Eutopia (27 page)

Still, he could follow one of those paths and eventually find himself back at Eliada.

Andrew marched upslope a few dozen yards. His doctor’s bag lay where he’d dropped it as he twitched and stumbled down the hillside. Miraculously, it was intact.

No, Andrew corrected himself. There was no miracle because there had been no battle. He had not been attacked by her, any more than he had encountered Loo in the trees.

The mechanism of this thing had simply preyed upon his own doubts and fears and aspirations. It had somehow aided him in isolating something that for lack of a better word might be called “sin.” And for a physician, sin was failure.

Andrew shut his eyes. Oh yes—the Juke had done its work with the brainless cruelty of a clockwork. It had done everything that it might, to draw him into its web—to ripen him for what amounted to a religious conversion.

All of which gave rise to another question: why hadn’t the strategy worked?

It should have. Andrew thought himself clever enough. He had been a good student and, recent experience notwithstanding, a competent physician. But he was under no illusions that he possessed heroic will or genius insight. What was it that saved him?

Norma said the Juke tended to make its deepest mark upon close families—through the amniotic fluid and germ plasm of the host mother, no doubt. And Andrew was far enough from the stem of that family tree that he was barely affected at all.

He flexed the fingers of his broken arm, and thought then about another possibility.

Perhaps it was something in Norma’s remarkably curative tea.

What was it she had said? Good for the body and the soul. Might she have discovered some root, some concoction that lessened the ability of this thing to rob men and women of their wills? It would explain how it was that she and her ilk had lived in this place for so long, without falling into the thrall of these creatures.

I will have to ask her for the recipe—as soon as I find my way back, he thought as he hefted the bag in his good hand and started to climb back up the slope. It wouldn’t be hard—there was a good plume of wood smoke climbing into the sky.
Perhaps
, thought Andrew as he climbed,
they are cremating Loo now.

Or perhaps
, Andrew thought as he first took sight of what was left of the Tavish’s homestead,
the Juke hasn’t finished with me yet
.

At the opening of the path was a body of a man, his intestines torn from his middle and stretched through the blood-quickened dirt, mingled with pine needles. More corpses were stacked in the middle of the common, in the same place that just a day ago, Andrew had worked his meagre skills to try to save Loo. The table was gone—perhaps locked in the still-smouldering ruins of the house where Loo had been kept in her last weeks.

Andrew knelt down by the first corpse and took a good look at the cut. Nothing had clawed its way out of this one and no creature had torn it either. The cut was crosswise across the gut, and it was neat enough to be from a blade, not neat enough to suggest a sharp one.

Andrew touched the man’s face. He stared with wide milky eyes up into the pines. Blood flecked his beard, and flies buzzed in Andrew’s ear. He let go of the man’s face, and touched his fingertip to the cooling tube of intestine, and drew a deep breath of the smell of this place—and uncertainly at first, he stood up, shaking with the realization: this was no chemical fakery. This was not something that Norma’s tea would drive off.

Andrew left the single corpse and made his way through a thickening cloud of flies to the others. Eyes stinging, he made a count: there were seven here, among them what was left of Hank, his skull split from the side. One eye hung out, its orb crusted with dirt where it touched the ground.

He wanted to cry out, to call for Norma—but he didn’t. The ones who’d done this weren’t in sight, but they mightn’t be far. So Andrew picked up his doctor’s bag, and propelled by the slimmest hope he struggled his way up the hill as quick as he might, to Norma Tavish’s cabin.

He didn’t have to get that far to find her. She was on her back, a great slash across her throat, beside a rain barrel next to the barn. Her hands were still clenched in fists, as though she were still alive, waiting for another fight to come.

Andrew reached down with trembling hands and opened those fists, uncurling each finger. He smoothed her hair back. He tried to lift her but that was beyond him. So he reached down and shut her eyes—the last grace he could give her. He left her there under the trees, and made for her house.

