The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book) (54 page)

"Remember," I said. "Water. Plenty of it. She gets any more
dehydrated that's when the problems'll start for real."

This sparked another burst of yammering and hand gesturing,
everyone suddenly so emotional I made it real simple by pointing at my
open mouth and saying. "Water. Acqua. Lots of it."

I left the Concello suite and headed back to my stateroom. The
winds had turned into a full-out gale, and I had to stoop so's not to get
blown over. There I changed into clothes that hadn't been sicked and
sweated on. I'd just finished when there was another knock on my
door; I almost didn't answer, for I figured it was someone else without
enough sense to treat a flu with liquids and clean bedsheets.

Instead it was Doc Ketchum. The long strand of hair he normally kept plastered over the top of his head had come loose and was irritating one eye.

"Mabel," he said gravely. "I could use your help."

I let him come in. He rearranged his hair and then rubbed his eyes
hard with the base of his hands.

"Been busy?" I asked.

"I've been at it for three hours."

"Some flu," I said.

"I thought so too."

I nodded knowingly, but then stopped. If my ears weren't playing tricks he'd used the past tense.

"You thought so?"

He nodded, tight-lipped. "Then I helped Con Colleano take a piss."

"So?"

"Was blood in it. Mabel. I'm gonna need a good nurse."

I raced out of my room. Ran all the way to May Wirth's and
barged in without knocking. May was stirring and moaning, her mother lifting a glass of water to her lips.

"No!" I yelled.

Mrs. Wirth looked up, frightened.

"It's the water. The barrels are bad. Infected." Was then I looked
around the room and saw that May, like most of the performers, had a
small paraffin stove; I told her mother she had to use it to boil water and
then give May that water and that water only.

Mrs. Wirth immediately gained the blinky, weak expression people get when circumstances change in an instant, which is the way she
still looked when I ran from her stateroom to the Concellos'. Was a lot
of yelling and throwing up of hands and accusations directed my way
in Italian, none of which I hung around for: a whole lot of people were
going to come down with amoebic dysentery that night if we were
lucky. If we weren't, it was going to be typhoid or cholera and a lot of
dead piled up by morning.

Seems Ketchum had gotten tired of waiting in my room, for I ran
into him just as he was stepping down to the rails. By then the skies
were darkening both because of the time of day and the gathering rain
clouds. I had to yell to be heard over the wind, which had escalated
from a howl to an out-and-out screech.

"WHAT DO WE DO?"

"GET MORE HELP."

I went looking for nurses, Ketchum for orderlies. Amazing, how
people will suddenly insist you need a special license to wipe spew off
a bedsheet, though after moving through two or three performer cars I
discovered who the real troupers were. Here I'm talking about the ringmaster's wife, Ella Bradna; Anders Christensen's daughter Petra; a
Loyal-Haganski named Olga; and believe it or not Lillian Leitzel, who
I'm sure volunteered just so's she could prove any opinions I had about
her wrong.

("So? Haff zee circus is ill? Veil, den. Lillian vill help. Lillian vill
help villingly.")

We started moving from car to car. The first sick car we reached
was the one belonging to Poodles Hannaford, something I remember
for two reasons. First, he still had his clown freckles and clown smile on, which looked nothing but macabre on a man bent over naked and
retching. Second, the moment the Loyal-Haganski girl caught a whiff
of foul odour she vomited all over her shirtfront and skirt. When she'd
finished emptying her stomach, Ella Bradna led her, white and shaky,
back to her stateroom.

This meant we were down to four, which was fine, for four is
about as many as can work in a small stateroom anyway. Together we
bathed and stripped and cleaned and formed bundles out of slimeoozing bedsheets and assured relatives gone frantic with worry there
was nothing to worry about, only a little bug in the drinking barrels,
tomorrow everything would be back to normal, just you wait and see.
Ella Bradna worked like a mule, steady and without complaint, at one
point telling me she'd seen the same thing happen on a German circus
she'd worked on years earlier. Petra Christensen was tentative, a fault
of her being no more than sixteen, though once she overcame the
embarrassment of seeing people nude and splattered with sea-green
muck, she put her head down and worked as quietly and efficiently as
Ella Bradna.

