The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [33]
All night the attending sister could hear the moans and delirium from Constance’s room. She heard her shout out “Hosanna,” and repeat it faintly through the night. At 7:00 the next morning, the toll of the church bell marked the hour. “At that clear sound, which she had always loved, whose call she had never refused to answer,” wrote the sister, “the moaning ceased; and at 10 o’clock a.m. her soul entered the Paradise.” The chapel was candlelit, the windows streaked with rain. Constance was robed in her habit with roses laid across her breast, a shock of beauty against the gloom. Reverend Louis Schuyler had arrived in Memphis just in time to read the services. Afterward, Constance was taken to Elmwood, where her body had to be held in a borrowed vault, as there were too many dead and not enough gravediggers.
Sister Thecla did recover, becoming a convalescent. Unlike any other disease, yellow fever’s hallmark is its cruel tendency to return after a period of brief recovery. When it did, as one doctor warned, it was time to order the coffin. Convalescents were under strict orders to remain in bed and quiet, but nurses and physicians usually hurried back to their duties. The vengeful fever would returnwith the most severe symptoms. Sister Thecla died one week later, after several days of pain and lucidity. An obituary for the two nuns read, “Of them may it be said that they were lovely in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.”
Louis Schuyler returned to St. Mary’s after Constance’s funeral. He had come to Memphis to fill the vacancy left by dead priests, to offer his services to a congregation of dying nuns and fever patients. Schuyler delivered the news to Dean Harris, who was still recovering, that both Parsons and Constance were gone. “My work here is done,” he said, “the whole of Memphis was not worth those two lives.” Schuyler left him sobbing.
Schuyler kept no diary or letters, nor would he have had time to write. Or perhaps the terror was too much for the sensitive twenty-six-year-old to record on paper. Even when encouraged to begin slowly, Schuyler had insisted working directly in the neighborhoods hardest hit by the epidemic. He refused a room at the Peabody Hotel for a cot in the parlor of Dean Harris’s fever-ridden home. Schuyler was in Memphis only four days before the fever struck him. The beds at St. Mary’s were full, and Schuyler was taken to the Court Street Infirmary, which had been recently opened for the feverish nurses and physicians. He was visited by another reverend from St. Mary’s, but Schuyler was already wildly delirious. It may have been due to his delirious shouts and screams that Louis Schuyler was moved from his hospital room into the death alley still alive. Piles of corpses and raw pine coffins lay all around him waiting for the wagons, which could take days to arrive. A nurse followed Schuyler’s litter into the alley and knelt beside him, promising not to leave his side. They sat beneath the buttressed stone and brick of the alley, cold shadows arching across the skyline creating a mosaic of gray light, sun and blue sky. “Please tell me,” asked Schuyler, “whether I am in Memphis or whether I am in my little church in Hoboken?”
On September 11, a cool front brought hope to the city. Rain had fallen the day before, chilling the air and sweeping the bayou clean. Will Armstrong sat at his desk that night at 9:00 writing to his wife, “My heart bounds with joy at the mere hope that this cool night will possibly end our labors . .