Sister Noon

by Karen Joy Fowler

  While she was still dressing and making her plans, the Chinese boy arrived to fetch her. Ti Wong was a round-cheeked child, short and solidly packed, who looked younger than his eleven years. Of course, the Chinese calculated age differently. He told her he was collecting whatever board members he could. Mrs. Hallis, the Ladies’ Relief and Protection Society president, and Mrs. Wilson, the ex-president, were already in the buggy. Nell said they were needed at once since some of the wards were ill.

  His English turned out to be excellent, a fast, bitten-off staccato, but easy enough to understand and with a good vocabulary. Lizzie learnt later that it had improved wonderfully the minute Nell stopped trying to get someone to run him off.

  One boy was especially ill, Meredith Penny, newly arrived from Santa Cruz. Ti Wong had himself helped Nell move Meredith in the night to the sickroom, and he told Lizzie that the boy had been too hot, with a too light, too shallow pulse. “Wood floating on water,” he said. And when she didn’t answer, added as if in explanation, “a Fu pulse.”

  The rain turned to a downpour. The mule stared curses at them, its ears set at an outraged angle. Lizzie took the seat in the front of the buggy and tried to hold an umbrella over herself and Ti Wong both. It was more polite than it was effective; he was already drenched. By the time they reached the Brown Ark, Ti Wong’s teeth were chattering and his hands trembled the reins over the mule’s back.

  They drew up beside Dr. Kearney’s rig. His bay nickered at them, gleaming wet and miserable. Ti Wong went to stable the mule and change his clothes. Lizzie and the other board members joined Nell and Dr. Kearney in the sickroom.

  Meredith Penny was eight years old, Mrs. Lake told Lizzie later. He had plans to be a fireman. “I can’t interest you in medicine, then?” Dr. Kearney was asking as Lizzie entered. He was seated by the bed in a chair that was too small for him, his knees high as a grasshopper’s. He had his watch out; his hand cupped Meredith’s wrist. “You have the look of a doctor to me.”

  Meredith allowed as how he might be a doctor.

  “A doctor meets the nicest people,” Dr. Kearney said.

  In the parlor he gave the women his diagnosis. Diphtheria. Lizzie’s feet were wet and her neck was cold. She didn’t know whether the latter was from rain or terror. The storm was painting the parlor windows with water and sand, so that the room grew darker with every gust of wind. “Oh, my Lord,” Mrs. Hallis said. Her hands were gripped together and still they shook. “Oh, my Lord.”

  Dr. Kearney put the Brown Ark under immediate quarantine. Lizzie sent Ti Wong out in his dry clothes into the storm to nail the yellow warning card onto the front door and stable the doctor’s horse.

  The other children were released from class and told to wait on their beds until Dr. Kearney could see them. By the end of the morning, Jenny Comstock, age fourteen, Ella Louisa Gray, age five, Harry Whinery, age five, and Kate Hanley, age seven, had all been sent to the sickroom. Six days passed and they’d been joined by Tilly Beacon, age twelve, Mansel Bennett, age eleven, Mattie Lorenzen, age seven, Elizabeth Jane Comstock, age fourteen, Alexander MacPherson, age five, George Maxwell, age nine, and Edward Reed, age twelve.

  In later years Lizzie often felt she remembered little of those dreadful days. She had been too tired and too terrified to take it in. Just as often, she felt she could never forget it. One child after another became listless and feverish. Some of them complained of sore throats, more did not. Their cheeks were the color of burnt roses, their lips slowly turned blue. Only the unaffected cried; the sick were too busy breathing.

  Every woman on the board with no small children of her own arrived to help. When they slept, they slept on the sofas in the tower room and the parlor and on chairs beside the children’s beds. They did manage to contain the disease within the Ark itself; no cases were reported in the rest of the city.

  Bartholomew Fitton’s father attempted to remove him from the Ark. He stood on the porch, a small, fat, desperate man in a straw hat, shouting at Nell so that all the children could hear. No power on earth would force him to leave his son there to die, he shouted. He tried to shoulder Nell aside, but she would not move. The police took Mr. Fitton away. A gun was found in his breast pocket; the officer then posted at the door told them so. This officer had his own children and wouldn’t accept so much as a cup of tea from inside.

  Meanwhile, the Comstocks, whose twins were already showing signs of the disease, made a tent for themselves in sight of the sickroom windows. They appeared under these every morning, waiting. Mrs. Lake would open the windows. “All serene,” she would call, so they’d know their children had lived through another night.

