by David Nickle
§
He didn’t have to get that far to find her. She was on her back, a great slash across her throat, beside a rain barrel next to the barn. Her hands were still clenched in fists, as though she were still alive, waiting for another fight to come.
Andrew reached down with trembling hands and opened those fists, uncurling each finger. He smoothed her hair back. He tried to lift her but that was beyond him. So he reached down and shut her eyes—the last grace he could give her. He left her there under the trees, and made for her house.
The door hung open when he came upon it. He approached it slowly, under the sensible assumption that whoever had done this could well be still inside. But the cabin was uninhabited. It had been ransacked; blankets tossed onto the floor, furniture overturned.
Just as Andrew had heard the call drawing him away from this place, the killers had heard a call drawing them here.
And they’d found what they’d come for.
The dead infant Juke in its pickle jar. All that was left of it were shards of glass and the now-familiar stink of it. Otherwise, it was as if it had never been there.
Andrew didn’t have to search long for the other thing he sought: the tea that kept the Juke at bay.
Norma kept a bin near the fire, and the killers had missed it. It made sense, as Andrew thought about it. They might not have any idea about what the mixture signified. And once they had the Juke—well, they had what they sought.
But the scent of the herbs was unmistakable—sweet and earthy and fine. He found a cloth, wrapped the concoction into a ball the size of a small roast, and put it into the medical bag. Then he went back outside.
He walked through the village not looking down or to the side, back to the path that had brought him here. He would make for the clearing where he’d fought off the Juke, and then the logging road beyond it back to Eliada.
It took all his will not to look down as he passed the barn—not to wonder whether it really was Norma’s spirit, freed from flesh by a slash across her throat, who had come to him at the conclusion of his battle with the Juke. A man might conclude such a thing; that the visitation coming after a true but yet-unknown demise, was evidence that Andrew Waggoner really had seen Heaven, really had been offered his salvation.
Andrew spat as he entered the woods. He would not entertain such thoughts. He would be no good to anyone—not himself, and certainly not Jason Thistledown, the boy to whom he owed his life and who, Andrew was certain, was in very grave peril indeed.
18 - Compassion. Community. Hygiene.
“It’s not infected,” said Annie Rowe. “Even with a half-working hand, Dr. Waggoner did well by you.”
She pulled the bandage back further, and Jason flinched, though the pain turned out less than he feared. “In a day or two we can take out the stitches,” she said.
Jason peered down at the wound. It was the morning of the third day since he’d sliced his hand in the quarantine, and it was indeed looking better; the flesh was pink and tender where the black stitches held it together. It itched more than it hurt.
“Hold still,” said the nurse, as she dipped a ball of cotton into a jar of alcohol and dabbed it on the wound. Now that stung. Jason looked away, up at the skylight of the operating theatre where Nurse Rowe had brought him to do the work. It was, she said, the cleanest place in Eliada, this operating room. It was also—next, maybe, to the storeroom behind the autopsy—the quietest.
Neither of them wanted to go down to the autopsy. So here they were.
“Thank you,” said Jason, and Nurse Rowe said: “Just doing my work here. Stop moving.”
“I’m not moving,” he protested. “I didn’t mean thank you for looking at my cut. I know that’s your job. I mean—”
“Hush. I know what you meant.” She eyed him over the spectacles she wore for fine work. She set his hand down on the table and reached around for a roll of fresh gauze. “He got away all right?”
“He did,” said Jason. It had been two days since Nurse Rowe had helped Jason gather the doctor’s bag and everything else. Jason had figured he could trust her, owing to their adventure the night of Dr. Waggoner’s escape, and she hadn’t betrayed that trust. But he hadn’t felt safe coming to see her after he saw Dr. Waggoner off. It might tip off Bergstrom, or those fellows who were responsible for breaking into the doctor’s rooms. Sam Green had promised to protect Jason best he could—but he’d given no word as to Annie Rowe’s safety. So Jason decided he wouldn’t talk to her again without an excuse.
