Principal Anthony Mancuso said he shares the concerns of parents and will “do what it takes” to get answers.
But early last week, at the start of a special Transcript investigation into reports of the sickness, Mancuso repeatedly insisted the school has not had an unusually high absenteeism rate this year. He said the local Health Board, which monitors school illnesses, was likewise unconcerned.
When presented with a list of sixteen names of children who have been sick or who continue to be sick, Mancuso continued to maintain that strictly in terms of numbers, the number of children who have been out sick for one or more days this fall is not unusual.
He conceded, however, that the unknown nature of the illness is reason for concern. Joe Rizzi, a spokesman for the Health Board, designed primarily to be a record-keeping and monitoring body, not an agency equipped to solve medical mysteries, agreed.
“I don’t mean to downplay parents’ fears, but I sincerely doubt we’re dealing with any truly life-threatening disease,” Mancuso said. But he added, “The fact that we don’t know—yet—what is causing this ‘bug’ certainly means we have to pay attention to this. And I assure you, we are.”
Officials with the state Health Department said they were unfamiliar with any outbreak of unusual illness anywhere in western Massachusetts. They had no further comment.
Mrs. McDonald and other parents say they are worried that some agent in the school’s water, hot lunch program, or heating and ventilation system might be responsible. Attempts to determine if asbestos or lead paint was used in construction of the building so far have been unsuccessful.
Nurse Garland cautioned, however, that it would be premature to say that the cause is something found at the school.
“These children all attend the same school, true,” she said, “but they also live in the same town, ride the same buses, play in the same playgrounds, and probably eat the same food bought at the same one or two stores. It could be almost anything.”
Still, she noted, “Morgantown Elementary is as good a place as any to start” looking for the cause.
Dr. Mark Bostwick, a general practitioner who has treated several of the sick children—many of whom he has referred to Pittsfield’s Berkshire Medical Center for tests that so far have been inconclusive—said it would be impossible at this stage to pinpoint the location of the agent.
“It would appear from my records that most of these kids live on the same side of town, out toward the rise,” he noted, “but that’s a very preliminary observation. That could be strictly coincidence. I would say the school is a better shot as a common factor.”
Bostwick said he would welcome the involvement of the Health Department. “This could be a virus, a bacterium, or some kind of poison,” he said. “The Health Department has the knowledge to deal with any of those.”
Dr. Hough, the state epidemiologist, met for two hours with Mancuso, members of the Morgantown Board of Health, and Dr. Bostwick. No parents were invited, none attended. Rod Dougherty was barred from the meeting, but he got a general outline of what had transpired in an interview later with Mancuso. It was sufficient for the lead story in Thursday’s paper.
During his two hours in Morgantown, Hough made copies of all available records. He told Bostwick to send any test results from Berkshire Medical to him by express mail. He asked a battery of questions, using a tape recorder and an epidemiological questionnaire to record the answers. After suggesting the school board approve money for asbestos, lead, and water testing, he toured the school, stopping briefly in the cafeteria, rest rooms, boiler room, and nurse’s office. He shook hands heartily and promised to be in touch within a week.
Then he left, unconvinced that what was going on in Morgantown, Massachusetts, was anything worse than a comparatively obscure but ultimately harmless virus making the rounds. A virus that, sooner or later, would be defeated by that mightiest—and cheapest—of disease fighters, the body’s immune system.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Thursday, October 30
Abbie didn’t know what to make of this man Thomasine had convinced Brad to invite over for dinner. She spent most of the meal being alternately awed and itchingly curious.
He was a real live Indian. On that point Thomasine had been emphatic. But except for his long, dark, braided hair (which unquestionably was an Indian touch), Charlie Moonlight didn’t look like any pictures she’d ever seen, and during the Indian phase that had preceded dinosaurs more than a year ago, Brad had buried her in books about Native Americans. He didn’t wear a loincloth or a deerskin coat; he was dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt. And he wore a watch. A digital watch, the same kind Daddy wore.
