The Whipping Boy (6 page)

“You said you needed to go. Now's your chance!”

“I'm . . . dead?” she mumbled.

“No ma'am, you aren't dead. I doubt that you'll need to do this when you're dead.”

“I'm a dead duck,” she sighed.

Every way they looked was some kind of critter—prairie chickens, rabbits, snakes—trying to find a perch above the water. A very live snake was swimming vigorously toward them. It was a blacksnake, and it came right for her leg, nuzzled against it, and tried to climb for higher ground.

She looked at it dully. “Thas a snake?”

“Yes ma'am, but it's just a blacksnake. He's looking for something to climb up. Now if you'll go ahead and finish, I'll get you out of here.”

“Lemme loose, you two!”

“Go ahead, now. Drain the lizard. Let er go—”

She finally did so, while the boys who were leaning out the window continued to look on seriously. The train was slowly moving on now, and they stood her up, unraveled the snake from her leg and pitched it away, struggled her back aboard, and pushed her through the crowd. Children were wailing. A man somewhere in the car was in a coughing frenzy.

It was completely dark when they idled through the mining town of Poteau, which was flooded out by the very river they were supposed to cross ahead. The train stopped on a dry patch just outside town, and passengers piled out, some so tired they just sat or lay down on the roadbed. The light of sheltered campfires reflected from a nearby hill, and word passed around that most of Poteau's few hundred citizens had retreated to high ground. Some of the miners decided to stay and join them, fearful of the big Poteau River crossing ahead. The train waited for the better part of an hour and Tom, passing through the crowd, heard all kinds of speculations about what lay ahead, from the most ominous to the rosiest: the track was good to the north, it was completely washed out, the roadbed was steadily higher, it was steadily lower, the bridge into Fort Smith had disappeared, it was ten feet above the water—everyone seemed to have a different, extreme idea, and the engineer took his time making up his mind. All wires were down, and there was no way to check by telegraph.

A little band of locals who had spotted the train showed up and wanted to get on, but the sooners who'd already been in the car defended their spots as fiercely as if they owned the railroad line. Pushing and yelling fights broke out in the darkness, and Tom was afraid the woman was going to wake up again with some other terrible problem—or that she would die before they made it to Fort Smith.

“My stomach's so empty it hurts,” Mr. Jaycox said.

A woman with a pokeful of onions between her legs sat in the seat in front of them. Mr. Jaycox leaned over and asked her if she'd take a nickel for a couple of onions. He gave one to Tom and they sat there peeling and munching on them.

The injured woman's condition kept worrying Tom. After they'd all reloaded, the conductor walked along beside each car with a lantern and called, “Can't tell how the bridge is ahead, but however it is, it'll just get worse. I'm taking this engine in. Anybody don't want to chance it ought to get off here.” He took out his watch and looked at it. “You have two minutes!”

There was more pushing as a handful of passengers decided to get themselves and their belongings off the train. A single gas lamp was lit somewhere in the car, providing dim light, and when the train started to move, the woman grew wakeful and started mumbling and cursing again. She tried to sit up straight. She flung her arms and legs around with as little concern as a baby, one leg going over Mr. Jaycox's until she was half in his lap, and she pushed directly against Tom's thighs.

If it was possible to die of blushing, Tom was a goner. He was immobilized, every muscle in his body stiff. When she sank headfirst, completely dead weight, into his lap, he looked down, truly scared, at the top of her muddy, damp head. Mr. Jaycox reached over and felt the pulse in her neck. He straightened her head so she could breathe. “Just leave her be.” He glanced sourly at Tom. “I wish that engineer would just take us wherever we're going, either to Fort Smith or the bottom of the Poteau River. I'm about to the point I don't care which.”

At a settlement called Cameron, on the shoulder of a hill, three more passengers who were afraid of the last bridge jumped off the slow-moving car.

Tom heard more anxious talk about logjams and fallen bridges.