  Meredith Penny was moved again, this time into a private room. Lizzie sat with him for hours, soaked in the general smell of sickness and the particular smell of this sickness—an unmistakable sort of wet mouse odor. When she’d been without sleep for more than a day, Lizzie had moments that returned her to her mother’s deathbed. She stroked her mother’s arm. She brushed her mother’s hair. Her father’s death was much more recent, but sudden and unexpected, a heart attack, and without the awful vigil.

  No one had really gotten to know this child. She tried to hold his twitching hands, she talked to him, she sponged his forehead. All the while, his eyes bulged from their sockets; his breath rasped in his throat like a crow cawing.

  She ran out of things to say. She didn’t know what songs he might like, or what stories. She wanted to talk to him about him, to give him a whole story of himself. This is what you love, she wanted to say. This is what you’re good at. These are the foods you like to eat. Here’s something you said when you were five. But she didn’t know him at all.

  On the seventh day he seemed better, and she waited hopefully for Dr. Kearney to tell her this was not her imagination. Dr. Kearney shook his head, leaning down to her softly. “This is the worst for me,” he said. “When it’s children and there’s nothing for me to do.” Meredith Penny’s fever rose higher and higher, until it carried him away. He died, and Lizzie and Mrs. Hallis and Dr. Kearney and the Reverend Phillips watched him do it.

  Later that morning Nell found Lizzie hiding in the cupola. “You need to eat and you need to sleep,” Nell said. Grief made her even fiercer than usual. “We’re only getting started,” she added, because she was no one for the comforting lie.

  Lizzie was hungry, but she couldn’t make herself go back downstairs. I’ll never sleep, she thought, but she did, though she rose four hours later, unrested. In that same four hours, Lena Heath, age ten, had been sent to the sickroom.

  The rain of days before had passed. It would have suited Lizzie better than this calm blue, this high, indifferent sky. She went to the kitchen to make herself some coffee. She turned at the slippery sound of Mrs. Lake’s shoes.

  “He’s with his mother now,” Mrs. Lake told her. “That’s what I try to hold in my mind. The child falling asleep in his mother’s arms. There’s rejoicing in heaven today.” This surely should have been a great comfort, but Lizzie could not make it so. She was too tired. She had another bit of a cry and then washed her face, combed her hair, and returned to the sickroom.

  A week later, the sick included Ella May Howard, age twelve, Franka Haun, age six, May Isabella Miller, age twelve, Dock Franklin Cole, age eight, Bartholomew Fitton, age five, and Harry Ambrose, age eight. Mattie Lorenzen was dead, although Dr. Kearney had performed a tracheotomy to try to save him. So was Ella Louisa Gray, the first child in her class to learn to skip.

  On February 22, Nell woke Lizzie from an afternoon nap. “Ti Wong,” she said simply, and Lizzie rose to follow her down the stairs to the private room for the dying. Miss Stevens had arrived already and stood by the boy’s bed.

  His appearance was an enormous shock, just when each of the women would have said she was far past shocking. They’d not thought of him as one of the children. No one had ever asked him how he was feeling. Nell’s face was wet and melted at the eyes, soft as dough. “He never com
plained, the lamb. He did as he was told and he never complained. Just yesterday I sent him to the basement for clean blankets. He must have already been deathly ill. Running up and down those flights of stairs. If only we’d sent him right away as I wished. Just a few weeks with us will be enough to kill him.”

  Ti Wong did not appear to be conscious. He lay with his fingers opening and closing as if he could catch his breath in his hands. “The policeman’s gone for Dr. Kearney,” Nell said. “I only hope he can be found.”

  Lizzie leaned down and tried to speak to Ti Wong. Beneath the thin surface of his lids, his eyes darted about like minnows. She picked up his hand, hot in hers, still grasping spasmodically. She felt his wrist; his pulse was unsteady, intermittent. A Fu pulse, Lizzie remembered he’d said with casual eleven-year-old competence. She was the one who’d let him stay. She was the one to send him out to stable a horse in his last suit of dry clothes. This one would fall to her account.

