Sweet Everlasting (35 page)

She ate dinner too fast. The cabin was immaculate; after she washed her plate, there was nothing to do. She could draw the bat. She could do some mending. She could look at her Audubon book. No—she couldn’t do that. Couldn’t even touch it, she realized. In a few days, but not yet. Not now.

Louie sat in front of the rickety screen door, staring out. She thought he looked lost. The half-moon had climbed higher, white as a bone over the treetops. She’d have gone for a walk, but she didn’t want to leave the dog alone, and she was afraid he’d run away if she took him with her.

In the end she sketched her bat, by lantern light, sitting at the table. His wings were translucent—she could see his bones right through them. He was in the order of Chiroptera, which was Greek for hand, “Cheiros,” and wing, “Pteros.” It felt funny to be drawing inside the house. Wherever he was, she hoped Artemis knew she wasn’t gloating.

At nine o’clock she took Lou outside, using a piece of rope for a leash. At nine-thirty, she was washed and ready for bed. She blew out the lantern and lay down in her alcove, pulling back the curtain over the window so she could see the sky. The smell of wet pine was fragrant and fresh, the sound of crickets a comfort. Lou whined in his sleep. She dropped her arm over the side of the bench and stroked his soft head, soothing him. She said a prayer for Ty and his family. It took a long time to fall asleep, but finally she did. And that was how she passed her first night without him.

C
OLUMBIA
B
ARRACKS

Quemados, Cuba

September 8, 1900

Dear Carrie,

I’m sitting on the barracks veranda as I write this. We have a Chinese cook in charge of our mess, which is regularly first-rate. My quarters are typically sparse for military digs, but altogether adequate. Palatial, in fact, compared to my lodgings here two years ago, which consisted of a mackintosh on the steaming jungle floor. If I had time for them, I’d entertain a hundred memories of that long-ago farce of a war, but from my new vantage it only seems like a violent dream. We “liberated” the Cubans, but the real winners were typhoid and malaria and yellow jack. Did you know that disease killed thirteen times as many men as bullets did? I pray it’s not arrogance, or not
only
that, that makes me believe I’m fighting for the right cause for the first time in my life.

I had intended to write to you sooner than this, but Camp Columbia was a hornet’s nest when I arrived a little over a week ago, and until this moment, quite literally, there’s been no opportunity. A terrible yellow-fever epidemic has been raging through the town since June, in spite of the army’s best efforts to scrub it, fumigate it, and even close down its bordellos. (There’s a doctor here named Stark who theorizes that the fever only visits people of reprehensible character, and if he can keep the soldiers out of the whorehouses, the incidence of disease will go down.) All of Quemados is in quarantine now, off-limits to Americans. The locals watch the loco Norte Americanos’ incessant cleaning and disinfecting with great amusement—while the death toll climbs. As a doctor whose job it is to try to discover this plague’s cause, I find myself in the awkward position of viewing each new casualty as a chance to move a step closer to the goal.

There are five of us on the commission here. Major Walter Reed is our leader, and the only one I haven’t met—he left for the States on business a few weeks before my arrival and isn’t expected to return until October. The man he left in charge is a doctor named James Carroll, who’s competent, I’m told, if not a particularly agreeable fellow. I’d make up my own mind on that score, but I can’t—he’s been near death with the yellow jack since I got here!

Yesterday, thank God, he started to improve, but he’s not out of danger yet. The other team members, Jesse Lazear and Dr. Agramonte, have been beside themselves—Lazear in particular because he feels responsible. Agramonte had a mild case of the fever when he was a child, so he and I are the “immunes.” But Lazear and Carroll agreed early on that they would subject themselves to the same risks they’d ask of anyone else during the course of the experiments. What’s ironic is that until now, no one seriously believed the culprit is a mosquito, not even Reed, not for
certain,
and it was only one of the theories that the commission planned to test. So Carroll let himself be bitten, and two days later he came down with the disease.

Now that it appears he’s going to recover, you’d think the mood among us would be jubilant, but it’s just the opposite. Carroll was so sick and went down so fast, we’re convinced the mosquito was the agent. But we can’t prove it! Before he grew too delirious to speak, he admitted that he went into the yellow-fever wards of the hospital, the autopsy rooms, and even into Havana during the crucial interval, so all chance of control has been lost. If he’d died, his death would’ve proven absolutely nothing.

