At the height of the 1918 Spanish flu
pandemic, a young nanny is put out on the street to die so she won't infect the
children. "The Children" was the opening story in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine's September/October 2011 issue.
The novella Champawat, a sequel about Anarchists and Democrats in 1919, picks
up three days after "The Children" ends. Please watch for it in Ellery Queen's September/October 2012
issue.
The Children
by Lia Matera
Copyright 2011 by Lia Matera
eISBN 978-1-937697-08-2
First Published in Ellery
Queen Mystery Magazine, September/October 2011 (70th
Anniversary) Issue
The Children
Ella awakened face-down on the
concrete. She spat out grit that swirled in the night wind, then rolled
painfully to her side. The Kingstons' windows were dark but the glare of arc
lights on their jack frost hurt her eyes. She dropped
her gaze to an iron fence like a line of spears from the Corinthian porch to
the next rowhouse. She struggled to free her arm from the sheet wrapped around
her, but the effort made her lungs boil with coughs. Earlier, she'd come to
with her nose mashed and her mouth covered, struggling to breathe through the
filthy linen. She remembered twisting and slithering toward the gate, frantic
to expose her face. Now, if she could pull herself through and tumble down the
steps to the basement level service entrance, the wagon wouldn't see her when
it passed. It wouldn't matter if she blacked out again, the drivers wouldn't
mistake her stupor for death. They wouldn't toss her onto a pile of corpses
stacked like cordwood. Maybe she could hang on till Cook came out for the milk.
None of the servants knew that Charles, Cook's bad-tempered husband, had dragged Ella to the curb
like garbage. He'd waited till long past
midnight, and if he'd wakened Cook afterward, it would have been to take his
vulgar pleasure, not to tell her what he'd done.
Charles had been glad to get rid
of Ella tonight, she knew that. When the Kingstons brought home baby Annie,
they'd wanted the house kept warmer at night. Charles always slept through
extra stokings of the furnace, so Mr. Kingston forced him out of his wife's
warm bed and onto a cot in the basement. To keep him from sneaking back to the
attic room and passing out there, Mrs. Kingston sent Ella, till then on a
feather mattress in the nursery, to take Charles' place, "problem
solved." As if the Kingstons knew anything about problems.
Most nights, Charles would slip
upstairs after the two o'clock stoking and lie with his wife as if Ella weren't
in the bed at all, as if Cook didn't weep with shame into her pillow, knowing
Ella merely feigned sleep.
The men in this household were
pigs. All but little John, eight years old and a master of silly limericks and
botched riddles. Ella hoped he didn't grow up to be like his father, who'd felt
no compunction about accepting an "accommodation" from her in lieu of
references.
The fact that this had been a
good deal for Ella didn't make his part of it right. He'd put his children into
a stranger's hands knowing nothing but what she'd told him herself. And she'd
have said anything to escape a shirt factory that left women half blind and
coughing up cotton dust.
The Kingstons should have let her
die inside, no matter their terror (everybody's terror) of the Spanish flu. At
first, they'd put her in a corner of the basement, as far as possible from the
potato bin and the new wringer washer. She didn't know how long she'd lain on
old blankets like a stray dog gasping for breath. She'd overheard Charles, his
voice full of false concern, tell the Kingstons they'd best set her out for the
wagon soon. She'd be dead before it arrived, and why risk having the sickness
seep through the house till then? What if he should nod off and miss the
moment? They couldn't put her to the curb in the daytime. It wasn't that sort
of neighborhood—cabinet members and senators and a supreme court justice
lived within a stone's throw. But if they kept her inside, the stench would
waft upstairs all day tomorrow, perhaps to baby Annie's room, or to six year
old Muriel's or little John's.
Mr. Kingston, a lawyer, had blown
hot air around it. He'd said it was a shame there were no caskets for the dead
anymore, nor anyplace to put them, with funeral parlors stacked floor to
ceiling. "Cook says the mother's dead and no father, that sort of family,
so we'd have to bear the expense ourselves. But there's just no possibility of
a burial now." Taking her to the hospital had been ruled out. "The Post says they've run out of everything,
beds most of all. The sick are outside on the ground, both sides of the
driveway and down the block. They can't do a thing for them. Pity the vaccine
was useless." Mrs. Kingston wondered if taking Ella there would at least
solve the problem of her disposal. "But how to get her there?" Mr. K
was slightly curt, as usual with his wife. "It's no use sending for the
Packard, no one at the garage will fetch her. They're not medics, can't expect
them to risk contagion." He'd added, "And do we want our hospitals
steam shoveling holes out back, piling in thousands of bodies like they do in
Philadelphia? Not that you can blame Philly—4600 dead there last week
alone. But I think our method's better, let wagons collect them off the streets
and take them to rural Virginia." They'd agreed it was a mark of excellent
governance that they could toss an afflicted servant to the gutter like trash
and think no more about her.
