White Wind Blew

by James Markert

  Wolfgang looked at him.

  “You should become a doctor, Wolfgang.” Friar Christian walked him toward the abbey church as birds chirped from the transepts. “Love the Lord with a scalpel in your hand. And communicate with him through your music.”

  ***

  Wolfgang returned home to Rose and Camp Zachary Taylor the next day, where the Spanish flu continued to spread. She gave him a quick kiss on the lips and immediately pulled him to work. The conditions at the camp were far from sanitary, and the tents were overcrowded. The virus struck the camp hard and fast. The men returning from action were believed to be carriers of the virus that would hit nearly 20 percent of the country’s population. Many of the barracks had been converted to hospitals for the thousands of soldiers who had become ill.

  At its height, forty per day were dying inside the camp. Rose and Wolfgang and dozens of other volunteers spent their days tending to the sick, changing bedpans, washing sheets, wetting towels, and assisting the doctors with whatever was needed. Despite their futile attempts to keep it contained, the virus spread outside the camp, turning up in thousands of cases across Jefferson County. One evening Wolfgang hurried past a cot where Rose sat, holding a wet cloth on the forehead of soldier who was so hot with fever he didn’t know who he was. He trembled with his eyes closed, moaning.

  “Wolfgang.” Rose stopped him. “Get the violin in our bag.”

  “I didn’t pack my violin, why would—”

  “I packed it this morning,” she said. “I had an idea. Just hurry and get it, please.”

  Wolfgang returned a few minutes later with one of his father’s violins and a bow. Rose stood and offered her seat to him. Wolfgang looked at her and then toward the open seat next to the suffering soldier. Finally he sat down. “I don’t want to disturb the others, Rose.”

  “Play, Wolfgang.” Rose squatted next to him. “Just play something. See if it doesn’t help calm him.”

  Wolfgang eyed the other occupied cots inside the cramped barrack and then positioned the violin against his neck. He slid the bow across the strings and began to play a snippet from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, softly. Moments later the soldier’s arms and legs began to settle. The fever was still burning him from the inside out, but his face appeared calmer, more at peace.

  “See, Doctor?” Rose winked at Wolfgang. “Keep playing.”

  Wolfgang continued. Ten minutes later, the soldier managed to find slumber. On the far side of the barrack, another soldier cried out. Wolfgang tucked the violin under his arm, hobbled across the barrack, and played.

  The epidemic eased by November, and by that time Wolfgang had gained a reputation at Camp Taylor for his musical medicine; the soldiers began calling him Music Man. Rose entered Saint Helena’s on South Fourth Street, a Catholic college for women, and set her sights on studying to become a nurse. Thoughts of the lingering Spanish flu were overshadowed by the announcement in November 1918 that the war was ending. An armistice was signed, and the telegraph operator at the Courier Journal was the first to spread the word. Church bells sounded and factory whistles blew in the middle of the night. Sleeping Louisvillians jumped from their beds and hurried to the streets, where they celebrated well into the next day.

  Wolfgang was shirtless when Rose pulled him from beneath the covers and tugged him to the street. She tiptoed and kissed him on the mouth. “The war has ended, Wolf.” They stood arm in arm for a few minutes and watched as their neighbors took to the pavement on foot, on bicycle, on canes, walking dogs, all of them hooting and hollering and waving their arms joyously in the air. They hurried downtown to dive right into the middle of it all. Men and women waved American flags and tossed confetti. Others had draped the flags across their bodies. Patriotic songs were belted out, one blending into the next. Stuffed dummies depicting “Kaiser Bill” hung in effigy from the Courier-Journal and Louisville Times building. Bands played. Couples kissed on street corners. Mothers hugged their children, and fathers walked with little boys and girls hoisted on their shoulders so they could see over the crowds. City leaders and politicians gave speeches from makeshift stages.

  Two weeks later Louisville had the largest parade in its history as most of the residents stood to watch ten thousand soldiers from Camp Taylor march in lines along Broadway en route to Central Park. Rose and Wolfgang stood on the curb along Fourth Street, waving to the soldiers as they passed in their seemingly endless rows, recognizing so many of them. The young soldier Wolfgang had first played the violin for spotted them alongside the street and shot them a sharp salute, which Wolfgang and Rose returned.

