Eutopia (16 page)

You will not stop me, Aunt Germaine. For I am about to do what you lacked the courage to. And I will not forget your betrayal neither
.

She might try to use her authority—those terrible eyes of hers—to dissuade him, but Jason would not heed them.

I mean to kill him
, he would say.
I mean to kill him before I burn his evil quarantine to the ground. Yes. Just like you did to my mama’s homestead. I am going to burn this place and everything in it and they can damn well hang me for it if they can catch me
.

Aunt Germaine would shrivel before the onslaught of his venomous rhetoric, and thus unencumbered, Jason would stride down the hall, to the office where Dr. Bergstrom lived. He would kick in the door rather than open it, and when Dr. Bergstrom opened his mouth to shout, Jason would raise the revolver, sight down its barrel, and before he put the bullet between the doctor’s no-good eyes, he would say . . .

He would say . . .

The corridor opened up into a larger room that Jason remembered. But this time, without the candlelight to blind him, he was able to apprehend a rectangle of light, or lighter darkness at any rate. A window? No—as Jason stumbled toward it, he saw that it was more than a window. Cool night air—air unsullied by that strange sweet smell—wafted in through an open door.

“Ha!” Jason left his scheming for a moment and hurried toward it.

He stumbled a moment over some carpeting, but regained his footing and continued, wondering:
Who opened that door? Maybe that fellow in white, on his way out?

Maybe—maybe those things?

Even as he wondered that, the lighter dark flickered for a moment, as a shadow drew across it. Jason stopped dead. He pulled the sheet close around him, pressing it against the cut in his hand.

The shadow came back. This one, at least, was not in miniature. It was nearly as tall as the door—definitely a fellow—but hunched peculiarly.

“Mister—Mister Juke?” said the shadow.

Jason said: “Who?”

The shadow stepped to the door frame, and reached out a hand. There was the sound of a match being drawn, and then, a tiny glow of light. Jason squinted and looked at the dark face behind the flame.

“The Negro,” he gasped.

“Who are you?” said the Negro, holding the match forward and looking Jason up and down. “And what happened here?”

And then the match went out and the darkness closed back in on them. That did it.

“You better step out of the way, sir,” said Jason, “because this place is filled with Devils from Hell and I don’t want to stay here a minute longer.”

Andrew Waggoner stepped out of the way, and let the boy out. He looked like a performer in a Greek play—robed in a blood-spotted sheet, face twisted in agony. Andrew was in his own kind of pain. Two nights after his incident, and he had still managed to keep off the morphine, and here he was, gallivanting in the middle of the night outside the quarantine. But one look at this boy, the blood, the wild expression in his eye, ignited his physician’s instincts and let him set his own troubles aside.

“Come on,” he said, leading the boy over to a little stone bench. “Sit.”

“I want to get as far from here as I can.”

“That’s fine. But not before I get a look at you. Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing.”

The boy squinted at him. “You’re the Negro doctor,” he said. “That right?”

Andrew let himself crack a smile. “Dr. Andrew Waggoner,” he said. “I prefer that to Negro Doctor, if you don’t mind. Particularly coming from a boy wearing a sheet.”

The boy nodded. Andrew was glad to see he seemed to be calming down.

“I’m Jason Thistledown,” he said. “Pleased to meet you, Dr. Waggoner. Sam Green says you’re going to make trouble here. That’s good, far as I’m concerned.” He put his hand forward. It was covered in blood that welled from a long slice up the palm.

Andrew lit a match on the stone bench and took a closer look at it. The wound was deep, like he’d cut himself with a straight razor. “How’d you get this?”

“Scalpel,” said Jason.

Andrew looked him in the eye. “What are you fooling with a scalpel for?”

“My aunt gave it to me.”

“Well, I’ll have to give your aunt a talking-to. This is going to need stitches.”

“Fine by me on both counts, Dr. Waggoner. Now can we get away from here?”

“Of course we can,” said Andrew. “I think we’re going to have to help each other getting back, though. Neither of us is in very good shape tonight.”

That was an understatement. Andrew had not been in very good shape for two nights now. The first night he’d tried to get outside, have a look at the quarantine in the cover of the moonlight, he had been in such poor shape that he had only gotten as far as the south staircase before the pain forced him to turn back. Tonight, it had taken him half an hour to make it downstairs and out the back of the hospital. The best that he could do for it was stay still, work the bruised and pulled muscles slowly back to health.

But he knew that something was odd in the quarantine. And there were questions to which he’d received no satisfactory answer.

He had been standing outside, staring at the open door in the front of the great building, willing himself the strength to go a little farther, step inside, when the boy appeared in his bloody sheet.

Well
, he thought as he tore a strip from the sheet and tied a bandage around Jason’s hand,
there’ll be no more exploration tonight.

“You want help walking back?” said Jason. “My hand’s bad, but I can sure walk all right. And you—”

Andrew nodded. There was no point in standing on pride. “I’d appreciate it,” he said.

“The Klansmen do this to you?” asked Jason as they moved away from the quarantine, across the clear lawn between there and the back of the hospital.

“You know a lot,” he said.

“Sam Green told me,” said Jason. “I don’t know much otherwise.”

Andrew pushed open the door and guided Jason to one of the examination rooms, where they lit a pair of lamps. At Andrew’s instruction, Jason sat down on the examination table. Andrew took a chair with wheels on the legs, and that made things better. He could roll back and forth looking for the things he’d need: primarily, a bottle of iodine and a sterile needle and thread. As he pulled that out of a cabinet, he caught Jason looking at it apprehensively.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve done this before.”

