Authors: James Gould Cozzens
Driven to do something, May did try to get Doctor Bull; but Doris was telling everyone who called that he was at the school, and wouldn't be free until after lunch. Doris was keeping a list of calls, and during the afternoon someone would get around. For May's benefit, she added: "Doctor Verney got some Doctor Moses from Torrington to fix it up to drive over and help. They want to stick everybody who isn't sick with this stuff. Honestly, May, I'm scared to death; and I'm not the only one, I can tell you! Everybody's going to get it, I think. You can die of it, you know —"
It was no exaggeration. Doris was scared to death. Appealing to her to watch Joe for a while would be useless. With so many people sick, and so many more who were probably going to be, there was no one available, even if May could pay. Those who weren't sick themselves, or almost frantic nursing their own relatives, would probably want more than money to expose themselves. Friends could be asked to do favours; but you couldn't ask them to do favours which might prove so deadly, favours which lasted six hours every afternoon.
Only half hearing what Doris was agitatedly chattering on about, May saw that this afternoon at least she would have to try it. Harry Weems would be the only possible hope. She had decided that almost at once, but, even at this difficult moment, she hesitated, for she didn't really know how contagious it was. If Harry refused, she couldn't blame him; it was simply that, after all Harry had done, she hated the idea of crowning her requests with one which he might regard as too much.
This, of course, was the major point, but it did not exclude another—a petty, surely irrelevant and contemptible, small one. If she asked Doris to ring up Harry, Doris, though not present in space, would crowd her in spirit. Doris would not be too alarmed by the situation to find time to enjoy her own ideas about this Harry and May business. Doris had done it too often before. Without ever saying a word, she could manage to imply that she knew there was more to it than met eyes less expert than hers.
What made Doris think so, beyond the prompt suspicions of a personal sensuality always on some sexual quest, it would be impossible to tell. That something had, something which Doris considered definite and conclusive, could be judged from the abruptness with which she took May into her confidence. Doris was anything but indiscreet. The unmistakable implication was that Doris knew that May was now on her side of the fence, and could be trusted to keep her mouth shut. Without asking May for any compensating information, she freely admitted her to secrets of such overwhelming local importance as that she had twice had abortions performed as a result of Robert Newell's attentions to her.
"There's a man in Waterbury," she said. "It doesn't amount to anything." She sounded as though she thought that May might have a necessary personal interest in the matter and needed reassurance.
To speak up, to make Doris realize that May was by no means on her side of the fence, and that the relation to Harry could not have been more innocent—common sense really ought to show Doris that; how in heaven's name could Harry have found an opportunity to sleep with her seemed impossible. To say anything, she would first have to admit that she understood what Doris thought. As a result, she never did say anything. Flushing a little, she listened with a tense, wordless revulsion to secrets which she did not want to know, and some of which—such as the fact that Mr. Newell paid his attentions indiscriminately both to Doris and Clara—really disgusted and outraged her.
Shrinking so regularly from this subtle contamination —not that she meant to blame Doris, or even Mr. Newell; nor that she presumed to condemn what she knew nothing about. She just didn't know, any more than she seemed to know about social or economic justice; or God in Heaven; or people going to church on earth—she had reached a point now where, even worried almost sick about Joe, and so distracted that she could scarcely speak she was able to consider and quail from possible thoughts of Doris's.
"Doris," she said. "Listen, see if you can get Harry Weems, will you? I just can't leave Joe alone this afternoon. If he could spare an hour —"
Amazed, immediately made penitent, she saw that she might have wronged Doris in her own mind as much as Doris had ever wronged her. Perhaps Doris's fear had after all somehow purged her; perhaps the quality of mercy, the openness to human appeal, so much readier always in sinners than in the saints, prompted Doris. She said: "Listen, May. I know you're in an awful jam. If you can get Harry or someone to watch him while I have lunch, I'll come back on the switchboard this afternoon. You can just stay home."
The impossibility of saying anything reduced May. "All right," she agreed, weeping, and hung up.
Starting awake in bed, George Bull flung out a hand which knocked the receiver of the extension telephone from its hook. Groping, he found it on the bedside table, dragged the telephone over. In the deep darkness, the telephone operator said, "Peters calling you, Doctor Bull —"
It was one of the Clark girls speaking, so it "was past midnight. He sought the chain of the lamp and jerked it, getting a shaded flood of painful yellow light. He ran a hand over his eyes through his mussed, upended hair. Now he could see his watch, and it was quarter to three.
