ROUNDSMEN

You don’t like to see a white foot on a dray horse. Hooker got three of them, and Jubal checks them over after he brushes her, getting her to lift each foot so he can look for splits and see how the shoe is wearing. She is a dapple-gray Percheron, seven, maybe eight years old, and been used hard, which is why they give her to Jubal when Mr. White sent him over from the Island. New man get the sorriest ride. Somebody had bob-wire in her mouth, probly back on the farm, she got some scars and don’t feel the bit lest you put some boss into it. Call her Hooker cause she always pull to the left but that was only a shoulder sore let go and Jubal has healed it up. He makes sure to do everything in the same order in the morning, like you need to with the jumpy ones, which means he lets her eat hay from the iron manger while he looks her over for rub spots.

“You take this to keep her off you,” Duckworth said on the first day they moved him onto the city job, handing him a rusty railroad spike, and she did try to crowd him against the stall boards, but every time he just duck under and go to the other side till she give up on it. Horse can’t kick back on you when you between its legs and it don’t have the patience for mischief that a mule does.

Jubal ties her lead line off to the post, hangs the collar over her neck, straps it shut, and then fixes the hames in the groove.

“Gone be a good day for us, Hooker,” he croons, crossing the trace lines over her back to keep them out of the way. “Get out and see the world some.”

He is only started laying the harness saddle on her when her tail goes up. He steps back and lets her pee like she always does, still got the nerves even with how he treats her. He waits for it to soak into the straw a bit, then cinches the harness saddle, keeping it loose. Horse like her only got one question in its head—how they gone hurt me next? She’ll bloat on you at first so it’s no use pulling that cinch too tight. Jubal lays the britching over her rump, lifting her tail gently to fix the backstrap and then buckling the cropper down to it before snapping the top strap onto the saddle. This was the hardest part when he first come, maybe somebody twist her tail or put a stick up her behind before. Lots of ignorant people think they know how to make a horse act right.

He replaces the halter with the bridle then, slipping the nose band over, working his thumb into the space between her front and back teeth to get her to open and pushing the bit into place. He gets the crown piece over her ears and snugs it all up, being sure the blinkers don’t rub on the eye and tightening the throat latch strap. She holds nice and still for him, lazily switching flies with her tail, not twitching under the skin like she done the first week. He had to come in a hour early those days, but now they know each other and got a understanding.

“Gonna be a hot one,” calls Jerrold Huxley, walking past with Spook, who is a light sorrel Belgian. “Be quite a number of em fore it’s over.”

“Spect there will.”

It was Jerrold he rode with to learn the job, Jerrold who helped him find the room on 27th. There is colored from just about everywhere in the building, from the Carolinas and Maryland and Virginia and up from Georgia and Mrs. Battle from the country of Jamaica and even one big-headed boy says he was born right in the City, that his people go back here from before it was United States and didn’t never belong to white folks. Rent is more than on Barren Island but it smells better and there is something to do at night.

Jubal runs the narrow end of the reins through the terret ring on the saddle, pulling them back through the horse-collar guides and then up to the bit rings on the bridle. He tucks the loose ends of the reins under the back strap and backs her out of the stall.

Tiny Lipscombe is on the ramp ahead of them leading Pockets, a beautiful bay with black points who will bite you if you come at him from the right. At the bottom they pass the grooms throwing dice on a blanket and move on to the wagons.

He backs Hooker up between the wagon shafts, then loops an arm’s length of rein around a post to keep her in place. Butterbean comes over from the dice game and holds the shafts up for Jubal to get the tug loops over them. He threads the traces back through the belly-band guides and hooks them to the wagon body, Butterbean stepping away the minute he’s not needed. None of the stable boys like to deal with Hooker. Jubal tightens the cinch another few inches and checks the traces for twists. Jerrold is doing the same at the next wagon over.

“Mulraney in yet?”

Jerrold shakes his head. “Aint seen the man, but he might be about. Likes to tip up on people when they not looking.”

Mulraney is the dispatcher and is always out to catch you with a bottle. Duckworth says it’s cause he can’t drink no more, doctor’s orders, and can’t stand the idea of somebody getting away with a nip under his same roof.

“He catch a sniff of liquor on your breath when you come back to the stable,” Duckworth told him the first day, “that is the end of you.”

