Comes a Time for Burning (16 page)

Chapter Nineteen

Marcus Snyder sat on the edge of the bed, arms wrapped around his mid-section. Stripped of his clothing, he wore only a loose cotton night shirt that reached his knees.

“Lie down, man,” Thomas said, taking Snyder by the shoulders.

“I…bloody…can’t,” Snyder groaned through gritted teeth.

“Laudanum,” Thomas snapped at Bertha.

“Dr. Hardy has just given him a quarter grain.”

“Then again. Do we have Salol? If we do, that as well.”

“Dr. Hardy is in the dispensary making preparations for Mrs. Snyder.”

A violent shiver raced through Snyder’s frame. “Warm blankets, now,” Thomas said. “And hot stupes for his gut.” Again he took Snyder by the shoulders, feeling the trembling in the man’s thin body. “You must help us, Marcus. We know how to fight this thing.”

“Feels like I’m bein’ cut in half,” Snyder managed, and he almost panted, so difficult was it for him to breathe. “What the hell…Flora?”

“She’s upstairs, man. She’ll be fine. Now lie back. You must do that.” To Bertha, he said, “I’ll try the morphine by injection instead of the laudanum. The relief must be quicker.” With linens above the Kelly pad, Snyder finally stretched out in the bed, and Thomas watched as the nurse spread blankets across the quaking body.

“Shit,” Snyder said as the chemical flame from the morphine burned into his leg. And then his gut exploded, the geyser of diarrhea soaking night shirt and bedding. Thomas marveled at Bertha Auerbach’s aggressive efficiency as in a moment Snyder was cleaned, and the soiled bedding and nightshirt thrust into a covered enameled bucket. He lay back, cursing roundly, the morphine slurring his words.

Bertha glanced up at the ceiling, indicating the women’s ward upstairs, as Thomas turned away from Snyder. She whispered, “I fear that she is worse. We must find someone for the child to stay with.”

“The child is the least of our problems,” Thomas said. Marcus Snyder’s eyes were closed, and Thomas could see the spastic contractions of his gut. “I’ll see to the Salol,” he said. “If he hasn’t yet begun to vomit, it may be of some use. We have caught this thing early.”

Back in the dispensary, he blessed the memory of Dr. John Haines, Alvi’s father. The fat stoppered glass jar was two-thirds full of the large .06 gram tablets of phenyl salicylate, and he pulverized two, then added two more for good measure, and dissolved the powder in water, along with a dose of laudanum.

“Four Salol with laudanum, every hour as long as he tolerates it without nausea,” Thomas said to Bertha, who had just positioned one of the mustard stupes to Snyder’s abdomen. He handed her the glass. Looking toward the rear of the ward as if for inspiration, he saw the single rooms and remembered his first patient of the day, a man nearly forgotten.

“Mr. Malone?” he asked.

“As before,” Bertha said. “He has survived the night.”

“Remarkable. Have you tested his reaction to stimulant?”

“I have checked him on the hour, Doctor. There is no change. Although I thought that perhaps there was slight movement when I held the ammonia caplet under his nose. My imagination, I suspect.” She assisted Snyder with the small glass, and he held one hand on his gut, the tears streaming down his face in agony. “If you can keep this down, it will help,” she soothed.

He turned at footsteps and caught a glimpse of Lucius Hardy walking past the ward.

“A moment,” he said, and Bertha nodded.

He entered the dispensary to see Hardy at the mortar and pestle, the heavy jar of Salol on the counter.

“So,” Hardy muttered. “You managed to spend five minutes at home.” He watched as Thomas industriously scrubbed his hands under the flow of hot water from the French table, a wheeled device that carried two five-gallon glass jars, one for hot and one for cold. Rinsed, Thomas submerged his hands in a pan of dilute carbolic acid. With a pick that had been in the carbolic bath, he cleaned under his fingernails, and then plunged his hands into a second pan of methyl alcohol. “And Snyder?”

“He will fight,” Thomas said. “He has taken the Salol and laudanum. His stages are the earliest, and he is strong. His wife?”

“We’ll see,” Hardy said, with none of his characteristic optimism. “There is so much pain that she cannot see. She cannot think.” He glanced up at Thomas. “I am constantly fascinated by the aggressive nature of this bacillus. I have never seen anything like it.” He took a deep breath. “All is well at home?”