  The other women returned to the other patients. Lizzie sat with Ti Wong. She prayed to God to spare them both. God makes no bargains, her mother had told her often enough, and a woman with a dead child knows this better than anyone. But Lizzie had never gotten out of the habit. In return for Ti Wong she offered God Ti Wong. Give us back this valuable child, she prayed, and I promise to value him. I promise him a valuable life. Not as a servant, but as something requiring education, a minister or a teacher.

  She knew this promise would be hard to fulfill. She stood by it. Let the very difficulty of it speak to her desperation. Ti Wong’s breath slid in and out of his throat with a sound like sandpaper. He lived on a ribbon of air, which spun down to a thread. His face went from blue to black. His hand went from hot to cold. Two hours passed, and then three.

  Then came a long moment when he didn’t breathe at all. Lizzie was on her feet, ringing frantically for the other women, when the trough of his chest finally rose.

  “He’s dying,” she told Nell, who arrived first. “If Dr. Kearney’s rig isn’t already outside, then he’s too late.”

  She couldn’t take her eyes off Ti Wong’s chest. She was hardly aware of Miss Stevens, arriving with towels, alcohol, a knife, a child’s silver whistle, until she spoke. “We’ll have to do it ourselves,” Miss Stevens said. “I’ll do it. I’ve watched Dr. Kearney three times now.”

  If she hadn’t offered, the procedure might have been discussed. It was possible the terrified women would have talked about it and talked about it until it was too late. Lizzie was overwhelmed with gratitude. Wonderful Miss Stevens with her science projects and her dissections. Her wonderful young eyes and her steady heart. Ti Wong began to convulse. His chest was an empty bowl.

  Lizzie held him by the arms. She had to climb onto the bed to do this, hoist her skirts and straddle the boy. Nell took hold of his head. Miss Stevens put the knife to his throat. She paused then, with her eyes closed. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,” Lizzie said. She spoke loudly for Ti Wong to hear. Nell joined her. “…for Thou art with me.” Miss Stevens made her first cut.

  “Hold him still,” she cried, because the child had jerked and struggled. Blood flowed from his throat, pooled in the cup of his neck. “I can’t see what I’m doing,” she said then, sharply. “There wasn’t so much blood for Dr. Kearney.” Lizzie let go of Ti Wong’s arms to towel the blood away with both hands. It came too fast, ran from his neck like water from a spout, seeped into Lizzie’s sleeves. Miss Stevens had slit his throat.

  Lizzie stopped wiping the blood away and tried to hold it back instead. Miss Stevens pushed her hands aside, made a second blind cut. There, amidst the blood, Lizzie could see a thin white shining reed. Miss Stevens impaled it on the point of her knife, rotated her wrist. With the other hand, she slid the whistle down beside the blade. Ti Wong’s chest rose at once, his breath singing a long, high, hysterical note, twice, three times. His face grew pink again and his fists relaxed. He slept while Miss Stevens held the whistle in place with her fingers and Lizzie kept the blood back with soaking towels and her hands.

  Five minutes later Dr. Kearney rushed in and found them there, Lizzie still astride Ti Wong, afraid to move. What a picture they must have made, Lizzie thought later. Miss Hayes and Miss Stevens drenched in gore, two Lady Macbeths up to their elbows, their hands inside Ti Wong’s neck, and Ti Wong singing in his sleep like a bird. The doctor was impressed all the way to speechlessness by the sight of them.

  It was something to remember, something to carry with them out of the horror, that they had behaved with courage and competence. When a thing needed doing, they had done it. Miss Stevens was the heroine, of course, but Lizzie had also come through. Ti Wong survived diphtheria and the Ladies’ Relief and Protection Society both, and had the scars to prove it.

  The next day Bartholomew Fitton, George Maxwell, and Elizabeth Jane Comstock died within hours of one another. It was a dreadful, unspeakable day.

  These proved to be the final diphtheria deaths. Of the fifty-seven children residing in the Brown Ark at the time, twenty contracted the disease and six of those died. The other fourteen recovered their health—“Children are resilient,” Dr. Kearney said—but the agony of loss was slow to recede.

  FIVE

  For many months afterward, every moment of pleasure for Lizzie was quickly followed by feelings of guilt. Where before she’d wished to return to her normal self as a matter of principle, now it was a matter of need. Another magical juncture she must find the strength to refuse. But how would she ever enjoy her dinner, her book, her Saturday ride again? She lost weight, though not to the point of being thin. She couldn’t sleep. Ti Wong was the only subject on which she could allow herself to be happy.

