White Wind Blew (3 page)

Wolfgang heard footsteps in the dark, her careful tiptoes creaking over wooden floorboards, and seconds later he couldn’t breathe. He inhaled, but the air just froze deep down until he thought his chest would implode. Patches of light and dark flashed across his vision. He fought with his arms, but couldn’t push her away. He pleaded for his legs to come alive so that he could run from the bed, from her, but he felt nothing down there. Screams sounded from deep inside his head, vibrations that dampened with every frantic beat of his heart.

Car tires screeched.

He pulled his knees up to his chest, and finally the whistling of a chorus of birds woke him.

“Rose…”

Wolfgang opened his eyes, panting. It was only a dream. Another nightmare.

He sat up straight and yawned, staring out the broken window, spotting three of the noisy birds perched on a low branch of an oak tree that still carried brown leaves throughout the winter. It was freezing inside; no surprise, given the state of the window that he’d neglected to board up before he’d fallen asleep. He rubbed his arms and stood, accidentally knocking over an empty wineglass.

His right knee ached. He massaged the muscles, eyeing the stack of theology books next to the piano as he stretched. It had been his ritual to study them every morning before work, but with as late as he’d been staying at the sanatorium and as many hours as he’d been putting in on his writing, it had been several days since he’d opened them. But those were excuses and he knew it. With the special privileges the monks at Saint Meinrad had given him, the books deserved his full attention. And they would get it.
But
not
this
morning.

Dozens of his papers had blown from the piano and were now scattered all over the floor. His head throbbed as he bent over to collect them, his cold fingers clumsy against the hardwood. He gathered the papers into a stack, put them into a black lacquered box atop the piano, and slid it under the bed.

It was six thirty. His patients would be waiting.

***

Wolfgang dressed in a black Roman cassock that buttoned down the front from neck to toe and covered it with a white lab coat. He heard a gentle tapping on his front door. And then a female voice.

“Wolfgang.”

Susannah was here.

“I’m coming.” Stopping by the kitchen, Wolfgang knelt down to see his distorted reflection in the glass of the coffee percolator. He stood back up, somewhat satisfied.

She knocked again. “Wolfgang.”

He smiled. Truly she harassed him on purpose. So went the morning ritual. He grabbed his black bag of musical instruments, straightened his lab coat, and opened the door. It was cool outside, sun-drenched.

Susannah waited at the bottom of his steps, gripping a small black purse. She smiled. “Morning, Wolf.”

“Morning, Susannah.” Together they walked up toward the trees. Under the sunlight, Wolfgang finally felt that warmth he’d been craving. “You sleep well?”

“I did. You?”

“I don’t sleep, Susannah. You know that.”

They walked silently through the woods for a few minutes as the wind rustled the dead leaves and naked tree limbs. The sunlight penetrated the tree branches above, highlighting the forest floor in a pattern of striped shadows. Mostly Wolfgang kept his eyes ahead, but he could feel her occasional stare. Susannah lived in the nurses’ dormitory near the back of the Waverly Hills property, roughly fifty yards from Wolfgang’s cottage. They walked to work every morning. Silence was sometimes their best communication.

“Do you have enemies I should know about?”

He looked at her, confused.

Susannah glanced at him. “Your broken window.”

“A brick came flying through about two in the morning.”

“What? Were you hurt?”

He showed her the cut on his right palm but then quickly dropped his hand back to his side. “It’s nothing. Probably a few hoodlums from the KKK.”

“Why would they bother us here on the hillside?”

“I fear they live here now.”

“What do you mean?”

“They were patients. They must have sneaked out.”

“You saw them?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know they were our patients?”

“One of them coughed. I know a tuberculosis cough when I hear one.”

They continued walking. The woods were full of deer, squirrels and rabbits, raccoons and chipmunks, stray cats and dogs, and at night the occasional possum would waddle across Wolfgang’s porch. But the pig that darted across their path just before they reached the top of the hill was a new wrinkle to the morning ritual. This one was extremely fat, crusted with mud and probably searching the woods for acorns.

“Looks like the same beast I danced with last night,” said Wolfgang.

The pig snorted, then faced them. Susannah squatted down and gave it a quick snort of her own. The pig scuttled back into the trees.

Susannah stood and ironed out her dress with her hands. “Lincoln needs to learn how to keep those beasts locked up proper.”