The door hung open when he came upon it. He approached it slowly, under the sensible assumption that whoever had done this could well be still inside. But the cabin was uninhabited. It had been ransacked; blankets tossed onto the floor, furniture overturned.

Just as Andrew had heard the call drawing him away from this place, the killers had heard a call drawing them here.

And they’d found what they’d come for.

The dead infant Juke in its pickle jar. All that was left of it were shards of glass and the now-familiar stink of it. Otherwise, it was as if it had never been there.

Andrew didn’t have to search long for the other thing he sought: the tea that kept the Juke at bay.

Norma kept a bin near the fire, and the killers had missed it. It made sense, as Andrew thought about it. They might not have any idea about what the mixture signified. And once they had the Juke—well, they had what they sought.

But the scent of the herbs was unmistakable—sweet and earthy and fine. He found a cloth, wrapped the concoction into a ball the size of a small roast, and put it into the medical bag. Then he went back outside.

He walked through the village not looking down or to the side, back to the path that had brought him here. He would make for the clearing where he’d fought off the Juke, and then the logging road beyond it back to Eliada.

It took all his will not to look down as he passed the barn—not to wonder whether it really was Norma’s spirit, freed from flesh by a slash across her throat, who had come to him at the conclusion of his battle with the Juke. A man might conclude such a thing; that the visitation coming after a true but yet-unknown demise, was evidence that Andrew Waggoner really had seen Heaven, really had been offered his salvation.

Andrew spat as he entered the woods. He would not entertain such thoughts. He would be no good to anyone—not himself, and certainly not Jason Thistledown, the boy to whom he owed his life and who, Andrew was certain, was in very grave peril indeed.

“It’s not infected,” said Annie Rowe. “Even with a half-working hand, Dr. Waggoner did well by you.”

She pulled the bandage back further, and Jason flinched, though the pain turned out less than he feared. “In a day or two we can take out the stitches,” she said.

Jason peered down at the wound. It was the morning of the third day since he’d sliced his hand in the quarantine, and it was indeed looking better; the flesh was pink and tender where the black stitches held it together. It itched more than it hurt.

“Hold still,” said the nurse, as she dipped a ball of cotton into a jar of alcohol and dabbed it on the wound. Now
that
stung. Jason looked away, up at the skylight of the operating theatre where Nurse Rowe had brought him to do the work. It was, she said, the cleanest place in Eliada, this operating room. It was also—next, maybe, to the storeroom behind the autopsy—the quietest.

Neither of them wanted to go down to the autopsy. So here they were.

“Thank you,” said Jason, and Nurse Rowe said: “Just doing my work here. Stop moving.”

“I’m not moving,” he protested. “I didn’t mean thank you for looking at my cut. I know that’s your job. I mean—”

“Hush. I know what you meant.” She eyed him over the spectacles she wore for fine work. She set his hand down on the table and reached around for a roll of fresh gauze. “He got away all right?”

“He did,” said Jason. It had been two days since Nurse Rowe had helped Jason gather the doctor’s bag and everything else. Jason had figured he could trust her, owing to their adventure the night of Dr. Waggoner’s escape, and she hadn’t betrayed that trust. But he hadn’t felt safe coming to see her after he saw Dr. Waggoner off. It might tip off Bergstrom, or those fellows who were responsible for breaking into the doctor’s rooms. Sam Green had promised to protect Jason best he could—but he’d given no word as to Annie Rowe’s safety. So Jason decided he wouldn’t talk to her again without an excuse.

That excuse came this morning, when after breakfast in the apartments he shared with Germaine Frost, his aunt suggested he have his hand seen to.

“I would change those bandages myself,” she said, as she straightened a stack of fresh index cards on the roll-top desk she’d been given for her work. “But I’m quite occupied with the catalogue. There are more than a thousand souls here. You should avail yourselves of the facilities.”

