Table of Contents
Death of the Firstborn
Acknowledgments
1 Sunday Service
2 Biblical Plagues and Pestilences
3 Emerods in Their Secret Parts: Pestilence in Mesopotamia
4 Plague in Athens, Flu All Over
5 The End of Grace
6 The Passing of the Rector
7 Bleak Midwinter
8 I Wish You a Merry Christmas
9 If All Els
10 Three Wise Men?
11 Helping Can Be Fatal
12 Spuyten Duyvil
13 Quarantine
14 Birdfall
15 To Every Thing There Is a Season
16 Threescore Years and Ten
17 Afterword
18 Bibliographical Note
Endnotes
Sometime:
The Plague
World
by:
Meredith Mason Brown
Sometime: The Plague World
Copyright © 2016 by Meredith Mason Brown
ISBN: 978-1-68256-578-0
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a novel, a work of fiction. The author is not a doctor of medicine. Names, characters, places and incidents in the book are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. But it is manifest that for thousands of years there have been in the past, and are likely to be in the future, plagues and pestilences which have killed large numbers of human deaths—numbers which could well grow sharply, in light of the steep growth over time in the human population.
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
Printed in the United States of America
LitFire LLC
1-800-511-9787
www.litfirepublishing.com
[email protected]
For my wife Sylvia, our son Mason,
our daughter-in-law Karen,
and our grandchildren John and Alison
Death of the Firstborn
Moses said, “Thus says the Lord: About midnight I will go out through Egypt. Every firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on the throne, to the firstborn of the female slave who is behind the handmill, and all the firstborn of the livestock. Then there will be a loud cry throughout the whole land of Egypt, such as has never been or will ever be again.” (Exodus 11:4-6)
* * *
Then I said, “How long,
O Lord?” And he said:
“Until cities lie waste
without inhabitant,
and houses without people,
and the land is utterly desolate;
Until the Lord sends everyone far away,
and vast is the emptiness in the
midst of the land.
Even if a tenth part remain in it,
it will be burned again,
like a terabinth or an oak
whose stump remains standing
when it is felled.” (Isaiah 6:11-13)
Acknowledgments
This book could not have been written without access to the copious notes taken by Daniel Floyd in the years after the death of his wife Elizabeth, and the painstaking transcription (decipherment would be a more accurate description, in light of Floyd’s small left-handed scribble) of those notes that was undertaken by Daniel Floyd’s sons Nathaniel and Michael, after their father died.
“This shall be the plague with which the LORD will strike all the peoples that wage war against Jerusalem: …” (Zechariah 14:12)
1
Sunday Service
A young man’s T-shirt did not put the fear of God into Daniel Floyd, but it did give him something to think about. On a bright Sunday morning in late October, Dan, wearing a well-pressed blue suit, had been walking to St. James Church, Rockinam’s only Episcopal church, to attend the 10 o’clock service. He walked past the firehouse, and, several buildings beyond it, past a charred stone chimney. The chimney was all that was left of a colonial house that had burnt to the ground a few months earlier, after being set on fire by a young apprentice fireman who had recently joined the fire department. The novice lit the fire in an effort to impress the veteran firemen with his skills by starting the fire, issuing an alarm, and putting the fire out all by himself, before the fire trucks could come. It turned out that it was not easy for a single inexperienced would-be firefighter to extinguish a fire started in a centuries-old dry wooden house. The young man ended up badly burned, jobless, and in jail for arson. Daniel’s younger son Michael, who enjoyed being a wise-ass, referred to the young firefighter/firelighter as “What’s-his-name? Is it Arson Welles”?
When Dan was half a block from the church, a different young man, maybe in his mid-20s, came towards him down the sidewalk, carrying in his arms a smiling boy who was no more than 2 years old. The young man wore denims and a black T-shirt – clothes that clashed with Dan’s church suit. Dan had not seen him before.
“Happy-looking kid you’ve got there,” Dan said to the young man.
“Thanks,” the young man said. “He’s a born smiler.”
The young man walked past Dan. Dan turned to look at the back of the man’s black shirt, which bore something white on it. The white on black made the shirt look like a Halloween costume, which was timely, since Halloween was less than a week away, and many in Rockinam liked to dress up as Halloween drew near. Was the shirt design meant to look like a wild Goth’s display? Was that a skull and cross-bones on the back of the shirt? Dan circled back and stared. A glaringly white skull and cross-bones stood out from the back of the black shirt. The writing on the back of the shirt was Gothic script, boxy, replete with curlicues. Was it written in German? Squinting his eyes, Dan read large white letters that proclaimed in street English: “We All Gotta Die Sometime.”
Dan turned around and went on into the church. Because it was only 9:40 A.M., only a handful of people had by that time arrived in the pews for the 10 o’clock service. William Templeton, the Rector of the church, hailed Dan at the church door. “You’re bright and early once again, counselor,” the Rector said.