Jubal takes the reins in hand and climbs onto the seat of the tip-wagon, watching Hooker’s ears to see that she is ready to go. He clucks and gives the slightest jerk on the lines and Hooker starts them out of the stable.

Mulraney is not in his office when they pass, old Doucette who stays through the night sitting there watching the telephone, afraid he will have to pick it up. They don’t really start to drop until noon, though now and then there is one that has laid out all night before somebody reported it.

Jubal gees her out through the doors to join the tail of the line on the Avenue. It is all kinds of horses they got working for White’s Sons—Shires and Suffolks and Haflingers and Belgians and big tall Percherons like Hooker. The breweries take up the Clydesdales for their delivery teams, and it seems like all the saddle horses gone off to the Philippines or been sold to the English for their war in Africa. There are six wagons waiting in a row, horses blinkered with their heads down and ears slack, some of them probly asleep, while the teamsters lean back and tilt their faces up to the sun rising over the tenements to the east. He’s never known Hooker to sleep in the traces, not even with a long standing spell, too busy worrying what somebody might surprise her with. No telling how many owners she been through to this point. Had her on a farm buggy maybe, mowed some hay, then when she got her size was sold into the City. Before the electric come in they run the streetcar and omnibus teams in all weather, uphill and down, till they were wore out. Every time a horse change hands it got someone new to deal with, someone got a whole nother way of doing to you. It puts Jubal in mind of his Mama’s stories about slave days and people being traded out for livestock or stores. Hell, he thinks, I’d balk plenty you put a hand to me. Get away with whatever I could.

Jerrold calls out as a couple of the shitwagon boys roll by, bringing their street manure to the pier.

“You boys had a busy night.”

“Yeah, we gonna lose these road apples and put the nags away,” answers the lead driver. “Then I’m gonna look up that gal you been keepin with.”

The teamsters laugh. Jerrold’s wife is a big, rawboned woman who scares the daylights out of everybody but him.

“Aint no woman got a nose will let you near em,” calls Duckworth after them. The shitwagon boys ride all night between sanitation stations and then ship it out at dawn. White’s Sons sends a dozen wagonloads upstate every day, stable manure bringing a price while the road puckey just gets dumped somewhere. “You boys is ripe.”

Mulraney shows up then, nodding sharp at them all. “Gentlemen,” he says, like always. Mulraney is not so bad for an Irish, he don’t call you nothin or tell you how to do your job if you do it right. Knows his horses, too, and word is he trained racers before the bottle got the best of him. He’s the one who says when it’s time to sell a horse out or send for the Cruelty people and put it away. You need a horse doctor to say it’s an accident and shoot it if you want insurance, but the Cruelty people are free if you say it can’t work no more and will suffer. Hooker was almost out the door to whatever ragpicker would buy her when Jubal came.

“She’s found her man, she has,” the dispatcher says whenever he sees her back in the traces. “It’s a remarkable phenomenon.”

The sun is two fingers over the rooftops when Jubal’s turn comes up, one of the stable boys ducking his head out the doorway.

“Thirty-eight between Nine and Ten,” he calls, and Jubal puts Hooker into motion.

He tries to keep to the streets with paving block, cobbles dealing hell to a white-footed horse, and keeps her to a slow trot. Hooker likes to run, which makes him think she was maybe once on a fire truck, and you got to keep some drag on the reins. Ninth is already crowded with traffic, hacks and delivery wagons and ice carts, a few pony phaetons and fancy carriages and the streetcar sparking up and down the middle. The hacks you have to watch out for, and the two-wheel cabs are even worse, cutting in and out of the flow to pick up or leave their fares, drivers waving their sticks and yelling at each other to stay clear. On the busiest day of the year in Wilmington it was nothing like this. When he first came, on foot, Jubal made his neck sore staring up at the buildings, one taller than the next, but driving you have to watch the cross streets, watch the rig ahead of you, watch for little ones trying to get under your wheels and you don’t dare look up at anything. At the end of the day he can barely open his hands, which never happened back home no matter how long he drove.

White’s Sons has the Board of Health contract and guarantees removal within three hours of notice, which is usually by a police from a callbox. But there is no police at the location, only a handful of little ones, Irishes they look like, daring each other to go up and sit on the dead horse’s rump. Jubal walks Hooker past it, the little ones, mostly boys and one little girl sucking on her fingers, moving away to watch. He stands in the seat to look behind as Hooker backs the wagon up to the horse’s head.

