Chaneysville Incident (43 page)

“Imagination?”

“No,” I said. “No. Not at all. There’s no imagination in it. You can’t create facts. But you can discover the connections. If you’re good, there’s a point where all the facts just come together and the ideas come out. It’s like a fire, smoldering, and then it catches, and the flame catches other things, and then it’s like a forest fire….” I stopped.

“But that isn’t happening,” she said.

“No,” I said. “That isn’t happening.”

She didn’t say anything for a while, she just stood there behind me, working the knots out of my shoulders. I closed my eyes and let my head loll back, feeling the warmth of her hands, wondering if I was going to have to do without that, wondering if I could remember how. Then her hands stopped moving.

“Suppose,” she said, “that there was something that you were leaving out. On purpose. Subconsciously.”

“This is history,” I said, “not psychoanalysis.”

She straightened up, but kept her hands lightly on my shoulders, as if she were holding me down. I looked at the table.

“What are the white cards for, John?” she said.

I felt my shoulders tense, and I fought it, but I knew her fingers had felt the muscles move beneath the skin. “Those are the facts you’re trying to explain,” I said carefully. I let my head sink forward until my chin was on my chest, and I waited. After a minute, her hands began to move, digging into the muscles on my shoulders, easing the tension. I brought my head up.

She stopped massaging my back and moved away. “I won’t push you,” she said, “but I won’t let you lie to me, either.”

I turned my head to look at her. She did not look good. Her hair had escaped from the fastenings that had held it in a loose bun, and wisps of it stuck out at odd angles. Her eyes were still red, and her clothes were rumpled from sleeping in them, and the light fawn wool slacks she had worn were soiled; there was a smudge on the right hip, black and oily, from where she had brushed against some soot-laden surface. She hadn’t noticed it, probably. When she did, it would bother her. She returned my gaze for a minute, and then padded towards the stove on naked feet. I had kept the fire going, and by now the floor would be warm and not a shock to her feet, but it was still dirt; I wondered what her mother would have said about that. I watched her as she dipped warm water from the reservoir on the stove into the dishpan and began to wash the coffeepot.

“I know what’s on the cards, John,” she said. “It’s something about you. Something personal. I know because it’s the kind of thing you wouldn’t tell me about. And that’s what I want to know.”

“You do know,” I said. “You know all about me. All the lurid details—”

“I don’t want lurid details.” She set the pot down hard. “I don’t want local color. I don’t want good stories. I want to understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Maybe you don’t think it’s important that I understand, but it is. It is to me. Because I love you. And I’m not going to leave you alone. Unless you make me. Force me. Oh, I’ll go away from here if that’s what you want, but I’ll be waiting for you somewhere. Unless you tell me you don’t want me anymore.” She stopped and turned back to the dishpan. Then she turned again, as if something had occurred to her. “Or was that what you were telling me?” she said.

“You know better than that,” I said.

“No, I don’t,” she said. “I don’t know anything for sure right now.”

“No,” I said. “That wasn’t what I was telling you.”

She nodded, turned back and finished washing the pot and rinsed it with cold water from the pail. Then she dried her hands on her pants. “All right,” she said. “I’ll leave you here. But I want you to know, I think it’s wrong. I think it’s dangerous. And I’m going to worry. I’m going to damn near die with worry. So I have to know the whole thing makes sense. So tell me, all right? Don’t lecture me, just tell me.”

She looked at me for a minute, then turned back to the stove and started to make the coffee, lifting the canister down, measuring grounds with only her hand. She moved deftly, her hands fluttering in the lamplight like golden birds. She finished preparing the pot and slid it onto the back of the stove, where the heat would not be too high. I realized that she had done something to surprise me—and her mother. She had learned how to make good coffee in an old iron pot on a wood stove—no mean feat. She wiped some sweat from her forehead. She looked at me. “Stove’s hot,” she said. Her voice was noncommittal.

I looked down at the cards.

