Winter Sisters

by Robin Oliveira

  Did bells ring like this on Easter?

  No. Easter came on Sunday. It wasn’t Sunday.

  Outside, wagons were creaking past. Someone set a lantern down near one window box. No one was hurrying. Hurrying would mean fire.

  So, it must be flood. In flood, there was always time.

  She and her father had once gone to the lapping edge of a freshet on Broadway and watched an eddy carry away bales of hay from an upturned packet boat. But she didn’t know whether they were above or below Broadway now. The Man wouldn’t tell them where they were. She knew only that after the Other Man had picked them up, he had driven them in his sleigh toward the river, and now train and boat whistles sounded almost all the time, and it felt as if they were so close that she sometimes dreamed that those sounds could carry them away like that eddy.

  Claire was still crying.

  Had the Man gone out? Sometimes he did at night, when the Other Man didn’t come. But she’d fallen asleep. Maybe they were alone. She couldn’t tell.

  Was he here? Where was he?

  Would he save them? Oh, she didn’t want to drown. Sometimes people did. That’s why they lived up high, her father told her. That’s why they lived up away from the river. Sometimes, the man’s voice in her dream sounded like her father’s. Come up! Come away! it called.

  She heard keys jangling in the lock, and a sliver of light from the opening door spilled down the stairs. Candlelight jounced around the basement, glinting off the shiny tip of the coal shovel.

  “Hello, doves,” the Man’s awful voice shrieked from the top of the stairs. “Don’t be afraid of those nasty bells. I’m here.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  At dawn, James Harley sputtered and reared upward onto his hands and knees, grabbing at a hellish pain at the back of his head. Wheezing, disoriented, he pulled his hand away. Blood was smeared across his palm. Stumbling to his feet, he took in the strange sight of the remnants of his winter coal bobbing on blackened water, a scrap of blanket drifting toward him, and a bed submerged under the opaque surface of the pooling mess. His brain worked hard to make sense of what he was seeing. He had lost something, he thought. Yes, that was it, something vaguely new and wonderful that had given him so much happiness of late. Woozy, he reached for a pillar. His shirt and trousers dripped with water. At his feet, the tip of his coal shovel protruded from the surface of the water. He picked it up. Staring at it, he tried to understand the odd confluence of seeping water, brutal headache, bloodied shovel, and the dispiriting sense of loss that now overwhelmed him.

  Water was rising past his ankles, seeping up from the ground, trickling through the walls, pouring in through the windows. He must get out of here; yes, this is what he must do. Driven by this sudden clarity, he dropped the shovel into the half foot of water rapidly overtaking his cellar and waded the few feet to the stairs. He climbed the wooden staircase on his hands and knees, fighting dizziness. Upstairs, he scrambled across the plank floor of his kitchen, staggering to his feet when he reached the back door. He flung it open. Water coursed down the alley. Two, six inches? More?

  Sunlight flickered off the water. His neighbors were spilling into the alleyway. One of them, a short, stout woman in a red kerchief, clung to a weathered fire escape. She had knotted a blanket around her chest, and from it came the muffled wailing of an infant. He knew the woman by sight, though not her name. She lived down the street, one of the many impoverished women whose boys wandered shoeless in the summer and hatless in the winter. Her boys clung to her, the youngest with one arm slung around her neck, his legs cinched around her waist, the older hanging onto the ties of her dirty apron. He was submerged to his waist at her side, wailing. The children’s high-pitched screams ricocheted off the water. The screaming finally accomplished what the water had not. It restored his foggy memory.

  Stricken, he turned. In his confusion, had he missed them? Left them in the cellar? Had he locked the door? Were they inside, drowning? Or had they somehow escaped upstairs? He replayed his awakening in his mind. Had the door to the cellar been open when he woke? Usually he locked it going in and out, but now he couldn’t remember.

  “In the name of God, James Harley, you’ve got to help me,” the woman cried.

  How would he explain Emma and Claire to anyone? Even if he could get down into the cellar and back again without being drowned, what would the girls do when they were free? Start talking, maybe. Tell everyone. And then—oh God, then—it would be the end of him. He looked yearningly at the door to his house. Water was already breaking over the threshold, pouring in. Surely the basement was nearly full now.