  What a bright boy he turned out to be. She loved to hear how he’d wheedled Nell into letting him make popcorn or taffy. If any of the other children asked, Nell said it was too much mess. But Ti Wong was her pet, her favorite.

  When he was still abed, letting Lizzie read him Sherlock Holmes mysteries and recovering his voice, she had told Nell that they needed to give more thought to his future. Nell was surprisingly agreeable, even to this. “What would you like to be when you grow up?” Lizzie had asked him.

  She herself had already decided he’d be a doctor. A Fu pulse, he’d told her. Dr. Kearney could surely be co-opted into this project. He would see the value in a doctor who spoke Chinese but was trained in Western medicine, none of that hocus-pocus of spinning needles.

  Ti Wong had answered he wanted to be a Pinkerton, but that could be changed. Would have to be changed. The Pinks wouldn’t take a Celestial.

  And then, just when some routine was finally returning—classes, fights among the boys, quarrels among the girls all resumed—just when it seemed things could, in fact, go on Minna Graham came to the breakfast table, complaining of a headache. The light was dreadful bright, she told them. Her eyes hurt. She asked to go back to bed. Nell was too tired to deal with it. She suggested that Minna, unable to contract diphtheria and largely ignored during the epidemic, now wanted attention. This was agreed to be just like Minna Graham. She went so far as to break out in large red spots.

  Measles, Dr. Kearney said. Two weeks later seven of the children, including Jenny Ijub, had rashes. New cases continued to appear throughout the month. Fortunately the strain involved was a light one. The new epidemic recalled the tragedies inevitably to everyone’s mind, but didn’t repeat them.

  SIX

  next came an epizoetic. More than half the horses in the Turf Gallery and the Fashion Stables on Sutter Street contracted distemper, as well as twenty of the horses in the Bill Bridges Stable, thirteen in the Hopkins Stable, and four in Roe Allen’s Stable on Market Street. Citywide some three hundred horses were affected. A chloride of lime mixed with carbolic acid was recommended for use about the barn. For horses themselves, potash and licorice root were to be applied in a paste directly onto the swollen glands in the throat.

  The symptoms, c
ase by case, were mild, but the aggregate was not; the streetcar companies were all but crippled. Yet under these adverse circumstances Myrtle Rolphe managed to get to Chinatown. Unaccompanied by police or clergy, with the proprietor protesting her every step, Miss Rolphe walked into the bowels of an opium den. With one hand she held a lavender-scented handkerchief over her nose to protect herself from the seductive fumes. With the other she seized one of Jesus’ straying lambs by the ear and dragged him to safety. The incident was less than twenty-four hours old, and Lizzie had already heard the story five times at least.

  Ti Wong could not hear it often enough. He was so obviously in love with Miss Rolphe. It made Lizzie very sad. Such an open display, such a hopeless object. She thought of Diego Estenagas, her Spanish prince. Only unrequited love lasted forever. Poor Ti Wong would spend his life desiring pretty, charitable white women who liked him only for his faith.

  SEVEN

  although all the women at the Brown Ark carried the diphtheria tragedies with them for the rest of their lives, on Mrs. Lake there was an immediate and peculiar impact. She began to insist that Ti Wong had brought the disease from Chinatown, even though Meredith Penny had obviously arrived from Santa Cruz already ill, even though there’d been no other reported cases in San Francisco and a deadly plague in Santa Cruz.

  Not that it mattered, Mrs. Lake was quick to assert. No one was blaming anyone. But. Still. Lizzie thought Mrs. Lake was suffering from not having saved anybody with an emergency tracheotomy. Miss Stevens was handling herself better.

  There was another factor contributing to Mrs. Lake’s imbalance. An unrelenting series of plagues is always bound to carry a biblical portent. But San Francisco had already been hearing for some time that Armageddon was coming.

  One afternoon back in October, when Lizzie had been eating a lunch at the Brown Ark, by invitation of course, she’d brought up the rumors of the appearance in Nevada of an Indian Messiah. He was reported to be preaching of the coming of a new world, a world without white people, which was even now floating in the heavens, drifting eastward from the Pacific toward the plains. When the new world landed, the whites would be destroyed, while all the dead Indians and herds of dead buffalo would be resurrected. The Messiah asked His followers only to be honest, peaceable, and chaste. He was said to perform miracles. This was all, in Lizzie’s mind, very Christian, which made it hard to dismiss.