She moved then, crossing the cabin with quick steps. I heard the rasp of material as she caught up her coat, the grunts of effort as she jammed her feet into her boots without bothering to unzip them, the complaining of the door as she tore it open and went out. Suddenly the cabin was freezing. I looked up, but she had closed the door behind her. I got up and went to the stove and put in more wood. Then I went back to the table. I wasn’t through the cards yet, but I tried a little correlation. Moses Washington had arrived in the County in the same year that Upton Sinclair wrote about the disgusting conditions in the packing plants. There was a little bit of a connection there—the public sentiment that Sinclair stirred up spurred Congress into passing the Pure Food and Drug Act, which was the first step towards Prohibition, because it required that the exact proportions of alcohol or narcotics included in food be reported on the label—but it was pretty weak…

The door opened and she came back in, closing the door quickly, but not before the cold had swept in. Her coat was open and her cheeks were flushed; she almost seemed to glow. “It’s beautiful out there,” she said.

“It’s cold out there,” I said.

“Cold and beautiful.” She took off her coat and hung it on a peg. She stepped out of the boots. The coffeepot was starting to make simmering noises. She went across and pulled it farther towards the back of the stove. “John,” she said, “why doesn’t anybody live here?”

“You mean on this side of the Hill?”

“Yes. The other side, it’s so…”

“Ugly?”

“Well, not exactly ugly. Just…used up. People have been living there so long, I guess, but it looked… I don’t know. Gray. Like an old mill town. Or maybe it was just the snow.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not just the snow.”

But she went on as if she hadn’t heard me, her eyes bright with something—discovery, maybe. “But over here, it’s so different. Like…like…Walt Disney. Those nature films, where the fox had a name and struggled for survival, and the seasons changed….” She stopped, looked at me.

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“I was just standing out there looking at it,” she said. “Thinking about it. It doesn’t make any sense; all this beauty over here and all that…”

“Fatigue,” I said.

“…whatever over there. You’d think somebody would have moved.”

“They don’t move,” I said, “because they’re afraid of the ghosts.”

The excitement in her eyes died and was resurrected as anger. “Right,” she said. “Ghosts.”

I looked at her for a minute, then I reached out and took up the blue cards, and flipped through them as I spoke. “I’m serious. They didn’t move because they were afraid of ghosts.” I found the card I wanted. “There used to be people living over here, beginning in about 1849. But there was a smallpox epidemic in”—I flipped through the cards—“1872. It killed practically everybody. But there were enough people left to make a comeback; there was a sizable settlement here in”—I flipped more cards—“1904. Then the second epidemic hit. Typhus, this time. I’m not sure exactly what time of year.”

“Fall,” she said. “Or late summer. Peaking in the winter and early spring. That’s the way it usually goes.”

I nodded. “It’s transmitted by body lice, right?”

“The epidemic form is,” she said.

“Makes sense. It’s under control in the summer and early fall, when the air is warm and people bathe more frequently, but come winter, when nobody wants to haul water and heat it and nobody’s about to go skinny dipping… It makes sense.” I took up my pen and made a note on the card.

“How can you
do
that?” she said.

“Do what?”

“Makes notes about something like that. You’re talking about a death rate of—”

“Close to a hundred percent, in this case,” I said. “I make a note because it’s a fact I didn’t know; the epidemic probably started in the late summer or fall. And it doesn’t bother me because I heard the horror story a long time ago. Old Jack told me. He and Uncle Josh White were the only ones who survived.”

“Out of how many?”

“Who knows?” I said. “When the ground’s clear you can count the old foundations. There were twenty, maybe twenty-five cabins over here. You figure four or five to a cabin. Anyway, Old Jack and Uncle Josh were lucky. They got the disease first, when there were plenty of healthy grownups around to take care of them. They got well. But more and more people got sick, and there were fewer and fewer to take care of them. Old Jack and Uncle Josh did what they could, but they were children. And at the end they were all that was left. They had figured out that people caught the sickness from each other, but they didn’t know they were immune, so they stayed in cabins as far apart as they could get, and they sat there looking at each other across the hollow, each one with a shotgun ready to blow the other one to kingdom come if he got too close.”

“How old…”

I flipped the cards. “Old Jack was twelve. Uncle Josh was thirteen.”

“Dear God.” She closed her eyes. I put the cards back in place.

