"Huh!" he said, fumbling for his clothes. "Now we're in for it!" —
He wondered suddenly how much, if any, morphine he had downstairs. His right hand, sore when he went to bed, was sorer now. Manhandling Joel hadn't done it any good. He interrupted the lacing of his shoes to shake it, grunting; exasperated to have any use of his body impaired. Whether Sal Peters' heart could stand it would be something else again. A little of Verney's fooling with urinalysis would have been a help. Catch Verney letting a pregnancy get far without the scientific fixings! George Bull thought: "I guess I've seen pretty near fifteen hundred of them in my time!" The fact was, though, that sometimes you'd think nature was conspiring with science. In rough and readier days it seemed to him that what they didn't do hurt them remarkably little. Once you. equipped yourself to look for all kinds of trouble, the patients obliged you by having it.
Overhead in the darkened drive-way, the white moon, shrinking towards the last quarter, hung high behind the great bare elm tops. The cold engine was hard to start and he must have made quite a racket, for glancing over at the house, he saw Aunt Myra's capped head in her bedroom window, thrust out silent, without remark or gesture. The car finally clear of the garage, the throttle well open, he left it, crossed the hard sod and called up to her: "Peters. You go to bed."
"Now, George," she said, "why don't you wait a minute and I'll get you some coffee. It wouldn't take any time."
"I've got to run. Go to sleep."
Driving, he turned down towards the bridge road corner. Behind him arose a hard, rhythmic pulse, racing louder along the night. Past him, flashing through the successive barren pools of arc-light, came a solitary motor—a whine of tyres, a rush of torn air. Twin red tail-fights and a glow cast up on a North Carolina number-plate dipped away down US6W. "Long way from home," George Bull said.
He turned left towards the bridge, past the cemetery, past the extended rectangle of the school, lightless and lonely, a glint of moonlight on the gold cupola. The road down the river from the bridge was dirt, and badly rutted. His headlights, watery, picked out the sagging rails of the fence; the hemlocks hung, half undermined at the brink of the worn bank. On his right the underbrush opened suddenly at the bend, a wide swathe cleared to a mark, and fairly fronting him was set the widespread quadruple steel footing of a transmission line tower. Affixed to a cross bar shone back at him an enamelled sign, scarlet skull and crossed femurs—Danger of Death 220,000 volts. A ruined stone wall began, ran with him through the brush a thousand yards and ended. The dying trees of an over-grown orchard, a lost hedge of lilac before the open foundations of a vanished farm-house, went by. Rounding the rocky out-thrust of the hill he came carefully down, rumbled on a narrow wooden bridge. Up on the other side he could see a light through the saplings. He turned into the barnyard of the Peters' farm and shut off his engine.
Pa Peters hobbled from chair to chair, gabbling this and that, his thin hair shining in the lamplight. His son Jeff was sulky, but concerned, too. Pregnancy was a woman's hard luck; eclampsia was a condition past his understanding; but blindness was easy to understand and no one could encounter it unmoved. The outlook, George Bull saw at once, couldn't have been worse. Sal Peters was a heavy woman, and between her fat and the advanced distension of her breasts it was impossible even to hear the weak heart without turning her over. She managed to down what was probably too little of an infusion of digitalis; and the convulsions had better be met with chloroform, not morphine. The results were not encouraging and by five o'clock it was plain that she was going to get rid of the foetus. There was a chance that, this once done, she would show an improvement. Since she lost a good deal of blood in the process, she seemed to improve; but at six the convulsions started again. At half-past six, she was dead.
The person most upset about it seemed to be Betty Peters, perhaps more because of her own long history of sexual miseries—she had begun at fifteen by spending a night with a group of men from Sansbury in a tobacco barn—than because of affection for her sister-in-law. Overcome by the bloody, painful nastiness of life, or the gradual loss of it, seen now in the close room for six night hours, she proceeded to have hysterics.
In no mood for patience, Jeff yelled: "Shut up, you lousy whore, before I kill you!" Pa danced around in a senile ecstasy of alarm, squealing. The best way out seemed to be to give both Pa and Jeff sleeping tablets. A fractional shot of the unrequired morphine did for Betty. Thus, by half-past seven, George Bull could leave them; three variously drugged, one dead; the house shut up, bleak and grey under the cold blue morning sky. Crossing the bridge into New Winton, he could hear the bells of St. Matthias's ringing briefly for Holy Communion.