“Yes. All is well. I brought a bale of clothing so that I might change frequently.”

“I have what I have, with more at what’s his name? Lindeman’s?”

“The same. The clinic has an account, of course.”

“I shall find time to visit him.”

“Did Bertha tell you, by the way? Malone still lives. She may have seen a reaction in the eyes.”

“And
that’s
remarkable,” Hardy said. “Oh,” and he held up a hand sharply. “I have had to speak with Mrs. Crowell more than once.” As he spoke, he rolled up his own sleeves. “She understands
aseptic
only in the most general terms, Thomas. The motions are there, but not the accomplishment. At one point, she removed the soiled linen from Miss Levine’s bed, and then returned with fresh—without a thought to her hands. I instructed her, but she bridles in her true matronly fashion.”

“She washed, however?”

“I fear I mortified her. I escorted her to the upstairs station and supervised the procedure. I’ll apologize if I have to, but she must be with us on this.”

Thomas nodded, but after hearing the confrontation with Pastor Patterson, he could imagine the blunt Dr. Hardy’s choice of words with Adelaide Crowell. “Stephens has left. We can’t afford to lose Mrs. Crowell,” he said tactfully, and Hardy’s smile was edgy.

“I’d rather her feelings suffered than have her become the cholera’s accomplice,” he said. “Or a victim herself, which is more likely.”

“I agree. I’ll speak to her as well. And I think a telegram to St. Mary’s is certainly in order. They may be able to lend us staff.”

“The Whitman woman?”

“She will come in this evening. A veteran and a jewell.”

“That’s good. I keep thinking about how this contagion is encouraged,” Hardy mused and shrugged heavily. “It seems logical that our source of contagion is the Clarissa.”

“Brought by ship, do you suppose?”

“Perhaps, and had the
Willis Head
been at dock for a week or more, I would suspect so, but she’s but a day or two in, I’m told.” Hardy looked hard at Thomas. “Gut cultures. That’s the only way. In every case. The Snyder child, the missing logger…if they are clear, fine. But I doubt that optimism.”

Thomas looked heavenward. “I have sent Howard to fetch the young man. With a culture from him, we’ll know…” He turned as Mrs. Crowell appeared in the doorway.

“Doctor,” she whispered, “Mrs. Snyder has passed…”

Hardy reacted as if stung, bursting past the wide-eyed woman and racing for the stairway, Thomas hard on his heels. They reached the upstairs ward to see the Snyder child, little nine year-old Matilda, prostrate over her mother’s chest, arms encircling a body that no longer responded.

The child wailed as Thomas took her gently in his arms. The child could have weighed no more than forty pounds, but her skinny arms were surprisingly strong.

“Let me,” Bertha Auerbach said behind Thomas, and he turned, handing the child to her. With the stethoscope, he roamed Flora Snyder’s chest, but the heart was silent. One foot twitched in the cholera’s oddly characteristic post-mortem response, and the child saw her mother move.

“She lives,” Matilda cried hysterically.

“No, child,” Bertha soothed. Thomas blocked out their voices, listening for any tell-tale sounds from the patient. No blood pushed through the carotids on the emaciated neck, no whispers from lungs. Flora Snyder lay flat, deflated, eyes glazed, jaw slack. Thomas reached out and gently touched the unprotected left eye, with no response. He looped the stethoscope around his neck and consulted his watch.

“Mr. Snyder must be informed,” he said. “A sad, sad thing.”

The child’s tiny body shook with sobs. Thomas lowered his voice. “The child must be washed.” He turned to look at Bertha. “Will you do that? And then she must remain isolated.” He reached out and took Matilda’s hand. “I’m sorry, Tilly.”

“There are four other children in the Snyder home,” Bertha said.

Thomas stared at her blankly. Lucius Hardy pulled the linen up over Mrs. Snyder’s face.

“We must ascertain that they are well,” Bertha said. She had not released the child, but hugged her against her clean apron. “Marcus has a brother living over in Carter. We must send a message to him. I will have Mr. Deaton tend to that. If all is well, Gwendolyn…that’s the oldest daughter…is perfectly capable of keeping things together. I will have Mr. Deaton fetch her so that she may have ample instructions about what must be done.”

“Howard has driven to the logging camp, Berti.”

