by David Nickle
“All right,” he said. “I will.”
And Jason bowed his head, and after a moment of sad quiet, he imagined a great celestial light descending over this infernal pyre. And imagining that, he thought up a prayer.
Oh Lord, he prayed, please see my mama to Heaven where she belongs. And Lord, see to it, please, that should my pa ever wish to speak with her from where he writhes and burns in that Other Place—
Jason opened his eyes and stared into the flames that consumed the cabin old John Thistledown had built the year Jason was born.
—please, Lord: see to it he stays where he is and keeps his damn peace.
§
A month ago, shooting the pigs might have brought Jason some measure of satisfaction. Now—somehow, the act seemed capricious; low-down cruel. But Aunt Germaine insisted.
“They are probably fine,” she said. “But who knows if whatever it was that took poor Ellen is not also somehow attached to the swine?”
“It don’t seem likely,” said Jason. “And anyhow—those pigs have value at market.”
Aunt Germaine shook her head. “There is no market,” she said. “Not close by. Go on, young man. Take your shot.”
“Well,” he said doubtfully, “they are cannibals.”
In the end, Jason was down six bullets from the Winchester, having missed with one and but wounded with another.
He made sure to gather up the casings for reuse before he and his new aunt started off, in the dawn light, toward the snow-choked pass to Cracked Wheel. Jason wondered how they were going to do it. But as they crossed a rise that had been beaten down by Aunt Germaine’s footsteps, and rounded a tree, he saw it. There, sticking out of the snow, were two pair of snowshoes.
“Have you ever walked in snowshoes?” she asked.
“‘Course,” he said. “There was a couple pair that burned up on the back of the woodshed. Didn’t think of them until now.”
“Well, it is a good thing I thought ahead,” said Aunt Germaine. “See? I brought an extra pair.”
“In case of survivors,” he said.
“That is right.”
“That was good thinking, Aunt Germaine.”
Aunt Germaine reached out, tossed one pair of shoes onto the snow, and stepped onto them. She motioned for Jason to do the same, and then looked at him very intently.
“I will look after you, Jason—from now on. I’ll see to you. We are, after all, family.”
“Family,” said Jason as he stomped his feet into place on the snowshoes. He hadn’t thought he’d be using that word again, but it felt good coming off his tongue.
“Let me carry your bag, Aunt,” he said as they headed off south.
3 - The Horror at Cracked Wheel
Cracked Wheel, Montana, was the biggest place that Jason Thistledown had ever visited, but he was wise enough to know that didn’t mean much. From talking to others when they came to town from time to time, he understood that Cracked Wheel was but a flyspeck next to the great towns of Helena, of Butte, of Billings. He knew that all combined, they weren’t any of them a thing to compare to Philadelphia where Aunt Germaine came from, or New York, where the scale of things dwarfed whole mountain ranges.
Still . . . there were more than a hundred people who made their homes here around a main street of log-and-board buildings. There was the Dempsey store, which handled dry goods and hardware and coffee and spices and the mail. When the season was right, they’d even get apples and such in, and when it was wrong, it would be applesauce, or anything else you might imagine sealed inside a tin can. There was a saloon, which Jason had not entered since he was very small, where you could get a room as well as a meal and a whiskey. Across the road was Johnston Brothers, a little storefront that offered doctoring and barbering and undertaking depending on your needs. And next to it was the town office, a low clapboard building where the records were kept of births, deaths and land titles.
That was where Aunt Germaine led him. “It is the one building that I dared enter before I came to you. I am not dead. So I believe it is safe.”
“Safe.”
Jason kicked off his snowshoes at the edge of the sidewalk and looked around uneasily. Huge drifts licked up the sides of buildings and swelled over the eaves of rooftops, from which icicles the size of men dangled and dribbled into icy pits in the snow. The wide street was nearly trackless—but for the oval scratches of their own snowshoes, and some older ones that maybe Aunt Germaine had made when she’d headed out.