"Well?"
Pa Peters, quavering comically, said, "Doc, you better come down. Sal's awful sick. She —"
"What the hell do you mean, awful sick?" he answered. "She isn't due for a month yet."
Someone took the telephone away, protesting, "Aw, you old fool, let me —" This stronger voice was Jeff Peters, and he said, "Hello! Doc! Listen, come down right away, can you? She's pretty near unconscious. She can't see anything—"
"If she's unconscious, how do you know she can't see anything?"
"She went blind about eleven o'clock, Doc; only it was dark in her room and she wasn't sure. She had a kind of convulsion —"
"Lord God!" George Bull roared. "She would! All right, I'll be down. Heat some water. Soak some rags in it—hot as she can stand it. Wrap 'em around her belly —" He slammed the receiver back, thrust his legs over the side of the bed and stood up.
"Huh!" he said, fumbling for his clothes. "Now we're in for it!" —
He wondered suddenly how much, if any, morphine he had downstairs. His right hand, sore when he went to bed, was sorer now. Manhandling Joel hadn't done it any good. He interrupted the lacing of his shoes to shake it, grunting; exasperated to have any use of his body impaired. Whether Sal Peters' heart could stand it would be something else again. A little of Verney's fooling with urinalysis would have been a help. Catch Verney letting a pregnancy get far without the scientific fixings! George Bull thought: "I guess I've seen pretty near fifteen hundred of them in my time!" The fact was, though, that sometimes you'd think nature was conspiring with science. In rough and readier days it seemed to him that what they didn't do hurt them remarkably little. Once you. equipped yourself to look for all kinds of trouble, the patients obliged you by having it.
Overhead in the darkened drive-way, the white moon, shrinking towards the last quarter, hung high behind the great bare elm tops. The cold engine was hard to start and he must have made quite a racket, for glancing over at the house, he saw Aunt Myra's capped head in her bedroom window, thrust out silent, without remark or gesture. The car finally clear of the garage, the throttle well open, he left it, crossed the hard sod and called up to her: "Peters. You go to bed."
"Now, George," she said, "why don't you wait a minute and I'll get you some coffee. It wouldn't take any time."
"I've got to run. Go to sleep."
Driving, he turned down towards the bridge road corner. Behind him arose a hard, rhythmic pulse, racing louder along the night. Past him, flashing through the successive barren pools of arc-light, came a solitary motor—a whine of tyres, a rush of torn air. Twin red tail-fights and a glow cast up on a North Carolina number-plate dipped away down US6W. "Long way from home," George Bull said.
He turned left towards the bridge, past the cemetery, past the extended rectangle of the school, lightless and lonely, a glint of moonlight on the gold cupola. The road down the river from the bridge was dirt, and badly rutted. His headlights, watery, picked out the sagging rails of the fence; the hemlocks hung, half undermined at the brink of the worn bank. On his right the underbrush opened suddenly at the bend, a wide swathe cleared to a mark, and fairly fronting him was set the widespread quadruple steel footing of a transmission line tower. Affixed to a cross bar shone back at him an enamelled sign, scarlet skull and crossed femurs—
Danger of Death
220,000
volts.
A ruined stone wall began, ran with him through the brush a thousand yards and ended. The dying trees of an over-grown orchard, a lost hedge of lilac before the open foundations of a vanished farm-house, went by. Rounding the rocky out-thrust of the hill he came carefully down, rumbled on a narrow wooden bridge. Up on the other side he could see a light through the saplings. He turned into the barnyard of the Peters' farm and shut off his engine.
Pa Peters hobbled from chair to chair, gabbling this and that, his thin hair shining in the lamplight. His son Jeff was sulky, but concerned, too. Pregnancy was a woman's hard luck; eclampsia was a condition past his understanding; but blindness was easy to understand and no one could encounter it unmoved. The outlook, George Bull saw at once, couldn't have been worse. Sal Peters was a heavy woman, and between her fat and the advanced distension of her breasts it was impossible even to hear the weak heart without turning her over. She managed to down what was probably too little of an infusion of digitalis; and the convulsions had better be met with chloroform, not morphine. The results were not encouraging and by five o'clock it was plain that she was going to get rid of the foetus. There was a chance that, this once done, she would show an improvement. Since she lost a good deal of blood in the process, she seemed to improve; but at six the convulsions started again. At half-past six, she was dead.
