Andersonville (93 page)

Jonas came driving up and leaped from the cart. Bad night air, Mastah. He was firm in the belief that night air was more dangerous than day air, stockade or no stockade.

Then get to your cabin before you catch your death, Jonas. You in your shirt-tail. The slave hastened off, a tatterdemalion under the serene moon. Ira demanded abruptly of Harrell Elkins whether he felt capable of approaching this new responsibility. You, he said, poor thing, with your babble of violets and miasmas.

That was mere relaxation. Harry tried to be spry as an athlete when he pulled his awkward body into the car. Pay strict heed to the professor, sir.
Kino
and
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we have both varieties at the hospital, together with a few not yet ticketed by those who research into the matter. But I shall ticket them. Now, then, and he lifted his gaunt glassy face to the white light above. Tell me of the patient, sir.

She’s fourteen or so. It seems she was in the family way and her mother sought to abort her.

Elkins growled a curse. He swore but seldom, and then it always came as a shock; it was like seeing a parson cut a buck-and-wing behind his pulpit. Is there severe hemorrhage?

I’m not aware. Daughter Lucy is with her. Laurel would appear to be unconscious or in delirium. I believe she’s very weak, and in acute pain.

A pox on all abortionists! Good grief, sir, have I my medical kit with me? Harry looked about wildly.

You’re clutching it in your hand, said Ira weakly.

He had grave doubts about Elkins’s ability to deal with this dangerous baffling case, rubbed to a rag as he was, chanting absurdities. But once arrived at the cottage Harrell Elkins became all physician; you would not have known the depth of his depletion unless you’d looked intently into his bony face. The questions he asked of the widow and Lucy were terse, searching, sane. Elkins opened his kit and withdrew tiny flasks containing his store of drugs, holding them with care to the light as he read the labels, holding them with a hand no longer sunburnt—a wide bony hand that was pale and seemed frail and yet remained unshaking. Have you salt and common loaf sugar? he asked of Mag.

The widow was in such a twitter that she scarcely knew. Yes, she did own salt . . . twas in a box . . . now, where was that salt-box . . . reckoned there was a mite of sugar on the shelf. . . .

I’ll go see, whispered Lucy.

No, have your father and the lad make a search. Elkins lowered his voice. And get this woman out of here.

I’m to stay?

I fear I shall need your help. His spectacles were opaque, frightening as he looked down at the girl. In a most intimate way, Madam. He had not addressed her in such fashion since the long ago day of his first arrival.

Coral was of much more help than his mother. Small quantities of salt and sugar were discovered, a pint of soft water was put to simmer upon the fire. The Widow Tebbs huddled, banished to the porch where she mourned for a time and then fell asleep and snored loudly.

Thank Heaven, said Harry Elkins, as if Lucy understood the drugs he mentioned, and their use. I’ve still a bit of white vitriol in my kit. And sugar of lead—I shall need to scrape the bottle. Attend me, please.

He put into her hands a miniature mortar and pestle. This contains alum. Please to pulverize it finely.

He had rubbed the patient with fever liniment, and was applying cold compresses. Such a paucity of needfuls, Lucy heard him muttering. Always a paucity. Damn it, here’s a muslin pillowcase, appears fairly clean. Sacrifice, and she heard the tearing of the muslin. When she looked at Elkins again he was bending tenderly over the smelly moaning invalid with a fresh moist compress. Is the alum well pulverized, Madam? he inquired without turning.

Tis to a powder, sir.

Do you fetch the pot of water that’s simmering.

She brought the steaming pot and watched with respect as Elkins stirred in his materials—salt, sugar, the alum she’d powdered, the drugs he’d measured. She found mysterious satisfaction in the steam which rose from the compound, in its whiteness, its odor. Lucy regarded Laurel Tebbs with that affection which a kind person gives to fledglings fallen from their nests, to starved stray dogs and cats. Laurel was a pathetic beast which had been treated cruelly, Lucy agonized with her in sympathy, she hoped that Laurel would not die. But momentarily also she might forget danger and delirium, and see beauty wrought between herself and Harrell Elkins: they had combined to make medicine, she had squeezed the pestle, she was helping him to help another.

Return this to the fire, please.

When she came back he had drawn a syringe from his bag and was inspecting it critically. You know— His abrasive voice seemed to speak from a sad vague past. My uncle was a surgeon, as I’ve told you. A wicked man, I believe, but I recall some of his theories and adhere to them whenever possible. He believed in professional cleanliness, he thought that disease might be spread by untidiness. I’m but a beginner. But I feel discomfort unless I’ve washed my instruments—again, whenever possible. Tis impossible to keep them clean over there—

Lucy knew the place he meant when he spoke the last two words.