“The Dago left it,” says the oldest of the boys, stepping closer. “The one that sells melons. It wouldn’t go no more and he whips it and hollers at it in Dago and it still won’t go so he jumps off and hits it on the nose and it just kneels down on its front legs and stays that way. So he grabs some crates from the alley here and busts em up with his feet and sets a fire under its back end. Only then it just falls down on its side and don’t move no more.”

“I seen one explode once,” says a boy who keeps putting his thumb up his nose. “Back when we lived by the river. Its belly blowed up like a balloon and then kablooey—all over the street. My old lady wouldn’t let us outside till they come get it.”

If you’re lucky the owner is still there and the harness is on and you can use that to pull it up. But this horse has been stripped clean, a dusty chestnut mare that maybe has the glanders, nose still running snot. Have to wash the wagon bed out good when he’s shed of it.

Jubal sets the brake and hops down to the street. The rest of the boys step up, leaving the little girl staring from the sidewalk. Sometimes the street children will cut the tail off before you get there, twisting horsehair rings for each other.

“Can we help?”

“You stay clear of her,” he says, pointing to Hooker. “Come too close she maybe kick your head in.”

The boys look at Hooker with new respect and a few take a step back. Jubal unwinds the cable and pulls it down to the carcass, then lets the tail ramp of the wagon down. He ties the forelegs together just above the knee, yanks a leather strap tight around the neck and then links the two together with chain, slipping the cable hook through the middle link. The boys squat to watch him work.

“You want to get these off the street before they go stiff,” he explains, “or else they maybe don’t fit on the wagon.”

The tip-wagon is low-sided and extra wide, with a pulley block bolted to the frame behind the seat, and the ramp has skid boards that he greases every morning. Jubal runs the free end of the cable through the pulley and then unhitches Hooker, knotting the traces together and then clipping the cable to them. More little ones come down from the stoops to watch, and women stick their heads out from the tenement windows all around. He leads Hooker away from the wagon, waiting for a furniture van to rattle past before heading her on a diagonal across the street till the cable is taut.

“Hold,” he says to the horse, using the reins like a lead line to keep her grounded, and goes to check that the carcass is lined up right. Even hooked to a load you never know what a horse might get up to—a loud noise or a bee in the blinkers and they can go off trompling people till they run into a wall. He comes back to her, holding the reins a couple inches from the bridle bit.

“Yo!”

He doesn’t have to yank on her or even slap with the reins, Hooker pulling steady and straight and the pulley squeaking and the carcass dragging up the ramp onto the wagon bed. A couple of the boys clap their hands when it is done.

“Where you gonna take im?” asks the second boy.

Jubal grins as he backs Hooker between the wagon shafts. “Straight to the butcher shop. This gone be your supper.”

The other boys laugh and call out Kevin eats horsemeat, Kevin eats horsemeat, pointing and dancing around the boy.

“We eat nuttin but cabbage,” he answers them, face going red. “Cabbage and beans.”

He has almost got Hooker back in the traces when a panel wagon pulled by a hackney horse, half lame and too small for its load, stops alongside him. The panel is new-painted in red and black and gold and says—

EDISON COMPANY PICTURES

HIGHEST-GRADE SPECIALTIES

The white man sitting next to the driver leans out to talk to him.

“There is another one that wants dealing with,” says the man, who wears a straw boater and looks like somebody Jubal knows. “At the corner of 39th.”

Jubal lifts his hat off. “Can’t carry but one at a time, suh,” he says. “But I thank you for the lookout.”

The man frowns at him for a moment, then points. “I know you.”

White folks always think they know colored because they don’t look so close, but then it comes to Jubal and he smiles. “That’s right, suh, you Judge Manigault’s boy.”

He does not add “The one who don’t walk right” which is how most of the colored in Wilmington know them apart, the ones who don’t say “the good one” or “the nasty one.” This is the good one.

The white man narrows his eyes, starting to smile. “And you are—?”

“Jubal, suh. Jubal Scott.”

“Of course.” The white man almost reaches down to shake hands, then catches himself. “What brings you up here, Jubal?”

Jubal keeps smiling. “How things come out, there’s a whole lot of us come north.”

