Chaneysville Incident

by David Bradley

  She looked at me for a minute, then turned back to the stove and started to make the coffee, lifting the canister down, measuring grounds with only her hand. She moved deftly, her hands fluttering in the lamplight like golden birds. She finished preparing the pot and slid it onto the back of the stove, where the heat would not be too high. I realized that she had done something to surprise me—and her mother. She had learned how to make good coffee in an old iron pot on a wood stove—no mean feat. She wiped some sweat from her forehead. She looked at me. “Stove’s hot,” she said. Her voice was noncommittal.

  I looked down at the cards.

  She moved then, crossing the cabin with quick steps. I heard the rasp of material as she caught up her coat, the grunts of effort as she jammed her feet into her boots without bothering to unzip them, the complaining of the door as she tore it open and went out. Suddenly the cabin was freezing. I looked up, but she had closed the door behind her. I got up and went to the stove and put in more wood. Then I went back to the table. I wasn’t through the cards yet, but I tried a little correlation. Moses Washington had arrived in the County in the same year that Upton Sinclair wrote about the disgusting conditions in the packing plants. There was a little bit of a connection there—the public sentiment that Sinclair stirred up spurred Congress into passing the Pure Food and Drug Act, which was the first step towards Prohibition, because it required that the exact proportions of alcohol or narcotics included in food be reported on the label—but it was pretty weak…

  The door opened and she came back in, closing the door quickly, but not before the cold had swept in. Her coat was open and her cheeks were flushed; she almost seemed to glow. “It’s beautiful out there,” she said.

  “It’s cold out there,” I said.

  “Cold and beautiful.” She took off her coat and hung it on a peg. She stepped out of the boots. The coffeepot was starting to make simmering noises. She went across and pulled it farther towards the back of the stove. “John,” she said, “why doesn’t anybody live here?”

  “You mean on this side of the Hill?”

  “Yes. The other side, it’s so…”

  “Ugly?”

  “Well, not exactly ugly. Just…used up. People have been living there so long, I guess, but it looked… I don’t know. Gray. Like an old mill town. Or maybe it was just the snow.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not just the snow.”

  But she went on as if she hadn’t heard me, her eyes bright with something—discovery, maybe. “But over here, it’s so different. Like…like…Walt Disney. Those nature films, where the fox had a name and struggled for survival, and the seasons changed….” She stopped, looked at me.

  “I know what you mean,” I said.

  “I was just standing out there looking at it,” she said. “Thinking about it. It doesn’t make any sense; all this beauty over here and all that…”

  “Fatigue,” I said.

  “…whatever over there. You’d think somebody would have moved.”

  “They don’t move,” I said, “because they’re afraid of the ghosts.”

  The excitement in her eyes died and was resurrected as anger. “Right,” she said. “Ghosts.”

  I looked at her for a minute, then I reached out and took up the blue cards, and flipped through them as I spoke. “I’m serious. They didn’t move because they were afraid of ghosts.” I found the card I wanted. “There used to be people living over here, beginning in about 1849. But there was a smallpox epidemic in”—I flipped through the cards—“1872. It killed practically everybody. But there were enough people left to make a comeback; there was a sizable settlement here in”—I flipped more cards—“1904. Then the second epidemic hit. Typhus, this time. I’m not sure exactly what time of year.”

  “Fall,” she said. “Or late summer. Peaking in the winter and early spring. That’s the way it usually goes.”

  I nodded. “It’s transmitted by body lice, right?”

  “The epidemic form is,” she said.

  “Makes sense. It’s under control in the summer and early fall, when the air is warm and people bathe more frequently, but come winter, when nobody wants to haul water and heat it and nobody’s about to go skinny dipping… It makes sense.” I took up my pen and made a note on the card.

  “How can you do that?” she said.

  “Do what?”

  “Makes notes about something like that. You’re talking about a death rate of—”

  “Close to a hundred percent, in this case,” I said. “I make a note because it’s a fact I didn’t know; the epidemic probably started in the late summer or fall. And it doesn’t bother me because I heard the horror story a long time ago. Old Jack told me. He and Uncle Josh White were the only ones who survived.”

