"I told you, damn it, get your filthy hands off me!"
The objectionable language attracted Bingaman's attention as much as the sense of outrage. The man responsible coughed hoarsely. There, Bingaman saw. To the right. Three rows over. Nurses, volunteers, and those few patients with a modicum of strength looked in that direction also.
"You bitch, if you touch me again - " The man's raspy voice disintegrated into a paroxysm of coughing.
Such language could absolutely not be tolerated. Bingaman left the patient he'd been examining, veered between beds, reached another row, and veered between other beds, approaching the commotion. Three men had evidently carried in a fourth, who was sprawled on a cot, resisting the attentions of a nurse. Bingaman's indignation intensified at the thought of a nurse being called such things, but what he heard next was even more appalling. His emotions made it difficult for him to breathe.
"You goddamn German!"
Marion. The nurse the patient shouted at was Bingaman's wife. The three men who had carried in the patient were pushing her away.
Outraged, Bingaman reached the commotion. "Don't you touch her! What's going on here?"
The patient's face reddened from the fury with which he coughed. Spittle flew. Bingaman stepped back reflexively, making sure that he stayed protectively in front of Marion.
"Put these masks on. No one comes in here without one. What's the matter with you?"
"She's
what's the matter," one man said. His voice was slurred. He was tall, wore work clothes, and had obviously been drinking." Lousy German." "Watch what you're saying."
"Hun! Kraut!" a second man said, more beefy than the first." Yer not foolin' anybody." He, too, was obviously drunk. "Yer the one who did it! Made my friend sick! Gave everybody the influenza!"
"What kind of nonsense..."
"Spanish nothing." The man on the bed coughed again. He was losing strength. Despite his feverish cheeks, he had alarming black circles around his eyes. "It's the German influenza."
The first man took a tottering step toward Marion. "How much did the Kaiser pay you, Kraut?"
"Pay her?" the second man said. "Didn't need to pay the bitch. She's a German, ain't she? Germans love killing Americans."
"I've heard enough." Bingaman shook with rage. "Get out of this hospital. Now. I swear I'll send for a policeman."
"And leave her?" The third man pointed drunkenly past Bingaman toward Marion. "Leave her to kill more Americans? She's the one brought the influenza here. The German influenza. This is how the Kaiser thinks he's gonna win the war. Damned murderous Kraut."
"I won't tell you again! Leave this instant or I'll - "
Bingaman stepped toward the men, urging them toward the door. The first man braced himself, muttered, "The Huns killed my son in France, you goddamn Kraut-lover," and struck the doctor's face.
Time seemed to stop. At once, it began again. Hearing exclamations around him, Bingaman lurched back, distantly aware of blood spewing from his lips beneath his mask. Then something struck his nose, and he saw double. Blood spurted from his nostrils. He lost control of his legs. He seemed to float. When he struck the floor, he heard faraway screaming.
Then everything was a blur. He had a vague sense of being lifted, carried. He heard distant, urgent voices. His mind reeled as he was set on something.
A cot. In a shadowy supply room at the rear of the gymnasium.
"Jonas, are you all right? Jonas?"
He recognized Marion's voice. Each anxious word sounded closer, as if she was leaning down.
"Jonas?"
"Yes. I think I'm all right."
"Let me get your mask off so you can breathe."
"No. Can't risk contamination. Leave it on."
She was wiping blood from his face. "I'll give you a clean one."
"Jonas?" A man's voice. Worried. Powell.
"I'm only dazed," Bingaman answered slowly. "Caught me by surprise." His words seemed to echo. "I'll be all right in a moment." He tried to sit up, but he felt as if he had ball bearings in his skull and they all rolled backward, forcing his head down. "Those men. Are they..."
"Gone."
"A policeman. Did you send for one?"
"What would be the point? When they closed the schools, the restaurants, and the stores, they also emptied the jail. There isn't any place to put those men."
