The Uninvited (6 page)

“Hurry!” Nela hoisted up the front end of the stretcher and led the way to the brick steps of the hall. She said something to her patient in Polish, but all I understood was the woman’s name—
Liliana
.

“
Nie!
” Liliana’s eyes flew open, and she grabbed hold of Nela’s hand. “Do not take me here!
Nie!
Nie!
”

“What can I do to help?” I asked, and I hurried past them so I could at least open the front door for them.

“Stay with us so you can drive us,” said Addie, maneuvering the stretcher up the steps from the back. She had to duck her head to avoid Liliana’s feet kicking her in the head with those thick Red Cross boots.

I pushed open a weighty paneled door, and the stench of vomit and whiskey socked me in the face with such a blow that I stepped back and held my breath. In the main front room, beneath beautiful golden-wood walls and stained glass windows, a shivering mass of coughing and wheezing bodies huddled beneath blankets, both on the floor and in cots. To my utter horror, blood flowed inside that hall—nosebleeds mainly. Horrific scarlet rivers that drenched clothing, cots, blankets, people, and even the walls. I swear upon a stack of Bibles: people bled from their noses with such force and velocity that the blood from their nostrils
shot across the room and
hit the walls.
They resembled victims of heinous knife attacks, or people wounded in the face by bullets. Not sufferers from influenza.

Not more than five feet away from me, a woman leaned over the side of her cot and vomited a black fluid that resembled tar, her lips blue, her face a purplish brown. A mahogany-colored body with wide-open eyes lay on a pile of blankets not more than five feet from where I stood, clutching the door, my legs shaking.

Nela and Addie lugged Liliana to the back of the room and turned to the left, through an open doorway. I covered my mouth to stifle the smells and attempted to follow after them—to do something besides gaping at the horror. My feet slipped in a dark puddle. I gasped, righted myself, and kept walking.

A young black man buried beneath a pile of blankets grabbed hold of my leg and forced me to a stop.

“Get me outa here, miss,” he said from down on the floor, his fingers tight on my shin, hurting the bone. “I gotta go. Please, get me outa here.”

“No, it’s for the best if you stay.” I peeled his hand off my leg and lowered his head back down to the scuffed floorboards. “There are doctors who can help you here.”

“How many doctors do you see here, miss? How many?” He nodded across the room toward a gray-haired physician in a white coat who forced a man down to a cot as the man shouted, “I want to kill myself! I don’t want to die like this. I want to take a knife to myself and my family.”

A Girl Scout in a khaki dress and hat stood behind the physician with a bottle of whiskey at the ready.

Another Girl Scout dashed toward the back staircase with a bedpan.

“Oh, God.” My eyes bulged at the sight of children cleaning up bodily fluids and tending to the sick—including, I noticed, my piano student Ruby Rogers, who mopped the floor on the far side of the room. Her chestnut-brown braids poked out from beneath a gauze mask, and blood stained the skirt of her uniform. “Girl Scouts are helping? Little Ruby Rogers is helping? Ruby!”

“There aren’t enough nurses or doctors, miss,” said the young man, and his grip grew fierce. “They’re all at the regular hospital. Get me outa here. I’m not sick anymore—I swear to God, I’m not.”

“What is your name?”

“Benjie,” he said, his brown eyes glossy with tears.

I squeezed his shoulder. “How old are you?”

“Nineteen, and I want to live to see twenty. I sure as hell won’t if I’m stuck in this godforsaken place.”

Someone called my name behind me, and I peeked up to find Addie and Nela rushing my way with the stretcher, which still held Liliana.

“There’s no room,” said Nela. “We can’t leave her here. I’m taking her to my house.”

“Let’s try the regular hospital again,” I offered. “Maybe—”

“It’s full!” Nela continued backing Liliana toward the door. “If we show up, they’ll send us away and glare at us, as if we’re covered in Southside germs.”

“All right. I’ll be right there.” I let go of Benjie. “I’m sorry. I need to go.”

“Take me with you!” Benjie pressed his fingers deep into the flesh above my elbow. “Please, for the love of God and all that’s holy, take me with you. Please!”

“Can we take him too?” I asked Nela.

She swung the front door open by hooking her ankle around the bottommost edge. “The house isn’t large.”

“He’s my neighbor,” said Addie from the foot of the stretcher. “Hey, Benjie. Can you walk yourself out of here on your own? Are you able?”