“Then…”

“We have but three patients, Thomas. If you will examine the Snyder children, I will watch over the clinic,” Hardy said. “I will want cultures of all of them. And from the residents of the Clarissa. And from the loggers at the camp. Cultures, cultures, cultures.” He punched a fist into the palm of his hand. “All. It will be simplest if you have them come to the clinic. By morning, we shall have answers. Pray that will be early enough.”

Chapter Twenty

Thomas bridled and saddled the gelding, and felt as if he should don blinders so that he might finish
one
errand without interruption. He swung onto the horse with a keen sense of foreboding, hating the thought of leaving the clinic, hating the thought of what he might find…and strangely excited at the same time by the whole challenge that consumed his world.

The gelding, freshly groomed and looking as magnificent as his shaggy personality allowed, stepped out smartly. The rain had stopped, and once more sunshine threatened to break through the clouds. A few more days of such weather, and some local wag would refer to the past fortnight as a “dry spell.”

Thomas had spent a privileged childhood and youth in Connecticut neighborhoods of neatly groomed village streets, white houses in neat rows with their white fences fronting the by-ways, meticulous stone walls at property lines, and overflowing flower beds. In medical school, claustrophobia had been his companion during the years spent in the teeming, dark city.

But here, as the gelding made his way through the slop and the rocks and the muck, Port McKinney reminded him of some of the hand-tinted engravings of carbuncles in the medical texts, an ugly little growth on damaged skin.

At one point in the village’s development, an attempt had been made at uniformity. A three block area bordered by Lincoln, Gamble and Lewis Streets actually looked village-like, with the doctor’s grand, Victorian house at 101 Lincoln overlooking the town, with the new brick bank—soon to go bankrupt and become the home of the Clinic—and a scattering of other buildings that appeared stout enough to survive a generation. But then folks became impatient as the timber industry boomed. The favored structures became slabwood shacks built from mill scroungings, often with canvas providing the roofs, the structure thrown up in record time. When a shack’s owner died or moved on, the materials in his little hovel were appropriated by another.

Marcus and Flora Snyder, along with their five children, had managed better. Thomas found their home a mile north along the inlet on a rise a stone’s throw from the water. Snyder had built first a one-room cabin, tight and pert of line, with steeply pitched roof and generous overhang. Two additions had been added over the years as the family grew and as Marcus could afford the mill boards.

As he approached, Thomas saw that the privy was a hundred paces from the house, slightly downhill, obscured by a grove of cedar saplings. It was as neat as the rest of the homestead. A tall young woman appeared at the front door as Thomas swung down from the horse, and his first thought was one of relief, that a neighbor lady had come to the Snyder home to help with the children. She took a moment to lean her broom against the side of the cabin as if the broom’s precise position somehow mattered.

“Good morning,” Thomas said. “I’m Dr. Parks, from the clinic. I’m looking for Gwendolyn.” It never occurred to him that this young woman might be the child, barely sixteen years old.

“Yes, sir. I recognize you. I’m Gwen.” Stepping closer, Thomas saw that indeed she was younger than she first appeared, but so thin and angular that no bloom favored her. Pale face, thin hair, prominent teeth, nothing about Gwendolyn Snyder shouted the vitality of healthy childhood blooming into adulthood, or the romantic idyll suggested by her Arthurian name.

Thomas took his time as he tied the gelding’s reins to a small stump beside the cabin, running through his mind the names of the Snyder children that Bertha Auerbach had supplied.

“Gwendolyn, my nurse, Bertha Auerbach, is tending little Matilda. The child is healing nicely.” A smile touched the young woman’s face and shed a layer of years.

“She was so frightened,” Gwendolyn said, her voice a soft, gentle alto. “I was going to take some bread pudding to her today. Would she like that?”

“I’m sure.” Thomas regarded the ground for a moment, searching for some heartfelt way to continue. He could feel Gwendolyn’s deep green eyes on him, waiting. Did she know why he’d come?

“Gwendolyn, your mother has died.” When she didn’t respond, he added, “Just moments ago.” The girl lost her balance, appearing to trip over her own feet as she pivoted back toward the doorway. She fell against the door jamb, both hands on the wood. Pushing herself erect, she leaned her forearm against the door frame and buried her face in the crook of her arm.

Thomas quickly reached her side, and with a hand on each shoulder, could feel the shuddering of her body.

