Chapter Thirty-Two Frankie
THIRTY-TWO FRANKIE
We all gathered at first light outside of the home of David and Mercy Banks, where I’d lived from the ages of nine to thirteen. Strange to look at it now and think how little it felt like home.
They’d fashioned a harness out of rope and leather so the men could take turns pulling a toboggan loaded with bags containing clothing, food, and water. There were snowshoes for each member of the party. The ladies were given ski poles to help walk and balance.
“The snow will be deeper up on the mountain,” David said. He, Chauncey, and Harold, now a boy of fourteen, carried rifles and wore wool hunting clothes. The youngest boy, Stewart, was ten and also dressed in wool but carried no weapon.
The snow had stopped falling and was starting to melt under the weak sun, but there was still half a foot of it, and David was right—it would be deeper, and much harder going, on the mountain.
To escape the valley, you needed to go up.
The easiest and most direct way out was the one they were taking, over the East Ridge Road that began at the end of Main Street by Luther St. James’s farm and wound its way up, then down again on the western face of the mountain, like a great snake.
Pearl was having trouble with her snowshoes. Her fingers were trembling, and she couldn’t get the buckles fastened.
“Let me help you,” I said, getting down on my knees and strapping Pearl’s leather boots into the snowshoes. The snowshoes were made from shaped ash and strips of rawhide with leather buckles. As I tightened the buckles, I wondered if this was one of the pairs the knackerman had made.
Pearl was wearing her father’s waxed coat with a hood, layered over her own wool coat.
“You’re ready,” I said, standing.
“Am I?” Pearl asked, eyes boring into mine. “I feel as though there’s something important I’m leaving behind.”
I felt everyone’s eyes on us: my aunt and uncle, David and Mercy, Chauncey and the boys.
“I’m sure you have all you need for the trip,” I said, choosing my words carefully.
“Give me a hug for luck,” Pearl said, and I embraced her, felt my lover’s familiar arms wrap around my waist. I worried that it was for the last time, but pushed the thought away.
It seemed too cruel, having to say good-bye to her with everyone watching.
Having to pretend I was just saying good-bye to a good friend and not the human being I loved most in this world; my other half, my beautiful wicked fox.
I longed to kiss her one last time but knew it was impossible.
I was a tempest of nerves, frustration, heartbreak, and fury, but I did my best to keep any trace of these feelings from showing on my face.
I felt Pearl’s hand slip into the pocket of my wool coat, for just a second. She drew back.
“Let’s be off then,” she said, looking away, putting on her best brave smile.
Uncle Thomas and Aunt Margaret were holding hands, whispering to each other.
“Come here and give me a hug for luck too, Frances,” Aunt Margaret said. I threw my arms around my aunt, clinging tightly to her, wanting to sob like a little child, but holding it back.
A good doctor, my uncle always told me, knows how to put his emotions into a little box when there’s work to be done.
“I love you,” Margaret said, putting her gloved hands on my face. “I love you like you’re my own daughter. And I will not sleep easy again until you and your uncle are back with me.”
I hugged my aunt tighter. At last, when I could form the words, I said, “We’ll come to you as quickly as we can.”
Aunt Margaret kissed my cheek, we all said our final good-byes, and the party of seven trudged down Main Street, Chauncey in the lead, packing down the trail the others followed.
Uncle Thomas and I stood in the street in front of the Banks home. Neither of us spoke or moved, only watched as the group got farther and farther away, until the street bent to the west, and they were out of sight.
At last, Uncle Thomas spoke. “Let’s make some coffee and oatmeal, then go on our rounds, Frankie. We’ve got a lot of patients to visit today.”
WHEN WE RETURNED home, I took off my coat, carefully pulling out the folded piece of paper Pearl had slipped me.
My uncle went to gather supplies from the office.
I went into the kitchen, feeling Aunt Margaret’s absence acutely.
I added wood to the stove, got down a pan and poured in oatmeal and water, filled the coffeepot, and put both pots on to heat.
Then I stood by the window and opened the note from Pearl.
My Darling,
If you miss me while I’m gone, go to our secret place. I’ll be there, waiting for you each afternoon in our dream house full of dust and cobwebs. You may not be able to see me, but you’ll feel me.
The real, solid me will be waiting for you in Amsterdale. Then we shall board a train and go and find our real dream house. Go and make a new life together, the world be damned.
Yours, forever and always,
P
As my uncle came into the kitchen, I slid the note into my pocket, and blinked back the tears stinging my eyes.
We ate breakfast in silence, and went out to do rounds, stopping at house after house where people had either taken ill or gone missing.
The platters of offerings left on stoops, the bundles of herbs hung in windows, the symbols painted on doors made Boone’s Ferry—the only home I’d ever known—feel unsettling, unholy.
Some people, the frail and elderly, seemed to succumb to the sickness, too weak to wander.
They spoke like madmen, but lay coughing, suffocating in their own secretions, finally slipping out of consciousness until the lack of oxygen killed them.
Uncle Thomas and I gave morphine to ease their suffering, but there was little else we could do.
With the help of family, we often bound the sick and mad to their beds.
