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:
And underneath that:
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:
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.”
“A new science.” Jason shook his head. “That’s something.”
“Do you know what it’s called?”
He shrugged. “Breeding, I guess.”
“It is called that. But there is a better word.”
Aunt Germaine leaned forward, her hand on Jason’s arm.
“Eugenics,” she said. Her eyebrows sprang up over the top of her glasses for an instant, and she smiled. “Eugenics, Nephew.”
“And now there’s a Eugenics Records Office,” said Jason. “I guess it caught on.”
The ERO as Aunt Germaine called it had started up officially in the last year. But it had been a dream of Dr. Davenport’s for more than ten years.
“Dr. Davenport contacted me
personally
,” said Aunt Germaine, “to join his crusade.”
“Crusade?”
“A figure of speech. Call it a mission. The mission, then, of the ERO was to compile an immense list—of every man, woman and child in America. Divided, of course, into segments.”
“Segments.”
“Of the population. Am I speaking too scientifically for you to follow, Jason?”
“I’m following.” Jason took a sip of coffee. “Dr. Davenport contacted you to help him make this list with segments and all.”
“Very good. Last year, he engaged a number of very proficient researchers—nurses, biologists, breeders, and so on—to travel out to the far corners of this nation, and compile this list. We all gathered at Cold Spring Harbor. We learned how to gather the information so as to be most useful to the enterprise. And then, one by one, we set out.”
“To Sing Sing?”
“Among other places, but yes. Sing Sing and prisons and hospitals are places that we have visited. It is particularly important to understand the scope of the criminal and the infirm, after all. For those—illness and stupidity and criminality—are among the things we hope to one day eradicate.”
“I thought you were eradicating ignorance.”
“Do not be disrespectful, Nephew.”
“I’m sorry, Aunt.”
That box of cards contained Aunt Germaine’s contribution to Dr. Davenport’s bold enterprise. The numbers—fully eleven digits long—were each one of them different from the next, and matched up with particular folks. The descriptions underneath (
Habitual Criminal
,
Rapist
and so on) were indications of what was wrong with them.
The percentage numbers said how good that person was overall. One of the things that the ERO was on the lookout for, said Germaine, was all the people that fell into the very lowest percentage. Jason couldn’t figure that.
“Why not look for the highest percentage?” he asked, and Aunt Germaine nodded and smiled at that.
“Why not indeed?” she said, and went back to work, entering the names and ages of the poor people of Cracked Wheel. They weren’t exactly murderers or habitual criminals or sufferers of epilepsy, but they weren’t the top of the percent either. They couldn’t have been that special. The germ had killed them all.
Jason only ever saw one of them before he and Aunt Germaine finally left Cracked Wheel. Several times he had nearly summoned the will to enter the saloon, and see what Aunt Germaine meant when she called it a charnel house. But each time he turned away—hands stuffed in his pockets or in fists at his hips—fear inhabiting his gut like a ball of raw dough—and stomped, defeated, through the ever-muddier street back to the town office.