“The illness was too much for her,” he whispered. “She passed quickly, with little pain.”

“I visited for a few moments last night,” the girl whispered. “So ill…my father?”

“We will do everything that we can, Gwendolyn.”

She pushed herself away from the door frame and grasped the broom handle, at the same time taking several steps away from the house. Holding the broom as if it might be a rifle of use to defend the homestead, she looked off across the inlet, the tears coursing unchecked down her cheeks.

“What are we to do now?” she whispered.

“The welfare of the others is at stake,” Thomas said. He stood beside her, a hand on her bony right shoulder. “I wish to have Matilda remain at the clinic so that her condition might be watched, Gwendolyn. There is some evidence at hand that if this contagion is stopped at its earliest stages, there is yet hope.” The child said nothing, eyes still locked far off in the distance.

“The other children?” he asked. “Frank, Mary, and Florence?”

For a time, he wasn’t sure if his words had registered. The broom wavered a bit, and she lifted it enough to rest the tip of the handle on the toe of her shoe, movements painfully slow and precise.

“Frank works at the mill, Doctor. He does not live here now. Mary and Flo are at school,” she said. Thomas heard her clearly, but for a moment, the possibilities overwhelmed his ability to reply. “At school,” he managed finally. Of course they were. Bertha Auerbach had spoken of the thirteen year-old Mary who might become the beauty of the family and ten year-old Florence, who was as likely to skip school to investigate the tidal pools as not.

They would be in the tidy frame schoolhouse a mile to the southwest, inland from the cove that arced around to the sawmill, on a promontory above one of the largest neighborhoods of tents and tent-shacks.

And if the contagion had spread through the family, the Snyder children might yet be well enough to share the bacilli with every other child in the tiny school.

“How many students attend the school?” Thomas asked. Gwendolyn rubbed her nose on her sleeve.

“Sometimes as many as eighteen,” she said. “Each day, perhaps ten. Mr. Whitman is not strict.”
Mr. Whitman
. Nurse Helen Whitman’s elderly husband, a former ship’s captain was now so crippled in the knees that he spent his days comfortable in a chair as school master.

Thomas grasped the young woman by both shoulders and turned her to face him. He could feel the outline of her bones.

“It is a dreadful disease, and highly contagious, Gwendolyn. I think that your mother contracted her illness while working at the Clarissa.” He could feel the girl flinch at that. “Do you work there yourself at times?”

“No. Only sometimes.”

No, only sometimes
. “Have you worked there recently?” She shook her head once. “Listen to me, Gwendolyn. In your mother’s case, the disease seems to have made itself known in a matter of hours, and through some weakness in her constitution, she was not able to fight it to a successful conclusion. And now your father is also ill, but it is too early to know the course of his illness.” He shook her shoulders gently. “I fear for the children, Gwendolyn. Can you answer some questions for me?” She nodded.

“Have any of your siblings complained of illness of any sort in the past week?”

“No. Only Matilda.”

“But the others are hale and hearty? No headache, no upset of the stomach or gut?”

“No.”

“Yourself?”

“I am well.”

Thomas looked at her critically, seeing a child who would be helped considerably by abundant meals rich in fat. Seeing Gwendolyn Snyder, Gert James would throw up her hands in despair and head right for the kitchen.

“When I first saw your mother at the clinic, she along with your father and the child Matilda, your mother seemed well enough. She was prostrated just hours later. While home, did she complain of illness? Disturbances? Weakness?” Her answer was another slow shake of the head, and Thomas felt a surge of elation.

“Gwendolyn, I would ask you to go now to the clinic. Your father will only benefit from seeing you, but I also want you to talk with Dr. Lucius Hardy. He is new with us. You know Miss Auerbach?”

“Yes.”

“Find her and have her take you to Dr. Hardy. He will want a culture from you.” At the puzzled expression that showed through the tears, Thomas added quickly, “it is a painless, quick examination of little consequence, and yet it allows us to be certain that no one in your household has contacted the cholera. Will you do that for me?”

“When should I go?”