Take this syringe and cleanse it in a basin. Give it a scrubbing.

In this way they toiled until the window was gray, until the moon sank toward western woods and lost its brightness. Coral slept on his bed, Ira Claffey slept at the table with his head on his arms, the widow had risen and gone to The Crib to resume her slumbers. Once, in the last hour of night, surgeon and nurse heard voices outside; they paid no heed, they were working. Ira told his daughter later, smiling behind his hand, that one of the middle-aged officers from the Reserves had appeared, a man whom Ira knew slightly.

He was more than astonished to find me in the cottage. I fear he was somewhat the worse for drink. The Widow Tebbs sent him packing.

Poppy. If you please!

Well, my dear, I thought it amusing.

Reckon I don’t. I find it disgusting!

Yet peculiarly she found no disgust in her experience with Elkins as they bent above the skinny misery in the bedroom. She had never thought to share an intimacy, even a secondhanded intimacy, with any man unless she were married to him. She knew that women as nurses went about bathing the sick; they bathed men, but only their hands and faces, perhaps they bathed their hairy chests a mite; male nurses did the rest. She had not believed that in this night or in any night she would be lifting the limbs of another female, opening those limbs, striving to preserve immobility in the sufferer while the man beside her manipulated his syringe, his sponges and compresses. The possibility had never even entered her mind. She was close to being appalled at discovering her lack of abashment.

We are faced with a variety of complications.

Yes, sir.

On the one hand it’s essential that we reduce the fever, and in doing so must reduce the pain suffered by the patient; on the other hand there’s been butchery; we must treat the local situation— As now.

Yes, sir.

Sometimes Laurel was silent, sometimes she snarled or cried out recognizable pleas, sometimes she tossed her arms wildly while wailing; it was difficult to tend her. Sometimes she made so much noise that Lucy could scarcely hear what Elkins was saying.

...Necessary to . . . more quietly . . . you see, I must hold the syringe . . . injection . . . regular female syringe would be preferable but . . . none . . . into the vagina for at least. . . .

The Dillards came driving up behind Blackie two hours after daylight. Laurel was still alive although Elkins had feared that she would die with the sunrise; she’d weakened terribly. But deep within the girl’s scrambled inheritance there was a will to live, there was power to be invoked—that tonic contained in bodies and souls of some of the weakest, some of the most wasted.

Effie Dillard bustled furiously to her task, ragged starched cap-frill standing out like sunrays above her pocked yellow face. She took one look at Harrell Elkins and ordered him home. Clean white cloths appeared magically, rough towels were drying and warming in front of the fire. Be off with you, Surgeon, or you’ll be lying sickly as this unhappy lass! She set the amazed Coral to picking the chicken she had rushed to decapitate before leaving Americus. If only I can get a wee swallow of broth down the child’s throat. Away with you, Surgeon! The dominie can help me as he’s helped before. Cousin Harry and the Claffeys rode off in the cart.

Before Harrell Elkins went up to bed he stood gazing fixedly at the bedraggled Lucy. Florence Nightmare, he said, indulging in the family jest as his beloved Sutherland had done often.

Mrs. Dillard fetched everything from febrifuge to Peckham’s Cough Balsam, from emenagogue tincture to female laxative and anodyne pills. She must have cleared two shelves of her medicine closet. She shared the concern of Elkins: it appeared that she would lose her patient about four o’clock of the first afternoon. She worked in frenzy to stimulate the child’s heart action and circulation. She reported, when Cousin Harry was able to look in the next morning, that Laurel was mending. Harry did not share this hopeful opinion. But when the girl lived still, two days following, he asked Mrs. Dillard what witches’ remedies she had employed.

A spicy friendship grew between the voluble Scotswoman and the weary young zealot. They made dreadful jokes about live chickens split with an axe and laid upon a sufferer’s wound, about black cats killed in the dark of the moon. When Elkins and Lucy arrived at the cottage in company, they came laden with provisions which Lucy had selected; but Harrell declared the rusks to be English worm cakes, the fresh bacon to be toad ointment. For sprains, strains, lame-back, rheumatism And So Forth, he recommended it. Obtain good-sized live toads, four in number. He described the process. Put into boiling water and cook until very soft. Then take out and boil the water down to one-half pint, and add fresh butter, one pound; and simmer together, and at the last add tincture of arnica. Lucy squealed and covered her ears, Mrs. Dillard regarded Elkins with studied malevolence. Well enough for you to scoff and jeer at wiser elder minds, young man! But I had yon toad ointment from a physician of the old school, and with it I cured two women of caked breasts. She added in meditation, Some folk might think it cruel to the poor toadies. But you could no kill them quicker.