Benjie scooted himself up to his elbows. “I think so.”

“We should take him.” Addie readjusted her hold on the handles. “His daddy’s a doctor helping a Negro regiment overseas. Benjie could probably be of use once he’s up and about.”

“Fine.” Nela tugged the stretcher and Liliana toward her, out the door. “But he’s got to swear he’ll help when he gets better. We’re going to be busy.”

I helped Benjie to his feet and, with my arm braced around his bony upper back, I guided him toward the exit.

“You’re going to be just fine,” I murmured in an attempt to comfort myself as much as him. “No need to panic. This is just a passing illness. They’re not panicking yet in Chicago, which is a good sign.”

Before we reached the last row of cots, I witnessed a little boy bleeding from his ears, as well as his nose, and he cried tears of red.

N
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down a dark road just south of the mills, along the edge of the river. I kept the throttle pulled all the way down to keep the ambulance running smooth and steady for our patients in the back. We puttered past Foursquare houses and little Queen Annes almost as nice as the family residences in the northern section of town.

“There’s the house right there.” Nela pointed toward one of the Foursquares, a boxy brick two-story with a dormer attic window that resembled May’s. It sat at the end of the street, right before the neighborhood ended and a long stretch of darkness that looked to be a soybean field began.

“Is there anyone in there who might get exposed to the germs?” I asked.

“No. My Fred—an American—married me right before his number came up for the draft. He set me up here, but I’m staying with Mother and the rest of my family while he’s gone.”

I adjusted the throttle, pushed down on the brake pedal, and eased the vehicle to a vibrating stop in front of her house. Nela and Addie sidled out of the passenger side and flew off to fetch our transports from the back.

Once inside, we lit oil lamps, set the kettle boiling for tea, tucked Liliana into Nela’s bed upstairs, and made Benjie comfortable on a yellow sofa in the living room. Nela bent down and struck matches to light a fire in the hearth, below a wedding photograph of her and a young man with hair so blond it looked almost white. Addie and I covered Benjie with a blanket crocheted in red and ivory yarn.

A woman near my mother’s age, dressed in a polka-dot Mother Hubbard dress and a ruffled nightcap, poked her round face inside the front door, and a gust of cold air blew inside the house.

“I saw the lights and heard that ambulance rumble up to the curb,” she said in an Irish brogue. “What the devil is happening in here?”

“We’re fetching flu patients, Mrs. O’Conner,” said Nela, coaxing a small and sizzling flame to life on one of the logs. “If you’re not already busy with your family, we could certainly use some spare blankets.”

“Half my house is sick with this unholy plague. God help us all.” Mrs. O’Conner made the sign of the cross over her chest, her wide sleeve rustling with the movement. “I can bring spare blankets if you come over to check on my grandbabies. You’re a trained Red Cross nurse, aren’t you, Nela?”

Nela nodded and struck another match. “I am.”

“We should fetch more of the sick,” said Addie, straightening her mask over her nose. “Soon.”

Nela pushed herself to her feet. “Bring your blankets, Mrs. O’Conner, and I’ll be over when I can. Ivy”—Nela’s blue eyes darted toward me—“you’ll keep driving us, yes?”

I pursed my lips, and a hundred more excuses to flee this current situation squawked inside my head.

“Yes,” I said, despite the trepidations and the aches in my head and my stomach. “I’ll help.”

W
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a neighborhood of squished-together houses with peeling paint and no front yards whatsoever—cheap and rapidly assembled structures built for Buchanan’s flood of mill and railcar workers toward the end of the past century. We peered through the dark for large white signs with the word
I
N
F
LUENZA
written in red letters, nailed to front doors. I smelled chimney smoke and something akin to the scents of rot and decay.

“Most folks hate having those signs on their front doors,” said Addie with a shift of her weight on the seat beside Nela. “They make them feel dirty. And punished. Whites are always saying my people carry more diseases as it is.”

“But”—Nela braced her hands against the dashboard and craned her long neck forward to better see the doorways through the windshield—“those signs are the only way we can tell if people need treatment. They own no telephones. They can’t call anyone for help.”