Near midnight, the murmuring in the car died away as they finally approached the Poteau River bridge into Fort Smith. A woman with a nervous, reedy voice started saying “The Lord is my shepherd,” and others joined in. In the blackness of night they could see nothing, and the river was so loud and close that the train already seemed to be under water. Partway out came an immense shudder. “The Lord is my shepherd” died away. Even the babies stopped crying. Tom quit trying to look out. Couplings clattered against each other as the bridge wobbled and swayed in the river with the current and the weight of the train. The steady
ch-ch-ch
of steam from the engine turned peculiar, then stopped altogether.

“Regulators are under water!” somebody said.

They lost power, and when he felt the car's vibration change and heard a loud splashing of water, Tom realized they were in it high above the wheels, plowing through the river on deeply submerged track. Water poured in from cracks in the floor planking.

He had been in feverish worried excitement since the woman fell on him. He was less anxious about the river than he was about her. She lay slumped on him, her bosom crushed against his leg, her head rubbing and jerking in his lap with the wild motions of the train. Sweat ran down his face like tears, and he squirmed in the seat, wanting both to get away and not to get away. The feeling of euphoria in his lower extremities was so potent that he seemed almost to float above the seat. He looked down at her head, trying to decide whether to move it, then his breath caught and in the momentary silence of the car, his was the only cry—startled, unintentional, brief.

Steam could be heard bubbling out the regulators, and the crowd gave up a ragged cheer. They'd made it across the bridge. The engineer stopped immediately when they reached Coke Hill, a high spot on the river end of Fort Smith, and the cars were still draining water as passengers piled off. Tom extricated himself and tried to stand up, but his body was numb, his knees rubbery, and he could hardly get out of the seat.

J
AKE HAD NEVER
been so happy to step off a train in his life. Located a couple of hundred yards west of Parker's gallows, Coke Hill was a little settlement off to itself, occupied by two bleak saloons, a ramshackle two-story hotel of dubious reputation called the Belle Point, and a huddle of poor dwelling houses. He hurried over to the hotel and secured a porter with a rig.

The porter took the highest route, his mare trotting sure-footedly through the streams of water in the brick streets. In the coolness the woman was briefly wakeful, mumbling and cussing, but still unable to talk sense. The boy acted sleepy and confused. Jake felt markedly better despite his exhaustion and hunger, moving briskly through the clean, cold air. As he'd expected, the low end of town was thoroughly flooded at the confluence of the Poteau and Arkansas rivers. The ground floor of the Dekker building was bound to be under.

St.John's Hospital was out Second Street, a modest house with tall windows and a picket fence around it. A red flag with black letters hung by the entrance:
SMALL POX
. A young man with a hat pushed back on his head and a patch of hair hanging down his forehead sat on the front step underneath the flag, calmly puffing on a pipe. The rain had momentarily stopped.

“Doctor in?”

“I'm Doc Eldon. Who is that?”

“Jake Jaycox.”

“What brings you?”

“I have a patient for you.”

“Wouldn't have smallpox, would he?”

“It's a she. No, she doesn't.”

“I can't do a thing for her, Mr. Jaycox. We've been under quarantine going on four days. I wouldn't even want to examine her.”

“Where can I take her?”

“What's the trouble?”

“Hit in the head. Can't seem to wake up.”

“Does she know her own name?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Well, ask her.”

Jake turned and asked what her name was. She gave no answer, and after a moment the boy, on whose shoulder she leaned, said grimly, “Sleeping again.”

“Probably has a concussion,” the doctor said quietly. He sat there a while nursing his pipe, looking out into the night, the
SMALL POX
sign waving slightly in the breeze above his head. “Can she stand up?”

“Not on her own.”

The doctor shook his head. “I don't know what to tell you. I can't see her. I've got eleven people packed in Vaseline in here.”

“I've heard there's a lying-in hospital on Seventh Street.”

Eldon hesitated. “Yep. That's Doc Finch. He'll be about all you'll find tonight. I've had people by here every few minutes. Doctors will be out all over town.”

“So you reckon that's the place to go?”

Eldon again hesitated, and gave a little shrug. “Well, he'll be there, anyway.”

With that precarious recommendation, on they went to Seventh Street, where Jake asked the porter to wait while they took the woman inside, with hopes of leaving her.

Finch's “hospital” was as busy as Muskogee on a Saturday night. A trail of blood led to a partly shut door, behind which someone was yelling, “Ashes, linen! Hurry up!” Jake learned from others in the waiting room that the doctor was trying to stop the bleeding of a boy who had chopped a hunk out of his ankle.