  “Out of how many?”

  “Who knows?” I said. “When the ground’s clear you can count the old foundations. There were twenty, maybe twenty-five cabins over here. You figure four or five to a cabin. Anyway, Old Jack and Uncle Josh were lucky. They got the disease first, when there were plenty of healthy grownups around to take care of them. They got well. But more and more people got sick, and there were fewer and fewer to take care of them. Old Jack and Uncle Josh did what they could, but they were children. And at the end they were all that was left. They had figured out that people caught the sickness from each other, but they didn’t know they were immune, so they stayed in cabins as far apart as they could get, and they sat there looking at each other across the hollow, each one with a shotgun ready to blow the other one to kingdom come if he got too close.”

  “How old…”

  I flipped the cards. “Old Jack was twelve. Uncle Josh was thirteen.”

  “Dear God.” She closed her eyes. I put the cards back in place.

  “What about the rest of the people?” she said. “The people on the other side of the Hill?”

  “They brought food,” I said. “They left it up on the ridge.”

  “That’s all?”

  “They mounted a guard to make damn sure Uncle Josh and Old Jack didn’t come across the ridge.” I looked at her. “Nobody understood typhus, you see. They thought it was contagious. It is contagious, if lice are a part of your life. So they isolated potential disease carriers and they kept the whole thing quiet as the grave.”

  “Kept it quiet? But why?”

  “Because they worked in town, most of them, the women doing days work and nursing children and the men working in the hotels, cooking, waiting, hopping bells, and if the word had gotten out that there was sickness over here, and that—” I stopped; something occurred to me. “Yes,” I said. “And if it was winter, like you said, the hotel season would have been ended, and if there was any money coming, it was going to have to come from the women—the men would have been out of jobs until spring anyway. And if the word had gotten out that there were colored people dying like flies, nobody was going to be having a colored woman taking care of a child. So they kept it quiet. I guess maybe Old Jack always figured it was the women’s fault. But anyway, that just about did it for this side of the Hill. Old Jack and Uncle Josh lived over here—I never knew when they decided it was safe to get close to each other—but nobody else wanted to come near. They were still afraid. And they told the children that there were ghosts over here, and that Uncle John and Old Jack were boogeymen, to make sure the children didn’t come exploring.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “And a good thing, too, because those lice live a long time. But I guess the stories outlived them; the stories were still around when I came along, but I never caught anything. Or maybe I was just lucky.”

  She turned back to the stove and went about the business of pouring herself some coffee.

  “I’ll take some of that,” I said.

  She whirled around. “I don’t understand you at all,” she said.

  I shrugged.

  “I mean it,” she said. “You just sit there on top of all this… I don’t eve
n know what to call it. Death. Horrible things. And you make notes on little cards and then you ask for another cup of coffee.”

  “Sometimes I’d rather have a toddy,” I said. “But if I did, people would say I was too weak to face reality.”

  She looked at me but did not reply; she just poured me a cup of coffee and brought it to me. I took it from her, holding it in both hands.

  “I don’t understand how you can be so calm about all the things you know about and still be so afraid of this town.”

  “I’m not afraid of it,” I said. “I just hate it.”

  “All right,” she said. “Tell me why you hate it.”

  “Isn’t typhus enough reason?” I said.

  “You said it yourself; they didn’t know anything about typhus in 1900.”

  “No,” I said. “But they knew that they didn’t want to live in dirt-floored shacks with a hundred people taking water out of the same spring. The Town built a waterworks in 1817. Maybe they didn’t know what caused typhus or typhoid—there was typhoid over here too—but they did know they didn’t want to live that way. And they let people go on living that way. And they made sure nobody ever made enough money to move. They made that epidemic as surely—”

  “All right,” she said. “But that’s not enough. Maybe it’s enough reason for Old Jack to hate, but you weren’t even born yet. And you didn’t lose anybody. To you it’s just—”

  “History,” I said. “And I’m a historian.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Is that what being a historian means—hating for things that don’t mean anything anymore?”

  “No,” I said. “No, it means hating for things that still mean something. And trying to understand what it is they mean, so you can hate the right things for the right reasons.”