"Can't understand what got into them. Accusing Marion. Outrageous," Bingaman said.
He managed to open his eyes and focus his aching vision. He saw Marion's worried face. And Powell's, which had a reluctant expression.
"What is it? What aren't you telling me?" Bingaman asked.
"This isn't the first time."
"I don't understand."
"People are frightened," Powell said. "They can't accept that it's random and meaningless. They want easy explanations. Something specific."
"I still don't understand."
"Someone to blame. The Germans. Marion."
"But that's preposterous. How could they be so foolish as to think that Marion would..."
The discomfited look on Marion's face made Bingaman frown. "You've been aware of this?"
"Yes."
"How long has this been going on?"
"Several days."
"And yet you still volunteered to come down here and help? I'm amazed." But then Bingaman thought about it, and he wasn't amazed. Marion always did what was right, even when it was difficult.
"Don't get the wrong impression," Powell said. "It's not like everyone feels that way. Only a minority. A small minority. But they've certainly made their opinions known."
"I'm going to have to stay home," Marion said.
"No," Powell said. "You can't let them bully you."
"It isn't because of them. I have a more important job. Feeljonas's forehead. Touch the glands in his throat. Put your hand on his chest. You don't need a stethoscope. You can feel the congestion. He has it."
* * *
The jolt of wheels into potholes and the noxious fumes of the Model T aggravated Bingaman's excruciating headache, making him nauseous as Marion drove him home. His injuries seemed to have broken the resolve with which he'd subdued the symptoms that he'd attributed only to fatigue. Now, as delirium took control of him, his last lucid thought was an echo of what he'd said to Dr. Bennett after seeing the nurse's corpse: How could this have happened so quickly ? By the time Marion brought him home, the pain in his swollen lips and nostrils was insignificant compared to the soul-deep aching of his joints and limbs. He was so light-headed that he felt disassociated from himself, seeming to hover, watching Marion struggle to get him out of the car and up the steps into the house.
He did his best to cough away from her, grateful that he'd insisted she put a new mask on him. But the moment she eased him onto the bed, exhaling with effort, she loosened his shirt collar and took off the mask, which had become blood-soaked on the ride home.
"No," he murmured.
"Don't argue with me, Jonas. I have to get you cleaned up."
"Should have left me in the hospital."
"Not when you have a trained nurse to give you constant care at home."
She took off his shoes, his socks, his pants, his bloody suit coat and vest and shirt. She stripped off his underwear. Shivering, naked on the bed, clutching his arms across his chest, teeth chattering, he watched the ceiling ripple as Marion bathed him from head to toe. She used warm water and soap, dried him thoroughly, then made him sit up and slipped his nightshirt over his head, pulling it down to his knees. She tugged long woolen socks over his feet. She covered him with a sheet and three blankets. When that still wasn't enough and his shivering worsened, she brought him a hot-water bottle and put on the down-filled comforter.
Bingaman coughed and murmured about a face mask.
"It interferes with your breathing," Marion said.
" Might contaminate..."
"I don't think it does any good. Besides, I've already been expos
ed to it." Working, Marion breathed harder.
Minutes, perhaps hours later, she was spooning hot tea into him, and when the chills suddenly turned into alarming amounts of sweat oozing from him, she tore off the covers, stripped him again, bathed him with rubbing alcohol, ignored his coughing, and eased him out of bed onto the floor. He had lost control of his bowels and fouled the bed. She had to change the sheets, then clean him and change his nightshirt, then tug him up onto the bed, and pull blankets over him again because the chills had returned. She covered his brow with a steaming washcloth and spooned more hot tea into him, trying to make him swallow pieces of warm bread soaked in the tea.
He lost all external impressions and floated away into darkness. His mind was like a boat on an increasingly choppy sea. A night sea. Storm-tossed. Spinning.
