Bright Mac heard the tapping at the basement window. It was Pear Butter, his oldest friend. Mac climbed up on the stack of old pallets to shoo her off, but as soon as he opened the window, the little filly was inside. “Mac,” she started, “what’s happened? I left messages for you like you said but—“
“Buttercup…” Mac tried to show courage, but the young colt didn’t have enough to spare. “…you can’t be here. Papple and Gala both got it. Bad. Ain’t nothing more to do. You need to leave, now.”
“Please,” Buttercup said, “It’s prolly nothin! My Grannyberry says that this one ain’t nearly as bad as the one ten years ago, won’t even have to lock everybody in who gets it, you’ll just get the sniffles and be done.”
Mac took a cautious step back. “I… I wish I could believe that everything’s gonna be OK. But you heard the radio, none of 'em ain’t ever seen a flu this bad before. They got doctors in Canterlot try’na find a cure but so far nothin.” He felt his jaw quake with every word. Buttercup made to embrace him but he stepped back again. “No!” He shouted. “You’ll get sick too!”
Buttercup stopped in her tracks and began to cry softly. “I’m scared, Mac… my mama already got the sniffles an’—“
There was a loud banging coming from upstairs. The front door. Then came a loud voice. “Sir, by order of the Ponyville Board of Health this house is under quarantine. No one is to enter or leave for fifteen days…”
Mac wasted no time. He shooed his friend back to the window where she entered. “If they catch you here you won’t be able to leave. You’ll be stuck here with us. Go now!”
“Mac…”
“Please!”
Buttercup nodded and climbed back out the window. Mac closed it carefully to avoid attracting attention.
“Bright Mac! Where are you?” Mac’s mother was calling him. “Get down here on the double! There’s ponies who need to see us…”
Mac crept up the basement stairs, then doubled back to the upstairs hallway. “Comin’, Mama,” he shouted.
“You come down here right this instant, young colt!” Beneath the yelling, Mac sensed a fear in his mother he’d never heard before.
Two earth ponies and a pegasi, covered in white cloaks and wearing thick masks and hoods, made it very clear. The house was quarantined. No one could come in or go out. Food would be delivered daily for those who needed it. Punishments for breaking quarantine would be strict, five hundred bits to start (a sum even Mac knew the Apples could not pay).
If anyone passed, they were to hang a white sheet or garment out the window, and someone would come collect the bodies.
Mac looked around at his family. Mama, standing there, afraid. Next to her were Papple and his big brother Gala, both audibly wheezing and sniffing, staring at the white-cloaked ponies with defiant eyes. By his side he felt tiny hooves wrapping around his own, his baby sister Ruby Red.
The white cloaks left, but before they left they nailed a bright white sign in red letters to the front door:
NOTICE
This house is under
QUARANTINE.
No pony shall enter or leave this house nor remove any pony or thing from it without the permission of a Town Health Officer.
Violators are subject to fines and imprisonment at hard labor.
Any person removing or tampering with this sign without authorization is liable to a fine of five hundred bits. - PER ORDER, PONYVILLE BOARD OF HEALTH
Mama tried to put on a brave face, saying that it would be just like a little vacation, no work, no school, just lots of time to rest and be a family. But school had been closed for a month now, and Mac hadn’t even gone into town for two weeks, though it was only a half-hour walk that he could do blindfolded.
Mac played along anyway, even though he knew something bad was coming.
Three days later, Mac and Ruby had each taken to their beds. Even Mama was soon brought low. Even when Mac just got a bowl of oats and some water for Ruby, or made some porridge for his parents and brother, he had to carefully plan it so not to waste too much energy.
The coughing kept getting worse, at all hours of day and night. By the fifth day, Mac knew they weren’t all going to make it.
That night, Mac woke up in a cold sweat to his Mama shaking him awake. “Mac…” she said, rasping. “Papple needs to see you. Right now.” She coughed. “Please… come now.”
Mac rose from his bed, coughing himself. Mama guided him to her own bedroom, where Papple laid on the bed, his breathing low and rasping. “Mac… Mac… C’mere. Son.”
Mac slowly walked to his father’s side. He could see that the flu had reduced his father - the strongest and most fit pony he’d ever known - to the point of death. He would have wept. He wanted to. But he knew this was not the time. He had to be strong, since his father could not.
“I’m here, Papa.”
“Mac…” His father reached out a hoof to embrace his son. And since they had both fallen to the same illness, Mac knew there was no point keeping away from his father now. He felt his father’s forehoof embrace him. “Oh Mac. You’re getting so… so strong. I…” he coughed violently. “I need you to take care… take care of Mama, and Gala, and Ruby… I need you to be strong… I need you to be a stallion for ‘em…”
“I… I will, Papa.”
“A stallion… gotta provide for his family. Or... what’s his life worth? It's on you. You remember that. You be a good boy. You take care of them. I’ll… I’ll see…”
Mac always would remember.
It's on me now. I'm the one who they're gonna need to survive now.
Cortland “Pa” Apple, husband of Annie Smith Apple, father of Gala, Bright McIntosh, and Ruby, passed from the world that night. Just after sunrise, Bright’s older brother, Gala, took a turn for the worst, and he, too, joined his father.
Mac was the one to hang a white sheet from the window, while his Mama, in her weakened state, could do nothing but sleep beside her husband for the last time. The Undertakers came for them soon after.
