Sister Noon (19 page)

There was, of course, the fact that she’d sold her daughter. Could a mother sell a daughter she loved? Lizzie thought that if she asked the Chinese boy this question, he would surely say yes. He would know of wonderful mothers who’d done just that. Apparently the woman cared enough for Jenny to offer thirty dollars for her return. Thirty dollars was probably a fortune to such a woman.

It had begun to rain that night and was raining hard by morning. Lizzie didn’t usually go to the Ark in the rain. But when Lizzie made up her mind to something, it was made up. Jenny must be returned to the mother who wanted her back. This meant that Lizzie must first meet with Mr. Finney.

By lunchtime she’d forgotten Mr. Finney even existed.

While she was still dressing and making her plans, the Chinese boy arrived to fetch her. Ti Wong was a round-cheeked child, short and solidly packed, who looked younger than his eleven years. Of course, the Chinese calculated age differently. He told her he was collecting whatever board members he could. Mrs. Hallis, the Ladies’ Relief and Protection Society president, and Mrs. Wilson, the ex-president, were already in the buggy. Nell said they were needed at once since some of the wards were ill.

His English turned out to be excellent, a fast, bitten-off staccato, but easy enough to understand and with a
good vocabulary. Lizzie learnt later that it had improved wonderfully the minute Nell stopped trying to get someone to run him off.

One boy was especially ill, Meredith Penny, newly arrived from Santa Cruz. Ti Wong had himself helped Nell move Meredith in the night to the sickroom, and he told Lizzie that the boy had been too hot, with a too light, too shallow pulse. “Wood floating on water,” he said. And when she didn’t answer, added as if in explanation, “a Fu pulse.”

The rain turned to a downpour. The mule stared curses at them, its ears set at an outraged angle. Lizzie took the seat in the front of the buggy and tried to hold an umbrella over herself and Ti Wong both. It was more polite than it was effective; he was already drenched. By the time they reached the Brown Ark, Ti Wong’s teeth were chattering and his hands trembled the reins over the mule’s back.

They drew up beside Dr. Kearney’s rig. His bay nickered at them, gleaming wet and miserable. Ti Wong went to stable the mule and change his clothes. Lizzie and the other board members joined Nell and Dr. Kearney in the sickroom.

Meredith Penny was eight years old, Mrs. Lake told Lizzie later. He had plans to be a fireman. “I can’t interest you in medicine, then?” Dr. Kearney was asking as Lizzie entered. He was seated by the bed in a chair that was too small for him, his knees high as a grasshopper’s. He had his watch out; his hand cupped Meredith’s wrist. “You have the look of a doctor to me.”

Meredith allowed as how he might be a doctor.

“A doctor meets the nicest people,” Dr. Kearney said.

In the parlor he gave the women his diagnosis. Diphtheria. Lizzie’s feet were wet and her neck was cold. She didn’t know whether the latter was from rain or terror. The storm was painting the parlor windows with water and sand, so that the room grew darker with every gust of wind. “Oh, my Lord,” Mrs. Hallis said. Her hands were gripped together and still they shook. “Oh, my Lord.”

Dr. Kearney put the Brown Ark under immediate quarantine. Lizzie sent Ti Wong out in his dry clothes into the storm to nail the yellow warning card onto the front door and stable the doctor’s horse.

The other children were released from class and told to wait on their beds until Dr. Kearney could see them. By the end of the morning, Jenny Comstock, age fourteen, Ella Louisa Gray, age five, Harry Whinery, age five, and Kate Hanley, age seven, had all been sent to the sickroom. Six days passed and they’d been joined by Tilly Beacon, age twelve, Mansel Bennett, age eleven, Mattie Lorenzen, age seven, Elizabeth Jane Comstock, age fourteen, Alexander MacPherson, age five, George Maxwell, age nine, and Edward Reed, age twelve.

In later years Lizzie often felt she remembered little of those dreadful days. She had been too tired and too terrified to take it in. Just as often, she felt she could never forget it. One child after another became listless and feverish. Some of them complained of sore throats, more did not. Their cheeks were the color of burnt roses, their lips slowly turned blue. Only the unaffected cried; the sick were too busy breathing.

