Chapter 8
Doctor Coates’s shingle hung at the south end of Main Street, and Lydia hammered on his door with the child in her arms.
The man who opened it was near sixty, rumpled as an unmade bed, with gray whiskers going eight directions and a lamp held high. Whatever he saw in the doorway, a strange woman, coatless in November, holding a gray bundle that coughed, he wasted no words on it.
“In,” he said. “Kitchen. The stove’s still going.”
His bag stood ready by the door, scuffed pale at the corners.
It had plainly seen the inside of every farmhouse in the county.
He worked out of the kitchen half the night, in shirtsleeves, by lamplight.
Steam kettles. Mustard plasters. A listening tube to the small laboring chest, again and again, his blunt face going longer each time.
Lydia held the girl upright through the coughing, fed the stove, fetched water, and obeyed.
Somewhere in those hours, a neighbor boy roused the boarding house, her valise was brought down, and a room was engaged.
She remembered all that only dimly afterward.
What she remembered was the kitchen, the kettles, and the doctor’s face.
Toward three in the morning, Tilly slept, propped high on pillows, breathing like a rusted gate but breathing. Coates washed his hands, poured two cups of stone-cold coffee, and delivered his verdict plainly. It was, she came to learn, the only way he ever delivered anything.
“Pneumonia. The left side’s the worst of it.
That is the roof of the trouble, not the cellar.
” He drank, grimacing. “The cellar is that the child is starved. Not underfed, madam. Starved. She has no more flesh on her than a fence rail, and fever burns flesh for fuel. Pneumonia on a well-kept child is a hard fight. On a frame like that, it is a siege.”
“Will she live?”
“She may.” He said it without softening.
“If she is kept warm as a hen’s egg, day and night.
If she is fed every two hours, broth, milk, egg beaten in, whatever will stay down, weeks of it.
If she is nursed by somebody who does not tire, in a room where the fire never dies.
Do all that, and I will still not promise you the spring.
Fail any of it, and I will promise you the other thing. ”
He set down the cup, looking at her kind-eyed and blunt together.
“Now. I have seen that child before, riding to church between the Harmons, done up in ribbons. You will tell me before either of us sleeps how she comes to be dying in my kitchen in another woman’s coat.”
She told him. All of it, plainly, in his own currency. The north room, the frost inside the glass, the arm, the shrug, the porch, the five dark miles. She ended with the only confession that mattered, that she had taken the girl with no authority under heaven, and meant to keep her.
Coates listened without once interrupting. Then he grunted, gathered the cups, and said the first kindness of the night, in the unkindest voice imaginable.
“Well. It took eleven years and the Children’s Aid Society to get one useful thing done in that house. Go to bed, madam. Your girl will want you at six.”
At six, as ordered, Lydia was at the bedside in the boarding house’s best back room, with the fire built high against all economy.
The nursing began that morning as it meant to go on.
Broth at six, milk with egg beaten in at eight, the counting of breaths between, the kettle kept singing for the steam.
Tilly took what she was given, a spoonful at a time, with her grave eyes open on Lydia’s face as though holding to a rail.
“Where do we live now?” she asked once, in the fever’s flat little voice.
“Here, today,” said Lydia. “I will manage tomorrow when it comes.”
It was the first answer she had given a child in eleven years that had no system anywhere behind it. Strangely, it tasted more like truth than any of the others.
By morning, the scandal was general.
Cedar Bluffs was a county-seat town of some twelve hundred souls, and news crossed it faster than weather.
The Society woman, the one from the orphan train in October, had gone out to the Harmon place and snatched the girl back.
Carried her off at dusk, coatless, like a gypsy.
Eber Harmon shouting theft off his own porch.
The child at death’s door at Coates’s half the night, whatever that proved.
Didn’t it prove something on both sides, depending which fence you talked across.
Lydia felt it when she walked to the depot at nine, through air gone brittle with cold.
Talk stopped at the mercantile door as she passed, took breath, and started again behind her, changed.
Women she had never met looked at her with narrowed interest. A placement was town business in a town like this.
She had made every soul in Cedar Bluffs a judge, and the evidence was still coming in.
The Harmons, to their credit as strategists, did not sue for the girl’s return. They went to church instead. It wanted three days until Sunday, but they came to town before that, twice. They were seen, and they were heard. Shamed before the county, they chose the high dry ground and held it.
They were well rid of a bad bargain, Eber told the men at the feed store, comfortably, ruefully, a charitable man imposed upon.
