Chapter Fifty-Two Frankie
FIFTY-TWO FRANKIE
It’s not true,” I said. “What the knackerman said about Aunt Margaret. It can’t be.”
It was just before ten a.m. and we were back at home in the surgery. Pearl was sleeping in my bed. Aife was in the room with her, curled up on the floor, keeping watch.
I had not told her about her parents yet. She had not asked, which was a relief and meant I did not have to lie.
Benjamin was still in the cot in my aunt’s sewing room, lying cold with a stitched Y-incision in his torso, covered by a sheet.
I was applying salve to the burns on my uncle’s face.
The heat coming off him from the fever and the burns was tremendous.
His lungs wheezed like old bellows, and it was difficult for him to speak without coughing.
The smoke in the barn certainly hadn’t done his already compromised lungs any good.
The smell of ruined fruit was on his breath, seeping from his pores.
He flinched as I touched him, either from the pain or the touch itself.
Even as I spoke the words, I knew they were a lie.
I felt the truth tucked inside of me like a dark, heavy stone: the child my aunt carried was not Uncle Thomas’s.
That was why she’d gone to Charlotte Albone and asked to end the pregnancy.
That was why she’d told the old midwife Thomas would not want the child.
I knew my uncle felt the truth inside him too.
He did not reply.
“You’ve got to get the samples to Boston,” he said. “Bring help before everyone in town is dead.”
“I can’t leave you and Pearl. Not now.”
He gazed up at me, his face greasy and red, his eyes yellow, his eyebrows and the front of his hair singed off. “Now is exactly the time you must leave, Frankie. They’re going door-to-door shooting the sick.”
“But Pearl—”
“If you want to save Pearl, you’ve got to bring back help. She isn’t safe here. No one is. Everyone—the sick and the uninfected—we’re all dangerous.” He spoke the words with fury, his hands balling into fists.
I said nothing, only nodded. And I thought of how he himself had chanted burn, devil, burn beside the pyre last night as the knackerman screamed.
“Go into my bedroom. Get my leather traveling case. We’ll pack the specimens up in that. Wrap them carefully.”
“But, Uncle, I—”
“Do as I say!” he snarled.
I nodded, backed away.
I was up in his room when I heard Luther and Henry arrive. They’d come to fetch Benjamin’s body and bring him to the church to be buried. They’d gone this morning with a group of men, including Reverend Davies, to bury the remains of the knackerman at the edge of the cemetery.
I came downstairs with the leather case and found my uncle, Luther, and Henry in the surgery.
“What’s all this?” Luther asked, looking at the row of specimen jars and test tubes laid out on the table, the piles of notes.
Uncle Thomas coughed, then cleared his throat. “Documentation of the outbreak. I’m sending Frankie to Boston with it. The doctors there, they have much more experience—more tools for studying and diagnosing.”
“No,” Luther said flatly. “No outsiders can know what’s happening here.”
“If it’s about what happened at your barn last night—” Uncle Thomas began.
“No,” Luther interrupted. He walked over, picked up a jar with a sliver of Benjamin’s lung inside, and set it down quickly, wiping his hand on his trousers.
“Your… collection here. It needs to be destroyed. It’s not leaving town.
Neither of you are leaving town.” He touched the revolver he wore strapped to his hip.
“As you wish,” Uncle Thomas said with a sigh.
“But, Uncle—” I started to argue.
Uncle Thomas shot me a just play along look.
“He’s right,” Uncle Thomas said, picking up one of the pages of notes I’d carefully taken and crumpling it in his hands. “Build a hot fire out back, Frankie. Burn it all.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
Uncle Thomas started to cough violently, putting a dirty handkerchief to his mouth to catch the blood-speckled mucus. Luther backed away.
“That’s settled then,” he said with satisfaction. “We’ll take Mr. Stoddard to the church. There’s a coffin waiting. We’ve already dug the grave. The reverend will do a service at four, and we’ll get anyone we can from town to pay last respects and have him in the ground before nightfall.”
“We’ll be there,” Uncle Thomas said. “Four o’clock.”
We led Luther and Henry to the sewing room, where they collected Benjamin’s body and carried him out of the house. I shut and latched the front door behind them.
“We’ve got to hurry,” Uncle Thomas said when I returned to the surgery. He had the metal lockbox that he kept certain medications in and was dumping out its contents. “They’ll be back. Back to make sure we’ve destroyed all the evidence.”
“What are we going to do?” I asked.
“You’re going to hide it. Hide it in a place no one would dare look. But they may be watching.” He hurriedly told me his plan. “Quickly now. I’ll pack these things up.”
I dashed down to the cellar and into the pantry, then out to the shed for kerosene, rags, and an armload of dry firewood.
Outside, I built a small, hot fire. Into it went glass canning jars of beets and pickled onions, a few old rags tied into odd shapes, pieces of scrap paper we used for starting fires in the kitchen.
Great clouds of black smoke billowed up like terrible phantoms. The jars crashed and exploded in the heat.
Back in the house, Uncle Thomas had wrapped the real specimen jars in cotton bandaging and placed them in a leather satchel along with our notes, then tucked the satchel into the metal lockbox.
“Go now,” he told me, pressing the box into my hands. “Make sure you’re not seen. Out the back door and through the woods.”
I buttoned up my old wool coat, stained with Pearl’s blood and singed from the barn fire, fetched my knapsack, and stowed the box in it.
I stopped by the shed for a shovel and slipped onto the path into the woods, the same path I used to follow to meet Pearl, a lifetime ago.
Once again, I did what I was good at: not being seen, blending in, moving through the dark, secret places of town like a ghost.