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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:
    8 OCLOCK (OR THERE-ABOUT) IN EVENING
    FEB 12 1911
    ELLEN THISTLEDOWN
    LOVING MOTHER OF JASON
    DIED OF FEVER
    IN HER OWN BED

    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