ON SATURDAY MORNING CHERRY HAD A DATE WITH JANE Fraser. This was the day they were to visit the abandoned farm which Jane had inherited.
“You brought a beautiful day with you,” Jane greeted Cherry at the door of the Barker cottage.
“Good morning! You look stronger today,” Cherry said. She waited for a garbled echo, but for once the parrot was asleep. The house was quiet. “Where is Mrs. Barker? Gardening?”
“She left bright and early to help a neighbor with some baking,” Jane said. “There’s going to be a potluck supper, a community supper, tomorrow evening to raise funds for the church. All the women are contributing food. If I weren’t so clumsy with these crutches, I’d like to go.”
“I heard you!” Floyd called, and came in from outdoors chewing on an apple. “Good morning, young ladies.”
He stuck the apple core in the parrot’s cage. “You two going over to the old farm this morning?” he asked. They said yes. “Well, don’t get your hopes up, Jane. That land’s been farmed until it’s worn out. And the house! It’s only fit for mice and bats to live in, not people.”
Jane said indignantly, “I wish you’d stop trying to discourage me.”
Floyd wrinkled his forehead. “I’m only telling you facts. I heard the main water pipe is busted. The roof’s ready to cave in. Place ain’t worth any repairs. Best thing you could do is sell it.”
“Please stop interfering!” Jane was growing annoyed. “I don’t care what you say, I’m going to try to move in there.”
Floyd turned to Cherry. “Miss Cherry, maybe you’ll listen to me. At least don’t go inside the house. Ever since the fire there three years ago, that house is ready to cave in. Be careful.”
Cherry nodded and held the screen door open for Jane. As she did so, a framed sampler on the wall caught her eye. Cherry had not noticed it before. It was embroidered in various, faded colors and was dated 1851. It read:
If wisdom’s ways you truly seek,
Five things observe with care:
Of whom you speak, to whom you speak,
And how and when and where.
The warning on Mrs. Barker’s wall made Cherry uneasy as if a voice were cautioning her. But that was foolish…
The drive to the abandoned farm took them along the river road. They passed Riverside Park, passed the woods, and turned into the roadway of the old farm or what was left of the private road—it was so thick with weeds that Cherry slowed the car down to a crawl. She drove halfway to the rickety house, which was as close as she could get, parked, and they got out. Even with the sun shining, even with blue sky and blue river, this old place was depressing.
“What a shambles!” Jane exclaimed. “Maybe Floyd is right. I wouldn’t know where to begin first to make this place livable.”
“Don’t let Floyd discourage you,” Cherry said.
“Let’s explore, shall we?” Jane said. “I know it’s dangerous on crutches, but I must have a look.”
“Well, at least let me go first,” Cherry said.
Cherry went ahead, picking her way, clearing a path as best she could for Jane. The farm grounds were larger than they looked to be from the highway. Half buried by the dense weeds, many other things were growing wild here—tall grasses, goldenrod, haw berries. Bees buzzed around a few gnarled fruit trees and shade trees. Birds swooped from tree to tree, and a bullfrog sang from some pond.
“It’s kind of pretty here,” Jane said. “At least it’s an outdoors place for Bill to live.”
Cherry scooped up a handful of earth. It was fragrant, rich black, moist, and firm to the touch. “This soil doesn’t look worn out to me,” Cherry said. “What a variety of things grow here! I recognize most of them. Do you?”
“Not many. I’m a city girl,” Jane said. “Isn’t that Indian corn, growing wild?”
As they slowly walked nearer to the house, they came to large patches of a leafy plant. Neither had ever seen this plant before. Growing untended, it had spread until it surrounded the house.
“There certainly is a lot of it,” Jane said. “What is it?”
“I wonder,” and Cherry stooped to take a closer look. “It looks like a sturdy woodland plant.”
It grew close to the ground, springing up as tall as twenty inches. Its stalks were covered with several five-leaf clusters and bright crimson berries. Cherry was curious enough to pull up a plant or two. The roots were about as thick as her little finger, three or four inches long, brittle, almost transparent—and, oddly enough, forked.