That excuse came this morning, when after breakfast in the apartments he shared with Germaine Frost, his aunt suggested he have his hand seen to.
“I would change those bandages myself,” she said, as she straightened a stack of fresh index cards on the roll-top desk she’d been given for her work. “But I’m quite occupied with the catalogue. There are more than a thousand souls here. You should avail yourselves of the facilities.”
“You want me to go see Dr. Bergstrom?” Jason had been avoiding Bergstrom, lest he find some new pretext to toss Jason back into the quarantine.
Aunt Germaine might have been worrying about the same thing. “No,” she said. “Aside from everything else, Dr. Bergstrom has more to do than inspect stitches and change bandages. Go, Nephew. Go find a nurse. And then find some fresh air and exercise.”
So Jason went—and made it a point not to find a nurse until he located Annie Rowe, seeing to a couple of new mothers in the maternity ward on the first floor. They made an appointment to meet in the operating theatre an hour later.
Now, Nurse Rowe listened hungrily as Jason told the story of Andrew’s escape. He told her everything, except how he found out that Andrew might be in trouble. “That’s a promise I made,” said Jason, “and I keep my word.”
“I won’t make you break your word,” she said, and cut a square of gauze. “I just pray he’s safe.”
“Safer than here,” said Jason. “Everybody keeps talking about this place as Utopia. I don’t know about that.”
“You don’t like it here?”
Jason laughed. “Oh it’s fine,” he said.
He’d spent the previous day out of the hospital, wandering the town while Aunt Germaine did her eugenics work. He could see how someone had set down a plan for it. The workers all lived in fine little houses in three roads, not one bigger than another, with space in back for a garden and some livestock. The roads were muddy, but they were wide—wide enough for little gardens in the middle. What he’d first thought was a church was a town hall, with space inside for big meetings and that motto—Compassion. Community. Hygiene.—repeated again and again where the walls met the ceilings.
The fellow who seemed to run the place told Jason they ran lessons for the young people two days out of the week from there. When the children of Eliada got a little bit older there’d be a proper school for them. In the meantime: would Jason like to stop by and learn some things?
Jason got out of there as fast as he could. He spent a little more time inside the sawmill. He would have stayed longer, watching the men run logs across the great whirling saw-blades, thinking how this was a kind of family he could join, something he could be. But a foreman spotted him and ushered him out into the road and Jason put thoughts of being a lumberman aside for another day.
In the end, he had wandered the town like he had wandered the train from Butte—hoping to catch a glimpse of pretty Ruth Harper, and finding other things instead.
“It’s a fine town,” said Jason. “Yet look what happened.”
Nurse Rowe gave a wry smile. “There’s no such a thing as Utopia, really. Not on earth. And for a Negro, that’s doubly true.”
“If that’s right,” said Jason, “I have to wonder why he’d come here. Why you’d come here, come to think of it. Seems like a long way to go to live a life as hard as you’d find anywhere else.”
“Wise boy,” said Annie.
Jason shrugged, and she laughed.
�
��Just because this place isn’t Utopia now, doesn’t mean it can’t be,” said Nurse Rowe. “There are ideals at work.”
Jason looked at Nurse Rowe sidelong. “Ideals. Like eugenical ideals?”
“Eugenical? Did you make that word up?”
“Maybe I did,” said Jason. “Eugenics is how I heard it. You know about eugenics.”
“I do. Mr. Harper speaks of it sometimes, as one of the pillars of Community. It’s all tied up with Hygiene.” She pointed to the door they’d come in. There were those words again, hung over the frame: Community. Compassion. And Hygiene.
“Mr. Harper?” Jason held out his hand so Nurse Rowe could wrap bandage over the gauze. “Haven’t met him yet. I met his daughter. Not him. I suppose I will at that picnic on Sunday. You two talk a lot?”
The bandage wrapped quickly, and Nurse Rowe cut it with a pair of scissors. “Oh no,” she said. “But I listen to him speak. He’s an inspiring fellow, is Mr. Garrison Harper.” She sat back on her stool, smoothed down her skirts. “It weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be here.”