It sits between them for a moment. As he remembers it this Manigault didn’t have no part in it, always being left out from what the big white folks was up to.

“Of course,” Harry says, smile fading. He points at Hooker. “I remember you now—you were a drayman.”

“It got four legs and a tail, I can make it move.”

The white man smiles again. “You own this horse?”

“Nawsuh, this belong to Mr. Tom and Mr. Andrew—that’s P. White’s Sons what keeps the street clear. They got three, four hundred horses.”

The good Manigault nods his head, figuring something. The colored man beside him squirms in his seat, eager to get going.

“Do they have horses for rental?”

“Don’t know but they might. Horses to do what?”

He waves a hand at the wagon panel. “To be in a motion picture. They should look like cavalry horses.”

Jubal shakes his head. “Don’t have none of that kind. Maybe you try the police, they always got some for auction.”

The man nods, pulls a small card from his vest pocket and hands it down to Jubal. “If you ever tire of this service, I might have some employment for you. Feel free to call on me.”

Jubal takes the card, squints at it. “Thank you, suh.”

“Harry Manigault.”

The name would have come to him sooner or later. “Like it say on your card.”

The man smiles again, just about the first real smile Jubal has seen since he’s been in the City. “Good day, Jubal. It is nice to see a familiar face.”

The driver smacks the hackney with his stick and the panel wagon jerks away. Jubal sticks his hat back on.

“We get that horse off the street, Mr. Harry,” he calls. “Three-hour guarantee!”

Dr. Bonkers’ does no harm. It would take a detailed chemical analysis to discover the specific ingredients, but the taste indicates that it is mostly vegetable oil with a dose of cayenne and some camphor to impart a suitably medicinal smell. The recommended dosage is small enough—a teaspoon before retiring—and the taste sufficiently off-putting that subscribers are unlikely to make themselves ill ingesting the Brain Food. Until the licensing imbroglio can be resolved it affords him access to people’s homes, and perhaps more importantly, a shiny black-leather physician’s bag with which to impress and intimidate them.

Dr. Lunceford is not a gifted traveler, his “spiel” limited to inquiries surrounding the prospective purchaser’s ailments and those of their loved ones, and has thus far moved only enough of the product to avoid being discharged and losing the totemic satchel.

“Do you suffer from epilepsy, spasms, convulsions, insomnia, hysteria, dyspepsia, paralysis, alcoholism, St. Vitus’ dance or other nervous disorders?”

The woman looks at him blankly, her door open only enough to see him with one eye. “Aint got none of those.”

“And how is the general health of your family?”

The woman looks behind her into the dim-lit room, then back to him. “Got a boy bust his arm.”

“Ah. Perhaps I can be of some assistance.”

Her eyes flick down to the leather bag. “You a doctor?”

Technically, at this time and in this state, he is not. “Madam,” he assures her, “I have set countless broken limbs. Countless.”

She looks at him suspiciously. “How much it gone cost?”

He is pushing, gently, against the door. It has been the most difficult lesson for him in this great city, that aggressiveness is valued, required, in fact, instead of being considered poor manners. “You should think about what you can afford. Is the young man in pain?”

He is by her then, surrendering to the now-instinctual New York habit of evaluating the apartment in relation to his own. There is light only from the street, coming in through a pair of dirty windows, revealing walls with patches of lath showing through and the remains of two layers of wallpaper in patterns that disagree with each other, wrinkled with moisture. They have pinned up a few color pictures torn from magazines, drawings of white people doing pretty things. No, thinks Dr. Lunceford, ours is not as bad as this.

The boy is small and dark-skinned, a permanent dent, most probably the work of forceps, in one side of his head. The injured arm lays slack in his lap as he sits on the only chair with upholstery in the two rooms, his legs sticking out straight from the seat. He looks up and Dr. Lunceford can read his thoughts—What is this man going to do to me?

He sits cautiously on the arm of the chair. “What’s your name?”

“Cuttis.”

“Curtis?”

“Cuttis.”

“How did you injure your arm?”

“Gettin co’.”

“In the basement?”

“On the train. When the co’ train come by slow enough I climbs up an thow some down to Montrose and James.”

“And you fell off the coal car?”