“This ain’t safe,” he said. He pointed at a hole in the glass of the front window, big as a thumbprint. The panel had been covered with a little wooden board, but no one had cleared the glass. “Look. Someone’s been shooting.”
Germaine didn’t hear him. She pushed open the front door to the town office. “Come inside,” she said. “Help me start a fire in the stove.”
Jason had to wait a moment for his eyes to adjust to the scant light. He had been inside very few times. He knew there was a long, dark wood counter in the front and a few desks behind it, with some wooden cabinets and a big wall of tiny little shelves for notes. It was all shadows now, musty smells of paper and dust, an uneasy chill left from colder days.
“Come on in,” said Aunt Germaine. “I’ve told you, it is safe. There are no dead in here.”
Germaine struck a match and set it to lamp wick. It illuminated her face for an instant before she moved away, scraped a chair across the floor and set down.
“Start a fire in the stove,” she said, “and I shall make some tea.”
Jason stepped around the counter. “Are we staying here?”
“Until there is more of a melt on the road,” said Germaine, “yes, I believe so. It’s all right. The clerk here went to his own bed before he passed. And there’s a fine store of tinned food I found last time I tarried. Come. Bring my bag. I will busy myself with my own work.”
Jason hefted her bag onto a clear space on the desk, which was otherwise covered in a stack of leather-bound ledgers.
“Thank you, Jason,” she said, and dug into the bag until she found a long wooden box. She set it in front of her, turned a latch and pulled from it a neat drawer, with white paper cards lined up. Then she opened a ledger, and, noticing that Jason was still watching her, repeated: “Thank you. Now start the fire. When it is going, we shall find some tea—and perhaps something to eat.”
§
A meal of tinned ham and pears in his belly, teacup only half-drunk beside him, Jason slept for he didn’t know how long next to the roaring fire he’d stoked in the wood stove. When he woke, it was darker than before—the lamp was doused and somewhere in the Cracked Wheel Town Office, he could hear Aunt Germaine’s rhythmic snores.
God, he must have been tired. Thinking through how the last day had gone, Jason could see how he’d get that way. It was amazing that he hadn’t burned the whole town down, starting the stove fire, like he’d burned down his mama’s homestead.
He got up and stretched. His eyes were accustomed to the dark, and he could see Germaine stretched out on a wooden bench on the customer side of the counter. It was hard to tell for sure, but he thought she had the Winchester cradled in her arms.
Jason looked over to the last place she’d been—the desk, next to the ledger. That had been something else he’d wanted to ask her about—exactly what it was she was doing there.
But every time he tried, she’d tell him to go do something else for her until he got so tired he fell asleep. Aunt Germaine was no fool, that was true.
Well, he thought, now the tables are turned, Aunty. Can’t fib when you’re asleep. Let’s see what you been up to.
He didn’t want to wake her, so Jason took some care. He lifted the ledgers off the table, and set them on the floor behind the counter. Then he did the same thing with her box of cards—which was still unlatched and open. And finally, when all that was in place, he took the lamp, and a box of matches, and with them crouched down behind the counter, next to th
e book and the box, and started checking through it.
He looked at the ledgers first. They were pretty easy. Stamped on the front were the words “Births & Deaths,” and inside were lists of names, set down by the year and the month and finally the day. They listed parents in some cases. Further along the page, there was sometimes another date—sometimes not. It wasn’t hard to figure it out: the first date was a birthday; the second, the date of dying. The earliest date for either, Jason saw, was 1844, which was, he suspected, the year that some fool settler had broken his wagon wheel and given the town its name. Subsequent years took up more pages, and as it moved on through boom and back to bust, far fewer. 1892 through ’95 all fit onto one page, with two or three lines to spare.
Jason couldn’t resist what came next: he flipped through to 1897, and the month of January. Sure enough, there was his name: Jason John Thistledown. Next to it: John & Ellen Thistledown. He thought seeing that would make him smile, but it turned out looking at his mama’s name written like that in some stranger’s hand had the opposite effect, so he closed the book.
