Wickett's Remedy

by Myla Goldberg

  “What happened?” she asked, her voice still thick with sleep.

  “He got sicker,” James whispered. “I woke up feeling like I was stuck inside an oven and realized it was on account of Tom. When we went to bed he was feeling lousy but he made me promise not to tell. But I had to do it. Didn’t I have to do it, Liddie?”

  She put her hand on James’s shoulder but this reminded her too much of the banished dream. She removed her hand. “You did right,” she promised.

  “He’s sure to hate me,” James squeaked. “And now he’s the only older brother I’ve got.”

  John had managed to sleep through the commotion of Thomas’s removal, but woke up on hearing his brother.

  Jamie was awful scared. When he first learned about Mick, he and Tom had been fighting and he wished it had been Tom instead.

  “Jamie, what’s wrong?” he called from the other room. “Where’s Tom?” John sat half upright on the mattress in the front room, too sleep-muddled to progress any further.

  “Tom’s sick,” Lydia called to him. “Ma’s got him now.”

  “But I thought we weren’t going to worry her,” John said. “He said it were just a small fever.”

  “It got bigger,” James replied.

  “I dreamed I were floating on the sun,” John whispered.

  Their father appeared from the bedroom. “We’re all to go to the front room. Liddie, you’re to sleep on the couch and I’m to sleep with the boys. On no account are you to go into the bedroom or your ma’s sure to kill me. You’re not even to go to the kitchen unless there’s nothing for it and tomorrow you’re to stay clear of the flat ’til supper.” He knelt on the floor so quickly Lydia thought he had fallen. “Oh Heavenly Father,” he whispered, “please look over your child Thomas this night and see that his fever lessens. Please keep your children Lydia, James, and John from slipping into illness. And please tell Mick, who is with you in Heaven, that we miss him—” He began to cry, the sound of the earth cracking open.

  Dan Kilkenny remembers Tom falling ill, but he is sure as taxes that Mick outlived him.

  When her husband’s memory began to slip in his later years, he often assumed Michael still lived, a mistake Cora eventually stopped trying to correct.

  BOARD ADJUDGES FLU NOT OF SPANISH VARIETY SUGGESTS SIMPLE STEPS TO AVOID THE DISEASE

  The Department of Health assured the public last night that Boston has no reason to fear an epidemic of Spanish influenza. “While there have been reports of a limited outbreak of some virulence,” officials said, “our findings, pending further investigation, suggest that pneumonia may be the culprit, accompanied by a flu of the normal and not Spanish type.”

  To avoid infection health officials advised against kissing “except through a handkerchief.” Citizens are further advised to take the following simple steps to protect themselves:

  Spray nose and throat daily with dichloramine.

  Get plenty of rest in bed.

  Keep windows wide open.

  Eat meals regularly and do not curtail on quantity.

  Beware of persons shaking their handkerchiefs.

  Don’t use common towels, cups, or other articles which come into contact with face.

  Don’t spit in public places.

  How’re you holding up?

  Pretty rough. They turned E Deck into another sick bay and so now I’m in H-8.

  Christ! All the way down there?

  It’s not very good. I feel lousy but I ain’t about to see the doctor.

  I’m kinda shabby myself but I think it’s seasickness. Leastways that’s what I tell myself.

  What’s the idea sending us out like this? We’re not even halfway to France!

  It’s lousy, but we gotta make it.

  It’s the ship that’s making it so bad. We’re all crammed together.

  Do like I do and stay on deck. At least that way you get air. I been sleeping up there too.

  Nobody stopped you?

  Who’s gonna stop me? It’s all too big a mess.

  It’ll be better once we hit Brest. As long as we’re on board we ain’t soldiers, we’re fish in a lousy barrel.

  Tell me a story.

  Nurse!

  Water, can someone bring me water?

  Oh God.

  Please, any kind of story. Tell me about your girl.

  Don’t got a girl.

  Nurse!