When they had departed, Mac was left alone. He was no longer a young colt. He couldn't afford to be anything but the stallion of the house.
As soon as the quarantine ended, Mama sent Ruby away to Manehattan on the train, with a note for her sister. The flu had already burned through Manehattan; and Ruby would at least have a home and food to eat while Mac and his mother tried to keep the farm running.
But even they had not seen the worst of what the Great Flu had done. That had fallen on the Pear family next door. For they had lost five - Pear Butter’s mother, grandmother, two older brothers, and older sister. Only Pear Butter, her father, Anjou “Pere” Pear, and her aunt Quince, remained.
The next time they saw each other, Buttercup again ran to her friend for comfort. “They’re gone, Mac! They’re all gone!” Pear Butter cried, her hooves around Bright Mac. “It’s just me and Father and Auntie and Auntie sayin' she's gonna leave and I’ve got no one else! We’re all alone!”
But she could not escape her father’s gaze. For when he saw who his daughter had embraced, he grabbed her away from Mac. Pear screamed all the louder, but he did not hear.
Her father glared at Mac. “You killed them. You stupid Apples. You killed my family.” He growled with contempt, and rage, and grief.
Mac wanted to cry, but no tears came.
It would be many years before Bright Mac and Pear Butter would ever say more than a few words to each other. Between the day of the memorial service for the hundreds of ponies lost in Ponyville, and the chance day ten years later when Bright Mac saw Pear Butter.
His Buttercup.
Grown up and beautiful, tending the orchard of her father, who also had spent the intervening years alone.
Mac sat alone at the kitchen table, a great map of the west orchard in front of him, half-covered in seed catalogs, old telegrams with apple prices, sales contracts, the giant family ledger of income and expenses, checkbook, and an old manual calculator. The last few years had been pretty good, and Mac wanted to plow the profits back into the farm. A new dam had been built for flood control, which meant that a good chunk of the Acres that would formerly flood every ten or so years was now ripe for planting, and Mac intended to get every last bit o’ profit out of that land he could.
Mama had tried to teach Mac everything she knew about running the farm, but every time it was left unspoken that Papple had known so much more. Her and Mac simply had to learn by trial, error, and hard experience. There were many lean years not so long ago when ponies didn’t want to buy anything but canned fruit and preserves, cheap and lasting for years. But things had gotten better since that tragic year of plague, and ponies were now buying fresh apples for eating, but more importantly, drinking more cider.
Mac had spent the last few hours since dinner trying to game out how he could make the most out of the available space. He decided that, good times or bad, cider would be something there’d always be demand for in the town. So he marked most of the empty spaces for cider varietals, leaving a few for fresh varietals and a few for canning. Never put all yer apples in one basket, he remembered Papple saying. Then he added up the amounts for the seedlings, filled out the order form, and wrote a check, stuffing an envelope for the morning mail. Satisfied, he went upstairs to bed.
But his wife was nowhere to be found, at least not in their bedroom. Tip-hoofing carefully so as not to wake his Mama, he found Buttercup in the room—the nursery, he remembered that they would call it—that they had set aside for their soon-to-arrive child.
She sat in the rocking chair that he had made with love for her, next to an open window, the first breezes of summer blowing through.
“Hey, beautiful,” he said. “Someone keepin’ you up?”
Buttercup rested a hoof on her belly. “The baby? Nah, they’re fast asleep in here too. Y’finished downstairs?”
Mac kissed his wife. “Yep. Gonna be doin’ lots of planting this summer. But I got a feelin’ it’s gonna pay off.”
She kissed him back. “You work too damned much,” she said with a smile.
“That means I’m working enough. You know how we Apples are.” He sat down next to her, on the soft rug Pear had gotten from her friends at her baby shower, shaped and colored, of course, like an apple.
“Hm.” Buttercup said, and turned back to the window. “I was just thinkin’… it was fifteen years ago that my Mama and brothers and sisters passed.”
Mac had completely forgotten the date, but not its significance to him, too. No, not forgotten, put aside. It hurts too much. “I… I guess you must be missin’ your family somethin’ fierce,” he said, hoping that she’d not go there.
“Now more than ever,” she said. “Don’t you think about your Pa and your brother?”
The words were like she’d ripped a bandage off a barely-healed wound. “Yeah. I do.” Mac felt a tremolo in his voice. “But they’re gone. I’m here. They can’t keep this farm going. It’s all on me. So… if you think I’m workin’ too hard, it’s for a reason.” He laid his head on her shoulder. “The reason is you.”
“Oh, Mac,” Buttercup said. She put a hoof around her husband, stroking his back. “There’s been too much grief to go around these past few years. I know you don’t like talkin’ about it. But don’t let it weigh your soul down. There’s joy in this world, and brightness, and many good things coming to us. And I think they’re all lookin’ down on us, proud as can be.”
I hope so, Mac thought. Then he heard her crying. “What’s wrong, love?”
“For a second, I added my own father and aunt in with the dead.” She turned back toward the window, and wiped a tear from her eye.
Mac opened his mouth to ask if Anjou or Quince had replied to any of the letters she had sent them since she found out she was expecting. But he knew the answer, and it angered him.
It’s all for you, he thought, hoping that she could read his mind. Your family abandoned you. But I never will.