Comes a Time for Burning

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Comes a Time for Burning Page 29

by Steven F Havill


  “You managed some sleep?” Thomas asked. Hardy looked rumpled and a little pasty, and he smelled strongly of wine.

  “Well,” and Hardy waved a hand in dismissal. “A little burgundy to kick the system, and if I can find a coffee pot, I shall be entirely happy. You, on the other hand, look a wreck, Doctor.”

  “If you’re going to be up for a bit, I want to go up to One-oh-one for a few minutes,” Thomas replied. “Bloedel, from the camp? He died earlier. I want a post, but I suspect heart failure.”

  “Isn’t it always, when we get right down to it.” Hardy said. “Patterson?”

  “He hangs on. He took a liter of salt solution at three. Perhaps another is called for now. Both Mrs. Whitman and Bertha are managing.”

  “Then we are content,” Hardy said. “And my regards to your brave wife, Thomas. We are going to benefit from her steadying hand within these walls. Take good care of her.”

  “Exactly my purpose at this moment, Lucius.”

  Walking the six blocks, Thomas caught the strong fragrance of scorched cedar as the light wind shifted this way and that. He entered One-oh-one and to his surprise found the kitchen bright with light and activity. Gert James, smelling of fresh lilacs, worked in her long robe at the stove. The dark circles under her eyes were the only hint of what the previous evening had brought. At the sideboard, she was slicing ham paper thin. A basket of fresh eggs stood near at hand.

  “Alvina is feeding the child, Doctor,” she greeted. “She is in the library.”

  “What time did Carlotta go home?”

  “I would suppose it was sometime after midnight. Her husband returned from the camps, and fetched her home.”

  “All went well? At the camps, I mean?”

  Gert glanced at him. “I did not hear the conversation, Doctor. I would suppose so. I did hear him say that he would visit down at the clinic, but there was still work to be done in the timber.” She regarded the ham critically. “Breakfast will be in just a few minutes. You will join us.” It wasn’t an invitation or query, but a flat command, and Thomas smiled.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “How is Mrs. Crowell?”

  “Grave.”

  “And Howard?”

  “He is resting at the moment. But this disease is persistent. It retreats, and then attacks with renewed ferocity.”

  “Dr. Hardy?”

  “He is with Howard as we speak.”

  “Good. I will be sending a basket down with you when you and Alvi return. The Pastor?”

  “I’m am surprised that Roland Patterson is still alive at this hour, Gert. He is desperately ill. He is beyond anything I can do for him.”

  Gert’s eyebrows rose ever so slightly. “We’ll see, then, won’t we.”

  Thomas wasn’t sure what she meant, and added, “If we can force enough fluids, maybe. If his heart will support it. We lost one of the loggers this morning. The Dutchman.”

  “You know…” Gert began, then Thomas saw her lips clamp tightly. She turned to face him. “When Dr. Haines…Alvi’s father…worked an epidemic at one of the Indian camps, everyone here in town was so afraid that he would bring the savages back to the clinic to treat them. That wasn’t so many years ago.”

  “Everyone…meaning Pastor Patterson?”

  Gert hesitated, and Thomas found himself wondering how her loyalties and beliefs must have torn her. “He tried to force the issue with Dr. Haines, to prevent…from that moment until Dr. Haines’ passing last year, they had not spoken.”

  “People are easily frightened, I think.”

  “I suppose they are.”

  “And Alvi should remain here, Gert,” Thomas said as he turned toward the kitchen door. “It’s not a question of fear. It’s a question of common sense. But I have been unsuccessful in my attempts to convince her.”

  The older woman shrugged as if to add, “I’ve said all I can say.”

  Thomas hesitated. “Gert—you did a brave thing. Thanks for last night.”

  A shoulder lifted a fraction. “Sometimes help has to be forced on people,” she said. “They don’t see it in time. Roland Patterson is a bit…starched, Thomas. If he survives, and by Heaven’s grace he will, it will be interesting to see if the collar loosens a bit.” She favored Thomas with a brittle smile.

  In the library, Alvi sat in front of a fire just large enough to temper the dampness, the only light to break the dim of pre-dawn. She wore a hugely voluminous robe, the infant lost somewhere in its folds. As Thomas entered, she was gazing into the bright yellow fire. She looked up at him and smiled.

  “It would seem that flame is the last thing I would want to see,” Thomas said. “But it’s soothing, isn’t it. John Thomas enjoys it, I suppose.”

  “He eats so much,” she said. “I feel as if he’s turning me inside out.”

  “I have only a few minutes,” Thomas said. “Gert demands that I have breakfast before I go back.”

  “You can’t keep this up, Doctor Thomas.”

  “I know. We should have some response from St. Mary’s today. Perhaps staff from there by mid-week.”

  “No one can wait that long,” she said. “You least of all.”

  “I trade off with Lucius. It is the nurses who suffer the most.”

  “I saw that,” Alvi said. “I am so sorry that Mrs. Crowell has fallen ill. You have hope for her?”

  “There is always that,” Thomas replied. “Always hope.”

  Alvi nodded and adjusted her son’s position. “Carlotta will return regularly as long as we need her. That way I may go down to the clinic for short periods.”

