The Ill: A short story about the Flu epidemic of the 1900's

My Father had been gone for three days when Mother started feeling the symptoms of the flu. We lived a short while from the city where we made a living with our small plot of land and neighboring stream. I was out on the stream, seated on a massive boulder. My pole, the one that Father had carved me for my birthday, was bobbing slightly as the running water tugged on the line. I hadn’t caught anything out of that stream since that new factory opened up down the road. I was just about to throw the useless tool into the water when Anton, my brother, came to me with tears in his eyes. He had a great deal of trouble trying to tell me what was wrong. He was 7 years old at the time. He often refused to wear a top and strode around in just his trousers. He has a scar under his left eye where he fell from the rock I was fishing on. He’s quite clumsy and quiet but this time, he was awash with emotion. He stood at the bottom of the behemoth stone and was barely able to call my name between heaving breaths. He was choking on his sorrow and I immediately thought the worst. When I landed near him he stammered through quivering lips and steamy breaths. Mother had the sickness. The sickness had been through the city the year before but this year was supposed to be better.
Mother goes to the city much of the time to sell the vegetables and bread we produce on our land. I am supposed to eventually take over Father’s job of finding buyers and other financial supporters. On the way back from selling her full batch of items, Mother told me about a sick man lying in the street, confusing the horses. She said that there was a group of people who looked at the man but made no effort to pull the dazed fellow to the side. She took it upon herself to help the man over to the building wall of the post office. She was at first angry with the man. She assumed he was incredibly drunk and had decided to nap in the middle of the horse paths. It was my mother’s irritated ego that drove her to move the man, not her compassion or good Samaritan ideal. My Mother was a tough woman that married my father when she was pregnant with my eldest sister, Moira. She brought our product to whomever Father found, and took great pride in her work.
A few days after she told us about the man in the road, she decided to send Moira to the city the sell the product. She wasn’t feeling all that well, but assured us it was nothing to worry about. I brought her water and her books until Moira came back from the city, after that I would go to the stream or complete any chores I hadn’t finished. The days passed and Mother was still not getting better. That’s when Father left to go find a real doctor. The doctors in town were professional but Mother didn’t trust any of them. She said she saw Dr. Rush peek through his office window across the street to the Big Town hotel. She called him a pervert and refused to be treated by him if she ever fell ill. Father took us to him anyway, and made us swear to not tell Mother. He’d take us out for two days to convince Mother that we’d been out and about looking for the correct treatment. After the first visit, which took a mere 30 minutes or so, Father took us out to the circus. We’d spend the whole day there and come back feeling no longer ill. Father had the right type of treatment for us. When it came to Mother, however, his treatment was met with full hostility. He later came that day with a small board that carried a pile of poop. He placed the board next to Mother’s side of the bed and told her that breathing the stink off of the poop would make her flu go away. I asked him where he heard that and found out that it was a popular rumor in the city. Anytime someone got sick, they sniffed the aromas of shit to make themselves feel better. I never understood the reason for it, but the treatment still hadn’t worked. This is what Anton was telling me.
As Anton and I made our way back home, we saw a horse we didn’t recognize and figured it was a doctor that father had sent here. We got inside and found Moira sitting across from a man in dark colors and he was holding a hat in his lap. The hat told me who he was and what he was doing here. My Father had died while looking for a doctor, he had succumbed to the illness that was being seen running rampant in the city. I asked about Mother and Moira stood up and hugged me. That was when I knew. The illness had taken away my hardworking Mother and my Father. I ran to Mother’s room and found the shit pile sitting next to a mound of blanket. The mound had the same eerie shape of the boulder by the stream, and this image immediately sank me to my knees, where I began to cry. I cried a torrent of tears and was unashamed about the whole thing. I never got to see the face of my dead Mother, and I didn’t want to.
When the man was done giving Moira helpful information about the flu, I asked him where they had found my Father. He told me that he had collapsed in the middle of the road a couple of towns away and was left lying in the road. Bystanders didn’t help him up and everyone had assumed the worst. There was a bank robbery the same day and the people who fled the scene had trampled on Father’s body with their kidney bruised horses. It was only because the officers had been trailing the men, when they pulled him to the side of the road for inspection. They assure me he was dead before the horses but I refused to believe it.
That was nearly three weeks ago and I decided to say something now because I am not feeling so well. I walked over to the stream again, but decided not to come home that night. I felt oddly at peace sitting by the boulder. I never made attempts to climb up to the top again. It felt wrong to try and I shooed away any birds that happened to land there, trying to call my attention with victory chants and calls, proclaiming themselves as king of the stream hill stone. I never threw stones but instead made great threatening gestures that were sure to frighten anything on top of Mother’s head. Moira has been stuck with both of their jobs and has spent little time with Anton and me. I told Anton of my secret plan to visit the circus but he told me that it had shut down. I never found out how he knew that, but for some strange reason, I believed him.