by Mark
Sloan, M.D. '75
I
keep a photograph of my grandmother, Nell Sloan, and her sons
John Francis and Nicholas on my writing table. It's a harvest
scene taken in a wheat field near the family farm just north of
Hoopeston, Illinois. The picture is undated, but from the fact
of the harvest and the ages of the boys -- John Francis is no
more than 3 and Nicholas still wears a baby's dress -- the photo
was likely taken in September of 1918. My father is also in the
picture, though his presence is not at all obvious. My grandmother
was several months pregnant with him on that hot afternoon, now
87 harvests gone.
In the picture, shown right, John Francis sits barefoot on a
stack of newly scythed and bundled wheat, squinting at something
off camera to his right. To his left and slightly above, Nicholas
smiles down from the safety of his mother's arms, a hand lightly
touching his big brother's shoulder. Gram's face is in shadow
except for her strong chin, illuminated by a single patch of sunlight
spilling over the brim of her work hat.
The photograph -- a swirling, nearly Impressionist study of
wheat stalks, fabric folds and midday sun and shadows -- is all
the more remarkable because its composition was surely an accident.
My grandparents were not given to unnecessary sentiment. The straightforward
inscription on the back is written in the familiar, spiky scrawl
of my grandmother's later years: "Mom, John Francis, Nicholas
-- in wheat field across from Nesbit's."
The picture marks the high point of my grandmother's life. Just
turned 30, she is young and strong, the harvest is nearly complete
and her boys and baby-to-be are healthy. She could not have known,
of course, that in less than six weeks it would all come crashing
down: John Francis, her first-born, would die in the Spanish influenza
epidemic that was barreling toward Hoopeston even as the shutter
closed.
Spanish influenza swept the globe in three waves over a 10-month
period that began in March 1918. More than 20 million people died
worldwide in that short span -- twice as many as died in combat
in all of World War I. The first wave was relatively mild, but
late that spring the virus mutated into a germ the human body
had never before encountered. Overwhelmed by this strange invader,
the immune system of "second-wave" influenza sufferers went haywire,
pouring huge amounts of inflammatory fluid into the victim's lungs.
Death could come in a matter of hours, in which case the victim
literally drowned in his own body fluids, or several agonizing
days later when influenza-weakened lungs finally surrendered to
pneumonia.
The second, "killer" wave entered the United States in late
August through the shipyards in Boston Harbor. By September 11,
aided greatly by wartime troop transports, the disease reached
the Great Lakes Naval Training Center just north of Chicago. Three
days later it hit Chicago itself. Then Spanish influenza began
its inexorable march south through the agricultural heartland
of Illinois, striking Hoopeston in mid-October.
I first became aware of my uncle John Francis when I was 9 years
old. I came across the harvest photo in a stack of pictures that
Gram, then in her 70s, was sorting at her kitchen table. I pointed
to the older boy. "Is that Daddy?" I asked. Gram opened her mouth
as if to say something, but then she stopped. "No," she said,
without looking up. She swept the unsorted pictures into a shoebox
and then slid the box onto a high shelf, well out of my reach.
Later I asked my father about the boy in the picture. He told
me that the boy was his brother, who had died near the end of
World War I. Gram never talked about him, he said, because it
made her sad. I wasn't to ask her about him again. Bewildered
by the discovery of my father's unknown brother (and a little
unclear on my World Wars), I went home that night and wrote a
fourth-grade essay about my uncle who had died fighting the Nazis.
It turned out that my father didn't know much more about his
brother than I did. Gram rarely spoke of him. My grandfather never
mentioned him at all. Beyond the occasional trip to Floral Hill
Cemetery to visit the family graves, all traces of John Francis
had simply disappeared by the time my father was old enough to
wonder why. Dad approached the subject only once, in high school.
Sick in bed one day, he asked his mother how she had managed it
all -- John Francis's death, the physical toll of her pregnancy
and the day-to-day demands of farm life -- without getting sick
herself. "I took a lot of castor oil," she said, and that was
that. The subject was closed.