Jason flexed his fingers and looked at the bandage. This one was better than the one Dr. Waggoner had put on him. That first bandage had started to peel back almost immediately. Nurse Rowe knew her bandaging.
“My aunt says she got inspired by a fellow like that,” he said. “Dr. Davenport was his name. He was lecturing at nurse school.”
“Well Dr. Davenport never came to lecture at my ‘nurse school.’ I heard Mr. Harper speaking in Chicago, in . . . the summer of 1907, I believe.”
“Didn’t know he went around making speeches. Did he have a tent like a preacher?”
“He might have in some of the other places he visited,” said Nurse Rowe. “He could get worked up as any evangelist. This one was in a hall. At the old World’s Fair grounds. I was accompanying my father, who had thought he might like to invest some money in Mr. Harper’s project.”
“Your pa was a rich man?”
“No,” said Nurse Rowe, and she tucked her chin against her neck as she rolled the remaining gauze back up and considered. “Not for lack of trying. But it seemed my father only ever had enough money to lose. He didn’t play cards, thank Heaven. But he fancied himself a speculator. When I was a little girl, he lost a great deal of money buying a stake in a gold mine in Montana that wound up a fraud. He had more success with real estate in the crash, and he was better at being a landlord. But that is not a rich man’s avocation. Not always.”
“So he got you worried,” said Jason, “that he might go and give Garrison Harper all the rest of your property—and you came along to see that he didn’t.”
Nurse Rowe covered her mouth to stifle another laugh. “You are a wise boy,” she said. “Young man. Excuse me. You’re a wise young man.” She looked up to the skylight, and leaned back on her stool. “I went along with him for exactly that reason,” she said. “And I wanted to see the World’s Fair, or what was left of it, one more time. You’d be too young to remember it—I am barely old enough. But my goodness . . . what a fantastical place it once was. The whole affair was strung with wires. Wires and electric lamps. It glowed like a fairyland after dusk. And in one of the pavilions—a scientist called Tesla put giant steel globes on poles and made lightning jump between them. You don’t forget a thing like that.”
Jason could see how. He’d first seen an electric light at work less than a month ago, in Butte. That tiny spark of brightness was enough to drop a fellow’s jaw. A man directing lightning from one ball to another? That was the business of old Zeus.
“Of course, by the time Mr. Harper set up his podium there, Dr. Tesla was long, long gone. The entire place had gone to seed. Many of the buildings had been torn down, and the pavilion that Mr. Harper had hired . . . well, it had seen better years. The paint on its entryway was peeling, and inside the plasterwork was crumbling. The pavilion still had some electricity, though. Enough to shine a very bright spotlight on Mr. Harper, and to run a projector to show some photographs on a sheet he’d hung from an archway.”
“Sounds fancy,” said Jason. Nurse Rowe smiled, like he’d been joking.
“I went in there thinking I’d just get my father out of there as soon as possible. As it turned out, I didn’t have to worry. Nothing Mr. Harper said did anything to convince Father that the mill-town in Eliada was a sound investment. I remember the tram ride home; he listed off all the problems. Eliada would be a logging town with nowhere to market its wood: the Kootenai flows north into wilderness in the Canadian territory The railway stops fifty miles or more south of Eliada, and Sand Point was already filling whole trains with wood. And stacked against all that, he said that Harper’s scheme to pay and look after his workers—it amounted to charity! He figured Harper for a mad socialist. He used those words. ‘He’s just another mad socialist, Annie. Best keep clear.’”
“You call this keepin’ clear?” Jason gestured with his bandaged hand.
“Well, when he said that, it caused me to think maybe Garrison Harper was a mad socialist. And maybe I was too. It was a fine speech. You haven’t met Mr. Harper yet, so you don’t know how he can be.”
“He’s a convincing fellow is he?”
“He convinced me,” said Nurse Rowe. “I’d just finished learning nursing at the American Medical Missionary College and was starting work at the Hinsdale Sanatorium. Don’t suppose you know about those places either, coming from where you do?”