* * *
He had no idea how long he was away, but gradually the spinning stopped, the weather calmed, and when he came back, slowly, dimly, he didn't think that his throat had ever felt so dry or that he had ever been so weak. His eyes hurt as if they had sunk into his skull. His skin was tight from dehydration, greasy from repeated sweating frenzies. At the same time, it seemed loose, as if he had lost weight.
These sensations came to him gradually. He lay passively, watching a beam of sunlight enter the bedroom window on his left. Then it went away, and eventually the sunbeam entered through the window on his right, and he realized that he'd been in a semi-stupor while the sun passed from east to west. But he wasn't so stupefied that he failed to realize that nothing in the room had changed, that his nightshirt and covers were the same as in the morning, that no one had been in the room, that Marion hadn't been in the room.
He tried to call to her, but his lungs were too weak, his throat too dry, and nothing came out. He tried again and managed to produce only an animallike whimper.
Marion! he thought desperately. His fear was not for himself, not that he had been left alone, helpless. His terror was for Marion. If she wasn't taking care of him, that meant she wasn't able to, and that meant...
The effort to move made him cough. Congestion rattled in his chest. Breath wheezed past his swollen bronchial passages and up his raw throat. But despite his pain and lethargy, he had the sense that he was better, not as feverish. His headache didn't threaten to cause his skull to explode. His muscles ached, but not as if he were being stretched on a rack.
When he squirmed to the side of the bed and tried to stand, his legs wobbled. He slumped to the floor. Marion! he kept thinking. He crawled. The hand-over-hand movement reminded him of the fear and determination he had felt when learning to swim. A pitcher on a table attracted his attention, and he grasped a chair beside the table, struggling to raise himself, to tilt the pitcher toward his lips. Water trickled into his mouth, over his scabbed cracked parched lips, down his chin, onto his nightshirt. He clumsily set the pitcher back down, apprehensive about dropping it, the water tasting too precious for him to risk wasting it. But as precious as it tasted, it was also tepid, stale, with a slight grit of dust. It had obviously been there a while, and with his premonition mounting, filling him with terror, he tried to call Marion's name, shuddered at the weak sound of his croaky voice, and crawled again.
He found her downstairs on the floor in the kitchen. His immediate panicked thought was that she was dead. But when he moaned, he thought he heard an echo, only to realize that the second moan had come from her, weak, faint, a moan nonetheless, and he fought to increase the effort with which he crawled to her. He touched her brow and felt the terrible heat coming off it. Yes! Alive! But the depth of her cough and the sluggishness of her response when he tried to rouse her filled him with dread, and he knew that his first priority was to get fluid into her. He gripped the top of a kitchen counter, pulled himself up, and sweated while he worked the pump handle in the sink, filling a bowl with water from the house's well. He almost spilled the bowl and barely remembered to bring a spoon, but at last he sat exhausted next to Marion on the kitchen floor, cradled her head, and spooned water between her dry, swollen lips. The heat coming off her was overwhelming. He struggled to the icebox, used an ice pick, and clumsily chipped off chunks from the half-melted block in the upper compartment. With the chunks of ice wrapped in a dish towel, he slumped yet again beside Marion and wiped the cool cloth over her beet-red face. He set the cloth on her forehead, spooned more water into her mouth, then gave in to his own thirst and drank from the bowl, only to have it slip from his grasp and topple onto the floor, soaking Marion and himself. He moaned, felt dizzy again, and lowered his head to the floor.
* * *
Time blurred. When he regained consciousness, he found himself on a chair in the parlor. Marion was on the couch across from him, a throw rug over her. Her chest rose and fell. She coughed. A plate of stale bread and a pitcher of water were on a side table. Someone found us, Bingaman thought, coughing. Someone came in and helped. But during the next few effort-filled hours, he was forced to realize that he was mistaken, that no one had come, that somehow he had shifted Marion into the parlor, that he had brought the bread and the pitcher of water.