  Torn between returning to save them and saving himself, he hesitated, his choice so painful he could hardly breathe.

  Surely the girls were already dead.

  Or would be, soon.

  It occurred to him now that he ought perhaps to have relayed the fact that the Pastures had a tendency to flood when he agreed to house the girls. But he’d not been given much choice.

  Harley ventured into the alley, first one step, then another, then scuttled backward and pressed his body against the house. The water was numbingly cold and rising fast. Within moments, it would pass his knees. He had to go now.

  Harley struck out across the alley, raising a hand to indicate to the shrieking woman that he was on his way. Twice, the current nearly took him. The woman screamed again and again for him to hurry. When he reached her, she turned so that he could peel the young boy off her back. Nimbly, the boy scrambled onto Harley’s shoulders and grabbed at the cut on his neck. Harley’s knees buckled from the searing pain. Terrified, the boy reared backward, and Harley lost balance and they both fell into the water. Harley struggled to his feet and fished the boy out by his wrist, warning him through gritted teeth to not touch his neck again or he’d be sorry. The frightened boy nodded. The older boy wrapped his arms around Harley’s right thigh, and they all plunged westward, trailed by the woman cradling the blanket and its wailing contents to her chest.

  They fought their way up the alley, crossed Franklin and Pearl Streets, forged on. More than a few pounds too heavy, the woman stopped frequently to catch her breath. The boys would not let Harley proceed without their mother at their side. They marched in fits and starts another three blocks up the slow rise of Madison, where the water lapped finally at dry pavement on Grand Street. There Harley plucked the children from his back and leg and sank to the ground, where an ever-growing crowd was seeking refuge.

  Exhausted, Harley hung his head between his knees, breathing hard, his neck throbbing. The woman sprawled on the pavement beside him and regaled anyone who would listen about his kindness. He had saved her children, and couldn’t they tell the poor man was hurt? A lurking journalist—in danger of losing his job if he didn’t come up with an interesting concoction—story—sooner rather than later—interrogated the woman, encouraging embellishment, and when she failed to comply, embellished his notes himself, inventing and shaping, hardly noticing when Harley slumped sideways onto the cobbles. Everyone took far too long to notice the nasty welt at the base of his skull. For a moment, the reporter contemplated the possibility that the man’s death might provide a more rousing and satisfactory end to his story, but he was too weak a person to lead a life of remorse. He commandeered a carriage to ferry them to City Hospital, and as it jounced up the cobbled hill, the reporter cradled Harley’s head in his lap, careful not to touch the gaping wound that would prove his subject’s heroism.

  Chapter Seventeen

  At the Van der Veer mansion, when the bells commenced their interminable peal, the Doctors Stipp and their family extracted themselves from the party, and Harold, already waiting outside, drove them to City Hospital at a rapid trot. The streets of the city seethed with panic. Drays and carts were fleeing uphill, away from the river, their coach lights winking. Harold shouted for news and they were fed bits and pieces: yes, it was the ice; the gas
along the riverfront was already out; the water was a devil. At Eagle Street, traffic was stoppered by a bottleneck and Harold could go no farther, and he had no choice but to deposit them into the swirling eddies of humankind.

  The hospital loomed at the corner of Eagle and Howard Streets: three stories, a basement, a new wing along Eagle Street, and a hexagonal Victorian tower, its windows lit tonight by candles in lieu of the usual gas. The building was a former jail, and though much money had been spent in fashioning a pleasing transformation, its dark stone facade still put a chill into Mary’s heart. They pushed through a crowd to the steep stairs of the hospital entrance. They had already determined that Mary and William would attend to whatever presented itself in the accident ward, Amelia would treat any laboring women, and Elizabeth would be helpful in whatever way she could. Dressed in their finery, they made an incongruous picture among the refugee patients.