“I don’t want to miss a single one of your utterances, Bill,” Dan said, with less than total truthfulness. “And I’m not a counselor any more. I retired from lawyering eight years ago.” In fact, Dan was early at church because he had time to kill, and he liked seeing other people from time to time. For almost two years he had been a widower, and both his sons – Nathaniel and Michael, Dan’s only children – had moved with their families away from the Northeast and out to California before Dan’s wife died. His sons preferred the warm temperatures and the glitz of coastal California to New England’s wide-ranging heat and cold, its winter ice and weeks and months of snow, its humid s
ummer heat, and its proliferating ticks and mosquitoes.
Dan went into the church, picked up a service sheet, and sat where he always sat, next to the aisle, on the right side of the church, four rows of pews in from the door – close enough to the door to be able to sprint out early at the end of the service, before the departing congregation was slowed to a crawl by the Rector’s stream of pastoral pleasantries to each of the departing congregants. In the middle of the pew Dan sat down in was a woman almost as old as he was, a big shapeless woman in a green dress. She smiled at him. Dan knew her by sight, but didn’t dredge up her full name, and didn’t try hard to do so. He thought her name was Grace something – although, looking at her ballooned body, Grace was a clear misnomer. Dan nodded to her politely, bent himself forward as if in earnest prayer, and pulled out a Bible – a New Revised Standard Version – from the back of the pew in front of him, so he could play a game he had made up, something he thought of as Bible Bingo. It was a form of augury he had created to pass time and seek divine guidance. With eyes closed, he opened the Bible, put his right forefinger blindly on a page, and opened his eyes to see what the finger-touched words were, and what they might portend.
His finger had landed on a passage from the book of the prophet Zechariah, the next to last book in the Old Testament. The passage was Zechariah 14:12, a text that Dan didn’t remember as being part of the Episcopal lectionary. Here is what Dan saw and read:
This shall be the plague with which the LORD will strike all the peoples that wage war against Jerusalem: their flesh shall rot while they are still on their feet; their eyes shall rot in their sockets, and their tongues shall rot in their mouths.
Dan wondered what this Bible text could betoken. It didn’t sound friendly and good, even though the book of Zechariah elsewhere included more promising developments, among them the return of the Jews from exile, and the prophecy of a coming day on which the Lord “will become king over all the earth.” What kind of plague was foreseen in the passage Dan’s finger had landed on? That sort of plague sounded hideously corrosive, and often fatal. Was the plague predicted in Zechariah’s book the Black Death? Smallpox? Ebola virus? Hantavirus? Tuberculosis, which seemed recently to be building up resistance to medicines that had worked well in prior years? Some kind of superflu? Dan wondered idly if the adjectival version of “superflu” was “superfluous.” Since late September, when seasonal flu typically began, the local pharmacies in Rockinam had been urging their customers to have flu shots. Was that because a strong form of flu was spreading and was vaccine-preventable, or just because the pharmacies hoped to profit from charging for the shots of vaccine? Without trying to answer that question, Dan early in October went to a nearby pharmacy for a flu shot. He experienced no flu symptoms following the shot, though he knew of some people in town who had contracted a kind of flu that was more unpleasant and lasted longer than in most recent years. Dan had heard of fevers and headaches and painful limbs and joints, and also of liquids that dribbled down from noses. He did not remember hearing of any local flu patients having flesh that rotted out, as appeared to be the case in the plague portrayed by the prophet Zechariah – but Dan remembered reading that over fifty million people had died of flu at and soon after the end of World War I. While Dan was born more than twenty years after that war was over, Dan’s parents had told him that he had had a great-uncle who had survived fighting in France in that murderous war, only to die of flu in December 1918, barely a month after the November 1918 armistice that ended the war.
By 10 A.M., St. James Church was full. A mother and two children managed to squeeze past the bulky Grace-somebody woman in Dan’s pew, causing that bulky woman to slide over nearer Dan, who continued to ponder the reading from Zechariah. Dan hoped his Bible reading looked uninterruptably devout. Up in the loft behind Dan, the organist started a tranquil prelude. Amidst the gentle music, an explosive throat-clearing cough rang out repeatedly at Dan’s right side like gunshots – first deafeningly loud, then somewhat muted when Grace steered her coughing into her bent right elbow. One of the coughs left some gooey greenish sputum in the hollow of her bent elbow. Another cough landed a lesser amount on the back of Dan’s right hand. After using the day’s service sheet to scrape up as much as he could of what had landed on his hand, Dan tucked the goop-filled service sheet into the back of the pew in front of him.