“Naw, I ain that stupit. After all I thown down Montrose and James wouldn’t gimme my share an we commence to fightin.” The little boy touches his arm, as if to bring back the memory. “James thow me down on the rail.”

The mother looks on, standing, waiting to see what he will do next. He has had women, back in Wilmington, repel him at gunpoint to keep him from vaccinating their children.

“Never forget,” Dr. Osler used to say when he took his students on city rounds, “that when you are in a person’s home, you are a guest.”

“I’m going to touch your arm, Cuttis. This one first.”

The boy reluctantly offers up his good arm, and Dr. Lunceford pushes his fingers to the bone, getting a feel for what should be. There is no way to be precise without a Roentgen, of course, but a few generations of cotton loaders who can still bend their arms will vouch for him.

“Now I’m going to straighten out the arm that you’ve hurt and have you try a few things.”

The boy looks at his face as he supports the broken arm under the elbow and slowly, gently straightens it.

“Can I see you make an o.k. sign with your fingers? That’s good—now push your fingers against mine—”

“It hurt.”

“But you can do it, can’t you? Now I’m going to hold around your fingers and you have to try to spread them—that’s good, this is all very good.”

He runs his fingers lightly up from the elbow to the wrist several times. “You were in this fight, what, two or three days ago?”

“Three days,” says the mother. “But we aint got nothin to pay a hospital.”

Dr. Lunceford ignores the statement, looking into the eyes of the boy. “Now I want you to pretend that your pain is a voice. When I touch a certain part, you tell me if the voice is humming, talking, talking loud, shouting, or screaming.”

“It hummin all the time.”

“I’m sure it is. You’ve been very brave about it.”

He begins to pinch around the bone, very slowly, moving toward the hand.

“She talkin now.”

“Uh-huh—”

“Louder.”

“How about here?”

Tears come to the boy’s eyes and he can’t speak. Dr. Lunceford eases the pressure, turns to the mother.

“I’ll need one of your stockings—it can be old but it must be clean. And if you’d boil a panful of water, please.”

She looks at him for a moment, as if the words take time to penetrate, then steps into the other room. He knows he should have phrased it differently—“something you’ve just washed” instead of implying that most objects in here are filthy. Which they are. There is a thin blanket hung over the back of the chair and he imagines the little boy stretches out on it and the threadbare ottoman to sleep, perhaps sharing the chair with a sibling. He waits till he hears pots banging in the kitchen.

“Your arm is broken up near the wrist, Cuttis, and if I don’t set it it’s going to heal but in the wrong position—”

“It be crookit.”

“That’s right. Now you’re going to have to help me—”

If it was a Monteggia fracture he’d insist they see a licensed doctor, somebody with a fluoroscope, but this is relatively standard—a distal fracture of both bones, the radial fracture complete and displaced, the ulnar of the greenstick variety, no obvious neural or vascular damage.

He gets a grip above and below the radial fracture. “I want you to take a deep breath now—”

The reduction is simple, rapid traction and torque, the boy crying out sharply and the mother rushing back in with a black cotton stocking in her hand.

“He ain counted to three,” complains the boy, tears running down his cheeks.

But Dr. Lunceford has the bag open, fishing in it for the can of rolled bandages. Most of the space is taken up with bottles of Dr. Bonkers’, but he manages to crowd a few useful articles between them, most of them purchased from a notorious thief on Tenth Avenue, a young Irishman who had never seen or heard of a colored physician.

“Barbers, I knew you had them,” he said, laying out his wares on a tabletop. “And the ginks who soak you to plant you under the ground. But a colored croaker, who’d a thought that?”

The bandages, already permeated with plaster of Paris, must have been prepared in a hospital, and Dr. Lunceford assumes the crime was perpetrated during a sojourn in one of the city wards, the thief making his rounds while still convalescing. “The quicker the patient can return to preferred activities,” Dr. Osler used to say, “the speedier the recovery.”

“I could use that water now,” he says to the mother.

She hands him the stocking and backs out of the room. He has the boy slowly supinate and pronate the wrist, feels the bones to make sure the reduction is holding, then helps the boy off with his shirt and slips the stocking over his arm, attempting to smooth out the wrinkles. A long-arm cast is not specifically called for, but with young boys the more immobilized the limb the better, discouraging their more rambunctious instincts.

The mother returns with a pan of hot water and he asks her to set it on the floor.