  “You’ll be fine,” Mary assured Elizabeth as they donned aprons, telling her niece that instinct would serve her well. Immediately, the nurse in charge put Elizabeth to work, arming her with pen and ink and ledger so that she could record patients’ names. Mary and William surveyed the crowded corridors, picking their way around sprawled limbs and sleeping children. St. Peter’s Hospital on Broadway usually treated these kinds of trauma because of its proximity to the railroad, where accidents occurred almost daily. But apparently the flood had inundated St. Peter’s and dozens of patients were stranded on its upper floors. Any and all victims—no matter how wounded—were being sent to City.

  The accident ward was downstairs, flush with Eagle Street, to allow for stretchers to be carried in. So far the injuries seemed to be mostly the result of the general frenzy: cuts and bruises and mild shock from fright. Since there were no women in labor, the same nurse in charge marshaled Amelia’s services to perform basic triage; she was to send those with bruised shins, broken fingers, and minor cuts upstairs to wait their turn. The more troubling cases called for immediate attention. These were arriving trundled up from the waterfront in jolting wagons, for the hospital board had yet to fund ambulances.

  “Have any other physicians come to help?” Mary said.

  “Just you and Dr. Stipp,” the nurse said, shaking her head.

  They were inundated. The accident ward was filling up. One man had shattered his feet by dropping something heavy on them, and William wheeled him to the operating room. Mary splinted a woman’s broken arm and leg, making a mental note to fashion her proper casts during a lull, but she could wait several days if necessary. Mary pulled a sheet over the head of a woman trampled by a runaway horse.

  Albert Van der Veer, distant cousin to Gerritt, arrived around one in the morning. He had also served as a surgeon in the War of the Rebellion. His brother, also named Garrett but with the more traditional spelling, had been a lieutenant colonel in the war but was killed in action in the Battle of Olustee in Florida. Unlike most of his compatriots, the younger doctor had welcomed Mary to the staff of the hospital when the Stipps arrived from Manhattan City. He was particularly skilled, like William, in orthopedics. Together, he and Mary operated on an open fracture, using techniques developed during and after the war. William set a broken humerus under anesthesia. In this way, the night lingered on, with complicated cases punctuating ever-lengthening periods of bandaging and soothing, the three doctors falling into the familiar rhythm of the marathon surgery sessions of the war.

  At 7:00 a.m., when an entire hour had gone by without a new patient, Albert Van der Veer went home. It was then that Mary and William found themselves at the side of an unconscious man who had suffered an odd blow to the base of his skull, which looked, for all the world, as if he had been hit across the back of his neck by a sword or a shovel.

  “Do you know him?” William asked the gaunt rail of a man at his side, who was keeping intense watch.

  “Not his name,” the young man said. “But he’s the hero of the flood.”

  William and Mary peered at their patient’s bloodied face, prominent jaw, and stolid build.

  “William, we know him. Isn’t this Mr. Harley?” Mary said. “Gerritt Van der Veer’s overseer?”

  It was. The cut had swelled, distorting the features of his face, but it was indeed James Harley. They rushed him into the operating amphitheater. They spent a good deal of time washing out the gash, which smelled of sewer water and railroad grease. The blow had somehow not severed the spine, but the cut was a perfect slice down to the sixth cervical vertebra. The vertebral process was exposed, glistening white in its pillow of red tissue. A chip of the bone had been cut away. Even with surgical intervention, there would be more swelling, and pain, probably for a good long while. He had likely suffered concussion, too, though they needed to wait to assess the extent of the danger. However, they both agreed he would be one lucky man if he emerged from this with only a ripping headache and sore neck. In the end, their task was mostly a matter of careful stitching.

  They saw Harley safely upstairs to a clean bed, where the young man from before was writing in a notebook. He leaped up and extended his hand.

  “Horace Young. I’m a reporter with the Argus. Tell me, how is our hero?”

  They answered the young man’s questions, repeating several times in different ways that the outlook for Harley’s recovery was still undetermined.

  “I see. Well, I’m going to write a story about our hero.”

  “Why do you keep calling him that?” Mary asked.

  “Don’t you know? He saved two children.”

  “Two children?’ Mary swallowed and exchanged a swift glance with William, allowing herself a moment of hope. “Girls?”

  The reporter shook his head. “Two little boys. Mr. Harley helped them through the floodwaters. Isn’t that a great story? You saved the life of a man who saved the lives of children.”

