Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Love and loss in the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic
Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) is a ‘very autobiographical’ short novel by Katherine Anne Porter. This is a condensed, adapted version — the original text is available here — begins p.190.
1. Adam & Miranda: Denver, Colorado: September 1918
Miranda is a young journalist living in a rooming house, where meets Adam, a soldier on leave. He is waiting to be sent to fight in the war in Europe.
Adam was in the hallway, a step outside his own door. He swung round, as if startled to see her. “Hello,” he said. “I don’t have to go back to camp today after all. Isn’t that good luck?”
Miranda smiled at him gaily because she was always delighted to see him. He was wearing his new uniform and was all olive and tanned: sand coloured from hair to boots. He always began by smiling at her but his smile faded gradually and his eyes became fixed and thoughtful, as if he were reading in a poor light.
They walked out together into the fine fall day, scuffling bright ragged leaves under their feet and turning their faces up to the blue spotless sky.
At the first comer they waited for a funeral to pass. The mourners seated straight and firm as if proud in their sorrow.
He was tall and heavily muscled in the shoulders, narrow in the waist. His uniform was tough and unyielding, though the cloth was fine and supple.
Adam expected to be sent over to Europe shortly. “I came in to make my will,” he told Miranda, “And get a supply of toothbrushes and razor blades. By pure chance I happened to pick your rooming house. “How did I know you were there?”
Strolling around the city, they kept step — his polished boots landing firmly beside her thin- soled black shoes.
Small talk flew back and forth between them, as they put off as long as they could the end of their moment together. The lovely miracle of being two persons named Adam and Miranda, twenty-four years old each, alive and on the earth at the same moment:
“Are you in the mood for dancing, Miranda?”
“I’m always in the mood for dancing, Adam!”
“How did you manage to get an extension of leave?”
“They just gave it,” said Adam, “for no reason. The men are dying like flies out there, anyway. This funny new disease.”
“It seems to be a plague,” said Miranda. “Like something out of the Middle Ages. Did you ever see so many funerals, ever?”
“Never. But I’ve got four days extra leave straight from out of the blue. Not a blade of grass must grow under our feet. What about tonight?”
“My head aches,” whispered Miranda.
“I’ll get you some Aspirin,” whispered Adam.
“There’s something terribly wrong,” she told Adam the following lunchtime. Her voice sounded small and thin. “I feel too rotten.”
They stopped, as always, at the open door before steps leading up to the newspaper office. Miranda listened for a moment to the rattle of typewriters above, the steady rumble of presses below.
“I wish we were going to spend the whole afternoon on a park bench,”
she said. “Or drive to the mountains.”
“I do too,” he said. “Let’s do that tomorrow.”
“Yes, tomorrow. Let’s run away together.”
Miranda’s editor (Bill) sends her home to rest in bed. Back at Miss Hobbe’s boarding house, Miranda telephones Bill from the communal hallway.
Miss Hobbe passes through, carrying a tray.
“My dear child,” she said sharply. “What is the matter?”
Miranda, with the receiver to her ear, said, “Influenza, I think.”
“Horrors,” said Miss Hobbe, in a whisper. The tray wavered in her hands. “Go back to bed at once… go at once.”
“I must talk to Bill first,” Miranda insisted.
Miss Hobbe hurried on. She did not return.
Bill shouted directions at her, promising to arrange everything: doctor, nurse, ambulance, hospital, her usual pay cheque every week. “But please go back to bed, Miranda. And stay there!”
She had been asleep for a long time when all at once Adam was in the room, turning on the light and sitting on the side of the bed. He began talking— as if resuming a conversation.
“You didn’t get my note,” he said, crumpling a square of paper and tossing it in the fireplace. “I left it under the door.’
“No,” said Miranda drowsily, “I think I have been asleep all day.”
“I was called back suddenly to camp for a lot of inoculations. They kept me longer than I expected. I called your office and then here. Miss Hobbe said you were in bed and couldn’t come to the telephone. Did she give you my message?”