Wolfgang began walking again. “Suppose they don’t want to be cooked.”

Just then Lincoln came running and huffing from the trees to their right. The letters
WHS
were stenciled in white above his left shirt pocket. He leaned over, hands against his thighs, breathing heavily. “I’m too busy in the morgue to deal with this every morning.”

Susannah patted him on the back. “Keep ’em penned, Lincoln. Can’t have our dinner running the hillside.”

Lincoln scratched his wispy hair. “Which way’d it go?” They both pointed toward the left side of the footpath. Lincoln took a flask from his pants pocket, downed a quick swig, and then offered it to Susannah. “Want a squirt?”

“No, Lincoln. I don’t want a squirt.”

“Wolf?”

Wolfgang shook his head, glanced at his wounded hand, and then surveyed the woods. “Too early for illegal whiskey, Lincoln.”

He screwed the top back on. “Suit yourself.” Lincoln disappeared into the trees.

They had nearly reached the clearing where a grassy field rolled downward from the façade of the sanatorium. A hammering sound echoed from the nearby workshop, a single-level barn nestled in the trees. Wolfgang ducked his head inside and the smell of wood chips welcomed him.

A dozen patients, those healthy enough to test their endurance, worked on various crafts. This workshop was a popular activity among the patients, because it allowed them to release tension. A giant farm boy named Jesse wore goggles and gloves while he repeatedly smashed a ball-peen hammer against a sheet of copper foil, denting it into some kind of shape. He took a break to wave and Wolfgang waved back. A young man in the back corner screwed wheels into a small wooden toy car. A bald man attached leather to the seat of a chair. A group of women sat behind wooden frames, working together weaving a colorful rug. One of them snickered at Wolfgang, who ducked back outside with Susannah.

“What?” asked Susannah.

“Nothing.” Wolfgang sniffed the air. “I smell breakfast.”

A tall black man with thick dark hair and bulging muscles walked away from the main sanatorium, pushing a loose-wheeled wooden cart stacked high with food and supplies. Apples, oranges, and bananas. Wheat bread and cucumbers and tomatoes. Beneath the cart rested a dozen glass jars of white milk. Steam rose from beneath a beige towel at the front of the cart. Fresh breakfast.

“Morning, Big Fifteen.” Wolfgang lifted the towel and snatched a piece of bacon.

“Morning, Boss.” Big Fifteen rested on the cart for a moment and wiped sweat from his forehead. He nodded at Susannah. “Miss.”

Susannah nodded without smiling and walked on across the lawn.

Wolfgang patted Big Fifteen on his thick shoulder. “First trip of the morning?” Three times a day Big Fifteen trekked the property with a cart full of supplies for the colored hospital that lay lower down the hill. And when he wasn’t pushing supplies, he helped with the maintenance, everything from chopping wood to cutting grass.

Big Fifteen nodded. “Gots to feed my people, Boss.” He stared toward Susannah, who stood facing a cluster of crows eating bread crumbs. “Why don’t she talk to me, Boss?”

“A little shy, I guess.” Wolfgang inhaled the pleasant aroma wafting up from the cart. “What else they cook up this morning?”

“Bacon…and some eggs and sausage.”

Susannah folded her arms across her chest and spoke over her shoulder. “We’d have more of the bacon if Lincoln would keep the pigs bottled up.”

Big Fifteen lifted the cart. “Reckon so, Miss.” He smiled. His muscles flexed beneath his long-sleeved gray shirt and he continued down the hillside.

“Good day, Fifteen.” Wolfgang watched him descend the uneven terrain, hardly straining on the downhill. Big Fifteen stood at least six foot six, and his hands were enormous, big enough to palm the largest of pumpkins from the patch on the north side of the hillside. They called him Big Fifteen because of the size of his boots.

Big Fifteen, a patient at Waverly for two years, had been cured of TB in 1916 when the hospital was a mere flicker of the size it was now, and he’d insisted on staying at Waverly to help the patients at the colored hospital. He’d never say it, but Wolfgang could tell by the looks Big Fifteen would give Dr. Barker that he wasn’t satisfied with the conditions down there. It was cramped, dark, and overcrowded. And if indeed it was fresh air that helped cure the disease, the white patients got the best of it, perched as they were at the highest point in the county, where the Waverly wind was found in abundance. The colored hospital caught everything downwind—the air, the smell of the pigs and cows, the smell of the freshly baked food before it was transported, along with the flooding from the heavy rains.

