Fatal Elixir

by William L. DeAndrea

  It was not entirely a comfortable experience. I could understand the outrage of decent citizens; not because there was anything obscene about the dance but because it is unnerving to have one’s mind read.

  And I could understand how a lonely man like Stu Burkhart could see her do this for a few minutes, once, from a distance, and decide he was in love with her.

  She ended the dance with the same posture she’d used that morning in town, head thrown back, arms upraised. Then she quietly retrieved the robe and stepped back into it, holding it tight around her with crossed arms. She walked slowly and with dignity off the stage, never once looking at or acknowledging the audience that was applauding her.

  Herkimer let his fiddle drop. He announced that he was now ready to sell Ozono. He was wise. Nothing could follow that.

  10

  LIGHTS WERE ON IN the composing room when I got home from the orchard.

  Lobo Blacke had his glasses on and was reading a book. I took a look at the spine and was amused to see that it was FitzGerald’s translation of the Iliad.

  “How do you like it?” I asked.

  “Wait a second.” He read to the bottom of the page, marked his place, and put the book down.

  “Not bad. Good blood and thunder. I borrowed it from Merton. I figured if this fellow was one of his favorite writers—along with you and Shakespeare—that he probably had a copy. It’s interesting to see that these ancient heroes were just as big a bunch of fools and crybabies as men are today.”

  “I told you you’d like it.”

  “You’re home late.”

  “Sorry, Father,” I said.

  “Don’t try to give me any of that nonsense,” he said. “I’m just curious about the medicine show. Did it really last until”—he craned his neck to look at the clock—“nine-thirty?”

  It was ten o’clock now, so he’d given me a generous half hour to get home from the orchard. Even Posy wasn’t that slow.

  “Not the show itself,” I said. “That was over by a little past eight. But Herkimer was there selling Ozono till well after nine. You’ll have to expect a lot of miracles around town over the next few days.”

  Blacke smiled.

  “As for me, when the crowd broke up, I just sat on a rock under an apple tree while I tried to figure it out.”

  “Figure what out?” Blacke demanded. “They put on a good show; they make a good living.”

  “But that’s the point. They put on a great show. And the people here on the prairie are starving for entertainment. That’s why we do so well with the Witness, and you know it.”

  “It’s a good newspaper.”

  “I know it’s a good newspaper, and we all work hard to make it that way, but you know as well as I do we could print nursery rhymes and keep ninety-nine percent of our circulation. The Witness for most of them is something to rest their eyes on other than the horizon.”

  “Getting bored, are you? How about a beer?”

  “No, I’m not getting bored. And I’d love a beer.”

  I went out to the kitchen and found the nightly bucket he had delivered from the saloon in town carefully placed on ice, still cool, and with plenty of head left. I got my mug from the cabinet and poured myself some.

  As I rejoined Blacke, I said, “The thing I don’t understand is why bother with the medicine at all? The show itself was easily worth a dollar.”

  “Especially to us entertainment-starved western yokels.”

  “I never said yokels. I would have paid a dollar to see it, all right? I mean why taint the commerce in something that’s worth the money with a fake ‘miracle’ concoction that plainly isn’t?”

  Blacke scratched his neck. “That’s a good point, Booker. I can’t answer the question, but there is something I do know for a fact: Some people can’t stand to make an honest dollar. If they can’t trick it out of you, they’d just as soon not have it at all.”

  I took a pull on my beer, surprised at how good it tasted. I didn’t know how the farmers and the punchers got through a day of hard physical labor in this weather. In any weather, come to that.

  Blacke was reminiscing now. “I remember Five Aces Jones, down in Texas. He played poker like he read your mind; he knew cards the way I know outlaws. But it wasn’t enough for him. He got so good that the thrill wasn’t there for him anymore. No risk. So to put the thrill back, he started cheating.”

  Blacke nodded. “Worked, too. He got plenty thrilled. You never saw so much emotion in a face as there was in Five Aces just before that red-haired cowboy drilled him.