“What about the rest of the people?” she said. “The people on the other side of the Hill?”

“They brought food,” I said. “They left it up on the ridge.”

“That’s all?”

“They mounted a guard to make damn sure Uncle Josh and Old Jack didn’t come across the ridge.” I looked at her. “Nobody understood typhus, you see. They thought it was contagious. It
is
contagious, if lice are a part of your life. So they isolated potential disease carriers and they kept the whole thing quiet as the grave.”

“Kept it
quiet
? But why?”

“Because they worked in town, most of them, the women doing days work and nursing children and the men working in the hotels, cooking, waiting, hopping bells, and if the word had gotten out that there was sickness over here, and that—” I stopped; something occurred to me. “Yes,” I said. “And if it was winter, like you said, the hotel season would have been ended, and if there was any money coming, it was going to have to come from the women—the men would have been out of jobs until spring anyway. And if the word had gotten out that there were colored people dying like flies, nobody was going to be having a colored woman taking care of a child. So they kept it quiet. I guess maybe Old Jack always figured it was the women’s fault. But anyway, that just about did it for this side of the Hill. Old Jack and Uncle Josh lived over here—I never knew when they decided it was safe to get close to each other—but nobody else wanted to come near. They were still afraid. And they told the children that there were ghosts over here, and that Uncle John and Old Jack were boogeymen, to make sure the children didn’t come exploring.”

“Oh, no!”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “And a good thing, too, because those lice live a long time. But I guess the stories outlived them; the stories were still around when I came along, but I never caught anything. Or maybe I was just lucky.”

She turned back to the stove and went about the business of pouring herself some coffee.

“I’ll take some of that,” I said.

She whirled around. “I don’t understand you at all,” she said.

I shrugged.

“I mean it,” she said. “You just sit there on top of all this… I don’t even know what to call it. Death. Horrible things. And you make notes on little cards and then you ask for another cup of coffee.”

“Sometimes I’d rather have a toddy,” I said. “But if I did, people would say I was too weak to face reality.”

She looked at me but did not reply; she just poured me a cup of coffee and brought it to me. I took it from her, holding it in both hands.

“I don’t understand how you can be so calm about all the things you know about and still be so afraid of this town.”

“I’m not afraid of it,” I said. “I just hate it.”

“All right,” she said. “Tell me why you hate it.”

“Isn’t typhus enough reason?” I said.

“You said it yourself; they didn’t know anything about typhus in 1900.”

“No,” I said. “But they knew that they didn’t want to live in dirt-floored shacks with a hundred people taking water out of the same spring. The Town built a waterworks in 1817. Maybe they didn’t know what caused typhus or typhoid—there was typhoid over here too—but they did know they didn’t want to live that way. And they let people go on living that way. And they made sure nobody ever made enough money to move. They made that epidemic as surely—”

“All right,” she said. “But that’s not enough. Maybe it’s enough reason for Old Jack to hate, but you weren’t even born yet. And you didn’t lose anybody. To you it’s just—”

“History,” I said. “And I’m a historian.”

“Oh,” she said. “Is that what being a historian means—hating for things that don’t mean anything anymore?”

“No,” I said. “No, it means hating for things that still mean something. And trying to understand what it is they mean, so you can hate the right things for the right reasons.”

She turned away from me and went back to the stove. She picked up her cup and sipped at it, still not facing me.

“You’re thinking,” I said, “that I’m talking about black people and white people.”

“No,” she said. She turned and looked at me. “I’m thinking you’re talking about you and me.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You’re the man with the logic,” she said. “Here’s some for you. You hate white people. I am a white person. Therefore you hate me. Only you say you don’t; you say you love me. Which seems like a contradiction. So I guess you must be lying about something. Either you can’t hate so much or you can’t love—”

“And you’re the psychiatrist,” I said. “You know it’s not that simple.”

“I know,” she said. “I know. You can hate me and love me at the same time. But you see, that’s not what I want. I don’t want you to hate me at all. I don’t want to live like that. If I have to, in order to be with you, then I will, for as long as I can. But if I’m going to do that, I have to know more about the hate, about where it comes from. Because you’re talking about hating me.”