Which left Leitzel. Naturally, everything was done with flourishes and sweeping arm movements and sighs meant to draw attention.
And while she wasn't particularly helpful in the cleaning departmentshe held everything at arm's length, meaning she couldn't get much
oompf into her scrubbing-I have to admit she did excel in the feareasing department. When we got to the room belonging to Merle
Evans, the bandleader, we found him shivering and coated with diarrhea and frightened his age was going to work against him.

"Vat?" Leitzel exclaimed. "You call ziss sick? Belief me. Alfred is
vorse after a night drinking tequila. Now. Let me light your paraffin
stove and get ziss vater to bubbling. You need is a little vater and everything is fine."

Slowly we moved from the star cars to the section of train carrying chorus performers and maintenance workers. Things got more crowded, generally four bunks to a room, and that made the work harder. We kept asking the sick which barrels they'd drunk from, though
mostly they were too frothing with vileness to answer. For this reason,
it was impossible to detect any rhyme or reason for the outbreak. In one
car everyone would be healthy and in the next all four would be violently puking and in the next you'd have one or two just starting to
come down with it. Yet it wasn't the stench or the sights that got us but
the sheer amount of manual labour. Our fingers ached and our elbows
got stiff and we all got the deflated feeling that comes from having
work that doesn't seem to have any intention of ending. Plus Ella
Bradna's back started complaining loudly; I could tell because she'd
stop, put a hand on her lumbar and wince. Luckily, we picked up three
spec girls who wanted to help so we started doing two cars at once, my
dashing back and forth to give instruction.

About an hour and a half in, we got to the workingmen part of
the train. There we took a rest outside before the real fun started. By
then it was totally dark outside, and the screeching winds had grown
chilly; still, the healthy workingmen were all outside, huddled and passing bottles and bearing the weather as best they could. Ketchum was
there as well, helping a group build bonfires so they could boil water
over flames, the workingmen not having the benefit of stoves in their
dorm cars. When he saw us he came running over. I don't know if it's
possible for skin creases to deepen in a couple of hours, but it seemed
to have happened to him.

"GOT GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS!" he hollered over
the weather.

"GOOD NEWS FIRST!" I shouted back.

"HEARD MAY WIRTH'S DOING A BIT BETTER. NOT
MUCH, BUT A LITTLE AND I FIGURE IF IT WAS TYPHOID
OR CHOLERA SHE'D BE DOING A LOT WORSE. IT'S DYSENTERY, MABEL, BAD DYSENTERY AND AMOEBIC SURE AS
SHIT, BUT STILL JUST DYSENTERY."

This news went a long way to reducing my numbed, achy-finger
feeling. I let my voice rest a minute before yelling again into the wind.

"THE BAD NEWS?"

Here Ketchum gestured toward the workingmen's car, squinting
against a whipping hair lock. "IT'S BAD IN THERE, MABEL. BAD."

The rest of my nurses all heard this, so we each took a big breath
and avoided looking at one another. Then we went in.

In the workingmen's car they slept three to a bunk, the bunks
piled three high. Even spread out, there was at least one sick body in
every bed and in some cases two and in the odd one three. Every single
man in that car was groaning and clutching himself and running torrents from both ends. The aisles ran with puke and diarrhea and urine
gone rosy with blood. Though every window was open, the jetting
winds outside were no match for the thickness of the stench inside the
car; one of the spec girls started to sniffle, and we all stepped back outside feeling horrified.

There couldn't've been less than four hours work in there.
Course, there was little we could do without fresh bedding and given
they were workingmen it was unlikely many of them would own a spare
set. Hearing this, we all decided Ella Bradna would take the spec girls
and go up and down the train begging people for spare sheets and drinking water, at the same time trying to recruit more nurses. That left me
and Leitzel and Petra Christensen. Seeing as there was nothing left for
us to do but roll up our sleeves and do what we could do in the meantime, I headed toward the door of the workingmen's car, which had
been left open and was slamming over and over into the door frame.

After taking a few steps, I noticed I wasn't being followed, so I
turned. Petra Christensen was crying, I suppose from fatigue and
shock, though it really didn't matter for I could tell she was done.