  “I remember another fellow—”

  I never got to hear about the other fellow, because just then there was a knock on the door of the office. Blacke wheeled himself to the front and pulled aside the curtain in the big window beside it to peek outdoors. Then he opened the door, and Merton Mayhew came in, out of breath.

  “Sorry to bother you so late, Mr. Blacke, Mr. Booker, but Pa’s out to the Simpkinses’ on a call, and sick people are showing up at the office, and Ma and I are swamped, and Ma wants to know if Mrs. Sundberg and Miss Rebecca can come over and help nurse them till Pa gets back.”

  “I’ll go ask them,” I said. “I’m sure they will. I’ll come over, too.”

  “You will?” Merton was shocked. There was the assumption in these parts (and most places back east, too) that nursing the sick was woman’s work. Merton undoubtedly felt he was stuck doing it because he had to.

  But to give my father his due, back in the days he thought he was raising me to be an officer, he had insisted that I learn the rudiments of nursing.

  “The men in your care,” he’d say in that tone he had, the tone of imparting the wisdom of the ages (as, I suppose, he was—men have been fighting since time began), “are your most precious asset. Anything you, as their commander, can do to preserve them in fighting condition you must do. Besides, it’s good for morale. You’ll be giving plenty of orders, son, that will get men hurt or killed. If you can give orders that will help relieve their suffering, or even do it yourself, the men will love you, and you will be a far more efficient officer.”

  As I’ve mentioned before, I never acquired the taste for giving orders, but relieving suffering was fine with me.

  “Yes, I’ll be along in just a few moments, after I talk to the women. What seems to be wrong?”

  “Fever. Vomiting. Intestinal pain. It’s stomach grippe, but worse than any I’ve ever seen.

  It was no laughing matter, but I suppressed the smile that sprang to my lips. Merton at that moment sounded exactly like his father.

  Then the spell broke, and he was a boy again. “Thanks a lot. I’d better get back to helping Ma.”

  With that he was gone, and so was I, upstairs one flight to Mrs. Sundberg’s room and knocked on the door.

  That was a mistake. She came to the door with her face white and her eyes terrified.

  “What is it?” she demanded, half afraid to know. “What do you want?”

  Then I remembered that the last time she had been awakened in what was for her the middle of the night, it was to receive the news that her husband, Ole, had been murdered by a highwayman. What I should have done was to have gone up another flight, awakened Rebecca first, then had her fetch Mrs. Sundberg. Cowardly, I admit, but some things just are women’s work.

  I hastened to reassure Mrs. Sundberg that the trouble didn’t touch her personally but that we were being called to help our neighbors.

  That was all she needed to know. The fear was gone, replaced by impatience at me for standing there when there was work to be done. She flipped her hand from me. “Go away, now. Shoo! Let me get dressed.”

  I was glad to oblige. When I got upstairs. I knocked good and loud on Rebecca’s door. I didn’t want to start ideas in her head that I was making surreptitious nocturnal visits.

  She opened the door sleepy eyed, not quite awake. Her thick honey hair was done in a braid, and made a blue flannel nightgown as provocative as the b
angles that the princess Farrah wore.

  I told Rebecca to blink a couple of times to wake up, which she did. When I could see about seventy percent of the blue, I told her of the summons.

  That popped her wide awake, and once again I was chased from her doorway so a woman could get dressed. I told her I’d meet her there, since I was already dressed, and she gave me a look but said nothing.

  I took the steps down two at a time. At the bottom, I had a surprise of my own. Lobo Blacke had struggled into his jacket and was just adjusting his hat.

  “I’m coming, too,” he said unnecessarily.

  From the defiance in his tone, I think he expected me to argue with him, so I double-crossed him. “The more the merrier.” I told him to lean forward in his chair, and as he did so, I smoothed out the wrinkles in the back of his jacket that he always gets when he puts the thing on by himself.