Dan followed the service half-heartedly at most. The imminence of Halloween led the Rector, inevitably, to preach about All Saints’ Day and what it took to become a saint. The sermon was 75% longer than the ten minutes Dan believed to be ideal, and was padded with words and phrases that were not in the day’s text, but that the Rector evidently thought sounded biblical – things like “myriad,” “And so it was,” and “It came to pass that.” After the Nicene Creed, the prayers of the people, and the Confession of Sin and Absolution, and before the Peace, the Rector said that because it was flu season, after he said the Peace, the congregants did not have to shake hands while exchanging the Peace with each other, but could bump elbows or simply nod to each other and smile, because “the Lord will know that you are exchanging His Peace, whether you do that with or without a handshake.”
“Please stand,” Rector Templeton then said – and added, when the congregation was standing: “The peace of the Lord be always with you.”
“And also with you,” the congregation dutifully replied.
“You may now exchange the Peace,” said the Rector – and the congregants did so, in various ways.
In the pew ahead of Dan’s, two congregants said “Peace be with you,” and smiled at each other, without making contact. Two others in that pew bumped elbows. Grace, if that was her name, said “Peace be with you” to Dan. She smiled at him, displaying teeth of ill-assorted spacing, direction, and shading. She accompanied her declaration of peace by grabbing Dan’s right hand with hers, and shaking his hand energetically.
“And peace also with you,” Dan replied. “Forgive me, but I have an appointment I have to keep.” He went out the front door of the church, walked briskly to the chapel and schoolroom across the courtyard, went into the men’s room, washed his hands vigorously, and, after seeing a plastic bottle of disinfectant on the side of the sink, squirted substantial amounts of disinfectant gel on his right hand before he rubbed his hands together. He then went to a local restaurant, walking briskly to get a seat for brunch before the congregations of the different churches in town filled all the seats in the restaurant. Before he began his meal he told himself quietly that, even though it was a Sunday, he did not feel like saying or getting close to Grace – and smiled at his self-inflicted attempt at wit. He told himself he’d pass the witticism on to his would-be witty younger son Michael.
On his walk home after brunch, Dan saw, in the window of a lesser antique store in town, a variety of Halloween artifacts, including dwarf jack-o-lanterns, a small plastic skeleton hanging by a black thread from what appeared to be a toy scaffold, and a paperweight made up of what appeared to be the well-cleaned toothy skull of a hominid, mounted on a black base bearing the inscription “Memento Mori.” The shopkeeper, in response to a question from Dan, said the skull was an exact replica of the skull of a bonobo’s skull. On impulse, Dan bought the skull for his home office desk, although there was little room and less need for more artifacts in his house.
After he got home, Dan, in an attempt to guard against germs from Grace and other St. James congregants, put his clothes in a laundry bag to be washed in hot water, and gave himself a steaming warm shower. He then threw out enough months-old magazines and unreadable books to make room on a corner of his desk for the bonobo paperweight. After turning on his computer, Dan read up on bonobos, including copious descriptions and photographs of their extensive sexual activities, which apparently were the principal ways by which bonobos kept peace amongst themselves. For Dan, aged 74, all sexual activities, except for occasional limp self-plea
suring, were distant (though often fondly recalled) memories.
It being a weekend afternoon, Dan then called his sons in California to chat. There was no answer at the home of his older son, Nathaniel, more often known as Nat. The absence of an answer was foreseeable, since Nat, an overworked oncologist in Santa Barbara, tended on the weekend to do things that were healthy and out of doors. Dan succeeded in reaching his younger son Michael, who made a reasonable living in Los Angeles by means of a succession of jobs in television, while he also did stand-up comic shows and wrote books that (according to Michael) made readers laugh. Dan told Michael about the skull and the inscription on its base.
“Memento Mori,” Michael said. “ ‘Remember that you will die,’ if my high school Latin serves me. Dad, you may be slowing down some, and your memory may be less all-inclusive and slower in calling things up to your mind than it was in your youth, but I doubt that you need a written reminder to be aware of your mortality. Not just yet, anyhow. Everyone seems to be able to manage to die eventually, even without having written a check-out date on their calendar. But maybe I can get a book title out of your skull’s inscription. How about a hoked-up book about a Japanese gangster, a Yakuza member named Mr. Mori? The title might be Remembering Mr. Mori. And maybe the gimmick would be that Mr. Mori was hard to kill. Or Mr. Mori might be a hired murderer, who thought it was funny to kill other people – `The Mori, the Merrier’. A book like that would fit right into an idea I’m working on, to do a book or a series of books, or maybe of TV programs, each with a name that’s deliberately distorted or screwy. Names like ‘Wetness for the Prostitution’ or ‘The Scarlet Teenager’. Or maybe Mori Eels. What do you think, Dad? Not a bad angle, eh? Might even make a buck or two.”
Sometime- the Plague World Page 1