“The break will hurt quite a bit for the rest of the day,” he tells the boy as he wets the bandage and begins to wind it around his crooked arm, “but tomorrow most of the pain should be gone.”

He has seen no facility in the apartment, perhaps everybody sharing an outhouse in the alley, or common toilets, tiny closets, placed on every other floor. He has seen every possible unsanitary solution as he has moved Yolanda and Jessie from building to building, structures thrown up to maximize profit per square foot, not to house human beings.

“Do you have any sort of medicine you use for the children? For toothaches or that sort of thing?”

The woman frowns, then walks to a rickety cupboard and pulls out a box of baking soda and a bottle of Mrs. Pinkham’s panacea.

“I got this for bad stomach,” she says raising the baking soda, “and the other for my lady problems.”

He nods to the Vegetable Compound. “Give him two tablespoons of that before he sleeps tonight.”

The potion is largely alcohol and will certainly have a soporific impact on a small boy. Kopp’s Baby Friend, basically morphine in sugar water, would be more effective, but Dr. Lunceford has refused to represent it.

“I got to buy your bottle too?”

He smiles. “Dr. Bonkers’ Brain Food is a tonic for a remarkable panoply of afflictions. A broken arm, however, is not one of them. I shall visit, if you don’t mind, in a week to be sure this cast is not causing problems. If you can’t spare anything now, perhaps at that time—”

The return visit is both responsible and good commerce, as only the most indigent or unembarrassable will allow you to walk away empty-handed more than once.

“I get you something.”

She steps out and Dr. Lunceford turns to the boy, who is watching his arm as the bandages begin to harden around it.

“Which arm do you throw with?”

“One that’s bust.”

“If you can be patient it will get strong again. Strong enough to bounce a lump of coal off this James’s noggin.”

The boy smiles. He has a beautiful face, really, and Dr. Lunceford vows to carry that smile, like a talisman, with him through the rest of the day’s adventures.

Dr. Lunceford knocks on every door in the next two buildings, then navigates through the crowd of humans and vehicles to begin on the structures across the street, the stairways unlit and coffin-like, each with its own particular odor, none pleasant. A few people answer, more just call and ask who he is, and none are in need of Brain Food. It is a wonder, given the conditions they live in, that the denizens of Hell’s Kitchen are not in a constant state of epidemic. Many people down home are poor, yes, certainly with less to their names than these urban colored, but they are not crushed into narrow, disease-breeding dwellings in such numbers, not part of an anonymous and vaguely threatening multitude. Dr. Lunceford finds himself, when on the more peopled avenues, walking in a kind of protective daze, eyes focused just beyond any approaching stranger, whereas in Wilmington each pedestrian requires a greeting tailored to their status and circumstance. Once, in their second week on 47th Street, he walked past a throng, taking only fleeting notice of a young pregnant woman, only to have Jessie call him back from his daydream. It troubled him to see her in such a context, his daughter only one more dismissable face among the millions. There is a harmony of purpose, despite its seemingly frantic activity, in a beehive or a colony of ants, but so much of the busyness here resembles nothing more than poultry overcrowded on their way to slaughter, each animal climbing over its neighbor for the last breath of air.

There are young men, and some not so young, lolling on the stoop of the next building. There are layabouts in Wilmington, most notably in the dead season between cotton crops, but there the men tend to congregate at a handful of drinking resorts and barbershops. In this city the front steps of many buildings are draped, by noon, with the unemployed, colored or white depending on the dominant population of the street.

“Bout time somebody come for that girl,” says one of the loungers as Dr. Lunceford steps carefully over his outstretched legs.

“She aint passed yet?”

“You know that she aint if you been hearin her Mama boo-hooin on the landing every night. ‘Oh my po’ daughter, Lord Jesus help my po’ daughter!’ ”

“We in the back. Don’t hear nothin but cats.”

“She enough to drive a man to bad habits.”

“Like you got none of them already.”

The men laugh.

“May I ask,” says Dr. Lunceford from the doorway, “where I can find this afflicted individual?”

The men eye him without respect or annoyance. He is a passing phenomenon, to be commented on when he is gone, a part of the meager entertainment afforded by the street that lays before them.

“Up five an in the front,” says the first young man. “And mind them steps by the second flo’.”

