Saving the World (52 page)

“You're a good guy, Emerson,” she tells him the night before the hike to Snake Mountain. They've gone up to Burlington together to pick up Sam and Soraya at the airport, catching a bite at a nearby cafe. David and Ben and girlfriends will probably be at the house by the time they get back, having driven up from the city in a rented car.

Emerson looks down at his dish, a vegetable soup Alma talked him into ordering. The cafe does mostly soups, sandwiches, no booze. He feels responsible, Alma knows he does, though she has told him that he's not to blame and is only as responsible as any of them are at how desperate so many people in the world are. She is grateful for his help, coming at critical moments. She remembers the time he showed up at her door, her first day back full time at her house. She'd been down in the basement trying to hook up the water softener, using her little spiral notebook of instructions. She'd messed up, and there was water softener salt all over the basement. She'd sat down on the spare sack of softener and wept, self-indulgently wishing there was an entry in the spiral notebook for doing yourself in. Upstairs, she heard steps on the porch, pounding at the door. Oh no, Mickey! she had thought, wondering where to hide herself. That's when she realized: even without Richard, she wants to live, to write a book, to fall in love again, to learn to work the water softener.

“You don't have to finish it,” she tells Emerson about the soup. A pall has come over them. Any moment now, Alma will burst into tears and Emerson, who specializes in trouble spots around the world, will not know what to say to her.

He checks his watch now, lifts a hand for the waitress to bring the check. He is afraid of her grief, most everyone is, except Helen, when she was alive, and Tera. Her stepsons have heard her blubbering on the phone so many times, including this time about the Snake Mountain plans. They cough and clear their throats, and soon most of their communications with Alma are through e-mails.

But here they are together on the mountaintop one last time. One advantage of climbing Snake Mountain on this tropical day: they've got the place to themselves. Alma's leg has healed, a faint purple scar she calls her fault line. Some days she feels a jab of pain at the spot, as she does now, maybe from the long hike, maybe from the imminence of a good-bye she is still not yet ready to say.

David and Claudine thank everyone for coming, then outline the
service. Anyone who wants can say something about Helen or Richard, read a poem, tell an anecdote. The gathering will conclude with a prayer from Reverend Don, then the scattering of ashes.

David kicks off the stories. A funny memory, about his dad climbing Snake Mountain, calling out Hello! So the act preceded Alma, the details a little cleaned up, either because Richard might not have wanted to sound disturbingly disbelieving in front of his young boys or because one of those kids, now grown up, knows a minister is in their midst and he better keep his story passably Christian.

Stories abound. Claudine has several funny Helen escapades. Mickey in a kind of slow drawl—Alma wonders what medication he might be on—tells about the time Helen came to visit him when he was living in Guam. Alma had no idea. Helen in Guam! Except she got on the wrong plane. Ended up in Manila. Is he making this up? Alma looks over at him, and for a moment their eyes lock. They are Helen's eyes in his face, just as from Sam's face Richard's eyes stare back at her.

It's disconcerting seeing these vague traces of the people she loves in the people she fears or feels unsure about. How will Mickey turn out? she wonders, remembering how much Helen worried about what would become of her troubled son. Those last weeks in which Helen outlived Richard, Alma came down every day from Tera's to visit her. Alma still could not stand being in her own house, deluged with memories. Helen could tell something was wrong, and so Alma had told her. Helen's eyes had filled with tears. “Come here by me,” she had said, patting a spot beside her on the hospital bed. And Alma had come and bowed her head into the old woman's shoulder, and together they had wept.

When Helen slipped into her coma, Alma sat by, waiting numbly for this next important departure. Occasionally, she had wet one of the little pink sponges the nurse had left in a glass and put it to the old woman's lips. The parched, toothless mouth would open and suck heartily. It was odd to feel that tug, that pull of reflex, that lusty will to live even in this comatose old woman.
Helen
, Alma whispered from
time to time,
I love you, I'm here.
And a few times, to indulge Helen, to indulge herself, she told her old friend,
Say hello to Richard
.