  “Stop fussing over me, for God’s sake,” he snapped. “What are you, my mother?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Now shut up.” I threw the door open, grabbed the handles on the back of the wheelchair, and pushed him out onto the walk.

  It was just a matter of a minute or so before we were at the doctor’s office. Helen Mayhew let us in. She was as small and plump as her husband and son were tall and lanky, and her usually jolly round face was now set grim and tight.

  “Thank God you’ve come,” she said shortly. “Take off your coats and get to work. Yes, you, Mr. Blacke. Wheelchair or no wheelchair, you can hold a man’s head while he’s sick.”

  So now, I helped him off with his coat, and we went into the next room.

  Somehow, it was the more horrible for there being no blood. Even I, a newcomer in the West, had become inured to some extent to scenes of carnage—from gunplay, or more frequently, from accidents involving cattle or horses or the vehicles horses pull.

  But this was something different. The moans of the victims, sounds and smells of retching, the feeble cries for help.

  Soon Mrs. Sundberg and Rebecca arrived, and we all did what we could. We placed wet compresses on fevered brows, held buckets and heads for those who needed it, and tried to find soothing and encouraging words for those who were still conscious enough to need them.

  It had become obvious that some of the nine people already here, on every available table and sofa, and some on blankets on the floor, were not going to survive. Jack Hennessy, the mountain of a blacksmith, already had cold, rubbery skin; he was moribund if not already dead. Others, though still evincing a thready pulse, had their eyes closed and could not be roused.

  Then there was a knock on the door. Cowardly again, I left that room of honor.

  I escaped nothing. There at the door was Jennie Murdo, carrying the limp form of her son, Buck, in her arms.

  Her face was a mask of anguish. She could hardly breathe through her sobs, let alone talk, but she was trying, gasping, “I gave him his medicine. That’s all I did, I gave him his medicine. He has his medicine every night at bedtime...”

  And then she started to scream.

  11

  I HAVE HAD A wide and varied experience with women for a man my age, but this was the first time I’d ever been confronted with one screaming and hysterical, and I didn’t know what to do.

  My first mistake was to try to take the boy with her.

  “What are you doing to my baby?” she screamed. “Leave my baby alone!”

  Next I tried to reason with her.

  “You came here to get help, didn’t you? I just want to bring Buck to where he can get help.”

  “You leave my baby alone!” she screamed, followed by more screaming without words.

  This was the point, onstage and in books, even the ones I used to write, where the woman is brought to her senses with a resounding slap, but I was loath to hit a woman in any event, and doubly reluctant to hit one with so many troubles.

  On the other hand, this screaming couldn’t be good for her. It wasn’t much good for me, either.

  As I stood there, agonizing over what I should do, Dr. Mayhew walked in and rescued me.

  “What’s this?” he demanded.

  The man looked like a walking corpse, his already cadaverous face showing an expression almost too angry and too grim to be that of a living man.

  I opened my mouth to speak, or rather to yell over the continuing, body-racking screams from Jennie Murdo, but Mayhew shook his head impatiently.

  “Never mind, I already know. A dose of Ozono. I have just left one hysterical woman over it—Simpkins is dead. How many are in there?” He gestured with his head toward the examining room.

  “Nine,” I said. “The boy makes ten.”

  “There will be more,” the doctor said. He looked at Jennie Murdo. “Sadly, I can do more for her than I can for the others.”

  He put his black bag down on a small table in the hallway, opened it, and drew out a bottle of laudanum. He didn’t even bother to measure it. He just grabbed the screaming woman by the nose, pulled her head back, and tipped a quantity into her throat. He held her nose until she swallowed, then let go.

  She was still sputtering for breath when he said, “She will quiet herself presently. Bring the boy inside when you have the chance. Try to catch her if she falls; the dose was obviously not exact.”

  He wasn’t through the door before his prediction came to pass. I turned back to the woman to find her eyes glassy and her starting, ever so slightly, to sway. I took the boy from her and laid him gently on the floor. Then I guided Jennie Murdo to a big armchair and sat her down. I lifted the boy in my arms and brought him into the examining room.