The sun, just over the thin woods crowning the Cobble, had reached the green—a bridge flood across its windy, wintry desertion. Rounding the corner, George Bull was in time to see Miss Kimball, pinched and breakfastless, entering the doors of St. Matthias's, her solitary shadow preceding her. Doctor Wyck came out of the rectory then, clad in a black cassock, and crossed the lawn diagonally between the maples to the sacristy door.
In front of Weems' garage a man in a slate-coloured uniform, with black leather leggings, ammunition-filled cartridge belt and heavy revolver, and the triangular yellow shoulder tab of the State Police, stood astride his halted motor-cycle. His face was red with cold around the goggles; his ears crimson against the edges of his cap. The wooden shutters of Bates' store were in place, covering the windows; the doors locked, the steps deserted.
New Winton would always look like this on Sunday morning, but to George Bull, knowing in how many houses people were sick, there seemed to be a stupefied paralysis, a cowering indoors as though the plague were abroad. The steady cold wind eddied noisily around his car; he rattled on up the wide white expanse of concrete.
A little smoke whirled off the lip of the chimney at the back of the Bull house. That must mean that Aunt Myra had a fire going, and he was helped by the promise of breakfast. Halting the car before the open door of the barn, he got out. His eye caught, he went to the threshold then. From the floor, just inside, he bent and picked up the bright object. It was a long, clean bread-knife.
Holding it, perplexed to account for its presence, he was attracted by a muffled, groaning sound. He walked forward at once to the first of the old, shadowed stalls. "Well, I'll be damned!" he said aloud. "Come out of there!"
The figure huddled on the dusty boards in the corner against the splintered, cobwebbed manger made no move, so he went in. "What's the trouble, Mrs. Talbot?" he said. He drew her to her feet, and, compellingly, out into the better light. "That yours?" he asked, pointing to the knife, put down beside his bag. "You'd better not carry things like that around. You'll hurt yourself."
Her mouth, twisted as though she had bitten a lemon; her eyes, angry and injured under the tangle of hair imperfectly pinned up, smeared now with cobwebs, made her look like one of those fantastic, miserably sinister women whose surfeit of misfortunes might once have started the idea that she had some to spare, could visit them on others. An earlier New England, in social and religious self-defence, had sometimes felt that hanging such people was its disagreeable duty. To remove her cheaply and for ever from human society no means existed but interring her in the ground. Now, at Middletown, the State of Connecticut had a tomb for incurable witches. Impersonally patient, the state provided for their disappearance with a certainty never reached by the haphazard methods of a magistrate or a crowd. One could hide from the rope or evade the hunters; the state's lethal process was old age and decay.
George Bull didn't pretend to the experience or diagnostic skill which would entitle him to an opinion. If he had to make a guess, he'd say it was a depressive phase of a mild manic-depressive psychosis. Perhaps no more than a cyclothymic case, coming and going; but all the odds were that it would come oftener and go more reluctantly. He didn't believe that she was or would be actually dangerous. The knife probably had to do with some notion of defence, not of attack— s
ome half-hearted effort to repair the exhausting helplessness felt from a general psycho-motor retardation. More contemptuous than not of the unwieldy jargon of this uncertain science, he said, "Well, one thing about it; you must be pretty cold."
"Get in," he added, opening the car door. "I think you'd better go home now."
She simply stood still looking back at him, so he bundled her in. Going back, he got his bag, opened it and pulled out a half-pint flask of whisky. Unscrewing the metal cup cap he filled it. "Drink it!" he said to her.
Plainly she was unwilling. She backed away feebly on the seat, and he said: "All right, don't. I'm not going to argue with you."
Regarding the poured whisky a moment, he swallowed it himself, screwed back the cap, snapped the bag shut. Going round to get in at the other side, he saw her struggling with the door handle, intent on getting out. Reaching across, he knocked her hand down.
They were rounding the corner to go along the east side of the green when, with stealth and an unexpected, or accidental, competence, she did get the door open. George Bull roared, grabbing at her; but the cloth he caught tore away in his hand, the door swung wide, and she banged against it, falling.