The need for controlled human experiments is obvious now, a thought that gives none of us any pleasure. The soldiers in the military hospital take all of this as a joke, and volunteer constantly. A trooper named William Dean from the Seventh Cavalry says he’s ready and willing to let one of Lazear’s “birds” bite him. God help us, and him, for we’re set to do it. Everyone is of two minds, as you can imagine. Having once suffered the full course of the disease myself, I can honestly say I wouldn’t wish it on Satan himself. But if Trooper Dean comes down with it on schedule, it would be the first case ever induced deliberately by the bite of an infected mosquito, and the implications would be enormous.

Forgive me, Carrie—can this be of any interest to you at all? I’m consumed by it, day and night. I’d thought to write you a pleasant letter about the camp—clean and comfortable; the weather—balmy and beautiful; the company—interesting to say the least. But I see I’ve jumped right into the storm that rages around us all the time, and dragged you into it with me with out a thought. It’s the enormity of what we’ve undertaken that confounds and humbles me, and the risks we can’t help taking with each other’s lives. If we succeed, people will say we were heroes, but if we fail, our hopes and our memories will be consigned to hell—and who’s to say they don’t belong there?

8:30
P.M
.—Jesse Lazear dragged me away to the officers’ mess, telling me I work too hard. I never told him that I wasn’t studying pathology culture results, but writing a frivolous letter to a dear friend! Jesse is an awfully good fellow, by the way. I knew him slightly at Hopkins, where he was an assistant in clinical microscopy. His wife and son were here in Cuba until recently, but he sent them back home because of the epidemic. He and I spend our free time (such as it is) together, two homesick bachelors comforting each other.

It’s an odd existence we lead here, Carrie. Already I miss the conversation of women, the sounds of children playing, the song of a plain, ordinary bird I recognize! I think of you in your cabin on High Dreamer Mountain, and wonder what you’re doing. What wildlings have you found to doctor these days? How does your hospital look in September? Has Louie driven you completely insane? If so, that would explain why you haven’t written me a letter yet. Memories of the times we shared this summer warm me, and help me through some of the horrors here. You gave me a promise that you would tell me if you ever needed my help. I believed it or I wouldn’t have left you. And now I’ll simply remind you of it again. Ever, Carrie—for anything.

It’s late, and the days are long and exhausting. Give my best to Frank and Eppy, and Broom, and Doc Stoneman if you write to him. Most of all, take good care of yourself.

Good night, Tyler.

Columbia Barracks

Quemados, Cuba

September 20, 1900

Dear Carrie,

Everything is chaos here. Jesse Lazear felt out of sorts two days ago, and now he’s so frantic with delirium they’ve had to restrain him. High albumin, high fever—his chances look very poor to me. Still, he’s young, only 32, and strong and fit; he may pull through. But time is the enemy now.

The hell of it is, it was another
accident
!” He was securing mosquito samples in the hospital, holding a test-tube bug on a patient’s stomach while it fed. Another mosquito lighted on his hand—he told us this before he became completely incoherent—and thinking it was the culex malarial variety that’s common in the hospital, he let it bite, meaning to capture it in a minute and add it to his specimen collection. But he was busy, and it flew off before he could catch it. He made no note of the incident and never thought of it again—until five days later when he fell gravely ill.

Dr. Carroll, thank God, is getting stronger all the time. Did I tell you about Trooper Dean in my last letter? He was our first volunteer. He was bitten, contracted the disease, and is now recovering. If Lazear dies, it will be for nothing, and Dean’s will be the only case that conclusively proves anything at all. I can’t describe to you the guilt and anguish and desperation among us all. The irony is demoralizing-two of the members of the very board sent here to put an end to unscientific conjecture about the disease have become its random victims. And anyone who disagrees with the mosquito theory can use Carroll’s or Lazear’s cases as
examples
to prove almost any method of infestation he likes!

Walter Reed is still away; Dr. Carroll talks of going home soon for a rest. Agramonte and I keep working, but Jesse’s agony makes it impossible to concentrate in any constructive way. And yet everyone feels we’re on the brink of something important, one of the great discoveries of the century. If I didn’t believe that, I would despair.

My family writes to me of all the news in Philadelphia. I keep my letters to them light and brief—because those two women in my life are volatile, and worry altogether too much about me. I hope that no word from you means that you are well, and happy on your mountain. I try to picture you there in autumn, but I find I can never see you in my mind’s eye without flowers. Do you remember your first gift to me? A tiny bouquet of wildflowers, light as a feather. You wrote that the sweet everlasting smelled like “perfume,” and so it did.

Be happy. Think of me sometimes.

Tyler.