In some cases, distraught husbands, wives, and children refused.
Uncle Thomas sedated those who were wild, thrashing, lashing out against us.
But soon, I knew, we would run out of what little sedatives we had left.
And each time I helped Uncle Thomas restrain one of the afflicted, I knew it was only a matter of time until one or both of us were bitten.
It was far worse than the horrors of the influenza outbreak last fall, which, I must admit, pushed us to our very limits in every way. How, I wondered, could we possibly find our way through this?
Sometimes I wish I were a person of faith—that I had some god or deity to pray to and seek comfort from.
I heard my uncle pray sometimes. I was never sure if it was for Margaret’s benefit, or if he truly believed.
Over and over, I found myself asking the same question I had asked during the flu outbreak as I watched men, women, and children drowning in their own secretions: If there was a God, how could he do this to us? What cruelty was in his heart?
When Uncle Thomas and I returned home from our rounds, it was nearly noon already and we found Bert Osbourne waiting on the doorstep.
“It’s Clarice,” he said. He looked pale and shaken. “They’ve found her. Out in the woods near where the river bends.”
“Is she alive?” I asked.
“I can’t say,” he told us. “They were carrying her toward the church.”
My heart sank like a great lead ball in my chest. If she’d been alive, if there had been any chance of saving her, they would have carried her to us. Bringing her to the church meant only one thing.
“Let’s go.” Uncle Thomas squeezed my hand, trying to rally us both. He was still wearing his coat and clutching his medical bag.
WE ARRIVED AT the church to find a group of men gathered there: Michael Knapp, Pete Talbott, Robbie Prichard, and Jim Collins—Luther’s young farmhand.
Jim didn’t meet my eye when I looked at him.
Reverend Davies had been praying, saying something about Jesus having mercy, about the trickster Satan being driven out, when we walked in and he looked up.
The church was dark inside, lit only by the dim sunlight coming in through the windows and a few oil lamps.
It had been years since I last attended church, but I immediately recognized the close, almost claustrophobic feeling, the smell of the oil lamps, candles, and incense Reverend Davies sometimes burned combined with old wood and furniture polish.
Finally we reached Mrs. Stoddard. She was up at the front of the church, in the sanctuary before the altar, the men in a loose circle around her. She lay on her back in a floral dress that was several sizes too large. Her hands and feet were purple, her hair a nest of tangles.
Just behind her, Jesus watched from the cross, his hands and feet nailed and bleeding, his head ringed with a crown of thorns, his eyes half open. Above the crucifix, a round window let in rays of diffuse light.
“Was she dressed when you found her?” Uncle Thomas asked, getting down on his knees. I joined him there on the ground, ready to assist in any way I could. He felt her neck for a pulse, put his ear to her chest and shook his head. She was gone.
The dead have a certain look: a waxy pallor, a film over the eyes. They no longer look human to me, but like a shell of what once was, an empty cup. It always makes my heart ache—to see how little is left when a person passes from this world on to the next.
Mrs. Stoddard had always been so kind to me.
Treated me like her own daughter when I was young.
Made molasses cookies when I visited because she knew they were my favorite.
Now she lay there, lifeless, an empty husk.
The sweet and rotten smell still came off her.
I was so grateful that Pearl had left town, that she was not here to see her mother like this.
“Was she dressed when you found her?” Uncle Thomas asked again, more firmly this time.
“No,” Reverend Davies said. “She was unclothed when they brought her in. I thought it was only right to preserve her decency, to cover her up in the house of God. So I asked Gayle for one of her dresses.”
Gayle was Reverend Davies’s wife, leader of the church choir, and a good friend of Aunt Margaret’s.
“Help me with this, Frankie,” Uncle Thomas said as he began undoing the buttons on the dress.
“What are you doing, Doctor?” Reverend Davies asked. “Isn’t it clear that the poor woman is beyond saving? She’s with Jesus now.”
“Her soul is free of the wicked one at last,” added Robbie Prichard.
“Hasn’t she been through enough, Doc? Out there for days, consorting with the devil. Doesn’t she deserve to be left at peace?” asked Michael Knapp as my uncle and I continued to undress her.
“I shall examine the body,” Thomas said determinedly.
“I don’t think—” the reverend started to argue.
“If we have any chance of surviving this sickness, I need to understand all I can about it.”
I knew he was right. Clarice Stoddard had been the picture of health when she was bitten, making her the first such person to succumb to the sickness. Her body might hold some sort of clue, something to help Uncle Thomas understand how to prevent more deaths.
“My God,” Uncle Thomas said as soon as her upper body was bared. “Who did this?” he demanded, glancing up and looking from one man’s face to another.
“We found her like this,” Pete said. “I swear.”
“She was out at the base of Saw Meadow Hill,” Michael added.
The bandage on her arm was gone, the bite wound red and festering, a yellowish, foul-smelling pus leaking from it.
Her skin had a yellow tinge but was mottled with purple and black in places—signs of frostbite, of dying tissue.
Yet it was clear that neither the cold nor the mysterious illness had killed her.
Clarice had been shot with a bullet straight through the heart.