Jason motioned with his bloody hand. “With your arm like that?”

Andrew smiled. “Well no,” he said, “not with my arm like this. But I can manage. This is simple work. Unless you want to wait for Dr. Bergstrom in the morning?”

“Hell no!”

“All right then,” said Andrew. “Hold still. I’m going to clean your cut out first and that might sting. Try not to shout.”

Jason didn’t shout as Andrew splashed iodine on his hand, but Andrew could tell that the boy wanted to.

“Very stoic,” Andrew said, dabbing the wound clean. “Now tell me—how’d you happen to cut yourself in the middle of the quarantine this fine spring night?”

“Bergstrom did it to me.”

“Dr. Bergstrom cut your hand?”

“No. Bergstrom locked me up in there—on account I might be infectious, even though I got no symptoms.”

“Infectious?” Andrew put a wad of cotton on the wound and pressed down. “Infectious with what?”

“Fever,” said Jason. “The fever that killed my mama and took about all of my town this winter past, I expect. But that’s bunk.”

“Wait a moment. A fever killed
all
of your town?” Andrew rolled back on his chair, and started to thread the steel needle. “Over one winter?”

“Over one week, more like,” said Jason.

Andrew frowned at Jason. “Are you making up stories?”

Jason shook his head. “Wish I were,” he said.

“Before I start, you want a little whiskey? It helps dull the pain.”

“No sir.”

“Then why don’t you tell more about this sickness that had you locked up in quarantine tonight? It’ll help distract you—and I’m curious.”

“All right.”

And so, as Andrew took the boy’s hand and started to draw the thread through the wound, Jason Thistledown told him his story. He teared up almost immediately. And Andrew wasn’t sure whether it was the pain of the stitches or the sadness of the memories that made him cry.

“Well. I am sorry for your loss,” said Andrew. “It’s a lucky thing your aunt happened by.”

Jason nodded. “I thank the Lord every day. I just wish she’d stopped Dr. Bergstrom.”

“All right, this is the last one.” And he pierced the skin at the very inner edge of the cut. Jason flinched more this time—as though he’d been holding it in until now.

“Can—can I have that bit of that whiskey now?”

“Sure you can.” Andrew wheeled back to the cabinet and got the little whiskey bottle. He poured a capful and handed it to Jason, who slugged it down and coughed.

“This supposed to help?” he finally managed.

“Get enough whiskey into a man, you can saw his leg off.”

“Don’t get any ideas.”

Andrew chuckled at that. “Don’t worry, Jason.” He wrapped the wound in gauze. “I’m done for tonight.”

Now that he was done stitching and bandaging, Andrew got a good look at the boy, assessing him as something other than a patient. He was most of the way to being a man, tall and lean with none of the awkwardness that came on a lot of boys at that time of life. His eyes were pale in the light, but they had a cast to them that Andrew had not often seen, like they looked right through a fellow. Overall, Jason Thistledown just looked strong, and Andrew thought he must be.

This boy, if he were to be believed, had survived an outbreak of something worse than cholera, worse than yellow fever, maybe as bad as Black Plague . . . Some sickness that had killed everybody in a town this past winter. Not a third or a half, but everybody. Everybody but one.

What kind of fever did that?

“Jason,” he asked, “can you tell me what the symptoms of the fever were?”

Jason handed back the cap, and Andrew screwed it back onto the whiskey.

“I only know what happened to my mama.”

“Tell me that.”

Jason nodded. He was quiet for a moment, looking down at his re-bandaged hand. Then he drew a breath, and started talking.

“She started getting sick a day after we got back home from Cracked Wheel. It was a clear day, all right for travel we figured. We were laying in some more supplies, was all. First thing she complained about was a headache. Then she had trouble with the runs, you know what I mean? Then she got all hot with fever, and she said ‘Why, Jason I think I shall lie down a moment.’ She had a hard time getting up after that, so I saw to her.”

“You feel anything during this part?”

“Not symptoms if that’s what you mean.”

“That is what I mean.”

“After that, things took a bad turn. She told me her stomach hurt, and she was sweating something terrible, and when I went to clean her off I saw that she was bleeding.”

“Bleeding? Where?”

“From her nose for a bit, and also—also from the skin around her fingernails.”

“And then—”

“Well,” said Jason, “she got worse and worse, until she seized up—and died.”

“Were you able to take her temperature? With a thermometer?”

“No.”

“Was she bleeding from anywhere else?”

“I don’t know. I think there was some around her toenails, and her eyes were awfully red.”

Andrew sat back and thought about what he’d told him. It was nothing he’d ever encountered—not clinically, certainly, and not even in the case studies that he’d read in Paris.

“And you didn’t have any symptoms.”

“Like my aunt says—I’m immune.”

“And you haven’t had symptoms—for how long?”

“About two months.”

“During which time, you got on a train, and on another train, then made your way up here to Eliada. Meeting all sorts of people at every stop.”

“That is right.”

“So why, I wonder, did Dr. Bergstrom order you into quarantine tonight? It seems as though your aunt’s right—you’re immune. You’re not carrying it either or others would have surely come down with it. So why lock you up now?”

“That is what I want to know.”

Andrew was about to ask his next question when he heard a gentle rapping at the door.

“Dr. Bergstrom?”

“Annie?” He turned his chair around to face the door. “Come on in.”

“Dr. Waggoner.” Annie Rowe stepped in. “What are you doing up? Oh,” she said, looking at Jason. She blushed and averted her eyes. “Hello, young sir.”

“Nurse Rowe, meet Jason Thistledown. Jason, cover yourself, would you?”