Fear, flu and a piece of fruit marked Christmas 1918
Hillsdale is located by Highway 89, alongside the Sevier River between Panguitch and Hatch. Once nearly 300 people lived in Hillsdale. Most of them were Wilsons and Johnsons: my mother's family and many assorted aunts, uncles and cousins. Then the people, the Wilsons and Johnsons and others, all moved away.
Today, the town site is marked by a few old houses, scattered ranches, a rejuvenation effort and a cemetery surrounded by a white wood fence. The rip-sawed log house where my mother grew up, with its interior walls of split river willows covered with homemade plaster, still stands. Water still runs in the ditch in front of the house where the George H. Wilson family drew wash water and dipped drinking water if the well went dry.
The year was 1918. It was winter. Alice Wilson was barely 16 years old, and the Christmas season found her lying isolated in an upstairs bedroom, seriously ill with a combination of Spanish flu and pneumonia. Weeks earlier, the dreaded flu epidemic had invaded Hillsdale, and throughout the town many were stricken. Several new graves had already been hacked out of the frozen hilltop.
In addition to Alice's illness, another severe heartache beset the family. Alice's older brother was serving in the Army in France and Belgium. The family knew his assignment was driving a mule cart to string telephone wires along the front-line trenches. Since early October they had heard nothing from him. Although the armistice had been signed, no word came to Hillsdale from their son in Europe.
Many prayers were offered in Hillsdale that Christmas season, and much faith went into the meager preparations. For Alice's family, Christmas Eve was a number on the calendar and perhaps a church program for the little ones. Perhaps not. Many public gatherings were canceled that year. There may have been modest gifts; Alice remembered nothing of Christmas Eve but phantoms on the bedroom wall that danced in her delirium, adding to the blur of fever and pain.
On the afternoon of Christmas Day, she was sleeping fitfully when the bedroom door opened. A very tall, husky man wearing the uniform of his country, with boots, leather leggings and a wide brimmed hat, stood in the doorway. A broad smile crossed his face, and isolation or not, her brother took the sick young girl into his arms and hugged her heartily. He was back from Belgium. The family had not received a letter because their soldier son was on a troop ship headed home. Home to Hillsdale.
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