Then, again, he did have that name. Who had ever heard of anyone having Moonlight for a last name? Only Indians named themselves after animals and the weather, nature stuff like that. Indians were very clever that way. Much more so than other people, who had last names that didn’t mean much of anything. Still, he didn’t speak in a funny accent (in fact, his English was as good as Daddy’s!). He didn’t eat Daddy’s roast beef with his fingers. He didn’t smoke a peace pipe after dinner. But he did live in the woods, and he did say he liked to hunt. During the meal he’d held her spellbound with the story of the time he’d tamed a wild raccoon, getting it to the point where it would perch on his shoulder and eat corn out of his hand.
To make it even more confusing, he was Jimmy Ellis’s uncle. Jimmy and Abbie had become great friends, and she knew for sure he wasn’t Indian.
“Do you wear feathers?” Abbie burst out when Thomasine and Brad had retreated to the kitchen to scrub plates from the main course. All evening she’d been battling to keep that question in. Despite Brad’s pre-dinner admonition to “be polite, I’m sure he won’t appreciate some nosy kid’s questions about Indians,” she could contain it no more.
Charlie laughed—a hearty, benevolent laugh. “Sure I wear feathers,” he said. “Sometimes.”
Abbie’s face lit up—from pleasure, not surprise. Real Indians had to wear feathers, at least every once in a while. “When do you wear them?” she asked.
“Oh, at ceremonies sometimes. Indians have powwows every year, usually in summer. Once in a while I go. That’s when I might wear a feather headdress, during the dances. Indians love to dance.”
Abbie could just picture it, a band of war-painted, feathered Indians circling a totem pole under the stars and moon, whooping and waving tomahawks and beating on their tomtoms. She’d have to get her father to take her to a powwow.
“Wow” was all she could say.
“Oh, yes. Indians like to be happy. You wouldn’t know that from a John Wayne movie, but it’s true. They like to dance, sing, sit around a fire and exchange stories, feast. At the Wampanoags’ powwow, in Mashpee, a town on Cape Cod, they always have a giant clambake. Of course, it’s not all fun. Sometimes we’re serious. Sometimes we communicate with the spirits.”
“Spirits?” Abbie asked, absolutely breathless. “Are they like ghosts?”
“Something like ghosts.” He chuckled. “Talking to them is like doing magic.”
“Can you do magic?” Thomasine hadn’t mentioned anything about magic.
“Well . . .”
“Could you do any magic now?” The excitement meter was into the red zone.
“Don’t pester Mr. Moonlight,” Brad said sternly. He was back in the dining room.
“She’s not pestering me,” Charlie cut in. “She wants to know if I can do magic. That’s all.”
“Yeah, that’s all,” Abbie said triumphantly. “I just want to know if he can do magic.”
“I don’t know if you would really call it magic or not, but . . . sometimes I can guess things I don’t already know.”
“Really?”
“Yup.”
“Could you do it for me?”
“Well . . .”
“Pretty please? With sugar on it?”
“Well, I suppose I could try.” It was at times like
these that Charlie remembered how soft the spot was he had for kids.
“Let’s see,” he said, his brow furrowing in deep concentration. “You—you have a special nickname, right?”
“Right.”
“And your . . . daddy calls you by it mostly, right?”
“Right.” Abbie thought she would explode, the excitement was that strong. This was so much better than that magician guy she’d seen on TV, Doug Henning. Because Charlie was here, here in the room with her. It was like her own private magic show. Maybe next trick he could produce a rabbit.
“And it’s a special name. A very special name.”
“Yes.”
So far Brad wasn’t impressed. Thomasine, who’d joined Brad by the table, was not so skeptical.
“Is it . . . Poopsie?”
“Noooo! That’s silly.”