"I viii take her back," Leitzel said, "und return as soon as I am
able." They walked away, one stooped and one with her chin up, both
with their clothes ruffling in the winds. I knew I wouldn't see Leitzel again, nursing fellow performers being one thing and nursing lowly
workingmen being something altogether different.

So I headed into the workingmen's car alone. Now that I'd
arrived, they were calling out and holding on to me and saying my
name, which was spooky because a lot of them had gone delusional
with fever and were calling out the names of wives or girlfriends while
others were moaning, "Help me, Ma." Others were panicking, whimpering they didn't want to die a poor circus razorback in debt to the
blue car for drinking. I dampened a few lips and foreheads and pulled
up a few blankets, which'd get thrown off immediately due to the
patient being hot with fever. After a few minutes, I realized there was
precious little I could do on my own, so I made a decision: I'd go to the
menage, check on Rajah and by the time I got back there'd be help and
water boiled and hopefully fresh linen.

So I left. Had to dodge outstretched hands and avoid faces gone
slack with dryness. I stepped into the bitter weather and, hunched
against the wind, hustled to the other end of the train, which in those
days was practically a mile long and travelled in four sections with four
locomotives. I half walked and half ran the whole way, reaching the
menage cars out of breath but amazed at my own energy. There I saw
Art, sitting in a cage, tending to an elephant with a river of green muckiness spilling from a butthole dilated to the size of a basin; it flowed
from the cage over the wash-out gutter and into the earth, making a
puddle of awfulness I practically stepped in.

"ART!" I hollered.

He waved and yelled back something I couldn't quite make out
because of the wind, though I think he said some of his bulls were
sick but he'd see me later. I moved on, taking a bit of water Art had
boiled next to the bull pens. As I hurried, I ignored the sounds of
sick animals: was yaks lowing and camels spitting and gorillas
chest-thumping and hippos crying and lions rumbling and a whole
lot of healthy animals gone vocal for fear of what was happening. A big crowd had formed around the prize Ringling akapi, for she
was the only akapi in America and had cost almost as much as the
albino elephant and if she died someone would have to deal with
John Ringling and his temper. I got to the cat section of the train
and started hoisting up sidings. Checked every one of my kitties.
They were all more or less fine, only Pasha and Boston looking a
little peaked and drippy but not too bad, considering. I gave each a
little fresh water with a promise of more later. Then I cranked up
the siding on Rajah.

I took a look, and it was a case of forcing myself not to fall
to pieces.

"Oh baby," I purred, "oh, you poor little baby."

Rajah lifted his head and growled, and as he growled a stream
of sick ran between his molars and onto the cage floor. I knew I had
to be careful, for a sick cat is a scared cat and a scared cat is always
dangerous, no matter how well he knows you. "Oh sweet kitty," I
kept saying as I slowly lifted the big metal latch and let the door swing
upward. "Mommy's here, darling little kitty," and I took a step inside,
offering fresh water, when Rajah mustered all his strength and
lunged. Landed his paws on my shoulders and pushed me back up
against the bars, and for a moment there was a murderousness in his
eyes that made me think I was done for. Then his eyes focused and he
seemed to realize who he'd pinned. A softness returned to his look,
and his muscles lost their tension. He arfed and laid his head on my
shoulder and drew me toward him.

So I put my arms around Rajah and got them messed with vomit.
His breath smelled like a sewer and his fur was crusted with awfulness.
I just held him tight and told him no way he was going to die, not with
me around, it being then I decided there wasn't a chance in hell I was
going to care for a $10,000 wrestling Bengal in a filthy cold menage
cage. So I wiped him off as best as I was able and gave him some clean
water and rubbed his pleasure spot. Then I took him out of his cage, Rajah shaky and arfing from his aches but not nearly so far gone as a
lot of the humans I'd seen that day. Still, it was obvious he was too
weak to make it to the performer train, and I was wondering what I was
going to do when I saw one of the workingmen driving a gilly loaded
with barrels of just-boiled water from the pie car. I hailed him and he
dropped Rajah and me in front of my stateroom.