The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book) (55 page)

I took Rajah inside and made up a pallet from sofa cushions. I
covered it all with a spare sheet and laid him down. For the next fifteen
minutes or so, I gave him sips of water and cleaned him with a warm
sponge and told him over and over how he was my baby and my best
kitty and how he was going to get better and get better soon. When he
was breathing evenly and asleep, I left him, glad he was in the warmth and
quiet of my stateroom. Already he was looking a little better: as he slept
he kept licking his lips, which in my experience means a cat's dreaming of
something agreeable-hippo steaks, maybe, or tearing apart an impala.

Just before I left, I looked around for a piece of paper. Course,
I couldn't find one, so I took some paper towelling and with a stubby
pencil wrote, "Art. Rajah inside. Careful!" After tacking it to the
door, I locked up and started making my way back to the workingmen's cars.

The wind was still howling and the jet-black clouds above were
spitting up huge fat raindrops that chilled the skull and made you wish
for a hat. I made it to the workingmen's car out of breath and found
things had gotten both better and worse. On the better side, there was
water ready and more volunteers and some offered-up sheets that
despite having seen better days would do the trick. On the worse side,
the stench had worsened and the nursing crew was in a terrible confusion, everyone except Ella Bradna bickering and grabbing at sheets and
generally showing the effects of fatigue and disorganization. When
they spotted me they stopped, and something that hadn't occurred to
me before became clear: nothing but nothing was going to get done
without me being there.

It was basically triage, this, the sort of rough nursing that gets
done after battles and bombings. Only problem was, I'd never had
wartime experience, and had about as much of an idea as to how to proceed as the others. Still, it was more than plain there was only one thing
to do; everyone else just needed to hear it from someone they figured
knew what she was doing.

"LADIES," I yelled, "WE'RE ABOUT TO GET OUR
HANDS DIRTY!"

We went into that groaning reeking hell and waded through bodily muck and did what we could. At first, I thought a panic was going
to break out, for every ailing workingman was calling out to be helped
first-thankfully, most were too weak to stand. We figured our first
job was to hand out the clean water, as most of the men were now coming down with dehydration and suffering mightily because of it. We
cautioned them against gulping though of course most ignored us, seeing as their thirsts were raging, so the liquid would come back up, having gained a glutinous texture from being in their stomachs. This would
leave them more dehydrated than before, so we'd give them more
water along with another no-gulping lecture, finding they were quicker to listen the second time around.

Was slow, patient work, getting water into them. Some of the
men were so dazed they could barely lift their heads, and the ones
with a little fight left in them pleaded to have the barf and shit
cleaned off them before we moved on. We made a long, slow sweep
of the cars, hydrating everyone we could, and when we got to the end
we went back again, handing out another series of sips, Ketchum's
biggest concern being that dehydration would start killing the older
ones and the liver-damaged ones. When this was finally done, we
tried cleaning the floor: it'd turned into a quagmire of shittiness,
ankle-high and practically seething, and if something wasn't done
cholera really would break out. It was a task involving a lot of mopping and helping men outside to either puke or piss blood. Unfortunately, there were men still far too weak to get up, help or no
help, and for them we handed out plastic bowls and metal bowls and
porcelain bowls and pretty much any kind of bowl brought to the car.
This helped, though still there were men who didn't make it to their
bowls, and there were men who'd fill their bowls in seconds, the sick
overflowing and covering bedclothes and sheets. In other words,
there was only so much we could do, though after an hour there were
stretches of floor showing between shallow puddles of sick. Around
this time I noticed Ella Bradna, barely able to push her mop, her face
gone slack with exhaustion. "Go home," I told her, and when she
didn't respond I put my hands on her shoulders and leaned close and
said, "please."

Finally, we'd got so we could concentrate on cleaning the men
themselves. Was difficult, for much of the vomit had dried, their bedclothes sticking to their bodies with a paste of their own making. Plus
it was hard to get at the men writhing on the second-level bunks and
near impossible to get at the men on the top bunks. In other words we
mostly couldn't change them in bed, as we'd been able to do in the
performer and maintenance cars; we had to rotate them and get them
to jump down, the movement itself often making them retch. Once
they were down and in the aisle, we'd strip them and throw the
fouled clothes outside, where the healthy workingmen were helping
by boiling water and running laundry. As the man stood shivery and
naked, and in some cases needing support, we'd sponge him down
and put him in whatever clean clothes he had, which in some cases
wasn't much. Then we'd throw down a clean sheet, not even bothering to tuck it in, and put him back to bed and give him more sips of
water. Before moving on to the next, we'd tell him it was critical he
puked and shat outside, and to call for help if he didn't think he could
manage.

Which is what happened. We'd be halfway through dressing a
man when a man we'd just been to would call out, and one of the recruits would have to half carry him outside where it was raining.
Thankfully, the healthy workingmen were starting to help in this detail,
so I had the satisfaction of seeing it actually get done. It did, however,
mean both men would come back in damp. Steam started coming off
bedclothes, adding a haze to the confusion. Pretty soon we were all
either damp or wringing wet and talking loud because it was hard to tell
where anyone was.

