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Authors: Victoria McKernan

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BOOK: The Devil's Paintbox
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“Come back in two weeks.” Abradale took off his
stained smock, then tenderly draped a sheet over the table of ferns.

“I won't be here in two weeks,” Aiden protested. “Is there someone else who has the vaccine? Another doctor?”

“There's none to be had right now. No. Sorry. Good evening.” Abradale waved a hand toward the door. “Now do excuse me. I've a table kept for me at six at the Golden Palace. Latecomers eat standing, and the meat is largely gristle by then.” He put on his jacket and picked up his hat.

“Might I impose upon you for company, then?” Aiden jumped at the tiny opportunity, racking his brain for polite words. “I—I would like to hear more about the ferns. I've often admired them, as—ah, I'm a logger, and there's ferns all over.” He couldn't tell one fern from another but figured the man for one who liked to talk much more than listen, so he should be all right.

“Awfully young for a logger, aren't you?”

“No,” Aiden said lamely.

“Well, come along, then; you might as well fill the other seat. But step lively.”

Aiden's plate was clean and his brain was numb with long Latin words about ferns before he managed to get Dr. Abradale back around to the subject of smallpox vaccine.

“That must be a fascinating process too,” he offered. “Making vaccine for people out of cows. How do they do it, anyway?”

“Nothing to it, really.” Abradale shrugged. “Scratch a pustule on an infected cow and put the pus to another cow. On
the udder, I think, tender skin there. The new cow develops pustules and you pass it on. Goes on forever.” He spoke with the careful overenunciation of too much wine. Aiden had insisted on treating for a jug of it. It was thick and terribly sweet, and he could hardly drink it himself.

“So is there a farm of cows just for that?”

“Um-hummmm.” Abradale nodded as he chewed.

“Where?”

“I've no idea. Cow country, eh! Down the valley, I suppose.”

Aiden poured him more wine.

“Thanks, lad.” He took a deep drink. Aiden choked some down too. The Golden Palace was indeed full, with men standing around the walls eating quickly off tin plates. A piano player pounded out lively music. There were no women except for one serving the tables.

“How do you actually get the vaccine from the cows to people?” Aiden asked.

“What? Oh, well, threads, generally.” Abradale sopped up the last smears of gravy with a piece of bread. “Bits of cotton string soaked in the cow pus, you see? Prick the arm, then lay on the string. They used to just take the cow around door-to-door and scrape it right from the cow into your arm! But this is the modern age, eh?” He plowed the last bit of bread around the bare plate in vain hope. “There's a team going about now, I believe—something about it in the
Gazette.”

“Going around where?” Aiden asked hopefully.

“Oh—logging camps, trading posts, forts and the like, I think. It's January, eh? Vaccine doesn't travel in summer,
goes bad in the heat, so winter is the time to take it around. Get to everyone while they're gathered up.”

“Will they bring it to the Indian villages too?” Aiden proceeded cautiously now.

“Oh no. Can't do that!”

“Why not?”

“Ah, well. Complicated,” Abradale said. “Different species. Well, not species, exactly—not like ferns and orchids. But different enough for disease. Influenza, whooping cough, measles—our diseases are much harder on the red man. Kills them four to one.”

“So—shouldn't that be more reason to vaccinate them?”

Abradale leaned forward, peering at him closely. “You're a Christian lad, eh—” Aiden wasn't sure if that was a question or not, but Abradale quickly went on. “Of course you are—you don't look a bit like a Jew—so you must believe God knows what he's doing, eh?”

“I'm not sure what you mean, sir.”

Abradale stirred three spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee and took a delicate sip. “Let God's will be done. You see? The good Lord can save the Indians if he wants!” Abradale patted his hand on the table like a judge. “Perhaps he doesn't want to. We shouldn't be interfering with vaccinations.”

The argument seemed so ridiculous that Aiden didn't even know where to start. Hadn't millions of good Christian white people died before the smallpox vaccine was invented? Had that been God's will?

“Will you have some pudding, Dr. Abradale?” The waitress, a plump young woman with shiny apple cheeks, leaned down over their table, showing a generous bosom and a tray
of desserts. “Ah!” Abradale beamed with happiness. “Have the pudding, lad—it's lovely.”

“I—ah, I'm full, thanks,” Aiden lied. He felt slightly nauseated and dizzy. Not from the rich food or syrupy wine but from the calm cruelty of Abradale's twisted logic.

“It's cherry!” The waitress tilted the tray toward Aiden and pointed to a little china dish with a piece of cake studded with purple cherries, swimming in custard and syrup.

She was not especially pretty, but her round face was smooth and the skin clear. Aiden thought of Bandy and what a different life she would have had if she weren't all scarred. She would be in San Francisco, teaching school and living in a cozy little room with gaslights and rugs. She could go to musical recitals and plays and have nice men courting her.

“No thank you,” Aiden said. He watched Dr. Abradale spoon up a glistening purple bite. “What about Christian Indians?” he asked. “Shouldn't they be vaccinated?”

“Ah, well, difficult that—” Abradale looked unhappy to have the conversation steered from cherry pudding back to smallpox. “You must understand, the vaccine isn't perfect for our own. It sometimes fails. Imagine the trouble if we start pricking the red devils! Remember the Whitman Massacre? Oh, it's nearly twenty years ago, and measles, not even smallpox, but no one forgets it around here.” He spoke quickly between spoonfuls. “The Indians got the measles and thought the whites were working evil magic on them. They slaughtered thirteen or fourteen people at the mission. So you see the problem, eh?”