I gripped the steering wheel and squinted through the nighttime streets for quarantined homes, and all I could think about was the amount of time Dr. Lowsley spent paying me personal house calls during my recent bout with the same strain of the flu. He had fussed with aspirin and cold presses and thermometers and made sure Mama served me tea and warm soup. No one needed to hang up a sign to flag down ambulances in the dark or put me in a hospital swarming with people vomiting black tar. Even Father—a man who had never paid me much mind once I started looking more woman than girl—meandered into my bedroom one night and held my hand beside my bed for at least an hour. I never would have possessed the time to die under such watchful care.

One block down from the tracks that divided South Buchanan from the rest of the town, not far from the spot where I’d just saved the women’s lives, we found a house marked with one of the red-and-white influenza signs. Addie and Nela scrambled to fetch the stretcher, and I followed behind them to a plain wooden door with an iron handle. Nela knocked and called out something in Polish, and when no one answered, she turned the knob and pushed the door open.

“Do you know the people who live in here?” I asked.

“No, but I feel in my heart that they need us.” She stepped inside, and Addie and I sauntered in after her, with Addie holding the back end of the stretcher.

A pair of older women wearing dark scarves over their heads spoke in hushed tones around a table in the front room. They dressed in long black clothing from another world, another century, and when they lifted their faces to us, they wrinkled their brows and frowned.

Nela said something to them in Polish. The women nodded and, with bony white fingers, pointed toward the staircase behind us.

We clopped up the steps while the tan stretcher swayed in the space separating Nela and Addie’s hands. The entire place stank of booze.

“People are drinking hard to fight the germs,” said Nela over her shoulder, as if she worried I might think less of the residents for the odor—not knowing about my own father and brother’s whiskey-fueled atrocities. “That’s why the emergency hospital smells like liquor, too. The doctors administer whiskey.”

“Well, then,” I muttered under my breath, “I certainly don’t need to worry about certain members of my family getting this disease.”

Upstairs, in a narrow hallway unlit by a single lamp, we passed two bedrooms in which families slept like passengers piled into crowded railroad cars, with two to four people per bed.

“Grypa?”
called Nela through the dim hallway.
“Grypa?”

“Pomocy!”
said a female voice from down the hall.

“Down here. Someone’s calling for help.” Nela steered the stretcher toward the sound of the voice, in the rightmost section of the house, and Addie followed behind with the bouncing empty stretcher jerking her elbows.

We came upon a room housing a man, a woman, and three children, including the girl who had called out to us, a pretty young thing with almond-shaped eyes who looked to be fifteen or sixteen. Her honey-blond hair, damp with fever, stuck to the sides of her face and trailed across a pair of cracked white lips, and she shuddered beneath a mountain of patchwork quilts, nuzzled between another girl and a boy.

Nela lowered the stretcher to the ground and spoke with the girl in Polish, rubbing the child’s shoulder and nodding the whole time. She then turned to us and said, “She’s the first one sick in the house and wants to leave before the others get it. Help me lift her, Addie.”

Addie took hold of the girl’s feet and assisted Nela in lifting her over her sister and onto the stretcher. The girl shivered and drew her scrawny knees to her chest, but I gave her my coat and helped the others get her laid out flat on her back to better distribute her weight.

We carried our transport down the flight of stairs and slid her into the back of the truck, behind the wooden covering marked with the large Red Cross emblem that stood out like a blood-colored beacon in the dark. After leaping back into the driving compartment, we journeyed into the night—off to the warmth of Nela’s house—before setting right back out again.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

The Buchanan Committee of Public Safety reports a continuing rise in the number of influenza cases within the city limits and in the surrounding farmlands. The disease, commonly referred to as “Spanish influenza,” resembles a highly contagious “cold” involving pain, fever, and an intense feeling of sickness. Most patients recover after three or four days; however, doctors state that some patients develop severe complications, such as pneumonia or meningitis, resulting in death.

“Under these current circumstances, sneezing, spitting, and coughing have turned as dangerous as German poison gas,” said Buchanan Health Commissioner Elmer Tomlinson. “We are taking public hygiene highly seriously.” Mr. Tomlinson asked Buchanan police officers to stop and scold all coughers and sneezers who fail to use handkerchiefs. Furthermore, he instructed local businesses to monitor the use of handkerchiefs by customers and patrons within their establishments. Any owners who fail to comply with this regulation will find their businesses shut down.

Schools, theaters, motion picture houses, restaurants, churches, and chapels remain open at present. Any ensuing quarantines will be noted in the
Sentinel
.

—B
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,
October 6, 1918