Veering almost off the road, George Bull drew his brake. Mrs. Talbot lay perhaps ten feet behind. They had been travelling slowly and she demonstrated how little she had been hurt by scrambling now to her feet. Turning, she scurried across the road, over the path, and down past the library. Since she was headed for home, George Bull decided that she-was probably going there. Seeing that any sort of pursuit would only make her more frantic, he sat at the wheel, shaking his sore thumb, watching. Stumbling along the back fence, past woodsheds and antiquated outhouses, she had got as far as the Tuppings'. There she suddenly turned in, darting out of sight! Unexpectedly clear in the Sunday morning stillness, George Bull could hear her beating on the back door.
"Hell and damnation!" he exploded. Stamping on the self-starter, he got the stalled engine started again, swept with a low-geared roar down the back street to the Tuppings' gate.
May, her hair pulled back and knotted behind, was as white as the long hem of nightgown showing below the skimpy bathrobe tied round her. She opened the dôor only a little; but, grasping the edge, George Bull moved it back, out of her paralysed hands, closed it behind him. He could see now the cause of May's horror. Mrs. Talbot, though certainly hurt in no serious way, had taken most of the skin off her cheek-bone and the left side of her forehead. Blood, flowing, reached her chin in wet, scarlet trickles. George Bull almost recoiled himself before the shocking result.
He said: "She's all right. Jumped out of the car, but it's just a little skin off. Found her hiding up in my barn and started to drive her home. Got any hot water? Well, cold will do; in a basin. Bring it here and I'll fix her up. Get some clothes on, will you? I want to take her over to her place and lock her up. We'll try to get Mrs. Darrow from Banning's Bridge. When Verney comes up, we'll see what can be done. It isn't safe to leave her around."
Probably exhausted by her escapade, Mrs. Talbot made now no protest or resistance. "You shouldn't get out of a car until it stops," he said. "But you're all right this time."
Pressed to sit down on a chair by the table, she remained lax, her back rounded in a weak flexion, her hands dropped open on her lap, her bloody face bent forward, chin on breast.
A little water slopped over the edge of the shallow basin as May set it down. "Make some coffee," George Bull said. "We'll try some on her when I get her patched up-—" He glanced at May and added, "Brace up! Nothing to cry about!"
"I'm not," May said.
"What's the trouble? Up all night?"
She nodded. Finding her voice again, she said: "But what am I going to do? I can't take care of him. He can't stay, by himself —"
"I'll look at him in a minute. Go and make that —"
When she came back with the coffee-pot and a cup, clad now in a grey jersey dress, he was affixing the adhesive tape to hold in place the upper patch on Mrs. Talbot's face. "That's better," he nodded. "Get a couple more cups and we'll all have some. Don't worry, we'll get Joe off your hands."
"I don't want him off my hands. I just want —"
"Huh!" George Bull said. "Unless you can hire two nurses, like the Bannings, I guess you haven't much choice in the matter. Go on; get those cups. I haven't had any breakfast."
As well as one hundred and eleven children, eighty- seven adults, most of whom lived in houses where there was already a case, had each received on Saturday five hundred millions of typhoid bacilli in polyvalent strains sensitized with serum from highly immune horses. Monday, they all took a thousand million more. Wednesday they got a last thousand million.
This would presumably arrest the spread by infection from new sources; but on Wednesday there were thirty-nine unquestioned cases and six or seven highly likely ones. Tuesday afternoon, which was ominously early in the course of the disease, Ralph Kimball died.
The solitary state policeman seen by George Bull astride his motor-cycle in front of Weems' garage on Sunday morning, had been reinforced. Above and below New Winton, US6W was half-closed with a barrier where motor traffic was requested to proceed straight through. In New Winton the state of siege and emergency had reached a high point on Monday. This sickness, not respecting person or position, in prostrating forty people had picked several in simple ways indispensable to ordinary life. Worst hit was the railroad. It was noon Monday before the Chief Train Dispatcher understood that at New Winton there was no one in the railroad's employ able to get out of bed. Signals were consequently not placed. Early trains, milk coming down, mail coming up, halted, put out flag-men and torpedoes, finally telephoned the Danbury yards for enlightenment. The resulting tie-up took half the day to straighten out. A head-on collision and a dozen derailed cars could hardly have done more.