Charlie was struggling. It was rare that he could get plugged in on demand, but it had happened. Usually, when he was eager to gamble, he would wait in the shadows of a casino until he felt it happening spontaneously, then move quickly to the tables. But there had been times—he could count them on one hand—he’d been able to move the mental levers, and it had happened.
Suddenly the first ghosts of an image, like a photograph materializing in the developing tray or a dealer’s hand coming up even as that dealer was telling him to bet or hold.
It was an apple.
The image of a red delicious apple, big and juicy and ripe.
It was followed, suddenly—almost painfully—by another image. The image of a man. An odd little man, featureless.
“How about . . . Apple?”
“Yes!”
“Apple Man?”
“Almost!”
“Apple Guy?”
“Wow-wee!” Abbie said, her excitement bursting around her. “It is! It’s Apple Guy! How’d you guess?”
How did he? Brad wondered. Thomasine must have told him, that’s how.
“Well, like I told you, sometimes I can do magic.”
They finished the wine (Charlie did not drink), had dessert, then Brad parked Abbie in front of the TV while the three adults talked.
Brad was getting to like Charlie. Perhaps “like” wasn’t exactly the right word. There was something intangible about him that made Brad uncomfortable, but he couldn’t put his finger on what, exactly. But like Abbie, he was fascinated by this man who so proudly proclaimed his Quidneck ancestry, even if fifty percent of his genes had been imported from Ireland. Thomasine had predicted Brad would be interested. She ought to know. Charlie was the first genuinely cooperative subject she’d found for her thesis—he’d been one of the leaders of the ill-fated land claim—and they’d spent much of the last two weeks in interviews. Already she had six ninety-minute tapes filled, with more ground still to cover. Thomasine had found him to be intelligent, articulate, likable, if highly opinionated and strong-willed. It was a wonder, Thomasine thought, that the tribe had lost the suit with someone like him to lead. It spoke volumes about the Indian’s predicament in the white man’s world.
As did Brad’s ignorance.
Brad had never met a Native American before. In his work he had interviewed Shiite Muslims, Israeli soldiers, an astronaut, a President, several senators, an even greater number of representatives, stars of stage and screen, Bruce Springsteen, mobsters, a hairless woman dying of radiation sickness, the editor of Pravda, Oral Roberts, the half of a pair of Siamese twins who had survived a botched separation, a Colombian cocaine king, Saudi Arabian oil ministers—but never an American Indian, only the people who owned the entire goddamn country once upon a time. It was an embarrassing cultural void, Brad realized, sitting here in Charlie’s company. And it put Thomasine’s research into a whole new light. They really have been made into ghosts, he thought. Ghosts in their own land.
“OK, Apple Guy,” Brad said when her tape was over. “Time for bed.”
“Can I sleep in your bed?” she begged.
“No,” he said firmly.
“Oh, please? Please-oh-please-oh-please.”
“Well . . .”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“Just one more night,” Brad said, trying to put some authority into his voice.
“I can just see it when she’s sixteen and wants the keys to the car.” Thomasine chided him. “Any bets on how the old marshmallow here will respond?”
Brad shot her a dirty look, but it was in jest. “Come on, Apple Guy,” he said, patting Abbie’s bottom and heading her toward the staircase. “Say good night to everyone.”
“Good night, Thomasine. Good night, Charlie.”
“Good night, Abbie,” the guests said together.
Brad and Abbie went up the stairs. A few minutes later Brad descended alone.
“She’s been having night mares lately,” Brad explained to Charlie. “I’ve been letting her sleep in my bed.”
“Nightmares?” Charlie repeated.
“Nightmares. On and off for a couple of weeks now.”
“Tell me about them,” Charlie said.
“Just ordinary kids’ nightmares, that’s all,” Brad answered, uncertain why his guest would be so interested.
“About a wolf?”
“No. A dinosaur.” Brad was becoming irked. There was something accusatory in Charlie’s voice.
“Any particular kind?”