“This very instant. I shall go to the school, and make a similar request there.”
The school
, Thomas thought with urgency. After securing another promise that Gwendolyn would immediately make her way to the clinic, the physician awoke Fats and forced the horse to jog through the streets and allies of Port McKinney. As he rode up the long slope, past the village of tents and shacks and a myriad of dogs all of whom Fats ignored, he could see the mill burners far to the south, one looking like a giant mushroom, spewing smoke across the countryside. Just inland from the original mill, a new structure had been erected—Schmidt’s new shingle factory, with its banks of saws, splitters, and drying kilns.

Still several hundred yards from the school, a shrill whistle attracted his attention, and he looked toward the inlet. Two horsemen were cutting across toward him, riding from the trail that bounded the shoreline.

Loath to pause for even a moment, Thomas did not pull the gelding to a halt until he recognized the broad figure of Bert Schmidt. The second man was a stranger, both to Thomas and to the horse that did its best to accommodate the man’s clumsy, uncollected efforts. Heavily clothed, with a bulky woolen coat, the man rode with his elbows nearly perpendicular to his body, bouncing in the saddle.

“Doctor, wait a moment, if you will,” Bert Schmidt called. He rode a stocky, close-coupled mare the same color as the sea otters that romped everywhere along the coast, and unlike his companion, Schmidt was completely at home in the saddle.

“My wife sends me to speak with you,” Schmidt said. He grinned. “She wishes that I return to her with the result of our conversation.”

“The result?”

Schmidt laughed. “Her words exactly, young man. ‘I don’t wish the two of you regarding me like some piece of sausage,’ she says. So her fate is in our hands. She’s in a curious frame of mind, sir. I don’t understand her.” He turned in his saddle. “Doctor, this is Captain Jacques Beaumont.”

“With the
Willis Head?”

“The same. She’s moored at the village wharf.”

Beaumont waited while Thomas urged Fats to flank him, then extended a beefy hand. “My pleasure,” he said.

“I can do nothing about your wife at this time,” Thomas said, and Schmidt frowned. As quickly as he could, he recited the events of the past evening and dawn. When he finished, it was Beaumont who found his tongue first.

“Saints be,” he murmured. “Cholera. For certain?”

“As certain as I am sitting here. Mr. Schmidt, the last thing I want is for your wife to be exposed to the contagion. Far away,” and he nodded at the house in the distance. “That’s the safest thing right now. Seattle would be better. Portland, better still. There should be no delay, sir.”

“Cholera frightens me as much as it should any man with half a brain,” Schmidt said. “It isn’t a
question
of delay, my young friend. What’s your best, educated guess that my wife’s…what did you call it? A lesion? What’s the guess that it’s the cancer?”

“Better than fifty percent.”

“Does the new fellow…Hardy? Does he agree?”

“Yes.”

Schmidt had been packing his pipe thoughtfully, and now he touched a match to the pipe until it billowed. “I haven’t met your new partner yet. Hope to hell he isn’t another Zachary Riggs.” The reference to his late father-in-law’s errant scallywag of a partner prompted a flinch.

“He is no Riggs, sir. A fine fellow. And brilliant. And hard-working. You will like him.”

“And you’re certain it’s cholera?”

“I’m certain, sir. And that’s why you and your wife should be on the next packet to Seattle. I shall not be able to accomplish such surgery on her while we’re with the cholera. The risk is simply too great.”

“Cholera.” Schmidt rolled the word through a cloud of pipe smoke. “Unusual, isn’t it?”

“Highly.”

“You know, in the far East, cholera kills a lot of people.”

“Indeed it does, sir. Here as well. Mrs. Snyder has just expired.”

Schmidt looked hard at Thomas. “Flora Snyder? Dead?”

“Yes. The same. And Marcus is in the battle.”

“Son of a bitch. You know he’s one of my best filers. When the lure of the sea doesn’t kidnap him. The little girl of theirs ill recently? Tilly? I suggested…no, I
told
him…to take her to you.”

“She is well. A small surgery. But she is in danger, Bert.”

“She has the cholera as well, you mean?”

“No, but she is exposed. At first, my thought was to send her home. But we can’t do that now. If she were to bring the contagion into the house with the others? Or if they have caught the contagion from their parents, then…”

“So what’s to be done?”

“Bertha knows of a Snyder brother in Carter. I haven’t been there. I don’t know where it is. But in the meantime, I am headed to the school. If the Snyder children are at risk, so too is every other child in that building. They must all be tested.”

“You can do that?”

“Of course.”
I sound as if I do this on a daily basis
, Thomas thought.