“But couldn't you explain the risks to them and let them decide?”

“Explain? They have witch doctors!”

Abradale scooped out the last drop of syrup, patted his lips, surrendered his napkin and pushed away from the table. “Fine evening!” He stood and shook Aiden's hand vigorously. “Call on me in two weeks, eh? I'll get some vaccine for you. Awful thing, the smallpox.”

iden walked back to Ruby's in a gloomy frustration. The rutted mud road had stiffened in the cold of night, and he stumbled over the lumpy ground. He turned his jacket collar up against the chill wind. He felt stupid. He should have thought this through before he left the camp. It had been a fool's errand from the start. Stupid Tupic coming here in the first place. Stupid Indians dying so easily. Stupid white men thinking everyone else was stupid. Stupid everyone in the world.

He had not slept much in three days now and was unimaginably tired. He tried to remember the lights. Two red, one white—three clear? As he skidded down the steep path to the waterfront road, he suddenly heard scuffling in the shadows. Aiden stopped, his skin prickling. He should probably be afraid, he thought, but was actually more annoyed. He was no longer a stick-legged pony. He had learned to fight and learned to hurt, was tired of both and didn't want to do either right now.

“Who's there?” he called out. “I've a damn grim attitude, so come on if you want! But you'll need four to take me down and I'll cut at least two of yours balls off as we go!”

The night fell silent. He thought he heard a woman giggling from one of the houses. The clink of a metal chain gave him a moment's warning, then it was all grunts and boots, clubs, chains, sticks and planks. Aiden ducked and swung a
hard punch at the nearest figure. He felt his fist connect with ribs, hard enough to wrench out a grunt of surprise. But then a hard whack knocked the back of his legs and his knees hit the ground. He dropped, rolled and kicked, and heard someone fall with a gasp of pain. Not a second for satisfaction, though, as a chain slammed into the mud inches from his head. He crabbed away, grabbed a chunk of dirt and flung it up toward the voices. A boot kicked hard against his side. He waited for the next kick, then grabbed the man's foot, twisted and flipped him to the ground.

Aiden scrambled to his feet and punched his fist into the man's stomach. The man groaned, but then a bat slammed across Aiden's back, knocking him facedown into the hard rutted road. He struggled to get up. It was so dark he couldn't tell if there were two or twenty men, but even the Bull couldn't fight off two men with clubs. He steeled himself for the next blow, but then there were shouts and gunshots, and as quickly as it had all started, it ended.

The attackers ran off. Someone took his arm and helped him to his feet. There were two big men with clubs of their own, and another with a pistol and a lantern.

“Well, there's one less for the bilge business!” One of them laughed. “Anything broken?”

“No.” Aiden bent over, waiting for the world to stop spinning. He wiped blood from his face with the back of his hand. Someone held the lantern up close to his face and Aiden squinted.

“Lookit there, Mack—he's a young one! Boy don't even shave yet!”

“They'd like him for a sailor, eh?” They all laughed.

“I do shave,” Aiden said defensively, stupidly, as if that
were all at stake in the world right now. It wasn't often, and only his chin, but he did shave.

“A few bruises, but still pretty enough,” the man said. They laughed some more and Aiden heard a bottle being uncorked.

“You fight like a man, anyway.” The man with the club took a drink and handed him the bottle. “Where are you staying? Ruby's or Little Joe's?”

“Ruby's.”

“Come on, then; we'll see you safe home.”

They walked him there, bid him good night and returned to their patrol. Aiden found a pitcher of water and some tin cups on a stand by the desk. He took a cupful outside, where he did his best to wash the dirt and blood off his face. He went back inside, felt his way down the dim hallway to his room, stumbled quietly to his bunk, pulled the rough blanket over his head and shivered. Seattle was notorious for Shanghai crews. It was the only way most ships got a crew these days. Knock a man on the head in a bar and he would wake up at sea the next day with no way off. Powhee had warned him; Ruby's guards took it as routine. So why did he feel there was something more to this attack?

Cold morning. What now? In the dining room, Aiden poured himself a cup of coffee and eyed what looked like the worst corn bread in the history of the world: flat doughy squares, shiny raw in the middle, where leavening had clearly failed. They looked worse than “corn jelly meat,” if such a thing were even possible. Still, he choked a couple down. They weighed in the bottom of his stomach like lumps of clay.

He was tired, for he had wakened often throughout the
night with storms in his mind.
Save the Indians. Get back in time. Stay alive.
How to do all that? He thought about going to the vaccine farm itself, but even if he found out where it was, what was he supposed to do—sneak into the barnyard and grope around the undersides of cows soaking bits of string in their pustules?

The door swung open and a boy came in.

“Gazette!”
he called. “Latest news! Two bodies in the harbor! Chinaman cannibal in jail! Dined on the flesh of those he lured with opium! Indian rampage! Cruelest, most vile slayings! Nine Christian souls sent home to Jesus! New invention called dynamite blasts away mountainsides!”

Aiden nodded at the boy and he scurried over with a paper. Aiden gave him a penny and took the paper.

“Do you have past copies?” he asked with a sudden idea.

“Why? Ain't news when it's past.”

“I like history.”

Dr. Abradale had mentioned stories in the newspaper about the “Indian attack,” as well as something about the vaccine.

“You might find some around,” the boy said. “In the fish market, or underneath the bums in the square.”

“Thanks.” Aiden ignored the boy's cocky attitude and fished some more pennies out of his pocket. “Or maybe the newspaper office keeps some?”

BOOK: The Devil's Paintbox
4.24Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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