The Fever Locks

The summer I turned twelve, my grandmother, Nana Rose, finally told me the story of her hair. We sat on the porch of her small, white house in upstate New York, fireflies blinking in the lavender dusk like tiny, hesitant prayers. She was ninety, her own hair a thin, white cloud, but when she spoke of it, her voice took on the weight of a preacher’s. ‘It came back curly, you know,’ she said, touching a wisp at her temple. ‘After we thought it was all gone.’

Nana Rose was born in 1914 in a town called Ashford, which no longer exists. It was swallowed by a reservoir in the 1930s, its church steeple still visible on clear days from the water’s surface, or so the old folks claimed. She was the youngest of three sisters: Eleanor, the eldest, and Mae, the middle one. Their mother, my great-great-grandmother, was named Harriet, but everyone called her Hattie. In the autumn of 1918, when the influenza came to Ashford, it moved through the town like a sickness of the earth itself. The wagons came at dawn, draped in black tarps, to collect the dead. Nana Rose remembered peeking from behind the parlor curtain, watching the horses’ breath plume in the cold, and the way the wheels left deep ruts in the mud that never seemed to wash away.

Hattie fell ill first. It started with a cough, then a fever that burned so high she’d tear off her bedclothes and stumble into the snow in her nightgown, leaving footprints that would melt into dark, wet spots on the porch. Nana Rose and her sisters would drag her back inside, their hands red from the cold and their own fevers rising. Eleanor, the eldest, got it worst. Her hair fell out in clumps, leaving patches of scaly, white skin. She’d lie in bed, crying, while Mae and Nana Rose took turns pressing cool cloths to her forehead. When Eleanor’s hair finally grew back, it was no longer straight but a wild, tangled mess of waves, as if the fever had bent it into a permanent question mark. ‘That’s when we knew an angel was passing over us,’ Nana Rose would say. ‘It touched us, but it didn’t take us.’

Their father, my great-grandfather Thomas, was a good man, but in those years he was already getting ‘forgetful.’ They called it ‘old age’ even though he wasn’t yet fifty. He’d wander off into the woods, searching for his brothers who’d died in the Great War, calling their names into the pines. He couldn’t join the fight, and that shamed him more than the forgetfulness. When the Spanish flu came, he couldn’t understand the quarantine. He’d leave the house to ‘fetch the mail’ and end up standing in the middle of the main road, staring at the empty sky, his hands shaking. Hattie, when she was well enough, would go find him. It was a kind of love, Nana Rose said, but a broken one.

They survived. All of them, somehow. But the town of Ashford did not. Years later, the government built a dam and flooded the valley. Everyone moved away, scattered like seeds in a wind. Nana Rose met my grandfather, a Navy man, and they moved to California. Her sister Eleanor married a man named Duke, and they had a daughter, June, in 1923. Nana Rose was only nine when June was born, and she was convinced she was going to be a big sister. She’d prepared a cot and a baby blanket, and when she sobbed into her mother’s skirt about the injustice, Hattie just laughed and stroked her hair, which was then still straight.

For decades, the story stayed buried like the steeple of Ashford’s church. But the summer I turned twelve, Nana Rose fell ill with a fever. It wasn’t the flu, just a bad summer cold, but her temperature spiked and she began to shiver under piles of quilts. I sat by her bedside, wiping her forehead with a damp cloth, and she grabbed my wrist with a strength that surprised me. ‘The fever, child,’ she whispered, her eyes darting. ‘It remembers you. It comes for what you think you’ve lost.’ At first I thought she was rambling, but then she told me about the day the fever broke. Her mother, Hattie, was burning up, and the doctor had given up hope. That night, Nana Rose heard a scraping sound at the window, like fingernails on glass. She looked out and saw a figure standing in the snow, wrapped in a long, dark coat. It had no face, only a smooth, pale oval where features should be. It raised a hand and pointed at her, and she felt a cold wind blow through the room. The figure was gone by morning, but her mother’s fever broke, and she slept peacefully.

Nana Rose pulled me close, her breath hot and sour. ‘It’s the fever lock, child. They say influenza changes you, but it’s the fever that marks you. It takes a piece of you, and leaves something else in its place. Your hair. Your memories. your name. But you have to give it something. I gave it my hair. Eleanor gave it her curls. But your great-grandfather, he gave it his mind, and it kept taking.’ She started to cough then, a deep, rattling sound. When she stopped, she looked at me with sudden clarity. ‘You have my hair, you know. Same color, same straightness. Don’t ever let it know you’re scared.’

I didn’t understand then. I just thought she was old and confused. But that winter, I caught a fever that went on for a week. The doctor said it was just a virus, but I had nightmares of being underwater, of a sunken town below me, its church spire reaching up like a finger. When I woke up, my hair, which had always been thin and straight, had grown in thick and wavy. My mother was amazed, saying it was ‘hormones,’ but I saw the fear in Nana Rose’s eyes when she looked at me from her chair across the room. She died that spring, quietly, in her sleep. And I haven’t been back to her house since.

But sometimes, in the dead of night, I’ll catch my reflection in a dark window, and for a split second, I see a figure standing behind me, faceless and tall, its hand pointing at my reflection’s head. And my hair, which I’ve never cut, will move on its own, as if a wind is passing through it, and I remember her words: ‘It comes for what you think you’ve lost.’ I don’t know if the angel protected them, or if it was the fever itself that let them live. But I do know this: every time I look at my wavy hair, I feel a cold draft on my scalp, and I wonder if the fever lock is still counting the strands, waiting for me to make a promise I can’t keep. And somewhere in the depths of a lake, a church bell begins to toll, though no one is there to pull the rope.