The bread was so old and hard that he had to soak it in the water before he could gently insert it into Marion's mouth and encourage her to eat. He breathed a prayer of thanks when she swallowed. When she coughed, he feared that she would expel the food, but it stayed down, and then he, too, was eating, rinsing a crust of bread down with the unbelievably delicious water.
* * *
Again time blurred. It wasn't bread but strawberry jam and a spoon that he now found on the table beside the couch. He remembered having seen the jam in the ice box. Marion was coughing. He was rubbing her fiery brow with a towel that held the last of the ice. He was spooning the jam into her mouth. He was raising a glass to her lips. He was drinking from another glass, feeling his parched mouth and throat seeming to absorb the water.
Darkness. Light.
* * *
Darkness again. The cellar. Stumbling. Opening the door to the root cellar. Despite the coolness, sweating. Groping for two jars of Marion's preserves on a shelf. Coughing. Swaying. Stumbling up the cellar steps, reaching the kitchen, squinting from the painful brilliance of blazing sunset, discovering that the preserves he had expended so much effort to get were dill pickles.
Darkness. Light.
* * *
Darkness. Light.
* * *
Light again. Marion was no longer coughing. Bingaman later concluded that what saved her life was her robust constitution, although when she was alert enough she insisted that he had been the reason she stayed alive. Because of his ministrations, she called them. She told him not to be so modest.
"Hush," he told her lovingly. "Don't waste your strength."
In the reverse, however, he had no doubt that Marion's own ministrations in the initial stage of his illness had been what saved him. The ruthless disease could be attacked only on the basis of its symptoms. After that, the patient would live or die strictly on the basis of his or her own resources, and now that Bingaman had endured the intimate experience of the influenza's devastating power, he marveled that anyone had the strength to resist it.
Perhaps strength was not the determining factor. Perhaps it was luck. Or Fate. Or God's will. But if the latter was indeed the case, God certainly must have turned against a great many people. To a Presbyterian such as Bingaman, who believed in a contract that linked hard work and prosperity with salvation, the notion that the influenza might be God's display of worldwide disapproval was disquieting. Surely, even taking the war into account, the world couldn't be that bad a place. Or was the so-called world war, with its machine guns and tear gas, chlorine gas, phosgene gas, mustard gas, the mounting horrors, the millions of needless casualties, in fact the problem?
But in that case, did it make sense for God in turn to inflict millions of other casualties?
* * *
"Dr. Bingaman." The nurse stepped back in fear, her face suddenly drain
ed of color, almost as white as her uniform. "It can't be!"
"What on earth?"
"I was told you were dead!"
"Dead?"
Bingaman took another step toward the nurse in the hospital corridor. She almost backed away. "After Dr. Powell died and Dr. Talbot, I-"
"Wait a second. Dr. Powell is dead?"
"Yes, and Dr. Talbot and - "
"Dead." Shock overwhelmed him. Dizzy, he feared that he was having a relapse and placed a hand against the wall to steady himself. He took a deep breath, repressed a cough, and studied her. "What made you think I was dead?"
"That's what I was told!"
"Who
told you?" "A lot of people. I don't know. I don't remember. It's been so terrible. So many people have gotten sick. So many people have died. I can't remember who's alive and who isn't. I can't remember when I slept last or when.
Bingaman's fatigue and his preoccupation when he entered the hospital had prevented him from realizing how exhausted the nurse looked. "Sit down," he said, realizing something else - the reason no one had come to his house to find out if he needed help. Why would anyone have bothered if everyone thought I was dead? And there must be a lot of people who have died.
"You need to go home," Bingaman said. "Get some food. Rest."
"I can't. So many patients. I can't keep the living straight from the dying. They keep going out and others come in. There's so much to do. I..."
"It's all right. I'm giving you permission. Go home. I'll speak to Elizabeth." He referred to the head of the nursing staff. "I'm sure she'll agree."
"You can't."
"What?"
"Speak to her."
"I don't understand."
NightScape Page 17