Quarantine: A Novel (6 page)

“It’s coming fast,” she said. “The air is still. And the bugs, they always fly about my face before a storm.”

“We’ll be home soon.”

“We won’t make it before the rain.”

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j o h n s m o l e n s

“Are you sure?”

She lifted her head toward him. She seemed to be looking at

something on his forehead. Her eyes were wide open, astonished.

Then he saw the first drop of water splash on her chin. Again, she laughed. “I’m sure.”

He felt the first drops in his hair. And then raindrops began

to pat the dirt in the road, leaving large round spots of mud. The shoulders of his shirt began to feel damp and heavy. “You’re right,”

he said. “Shall we run?”

“Carry me.”

“All right—you’re a sack of potatoes.” She squealed as he picked her up and threw her over his shoulder, and then he trotted to

the other side of the road and stood against the wall of Mr. Poe’s stable, where he put his sister down and held her close to his side.

The rain fell straight down, and they were dry as long as they

kept their backs to the shingled wall. The road quickly turned

to mud. A sheet of water came off the roof, pounding the earth

inches from their feet. Sarah held out one hand, catching water

in her cupped palm.

Lightning forked down from the clouds with a sizzling crack

and a f lash so bright that for a moment Leander himself was

blinded. He blinked several times, seeing a black image of the

fork in his mind. The sky seemed to break open angrily, thunder

rumbling so loud that the ground shuddered. Sarah screamed,

and he held her closer. Then the wind came up quickly, tossing

the hanging vines of the willow tree next to the stable. The rain swept in on them, and in a moment they were drenched.

“Come on,” he said, taking her hand. “Let’s get out of this.”

The stable door to his right was ajar, and he pulled his sister

inside where the dry air was close, smelling of manure and hay.

Horses moved nervously in their stalls, their hooves clopping

on the packed earth floor. With the next crack of lightning, the thunder followed almost immediately. Throughout the stable,

horses whinnied and snorted.

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q u a r a n t i n e

Then the wind slammed the door shut, causing Sarah to scream

again. It was almost pitch dark—the only light coming through

gaps in the wall high up by the loft beams. Sarah put her arms

around Leander’s waist.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Just a little thunder and lightning.

When it passes, we’ll get home.” But she was trembling now.

She always did, because though she rarely showed fear she was

petrified of thunder and lightning. He realized he could never

imagine what it would be like to live in perpetual darkness. “It’ll be over soon,” he continued, dismayed that he couldn’t sound

more convincing.

Her arms tightened about his waist, and she pressed her face

into his ribs. “I know,” she whispered. “But there’s—it’s some-

thing else.”

“What?”

“Here, in the stable. We’re in the Poes’ stable, right?”

This was another thing that often amazed him. They would

walk hand in hand about Newburyport and he would purposely

not say where they were, and yet she would tell him they were

on Liberty Street, or that they had just passed the apothecary on Pleasant Street. When he asked her how she knew this, she would

only smile. It was much like when she was in their house, and

she could move about almost as freely as though she could see.

“Yes—we’re in the Poes’ stable,” he said. “And we’ll stay here

until the storm moves out to sea. Then we’ll run home and give

this flounder to Mother.”

But she was having none of it, and her fingers tugged at his

shirt. “Leander, we’re not alone—there’s someone else in
here.”

“It’s just the animals. They’re frightened by the storm and—”

“No,” Sarah whispered. “There’s a
man.
I know there is.”

Leander looked toward the back of the stable. The doors there

were closed, pale light coming through the spaces between the

boards. Then the door squealed on a hinge and opened slightly.

Lightning cracked overhead, and for a moment Leander saw—or

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thought he saw—the silhouette of a man. A naked man. He must

have been imagining it: a naked man who had opened the door

and stepped outside as the lightning flickered.

Leander closed his eyes. The image was there: the gap in the

door, the man, his back hunched. When he opened his eyes he

saw no one, and asked, “What do you smell?”

“It—” Sarah hesitated. “It smells like the outhouse.”

“Shit.”

He wasn’t supposed to say the word, but he did sometimes—

though rarely around his sister. She let go of his waist and stepped back from him. “That’s right,” she whispered. “Shit.” He couldn’t tell if she was still frightened by the fact that there was another person in the stable with them or that she had said a word that she had been taught never to utter. Then she said, “I smell his shit.”

“I saw him leave.” Leander couldn’t bring himself to say any-

thing more—to suggest that the man was naked was, in some way,

more of a transgression than saying a forbidden word.

“We must have scared him off?” Sarah asked.

“Yes.”

“Let’s go now, Leander.”

“First—” He placed the wrapped fish in his sister’s arms and

moved away from her. “Hold that, and you stay right there. Don’t move.” He started walking toward the back of the stable.

“Where are you
going?”
Her voice was full of panic.

“Just stay put. I’ll be right back.”

Leander walked slowly toward the back doors. Horses thrust

their heads over the walls as he passed. When he reached the back door, he pulled it open just enough so he could peer out into the yard. He could see the Poes’ house and hear chickens in their coop.

There was no sight of the man, and the rain had let up.

“Leander,”
Sarah called.

He turned to look back toward his sister, but then something

came over the stall to his right—the long-eared head of a mule,

which brayed with such force and anger that Leander took a step

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backwards and slipped, his right boot gliding on something soft

and slick. He fell to one knee, and to keep his balance he placed his right hand on the ground—and he gasped,
“Shit.”
It was warm and it covered his hand, and as he got to his feet there was another bolt of lightning, and in the flickering glow that came through

the cracks in the boards he saw it: vile black shit laced with blood, dripping from his fingers.