Several times, especially as the wave of stories begins to die down, Alma thinks of speaking up. She has several anecdotes ready and a love poem she'd once written for Richard. But each time her heart, if not her mind, goes blank. Why did she think this was a good idea? Beyond in the haze, she can see the neat, husbanded little plots of land, the earth's horizon, curved and turning toward the south, where her family came from, where she lost Richard, where the world grows poorer and sicker. What can she say about these two beloved people in the face of that bigger vision?

Again that feeling wells up in her, an intuition, as the black-kerchief poet called it, and with it that story she has held on to for so long it is now the quivering little needle of her moral compass.

“Anyone else?” David, of course, is remembering that this was Alma's idea. Surely, she has something to say. His voice is tentative, gentle—that father gene did get passed on. But Alma has nothing to say or, rather, has a whole story to tell them, the story of Isabel, of how some people, real people, have kept faith no matter what, how she wishes that for all of them. But it feels as if the moment she says so, she will be closing down this baffling world with a homily soaked in her tears. Better let the reverend take it from here.

“Okay then, let's bow our heads in prayer,” Reverend Don says, as if reading her mind.

After a handheld Our Father, the ashes are passed around. Two urns make the rounds. Alma wonders whose is Richard's? Helen's? She fills her hands, one fistful from each one. When the urns have gone full circle, the group lines up at the edge of the stony outcrop.

Alma feels as if she should make a wish, like blowing out candles, like seeing the first star in the sky. But she has entered a world where wishing would only return her to grief. She has to make a bigger leap, into a story that is not just a story, her own and not her own. Richard and Helen, Isabel and Balmis, the black-kerchief poet, Benito—they
are inside her now, wanting her faith, needing her hope. So this is how the dead live on.

No one says, Now! but after the first person flings a handful, the others follow. There is no wind today, another good thing about it being hot, becalmed. The ashes fly out from all their hands—
floating on faith, floating on love
—blessing the ground.

T
HIS NOVEL COULD NOT
have been written without the immeasurable help and support of so many generous and special people.

First and foremost, my deepest appreciation to Catherine Mark, scientific editor at the CNB in Madrid, helper par excellence, for sending e-mails with needed details, dates, and oodles of encouragement. This trusting soul loaned a perfect stranger books from her ample Balmis collection, which books crossed the Atlantic twice, once here and then back. Her own translation of Gonzalo Díaz de Yraola's
The Spanish Royal Philanthropic Expedition: The Round-the-World Voyage of the Smallpox Vaccine, 1803–1810
(
La vuelta al mundo de la expedición de la vacuna, 1803–1810)
, a facsimile of a 1948 edition (repr. Madrid: Instituto de Historia, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2003), along with Michael Smith's
The “Real Expedición Marítima de la Vacuna” in New Spain and Guate mala,
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s. 64, pt. 1, (Philadelphia, 1974), are the two most thorough studies of the Balmis expedition in English. Also helpful are articles by John Z. Bowers, “The Odyssey of Smallpox Vaccination,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
55 (1981), 17–33; Sherbourne F. Cook, “Francisco Xavier Balmis and the Introduction of Vaccination in Latin America,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
11 (1942): 543 – 60 and 12 (1942): 70 – 101 ; as well as various articles by José Rigau-Pérez, who specializes in the Puerto Rican fiasco.

Special thanks also to Professor Ricardo Guerrero, whom I had the good fortune to meet as I was touring Galicia, for his gift of Gonzalo Díaz de Yraola's book, which led me to befriend its translator, Catherine Mark. To other Balmis aficionados in Spain, including Manuel Prada and José Luís Barona, who kindly answered
my queries, and José Tuells, whose book is listed below, muchas gracias and many thanks. Also my thanks to Tom Colvin for information concerning Mexican and Philippine portions of the journey.

Closer to home in my own stomping grounds of Middlebury, Vermont, many thanks to Rachel Manning of Middlebury College's Interlibrary Loan Department, who brings the world's treasures here for us to study. To her and to Joy Pile and the wonderful staff at this library, I owe my deepest appreciation and gratitude. To the incomparable Paul Monod, professor of history, for his good humor and patience with all my tireless questions. And to John Quinn, for his legal help with my troublemakers.