Monday, Helen Upjohn came down with typhoid. Since Geraldine was sick already, and those two were the ones experienced in handling the post office work, even on its much-belated arrival the mail remained in the bags. Walter Bates was a long while in resuming his titular office of Postmaster, for he was engaged, as First Selectman, in interviewing Jethro Evarts.
Jethro, though he had not lived in the house since his wife died, refused to allow it to be used. Remote, almost impregnable in his complete deafness and partial blindness, his refusal had at first been absolute; then, conditioned by a demand for rent. At that point Doctor Bull, who had come with Walter Bates, departed. He went and broke in the door, started Grant Williams and Harry Weems and Howard Upjohn working on the furnace. Mr. Bates stayed to reason, finally convincing Jethro's sister, with whom Jethro lived. While the old man watched her suspiciously, not able to hear what she was saying, she told Walter, all right, to use it anyway; and there was no need to pay Jethro anything. She would see that he didn't get out, so he would never know about it. When Jethro pushed his pad over for her to write down what it was, she scribbled Nothing that concerns you.
Arriving triumphant with this irregular permission, Mr. Bates found the house wide open, Mrs. Foster and Mrs. Baxter on their knees scrubbing floors, all the furniture jammed in one room, and three nurses from the Torrington hospital making up a variety of cots. In the cellar Howard could be heard banging and hammering around the furnace; Harry Weems and Grant were unloading a Ford truck on the lawn; from another truck Eben Quimby was uproariously dumping a load of coal down a chute. Parked in the overgrown drive was Doctor Verney's shining car.
Seeing that the key entrusted to him was not really needed, Mr. Bates decided not to bother them. He still had all the mail to sort.
Tuesday, nineteen patients had been moved in. One was Helen Webster and May stayed on the switchboard until half-past ten that night. At six the next morning, Doris, coming to relieve her sister, found Clara so sick that it was necessary to telephone her father to come down and bring her home—she couldn't possibly drive the car back to Truro. Until the telephone company could arrange for reli
ef, May and Doris would work on twelve-hour shifts. Wednesday morning, the Reverend Doctor Wyck, who had intended to bury Ralph Kimball that afternoon—Howard didn't consider, it prudent to embalm him, so they had to be prompt about it—took to his bed. At the Evarts' house, Doctor Verney, stopping a moment on his way to the Bannings', was joined in anxious conference with Doctor Bull over Larry Ward, sunk in what gave every sign of being a fatal coma. His case had chosen to complicate itself with pleurisy. .
Just before noon, Henry Harris, leaning against the door jamb of the post office, was reading his way patiently through the New York Times, in no hurry to reach the editorials. The news was done with, the rectangles of advertising grew bigger, but sometimes space enough was left for a column or so of something, and Henry Harris scanned whatever it was.
On page eleven he was rewarded. The word, New Winton, in nine-point surprised him. This smallest possible headline topped an inch and a quarter paragraph inserted at the bottom of the second, almost filled column of a minor political story. Typhoid at New Winton Traced to Water.
Henry Harris began to smile, warming, New Winton, Conn., March 11th. An outbreak of typhoid fever in the village of New Winton, Litchfield County, was being investigated by the State Department of Health and local cases of the disease and one death had been reported. The investigation, officials said, had disclosed that all patients had drunk water from the local reservoir, made turbid by recent rains.
"Short and sweet," he thought; unreasonably delighted by the empty, perfunctory sentences; the figures no longer current; the mean obscurity of place. Aloud, he said, "That'll teach us, I guess!"
Chuckling, he hesitated a moment, for really to appreciate it one had to see the whole page, the rambling political hand-out, the fluently-sketched group, of pert, slight girls with their long legs and flaring panties enriched by Puerto Rican needlework for $2.97; but, after all, who would appreciate it but himself? With his finger-nail he detached the small oblong of print, turned and went into the post office. Borrowing a thumb tack from the lower corner of an official notice, he pinned his story in the centre of the worn board.
The Last Adam Page 20