  The Medical School at the University of Louisville welcomed Wolfgang with open arms. He had experience and a high school diploma, which instantly put him on more solid ground with the professors who had their share of students with only two years of high school, or less. Many were students because their parents wanted them to become doctors and were willing to donate more money. The teaching staff immediately singled out Wolfgang because they knew he was there for the right reasons, and he was motivated.

  Professor Montgomery Philpot, a sixty-year-old doctor with a reoccurring case of gout in his left leg, was particularly intrigued by Wolfgang’s musical medicine. He’d read an article in the Courier Journal about a young man playing the violin for the soldiers at Camp Taylor. One afternoon after his pathology lecture, the professor asked Wolfgang about it, and Wolfgang admitted that he was indeed the young man from the newspaper article.

  “I know it was popular with the soldiers.” Professor Philpot scratched his rotund belly as he sidled along with Wolfgang, both of them limping across a sidewalk that was covered with fallen leaves. “But do you believe this musical medicine to have purpose?”

  “I do, Professor.” Wolfgang walked with books in his arms. “It is not the answer as far as cure, but I do believe it helps the soul, and when the soul is at peace, healing can take place.”

  “Spoken like a man of the cloth.” Professor Philpot laughed. “Most of the staff here would think you crazy, young man.” He scratched his bald dome, which was covered with liver spots. Wisps of long white hair stuck out around his ears.

  “I agree it’s unorthodox, Professor, but—”

  “I for one think it’s brilliant, Wolfgang.”

  Wolfgang let out an anxious breath. “It was my wife’s idea originally.”

  “Of course it was. What are we without our wives, Wolfgang? Dogs chasing our own tails.” Professor Philpot patted Wolfgang on the shoulder and pointed toward a brick building across the lawn. “Come, tell me about your experience at Camp Taylor. And your music. I’ve got a cadaver in Dissecting Room A that hasn’t totally been plucked by our second-year vultures, if you care to take scalpel to hand.”

  ***

  The stench Wolfgang expected, but not the dozen chickens clucking around the legs of the dissecting tables. The shelves along the walls were full with boxes, files, bones, skulls of various shapes and sizes, and jars with things floating inside of them. A broom leaned against the closest shelf. Philpot used the broom to corral the chickens to the far corner of the room, where a cage rested with its door wide open, the floor covered with hay, dirt, and feathers. Once he had them inside the cage, he closed the door and moved a box of bones in front of it to keep the chickens from escaping again. He leaned the broom against the wall and grunted as he faced Wolfgang. “Dr. Jennings.” Philpot wiped sweat from his brow. “The chickens are his. He’s doing an experiment on embryology, and they’re constantly getting loose.”

  According to Professor Philpot, many of their cadavers were, as he called them, “indigent” Negroes, and it appeared that the body currently lying on the dissecting table had been badly hacked by the second-year students. The man’s heart was missing, as were most of his ribs and his liver. The right lung was still intact, and Wolfgang immediately got to work analyzing it, taking notes, sketching his own diagrams. �
�Make friends with the lungs, Wolfgang. With tuberculosis running wild, we’re going to need our share of doctors who are competent with them.”

  While Wolfgang worked on the cadaver, Professor Philpot waddled around the room, rearranging things, looking for things, clanging things, his head moving not unlike the chickens inside the cage as he talked about the woefully underfunded medical school and the state of medicine in general ever since Abraham Flexner’s infamous report in 1910. “‘Quite without resources,’ Flexner writes.” Philpot grabbed a scalpel off a cart. “How can we expect to have resources without proper funding?” he scoffed. “Flexner was on the nose, Wolfgang. Blunt and a tad harsh, but on the nose. Not one university across the country went unscathed by that report. Things have improved here, there is no doubt about that, but our classes are still far too big, the labs are overcrowded, and the staff is undermanned.”