  “I suppose it’s a waste of breath for me to ask that you not do that.”

  “Why ever shouldn’t I? I am as skilled, as trained, as any—and more than most. A few hours each day won’t hurt me, and will provide some much needed relief.”

  “Berti said that you were with Elaine last night.”

  “Yes. I told her what had happened. I held her for more than an hour. And then she was finally able to cry, Thomas. She could not bear to look on her step-father, ill as he might be. And now she has no one.”

  “Patterson might yet live,” Thomas said.

  Alvi’s smile was thin. “As I said, she has no one.” She shifted the swathed infant, drawing him away from her breast. “My arms are paralyzed,” she said. “He’s a heavy brute.” She held him toward Thomas, who took John Thomas with nervous care. “You need practice, you see.”

  “Precious little time for that.”

  “You shall have the time, when all this is past. I want Elaine to live with us, if she’ll have us.”

  The statement came so unexpectedly that for a moment Thomas wasn’t sure he had heard her correctly. “Pastor Patterson may have something to say about that, Alvi. Should he survive the night, that is. And if not, then surely she has other relatives, does she not?”

  “None on this side of the continent, but that’s a choice for her to make,” Alvi said. “As you know, I can be most persuasive. We can.. and should…provide a home for her, Dr. Thomas. She can go to school, and then continue her medical studies. She must be encouraged in that direction.”

  “Medical studies?”

  “Of a certainty. Have you ever known someone of her tender years with such skills? Such sympathy for the work of the clinic? It is what she wants. We must provide the opportunity.”

  “She has told you this?”

  “In all ways but words. In any event, she must remain with us for some time. She has no home, after all. Should her step-father survive, we shall have both of them under our room for some time. We can’t just turn them out.”

  “We’ll have to see, then, won’t we.”

  “You sound unconvinced,” Alvi said.

  “But you will see to that,” Thomas laughed. He rocked John Thomas from side to side, enchanted with the tiny face and miniature hands, and then handed him back to Alvi. “If Elaine joins us, then it’s but thirteen more, Alvi. You’ll have your mantl
e photograph yet.”

  She smiled brilliantly. “Because she will join us not as a guest, but as a member of the family, Doctor Thomas. And what a marvelous thing that will be.”

  “First, we do what we can for Roland Patterson and all the others.” He frowned in thought. “And what an odd thing.”

  “Odd?”

  “Eleanor’s madness. In some ways, most calculating. She has removed the seat of contagion from the village with massive, bold strokes. Some one—I’ve forgotten who—told me a day or two ago that the best solution to the Clarissa’s problems would be the torch. We certainly expected no one to seriously entertain the idea.”

  “Come!” A commanding voice snapped from the library doorway. “A hot breakfast, and then you two can do what you must.”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  With the capriciousness so characteristic of the disease, the cholera outbreak in Port McKinney killed twenty-three before burning out. The last six deaths directly attributable to the outbreak occurred on May 17th and the morning of May 19th, 1892.

  At seventeen minutes after six on May 17th, Pastor Roland Patterson died after abruptly sitting up in bed, gesticulating and shouting, although no words issued from his parched mouth before he pitched back, senseless.

  Later that same day, the twenty-six-year-old logger Herb Bonner received two liters of mild salt solution to ease the thickening of his blood from dehydration, asked for a drink of iced champagne, and died before he had the chance to swallow.

  Hours later, logger Carl Curran suffocated after inhaling his own vomit.

  Of the young women from the Clarissa, three suffered long and complicated recoveries, and as soon as they were ambulatory, left Port McKinney for Seattle. Letitia Moore struggled until the early morning hours of May 19th, and then passed away after telling Bertha Auerbach that she felt well enough to walk home.

  At 8:12 AM on May 19th, fifty-two-year-old veteran nurse Adelaide Crowell died in her sleep after what appeared to be a restful and recuperative night.

  Four days later, sixteen-year-old villager Bennie Tuttle drowned while diving for the trove of logging chain flung into Jefferson Inlet by the explosion of the Willis Head.

  Thirty-nine-year-old ambulance driver and family friend Howard Deaton recovered fully, but fought a recurring infection in his leg. It killed him two years later, on Christmas Day, 1894.

  Lucy Levine, twenty-two, the first to be struck in the epidemic, survived the cholera, left Port McKinney never to return, and married a sawmill operator north of Bellingham, Washington.

  Carlotta Schmidt underwent surgery for breast cancer at the Port McKinney Clinic on May 28th, 1892, and died of recurring cancer three years later.

  Sonny Malone awoke from his month-long coma in June, 1892, to ask Dr. Thomas Parks what had caused the loss of all of his hair. Never returning to the big timber, Malone became a fixture around Port McKinney, although reportedly suffering from “mental aberrations.”

  Elaine Stephens, who had lost her entire family, lived with Thomas and Alvina Parks for six years, eventually completing her studies toward a medical degree. After completing University in Portland, she returned to Port McKinney to practice at the Parks-Hardy Clinic.

  By that time, the family portrait on the mantle at 101 Lincoln showed considerable progress toward Alvi’s goal.

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