“The roots look like little men,” Jane said. “See, here is the body, here are two arms, and here are two legs.”
“You’re right,” Cherry said. “Think you can walk as far as the house? Your house.”
She could, in her eagerness, with Cherry helping. Closer up, the house was really dilapidated. The girls could see that once it had been a comfortable farm home. It was small, with many windows, long and narrow and old fashioned now, but still inviting. They tried to visualize the house with repairs for windows and roof, and a fresh coat of paint.
“White paint,” Jane said. “White with dark-green shutters and roof. Stop me from dreaming. Let’s go in.”
“Well, if it’s as unsafe as Floyd said, we’d better not. But we could at least stand in the main door and look in,” Cherry suggested.
There was no front porch, just a stoop, though Jane vaguely remembered a big back porch facing the river. The house itself was pleasantly close to the river. Cherry and Jane stepped up into the front entrance door. The door was unlocked and swung open easily into a long hall.
“Oh, there’s the staircase. I remember sliding down the banister!” Jane said. “And just to our left, that’s the living room. Or was.” Beyond that, down the hall, was the old dining room, and across the rear of the house they could see a kitchen.
The house was so still, as they stood on the threshold and peered in, that they could hear their own breathing. Jane muttered that she wished she knew the century old secret of this place.
“You wouldn’t let a ghost keep you away?” Cherry teased her.
“I’d simply invite the ghost to live with us,” Jane said. “Joking aside, there must be some reason why there’s a legend or story about this farm. If I could only—Why, what are you doing, Cherry?”
“Sniffing. Don’t you smell it?”
A curious sour odor came from somewhere in the house. Cherry could not identify it. At the same time, she noticed how warm the air was in the house. Well, an old, closed-up house, with the mid-September sun beating down on it, could be expected to be hot and smell musty. Except that this sour, moldy odor was not quite the same as dust and mustiness—Cherry sniffed again, trying to locate where the odor came from. It seemed to hang in the air everywhere.
Jane was laughing at her. “You look like a puppy, sniffing in all directions! Can’t we go in?…Not a good idea? Well, then, Miss Nurse, I admit I’m getting awfully tired.”
They agreed it was enough exploring for a first visit. They slowly made their way back to the car. Then they drove on to Sauk. Dr. Hal X-rayed Jane’s ankle, which was healing satisfactorily, and Cherry drove her back to the Barkers’. Since she was out in the field anyway, she visited two more patients.
After supper with Aunt Cora, Cherry was so full of fresh air that she could hardly keep her eyes open. She did write a long letter to her nurse friends—all about rural nursing. Then Cherry telephoned her family in Illinois and had a good talk with her mother and father.
Sunday was fun. At church Cherry saw her new friends again, and Dr. Hal. He invited Cherry and Aunt Cora to the potluck supper. Since it was fifteen miles away, and since Cherry and Dr. Hal drove all week at work, Aunt Cora decided they’d go no farther than her own dining table. She appointed Dr. Hal to help her while she made coffee and buttermilk biscuits. Cherry was delegated to bring in the rest of the food, and set the table, not forgetting candles and flowers.
The three of them lingered over supper. Dr. Hal seemed to be enjoying himself. He told them of a discovery he had made about the cave at Riverside Park.
“You remember, Cherry, that you wondered so much what was on the other side of that barrier, deep in the cave? Well, even though I was sure there was nothing, you got me to wondering, too. So I went back there, late yesterday afternoon. Went with Joe Mercer. Took two of us to dislodge that old barn door.” He explained to Mrs. Ames how the old door was wedged against, almost into, the walls of the cave. “And what do you suppose Joe and I found?”
“What?” Cherry asked, holding her breath.
“Nothing. A pile of dirt. Just dirt and darkness. Some kids must’ve dug loose enough dirt to put the old barn door in place. They probably did it to make a hiding place for some game. Joe and I felt foolish, I can tell you! We put the door back as we found it.”