  She turned away from me and went back to the stove. She picked up her cup and sipped at it, still not facing me.

  “You’re thinking,” I said, “that I’m talking about black people and white people.”

  “No,” she said. She turned and looked at me. “I’m thinking you’re talking about you and me.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You’re the man with the logic,” she said. “Here’s some for you. You hate white people. I am a white person. Therefore you hate me. Only you say you don’t; you say you love me. Which seems like a contradiction. So I guess you must be lying about something. Either you can’t hate so much or you can’t love—”

  “And you’re the psychiatrist,” I said. “You know it’s not that simple.”

  “I know,” she said. “I know. You can hate me and love me at the same time. But you see, that’s not what I want. I don’t want you to hate me at all. I don’t want to live like that. If I have to, in order to be with you, then I will, for as long as I can. But if I’m going to do that, I have to know more about the hate, about where it comes from. Because you’re talking about hating me.”

  “No—”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, you are. If you think that what somebody did or didn’t do to a bunch of people who died fifty years before you were born is something you ought to take personally, then when you say you hate white people I have to take it personally.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I am white, John. You know that? I am. I don’t think you ever have realized that. Because if you did, then you’d have to hate me—ˮ

  “It’s not that way,” I said.

  “Then how is it?”

  I sat there for a minute, thinking, getting the words in order. “It looks that way,” I said. “I suppose that’s the basis of it all; hate, black people, white people, those simple things. But it’s so much more complicated than that. It has to do with… atmosphere. I don’t know exactly what it is. Corruption, maybe. But every place has corruption. Bigotry. Self-righteousness. All those things. So what it comes down to is atmosphere. This place stinks. It makes me choke. It’s not the people; it’s not the mountains; it’s not anything in particular. It’s just a stench, like somebody buried something, only they didn’t bury it quite deep enough, and it’s somewhere stinking up the world.”

  She looked at me and shook her head. “All right,” she said. “It’s the smell you hate.”

  “I don’t hate the smell, I hate…” I stopped.

  “What?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’m trying to say that it’s a funny kind of smell. One of those things that gets in the air and makes the lemmings run to the sea. Whatever it is that’s in the air, it makes people be just as bad to each other as they can be. It makes them treat each other like dirt.”

  “That happens everywhere,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, “I suppose it does.”

  She shook her head. “John, what you’re saying doesn’t make any sense.”

  “No,” I said. “No, I guess maybe it doesn’t make any sense. But you want me to tell you things before I understand them.” I looked at the cards, reached out and pushed them away, set my coffee down where they had been. It was rich and dark, and the aroma was sweet in my nostrils, but I knew it would taste bitter; I longed for cream. “You came in on the local, didn’t you?” I said.

  “You mean the bus?” she said.

  “Yes. You came in on the local and you went into the Alliquippa and got the desk clerk to phone you a taxi.”

  “John,” she said, “what the hell…”

  “It’s what you’d do,” I said. “And they’d know right away you were from the city, because of the way you dressed, and because they’d never seen you before, and because you’d call it a ‘cab.’ ” I looked at her. “Around here, it’s called a taxi, you see.”

  She was staring at me now, as if she thought I was crazy.

