by Cat Winters
A Girl Scout in a khaki dress and hat stood behind the physician with a bottle of whiskey at the ready.
Another Girl Scout dashed toward the back staircase with a bedpan.
“Oh, God.” My eyes bulged at the sight of children cleaning up bodily fluids and tending to the sick—including, I noticed, my piano student Ruby Rogers, who mopped the floor on the far side of the room. Her chestnut-brown braids poked out from beneath a gauze mask, and blood stained the skirt of her uniform. “Girl Scouts are helping? Little Ruby Rogers is helping? Ruby!”
“There aren’t enough nurses or doctors, miss,” said the young man, and his grip grew fierce. “They’re all at the regular hospital. Get me outa here. I’m not sick anymore—I swear to God, I’m not.”
“What is your name?”
“Benjie,” he said, his brown eyes glossy with tears.
I squeezed his shoulder. “How old are you?”
“Nineteen, and I want to live to see twenty. I sure as hell won’t if I’m stuck in this godforsaken place.”
Someone called my name behind me, and I peeked up to find Addie and Nela rushing my way with the stretcher, which still held Liliana.
“There’s no room,” said Nela. “We can’t leave her here. I’m taking her to my house.”
“Let’s try the regular hospital again,” I offered. “Maybe—”
“It’s full!” Nela continued backing Liliana toward the door. “If we show up, they’ll send us away and glare at us, as if we’re covered in Southside germs.”
“All right. I’ll be right there.” I let go of Benjie. “I’m sorry. I need to go.”
“Take me with you!” Benjie pressed his fingers deep into the flesh above my elbow. “Please, for the love of God and all that’s holy, take me with you. Please!”
“Can we take him, too?” I asked Nela.
She swung the front door open by hooking her ankle around the bottommost edge. “The house isn’t large.”
“He’s my neighbor,” said Addie from the foot of the stretcher. “Hey, Benjie. Can you walk yourself out of here on your own? Are you able?”
Benjie scooted himself up to his elbows. “I think so.”
“We should take him.” Addie readjusted her hold on the handles. “His daddy’s a doctor helping a Negro regiment overseas. Benjie could probably be of use once he’s up and about.”
“Fine.” Nela tugged the stretcher and Liliana toward her, out the door. “But he’s got to swear he’ll help when he gets better. We’re going to be busy.”
I helped Benjie to his feet and, with my arm braced around his bony upper back, I guided him toward the exit.
“You’re going to be just fine,” I murmured in an attempt to comfort myself as much as him. “No need to panic. This is just a passing illness. They’re not panicking yet in Chicago, which is a good sign.”
Before we reached the last row of cots, I witnessed a little boy bleeding from his ears, as well as his nose, and he cried tears of red.
NELA LED ME DOWN A DARK ROAD just south of the mills, along the edge of the river. I kept the throttle pulled all the way down to keep the ambulance running smooth and steady for our patients in the back. We puttered past Foursquare houses and little Queen Annes almost as nice as the family residences in the northern section of town.
“There’s the house right there.” Nela pointed toward one of the Foursquares, a boxy brick two-story with a dormer attic window that resembled May’s. It sat at the end of the street, right before the neighborhood ended and a long stretch of darkness that looked to be a soybean field began.
“Is there anyone in there who might get exposed to the germs?” I asked.
“No. My Fred—an American—married me right before his number came up for the draft. He set me up here, but I’m staying with Mother and the rest of my family while he’s gone.”
I adjusted the throttle, pushed down on the brake pedal, and eased the vehicle to a vibrating stop in front of her house. Nela and Addie sidled out of the passenger side and flew off to fetch our transports from the back.
Once inside, we lit oil lamps, set the kettle boiling for tea, tucked Liliana into Nela’s bed upstairs, and made Benjie comfortable on a yellow sofa in the living room. Nela bent down and struck matches to light a fire in the hearth, below a wedding photograph of her and a young man with hair so blond it looked almost white. Addie and I covered Benjie with a blanket crocheted in red and ivory yarn.