Every woman on the board with no small children of
her own arrived to help. When they slept, they slept on the sofas in the tower room and the parlor and on chairs beside the children’s beds. They did manage to contain the disease within the Ark itself; no cases were reported in the rest of the city.

Bartholomew Fitton’s father attempted to remove him from the Ark. He stood on the porch, a small, fat, desperate man in a straw hat, shouting at Nell so that all the children could hear. No power on earth would force him to leave his son there to die, he shouted. He tried to shoulder Nell aside, but she would not move. The police took Mr. Fitton away. A gun was found in his breast pocket; the officer then posted at the door told them so. This officer had his own children and wouldn’t accept so much as a cup of tea from inside.

Meanwhile, the Comstocks, whose twins were already showing signs of the disease, made a tent for themselves in sight of the sickroom windows. They appeared under these every morning, waiting. Mrs. Lake would open the windows. “All serene,” she would call, so they’d know their children had lived through another night.

Meredith Penny was moved again, this time into a private room. Lizzie sat with him for hours, soaked in the general smell of sickness and the particular smell of this sickness—an unmistakable sort of wet mouse odor. When she’d been without sleep for more than a day, Lizzie had moments that returned her to her mother’s deathbed. She stroked her mother’s arm. She brushed her mother’s hair. Her father’s death was much more recent, but sudden and unexpected, a heart attack, and without the awful vigil.

No one had really gotten to know this child. She tried to hold his twitching hands, she talked to him, she sponged
his forehead. All the while, his eyes bulged from their sockets; his breath rasped in his throat like a crow cawing.

She ran out of things to say. She didn’t know what songs he might like, or what stories. She wanted to talk to him about him, to give him a whole story of himself. This is what you love, she wanted to say. This is what you’re good at. These are the foods you like to eat. Here’s something you said when you were five. But she didn’t know him at all.

On the seventh day he seemed better, and she waited hopefully for Dr. Kearney to tell her this was not her imagination. Dr. Kearney shook his head, leaning down to her softly. “This is the worst for me,” he said. “When it’s children and there’s nothing for me to do.” Meredith Penny’s fever rose higher and higher, until it carried him away. He died, and Lizzie and Mrs. Hallis and Dr. Kearney and the Reverend Phillips watched him do it.

Later that morning Nell found Lizzie hiding in the cupola. “You need to eat and you need to sleep,” Nell said. Grief made her even fiercer than usual. “We’re only getting started,” she added, because she was no one for the comforting lie.

Lizzie was hungry, but she couldn’t make herself go back downstairs. I’ll never sleep, she thought, but she did, though she rose four hours later, unrested. In that same four hours, Lena Heath, age ten, had been sent to the sickroom.

The rain of days before had passed. It would have suited Lizzie better than this calm blue, this high, indifferent sky. She went to the kitchen to make herself some coffee. She turned at the slippery sound of Mrs. Lake’s shoes.

“He’s with his mother now,” Mrs. Lake told her. “That’s what I try to hold in my mind. The child falling asleep in his mother’s arms. There’s rejoicing in heaven today.” This surely should have been a great comfort, but Lizzie could not make it so. She was too tired. She had another bit of a cry and then washed her face, combed her hair, and returned to the sickroom.

A week later, the sick included Ella May Howard, age twelve, Franka Haun, age six, May Isabella Miller, age twelve, Dock Franklin Cole, age eight, Bartholomew Fitton, age five, and Harry Ambrose, age eight. Mattie Lorenzen was dead, although Dr. Kearney had performed a tracheotomy to try to save him. So was Ella Louisa Gray, the first child in her class to learn to skip.

On February 22, Nell woke Lizzie from an afternoon nap. “Ti Wong,” she said simply, and Lizzie rose to follow her down the stairs to the private room for the dying. Miss Stevens had arrived already and stood by the boy’s bed.

His appearance was an enormous shock, just when each of the women would have said she was far past shocking. They’d not thought of him as one of the children. No one had ever asked him how he was feeling. Nell’s face was wet and melted at the eyes, soft as dough. “He never complained, the lamb. He did as he was told and he never complained. Just yesterday I sent him to the basement for clean blankets. He must have already been deathly ill. Running up and down those flights of stairs. If only we’d sent him right away as I wished. Just a few weeks with us will be enough to kill him.”