So when I called Dad from California a few weeks before his
80th birthday and asked if he would go with me to Hoopeston, he
didn't hesitate. By then the harvest photograph was mine, a gold-framed
gift from my parents a couple of Christmases before. My curiosity
about the little boy on the pile of wheat had grown. Maybe we
could find out more about him, I said. "Yes," he replied over
the crackle of a bad connection. "Yes, I'd like that."
The day before my father's birthday party we made the 50-mile
drive to Hoopeston from my parents' home in Kankakee. I had flown
out from San Francisco with my own family a few days earlier,
both so that my children could spend time with their grandparents
before the flood of relatives arrived and so that Dad and I could
have a day to find out what we could about John Francis.
We left Kankakee after breakfast. Forty miles out of town the
interstate gave way to a smaller state highway, once the main
artery from Chicago to the Corn Belt counties. I hadn't been to
Hoopeston in more than 20 years, since just after Gram died. The
flat expanse of empty wintertime fields crisscrossed by unmarked
single-lane roads hadn't changed at all.
Our first stop was the farm, though Dad was reluctant to take
me there. The old house still sat on the west side of Highway
1, just north of Hoopeston, but almost nothing else was left of
the well-kept place I remembered. The chicken coops and cattle
barns were long gone. Pastureland had been plowed under to make
way for more grain production. The house itself, in which Dad
was born and John Francis had died, was in a state of advanced
decay. The windows were boarded up; the front porch had rotted
to nothing. We sat in silence for a couple of minutes with the
motor running, then Dad turned the car around and drove back out
to the highway.
We arrived at Floral Hill Cemetery, an isolated island of trees
in a sea of fallow grain fields, just before noon. The Sloan family
plot lies just beyond a pair of wrought-iron entry gates, guarded
by an ancient, silver-painted Army tank and a memorial to Hoopeston's
war dead. We passed through the gates and circled behind the tank
to the three graves nearest the road. My grandparents are buried
side by side under simple gray headstones. John Francis lies on
Gram's right, under a smaller granite block inscribed "January
15, 1915 -- October 29, 1918."
It was a sunny and unseasonably warm January day. Melting snowdrifts
dotted the barren landscape. We left our coats in the car and
went to work, clearing brittle tree branches and soggy clumps
of leaves from the graves. I asked Dad where the harvest picture
of Gram and his brothers had been taken, figuring the old Nesbit
place to be a mile or two southwest of where we stood. Dad nodded
toward the field that started at the edge of the cemetery. "We
passed it on the way in," he said. He pointed to a spot 50 yards
away, an anonymous patch of thawing black earth. "Right there."
He drew a line with his arm through the field, across the highway
and back to the farmhouse, less than a mile to the west. "Your
grandmother could see the cemetery from her front porch," he said.
I stood with my armload of brush, looking from John Francis's
headstone to the house and back again. In all my visits to the
farm as a child, I had never noticed the cemetery so close by.
We left Floral Hill and drove the couple of miles to the public
library, a decrepit limestone box on the edge of Hoopeston's faded
business district. I had expected to spend hours leafing through
crumbling archives in the library's basement, but on hearing our
request the librarian simply reached high into a glass-doored
cabinet and handed us a small carton of microfilm marked "Evening
Herald: September 1918 -- March 1919." I spooled the film into
a projector and started cranking.
We zipped through the month of September, then slowed as October
wound into view. Two major stories -- the impending climax of
World War I and the mounting death toll from Spanish influenza
-- dominated the headlines. Front page tales of Germany's snowballing
defeat were interwoven with reports of thousands of flu victims
in Chicago, as well as the death notices of a growing number of
Hoopestonians.
The Evening Herald of Tuesday, October 29, predicted
cool and showery weather. Headlines trumpeted the annihilation
of Austrian troops near Piave, Italy. The German army was on the
retreat in Alsace and Lorraine. Armistice Day was less than two
weeks away. On the local front, the influenza epidemic was described
as "unchanged in the previous 24 hours" by Miss Laura Leininger,
the head of Hoopeston's temporary Red Cross hospital. Four hundred
sixty-four cases of the disease had been reported within the city
limits. Sixteen residents had died. Miss Leininger reported that
17 patients were being cared for at the hospital, "all of them
. . . doing nicely," with the notable exception of the three who
were listed in an accompanying article as "near death."