“If that’s a discovery,” Aunt Cora said, “then I’m a ring-tailed monkey.”
The first person to tell Cherry the bad news was the highway patrolman. He hailed her to a stop on the highway early Tuesday morning, and braked his car alongside her car.
“Morning! You’re Cherry Ames, the county nurse, aren’t you? I’m Tom Richards.” He touched his broad-brimmed hat in greeting. He was a strapping, sun-reddened man. “There’s some people suddenly taken sick around here, Nurse. Seems they went to the potluck supper—here’s their names. One of their youngsters stopped me on the road. They have no telephone to call the county health office.”
“Thanks, Officer.” Cherry took the slip of paper he handed her. Nichols, R.D. No. 3. She didn’t know them. “I’ll go right over there.”
“Right. See you again, Miss Ames.” The highway patrolman drove off.
Taken sick after the community supper! If one family was stricken, others might be, too. No one had reported sick yesterday, but it took time for an illness to develop. Cherry had left Sauk very early this morning. She stopped at a highway telephone booth and called her office.
“Yes,” the clerk said, “several families have phoned in asking for emergency help.” The clerk read off their names.
“I’ll go see them right away,” Cherry said. “Any word from Dr. Miller?”
“He’s on his way to the appendicitis case at the Anderson farm,” the clerk said. Cherry could make connections with him by telephoning the clerk periodically, as Dr. Miller would do.
At the Nichols’ place, Cherry found the father, mother, and the two eldest children in bed, seriously ill. All of them had similar symptoms: fever, extreme weakness, aching back and limbs, running nose, sore throat. Cherry recognized they had respiratory flu, in its acute stage. These were routine symptoms of respiratory flu.
She did not understand, though, why Mrs. Nichols reported that they all had diarrhea and cramps, and the younger child had been vomiting. Those were not respiratory flu symptoms. Those were symptoms of some other type of virus. But what? These patients had flu and something else which Cherry could not recognize. The symptoms of the unknown illness—the diarrhea, cramps, and vomiting—had started yesterday.
“Did you call a doctor, Mrs. Nichols?” Cherry asked.
“No, we treated ourselves.”
“With what?”
“Oh, just home remedies,” the woman said vaguely. Cherry put her vagueness down to her weak, sick state. She asked a few questions about the pot luck supper on Sunday. Mrs. Nichols said the room had been crowded and poorly ventilated.
“I guess some people there had colds,” the woman said.
“Someone there probably had a flu virus,” Cherry said, “and you caught it. I’m going to ask Dr. Miller to come to treat the four of you. Don’t try to get out of bed.”
Cherry gave first aid. She quickly made the four sick people as comfortable as she could, told the well children to keep away from them, left there, and telephoned for Dr. Miller. Then she drove to the next emergency names on her list.
In some of these families she found flu symptoms. In others she found even more acute flu symptoms plus the unexplained diarrhea and vomiting. Cherry was puzzled. In all the latter cases she noted that the families had “treated themselves with home remedies.” Exactly what home remedies? Nobody would tell the nurse. They seemed to be evading or too sick to talk.
Among these persons was the forbidding Jacob Hummer. His hand was healing—the man was strong and lucky! But Cherry urgently advised calling a doctor to check his flu infection.
“No!” said Hummer. “Nature will heal me.”
“Mr. Hummer, it’s necessary! If you won’t call a doctor, you can’t call me again, either. The rule is that the county nurse can make two home visits to encourage medical care. Only two calls, and no more if the family refuses to call a doctor when the nurse tells them it’s necessary.”
The Hummers gave in then, reluctant, but frightened by the man’s condition. Cherry telephoned in a call for Dr. Miller, and arranged to meet him later that afternoon.
They met and worked together at the Nichols’ and the Hummers’. Then they went to the crossroads grocery store, for a conference over a carton of milk. Cherry described her day’s cases to Dr. Hal.
“What’s this about so many having diarrhea and cramps?” Dr. Hal asked. “Those aren’t flu symptoms.”