A woman near my mother’s age, dressed in a polka-dot Mother Hubbard dress and a ruffled nightcap, poked her round face inside the front door, and a gust of cold air blew inside the house.
“I saw the lights and heard that ambulance rumble up to the curb,” she said in an Irish brogue. “What the devil is happening in here?”
“We’re fetching flu patients, Mrs. O’Conner,” said Nela, coaxing a small and sizzling flame to life on one of the logs. “If you’re not already busy with your family, we could certainly use some spare blankets.”
“Half my house is sick with this unholy plague. God help us all.” Mrs. O’Conner made the sign of the cross over her chest, her wide sleeve rustling with the movement. “I can bring spare blankets if you come over to check on my grandbabies. You’re a trained Red Cross nurse, aren’t you, Nela?”
Nela nodded and struck another match. “I am.”
“We should fetch more of the sick,” said Addie, straightening her mask over her nose. “Soon.”
Nela pushed herself to her feet. “Bring your blankets, Mrs. O’Conner, and I’ll be over when I can. Ivy”—Nela’s blue eyes darted toward me—“you’ll keep driving us, yes?”
I pursed my lips, and a hundred more excuses to flee this current situation squawked inside my head.
“Yes,” I said, despite the trepidations and the aches in my head and my stomach. “I’ll help.”
WE DROVE THROUGH A NEIGHBORHOOD of squished-together houses with peeling paint and no front yards whatsoever—cheap and rapidly assembled structures built for Buchanan’s flood of mill and railcar workers toward the end of the past century. We peered through the dark for large white signs with the word INFLUENZA written in red letters, nailed to front doors. I smelled chimney smoke and something akin to the scents of rot and decay.
“Most folks hate having those signs on their front doors,” said Addie with a shift of her weight on the seat beside Nela. “They make them feel dirty. And punished. Whites are always saying my people carry more diseases as it is.”
“But”—Nela braced her hands against the dashboard and craned her long neck forward to better see the doorways through the windshield—“those signs are the only way we can tell if people need treatment. They own no telephones. They can’t call anyone for help.”
I gripped the steering wheel and squinted through the nighttime streets for quarantined homes, and all I could think about was the amount of time Dr. Lowsley spent paying me personal house calls during my recent bout with the same strain of the flu. He had fussed with aspirin and cold presses and thermometers and made sure Mama served me tea and warm soup. No one needed to hang up a sign to flag down ambulances in the dark or put me in a hospital swarming with people vomiting black tar. Even Father—a man who had never paid me much mind once I started looking more woman than girl—meandered into my bedroom one night and held my hand beside my bed for at least an hour. I never would have possessed the time to die under such watchful care.
One block down from the tracks that divided South Buchanan from the rest of the town, not far from the spot where I’d just saved the women’s lives, we found a house marked with one of the red and white influenza signs. Addie and Nela scrambled to fetch the stretcher, and I followed behind them to a plain wooden door with an iron handle. Nela knocked and called out something in Polish, and when no one answered, she turned the knob and pushed the door open.
“Do you know the people who live in here?” I asked.
“No, but I feel in my heart that they need us.” She steppe
d inside, and Addie and I sauntered in after her, with Addie holding the back end of the stretcher.
A pair of older women wearing dark scarves over their heads spoke in hushed tones around a table in the front room. They were dressed in long black clothing from another world, another century, and when they lifted their faces to us, they wrinkled their brows and frowned.
Nela said something to them in Polish. The women nodded and, with bony white fingers, pointed toward the staircase behind us.
We clopped up the steps while the tan stretcher swayed in the space separating Nela and Addie’s hands. The entire place stank of booze.
“People are drinking hard to fight the germs,” said Nela over her shoulder, as if she worried I might think less of the residents for the odor—not knowing about my own father and brother’s whiskey-fueled atrocities. “That’s why the emergency hospital smells like liquor, too. The doctors administer whiskey.”
“Well, then,” I muttered under my breath, “I certainly don’t need to worry about certain members of my family getting this disease.”
