Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

Aunt Germaine set the bag down in a drift. She took a little handful of snow, and scrubbed the handles of the bag where Jason had held it. Then she took more snow and rubbed it in her gloved hands before opening the bag. She rooted through some neatly folded cloth until she pulled out a small handkerchief, with strings coming out of each corner. Jason watched as she placed the cloth over her mouth, then reached up and tied it behind her head like she was doing her hair. In the end, the little handkerchief covered her mouth and her nose. Finally, she pulled off her hat and took off her coat, and set them down atop the carpet bag.

“Very good,” she said, her voice muffled by the cloth. “Now let us see how you have been getting by, Jason.”

Jason stepped aside to let Aunt Germaine through. She did not get far inside.

“Oh my,” she said. “Where does one start?”

Jason looked past her to see what she meant. The cabin was a simple enough place to his eye. One long pine table with a couple of chairs, the wood stove in the middle of it, a tiny windowsill and the beds at one end of it. All in one room.

“This,” she said, “is a breeding place for germs. The ground itself is your floor! Had you been staying outside all the time, Jason?”

“No ma’am.”

“Did you isolate your dear mother as she was ill?”

“No ma’am.”

She turned to him. Her eyes seemed very large behind the glasses. “And after she passed. You’ve remained here for how long after that?”

“Don’t know.”

“Weeks?”

“Months.”

“Oh my.”

She stepped back outside, and leaned close to him. “It is all right, my dear,” she said. “I am well-trained. Open your mouth. And turn to the sun, please, so I can better see.”

§

Two hours later, Jason Thistledown was naked as the day he was born, up to his breast-bone in a tub of scalding hot water that Aunt Germaine had made him boil up on the wood stove and haul to a level spot in the lee of the house, and rubbing himself down with a black, stinging bar of soap from the carpet bag.

Jason tried to argue. “I’m not sick,” he said. “If I was carrying this germ, wouldn’t it make sense for me to be sick? It’s got to be gone now!”

“No,” said Germaine, “it does not. You clearly have an immunity.”

“How can you know that?” he demanded. “And how would it be on my clothes?”

She pointed back at the house. “Fetch the water, Jason. And get in it. This is not a discussion.” She clapped her hands. “Hop to it.”

Now, sitting in the water, Jason wondered how in the course of less than an hour he could have moved from contemplating shooting a woman to hopping to it when she hollered.

Part of it, he suspected, was that she did seem to know what she was doing. She examined him like she was a doctor, and when he asked about that she said that back in Philadelphia she had worked as a nurse. She seemed to know a lot about germs, and when he asked about that she made a joke about them being her namesake. “The girls used to call me Germy behind my back,” 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.