  Finally Philpot got to the reason he’d brought Wolfgang into the lab in the first place—the music, which Philpot took to like a bee to honey. He even encouraged Wolfgang to write a paper on it, using his experience at Camp Taylor as an example. And then the professor motioned Wolfgang to the head of the table. “Care to take a look at the brain?”

  Chapter 25

  Wind blew snow against the solarium screens, scattering pages of concert notes from Wolfgang’s podium. The choir barely broke stride, pausing only for a second when their choirmaster squatted to grab the first sheet from the floor. Wolfgang continued to conduct with his free hand, hopping and conducting like some deranged frog, all while keeping his eyes on the choir. Ever since Dr. Barker’s reluctant approval, they had been practicing with great enthusiasm.

  He moved back to the podium, his face red, and his hair dotted with snowflakes. He mentioned canceling the rehearsal due to the inclement weather, but the choir wanted to hear nothing of the sort. They demanded to sing, and the musicians never once stopped performing, despite the numbness in their hands. Rufus must have heard them playing, because after only a few minutes into their first piece, he’d joined in, blowing his flute from down the hillside, practicing from afar as he’d been doing for weeks now.

  Wolfgang conducted like an orator, his vision roaming the choir from side to side, leaving no one out. On each pass he made sure Susannah was in view. For two days he’d wanted to ask her about her clandestine visit to Dr. Barker’s house, but he feared upsetting her. Other than leaving him to walk the hillside alone that night, she’d acted no different around Wolfgang. She’d knocked on his door the very next morning as usual—her eyes a bit heavier than normal—and apologized for leaving without him the night before, although he’d noticed that she’d conveniently not offered any explanation. It was none of his business. That was her attitude, and that was how he’d left it—an irksome mystery.

  Halfway through the rehearsal Wolfgang spotted Dr. Barker standing in the shadows at the end of the solarium porch. He stood there listening, watching. Spying. And then he was gone. After they finished a Haydn piece, Susannah stepped away from the choir, eyeing the spot where Dr. Barker had stood. “Did you see him watching?”

  “I think he’s up to something.” Wolfgang watched Susannah carefully, wondering if she knew something more.

  Susannah folded her arms. “He pulled the case files on all the musicians and choir members today.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know.” Susannah looked upward as a voice soared over the weather.

  “My cakes… My cakes…”

  “How long has he been carrying on?” asked Wolfgang.

  Nurse Cleary came running across the solarium, panting and calling for Susannah. She’d taken on Rita’s hours in the mental ward and had been none too pleased about it. “It’s Herman,” she cried. “He’s going mad. I can’t take it anymore.”

  Susannah brushed quickly beside Wolfgang. “You don’t have to come.”

  “I don’t trust him.”

  Susannah hurried to the stairwell, her feet pounding the steps in rapid motion, her hand gliding up the rail. Wolfgang had to hustle to keep up. When she reached the rooftop, she held on to her hat and never broke stride as she lowered her shoulders into the wall of wind that threatened to push them back down the steps.

  “Susannah,” Herman shouted. “I want my cake! Bring me my cake! Susannah!”

  Wolfgang could have strangled him. Susannah opened the door to the nurses’ station and stormed inside, fumbling for her keys. She quickly unlocked Room 502. “My Lord, Herman. What is wrong with you?”

  Herman sat cross-legged on the floor beneath his window, yelling through the screen. He looked up when Susannah entered. He was fully clothed this time. Benson’s bulk was concealed on the bed but unmoving beneath the covers. Wolfgang wondered how he could even breathe under there. No wonder Benson had been at Waverly for five years. He breathed his own diseased air all the time.

  Herman unfolded his long legs and braced his hands on the wall to stand. He faced Susannah, his voice under control. “Nobody listens.” Tears welled in his eyes. “Nobody hears me.” He stepped closer to the doorway. “Nobody ever listens to me.”

  “Stay back,” Wolfgang told him.

  Susannah stepped in front. “He’s not a criminal, Wolf.”

  Benson poked his head out from beneath the covers. “I can hear him. I can most certainly hear him. I ate my dog. They let him out, but I ate him. Rita’s feet…they dangled…” Benson ducked his head back beneath his turtle shell of blankets and stopped talking.