  It’s so hot.

  Tell me about her. Is she pretty?

  Ain’t there any water?

  Can’t—breathe.

  She’s pretty.

  Does she have a nice smile?

  She has a nice smile.

  Where’s a nurse?

  We’re all alone here! We’re gonna die here!

  Shut up, you!

  Does she sing to you at night?

  Nurse!

  She sings.

  What does she sing?

  Can’t—breathe.

  I’ll do the cookin’, I’ll pay the rent—baby—I know I done you wrong.

  Water!

  You’re lucky, having a girl like that.

  So hot.

  Go to sleep.

  Nurse!

  Can’t. I’m afraid to close my eyes.

  Harmon, Lewis, Cahill, Mahoney, take E Deck, Sections Three through Five, port side. You heard me! Move it!

  No sir.

  What did you just say?

  I said, “No sir.”

  Harmon, go down to E Deck and clean those compartments and bring up anyone you find down there. That’s a direct order.

  Sir, if I go down there I’ll end up like them.

  This is not open for discussion, Harmon.

  Sir, it’s terrible down there. The bodies are beginning to smell and there’s blood and piss all over the floor.

  Harmon, if those compartments aren’t cleaned every day they are only going to get worse. We are still three days from France and I won’t have this ship turning into a floating shit pile.

  It’s already worse than that, sir.

  Harmon, I expected better from you.

  It’s a floating coffin.

  I’m not going, sir.

  Me neither, sir.

  Court-martial us if you want, but we ain’t going down there. Sir.

  My Dear Boy—

  I am sure your mother would not have liked being old, especially not here, where they do not leave you alone and there is always somebody checking on you. Either the maid, or the fellow who comes to make sure I have taken my pills, or the girl who just comes to “chat.” She is the worst of them. She wants to ferret out if I am still up to the task of looking after myself in this little apartment that your mother would have hated. This girl can tell I am not my regular self lately, but the only answer she will get from me is that I have a lot on my mind.

  The truth of the matter is that I am having trouble sleeping. The only bright side to this is that it gives us something in common. You never did sleep through the night. We tried everything—leaving a light on, not leaving a light on, feeding you extra, feeding you less. The doctor said you would outgrow it eventually, but you showed him. Sometimes you had to pee. You would wander into our room, your little eyes half closed and your little feet vanishing into the carpet your mother had special-ordered from Brussels. Then you would stand beside our bed, more asleep than awake, and let loose all over that nice, expensive, imported carpet. That was when we decided to stop giving you warm milk. I have started taking the same precautions. No liquids after six p.m. or I cannot be held responsible for the consequences. I am never so grateful to be living alone as when I wake up to find I have wet the bed.

  What did you do when a bad dream woke you up? I suppose your mother would know the answer. I will add it to the mile-long list of questions I would like to ask her. I have never been the sort to remember my dreams, so when one shoves me awake in the middle of the night, I am not prepared. Mostly I just stare at the ceiling and invite whatever cockamamy thought that wa
nts a piece of me to help themselves. I cannot recommend it as a pastime, but it is better than the pills the doctor here gave me when I told him about it. Taking those things is like pouring syrup into my head. The next morning I feel like someone traded my tongue for a chunk of tire rubber.

  Love,

  Your Father

  A sound pounded in Lydia’s ears. On first waking, she was confused by the narrowness of her bed. Then the tide of drays subsided and she opened her eyes. At the sight of Michael’s two letters still tacked beside the faded picture of the Sacred Heart, the previous day’s events emerged from sleep’s temporary blind. Today was the first day of Thomas’s illness and the second day without Michael. Lydia’s father and brothers sat motionless at the front room’s threshold as if staring hard enough would permit them to see through the dividing curtain that separated them from the kitchen and Tom’s sickroom.

  “It’s so quiet,” John whispered.

  If their mother had not barred them from the kitchen, Lydia could have put breakfast on. She was not hungry—she doubted any of them were—but she needed to do something. She did not think she could bear to wait there, useless as a severed limb.

