Prologue | Notion

1903

Shreveport, Louisiana Oakland Cemetery

Sitting on a worn bench under the shade of one of the oldest magnolias in town, Katie swung her legs and turned to her father, who looked far away, even though he was right next to her, staring straight ahead.

She had been quiet for ten minutes before deciding to speak. “Daddy, why do we come to this cemetery so often? No one else is ever here. This place is too quiet.” Pausing for just a breath, she added, “It makes me sad to sit here and think about all the dead people around us.”

Sean startled out of his own thoughts, answering his daughter, who seemed relieved to be talking in this solemn place. “Katie, I like to come here—it is peaceful to me. Besides, there are lots of people here—they are just not alive anymore like we are,” he answered, shifting his gaze from his young daughter to the monuments and markers that stretched for blocks in all directions.

She persisted, not wanting to sit silently any longer, “But who do we know that is buried here?”

She had asked that same question, more or less, almost every time they had spent a bit of a Sunday afternoon here with little more than a nod or single word from her father by way of response. But he had decided it was time to tell her why this place was important to him. Next week, Katie was turning ten. She would be the same age as he had been when that awful September had happened. She was old enough to know about what he had gone through. In fact, he reasoned, it might make him feel better to share the story of his loss with Katie.

He had waited to share his memories of Oakland until he felt she could understand their power. Today, though, he turned toward her and pointed to the graceful swell of earth that had formed a little hill of sorts just down from where they sat. She shifted in her seat and followed his direction to stare at the hill some twenty feet away.

He began slowly, “Katie, I just am not sure who all I know that is buried here, over there in that swell. That is the sad truth.” Sean faltered for a moment as if this were a fact that he was barely able to acknowledge.

“But how can you not know something like that? Don’t you know who died?” Katie seemed confused. She had already seen death. Both her grandmother and a neighbor boy had died. She had gone to their funerals. She had sung the songs, looked at the bouquets, been to the graves. But those deaths were marked by big stones with engraved names and dates in the flat ground where she had placed flowers. This hill was something else altogether.

“Well, Katie, when I was just your age, a terrible summer happened here in Shreveport, a summer when yellow fever came up that Red River. By the end of September, about a quarter of everyone in town had died. Everybody got sick so fast, so many people died,” his voice faltered.

Katie sat solemnly, realizing that at last, her daddy would explain some of the questions that she had wanted to ask, ones that her mother had always discouraged. “Gosh, Daddy, that must have been terrible,” she said quietly, almost holding her breath, lest this interruption stop his story altogether.

Sean continued, “Yes, Katie, it was about as bad a thing as I could imagine. People who managed to live through it, lots of them left this part of the country, scared to stay here because of the fever. People were dying so fast that summer, September of ’73, that there weren’t hardly enough living people to bury the dead.”

Katie looked around at the graves near the bench and began to feel the weight of her father’s words. “But Daddy, why didn’t someone stop it?”

“Well, the doctors just didn’t know how to stop it. All we understood was that when the sickness hit, people got struck down fast, and not all of them got well again.”

Katie sat very still thinking about how scary that sounded, getting sick and dying so quickly.

After a moment, Sean said in a much softer voice, “Some did, though.”

That explanation seemed to take the breath out of him for a moment. He paused and pointed toward the small hill, explaining, “That is where all those folks were put who died when the fever was at its worst. People died too fast to be buried in a family plot or died without a family to bury them.”

“No one to bury them?” Katie wondered aloud how that was possible. She had seen dozens of people at the church and this very cemetery when MawMaw had died.

Sean pointed over to the left and said, “That spot there, Yellow Fever Hill—almost eight hundred people got buried together in one big plot—that spot is the final place that lots of people I knew as a boy ended up, I believe.”

“Daddy, is that where Aunt Katherine is?” Katie had so many questions about her missing aunt, and this seemed like the best place to ask them.

Calling to mind his older sister, Sean smiled at her memory. “Yes, I think it must be, but I can’t be sure.”

After a moment, he continued, clearly recalling that day nearly thirty years ago, “When I got sick, Katherine left to go to town for my mother. I think maybe to get something, some kind of medicine, for me.” His gaze shifted from the mound to Katie as he spoke slowly as though he felt those days returning to him.

“Almost all of the doctors here had died, and only a handful of nurses were left. Shreveport was half empty, and so many of the people there were dying or afraid of dying. Katherine left that morning, but she never came back.”

“But where could Aunt Katherine have gone?” Katie interjected.

“My mother, your mawmaw, always thought maybe she had gotten away, had left this place. I think maybe she hoped she had. But I never thought she would run away and leave me so sick.”

Katie sat silently. Sean paused again then added, “She just never came back home.”

“But you had the fever too, Daddy?” Katie looked at her father now as someone who had lived through what had killed all those in the mound.

“Yes, but I guess I must have had a light case. We didn’t know why some people got it and died so fast, but some of us were just sick for a couple of weeks.”

Katie asked, “What did the fever feel like, Daddy? How were you able to get well?”

“All I remember was the headache. I can still remember it now, all these years later. It was like someone had hit the front of my head with an axe. But your mawmaw kept bathing me with cool water and giving me salts and mustard rubs.”

Katie felt so sorry for her daddy and now for MawMaw and for Aunt Katherine, wherever she was. She almost wished she had not asked again about the cemetery.

Sean finished, “All I know is after about four or five days, I woke up and felt better. I wasn’t quite the same that fall, but by the time that winter came, I was pretty much back to my old self.”

“And no one ever heard from Aunt Katherine again?” Katie had long suspected something tragic had happened to her namesake, but no one before today had really explained it all to her.

“No, and I just know she has to be buried here. She must have come to town and gotten sick and couldn’t get back to us. She would never have left us.”

“So you and Momma named me after Aunt Katherine who was lost?”

“Yes, my Katie, my own girl. She was so important to me. When I had a little girl, I knew that having another Katherine was exactly what our family needed.”

“Am I like Aunt Katherine, Daddy?”

“Absolutely, my sweet girl. You remind me of her, your sassy ways and that red hair,” Sean answered, hugging her into his shoulder.

“So when we come here on Sundays, do you think maybe she is here and knows we are sitting here thinking of her?”

Sean nodded as he squeezed Katie’s shoulder again, and he wiped a tear from his eye.

“And Daddy, are you sad that you told me the story of Aunt Katherine today?”

“Katie, my dearest girl, I had always intended to tell you about what happened to your Aunt Katherine, but I just wanted to wait till you were a little older.”

“Thank you for telling me today. Now I understand why this place is so special to you.” Katie knew that talking about Aunt Katherine must have been hard for her daddy, but she was relieved to know a little more of her story.