  “I’m better than all of them,” Herman said. “Don’t you see?”

  “Better at what?” Susannah asked.

  Herman sat on his bed, defeated and tired. “I want my cake.”

  Susannah sat bravely beside him. “What is it, Herman?” She lifted his hand and looked into his dark eyes. “Better at what?” Herman stared past Susannah at Wolfgang and then whispered something into her left ear. Susannah’s eyes widened and she spoke to Nurse Cleary, who stood behind Wolfgang in the doorway, panting. “Go to the kitchen and get me a cake. Any kind of cake.”

  “But—”

  “Just do it,” Susannah yelled. Nurse Cleary turned away, and seconds later the door to the nurses’ station flew open and slammed against the outside wall. Wolfgang closed it, but not before the wind had scattered the papers atop the desk in the center of the room. He left them where they landed and returned to Room 502, where Susannah continued to comfort Herman. Wolfgang couldn’t believe how she’d tamed the man. Well, yes, he did believe it. She had a way of controlling any man. And what had he whispered in her ear? How dare he get that close to her? And what was he talking about, “no one listens”? How could they not, as loud as he was?

  “No one listens,” Herman said softly.

  Susannah touched his shoulder. “We’ll listen, Herman.” Wolfgang saw a look of determination in Susannah’s eyes that wouldn’t be squashed by his fear and distrust of Herman. She stood from the bed and tugged on Herman’s elbow. Herman stood beside her, dwarfing her by at least a foot, the top of her head barely reaching his shoulders. She walked Herman out of Room 502 and into the body of the nurses’ station. She left him standing in the middle of the room while she hustled around to the back of the desk for a folding chair.

  “Susannah,” Wolfgang said. “What on earth are you doing?” It was the same chair Rita had used to hang herself. Seeing it in her grip made him uneasy.

  Susannah placed the chair behind Herman and told him to sit. He did, lowering his body slowly down to the small seat that creaked under his massive bulk. Susannah tied a towel around his neck. Not once did he ask what she was about to do to him, not even when she reached across the desk for a pair of scissors.

  “Susannah?” Wolfgang said.

  She gave him an annoyed look. “Relax, Wolf. I’m just going to cut his hair.”

  “Cut his hair?” Wolfgang stared at the top of
Herman’s head, where strands of hair stuck out at odd tangents like plant growth. “That could take days.”

  Susannah rolled her eyes and worked like the barber she wasn’t. “He’s been ignored his entire life, I bet.” She lifted a tangled patch of Herman’s dirty brown and gray hair. Snip—the clump fell to the floor with a slight bounce. “But not anymore.” Herman stared straight ahead into Room 502 as if they weren’t discussing the man right in front of him. Susannah clipped another patch of hair.

  Lincoln opened the door to the nurses’ station and stuck his head in. “Wolf, you better come down. It’s Frederick.”

  Wolfgang looked at Susannah and then specifically to the scissors in her right hand. Herman was calm now, but Wolfgang didn’t trust him. The big man had bruised her before.

  “Go, Wolf,” said Susannah. “I’ll be fine.”

  Wolfgang turned and left. He trusted her.

  ***

  Wolfgang found Frederick Helman in the middle of the fourth-floor hallway, on his stomach, his left cheek against the floor, his eyes facing the wall. Wolfgang knelt down and felt for a pulse at Frederick’s neck. He found one.

  “You left him like this?” he asked Lincoln.

  Lincoln squatted next to him. “Of course not. He was in his room, but he was crying hysterically.” Lincoln fingered the rim of his fedora. “He’s getting stronger. He was letting it out pretty good for just one lung.”

  “What was it about?”

  “Wouldn’t talk to me,” said Lincoln. “That’s why I came and got you.”

  Wolfgang looked down the hallway toward Frederick’s room on the right. “Apparently in the time it took you to find me he’d made it this far on his own.” Wolfgang snaked his arms underneath Frederick’s torso. The poor young man was so slight compared to what he had weighed upon his arrival at Waverly. Lincoln helped Wolfgang by grabbing Frederick’s feet, and together they carried him back to his bed.

  “What do you think he was trying to do?” asked Lincoln.