Читать книгу Constance - Patricia Clapp - Страница 13

February 1621

Father recovered, I know not how, but he is one of the few who have. A week after he was taken ill he was able to leave his bed and walk about the room a bit, and then I left him to care for himself and went to the Common House to work with Elizabeth and the others.

Prissy Mullins’ brother has died, and the poor girl is stricken with grief and loneliness, but she has put herself to caring for the small children whose mothers are either dead, or dying. ’Tis strange how few of the children are stricken—I know not why this is. Bess Tilley and Mary Chilton help Prissy, and so, without ’Maris and Oceanus to look after, I have been free to help with the nursing.

Were there time to think about it perhaps I might wonder why, after my horror of the awful Sickness, I was willing to assist. It may be that after tending Father and finding myself still uncontaminated, my fears were eased, or it may be simply that every hand is needed and I could not, in all pride, be the one to shirk. Or—perhaps—this is all a part of growing up. In any case, I went.

When I first walked into the Common House I could not believe what I saw. The floor was covered with mats and pallets, with barely room to step between them, and on each lay some miserable creature, blazing with fever, shaking with chills, or spewing a life out. There was a strange hush in the room, with a constant low sound of weeping, soft moaning, or whispered voices. The great fire, which the men keep blazing, threw a fearsome flickering light over everything, making a weak hand, raised in suffering, become a skeleton shadow on the wall. For a moment I stood in the doorway, doubting whether I could force myself to enter. The nauseous stench, the sounds of agony, the nightmare look of the place, made me want to turn and run. Then I saw Captain Standish, kneeling beside some poor wretch, bathing a face drawn with pain. Looking up, he saw me too, and smiled.

“Another pair of hands, Constance?” he said. “God bless you! Here, empty this basin, girl, and rinse it well. The water is there in the cask beside the door.”

And that was it. As I carried the cleansed basin back to Myles, I saw John Cooke and his father lifting Edward Fuller from the floor in the corner of the room. As they carried him past me I saw that he was dead. Dr. Fuller held the door open for them, and as he watched his brother being taken from the house his face was wiped clean of all expression. I had just handed the basin back to the Captain when I felt a touch on my ankle and looked down. It was Ann Fuller.

“That was my husband?” she whispered. In the wavering light from the pine knots and the fire her face seemed all bones, with great black holes for eyes. “That was Edward?”

I knelt beside her. I could not answer—I just nodded.

“Sam—my little Sam—is he—”

“Samuel is well,” I told her. “He is with the other children. Priscilla is tending them.”

She grasped my hand; her own was scorching hot, the while she shivered. “Watch over him, Constance. Little Sam—see he is taken care of. Please!”

“I will. I promise. Try to sleep now, ma’am.”

She turned her head away from me, and there were slow tears seeping from her closed eyes. The next night she was buried beside her husband.

Somehow, I know not how, I was going from one to another, emptying their terrible slops, sponging their faces, spooning gruel into the mouths of those with enough strength left to swallow. There was no time to bathe the dead, nor prepare them properly for burial; we must needs tend the living. Day and night were much the same, save that we removed the dead by night. Sometimes Elizabeth would be working with me, and Desire Minter—no time now to gaze after John Alden—and Mistress Brewster, the only one who took time to breathe a prayer over each corpse as it was carried out. Several times I saw John Cooke, his face tight with disgust at the chores to be done, helping with a gentle tenderness that did not seem strange to me.

It went on for weeks, and days and time meant nothing. There was little talking—no one had the strength to spare for unnecessary words. There was a certain order to our work; there were those who cooked and those who tended the children, whom we kept away from the sick ones as much as we could; there were those who dug the graves and buried the dead; there were those who bore most of the nursing; and there were those who—in spite of everything—continued to build houses! And still they died.

And then one night I saw Father come into the Common House, carrying little ’Maris. He handed the child to Elizabeth, and together they stood gazing down at her tiny little face. I tried to go to them, and something stopped me—they were so alone with her. Elizabeth sat the night holding the babe, rocking her gently and crooning songs without words. All the next day Damaris seemed to sleep, though she turned restlessly from one side to the other, fretting in small unknowing sounds. Elizabeth went back to nursing the others, stopping by ’Maris’ small pallet each time she passed, kneeling for a moment, her hand caressing the child’s hair and her flushed face. I sat with her for a while, bathing her with cool water, trying to ease the fever. Once she opened her great dark eyes and looked at me and smiled a little, and then started to cry weakly, so that Elizabeth came back to her.

Sometime in the night I stretched myself on a bench to sleep briefly, and woke a short time later to see Elizabeth and Father together before the fire. Father was taking Damaris from Elizabeth’s arms. As he walked slowly out of the Common House, carrying his tiny daughter, I saw the tears that streamed from his eyes and heard the dreadful sound of a man sobbing. Elizabeth stood watching them go, one hand against her throat. She made no noise, not even when I went to her and held her in both my arms.

And the days and the nights go on, and the sick are brought in, and the dead are carried out. Mary Allerton died, too weak after bearing a stillborn son to withstand the Sickness. And the whole Tinker family died, and Degory Priest died, and Mary Chilton’s parents died, and John Goodman and Thomas Rogers and Richard Gardiner died, and Francis Eaton’s wife Sarah died, and John Crackston and John Rigdale and Thomas Williams died, and Anne and Edward Tilley died, and John and Bridget Tilley died, and Jasper Moore and his sister Ellen died, and John Hooke and Robert Carter died . . .

Dr. Fuller said today he thinks the Sickness is ebbing, that fewer people are falling ill. A few or many—what does it matter? Soon there will be none of us left.

And who will bury the gravediggers?