  They heard their mother before she saw her. Not more than a few seconds elapsed between the sound of her step on the floorboards and her appearance in the front room, but in those interminable moments, steps too slow or too fast would have foretold unwelcome news.

  “Is he all right?” they asked as one when Cora appeared.

  “He’s asleep,” she replied, “but it were a strange night. Maybe two hours after I had got him settled down, we were both of us resting when Tom on a sudden sat up and asked did I recall Sally, the oldest Connelly girl? I told him sure, and then he says in a voice that weren’t like him at all: ‘Well, she just passed on.’ Then he lay back down, calm as can be, and drifted off to sleep.” Cora’s mouth tightened. “I kept my eye on him after that; his fever climbed awful high, and I kept a cold cloth on him ’til it went down. Every time he opened his eyes I got a dreadful feeling, wondering what he’d say next.”

  Fatigue and sickness are allies of Our whisperings. Sally Connelly appears to have benefited from the fact that Thomas Kilkenny suffered from both at the moment she joined Our ranks.

  “Is Sally all right?” Lydia asked. She remembered the Connelly girl from Michael’s send-off. She was a few years younger and had spent the party dancing.

  “I don’t know one way or the other,” her mother replied. “And neither does Tom. When I asked him this morning he had no memory of such a thing.”

  Had Cora Kilkenny not recalled this episode, We would never have learned of Sally Connelly’s success. Our collective knowledge is surpassed only by Our collective amnesia, which encompasses millions of moments lived and subsequently forgotten.

  James rose from the mattress. “Then he’s awake? Can I see him, just for a minute?” he pleaded. “If you like, I’ll hold my breath. I won’t say a word and I won’t touch him. I’ll just see him, is all, and I’ll wave.”

  Their mother shook her head. “None of you are to go into that room until he’s improved. I know it’s a hard thing to ask, but the very best thing is for you to go about your business same as always. At the very least I can’t have you staying here. I won’t have you setting in a sickhouse all day long.”

  Lydia thought back to the fainting girl and the way Mr. Gorin’s voice shook as he told them he was closing the store. Her mother’s request seemed pointless. All of Southie was a sickhouse.

  “Your ma’s got a point,” her father agreed. “We’d not be doing a thing to honor Mick’s memory if we fell ill.”

  “But Ma, you’ll need someone,” Lydia reasoned. “At least let me spell you while you rest up from last night.” Michael had died miles distant, but Tom was right here, where she could do something to help before it was too late.

  “Stupid girl!” Cora scolded. “Do you think I’ll let you knit your own shroud? It wants the young!”

  “I’m sorry, Ma,” Lydia breathed. She no longer felt twenty-three, but thirteen.

  “Good Lord,” her mother whispered, “I didn’t mean to yell.” She enclosed Lydia in her arms, surrounding her in the scents of soap and rose water.

  “I couldn’t stand to lose you,” she spoke into her daughter’s hair. “It would kill me for sure. And that’s why you’ll obey along with your brothers and leave me to care for Tom.”

  “I’ll do whatever you ask,” Lydia promised, her words absorbed by the fragile skin of her mother’s neck.

  John was sent to school, James to the factory. Lydia’s wage could be used for medicines for Thomas, an assurance that did nothing to assuage the futility of reporting for work.

  Several people she passed on the way to Gorin’s wore gauze masks over their noses and mouths. Others wore pouches around their necks filled with camphor.

  Southie’s streets were silent, as though it had been determined that even trading pleasantries risked contagion. The houses were similarly changed. Funeral wreaths adorned doors in a grim profusion of black, gray, and white. At first Lydia was consoled that she was not alone in her grief, but by the time she reached West Broadway the unceasing displays had crowned Death a conquering hero.

  According to Katy Donnell, camphor never did a lick of good.