Sickly beyond what was disclosed, Nella told the sewing circle.
Coughed the day we had her. The Society woman knew, mark that.
And now the same woman steals the girl back, and respectable people are slandered in their own county for the crime of Christian charity.
It was well done, Lydia admitted, hearing it all secondhand. It cost them nothing, and it banked their position. If the child died at Coates’, why, there was the proof of the sickliness, sad as could be.
At the depot, she composed her wire to New York.
She wrote it three times on the back of a form before she paid for it.
There was a version that excused, and a version that accused.
She tore up both. What she sent was an agent’s report, the last one, exact and level.
Follow-up call found placed child gravely ill, untended, confined unheated room.
Physician confirms pneumonia, starvation.
Family refused doctor repeatedly. Removal effected by me without authority.
Child under physician’s care Cedar Bluffs. Await instruction.
The answer came next morning, and it was two lines.
Employment terminated this date for unauthorized removal. Surrender child to local committee forthwith.
She read it on the depot platform, in the wind. The operator watched her through his window, having read it first, as operators do, which meant the town would have it by noon.
Eleven years. Four hundred children. Two lines.
Lydia folded the paper into her valise, next to her father’s Bible.
She walked back up Main Street with her spine straight, past the talk that stopped and started.
Somewhat to her surprise, the wide calm held.
The word dismissed, arriving at last, weighed less than the fear of it had weighed for a week.
It was only the bill for the road north, and she had known the price when she took it. She would not haggle now.
Forthwith, however, was another matter. Surrender the child to the local committee forthwith.
The local committee for placements in Cedar Bluffs was three men. She called on all three that afternoon, because procedure deserved its chance, and because she needed to see their faces.
First came a church elder, dry as a haymow.
He received her in his front room and looked at her the way one looks at a debt come visiting.
The committee’s charge was placements, he explained, not invalids.
There was no fund for nursing. There was no household standing ready.
Had she considered that the child ought never have been removed?
The second elder said the same in fewer words, through a partly opened door.
Kindest of the three was the storekeeper, honest as well, being a man who dealt in stock. He knew what he was looking at. He came out from the counter, at least, and dropped his voice.
“Ma’am, I will tell you what the reverend gentlemen will not.
Nobody on this committee will take that girl, because that girl is like to die.
Nobody wants the burying of her on his account book, before God or the county.
And there is another thing.” He glanced at the window, at the street.
“Folks are watching how this settles. The Harmons have friends. A man in trade cannot be seen to take sides in it. You understand me.”
“Perfectly,” said Lydia. “You are the third respectable man I have understood today.”
She was unjust to him, a little, and knew it.
The charity could not be spared that day.
She walked back to the boarding house through the blue cold with procedure’s chance fully spent.
The committee would not take Tilly. The committee would also not fight to take her.
Forthwith had died in three parlors of the same disease each time.
Nobody wanted a dying orphan, except one dismissed woman with no roof to put her under.
The boarding house keeper was waiting in her own hallway, arms folded, with the room key already off its hook.
She was sorry, she said, in the voice of a woman who had rehearsed with her sister all afternoon.
It had been represented that the child was convalescent.
It was now generally said the child had the lung fever.
Boarders were asking, and hers was a respectable house.
No sick children kept. And, the sister put in from the parlor doorway, saying the quiet part with relish, no dismissed women neither.
The week’s rent would be returned. The room was wanted by Saturday. By tonight, said the sister.
Lydia did not argue this bench either. She was learning the size of the country she had moved to on Tuesday night, the country of no position. Its borders were being walked for her, parlor by parlor.
At dusk, she settled with Dr. Coates for the visits, which took her funds down to seven dollars and small silver.
Coates, blunt as ever, would not shave the bill, doctoring being how he ate, but he looked at her a long moment over it.
The look said something she was too proud, that evening, to let it say aloud.
By full dark, it was done. Lydia Marsh stood on the frozen board sidewalk of Main Street, Cedar Bluffs, with a valise in one hand. Against her shoulder lay a blanket-wrapped, fever-hot child. The wind came down the street from the north, carrying dry snow past the lit windows of respectable houses.
Eleven years, she thought. Four hundred children lodged safe, and I cannot lodge one more for a single night.
Tilly stirred against her neck, coughed, quieted.
She stood there in the wind, between the lit windows and the dark. The measure of it she took without flinching, because flinching warmed nothing. A valise. A burning child. Seven dollars. Not one open door in the county.
For the first time in her orderly life, Lydia Marsh had nowhere at all to go.