Miranda shook her head. “I remember there was a doctor here. Bill sent him and said he would send an ambulance take me to the hospital. The doctor left a prescription.”
“Where is it, the prescription?” asked Adam.
“I don’t know. He left it, though, I saw him.”
Adam moved about searching the tables and the mantelpiece. “Here it is,” he said, checking his watch. “It’s after one o’clock but I’ll find an all-night drug store. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Goodbye, goodbye. Miranda watched him disappear through the door. Then she closed her eyes.
When I am not here, I cannot remember anything about this room where I have
lived for nearly a year. Except that the curtains are too thin and there is never anyway of shutting out the morning light.
Miss Hobbe had promised heavier curtains. They never appeared either.
“I’ve got your medicine,” said Adam, “and you’re to begin with it this minute.”
“So it’s really as bad as that?” said Miranda.
“It’s as bad as anything can be,” said Adam. “All the theaters and nearly all the shops and restaurants are closed. The streets have been full of funerals all day and ambulances all night — ”
“But not one for me,” said Miranda, feeling lightheaded. She sat up and beat her pillow into shape. “You’re running a risk,” she told him, reached for her robe. “Don’t you know that?”
“Never mind,” said Adam. “Take your medicine.” He offered her two large cherry pills. She swallowed them promptly and instantly vomited them up.
“Do excuse me,” she said, beginning to laugh. “I’m so sorry.”
Adam, without a word and with a very concerned expression, washed her face with a wet towel. Giving her some cracked ice from one of the packages, he firmly offered her two more pills.
“This time last night we were dancing,” said Miranda.
Her eyes followed him about the room. Now and again, he came and slipped his hand under her head, holding a cup to her mouth while she drank. He pulled the covers about her. “Go to sleep, darling,” he said.
Her door was half-open. Adam was standing with his hand on the knob.
Miss Hobbe with her face all out of shape with terror was crying shrilly, “I tell you, they must come for her now, or I’ll put her on the sidewalk … I tell you, this is a plague! And I’ve got a houseful of people to think about!”
Adam said, “They’ll come for her tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow morning? They need to come now!”
“They can’t get an ambulance,” said Adam, “and there aren’t any beds. And we can’t find a doctor or a nurse. They’re all busy. That’s all there is to it. You stay out of the room, and I’ll look after her.”
“Yes, you’ll look after her, I can see that,” said Miss Hobbe, in a particularly
unpleasant tone.
3. Fever Dream
Miranda slips into delirium with Adam at her bedside
She floated into the darkness, holding his hand, in sleep that was not sleep but clear evening light in a small green wood. An angry dangerous wood full of inhuman concealed voices singing sharply like the whine of arrows.
She saw Adam transfixed by a flight of these singing arrows that struck him in the heart and passed shrilly cutting their path through the leaves. Adam fell straight back before her eyes, and rose again unwounded and alive.
Another flight struck him again and he fell. Yet he was there before her untouched in a perpetual death and resurrection. She threw herself between him and the track of the arrow. She cries, No! No! angrily and selfishly, like a child cheated in a game.
It’s my turn now. Why must you always be the one to die?
The arrows struck her cleanly through the heart and through his body. He lay dead, and she still lived. The wood whistled and sang and shouted. Every branch and leaf and blade of grass had its own terrible accusing voice.
Adam caught her in the middle of the room, running, “Darling, I must have been asleep too,” he said. “What happened? You screamed terribly!”
Time has passed. Adam is still by her bedside (or has returned to it)
“I’m going back to that little stand and get us some ice cream and hot coffee,” he told her, “I’ll be back in five minutes. Goodbye for five minutes.”
He held her chin in the palm of his hand and tried to catch her eye, “Try to be very quiet.”
“Goodbye,” she said. “I’m awake again.”
