Lake in the Clouds (50 page)

M
AY
12, 1802. E
VENING.

Heavy rain for most of the day. This morning there were four eggs in the sparrow’s nest on my windowsill.

Three letters by the afternoon post. One from Curiosity, with news of home but no word of the voyager. The second letter was from Captain Lewis, with greetings from the president and a list of questions to be answered regarding vaccination on the frontier. To this he added a personal note and wishes for my good health and an uneventful journey home. The last letter was from my brother Luke, with news of the earl’s death. He lived a long and honorable life and he will be remembered for his bravery and wisdom. Young Alasdair is now the new earl of Carryck. Luke writes also that Jennet is to be married to the factor Ewan Huntar, as her father wished. I expect I will hear more of this from her in tones very different from my brother’s.

Madame du Rocher has left this city in the dead of night. Only one of her slaves had been returned to her. The rest are gone away for good and good, says Mrs. Douglas. May she be right.

M
AY
14, 1802. E
VENING.

Today Mrs. Graham, who had been away visiting a married daughter in Boston, came and spent all day in the wards. She divided her time between reading the bible to people who speak no English and generally getting in the way. My only conversation with her was very brief, as I did not wish to be interviewed on the state of my everlasting soul. She is supposed to be a very good and generous lady but the tribute she demands for her charity is very high indeed.

Dr. Simon took pity on me finally and asked me to assist him at the hospital. There we saw the interesting case of a young woman with a blockage of the urethra, which we were able to clear. Whether it will come again or not is a question that can’t be answered, unless it were possible to look inside her living body.

M
AY
15. E
VENING.

Beautiful warm weather and a high wind to wash away the stink of the city. Today an Irish orphan boy of about five years bit Dr. Savard hard enough to draw blood. His face went very pale but he made no sound of protest or pain, and neither did he let the boy go until he had finished treating a burn on his ankle. Later when I asked if he wished me to tend to the bite wound he gave me such a fierce look that I was taken aback.

Six new vaccinations this morning.

At three in the afternoon Blue Harry slipped into a final sleep and died quietly. Mr. Magee is very sad at the loss of an old friend.

Spent an hour in the nursery in the morning and another in the afternoon. Dr. Simon knows where I go when he cannot find me. He makes no comment at all.

M
AY
16. E
VENING.

Today a letter from Curiosity. No news of my father and Elizabeth, but Friend Gabriel Oak is at peace and laid to rest. Dr. Todd conducted the autopsy and Curiosity was present. She reports the lungs much ulcerated and wasted away, as expected.

In Paradise the flax and barley and rye have been set in the fields along the river. At Lake in the Clouds the women will be planting corn.

Today I treated a young woman who had been badly beaten, ribs cracked and a gash on her face that I closed with six stitches. It will leave a scar in the shape of a sickle that curves away from her mouth. She is the fourth woman who has come to us in such a state since my time here. When I asked if she had no other way to earn her bread than to sell her body she said she is well paid for her bruises and expects nothing else.

What a hard place is this city for women especially. Dr. Savard claims that most of the women who make a living this way—and there are legions of them—will not see thirty years. Disease and violent injury kill most, but a good number freeze to death every winter for want of a simple fire.

M
AY
20. E
VENING.

Clear and warm with a cool breeze. By all accounts, Almanzo Freeman is no longer in New-York City. May his journey be an easy one.

Examined five vaccination subjects and extracted virus from one. Assisted Dr. Simon and Dr. Scofeld with the amputation of a gangrenous leg below the knee. Patient is a boy who either speaks no English or does not wish to speak. He has been recorded in Mr. Eddy’s record book as John Smith 24.

Mr. Matthias Greenaway, who is the Master of Scavangers and a member of the city council, underwent surgery to remove cataracts this afternoon in his own home on Park Avenue. Dr. Simon invited me to observe. Mr. Greenaway was given enough opium to render him insensible and then he was tied securely to a table with straps across his forehead, shoulders, waist, hips, knees, and feet. Dr. Ellingham performed the surgery with assistance from three others. Corneal incision near the limbus was made by puncture with a sharp curved needle, enlarged to both sides with a blunt curved needle and then with a curved scissors. A flat instrument of about a finger’s width was then put into the eye by an assisting doctor, and while it held the cornea away from the lens, Dr. Ellingham used a sharp needle to open the capsule. Next the instrument was passed between the iris and lens to free adhesions. Finally Dr. Ellingham exerted gentle pressure to dislodge the cataract. The operation was then carried out on the other eye. The whole undertaking was handled with great speed.

My grandmother Falling-Day was distrustful of O’seronni doctors who were so eager to cut into the body with their knives, but even she must see the miracle of this. To bring light where darkness has fallen, what greater service can a healer provide?

Every day I feel my grandmother near me and sometimes I feel her disappointment to see me put aside her gentle medicines for harsh O’seronni ones. Sometimes I ask her if I cannot have them both, but there is never any answer.