  She could not remember when she had seen so few cars and carriages on West Broadway. So many stores were shuttered that she did not realize she had passed Gorin’s until she reached the end of the block and was forced to retrace her steps. In Gorin’s front window a sign read, CLOSED FOR THE DURATION OF THE WEEK, in handwriting other than Mr. Gorin’s. The handwriting affected Lydia more profoundly than the message, for only something terrible would have prevented Mr. Gorin from creating the notice himself.

  Frances Messinger swears on wormwood.

  As she turned to face the deserted street, she made a decision. The notion had occurred to her after her mother had barred her from the house, but Gorin’s shuttered window gave her the license and the resolve. She walked the length of West Broadway, all the way to Dorchester, and then on toward Telegraph Hill.

  Jonah Siles cured his wife by placing a shotgun beneath her bed, the magnetism of which drew out her fever.

  On arriving at Carney Hospital, the sight of white canvas tents filled with patients and stretching in orderly rows across the lawn banished the doubts that had trailed her from West Broadway. Her instinct—informed by her memory of the overcrowded clinic and the hospital hallways lined with beds—was correct: the situation had grown worse. She never would have imagined tents here, but the sight was unexpectedly comforting. Michael had been quartered inside a tent.

  Though it was not his handwriting, the sign was his: in the days following his daughter’s death, Tom Gorin’s hand shook uncontrollably.

  The young man in the first tent she entered was near Michael’s age. He had matted brown hair and asked through chapped lips for a glass of water. Exiting the tent, Lydia nearly collided with a passing nurse.

  “Can I help you?” the nurse asked, observing Lydia’s shirtwaist with confusion. Lydia was not nurse, nor nun, nor patient.

  Joseph Powers, of the Bolton Street Powers, was sure he had dreamed the lovely lady who entered his tent.

  “The man in that tent wants water,” Lydia answered, this the first time she had lent breath to the impulse that honored the letter of her mother’s mandate while ignoring the spirit. “I’m going to fetch it for him.”

  “Are you Red Cross?” the nurse asked.

  “The tents weren’t here when I came yesterday,” Lydia replied. “They all have flu, don’t they?”

  “We erected the field hospital early yesterday evening,” the nurse confirmed. “We’re waiting on more nurses from the Red Cross. Have you any nursing experience at all?”

  “Let me help. There’s so many—” Lydia paused. In that instant the tents seemed to stretch for miles. “Surely I can do something” she urged.

 
; If the nurse turned her away she would find another hospital. She did not know where another hospital was. She would walk until she found one.

  The nurse’s voice softened. “Are you able-bodied?” she asked.

  Lydia nodded, expectation weighting her tongue.

  Katherine Jennings remembers neither the young volunteer’s name nor her face, only the force of her desire to help.

  “Well,” the nurse conceded, “you’d better don a mask before you check with Head Nurse, or she’ll think you’re completely unfit, but as far as I’m concerned we need all the help we can get.” The woman extended her hand, exhaustion inhabiting even her smallest motions. “Welcome to Carney,” she said, and vanished into a tent.

  Fiona Keane recalls a hand that was ruddy and warm.

  Jack Manley, from Tent Seven, remembers Lydia’s hand as pale and cool.

  Diverted by the needs of others, Lydia’s grief faded to a dull ache and then to merciful numbness. She yielded to the serial refilling of water glasses, their transport from sink to tent, and their delivery to myriad lips—men’s lips and women’s lips; lips smooth and lips chapped, some with fever blisters; lips wide and narrow, roseate and pale. The effect of this act did not diminish with repetition. It was a ministration necessarily tender and careful, attuned to the tilt of a chin, the vigor of a swallow. Sometimes she accidentally angled the glass too far and water spilled onto necks and chests, or she angled the glass too slightly, requiring a patient to stretch. The gaffe embarrassed her but the patients did not complain. Grateful stares caressed her even as water soaked bedclothes or necks strained for water just out of reach. With Lydia beside them they were not alone.