Also to the extraordinary nurses of Addison County Home Health & Hospice and to Dr. Chris Nunnink, for taking the time to help me. To M. H., and her family, for blessing me with your precious time and friendship!

Many thanks to Brian Simpson, editor of
Johns Hopkins Public Health Magazine
, and Suzanne Fogt, then working at the Sustainable Enterprise Program, World Resources Institute, for their help on current world epidemics, biological terrorism, and on the increasingly desperate situation of so many of the world's poor. Jessica Hagedorn and Luis Francia kindly added to my knowledge of latecolonial Philippine history and lore; Liliana Valenzuela stepped in with Mexican history expertise. My thanks also to Dr. Erin Felger for medical-military help.

As for making my novel seaworthy (all sea lingo and wind direction errors are mine), I want to thank the intrepid Joan Druett, whose wonderful books on sailing, most especially,
Hen Frigates
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), acquainted this landlubber with a watery world she knew nothing about. To Brian Andrews and Deidre O'Regan, who loaned me books and arranged for me to go aboard the
Spirit of Massachusetts
and experience seasickness firsthand: many thanks. And to Herb and Shayna Loeffler, whom I met aboard the
Spirit
, for answering any number of tedious questions on board and later by phone and e-mail, thank you both.

I owe a special thanks to Dr. Ellen Koenig, for educating me about the AIDS crisis in the Dominican Republic. Her clinic in the capital is far and away the best treatment center for AIDS in the country. I want briefly to acknowledge her work here. At a time when very few Dominican physicians dared sully their practices by treating those with this “pariah” disease, Dr. Koenig, then a comfortable American woman in her forties married to a Dominican businessman, decided to earn
a medical degree in order to tend to those in such dire need. Thank you and your assistant, Dr. Carlos Adon, for taking time out to accompany me to other needy clinics and for persevering in running a first-rate care facility for AIDS patients in the Dominican Republic. There are Isabels afoot in this world! It is an honor and a privilege to know you.

In commemoration of the recent Balmis bicentennial, several books have been published in the last few years, all of them in Spanish: two by Susana Ramírez, who probably knows more than anyone about the smallpox expedition and has been writing for years on the subject:
La salud del imperio: La real expedición filantrópica de la vacuna
(Madrid: Fundación Jorge Juan, Ediciones Doce Calles, 2002) and, along with coauthor José Tuells,
Balmis et variola
(Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana, Conselleria de Sanitat, 2003); Emilio Balaguer Perigüell and Rosa Ballester Añón's
En el nombre de los niños: La Real Expedición Filantrópica de la Vacuna
(1803–1806) (Monografías de la Asociación Española de Pediatría, 2003; electronic book available at
http://www.aeped.es/balmis/libro.balmis.htm
); Juan Carlos Herrera Hermosilla's
El sueño ilustrado: Biografía de Francisco Javier de Balmis
(Ediciones Paracelso, s.l., 2003). Earlier studies include the aforementioned Díaz de Yraola's book as well as Francisco Fernandez del Castillo's
Los viajes de Don Francisco Xavier de Balmis
(Mexico: Galas de Mexico, S.A., 1960). There is also a wonderful booklet put out by the Alicante Rotary Club/Fundación Dr. Balmis,
Balmis y los héroes de la vacuna: Expedición Filantrópica a América y Filipinas
,
1803
. In addition, a new anthology of articles by Balmis experts from around the world, edited by Susana Ramírez,
La Real Expedición Filantrópica de la Vacuna: Doscientos años de lucha contra la viruela
, will soon be available from Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid, Spain.

The novel's Isabel chapters follow closely the trajectory and main events of the royal expedition. But the creation of character and circumstance based on these historical personages is my own invention. Isabel, under several surnames, was indeed the rectoress of the orphanage in La Coruña and was the only woman to accompany the expedition. Her adopted son, Benito, was one of the original twenty-two carriers. Only twenty-one are named in the official documents, thus the license to invent Orlando. Isabel did go on to the Philippines with the twentysix Mexican boys, returning two years later to Mexico, and settling down finally with Benito in Puebla de los Ángeles, the City of the Angels.