“Abel seems to be doing better every day,” said Susannah, as they walked on. Abel Jones, the poor little boy; he’d arrived at Waverly in 1926 from the German Protestant Orphans Home. No family, no visitors, no pictures from loved ones. Susannah had become like a mother to him, and at times Wolfgang felt like he’d become the boy’s father too, a position that left him at once uncomfortable and yet pleased.

Wolfgang glanced at her. “Abel has you to take care of him.”

The comment drew a smile from Susannah. “Miss Schultz spoke of you before I left last night. She hopes you’ll play for her today.”

“Dr. Barker thinks my music therapy is a waste of time.”

“Has he told you that?”

“No, but I can tell.”

Susannah waved her hands. “Dr. Barker is a bore who’s mad at the world because his wife won’t sleep with him anymore.”

“She’s afraid of catching TB,” Wolfgang said. “I’d be careful too.”

“Would you?”

“You know what I mean.”

She watched him curiously. “You know Barker’s wife moved out.”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“Moved off the hillside and took the kids with her,” said Susannah. “Heard they’re staying with her family in the Highlands, near Cherokee Park.”

They were twenty yards away from the entrance portico on the south side of the sanatorium, where a cluster of visitors met with some patients on the lawn. One of the visitors stared at the building while the patient talked. The portico had archways with alternating sections of brick and stone that gave it a mosque-like appearance, although the building itself looked more like it was stolen from an Ivy League college campus. It was a five-story monster made of brick and stone, ornately fashioned by Gothic architecture from the first floor all the way up to the rooftop and bell tower. Solarium porches stretched the length of the building on each floor, six hundred feet long. Every room on the south side opened to the sleeping porches, where the patients who still had a chance at survival stayed. The terminal cases were on the other side of the hallway, behind the rooms that opened up to the solariums. The building was designed in the shape of a boomerang, with the idea that it could catch the breeze and keep fresh air on the patients at all times.

Rest and fresh air supposedly helped tuberculosis, but the pressure to find a definitive cure led to experimental treatments such as pneumothorax—collapsing diseased lungs—and another surgery called thoracoplasty, in which Wolfgang and Dr. Barker removed several rib bones from the chest wall. They also performed lobectomies, in which they removed parts of the lung, and in some cases the entire lung. Phrenicotomies cut the nerve supply to one of the diaphragms in hopes of allowing the disabled lung to heal. They used heliotherapy, or sun treatment, because they believed that sunbathing killed the bacteria that caused tuberculosis. But these were all treatments, not cures, and the procedures, bloody and dangerous as they were, often only delayed the ultimate outcome.

Recently they’d been losing almost one patient per hour, and the menace showed no signs of slowing. Waverly held its full capacity, and the waiting list was growing. While Waverly bulged at the seams, the town shrank. The disease consumed entire families. Wolfgang spent much of his day now hearing confessions, regardless of faith or denomination. But he refused to allow the dying to exit the world without cleansing their souls, and the patients never seemed to mind.

Father, bless me for I have sinned…

“Wolfgang?”

“Yes?”

Susannah grinned. “Where were you just now?”

“Contemplating whether or not to open the door for you.” He stepped forward and opened it. They stood in the center of a hallway that stretched three hundred feet on either side of them. Shiny black and red tiles formed a checkered pathway down the center of the hallway. The walls were gray, the woodwork a dark brown. Globe lights hung down from the white ceiling. You could smell how clean it was.

Coughing echoed down the hallway, reminding Wolfgang that it was still a home for the dying. Yet the doctors, nurses, and volunteers made it as much like home as possible. A retired farmer from Bardstown ran Waverly’s hillside farm, raising cattle, hogs, and chickens to provide meat, fresh eggs, and dairy products for the patients and staff. Those who turned to faith could visit the nondenominational chapel that Wolfgang oversaw on the second floor. Children could attend school in the pavilion building, and there were playgrounds there as well. The library contained hundreds of donated books, newspapers, and magazines. Waverly’s theater offered movies and plays, and patients could partake in activities from weaving rugs and making toys to the popular copper hammering and furniture manufacturing, and everything made was sold to the public to raise money for the hospital.