Columbia Barracks

Quemados, Cuba

October 13, 1900

Dear Carrie,

Jesse Lazear is dead. We buried him two weeks ago in the post cemetery with full military honors. He left a wife and son, and the unborn child his wife carries. They say he had no insurance, no pension, and they’ll be left with nothing. I miss his tall, lanky shape hanging in my doorway at dinnertime, and drawling, “You planning to eat anytime this week, Dr. Wilkes?” He had an old-fashioned Southern courtliness that made him easy to know, easy to love. His passing has diminished us all, and the mood here is grim.

Dr. Reed arrived a week ago and is working feverishly on the preliminary report he plans to deliver to the American Public Health Association on the 23rd. But for all his activity, he’s got precious little to go on, and we all dread the consequences when his colleagues realize his mosquito theory is based on three cases, two of which were uncontrolled. But death is all around us. September was the worst month for the fever in Havana in two years. Reed has no choice but to go forward with all speed.

I’ve been thinking of that night you met me on the bridge over South Creek, Carrie, after one of my patients had died—do you remember the old man with the brain lesion? I’d stayed with him all day, and he was lucid almost to the end. It hit me hard when he died, no doubt because he’d reminded me of my father. You didn’t say much to me that night. But you leaned against me while we stared down at the water rushing under our feet. I can close my eyes now and feel the weight of you against my arm, and it comforts me. That warmth and that pressure. There must be a hundred things I’ve never thanked you for. Are you well, Carrie? Are you happy? I pray that you are, and that you’ll keep your promise to tell me if you should ever need me.

Yours, Tyler.

Columbia Barracks

Quemados, Cuba

November 20, 1900

Dear Carrie,

There’s time for only a note, in case you’ve been wondering how we fare. There was a storm here five days ago, a strong one that uprooted trees and—much worse, from our admittedly peculiar viewpoint—blew most of the mosquitos out to sea. Since then, Dr. Reed has had us scouring the island with cyanide bottles in a most undignified manner, hunting for eggs and larvae so that our experiments can go on.

His report to the APHA was greeted with a great shrug of indifference by the attendees, and with open scorn by the newspapers afterward. The
Washington Post
called the mosquito hypothesis “the silliest beyond compare,” and referred to the members of the team—yours truly included—as “whoever they may be.” Reed was glad to come back, and now he’s supervising work on a new observation camp being built about two miles from here. It’s to be called Camp Lazear.

Since an animal has never contracted yellow fever in any known experiment, we find ourselves in the ethically questionable position of needing to recruit more human volunteers. We have eight so far, including an American army private and an American civilian clerk from General Lee’s headquarters. The others are all Cubans, desperately poor men, overjoyed at the idea of earning $100 in American gold for doing what they consider nothing at all. I’m happy to say that the American volunteers have declined payment. Kissinger, the private, was bitten today by a carefully infected “ladybird.” If he doesn’t contract the disease, everything we’ve done is for nothing. If he does—he may die. It’s a bleak, practically winless situation, and the pressure’s beginning to tell on all of us. Dr. Carroll is back from his sick leave, but he seems bitter and remote. He and Reed were friends for years, but there’s a strain between them now. Some say it’s jealousy, that Carroll resents the professional advancement in store for Reed once—if ?—his theories are accepted. Even so—

Forgive me. This can’t possibly be of any interest to you. I’m surrounded by these petty intrigues 24 hours a day and have lost my perspective. Well, what shall I say to you, then? Shall I describe the weather? The cold mango I ate for breakfast? Shall I tell you that I miss you, that I think of you more often than I have a right to? I might have once, but your continued silence tells me those words would not be welcome anymore. Might even cause you pain. I’ve hurt you enough in the past, Carrie, and would never knowingly do it again.

Yours ever, Tyler.

Camp Lazear

Quemados, Cuba

December 10, 1900

Dear Carrie,

This will be my last letter to you from Cuba. I’m going home in three days, assuming all goes well here in the meantime. I plan to spend the week preceding Christmas with my family in Philadelphia, then report immediately to the Pathology Laboratory at the Army Medical College in Washington, D.C. I’ll be a civilian bacteriologist there, working, at least initially, on identifying the specific agent of the disease carried by the
C. fasciatus
mosquito, and after that, we hope, on an immunizing agent. There’s a great deal we don’t know—but what we now
do
know, definitely and unequivocally, can’t be underestimated. I don’t think it’s too much to say that our mission here has changed medical history. If it weren’t for the loss of Lazear, we could claim absolute victory. But that’s a loss we can never forget, and it tempers everything. The truth is, it’s a bloody
miracle
that no one died besides Jesse. Even though so much is still a mystery, all of us are repelled by the thought of infecting more volunteers, and we’re agreed that it has to stop.