“I think those patients all dosed themseves with some kind of home remedy,” Cherry reported, “instead of getting medical help right away.”
Dr. Hal frowned. “Find out what the remedy is. I’ll inquire, too.”
Nobody was willing to tell Cherry what the remedy was. And she could not find out the reason for this silence. One farm woman said she had been advised to “keep mum,” but swore she’d heard it effected many cures. Cherry noticed, in the next day or two, that those flu patients who had taken the remedy were sicker than ever. And not with flu! The ordinary flu cases were getting well! Dr. Miller, aided by other county physicians, was kept busy treating this emergency. He had a hard time diagnosing the elusive ailment, and when these patients began to recover, it was slowly. On an off chance, he treated some patients for poisoning; it helped.
“What in the world have they taken?” he said to Cherry. “We must find out.”
Cherry finally learned something on Friday at the Swaybill’s farm. Marge and Clyde, the teenagers, had attended the potluck supper, and while Clyde had a mild runny nose and sore throat, Marge was acutely sick. She was in bed in her own room. She complained privately to Cherry of terrible cramps.
“I think what did it,” Marge said, “was that new patent medicine Mother dosed me with. I wasn’t hardly sick until she gave me that stuff yesterday.”
Cherry pricked up her ears. “What new patent medicine?”
“That herb remedy. Everybody for miles around has been buying it,” Marge said. “Mother always thinks this or that new remedy is going to make her stronger, and cure everything.”
Cherry went to question Mrs. Swaybill. The hospital laboratory had examined her throat swab of the last visit and found it did not carry any virus; Mrs. Swaybill had just a common, very sore throat. Now Cherry was concerned lest Amy Swaybill catch a further infection from Marge—and she wanted to learn about that new patent medicine.
“Why, it’s just a harmless mixture of natural herbs,” Mrs. Swaybill answered Cherry’s question. “A bowl of herb tea saves you from a fever, they say. So I thought, when Marge began to run a fever, that this new herb medicine sounded good—”
Apparently Mrs. Swaybill relied as much on “natural” remedies as Aunt Cora’s friend, Phoebe Grisbee, did. But a patent medicine, even if it included herbs, was quite another matter.
“Where did you get this patent medicine, Mrs. Swaybill?” Cherry asked. Mrs. Swaybill hesitated. Cherry pressed her.
“I bought it from an old door-to-door pedlar. He lives around here somewhere. In a shack in the woods, near Muir, I heard. Oh, I can see from the look on your face, Miss Cherry, that you don’t think much of these cure-alls! But we’ve all been buying odds and ends from Old Snell for years, aspirin and show laces and vanilla, and herbs and berries in season, and we trust him.”
Cherry recalled seeing a shabby old man selling from a basket at the Swaybill’s door. She asked Mrs. Swaybill what the patent remedy was like.
“It’s a smelly liquid. Nature’s Herb Care is the name. I wish you wouldn’t ask questions about it.” Cherry inquired why not. “Well, Old Snell asked us to keep quiet. As a friendly favor. Seems this remedy is brand new, and he has only a small amount of it to sell to his steady customers, and he didn’t want to offend any other folks who’d ask to buy it if they heard about it.”
“I don’t like the sound of all this,” Cherry said.
“Well, Old Snell was a mite uneasy about selling a new product,” Mrs. Swaybill admitted. “But I tell you, the stuff is real good! I tried a little bit of it a couple of weeks ago for my weak spells, and it perked me right up! Why, I was so pleased with it, I sent Old Snell to sell some to my cousins across the river, in Missouri. Here’s the jar if you want to see it.”
Cherry took the jar from Amy Swaybill and studied the printed label. It made claims too numerous and too extreme for Cherry to believe. Its directions for use were crude. The label listed the ingredients only as “natural herbs and preservatives.” It gave the manufacturer’s name and address as “Natures Herb Co., Flushing, Iowa.” Cherry asked about that.