“Yes. A flying dinosaur. A rhamphorhynchus, to be precise.”
“What does it look like?”
“An oversize vulture, is as near as I could describe it. Why?”
“Just curious.”
“Nightmares are pretty common with kids that age,” Brad said, launching into his mini-discourse on Childhood Fears and Their Subconscious Manifestation. He wasn’t about to tell this stranger what he believed the real cause of Abbie’s sleep disturbances was: Heather. “Kids are full of fears, which find their subconscious expression in bad dreams. It’s actually a healthy process, from what little I’ve read. Sort of the mind’s pressure-relief valve. Harmless, if momentarily scary.”
“That’s one explanation,” Charlie said.
“And what’s another explanation?” Brad shot back, more angrily than he intended. He wasn’t sure he wanted Charlie to answer. Was it possible he’d found out about Heather, the way he’d found Abbie’s nickname?
“Sometimes dreams have greater meaning,” Charlie said. “Meaning that we may not at first understand, may never understand, especially if we don’t try to understand. And not everyone wants to try. I think Thomasine, whose work in anthropology has opened her mind to how other races and peoples see dreams, would have to agree.”
“I would,” she said. She thought of Primitive Culture, the 1871 book by Edward B. Tylor, one of the great classics in the field. Dreams and visions were eloquently, if chauvinistically, discussed in it.
“Sometimes dreams can be warnings,” Charlie went on. “Sometimes dreams can be real events that we may misinterpret as wanderings of the sleeping mind. Adults especially may be prone to that mistake.”
Since Jimmy’s snare lesson, Charlie had been preoccupied with an old story his father had told him. He couldn’t seem to get it out of his mind. (And yet it was nothing like the obsession it would soon become.)
“Let me give you an example,” Charlie continued. “There’s an old legend that many years ago, before the white man came—at a time when only Quidnecks and Mahicans and Pocumtucs walked these woods—the children of a certain Quidneck village began to be sick. By day they were fevered and complained of aches and chills. Sleep brought no relief; at night, they said, they were visited by spirits that took the form of bears, wolves, giant vultures, flying snakes. Their natural interest in the woods vanished, and they became tired and listless, preferring instead to remain by the village fires, or the corn patches, or in their wigwams and longhouses.
“At first the mothers thought little of it. They knew that children are always getting sick, just as they are always getting better again very q
uickly. The natural order of things. But these children did not get better, and when, after days and days, when the children were so sick the mothers began to fear they would die if something were not done, they called in the village powwow.”
Brad had heard the term, but only in the context of annual gatherings of Indians—what he considered tourist attractions. The kind of event he’d been telling Abbie about.
“Not that,” Charlie said, as if he’d been able to reach into Brad’s mind again and pluck the thought lying on the surface. Unconsciously Brad swallowed. “I mean what you would call a medicine man or a priest.”
“Shaman, to an anthropologist,” Thomasine added.
“Correct. The powwow examined the children, and he spent nights with them in their wigwams, days with them by their mothers’ sides. He listened to them tell of their dreams. He took notice of other omens. The weather, which had turned sour, destroying crops. Animals acting strangely. Finally, he withdrew into the mountains to ponder what he had seen. While he was gone, the earth shook and the clouds opened and the thunder came. All of the children of the village—there must have been twenty-five or thirty—were sick, and none was getting better. The whole village was frightened. By now it was very clear that some terrible evil spirit was at work.
“The powwow emerged two days later, very shaken and upset. During his time on the mountain—the mountain we today call Thunder Rise—he had seen both Cautantowwit, the Great God of Good, and Hobbamock, the Great Evil Spirit. It was Hobbamock, and spirits under Hobbamock’s control, that were making the children so sick. And it was those spirits taking the forms of wolves and flying serpents that were visiting the children at night. The powwow did not see them—they showed themselves only to children—but he sensed their presence. That’s what reminded me of this whole tale, the fact that they were not nightmares, but actual spirits.”
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