The steps just below the second-floor landing have fallen through on one side, Dr. Lunceford stepping carefully on the risers and supporting himself by pressing the wall rather than trusting the treacherously loose banister. He wonders how long they have been in this state, wonders that none of the men relaxing in front has access to a hammer and nails or the inclination to borrow such items. In their first apartment after the move from Philadelphia, in the tenement near the corner of 51st and Ninth, the toilet that served their floor was a swamp. After futile entreaties to the landlord’s somnolent representative, a hunchbacked Pole who dwelt in the basement, and marked indifference from the tenants who shared the level, Dr. Lunceford spent a day cleaning, scraping, painting, and doing his best to repair the rudimentary plumbing. When finished he could bear the idea of his wife and pregnant daughter employing the facilities, but within a week the room was back to its former squalid condition.

The woman who answers the door seems frightened at the sight of him.

“Who send for you?”

“No one, but I—”

“She not dead.”

“I am a medical man, not an undertaker.” He holds the bag up where she can see it. “If you’ll let me in perhaps I can be of some service.”

There are lighted candles in the first room, one placed carefully next to a tiny chromo of the Virgin Mary. The woman wears a red cloth wrapped like a turban over her hair and sports a large crucifix, carved from yellowish wood, outside of her housedress. Catholics, Dr. Lunceford guesses, up from somewhere in Louisiana. Two very small children, a boy and a girl, play on the bare, sticky floor with a stewpot and a wooden spoon, while a child not yet a year old squats half-immersed in soapy water in the stone basin that also serves for kitchen needs. A girl of perhaps eight years stands by the half-open curtain that separates their two rooms.

“You wash the baby,” the woman says to this girl. “This man gone look at Essie.”

Essie lies on the larger of the two beds crowded into the back room, a cracked window affording her a view of the grimy brick airshaft and the trio of pigeons nodding sleepily on the sill. Sound asleep, on the other bed, is a fully clothed man of about thirty.

“That Mr. Ball,” says the woman softly. “He work nights, so we rents a bed to him.”

Dr. Lunceford feels very tired, though it is only eleven in the morning. Too many stairs. “Hello, Essie,” he says.

The girl, possibly as old as twelve or thirteen but wasted with disease, does not respond, her huge, frightened eyes following as he squeezes between the beds and steps to her side. She is propped on a pair of yellowed cushions, her neck swollen, breathing noisily and with extreme difficulty. Dr. Lunceford lays his palm on the girl’s forehead.

“How long has she had this fever?”

“She been po’ly more than two weeks now,” says the woman. “Her daddy, he work loadin the boats, he been to the hospital but they won’t send nobody.”

“There are visiting physicians.”

“Suh, we just come up here. We can’t affo’d none of that.”

Dr. Lunceford nods. “Would you bring the lamp over, please?”

The woman squeezes in next to him, holding the oil lamp. “First she tired all the time, then she coughin, and then she can’t even swallow.”

“Would you open your mouth for me, Essie? Wide, like when you have to yawn—”

It clearly causes the girl some pain to open.

“And could you hold the light closer, please?”

The next time I see that thief, thinks Dr. Lunceford, I’ll have to ask him to purloin a laryngoscope. He pushes her tongue down with a depressor and inserts the little ball of a mirror as far in as he can get it. The tonsils, uvula, and pillars of the fauces are all swollen, covered by the grayish pseudo-membrane, which extends up to the posterior nares and down over the epiglottis and into the larynx. The membrane is relatively thick, adhering tightly to the mucous membrane in most places, the windpipe nearly completely occluded. It is a wonder the girl can breathe at all.

There is only one course open to him. Her pulse is weak and irregular, the exudation, though not yet gangrenous, beginning to slough off and spread the sepsis. Five years ago she would be doomed, his role limited to supplying enough opiates to allow her to leave on a cloud. But there is an anti-toxin now, manufactured by the Board of Health itself, a serum he has no access to.

Dr. Lunceford touches the girl’s cheek lightly. “You can close for a moment, Essie. Thank you.”

“That look bad, don’t it?”

He turns to the mother. “I will need some alcohol—three inches’ worth, in a glass. It doesn’t matter what sort.”