But she was not. Two alert young interns from the County hospital were now in the room. “We need to go down and get the stretcher,” said one
Their voices roused her. She sat up, got out of bed at once and stood glancing about brightly.
“Why, you’re all right,” said the darker and stouter of the two young men. “I’ll just carry you.” He unfolded a white blanket and wrapped it around her. She gathered up the folds.
“But where is Adam?” she asked, taking hold of the doctor’s arm.
“Oh, he’ll be back,” the intern told her easily. “He’s just gone round the block to get cigarettes. Don’t worry about Adam. He’s the least of your troubles.”
Miranda lay lifting the nap of her white blanket softly between her fingers. She was watching a dance of tall deliberate shadows moving behind a wide screen of sheets spread upon a frame.
Miss Tanner stood at the foot of the bed writing something on a chart.
“Shut your eyes,” said Miss Tanner.
“Oh, no,” said Miranda, “for then I see worse things,”
But her eyes closed and internal torment closed about her.
Oblivion, thought Miranda. Her mind was feeling among her memories of to describe the unseen, the unknowable. Eternity is more than the distance to the farthest star.
She lay on a narrow ledge over a pit that she knew to be bottomless.
Look, don’t be afraid! It is nothing — only eternity.
November 11, 1918: Sanatorium, Denver, Colorado
The light came on, and Miss Tanner said, “Hear that? They’re celebrating. It’s the Armistice. The war is over, my dear.”
Her hands trembled. She rattled a spoon in a cup and stopped to listen. Then she held the cup out to Miranda. From the ward for old bedridden women down the hall floated a ragged chorus of cracked voices singing, My country, ’tis of thee…
Miranda was sitting in a long chair, near a window. The colourless sunlight was slanting on the snow, under a sky drained of its blue.
“Can this be my face?” Miranda asked her mirror.
“Are these my own hands?” she asked Miss Tanner, holding them up. The human faces around her seemed dulled and tired, with no radiance of skin and eyes. The once white walls of her room were now a soiled grey.
Closing her eyes, she rested for a moment. Opening them again, she saw with a new anguish the dull world to which she was condemned. All the light seemed filmed over with cobwebs, all the bright surfaces corroded. Dead and withered things that believed themselves alive!
Miss Tanner said, “Read your letters, my dear. I’ll open them for you.” Standing beside the bed, she slit them cleanly with a paper knife.
Miranda, cornered, picked and chose until she found a thin one in an unfamiliar handwriting.
“Oh, no, now,” said Miss Tanner, “take them as they come. Here, I’ll hand them to you.”
What a victory, what triumph, what happiness to be alive, sang the letters in a chorus. The names were signed with flourishes. Like the circles in the air of bugle notes.They were the names of those she had loved best. Some were of those she had known well.
A few meant nothing to her, then or now.
The thin letter in the unfamiliar handwriting was from a stranger at the camp where Adam had been:
Your friend, Adam Barclay has died of influenza in the camp hospital. He asked me — in case anything happened — to be sure to let you know.”
It had happened — she looked at the date — more than a month ago.
“I’ve been here a long time, haven’t I?” she asked Miss Tanner, who was folding letters and putting them back in their proper envelopes.
“Oh, quite a while,” said Miss Tanner, “but you’ll be ready to go soon now. You must take of yourself, though. Come back now and then and let us look at you, because sometimes the after-effects are very-”
Adam, now you need not die again, but still I wish you were here; I wish you had come back. What do you think I came back for, Adam? To be deceived like this?
At once, he was there beside her, invisible but urgently present. A ghost but more alive than she was. The last intolerable cheat of her heart. Knowing it was false she still clung to the lie, the unpardonable lie of her bitter desire.
Miss Tanner said, “Your taxicab is waiting, my dear,”
No more war, no more plague. Only the dazed silence that follows the ceasing of the heavy guns. Noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets, the dead cold light of tomorrow.
Now there would be time for everything.
The complete original text of Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) is available here begins p.190