“I know about missionaries. They spread the word of Jesus.”
“Word and deed,” she said. “The college taught me what I know about nursing; the Sanatorium taught me the need for it. They were still working on it when I left it for Eliada, later that year. Made by good Christians, in a lovely well-off village, to minister and cure the fallen women of south Chicago. Some would come to the sanatorium. But we’d go visit more than that, in their homes . . . in their slums.”
“Slums?” That was a new word to Jason.
“Jason, I watched more babies born into filth and squalor—put those babies into the arms of their mothers, and left them in their cold, filthy shacks . . . more than I’d care to say. I don’t know if it was worse if their man had left, or if the cad was still sharing the roof. It broke my heart to see it, I swear.”
Jason put his hand on Nurse Rowe’s. “Better if they leave, if they’re that kind of pa.”
Nurse Rowe took a breath, and slipped her hand from under Jason’s. “And so,” she said, “when Mr. Harper stood in front of us, and said those three words—Community. Compassion. Hygiene.—it struck a chord in me. I remember how Father fidgeted beside me, when Harper explained how we could fiddle around the edges all we wanted—babies would still die in their mothers’ arms, until we got to work in the middle . . . fixed society up, top to bottom.”
“Or start a new one,” said Jason.
Nurse Rowe nodded. “That was when he had me. The missionaries . . . for them, the meek are rewarded in Heaven. It seemed to me that Mr. Harper was fixing to make a little bit of that Heaven right here. Before we left, I took down the address he gave—it was a lawyer’s office in Chicago—and a week later, I went there. To offer my services.”
“And you’ve been here since then. For—” he counted it in his head “—four years.”
“Nearly, yes.”
Jason thought about that. “You must’ve seen some things in that time,” he said.
Nurse Rowe shook her head and chuckled. “You are fishing, Mr. Thistledown,” she said. “You ask why I want to stay here in Eliada, and that’s a fair question. But I could ask the same of you.”
“I haven’t been here but two days,” he said.
“And yet—the things you’ve seen.” She bent forward and put her hand on top of his now. Her eyes found his, and he couldn’t look away. It may have been that, it may have been a shift in the cloud . . . but it seemed as though Nurse Annie Rowe was bathed in a strange light, like gold shimmering down from Heaven.
She went on: “Y
ou went into the quarantine,” she said, “and you drew your own blood. And you saw. And now you’re trying to find a way to talk about it.”
“I ain’t—” he began, but she stopped him.
“It’s all right, Jason,” she said, and gripped his good hand in hers.
Jason yanked his hand away. “No,” he said, “it ain’t.”
“It’s all right,” she said again, but she kept her hands to herself. “You’ve seen so much. You can let it go, in here. I won’t tell. It’ll be between you, and me, and Jesus Christ our Lord.”
“Jesus ain’t here,” he said.
Annie laughed once more and said, “Of course he is. All around us, Jason. Always. You know what Eliada means, don’t you?”
And then, for an instant, Jason thought that funny gold light showed him a row of teeth . . . Then he thought, No, I got her confused with someone else . . . and Jason pushed his bandaged hand underneath his arm, and pressed down hard.
“My aunt,” he said, through gritted teeth, “said I should see a nurse and get some fresh air. I have to go get some air now.”
Nurse Rowe nodded. And a cloud moved above the skylight—perhaps—and dimmed whatever light it was that rained upon her.
“I didn’t mean to press my beliefs,” she said. “I’m sorry. I thought it’d give comfort.”
“Don’t be sorry. I’m glad you like it here,” said Jason as he got up and headed to the door.
He spared a glance at the skylight—at the even ceiling of deep grey cloud—and he added, “Thank you for the bandaging and all.” He stepped out the door, and headed down the hallway toward the town, for his second tour of “Utopia” in as many days.
He wouldn’t run into Ruth Harper this time either, and Jason was fine with that. For the first time in many weeks, he thought of the solitude of winter on the farmstead, the quiet of Cracked Wheel in early spring . . . both places without God, or man.