As she walked out, Mrs. Kingston
turned to say, "Charles, I'm terrified for the children. Is there
someplace you can go for a few days after handling her… her body? I appreciate
that you've stayed down here, away from all of us, since moving her. I'll leave
some coins for you on the washer, for lodging and food. Please don't take the
chance… don't say good-bye to Cook. I'll explain to her tomorrow." Charles
had said yes, missus. "And you have no guess how the disease came into the
house? We kept you all inside, none of us has been out for days." Charles
said nothing. The servants knew Mr. K slipped away once or twice a week,
returning just before dawn. He'd been doing it for months. "I'll have Maid
put on gloves and a mask and send the rest of Nanny's things down the laundry
chute. You'll get them burned before you go?"
Later Ella realized, blearily
from her corner, that Charles was feeding something other than coal into the
furnace. He was stuffing in her clothes and hats, in case some trace of
sickness clung to them. There would be nothing left of her. Her body would melt
away in a lye-covered layer of a mass grave. There would no stone with her name
on it, there would be no ceremony. Funerals, like all public gatherings, were
forbidden, illegal on order of the mayor. Not that any but the very rich could
afford coffins—the few that could be found cost as much as Model Ts.
She noticed a darting movement in
the shadow between the arc lights. A rat. It approached in tentative sets of
steps. She wanted to scream but couldn't get enough air into or out of her
lungs. She tried to unroll herself from the constricting linen, desperate to
free her arms, to ward off this creature that, like her employers, couldn't
even wait till she was dead. The rat turned, its ears angling toward the sound
of metal wheels, the clomp of horseshoes on cobbles. Then it dashed back into
the shadows.
The death wagon had turned onto
her street.
Ella knew, from nights watching
through the attic window, that two men in rubber boots would climb from the
wagon's benchlike seat. As their horses stomped and fussed, they'd bend over
her. From above, she'd look like a rolled carpet or bundle of bedding. Each
would pick up one end, then they'd stagger to the open back of the wagon. With
a practiced swing or two, they'd hoist her onto the stack. Men had been doing
this since the middle ages.
And how was 1918 different than
1318? People were dragged away to prison for speaking against their ruler,
thanks to the Sedition Act. Girls were burned alive, not at the stake but in
locked shirtwaist factories. Men were tortured and lynched by mobs, not of
peasants but of Klansmen. The poor fought wars so the rich could divide the
spoils. And again, the streets rattled with wagons full of pestilent corpses.
They had been right, at the
Anarchist's Hall. (It was shuttered now, many of her friends deported.) Mamma
had taken Ella almost every night—it was where all the immigrants went,
it was their social center. They staged plays and songfests, they collected
money for strikers and shingle-weavers with cedar lung, they hosted speakers
and held rallies. Ella and the other children had rampaged up the halls, jumped
down the stairs, played games in the kitchen, and ignored the endless blather.
They didn't care if someday humans treated each other as equals and shared
their wealth. Things seemed just fine at the Hall. She couldn't imagine why the
grown-ups complained all the time.
That's how people like the
Kingstons were. They thought all the world was like their happy piece of it.
They didn't understand the fuss—the strikes, the Free Speech Actions, the
opposition to the draft. Things around them were good. Why should anyone
protest?
Nicky used to say, it's not
enough to tell people things aren't fine for others. Until trouble's brought
home to them, they can't understand it. He was in Mexico now because he
wouldn't fight men who'd done him no harm in a war no one could explain.
Someday soon he'd come looking for her. The Kingstons wouldn't bother lying
that they'd cared for her till the end. They'd simply refuse entry to a
tattered-looking man asking after a dead servant.
Her ear on the cold sidewalk made
the wagon jarringly loud, the more so because it was different from common
street sounds, from the backfires and rumbles of cars, the clatter of trolleys,
the staccato of women's boots on cobbles or cement.
It stopped near the Roosevelt
house. Too close. It would come for her next.
She struggled with her shroud
until panic kicked her senses out from under her. When she drifted back to
consciousness, she couldn't remember why she was outdoors at night. Mrs. K was
very strict about the servants coming in before dark, she wouldn't like it.
Then Ella heard exclamations, swearing, someone's low murmur: "Ten for the
both of you."
The sound of horses, their
puffing breaths as they stood idle, brought her situation back into focus. Did
it cost so much, ten dollars, to have a body hauled away like rubbish?
"And not a word about
it," the voice continued.
"We'd shut our mouths, all
right," a wagon man said, "for ten each."
After that, for a while Ella listened
to the horses shift arrhythmically on shod hooves. Could they smell the dead
bodies behind them? Could they smell the disease?
Time passed, maybe only minutes
but they seemed like hours. The wind whistled up her nightdress but it didn't
make her cold, she was insulated in her fever. She looked through bars (how had
they come to be in her sight?) as the wagon men walked past with a bundle in a
sheet. It gave a jerk, like a cocoon suddenly straining to deliver a terrible
moth. Were Ella's eyes playing tricks on her? Was she was seeing herself from
outside her body? She watched as the shrouded body was slung onto the
cart. …
To read the rest of "The Children"
please go to Amazon's Kindle
Store, the iTunes Store, or Barnes & Noble's Nook
Store.
And please look for the sequel, Champawat, in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine's
September/October 2012 issue.