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Five

Market Square had long been the center of Newburyport

commerce. The Congregationalist meeting-house dominated its

center, surrounded by a labyrinth of vendors’ stalls and shambles which stood on trodden dirt, f lecked with crushed seashells.

Below the square, a row of warehouses lined the riverbank, and

the wharfs were crowded with ships and fishing smacks of every

description. In the narrow streets that ran out of the square,

there were dozens of boarding houses, taverns, grogshops, and

brothels, all designed to accommodate the ever-transient sea-

farer. With nearly eight thousand residents, Newburyport was

the fourth largest seaport on the East Coast. Her ships traded

throughout the world, and it was not uncommon to find shrubs

and trees indigenous to faraway lands such as Japan gracing the

yards of the Federalist mansions on High Street. In the wain-

scoted parlors and drawing rooms of such homes, one might find

Turkish carpets and furniture made of exotic woods imported

from Africa or South America. The distance from High Street,

which ran the length of a ridge above the Merrimack, to Market

Square, at the water’s edge, was not great—fifteen minutes on

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foot, briefer by coach and four—but the social distinctions rep-

resented by the two locales was immeasurable, some would say

insurmountable.

And yet the four men who entered Giles Wiggins’s rooms

overlooking Market Square might be considered unofficial repre-

sentatives of the city’s entire population: Jeremiah Storrs was one of Newburyport’s wealthiest shipbuilders; Emanuel Lunt’s family

had operated a coasting schooner since well before the British had been run out of Boston; Simon Moss and his sons tended one of

the most productive farms in Newbury; and Caleb Hatch had

been constable, high sheriff, and now harbormaster during his

three decades of service to the city. That these four men would

agree to meet in one place would be, to many Newburyporters,

curious, if not inconceivable; that they would gather, in secret as it were, in the humble offices of Dr. Wiggins would be nothing

short of alarming, which was exactly why they had agreed upon

such an unlikely venue.

Giles had placed the decanter of brandy on his desk, as though

it were a peace offering, and he poured each man a drink as they settled into the motley collection of chairs he had assembled from his two rooms.

Jeremiah Storrs, who was well into his eighties, naturally

assumed possession of the one worn leather armchair. “Word

spreads faster than disease,” Storrs said. “The idea of closing the harbor has swept along High Street virtually overnight, and I can tell you that we won’t stand for it. Instead ships will enter Boston or, worse, Salem.” He tossed back his brandy and held out his glass so that Giles might replenish it.

“It’s one ship.” Emmanuel Lunt smoked a dudeen, a clay pipe,

which caused him to speak through gritted teeth. “But there’s

already a sense of panic up and down the wharves.” He had lost

his right hand in action at sea, and the end of his forearm was

sheathed in a thick piece of leather that over the years had been polished smooth from wear.

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“Last time we had something like this,” Simon Moss said,

“smoke houses were established on every road leading into the

port. It was August—terrible heat, I tell you—and we couldn’t

get our produce to market. I ended up with a barn full of garbage and fields left to rot. Poor farmers such as I can’t afford to sustain such losses again.”

“This may very well be true, gentlemen,” Caleb Hatch said.

He stood behind his chair with one hand tucked in his vest, and

spoke as though he were making a public address. “But I recall

that more than three dozen people succumbed on Federal Street

alone in a matter of days.”

All four men began talking at once, their voices scraping and

clawing over each other. Giles went to the window behind his

desk and looked down on the activity in Market Square. It seemed an ordinary summer’s morning. The air was particularly clear

after the previous day’s thunderstorm and rain. His rooms were

on the second floor, so that he could see past the meeting-house spire, across the roofs of numerous waterfront buildings, to the pale blue expanse of the river basin. The
Miranda
lay at anchor just inside the north tip of Plum Island; atop her mainmast, a yellow flag fluttered in the breeze.

The din of voices went on for a minute, rising in pitch and

ferocity, until Jeremiah Storrs finally pounded the tip of his cane on the f loorboards. When the others quieted down, he said,

“Gentlemen, if you
please.
What have we here? Can someone tell us so that we may assess the situation? Good Lord, if we must

insist on this grand experiment called democracy—a silly notion

with no real future, I assure you—then I suggest we proceed in

something of a democratic fashion.”

“Are you suggesting we take a vote?” Simon Moss asked.

“Nothing,” Storrs said, “could I find more repugnant.”

“Perhaps you might buy mine?” Emanuel Lunt added.

The men laughed, and then they began to sputter and jabber,

until the octogenarian again pounded his cane on the floor. “I

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do think, gentlemen, we must needs obtain some facts. What are

the
facts?”

There followed a moment of silence, and then Caleb Hatch

cleared his throat. “The fact is we have two long boats full of

constables standing watch over one ship that’s under quarantine

out in the basin. This, after consultation with Dr. Wiggins,

who found evidence of disease among her crew. I have met

with the ship’s owner, Enoch Sumner, and despite his protesta-

tions, told him that the quarantine of this vessel will be upheld until we are assured that there is no threat to the safety of this seaport.”

There was again silence, and Giles knew that all four men had

turned to him, but for the moment he remained at the window,

gazing across Market Square toward the sea.

“Well,” Emanuel said finally. He was Giles’s closest—and

perhaps only true—friend. They had attended school together,

played at the Frog Pond in the Mall together, and during the war they had shipped out together. “What ails these sailors, Giles?”

“I can’t say for certain.” Giles clasped his hands behind his

back. “It could be some fever that will in a short time run its

course.”

“Can’t you give it a name?” Moss asked.

“It could be yellow fever,” Giles said. The others began to