Ti Wong did not appear to be conscious. He lay with
his fingers opening and closing as if he could catch his breath in his hands. “The policeman’s gone for Dr. Kearney,” Nell said. “I only hope he can be found.”

Lizzie leaned down and tried to speak to Ti Wong. Beneath the thin surface of his lids, his eyes darted about like minnows. She picked up his hand, hot in hers, still grasping spasmodically. She felt his wrist; his pulse was unsteady, intermittent. A Fu pulse, Lizzie remembered he’d said with casual eleven-year-old competence. She was the one who’d let him stay. She was the one to send him out to stable a horse in his last suit of dry clothes. This one would fall to her account.

The other women returned to the other patients. Lizzie sat with Ti Wong. She prayed to God to spare them both. God makes no bargains, her mother had told her often enough, and a woman with a dead child knows this better than anyone. But Lizzie had never gotten out of the habit. In return for Ti Wong she offered God Ti Wong. Give us back this valuable child, she prayed, and I promise to value him. I promise him a valuable life. Not as a servant, but as something requiring education, a minister or a teacher.

She knew this promise would be hard to fulfill. She stood by it. Let the very difficulty of it speak to her desperation. Ti Wong’s breath slid in and out of his throat with a sound like sandpaper. He lived on a ribbon of air, which spun down to a thread. His face went from blue to black. His hand went from hot to cold. Two hours passed, and then three.

Then came a long moment when he didn’t breathe at
all. Lizzie was on her feet, ringing frantically for the other women, when the trough of his chest finally rose.

“He’s dying,” she told Nell, who arrived first. “If Dr. Kearney’s rig isn’t already outside, then he’s too late.”

She couldn’t take her eyes off Ti Wong’s chest. She was hardly aware of Miss Stevens, arriving with towels, alcohol, a knife, a child’s silver whistle, until she spoke. “We’ll have to do it ourselves,” Miss Stevens said. “I’ll do it. I’ve watched Dr. Kearney three times now.”

If she hadn’t offered, the procedure might have been discussed. It was possible the terrified women would have talked about it and talked about it until it was too late. Lizzie was overwhelmed with gratitude. Wonderful Miss Stevens with her science projects and her dissections. Her wonderful young eyes and her steady heart. Ti Wong began to convulse. His chest was an empty bowl.

Lizzie held him by the arms. She had to climb onto the bed to do this, hoist her skirts and straddle the boy. Nell took hold of his head. Miss Stevens put the knife to his throat. She paused then, with her eyes closed. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,” Lizzie said. She spoke loudly for Ti Wong to hear. Nell joined her. “…for Thou art with me.” Miss Stevens made her first cut.

“Hold him still,” she cried, because the child had jerked and struggled. Blood flowed from his throat, pooled in the cup of his neck. “I can’t see what I’m doing,” she said then, sharply. “There wasn’t so much blood for Dr. Kearney.” Lizzie let go of Ti Wong’s arms to towel the blood away with both hands. It came too fast, ran from his
neck like water from a spout, seeped into Lizzie’s sleeves. Miss Stevens had slit his throat.

Lizzie stopped wiping the blood away and tried to hold it back instead. Miss Stevens pushed her hands aside, made a second blind cut. There, amidst the blood, Lizzie could see a thin white shining reed. Miss Stevens impaled it on the point of her knife, rotated her wrist. With the other hand, she slid the whistle down beside the blade. Ti Wong’s chest rose at once, his breath singing a long, high, hysterical note, twice, three times. His face grew pink again and his fists relaxed. He slept while Miss Stevens held the whistle in place with her fingers and Lizzie kept the blood back with soaking towels and her hands.

Five minutes later Dr. Kearney rushed in and found them there, Lizzie still astride Ti Wong, afraid to move. What a picture they must have made, Lizzie thought later. Miss Hayes and Miss Stevens drenched in gore, two Lady Macbeths up to their elbows, their hands inside Ti Wong’s neck, and Ti Wong singing in his sleep like a bird. The doctor was impressed all the way to speechlessness by the sight of them.