The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [26]
A man met Constance in the street with a telegram. It was surprising to receive such an official note. Only days before, the newspaper had published a notice from the telegraph company requesting people to pick up their own messages; all of the messengers had left the service of the agency.
The messenger handed Constance the telegram. Father and mother are lying dead in the house, brother is dying, send me some help, no money, signed Sallie U.
“Will you go to that poor girl?” he asked.
A number of nurses, doctors, ministers or nuns later wrote of the fear that accompanied them the first time they entered an infected home. They had nursed hundreds from the halls of sick wards, but it was something else all together to climb the steps of a porch and open a door with a yellow card swinging from a nail. The first thing to strike was the smell. It floated into the streets, a scent like rotting hay. The smell grew stronger and overpowering once the front door opened, where it mingled with soiled sheets, sweat and vomit. Inside, one never knew what to expect. Moans, cries, delirious screams, or worse, no sound at all. There was darkness, as windows were boarded shut, and there was the stagnant heat of imprisoned air. Then, as their eyes focused, they saw the bodies. At first it was hard to tell which ones were living and which were not. If deceased, one could never know how long they had been that way or in what condition they would be.
Constance arrived at a small but neat home. Serpentine watermelon vines grew wildly around the homes in the neighborhood, and abandoned cats and dogs howled for lost owners. A pretty young girl in mourning led her into the house. Dust floated, effulgent, in the shafts of afternoon light, and the air was heavy as steam. One corpse lay on the sofa, another one on the bed, their skin yellow and tongues black. A tall young man, nearly naked, was also in the bed, delirious, rocking back and forth. His eyes sank deep into his cheekbones ringed by bruised half moons. Outside the window, Constance heard a crowd gathering, presumably to loot the house once all were dead. Constance ran into the yard and shouted at them to leave, warned them of the plague. They scattered like insects in the sunlight.
The healthy were not permitted to touch the dead for fear of spreading the disease further, so Constance sent for an undertaker. But, it could take as long as two days to have the bodies removed. Mr. Walsh, the county undertaker, refused to pay extra wages to the colored men loading and unloading the bodies. Finally, he was arrested. From then on, the men were promised five dollars for an adult corpse, three dollars for a child. In the meantime, the Citizen’s Relief Committee arranged burial patrols to locate bodies by report, smell or even the low flight of buzzards. At the hospitals, patients died so quickly that thirty new corpses might be piled in the dead house before the undertaker returned from the cemetery.
The grounds of Elmwood Cemetery were bloated with shallow graves, some only sixteen inches beneath the surface. Deep, muddy scars cut into the grounds where coffins had been laid side by side in long rows in the earth. And on more than one occasion, a knock was heard before the lid was screwed tight or the coffin lowered into the ground, and a patient, thought to be dead, would call out from inside.
Elmwood was two and a half miles outside of the city between a railway line and North Walker Avenue. A streetcar ran from the city to the cemetery every ten minutes where visitors with admission tickets could visit family plots. Weeping willows, seashell roads and flowers made the cemetery a peaceful place of recreation. Families purchased plots at Elmwood—an adult, white, first-class