The person most upset about it seemed to be Betty Peters, perhaps more because of her own long history of sexual miseries—she had begun at fifteen by spending a night with a group of men from Sansbury in a tobacco barn—than because of affection for her sister-in-law. Overcome by the bloody, painful nastiness of life, or the gradual loss of it, seen now in the close room for six night hours, she proceeded to have hysterics.
In no mood for patience, Jeff yelled: "Shut up, you lousy whore, before I kill you!" Pa danced around in a senile ecstasy of alarm, squealing. The best way out seemed to be to give both Pa and Jeff sleeping tablets. A fractional shot of the unrequired morphine did for Betty. Thus, by half-past seven, George Bull could leave them; three variously drugged, one dead; the house shut up, bleak and grey under the cold blue morning sky. Crossing the bridge into New Winton, he could hear the bells of St. Matthias's ringing briefly for Holy Communion.
The sun, just over the thin woods crowning the Cobble, had reached the green—a bridge flood across its windy, wintry desertion. Rounding the corner, George Bull was in time to see Miss Kimball, pinched and breakfastless, entering the doors of St. Matthias's, her solitary shadow preceding her. Doctor Wyck came out of the rectory then, clad in a black cassock, and crossed the lawn diagonally between the maples to the sacristy door.
In front of Weems' garage a man in a slate-coloured uniform, with black leather leggings, ammunition-filled cartridge belt and heavy revolver, and the triangular yellow shoulder tab of the State Police, stood astride his halted motor-cycle. His face was red with cold around the goggles; his ears crimson against the edges of his cap. The wooden shutters of Bates' store were in place, covering the windows; the doors locked, the steps deserted.
New Winton would always look like this on Sunday morning, but to George Bull, knowing in how many houses people were sick, there seemed to be a stupefied paralysis, a cowering indoors as though the plague were abroad. The steady cold wind eddied noisily around his car; he rattled on up the wide white expanse of concrete.
A little smoke whirled off the lip of the chimney at the back of the Bull house. That must mean that Aunt Myra had a fire going, and he was helped by the promise of breakfast. Halting the car before the open door of the barn, he got out. His eye caught, he went to the threshold then. From the floor, just inside, he bent and picked up the bright object. It was a long, clean bread-knife.
Holding it, perplexed to account for its presence, he was attracted by a muffled, groaning sound. He walked forward at once to the first of the old, shadowed stalls. "Well, I'll be damned!" he said aloud. "Come out of there!"
The figure huddled on the dusty boards in the corner against the splintered, cobwebbed manger made no move, so he went in. "What's the trouble, Mrs. Talbot?" he said. He drew her to her feet, and, compellingly, out into the better light. "That yours?" he asked, pointing to the knife, put down beside his bag. "You'd better not carry things like that around. You'll hurt yourself."
Her mouth, twisted as though she had bitten a lemon; her eyes, angry and injured under the tangle of hair imperfectly pinned up, smeared now with cobwebs, made her look like one of those fantastic, miserably sinister women whose surfeit of misfortunes might once have started the idea that she had some to spare, could visit them on others. An earlier New England, in social and religious self-defence, had sometimes felt that hanging such people was its disagreeable duty. To remove her cheaply and for ever from human society no means existed but interring her in the ground. Now, at Middletown, the State of Connecticut had a tomb for incurable witches. Impersonally patient, the state provided for their disappearance with a certainty never reached by the haphazard methods of a magistrate or a crowd. One could hide from the rope or evade the hunters; the state's lethal process was old age and decay.
George Bull didn't pretend to the experience or diagnostic skill which would entitle him to an opinion. If he had to make a guess, he'd say it was a depressive phase of a mild manic-depressive psychosis. Perhaps no more than a cyclothymic case, coming and going; but all the odds were that it would come oftener and go more reluctantly. He didn't believe that she was or would be actually dangerous. The knife probably had to do with some notion of defence, not of attack— some half-hearted effort to repair the exhausting helplessness felt from a general psycho-motor retardation. More contemptuous than not of the unwieldy jargon of this uncertain science, he said, "Well, one thing about it; you must be pretty cold."