The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [27]
A young girl named Grace lived with her father, the superintendent, in a cottage at Elmwood. She tolled the bell each time a body was buried and kept the names in a large, red leather logbook. During the month of September, there was page after page of yellow fever victims. It was said that the bell at Elmwood tolled constantly that month.
Constance left the small house sick from the stench. The air, suffused with moisture, closed the odor of death around the town and its people. She went in search of more nurses and beef tea for the ill. As she did so, she noticed a spectacular sun, a blood orange setting over the Mississippi. How strange, she thought, that one could still find anything beautiful at all.
By dusk, plumes of black smoke climbed the night air as contaminated mattresses, blankets, furniture and clothing burned in the fever fires. Fire engines hosed the streets in attempts to wash them. A mixture—three pounds copperas, one pint of carbolic acid, one bucket of water—ran through the alleyways and cesspools for cleansing. When rain began to fall, blasts of gunpowder quaked throughout the city to clear the air of disease. The chief of police had ordered a curfew for the citizens and the midnight church bells silenced. In the stillness, tree limbs cast ominous shadows like awnings over the streets, and in the deepest hours of night, the city seemed to drone with the sound of dirges.
At daybreak, smoldering piles of charred bedding were silhouettes against the lawns and tidy houses of the dead. People climbed into their beds at night wondering if their own belongings would be burning on the lawn the next day. At one home, the sisters found two bodies still unburied, rotting. This time, Constance found a policeman to secure the undertaker. At another house, a mother lay dying, leaving four children and a baby starving. Constance drove through town looking for milk to feed the infant. Eventually, the horse lost all of its shoes. There was not one blacksmith left in the city.
Constance wrote to her mother superior. The post office was still in operation, though letters postmarked from Memphis arrived with five or six holes punched through them. A nail-studded paddle pierced the paper to “fumigate” it with a solution of sulfur. Constance’s letter implored the mother superior for more help and described the day-to-day siege yellow fever took on the city: “One grows perfectly hardened to these things—carts, with eight or nine corpses in rough boxes, are ordinary sights. I saw a nurse stop one today and ask for a certain man’s residence—the negro driver just pointed over his shoulder with his whip at the heap of coffins behind him and answered, ‘I’ve got him here in his coffin.’ ”
It was one of the few letters she wrote; Constance worked constantly. On some days she kept a diary, but on others, she worked straight through several nights in a row. One of her sisters pleaded with her to rest and eat something.
“Sister, I am hungry all the time, no matter how much I eat: I am so very well. Do not worry for me.” She sat down to a small plate of food, brushing at the flies and sweat bees hovering in the humidity. The smell of the river was heavy in the air, a mingling of putrid sweetness and lowland fertility.
She told the nun how she had found a husband and child just taken ill, with the mother dying. The nun listened as Constance told the story and watched the manner of her hands as she spoke. “I persuaded her husband to leave the sofa in her room and to go to bed in the next room,” Constance said. “While the