Around the room were several kids, some wailing, with mothers trying to calm and shush them. A couple of fathers sat on the back bench, stiff and sleepy, faces emptied of all expression. Jake wondered, as he often had, what it was like to be perpetually tormented by sick and dying children, having to bring them to these carbolic- and liniment-reeking rooms, and so often having to bury them. He'd never had a wife, partly for that reason. To have a family was to sign up for the army of illness and death.

Tom Freshour sat straight-backed but sleepy on a bench with the woman listing against him, her eyes closed. Even with her leaning on him and his own eyes almost shut, the boy still sat up straight.

The chief nurse was an angry-faced woman who regarded the three of them with icy displeasure, and her scowl worsened when Jake admitted they didn't know the injured woman's name. A fat, full-bearded man careened into the waiting room and glanced around with a wild glint to his eye. His nose was livid, and he smelled and looked like a back-alley drunkard. He was the doctor, it turned out. He took a couple more children by the arms and dragged them into the back room. The chief nurse remained behind her desk, surveying people in the room with disapproval. Two other nurses scuttled here and there, doing the work of the place.

Jake regretted even coming here. The woman would get better medical care under a railroad trestle than in this sawbones' joint. By now he was so tired that he could have walked out the door and gone to sleep in a mud puddle in the yard. For a while he stood there looking at the boy, who gazed in sleepy bewilderment at him. Jake let out a big sigh. “Come on. We can't leave her in this place.”

***

Mrs. Peltier was as decent and kind a landlady as ever lived—as long as her rules weren't broken. Jake had lived at her Bachelors' House for thirteen years and was not shy about knocking on her door in the middle of the night. She woke up and attended to the woman without complaint, taking her into the spare bed in her own parlor.

Jake and the boy sat in exhausted silence at the little table in Mrs. Peltier's kitchen. They shared a loaf of bread, a couple of apples, and bottles of strawberry-flavored soda water from the icebox. After watching Jake, Tom eventually reached for the bright red soda. He drank it, looked at it in sleepy amazement, and wolfed down some bread.

“What will happen to her, Mr. Jaycox?” he asked, blinking his eyes slowly.

Jake shook his head. “I never heard of anybody killed by an accounts book before, but you never can say for sure.”

The boy looked away from Jake, into his strawberry soda.

“By the way, you can call me Jake.”

“Yes sir.” The boy's eyelids soon descended, and he fell asleep sitting upright, in mid-chew. Jake had to help him up. He pushed him upstairs.

A note had been shoved under Jake's door. Helped to the couch, Tom curled up and went to sleep. His clothes were still wet, but the room was warm enough, and Jake let it be. He walked over to the note on the floor, hesitated, then decided that it was probably from the store, and he didn't want to see it. Not tonight. He noticed Tom's face, a little rounder and more like a child's when he was asleep. But he wasn't a boy. He was a young man who just didn't quite know it yet. Jake went in and shut his own door to merciful, private quietness. Finally.

***

At 6:30 the next morning, Jake and Tom were slogging down Rogers Avenue fortified by a good boarding-house breakfast. Mrs. Peltier had judged their patient improved, sleeping soundly and with better color. It was still cloudy but not raining, the streets quiet, horsecars not running. The note Jake had waited until morning to read was somewhat mysterious. It said simply, “Jake, I need to see you as soon as you get back. Ralph Dekker.” A block away from the Dekker building they hit the floodwater, and it was thigh-deep by the time they got to the front door. Directly across the street, the old courthouse jail sat on its privileged hillock a couple of feet above the flood. The last block of Rogers Avenue sloped sharply downhill to the train station, which had completely disappeared, roof, chimney, and all, beneath the flood.

The sandbagging around the store building was so far under that Jake didn't even see it until he bumped into it. The front door was open to the water. Around the large front sales room floated sundry items of stock and trash, a couple of spittoons, and one rat swimming for its life, among the carcasses of many others. The sales desk barely stuck out of the water. A worker paddled a johnboat piled with stock from the sports equipment shelves toward the rear of the big room.