He turned to Aunt Germaine’s box and those cards. On the front of it there was a simple gilded engraving:
ERO
And underneath that:
Cold Spring Harbor
Jason pulled out a card and squinted at the tiny handwritten notes on it.
The card was harder to figure than the ledger.
It had a name on it too—FLANNIGAN, Anne—and there was a number (1892) that might have been a birth date. There was a place name too: Indianapolis, Indiana. But the top of it was a line of nothing but numbers. Then there was a space, and a percentage:
43 %
Underneath that, there was a word that Jason had never seen before. He sounded it out in a whisper:
“E-pie-lep-see.”
Jason shrugged, and slipped the card back into the box.
A bundle of them after that came from Indianapolis. More names, more numbers. He saw that Epilepsy word after only a few of them. On other cards, new words replaced it: Consanguineous; Degenerate; Feebleminded. Then he was past the Indianapolis cards, and onto a new locale:
Ossining, New York—Sing Sing.
The numbers were the same length, but the names seemed to be all of men. And the words that came after were more recognizable:
Thief. Rapist. And Habitual Criminal.
“Murderer.”
Jason nearly knocked over the lamp, catching it and steadying it as he turned.
Aunt Germaine leaned on the counter, rifle laid across it. She was not wearing her glasses, and the lamplight made her eyes tiny pits of fury; her mouth worked like an air-drowned trout as she stammered, and finally, shouted:
“Murderer! You would kill me! Me!”
Jason swallowed and stood, and Aunt Germaine recoiled from him, as though he were some bandit. “Away!” she cried. “Away!” She pushed herself back against the bench where she’d been sleeping, and cowered like a child just woke from a nightmare.
And why shouldn’t she have nightmares? Jason’s mama would wake from them often enough, and she hadn’t seen half the horror that her sister had, here in this town. . . .
Jason stepped up to his side of the counter.
“I’m sorry, Aunt Germaine,” he said softly. “Calm yourself. I was lookin’ in your bag. Just started—having a look at those cards you got. I’m not aimin’ to kill you. Hush.”
Germaine drew a breath at that, and squinted at Jason. “You were looking at . . . the cards. From the top of the bag?”
“That’s right,” said Jason. “I’m sure sorry. I should have asked—”
“Yes, you should have.”
“I’m sorry, Aunt Germaine,” he said. “I guess—”
“You were curious,” finished Germaine. She reached down and found her eyeglasses, and set them on her nose. She drew a deep breath. “That is only natural for a boy awake in the night in a place such as this. Curiosity. Better, I suppose, that you satisfy it going through my private things than rooting through the charnel house over in the saloon. Well, Jason, tell me: is everything clear to you now?”
Jason had to admit that nothing was any clearer now that he’d snooped through Aunt Germaine’s things, and said he was sorry once more.
“Perhaps,” she continued, “you have a question then? Something that you might have asked me earlier, as we ate the dinner I prepared for you? Drank the tea I brewed for you?” Jason felt his face flush with shame. Any questions he had, and there were more than a few, got buried in that shame. Aunt Germaine’s lips pursed, and she nodded as though he had confirmed something.
“Let me hazard a question for myself then. ‘What, oh dear Aunt Germaine, ever are you doing for the Eugenics Records Office?’”
Aunt Germaine didn’t say any more that night. She was clearly upset at her nephew for invading her things like that, so ordered Jason back to sleep while she carefully replaced the box into her bag, and moved it next to her.
But they were there for days after, and she soon forgot her anger—her strange night terror—and set about answering her own question.
§
When Aunt Germaine was quite a bit younger and Mr. Frost was still of this world, she took a hungry interest in the foundling science of biology—“Like medicine,” she said, “but with an interest in all living things.”
“I thought you were a doctor, or a nurse or some such thing, all you know about germs,” said Jason. “Didn’t you say you were a nurse?”