I started to ache. I was beyond tired, my head so weighty I
swore any minute it'd start playing tricks, though by the same token I
hadn't felt so valuable since John Ringling killed the cat acts in 1925
so there was an exhilaration mixed in. We were about two-thirds of
the way down the second workingmen's car when I decided to step
outside and have some of the coffee the cookhouse staff were handing around.

I don't think I'd ever seen such rain. Those fat splattering drops
had transformed into sheets so thick it was hard to pick out individual
drops. I stood in the alcove of the door to the workingmen's car; for
a moment I stuck my arm into the deluge and then brought it back in,
stinging. The worst thing was the winds were still terrific, so the rain
didn't even seem to be falling. Instead, it was everywhere, as much
hitting the ground as ricocheting back up in an upside-down rain and
a sideways rain and a diagonal beating rain. Waves of it battered the
sides of the rail cars, no rhyme or reason to the way it moved except
for every once in a while when the wind would pick up and surge for
a few seconds in a specific direction and the rain would follow. Then
the surge would end and the rain'd no longer be rain again but water,
coming from everywhere.

A soaked workingman spotted me and brought me coffee. As I
sipped, I watched lightning light up the rail yards: people were running
up and down the trains, ferrying water and towels and bedpans
and men needing to empty their stomachs. Then it would all go dark.
About twenty feet away Ketchum was trying to co-ordinate everything happening outside; he'd found himself a slicker and a rain hat, water
pouring off him and hitting the earth in sheets. He was yelling for more
water and coffee and towels and-best news I'd heard all day-cups of
broth for those feeling better.

When I heard this, my exhaustion made itself known. It wasn't
even so much that my muscles hurt, though they all did, but more that
everything hurt. The whole of me ached, and until that happens you
don't really think about this thing called your body. My eyes had sunk
to half mast. My brain had slowed. Maybe this was the problem. I just
sipped coffee, watching the storm and feeling proud and happy and
bone-weary when it happened.

I was standing there, enjoying the way the heat from the cup was
passing through my hands to my arms and then to my doused body,
when I got a strange feeling. It made me feel uncomfortable and tense,
though I had no idea exactly why, though maybe it had something to do
with all this rain meaning something. Like maybe this rain ought to
indicate something. Was a curious thought, this, and though I figured it
was just exhaustion talking, I didn't dismiss it outright. I just kept looking at the rain, splashing dirt and hitting workingmen in the face and
battering the tops and sides of the Pullman in front of me. The whole
time my legs tingled with an unnerved sensation, like all this rain really was trying to tell me something.

Throughout, the wind was howling, and in that howling I was
sure I could hear a voice, screaming something at me, though no matter
how hard I strained I couldn't quite make out what that something was.
Mabel, I said to myself, you're going bonkers again, tuckering yourself out
like this isn't a good idea, better watch it in the future. I even smiled at the
prospect of treating myself better when this was all over. Then it hit me.
I dropped my coffee and felt it heat the tops of my boots.

Oh, God, I yelled inside myself.

Rain.

So I was running. Was like one of those dreams when you're trying to
get someplace but you can't because your feet have gone heavy as
cement blocks or they're sticking to the ground or you've forgotten
how to run. In this case, my boots kept getting stuck in the mud, and
because they were boots borrowed from Art and they were too big my
feet kept lifting out. Finally, I kicked them both off and ran in stocking
feet, though when you're that scared, believe me, it's the intensity of
your fear makes you humiliated and not the fact your feet are without
shoes and caked in mud.

I made it to our stateroom. The wind and rain had whipped the
note off the door. Still, what you do is hope. You pretend otherwise.You
come up that hill and you see that body heaped beside a horse and you
think, Nope, uh-uh, can't be her. So I reached out, figuring if the door
was still locked then everything was fine, Art was still in the menage
tending to the elephants (which he loved more than all other animals
put together, though as a menage boss would never admit it). I reached
out, thinking if it was still locked then Art hadn't come back to change
or have a smoke or file a broken nail.

Soaking wet, I reached out.

ART ROONEY WAS BURIED THE NEXT MORNING ON A KNOLL
outside of town. Was a sight, all those workingmen, heads
lowered and weeping, though beyond that my memory of it's cloudy.
As for Rajah, the circus was obliged by law to put him down, and all the
newspapermen printed that's what happened. As usual, what the newspapermen printed and what really happened bore no resemblance. Like
all big animals gone rogue, Rajah would've been sold to a Mexican circus, where he'd've fought lions or bears or small elephants for a special
admission. For a while, there was a rumour saying he'd died somewhere in Nuevo Leon, torn apart by a pack of unfed prairie wolves. If
it's true, at least he died to the sound of cheering.