably a flu germ, she’d said, but she’d had flu before and always just walked it off. She was more worried about Jason coming down with it, and so ordered him to the far end of the cabin for all the good that would do.
Jason hadn’t come down with a thing—not so much as a sniffle. That, to his way of thinking, meant that whatever it was, it wasn’t much of a flu at all.
Still believing this, Jason dried his nose and got up from his chair and went to see to the wood stove, which was starting to cool. He dug around in the wood box and came up with a stick of birch that looked about right, and opened the stove’s front and shoved it in. It raised a little flurry of sparks in the bed of coals inside. Jason blew on it a bit, and fanned it with his hand, poked it with his fingertips until it was just right. Then he closed the door and wiggled the flue to make sure it was properly open so the fire would take.
When he got up, that was it.
Later, Jason would think that it was better his mama saw him tending the fire as she died. His mama valued that sort of thing, that self-sufficiency as she called it. Self-sufficiency had seen her raise Jason alone here in the wilds of northwest Montana—laugh at all the folks who’d said she, born and raised in the east and come out here only late in life, wouldn’t last a year now that her husband was gone.
Yes, he would think, she probably took a deal of comfort in watching him see to his needs; more comfort than having him right there beside her as the life fled her flesh.
Yet there at the deathbed, Jason didn’t even cry. He just stood, hands hanging dead weight at his side. He shuffled over to her bed, and fell to his knees, and died himself or so it seemed to him.
His mama was gone; taken from him by a God-damned germ.
It was on February 12, 1911 that she died.
Jason did not look at the clock when it happened, but sometime afterward he remarked to himself that it struck eleven in the night; so he surmised she’d died prior to eleven but past what might normally be the supper hour, although they had not had a proper supper, and he finally hazarded a guess and wrote this down in the front of their Bible:
He wrote those words the morning of February 13, before he ventured outside to check on the pigs and found that one of them had died too—a young boar that Jason’s mama was fattening for slaughter. The freeze had taken care of the slaughter, and by the time Jason had come out, the remaining four pigs were taking care of the carcass.
The whole homestead was snowbound—one side of the cabin was covered in a drift of white that went from the roof shingles to the ground in a smooth curve, like the snow that ran down the distant western mountain peaks, and the blizzard had left no path between cabin and pigsty. Jason started through the white anyway but it was tough going.
He was finally reduced to hollering, “Stop! You’re eatin’ your own! Damn cannibal hogs!” The swine paid him no heed.
Jason swore a storm, and waved his arms, and finally, in frozen exhaustion, turned back to the cabin.
With that picture in his head, he knew there was no question.
No matter how he loved her, Jason Thistledown could no longer live under the same roof as his mama—reduced as she was to nothing but soured meat.
When he composed himself, he found a shovel and began digging a path from the cabin. The sun was as high as it would get, casting a shortening shadow to the north by the time he’d made it to the side where the woodshed stood. There was a good half-cord of wood stacked within. But Jason looked to the braces. They were six feet from the ground, and spaced adequately for the task.
Against the wall in the shed was a stack of pine planks, bought by him and his mama that autumn past in hopes of setting down a proper floor in the cabin. He lifted two of those planks into the rafters, making a high platform that he reckoned would keep her safe from predation and wolves until the thaw.
“I am sorry, Mama,” he said as he hefted her sheet-wrapped body over his shoulder and put a foot on the ladder. She was wearing the same sheet she’d died in, and he had not washed her, and even in the sharp February cold she gave a stink like a shallow privy.
“I guess,” he said as he rolled her onto the makeshift platform and settled her on her back, “sayin’ sorry’s one thing I can do fine.”
The winter finished hard, one storm after another hitting the Thistledown homestead in a succession of punishing smacks that blanketed the snow in thick layers. Jason fought back dully—each day clearing a path between the door of the house and the woodshed, and halfway along cutting off another path to the sty. He waited a few days but finally succumbed and became diligent in throwing feed to the cannibal swine, creatures he was coming to hate but could not bring himself to kill.
He told himself that when the thaw came, he would trade the sty of them for the finest of coffins, and the churchyard plot nearest to Jesus, a tombstone carved with his mama’s saintly visage and words from the most eloquent preacher in Montana to send her Heaven-ward.
Toward such an end, the pigs would have to be fed daily, lest they ate one another to extinction before winter’s finish.
Aside from the daily feedings, however, Jason did not spend much time tending the pigs.
Most times, he sat bundled in the woodshed, the Winchester in his lap. As the days grew longer, Jason grew more certain that his mama’s frozen resting place was not so secure. Three years ago, during a winter not so harsh as this one, his mama had bent down and showed him tracks in the snow.