  “You probably didn’t bother asking directions. You just told the cabdriver that you were looking for me. And he told you where to come. Not just to the house; he knew I’d be over here. Didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “That’s what this town is like,” I said. “You sneeze and seven people say God bless you. And I’ll tell you what else it’s like: when you got to the foot of the Hill, the driver stopped and let you walk up the Hill. Didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You know why he let you off there? You know why he didn’t bring you on up the Hill? I’ll tell you why. You see, the only time Jobie—that’s the driver—the only time he drives people up here is when they’re white ladies coming to talk to Aunt Dorrie about getting some sewing done. There’s not too much of that anymore; they drive themselves now, those that come. But before everybody had a car, he used to drive the white ladies right up the Hill. But he’d let the colored people walk. See, there’s no pavement on the Hill, so every time Jobie’d come up, at least in winter or spring or after a decent rain, he’d get that old Checker stuck hub-deep in mud, and he’d have to find a colored man and pay him a quarter to help push it out. It didn’t matter to the white ladies—he’d just charge them an extra fifty cents fare. But the colored folks couldn’t afford an extra fifty cents, so they’d walk up the Hill and save Jobie all the trouble and themselves two hours’ wages. Now you. If you had just got in the cab and told him to take you to the Hill, or even to Washington’s, he’d have brought you right up and charged you the fifty cents extra. But you asked for me, and I guess he figured there was something between us. So he let you off at the bottom of the Hill.” I looked at her, but she didn’t see it; there was nothing on her face but puzzlement. “It’s interesting,” I said. “Around here they have never become sophisticated enough to develop the concept of ‘nigger-lover.’ They just sort of figure it rubs off. So you walked up the Hill. Now, I don’t know what you saw, because I don’t know which way your head was turned. But I know what you smelled. You smelled the old rotting timbers in those falling-down houses, and you smelled a little sweet-sour smell from something that had died in the weeds, and you smelled pinewood smoke, and you smelled gassy smoke from
coal, and you smelled fresh earth from the graveyard. And you smelled the stink from the outhouses. They still use them, you know. There’s a sewer line now; they ran it in ten or fifteen years ago, because the state government gave them a grant to pay for it. But nobody was giving any grants to pay for people hooking on, and anybody who could afford it was using the money to get off the Hill. So you smelled the outhouses. Not just the ones now; you smelled maybe a century and a halfs worth of outhouses. You smelled a hundred and fifty years’ worth of…shit.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “I was lucky,” I said. “I didn’t have to worry about a sewer line, because Moses Washington had dug himself a cesspool, and I didn’t have to worry about a spring because he had dug himself a well—two wells, as a matter of fact. So I had a toilet in the house, and it was warm for me in the mornings, because I had a furnace too. And I was clean, because I had a shower on top of all that. I was better off than anybody. But I still had to breathe the air.”

  She was looking at me, and I could see she was confused.

  “The smell used to be a lot stronger,” I said. “There were more people over there then. And there were a lot of dogs; just about everybody had a dog. And pigs. Floyd used to keep his pigs up behind the graveyard, and when the wind was blowing the wrong way it got pretty bad. That part of it got to the Town, and they started enforcing a state regulation that made him cook the garbage before he fed it to them. It’s really the garbage that smells, you see, not the pigs. So that got rid of some of the smell. Got rid of the pigs too, eventually, because it cost too much for Floyd to cook the garbage, he had to build an oven or something, and he couldn’t get the money from the bank, or it was too much trouble…. I don’t know. Anyway, he stopped keeping the pigs, and the smell got better. But it was still there. Because the Hill smelled. And the people smelled too.”

  I stopped and looked at her, but she didn’t say anything. “I’m serious,” I said. “The people smelled. I remember back when I was in high school, they used to laugh at some of the kids from the Hill because they didn’t smell just like Barbie and Ken were supposed to. I remember one of the home ec teachers caused all kinds of trouble when she took some of the girls aside and gave them a little talk on the subject of personal hygiene and antiperspirants and soap and water. I tell you, they had a whole delegation from the church after that poor woman’s head for saying those girls smelled. It wasn’t her fault; she was trying to be nice. But nobody on the Hill understood her, and she didn’t understand the Hill. I guess maybe she could have figured out how hard it is to keep clean when you don’t just step into a shower stall and dial hot or cold, when you have to get up before sunrise and carry water two buckets at a time for a quarter of a mile, and then heat it over a stove after you chop the wood for kindling and get the fire up, and then take your bath in a tin tub and then get all sweated up hauling the water away. She was teaching home economics, but the girls she was talking to had to come home and do the laundry with a washboard. I guess somebody could have explained that to her. I guess somebody could have explained that when your life is made up of a thousand little sweaty tasks you just don’t get in the habit of confining your perspiration to one set of clothes and calling it a sweat suit. And I suspect she would have understood and felt sorry. But she still would have thought those girls smelled bad. Thing was, there wasn’t anything wrong with the way they smelled. If everybody lived the same way, nobody would have thought they smelled. Nobody would have noticed any odor at all. Or they might have liked it.