I will speak to Dr. Todd and see whether or not it might be advisable to suggest such an operation to Galileo Freeman.

Today marks one full month since we came to the city. By my records I have performed more than thirty vaccinations and retrieved viral material from almost as many. I have seen a great many surgeries, five autopsies, and assisted in sixteen births. In the time I have been assisting in the Almshouse I have seen forty-seven deaths, more than half of those infants or children less than two years.

Many of the fruit trees along the Broad Way are in blossom. Today I saw a woodpecker in Bowling Green. I was taken by such a strong homesickness that it was some time before I could speak.

Another letter from Captain Lewis, repeating much of what was said before as if he forgot that he had already written. A letter from Curiosity. No news of my father or stepmother or of the voyager.

J
UNE
1. L
ATE
A
FTERNOON.

Examined ten vaccination subjects and retrieved virus material from three. Six new vaccinations, four children and two young men. Dr. Simon says that I am now proficient in all stages of the Jenner method. He has written to Dr. Todd to tell him that my education in this matter is complete enough to send me back to Paradise.

In one week we depart this city for home. On that day I will vaccinate Ethan so that by the time we reach Paradise I will be able to retrieve fresh virus from him in Dr. Todd’s presence. I will also take vaccination material with me should Ethan’s attempt fail.

Dr. Simon has asked me to continue to assist in the wards and vaccination office until we depart the city. I would not know what to do with myself if I had no work, and so I accepted. According to my records I have seen patients with abscess, aneurism, arrhythmia, as-cites, childbed fever, cholera morbus, contusion, cataract, cancer, dyspepsia, dysentery, dislocations, epilepsy, fevers, fractures, gonorrhea, hoemoptoe, hernia, ophthalmia, palsy, pthisis pulmonalis, scarlatina, and wounds.

A new patient was brought into the wards by the constables who found him in the street, robbed and insensible. Aged about fifty years, from the condition of his hands a mason or bricklayer by profession. Dr. Simon’s diagnosis is of the terminal stage of the disease called morbi venerei but referred to by the doctors here as syphilis and by the patients as the French disease or French pox. The patient’s symptoms include a large protrusion on the left shoulder which is an advanced aneurism of the aorta, highly irregular heartbeat, blindness, loss of reason, and extreme ulceration of the nose and legs. I have seen this disease in many guises since working in the Almshouse and yet Dr. Simon is reluctant to speak to me about it. He prefers to think me innocent not only in deed but also in my knowledge of what passes between men and women.

Dr. Savard was less concerned with my unmarried status and proved willing to discuss the case, though I fear that his talkativeness had a great deal to do with the bottle of brandy he keeps in the bottom drawer of a cabinet in the kine-pox office. He copied a passage for me from Morgagni regarding death due to aneurism.

Today Kitty lost consciousness for close to an hour. Upon waking she asked to be bled again. She speaks of staying on here for the rest of the summer so she might continue in Dr. Ehrlich’s care.

I must still write my weekly report to Dr. Todd, and this time I will speak more bluntly about his wife’s poor condition. He will receive my letter with hers, and what a contrast that will be. Kitty speaks and writes only of amusements and shopping, though it seems to me that there is a growing desperation about her.

At ten to three o’clock on the last Saturday she would spend in the Almshouse, Hannah sat at the desk in the Kine-Pox Institution office with a piece of paper before her and a newly sharpened quill in her hand. She read the words she had written once again.

All week Hannah had been consumed by this moment and it came to these few dozen words. She was taken by the sudden and almost irresistible urge to tear up the note and write another one.

Instead she put down her quill, folded the note she had written, and wrote out the directions on its face. If all went
well she might one day be able to tell Will about all of this, why she had deceived him and to what end.

From the pocket of her work apron she took another piece of paper, this one soft with handling. She had read it so many times since Manny gave it to her that she hardly needed to look at it and yet she did, because it was the only place she could turn for assurance that what she was about to do was good and right.

She wished for her grandmother Falling-Day or for Many-Doves. From her grandmother she had heard every day what she owed to herself and to her clan, what it meant to be Kahnyen’kehàka, what it would take for her to survive in this white world. Every day since her grandmother died Hannah had heard Many-Doves repeat those same words to her own children.
Make your own way in your world and in theirs; leave the poison called alcohol to the white men who brought it here; do not get involved in their wars; give them no opportunity to make you their prisoner.

If she could talk to one of them in the language they shared maybe she could make sense of all of this, understand how it had become necessary to go against the things they had taught her. But all the guidance she had now was this paper.

When Manny gave it to her, she had expected nothing more than a description of the child he was looking for, Selah’s daughter. To her surprise and great unease she found something very different: a carefully copied letter addressed to the director of the Almshouse, Mr. Furman—a man she had seen only once, and who, as far as she could tell, spent as little time as possible in the building.

The names Ruth and Connie had been crossed through and over them were written Selah and Violet, in Manny’s hand.