Upstairs, in a narrow hallway unlit by a single lamp, we passed two bedrooms in which families slept like passengers piled into crowded railroad cars, with two to four people per bed.
“Grypa?” called Nela through the dim hallway. “Grypa?”
“Pomocy!” said a female voice from down the hall.
“Down here. Someone’s calling for help.” Nela steered the stretcher toward the sound of the voice, in the rightmost section of the house, and Addie followed behind with the bouncing empty stretcher jerking her elbows.
We came upon a room housing a man, a woman, and three children, including the girl who had called out to us, a pretty young thing with almond-shaped eyes who looked to be fifteen or sixteen. Her honey-blond hair, damp with fever, stuck to the sides of her face and trailed across a pair of cracked white lips, and she shuddered beneath a mountain of patchwork quilts, nuzzled between another girl and a boy.
Nela lowered the stretcher to the ground and spoke with the girl in Polish, rubbing the child’s shoulder and nodding the whole time. She then turned to us and said, “She’s the first one sick in the house and wants to leave before the others get it. Help me lift her, Addie.”
Addie took hold of the girl’s feet and assisted Nela in lifting her over her sister and onto the stretcher. The girl shivered and drew her scrawny knees to her chest, but I gave her my coat and helped the others get her laid out flat on her back to better distribute her weight.
We carried our transport down the flight of stairs and slid her into the back of the truck, behind the wooden covering marked with the large Red Cross emblem that stood out like a blood-colored beacon in the dark. After leaping back into the driving compartment, we journeyed into the night—off to the warmth of Nela’s house—before setting right back out again.
The Buchanan Committee of Public Safety reports a continuing rise in the number of influenza cases within the city limits and in the surrounding farmlands. The disease, commonly referred to as “Spanish influenza,” resembles a highly contagious “cold” involving pain, fever, and an intense feeling of sickness. Most patients recover after three or four days; however, doctors state that some patients develop severe complications, such as pneumonia or meningitis, resulting in death.
“Under these current circumstances, sneezing, spitting, and coughing have turned as dangerous as German poison gas,” said Buchanan Health Commissioner Elmer Tomlinson. “We are taking public hygiene highly seriously.” Mr. Tomlinson asked Buchanan police officers to stop and scold all coughers and sneezers who fail to use handkerchiefs. Furthermore, he instructed local businesses to monitor the use of handkerchiefs by customers and patrons within their establishments. Any owners who fail to comply with this regulation will find their businesses shut down.
Schools, theaters, motion picture houses, restaurants, churches, and chapels remain open at present. Any ensuing quarantines will be noted in the Sentinel.
—BUCHANAN SENTINEL, October 6, 1918
Chapter 6
I arrived at May’s front path just as daybreak awakened in a blaze of bright-orange streaks in the eastern sky. A light drizzle cooled my flushed skin. I lifted my face to the tangerine clouds and bathed in the lush sprinkles for a moment of respite, before ducking beneath the covering of the Dovers’ front porch.
In addition to Liliana and Benjie, the Red Cross volunteers and I had transported six influenza patients to Nela’s house throughout the night. Mrs. O’Conner kept the fireplace and the tea piping hot, and a bounty of blankets warmed the cold.
Back inside the comfort of May’s house, I sank myself down on her stiff parlor armchair and leaned my head against its cushioned backing. The stench of death and sickness clung to the fibers of my hair, the same way Billy’s cigarette smoke always embedded itself inside my clothes and my hair after he took up the habit.
“I don’t know what I’d do without these little coffin nails right now,” he had told me out on our front porch, the night before he would board a train and leave us for good. He blew a smoke ring into the air like Alice’s caterpillar friend and added, “Pops turns to drink when he’s anxious, and that’s all fine and well, as long as his temper’s at bay. But I prefer my good pal tobacco.”
“Cigarettes are called coffin nails for a reason, Billy Boy,” I remembered telling him. “Be careful with those things. You’re risking your life.”
