Chapter Seven Frankie
SEVEN FRANKIE
Within twenty-four hours, every horse in town was sick. On Uncle Thomas’s advice, they were all shot, though he admitted to me that he was no longer certain of his initial diagnosis. He’d read all the entries on rabies in his various medical texts, but nothing seemed to make sense.
“The symptoms are close, but not quite the same,” he explained while we drank coffee in the exam room this morning.
“And no other animals have been afflicted,” Thomas went on, setting down his coffee cup.
“Only the horses. But we know any mammal can acquire rabies. It’s also atypical and…
concerning that it spread so rapidly through the entire town. ”
I knew we were thinking the same thing: the Spanish flu had started with one case, Freddy Bishop.
He had just returned by train from visiting his sister in Montpelier, and it spread through the town like wildfire.
Uncle Thomas understood that the sick should be quarantined, but it proved nearly impossible.
Mothers refused to be kept from their children, men insisted on going to Loon’s Call for a brandy even when they were so ill they were hardly able to walk themselves over.
Uncle Thomas had petitioned for temporary closures of Loon’s Call and the factory, but this only happened after two weeks, when half the town was already bedridden and there weren’t enough men to work the machines or buy drinks at the pub.
He rubbed his eyes. “Luther told me the knackerman has been sent for, to begin collecting all the bodies. I think we should have a word with him when he comes. He’s been working with horses his entire life, from what I understand.
He’s surely more of an expert than I am.
Perhaps he has some idea of what disease this could be. ”
I agreed, though the truth was, I didn’t enjoy the idea of conversing with the knackerman.
He’d arrived in town four or five years ago and built a cabin on the eastern side of Saw Meadow Hill, far from any other houses.
Tall, broad-shouldered, with dark hair and eyes, the man looked solid as a tree trunk.
Some folks said he was Irish, others said Welsh or Scottish.
He would come down the hill into town, driving a cart with two horses, to take away livestock that could not be eaten.
He rendered beasts and worked leather. He made snowshoes and sold them in town, along with pots of glue and tallow and various leatherworks.
One year Aunt Margaret had bought a little drawstring pouch from him and presented it to Uncle Thomas as a gift, but it was stiff and had a rank odor.
Thomas put it in a drawer, then discovered that Margaret had taken it back out and was using it to store her hairpins.
She now used it to hold the bones she read each morning.
Two times per year, the knackerman went door to door, gathering kitchen knives from the women, and axes and hunting knives from the men, to sharpen on his stone.
He dressed from head to toe in leather he had tanned himself, though his tailoring skills left quite a bit to be desired.
His clothes were a strange patchwork of bits of leather of various tones and textures, all the stitching visible and done rather crudely.
Uncle Thomas said it reminded him of a medical student’s first attempts at sutures.
The children ran when his cart came clanging down the street, the littlest ones hiding behind their mothers, the older children ducking behind bushes, or tearing back into their houses and locking the doors.
But he paid them no mind, just carried on with his business and went back up the hill when he was finished.
I had never been to his place up on Saw Meadow Hill.
Neither had Uncle Thomas, as far as I knew.
But Aunt Margaret had. She’d gone with Reverend Davies and some of the women from church last spring.
They were reaching out to those on the outskirts of town who did not attend church to let them know they were welcome to come anytime; that the Lord always had room for more members of his flock.
The knackerman, according to Margaret, made it abundantly clear that he had no interest in attending church, and used a string of profanity to do so. Margaret seemed quite shaken by the visit.
“You would scarcely believe the words he said,” she’d told us over dinner that night, her face coloring at the very recollection. “Saying those things to a holy man and a group of ladies! Can you imagine?”
Uncle Thomas had smiled and so had I, exchanging glances across the table.
The two of us could very well imagine. A man like that, unmarried, living in the woods with his animals, half wild, with a taste for whiskey—both Uncle Thomas and I could imagine just what such a man might say at the concept of being saved by the Lord.
Aunt Margaret proudly announced that she and the ladies and Reverend Davies had not given up on the knackerman and would return to try again.
Every soul is worth saving, that’s what the reverend preached, even the wicked and the profane, the drunkards and the outcasts.