“You want me to go see Dr. Bergstrom?” Jason had been avoiding Bergstrom, lest he find some new pretext to toss Jason back into the quarantine.

Aunt Germaine might have been worrying about the same thing. “No,” she said. “Aside from everything else, Dr. Bergstrom has more to do than inspect stitches and change bandages. Go, Nephew. Go find a nurse. And then find some fresh air and exercise.”

So Jason went—and made it a point not to find a nurse until he located Annie Rowe, seeing to a couple of new mothers in the maternity ward on the first floor. They made an appointment to meet in the operating theatre an hour later.

Now, Nurse Rowe listened hungrily as Jason told the story of Andrew’s escape. He told her everything, except how he found out that Andrew might be in trouble. “That’s a promise I made,” said Jason, “and I keep my word.”

“I won’t make you break your word,” she said, and cut a square of gauze. “I just pray he’s safe.”

“Safer than here,” said Jason. “Everybody keeps talking about this place as Utopia. I don’t know about that.”

“You don’t like it here?”

Jason laughed. “Oh it’s fine,” he said.

He’d spent the previous day out of the hospital, wandering the town while Aunt Germaine did her eugenics work. He could see how someone had set down a plan for it. The workers all lived in fine little houses in three roads, not one bigger than another, with space in back for a garden and some livestock. The roads were muddy, but they were wide—wide enough for little gardens in the middle. What he’d first thought was a church was a town hall, with space inside for big meetings and that motto—
Compassion. Community. Hygiene.
—repeated again and again where the walls met the ceilings.

The fellow who seemed to run the place told Jason they ran lessons for the young people two days out of the week from there. When the children of Eliada got a little bit older there’d be a proper school for them. In the meantime: would Jason like to stop by and learn some things?

Jason got out of there as fast as he could. He spent a little more time inside the sawmill. He would have stayed longer, watching the men run logs across the great whirling saw-blades, thinking how this was a kind of family he could join, something he could
be.
But a foreman spotted him and ushered him out into the road and Jason put thoughts of being a lumberman aside for another day.

In the end, he had wandered the town like he had wandered the train from Butte—hoping to catch a glimpse of pretty Ruth Harper, and finding other things instead.

“It’s a fine town,” said Jason. “Yet look what happened.”

Nurse Rowe gave a wry smile. “There’s no such a thing as Utopia, really. Not on earth. And for a Negro, that’s doubly true.”

“If that’s right,” said Jason, “I have to wonder why he’d come here. Why you’d come here, come to think of it. Seems like a long way to go to live a life as hard as you’d find anywhere else.”

“Wise boy,” said Annie.

Jason shrugged, and she laughed.

“Just because this place isn’t Utopia now, doesn’t mean it can’t be,” said Nurse Rowe. “There are ideals at work.”

Jason looked at Nurse Rowe sidelong. “Ideals. Like eugenical ideals?”

“Eugenical? Did you make that word up?”

“Maybe I did,” said Jason. “Eugenics is how I heard it. You know about eugenics.”

“I do. Mr. Harper speaks of it sometimes, as one of the pillars of Community. It’s all tied up with Hygiene.” She pointed to the door they’d come in. There were those words again, hung over the frame: Community. Compassion. And Hygiene.

“Mr. Harper?” Jason held out his hand so Nurse Rowe could wrap bandage over the gauze. “Haven’t met him yet. I met his daughter. Not him. I suppose I will at that picnic on Sunday. You two talk a lot?”

The bandage wrapped quickly, and Nurse Rowe cut it with a pair of scissors. “Oh no,” she said. “But I listen to him speak. He’s an inspiring fellow, is Mr. Garrison Harper.” She sat back on her stool, smoothed down her skirts. “It weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be here.”

Jason flexed his fingers and looked at the bandage. This one was better than the one Dr. Waggoner had put on him. That first bandage had started to peel back almost immediately. Nurse Rowe knew her bandaging.