“We are getting ahead of ourselves,” said Germaine.
Mr. Frost was a doting husband and so indulged his wife’s passion as much as his pocketbook would permit. He purchased her a microscope and kit for making slides—allowing her to view the most minute specks of life—and a small library of volumes which included: Herbert Spencer’s Social Statistics; Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species; and of course, Charles Galton’s seminal tome Inquiries into Human Faculty and Development.
“What about Bulfinch’s Mythology?”
“That is not a biology book,” said Aunt Germaine.
In addition to her reading and her microscopy, Mr. Frost’s fortune enabled Aunt Germaine to attend summer lectures at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in New York. That was where she first heard Dr. Charles Davenport speak.
“Looking at him, one could see the divinely inspired brilliance,” said Aunt Germaine. A native New Yorker who had completed his studies at Harvard University, Charles Davenport was engaged with the Institute at their biological research station at Cold Spring Harbor in Long Island. He was a tall man, stooped, in his early middle years then but with a goatee going to white on a chin and an expression of sheer intellectual vigour in his eye.
“Sheer intellectual vigour,” repeated Jason. “Now what’s that look like?”
“Studious. Serious,” said Aunt Germaine.
Charles Davenport was a zoologist—which is to say that he studied the ins and outs of the animal kingdom. The first lectures that Aunt Germaine encountered were discussions of studies he had made of lower life forms such as he might dredge from the harbour: pill bugs and molluscs and primitive fish.
It was clear to Aunt Germaine, however, that he was most interested in the study and improvement of the kingdom’s greatest achievement.
“What was that?” asked Jason.
“Man,” said Aunt Germaine.
Dr. Davenport even then had very clear ideas about the way that man might be bettered. In the course of his lecture, Aunt Germaine recalled, he stopped and asked the room:
“Why do we study these lowly, wet creatures? These things that cling to the bottom of rocks and suck up algae? Is it because we have a direct application for them in our lives? Surely not. Then why?”
Aunt Germaine’s hand shot up, and when he called upon her, she answered:
“Toward the betterment of all mankind?”
“Excellent, Madame,” said the doctor. “Precisely. For we are
all made from the same protoplasm. And in understanding these creatures—how they live and eat and, forgive me Madame, how they breed—we can better understand how we might live, might eat, might breed. To our race’s betterment, of course.”
This occasioned, said Aunt Germaine, some controversy in the lecture hall, as some wondered whether the doctor was comparing humanity to common garden slugs by some blasphemous design. But Dr. Davenport was not deterred.
“Our ignorance,” he said, “is appalling, when it comes to the understanding of the effect of interbreeding on the races and the children they beget. And the consequences might be severe, should we not move swiftly to eradicate that ignorance.”
Jason wasn’t sure that he would have been any less put off than the others who were there. “I know I ain’t a garden slug,” he said. “Or descended from one either.”
“Do not be so certain, Jason.”
“And what did he mean about interbreeding?” asked Jason. “What consequences are those?”
Aunt Germaine sat back.
“You and your mother raised swine,” she said. “Perhaps I can explain it that way. How is it that you get a prize pig? Do you pray for one? Do you purchase two inferior pigs and mate them? No. You feed and keep a good sow. And from time to time you bring in a prize boar.”
“If there’s one around,” said Jason.
“All right,” said Aunt Germaine. “If there’s one around. If there is not—and you mate your beautiful sow with some—oh, some stringy, undersized, sickly little pig . . . what sort of offspring would you expect?”
“Not so fine,” he said. “I expect.”
“There is a saying that Dr. Davenport coined some time after that. Breed a white woman with a Negro—the baby’s a Negro. A German with an Italian: Italian. A white fellow with an Indian squaw?”
Jason guessed: “A baby squaw?”
Aunt Germaine clapped.
“You mean to tell me Dr. Davenport was talking about breeding people the way farmers breed pigs.”
Aunt Germaine beamed. “It is a science,” she said. “A new science.”