Eutopia Read Online Free PDF Page B

she said and laughed.
    It wasn’t all that funny, but Jason laughed too. He hadn’t done that in some time, laughing aloud, and it felt good to finally clear the pipes.
    “What girls?” he asked.
    Aunt Germaine’s smile faded a bit. “Oh you know,” she said. “The other nurses.”
    Jason hadn’t a chance to ask many more questions the next couple of hours, as he followed Aunt Germaine’s very precise instructions about how to heat the water, where to do the bath and most importantly how to wash his clothes and himself.
    Finally, as he finished the last spot at the very back of his head, he started up again.
    “Aunt Germaine,” he said, “how is it that I never heard of you? You and mama have a fallin’ out?”
    “Not precisely that,” said Germaine. “Let us say that we married into different circles.”
    “That’s how come you’re called Frost, and not Thornton?”
    “Yes. That is how come.”
    Jason set down the soap in the snow. It bled little spider legs through the white. “How come you’re here now?” he asked.
    Germaine turned around, glancing at Jason then away. “I was—nearby, when I learned what had happened here.”
    Jason gave her a look. “How nearby? Nobody’s been here all winter to see what happened.”
    His aunt pulled off her gloves, and wrung them together. “Nobody has,” she said. “And you have not left the homestead, and no one has come.”
    “Too much snow,” said Jason.
    His aunt didn’t say anything to that. She kept her eyes down, while Jason worked it out: news had come from here that was not about his mama, but still bad enough to draw relations nonetheless.
    His hand fell back into the tub, and although the water was still quite warm, he shivered.
    “What happened in Cracked Wheel? More people get sick?”
    Aunt Germaine looked up. Her eyes might have been big and wet again, but the sun reflected off the glass so Jason could only surmise it by the tone in her voice.
    “The whole town,” she said quietly. “It is gone.”
    §
    Jason would never set foot in the cabin again, of that he was sure.
    As the sun set below the mountains, the flames were already reaching higher than treetops. He felt himself hitching to cry all over again as he watched the flames take it, and the woodshed, and his mama—who was going onward with no coffin, no tombstone, no sweet-voiced eulogy from the best preacher in Montana: a quiet recitation of the Twenty-third Psalm by Aunt Germaine, a lick of flame to kerosene, and then . . .
    Fire.
    Aunt Germaine stood beside him, her arm around his shoulder as the flames went higher. “Jason, this is something no young man should have to do, but so many do. You are very brave.”
    Jason coughed, to hide that he was crying. “Not my idea,” he said, quiet enough that he’d figure his aunt couldn’t hear. But her ears were better than her eyes and she answered him:
    “You wouldn’t know,” she said. “You haven’t seen the town yet. You haven’t seen what this germ does.”
    “I know well enough,” he said. “Mama should be buried.”
    “Why’s that?” Germaine raised her voice as the flames hit the woodpile. “She Catholic? A Jewess?”
    “You know she ain’t,” said Jason.
    “Then cremation is still good enough for my sister. It was good enough for Mr. Frost, it’s good enough for Ellen.”
    Jason swallowed hard. They had had a falling out, Aunt Germaine and his mama—that was a sure thing.
    “If we do not do this,” said his aunt, “then what happens when some trapper comes by in the melt, starts rooting through the house and picks up that germ? What happens, I will tell you, is this: it is an epidemic. Like the cholera.”
    “Is that what this is?”
    Aunt Germaine put up her hand. “The flames are taking,” she said. “Let us pray for your mother’s immortal soul.”
    “All right,” he said. “I will.”
    And Jason bowed his head, and after a moment of sad quiet, he imagined a great celestial light