“Jesus would want us to show him mercy, to open our hearts to him,” Reverend Davies had told the women.
Aunt Margaret had a wistful little smile as she relayed his words to Uncle Thomas and me.
But some people, I knew, could not be saved.
I’ve always counted myself as one of those people and do not bother to attend church.
I had when I’d been forced to as a child: combed and washed and stuffed into a stiff Sunday dress and shoes that pinched my toes.
These days, no one forced me, a fact that I’m sure Reverend Davies finds as much of a relief as I do.
I go when it’s necessary: for a wedding or a funeral, or to attend a town meeting or a festival.
Aunt Margaret is in the choir and goes to rehearsal each Friday, and on Wednesdays she attends the ladies’ sewing circle there.
She has invited me to join her, but I always politely decline.
Each Sunday, when the church bell in the steeple rings, she and Thomas go off in their best clothing, while I stay behind in my chore clothes, doing odds and ends around the house or reading on the porch.
The knackerman arrived in town just after one, two horses pulling his old wooden cart—one of them, I knew, was the white mare that had kicked poor Luther St. James in the head, the horse that Luther had pronounced ready to be turned to glue.
She was now the knackerman’s most faithful workhorse and always part of the team that pulled his cart.
Uncle Thomas and I were in the tavern, sipping ales and watching through the big window when we saw him approaching down Main Street.
It was early in the day and not many men were there: everyone was at the factory.
“We’ll offer to buy him an ale,” Uncle Thomas said to me, “and see what insight he may have.” It was well known that Loon’s Call was often his first stop before he made his rounds, so we went out to greet him.
The air was raw and cold, the sky dark with heavy clouds, and snow had begun to fall in wet, thick flakes.
It was going to be a bad storm. I could feel it in the air.
Spring storms could be the worst, settling over the valley, winter keeping us tight in its clutches, refusing to let go.
From the front wall of the knackerman’s cart hung the blades: knives, saws, cleavers that clanked together like wind chimes, making a strange and sinister music as he came along Main Street.
He pulled his cart up in front of the tavern, and I could see right away that the horses were sick.
Their eyes yellow, their breathing labored.
They seemed nervous, frightened. They fidgeted, struggled against their worn leather harnesses.
The knackerman stood, gave them the whip, and shouted at them in a deep throaty tongue, words I could not understand.
I looked at my uncle, and he nodded at me, a solemn and serious gesture to show he’d noticed it too.
When the knackerman dismounted, climbing down from the driver’s seat of his cart, it was obvious that something was terribly wrong with him as well.
He was dressed in his usual filthy leather garb and moccasins.
His long hair was a dirty tangle of curls, and his thick, dark beard had what appeared to be dried bloody mucus in it.
He was sweating and pale, and the whites of his eyes had a distinct yellowish tinge. I recoiled at the sweet burned-sugar smell coming off him and shot my uncle a panicked look.
“How long have you been ill, sir?” Uncle Thomas asked, skipping any pleasantries.
“Who’s ill?” he barked in his thick brogue. “Ain’t I.” His chest rattled and wheezed as he spoke. He held on to the side of the cart and seemed to sway slightly, as if he’d already been drinking.
“Your horses are sick,” I said.
He turned and looked at me, seemed to study me for a few seconds. “Aye,” he said at last.
“When did they become ill?” I asked, surreptitiously trying to cover my nose.
“Can’t say I recall,” he answered; then he coughed mightily, spat blood-flecked sputum onto the mud at his feet.
“Do you know what day of the week it is?” Uncle Thomas asked.
It was a question he often asked to determine a patient’s state of mind, to see if they were delirious with fever or illness.
The knackerman squinted at him, hacked out a laugh. “ ’Tis the day the knackerman comes to collect your dead beasts.”
Uncle Thomas nodded, then reached into his pocket and took out his cigarettes.
He offered one to me, which I took, then one to the knackerman.
I was sure smoke from a cigarette was the last thing the man’s wheezing lungs needed, but it was a clever gesture.
He grinned and snatched the cigarette, letting Thomas light it for him.
“I’m Dr. Thomas Endicott.” Uncle Thomas squinted, the icy flakes falling heavier around us.