Cato Dillard spent two nights at the Claffeys’ and then returned to Americus to keep an engagement with the ruling elder. But Effie remained at the Tebbs place for more than three weeks, sleeping on a sofa which black people brought from the Claffey house, sleeping close to her patient so that she could be alert at the first groan from Laurel. Mag was allowed to occupy the bed in the front room (but only after Coral had been commanded to beat the mattress in hot sunlight for an hour, and after fresh bedclothing had been put upon it). Coral was billeted in The Crib with Zoral; Effie Dillard demanded that he burn the chicken-coop which served previously as Zoral’s kennel. Coral undertook to obey, but Zoral witnessed the preparations and set up such a screaming that Coral took pity and dragged the coop behind the ruined stable where Zoral might dwell in it when so minded. The Widow Tebbs’ professional life was at a standstill. She sulked because of this, once she had recovered from fright over her daughter, and once she recognized that the girl was recovering, that friends had saved her.

Mrs. Effie preached a violent sermon on the subject of abortion until the widow was in tears. Then Mrs. Effie offered her Georgia version of cockaleekie, and spice cake baked between bedside labors. She won Coral’s heart with vinegar pies and with the gift of a miniature brass pocket pistol which had belonged to Effie’s own father. Immediately thereafter she sentenced Coral to scrub the front room’s floor and to help her in wiping down walls.

She scolded about the state of affairs under the house, and declared that she would fetch one of her own Negroes from Americus some fine day to rake that smelly mess.

Coral said, Tain’t that which smells mostly. Reckon it’s the stockade yonder.

You’re daft, lad! A reek arises through the very cracks in the floor. Think you I’ve no nose upon my face to smell with?

Reckon it’s on account of that blame little Zoral. He’s fetched by the sight of a dead critter. Always pulling them under the house to play with. Plays like they’re a train and he’s a engine-driver.

Then I’ll work him a poke of yarn balls, the poor mannie, and he shall sport with those.

Reckon Zoral he wouldn’t fancy no such pretty-plays. What he likes most is a dead bat. He hain’t never had but one, less twas when I was off to the war.

On the second day of her stay she found time to scrub Zoral in a tub of hot water and to clip his shaggy hair. His yells were heard past the boundary of the Claffey plantation. She levied upon Lucy for clothing. Sundry items were extracted from the funereal chests packed by Veronica Claffey; Lucy saw no sense in hoarding all those things, neither did her father. Zoral was provided with under-drawers for the first time in his life, which article of clothing held fascination for him: he was always lifting the skirt of an ancient plaid dress once worn by Sutherland Claffey, and bending over to look at his own drawers. He received a wide-brimmed red straw hat which had belonged to Lucy. The hat vanished, only to reappear later on the head of a very young Reserve private who strolled past the house.

Effie was out of the cottage in a flash. Young man, you’ve stolen yon hat from the bairn!

Didn’t steal nothing, lady. He sold it to me for a polecat I done shot over here on the railroad. We made a trade.

But the bairn’s an innocent! Scarce can he speak an intelligible word!

Well, he made out that he wanted my polecat, and he kind of grinned, and he give me the hat. I was tickled a-getting it, for I had none.

Effie’s sense of justice compelled her to lecture the youth on his sin in taking advantage of a simple-minded infant, her benevolence compelled her to provide him with a paper of sorghum candy.

Two barrels of whiting had been discovered in one of Ira Claffey’s sheds, so from Ira the minister’s wife begged a few pounds of this material. She asked her husband to stop by the glue-works at Americus before he drove north on his next visit. Here were essentials for the manufacture of whitewash. Mrs. Dillard presented Coral with the bullet mould and powder flask which should have accompanied the brass pistol. Submitting to this bribery, he worked without resentment at mixing a wash for rooms in the cottage. Even Zoral was taught to carry water in assistance, though he spilled half the water each time in mounting the steps, and managed to fall into whitewash when the vat was full, thus entailing more work for Mrs. Effie, more laundering of Zoral, more roars. Very soon the widow sat sewing carpet-rags in a freshly whitened front room (later she was made to shape the circular rag-rugs themselves: she manufactured two, lumpy and uneven, to present additional hazard to Coral and his crutches. One rug was variegated rosily, the other blue and white. Mag thought them beautiful) and Laurel pursued her convalescence in a freshly whitened bedroom.