“Land’s sakes, I don’t know the company that makes it,” Mrs. Swaybill said.
“Hmm.” Cherry remembered Dr. Hal wanted a sample. “May I keep this jar?”
“Surely, if you like. There are only a couple tablespoonfuls left. But you won’t get me or Old Snell in trouble, will you? He’s only a poor old man trying to make a living. And—and it’s helped my cousins in Missouri, too!”
Cherry reported this conversation to Dr. Hal, at her office on Friday evening, and turned the sample over to him.
“So this is what they took,” Dr. Hal said. “If only people would consult a doctor, and promptly! If only they wouldn’t think they can diagnose their ailments and prescribe for themselves. The claims on the label are fantastic. Listen to this—in fine print.” Hal read aloud: “Cures arthritis, flu, cancer, tuberculosis, falling hair, tiredness—” The young doctor added ironically, “And just about everything that afflicts the human race.”
“I never heard of this preparation, did you?” Cherry asked.
Dr. Hal shook his head. “I’ll bet you this is the troublemaker. I think we ought to report it to the Food and Drug Administration.”
“I thought of that, too,” Cherry said.
They discussed what they had better do. Iowa maintained several health agencies to protect its population. However, the pedlar had sold the remedy also to Mrs. Swaybill’s cousins in Missouri; that constituted interstate commerce and made it a matter for the United States Food and Drug Administration, operating under the Federal Pure Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. The job of FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, was to stop the manufacture and distribution of medicines, medical devices, foods, and cosmetics that were unhealthy or impure or worthless or misbranded. FDA could take violators into the federal courts, where they would be liable for heavy fines and jail sentences. FDA thus protected the population against harming themselves.
Honest and responsible manufacturers cooperated with the Food and Drug Administration, checking their new products and label directions with the FDA experts before offering them to the public. But not all manufacturers were honest. That was why the FDA had to be a scientific crime-detection agency. Anyone, a doctor or a druggist or a private citizen, if he had serious doubts about a product, could report it to the FDA. Their inspectors were at work all over the United States, and FDA had branch offices in many cities.
“The branch nearest us,” Dr. Hal said, “is in Des Moines. But I wonder whether we oughtn’t notify the state health authorities first?”
“I’ll notify Miss Hudson, too,” Cherry said. “When are you going to report this awful ‘remedy’?”
“Right now,” Dr. Hal said, and picked up the telephone. He told the operator that he wanted to put through a call to the State Department of Health in Des Moines. “I know the offices close at five or five thirty, Operator,” Dr. Hal said, “but there’s probably an emergency line always open.”
He and Cherry waited while the call to the state capitol went through. It took several minutes. Finally Dr. Hal reached someone, for he said:
“Hello! This is Dr. Hal Miller, county doctor at Sauk, and I want to report a suspicious new medicine.” He listened for a while, then said, “Oh. Well, I’m not surprised, I’m calling so late in the day, and now it’s the weekend. Yes, I’ll call again tomorrow morning. … No, I don’t know too much about this medicine.… No, I don’t know as much as that, not yet.…” He listened again. “That’s a good idea. Will do.” After another pause, he said, “Thanks very much,” and hung up.
“What’s ‘a good idea’?” Cherry asked.
“Well, you heard that I’m to call back and try to reach the appropriate health officers. The man who talked to me suggested that until a contact can be set up, we get all the information we can about this remedy. Who makes it and where, and what goes into it. Of course they’ll make the investigation, but anything we can tell them will save them a lot of time and get this remedy off the market that much faster.”
“I see,” Cherry said. “What do you want to do with this jar of the remedy, Doctor?”
“I’ll keep it. It’s evidence to hand over to the health authorities.” Dr. Hal picked up the jar as gingerly as if it contained dynamite. “Cherry, I’d like you to be present when I telephone again tomorrow morning. There might be some questions I couldn’t answer, but you could.”
“I’ll be back here first thing tomorrow morning,” Cherry said, “Saturday or no Saturday.”
“Good. Now I’ll walk you home.”