As I recalled, he turned his face toward mine in the moonlight, and he didn’t even need to say one word for me to understand the ignorance of my comment, considering where he’d be traveling in the coming weeks.
A WARM HAND TOOK HOLD of my wrist and shook me awake.
“Ivy,” said May in a soft coo. “Wake up.”
My eyes blinked open to the sight of the first light of dawn shining against May’s smooth face and brightening the watercolors on the wall behind her.
“I stayed up late and waited for you.” She stood up straight and tightened the sash of the red silk robe she wore. “You had me worried after trekking off into the night to see that German. I thought the first-ever boarder at Dover’s Home for Women of Independent Means either eloped with the enemy or got shanghaied into the German armed forces.”
“I’m sorry.” I winced at a sour taste in my mouth and scooted upright in the chair. “I didn’t actually speak with the German for long.”
“Did you tell him who you are?”
“He already knew. He threw me out of his store.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” May sat down on her green sofa—the one built by Daniel and his brother. “That doesn’t sound like it helped with your guilt in the slightest.”
“Not in the slightest. I think I should go back.”
“And say what?”
“I don’t know, but I overheard men from the APL talk about shipping him off somewhere. Fort Oglethorpe, I think.”
May cringed and sucked air through her teeth. “I suppose that’s better than a lynching.”
“I suppose.” I held my head in my hands and dug my elbows into the tops of my thighs. “I can’t believe we’re even using the words ‘That’s better than a lynching.’ What’s wrong with the world right now?”
“What isn’t wrong with it?” She sat back on the sofa and crossed her bare right leg over her left one. “Where did you spend the rest of the night, then? You didn’t go back home, did you?”
“No! Absolutely not.” I lifted my head. “I drove an ambulance for two Red Cross nurses who didn’t know how to drive it themselves.”
“What?” May laughed. “‘Tickling the Ivories with Ivy’ also knows how to helm large automotives?”
“I do. I used to drive tractors and trucks on the family farm. My father insisted everyone help with everything out there—even us women.”
“Well, good for you.”
“That part helped with the guilt a tad, but seeing how much people are suffering from this flu . . .” I closed my eyes and
rubbed the balls of my fingers against the lids, finding the movement oddly soothing. “It was hard, witnessing all of that. I don’t know if I have the courage and strength to do it again.”
May reached over and patted my leg. “Go up and sleep in your new bed for a while. It’ll make you feel better about everything, and it’ll be far more comfortable than dozing in Eddie’s grandfather’s stodgy old chair like this.”
Another sharp pain walloped me in the middle of my stomach, but I nodded and pushed myself out of the seat.
“Thank you for all of your help,” I said before leaving that spot in the room. “I’m sorry if people ever . . .” I trailed off, not quite knowing how to articulate what I meant without uttering stupid phrases such as I’m sorry people call you “Eddie’s souvenir” and discuss the size of your bosom.
“If people ever what?” she asked with a tilt of her head.
I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry if Buchanan hasn’t always treated you kindly.”
She nodded. “Well, thank you. But you don’t need to take responsibility for the town’s sins, too.”
“I just . . .”
“Go up to bed, Ivy.” She smiled and gestured with her head toward the stairs. “As my mother always told me, there’s no use trying to face your troubles when you’re tired. The troubles always win.”
A LONG DAYTIME SLUMBER up in the attic’s squishy bed, coupled with a late-evening bath, erased some of the strangeness and heartbreak of that long, lucid dream of a night. I donned a fresh pair of undergarments, a clean white middy blouse, and a honey-brown skirt I had sewn from extra fabric we didn’t need after Billy left for the army. Mama had bought the fabric for a new pair of Sunday trousers she intended to make for him before his number was called, and there was no sense in allowing good wool to go to waste.
I followed the scent of freshly brewed coffee to May’s kitchen and found her sitting by herself at a round table near the icebox. She played some sort of game with a board and a flat wooden pointer shaped halfway between a spade and a heart. Darkness had already descended over the world outside the window, and the board reflected the glare of the electric light shining down from a stained-glass lamp above the table.