  The doctor turned away from a woman I did not know, who was whimpering and clutching her stomach. He felt Buck’s throat and lifted an eyelid.

  “Yes,” he said. “The boy is dead. Please place him over there.”

  It stunned me like a blow on the head. I had spent less than a minute talking to this child, but he had been so alive, such a boy of a boy, full of energy and concern about his ridiculous dog.

  I placed him down even more gently than before, near where the now-dead Hennessy lay.

  Mayhew now had a tube and a funnel and was doing things to the woman’s mouth.

  “Mr. Booker, Mr. Blacke. I believe a gastric lavage will not come too late to help this poor woman. I believe my wife and these dear ladies are doing all that can be done at the moment. If you would oblige me by stepping across the hall to my private office for a moment, I should like to have a few words with you.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. That was conscience. My feet and body were more than ready to go.

  The room was dark when we got there. I let the light spill in from the hallway and saw an oil lamp mounted on the wall and another on the doctor’s desk. I took out my match safe and lit them both, making the light as bright as possible. I wanted a lot of light after what I’d seen that night.

  By the time I’d finished, Blacke had already wheeled himself into the room. He spun over to the wall behind the doctor’s desk and was scowling at his diploma.

  “Why the hell,” he said irritably, “don’t they write these things in English, so you can know what the hell it says?”

  “It just says he’s a doctor, and he should be treated with the respect he deserves.”

  “Anybody who’s met the man can tell that.”

  “Why do you think he wants to talk to us?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “I have a suspicion,” I said. “I don’t like it.”

  That brought a bitter laugh from Blacke. “I like the delicate way you put things, Booker. I think that’s what makes you such a successful writer. Seven or eight dead already, and you let on as how you don’t like it. Booker, my friend, this town is teetering on the brink of destruction. Unless a lot of people use their brains, including at least one who doesn’t have any, this place won’t be worth living in.”

  I was about to accuse him of overstating the case at least as much as I had understa
ted it when the door opened and the doctor walked in.

  Dignified as ever, he said, “Gentlemen,” and nodded to us. He went to his desk; I sat in the chair facing him. Blacke, of course, had his own accommodation.

  Mayhew looked at us for a moment, inexpressibly weary. Then he heaved a shuddering sigh and buried his face in his hands. He sat that way for a full minute, breathing deeply. Finally he lifted his face and said, “Mr. Booker, Mr. Blacke. When this is over, if it ever is, I shall take the time to thank you and the ladies for what you have done tonight.”

  “We’ll consider the thanks as given,” Blacke said. “What do you want to tell us?”

  “From the look on your faces when you left the examining room, I think you already know. My son has told me that he mentioned to you that this malady reminded him of a severe grippe. I am proud of him. That was an excellent attempt at a diagnosis from an untrained boy who lacks the depraved imagination adulthood frequently forces on one. I, who do not suffer from such a lack, have a different diagnosis, and I am positive of it.”

  Blacke was nodding. “Poison.”

  “Metal,” I said. “Lead, or arsenic.”

  “Arsenic, without a doubt. The lavage worked; I was able to question the woman briefly before I came in here. The nausea, the gastrointestinal pain, the fever, the burning in the extremities. All the symptoms of acute arsenic poisoning were present. There is no reason to think they were lacking in the patients whom I did not get to question. Mr. Simpkins’s case was the same; I was called too late to save him.”

  “And all these people got hold of Ozono tonight, and couldn’t wait to put the miracle to work.”

  Blacke’s lips were a thin gray line. “Good God. Booker, how many bottles of that stuff did he sell?”

  “I don’t know. A hundred and fifty, two hundred. I do know that he ran out at one point with twenty or thirty customers left to serve, and Feathers came out and juggled some more to keep them happy while Herkimer went in to mix up another batch and pour it in the bottles.”