  “But are you certain they weren’t girls?”

  Young peered at her from under a layer of pale eyelashes. His scrutiny gave off the foul taint of a vulture. “Wait. I know who you are. Stipp. That’s your name, isn’t it? Of course. You are those doctors who wouldn’t give up on those sisters who died in the blizzard. That’s why you asked whether or not the children were girls. But you buried them the other day, didn’t you? I read the notice in the Argus.”

  William followed Mary as she turned away and strode down the hallway, sick of the cavalier way people mentioned Emma and Claire’s disappearance.

  “Wait,” Young called. “I want to write about your part in all of this, too. A woman doctor is so interesting. What does your husband think of your unusual profession?”

  “Unusual profession?” Mary said, wheeling around. First at the party, from Abraham Lansing, and now this reporter. “As opposed to what? A laundress? Or a prostitute? Is that what you are implying? Or ought I to become a writer so that I, too, could ask idiotic questions while making ridiculous assumptions about what people ought and ought not to do?”

  He caught up to them, breathless. Didn’t she grasp that they, too, were heroes for saving Harley’s life? Didn’t she understand that her name would be honored throughout the city? Didn’t she realize how free advertisement like this would help her?

  William seized Young by the elbow and bellowed, “Ye God man, have you no sense? Leave us alone.”

  —

  On the way home, the chaos of the night before had subsided, though the traffic was still heavy. It was cold. Outside the thick stone walls of the hospital, you could hear the ice marshaling its forces and pushing ever southward. Mary laid her head against the hood strut of their carriage, exhausted. Amelia had already fallen asleep, and Elizabeth was nodding off opposite Mary. Only William was alert, interrogating Harold on what he had heard of the flood damages. Throughout the night, Mary had glimpsed Elizabeth at her duties, and her niece had appeared competent and engaged, an encouraging sign that Amelia and Mary had acknowledged t
o one another using the tools of concerned parents everywhere: mute and fleeting expressions of approval and relief, which they assumed their children never saw and which their children always did.

  As the carriage crested the hill on Madison, it occurred to Mary that she ought to send a note to the Van der Veers to tell them about James Harley’s injury.

  She shot straight up, recalling only now that Jakob had left with Harley to go to the Lumber District. At least that was what Gerritt had explained after Jakob and Harley bolted from the room. Something, Gerritt had said, about retrieving the company’s books. But if Harley had been hurt, then what about Jakob? Had he, too, been caught in the flood? Too drained by the night’s demands, she and William hadn’t yet told Elizabeth or Amelia that they had treated Harley. She debated now whether or not to raise the alarm, but she decided not to. It would only cause unnecessary worry and concern. In her note to the Van der Veers, she would ask after Jakob. She would wait to see what they replied before mentioning anything. It was, after all, a good sign that Jakob hadn’t been admitted.

  When they pulled up to their house, it was Elizabeth who climbed out first and noticed the policeman seated on their front steps.

  And another moment still before she saw that his arms were wrapped around two sleeping girls, their heads resting in his lap.

  Book Two

  Chapter Eighteen

  By eight in the morning, the damage the flooding had caused was visible everywhere along the waterfront. Jagged ice piled along the shore had been overtopped by river water brimming with all the flotsam it had dredged along its path—carriage wheels, horsewhips, sidewalk planking, uprooted trees, roof beams, drowned livestock, a child’s hobbyhorse, and one spiraling dervish of a cart. In the middle of the river channel, great mountains of ice abutted the North Bridge supports. A house floated past, completely intact until it cracked against the bridge and smashed to pieces. On a smaller floe, a rooster flapped its wings and crowed. A steam tug had gone keel up and jutted against a remnant of the pier. Onshore, roiling water enveloped the buildings along the quay to at least the second floor, making canals of the streets, and even swirling into the gasworks between Lawrence and North Lansing, tearing away piping. The Hudson inundated warehouses and homes alike, wetted grain as well as silk, inconvenienced both the rich and the poor, defied the careful and the careless, swamped the Erie Canal, sloshed upward to the D&H railroad tracks, and sundered the city’s main waterline from its anchors.