Dr. A.J. Clay, Hoopeston's beleaguered health officer, issued
a cautiously optimistic update, pointing to a mortality-free day
as evidence that the epidemic was leveling off. He was encouraged
enough to predict that "by the end of the present week the disease
will be under complete control and the epidemic will practically
be checked."
His optimism proved unwarranted. In the following day's edition
four more deaths were reported: Fred Johnson, a 60-year-old Swede;
Clarence Bennett, a young man described as "strictly honest and
upright, despite having been orphaned at an early age"; Elsie
Bell, age unknown, wife of Isaac Bell; and "the little son of
Mr. and Mrs. John Sloan, Jr."
My father found his
brother's obituary a few pages later, nearly lost among the farm
reports and advertisements for hernia trusses, tailored suits
and a patent medicine billed as a "sure cure" for Spanish influenza.
Dad leaned forward and tapped the screen. "There he is," he whispered,
squinting through his trifocals at the tiny print. "Poor little
guy."
Infant Sloan
Master John Francis Sloan, the four-year-old
son of Mr. and Mrs. John Sloan, Jr., residing
four miles northwest of Hoopeston, died at 8:30
o'clock last evening, following an illness of
about a week from Spanish Influenza. The little
one's condition had been critical for several
days. Funeral services will be held Thursday
at Floral Hill cemetery.
John Francis's coffin was taken by truck from the farm to Saint
Anthony's Church in Hoopeston. Because of an influenza-related
ban on all public gatherings, the priest simply blessed the body
as the truck rolled past the church doors. Only immediate family
members were allowed to attend the burial at Floral Hill.
The obituary got his age wrong. My uncle was 3 years, 9 months
and 14 days old at his death. He died on his father's 35th birthday.
We sat up late the night before I flew back to San Francisco,
rummaging through a box of old photographs and yellowed newspaper
clippings at the kitchen table in Kankakee. Dad laid out his genealogical
treasures one by one, painting for me a picture of the nearly
extinct family farm way of life he'd known as a child.
He showed me a picture of my grandfather, a gentle bull of a
man, steering a horse-drawn plow in a field behind the house as
Dad and Uncle Nick trail behind. In another photo Gram and her
four sisters, only two of whom lived into my memory, appear as
lovely young women. Dad pulled a remarkably well-preserved picture
from a crumbling envelope. "Ah, here he is," he said, handing
it across the table. "Here's your uncle."
In the photo, a close-up this time, a smiling John Francis mugs
for the camera. Seated beside him on the wooden well platform
just outside the kitchen door, Gram beams a broad, unguarded smile.
This was the first time I had seen my uncle's face in full: he
was undeniably a Sloan, with my father's round cheeks, high forehead
and jet black hair.
I asked Dad what he thought his life would have been like if
John Francis had survived the epidemic. He leaned back in his
chair for a moment, lips pursed, gaze fixed in a long-vanished
middle distance. He fingered the edges of the picture, then slid
it back into the envelope.
"I think he would have stayed on the farm," he said after a
long pause. "Being the oldest, your grandfather would have left
it to him." He looked again at the picture of his father behind
the plow. "He was disappointed that neither Nick nor I came back
to work the place after the war."
It was past midnight. A gloom had settled over our final night.
Dad shook his head, back in the present, and carefully repacked
his picture trove in the dilapidated shoebox, sealing it tight
with a crossing network of rubber bands.
I pushed back my chair and stood, ready to get some sleep before
the drive to the airport. "Maybe he would have been a rotten kid,"
I said, trying to lighten the mood a bit. "Just one more big brother
to beat you up."
Dad rose and stretched. He slid the box back onto a high cupboard
shelf. "That would have been fine," he said, wiping an eye as
he reached across the table to shut off the light. "That would
have been just fine with me."
Mark Sloan, a pediatrician, lives in Santa Rosa, California,
and is working on a book about childbirth and the first day of
life.
(October 2005)