The woman leaves and Dr. Lunceford sits on the side of the bed. There is an illustration of Christ on the cross, torn from a newspaper and at some point folded many times, tacked to the wall over the headboard of the bed. The folding has left the image divided into many squares, each one featuring an isolated locus of agony—a spiked and bleeding palm in one square, a section of thorn-pierced hairline in another. The effect makes it seem as if one of the Savior’s eyes is raised to Heaven and the other, with a glint of challenge rather than supplication, squarely fixed on Dr. Lunceford.

And what shall you do for My lamb?

“It’s hard to breathe, isn’t it?”

The girl nods weakly.

“We’ll try to do something about that.”

The smallest boy is out of the basin, being wrapped in a blanket by his sister, and the woman is pouring gin from a square bottle into a glass. A hinged wooden lid has been lowered over the washbasin and there is a huge pile of dusty field greens spread out on it.

“She gone die?”

“Your daughter is very ill, but there are things that can be done for her. The first and most vital is to make sure her breathing is unimpeded. There is a procedure I will need to perform, and I need your permission to go ahead with it.”

It is a matter for the Board of Health, of course, but by the time their representatives arrive the girl will be gone. In a race between the Klebs-Loeffler bacillus and city bureaucracy, there is no question as to which will win.

“You gone cut her?”

“No, M’am, but she will be made very uncomfortable for a short while.”

The woman holds out the glass of gin to him, which he takes as acquiescence. Dr. Lunceford stacks several bottles of the Brain Food on the table in order to gain access to his instruments. The woman stares at the bottles. Women such as these, feeding their children on pork fat and road-clippings, are the principal consumers of the Bonkers elixir, and for an instant he feels ashamed to be associated with it. He slips the metal instruments he’ll need from the pocketed canvas roll and stands them up in the alcohol. He has only one O’Dwyer tube, medium-sized, something the hospital thief threw in for free with no idea of its purpose.

“We just come up here,” the woman says again, shaking her head. “Didn’t count on nobody getting sick.”

He has performed the intubation dozens of times, often on infants, in the days before the serum. Very few of those children survived. He pushes the tongue to the side with his curved forceps, then uses them to help guide the tube past the epiglottis and into the larynx, the girl heaving and gagging despite his care not to press on the vagus nerve. Her sputa, fine and poisonous, spray upon the lenses of his spectacles. The tube is brass covered with rubber, not very flexible, and when it is in place he tugs very slightly on the thread to be certain that the retaining swell is anchored below the vocal chords. When he leans away with the device in place the girl is soaked with sweat, but her dyspnea has been vanquished, her chest expanding and contracting heroically.

“Just breathe normally,” he tells her, tying the thread around the stub of a pencil. “There’s plenty of air for you now. And if you should begin to swallow the tube, which can happen sometimes, you can pull on this and cough and it will come out.” He hands her the pencil, then touches her face again. “You’re going to feel better now.”

In the kitchen he scrubs his hands with carbolic soap, gargles with Condy’s fluid and carefully cleans his spectacles. He explains to the woman that her daughter should be fed in a supine position with nothing more solid than rice with milk, that she will likely fall asleep immediately, her body sensing that strangulation has been circumvented. He does not tell her the rest. If you warn them the authorities are coming they are likely to hide things, and the bacillus continues to travel. She makes the sign of the cross in the Catholic manner, thanking God several times and Dr. Lunceford once.

“Antoine come back near seven,” she tells him, “but he don’t get paid till Sa’day.”

As he leaves the young men stare at the bundle of greens under his arm.

“Doctor got him some groceries,” calls one of them as he heads east. “Maybe he got a ham in that bag.”

It is a long walk to the apothecary on Broadway. There is only a young white man in a white apron inside, dusting bottles on one of the half-dozen shelves. Dr. Lunceford lays his bag heavily on top of the pharmaceutical counter. A gaudily painted sign on the wall proclaims that the establishment sells his celebrated Brain Food.

“May I use your telephone?”

The young man frowns. “Telephone is a nickel.”

Dr. Lunceford digs a coin from his pocket and lets it spin on the counter. The greens will not be especially filling, but excellent nutrition for a woman in Jessie’s state.

“The City Board of Health, please,” he says when a female voice comes over the wire. “Pathology, Bacteriology, and Disinfection.”

Everyone in the apartment will be quarantined, most likely, the poor dockworker and the snoozing boarder likely to lose their employment. Clothing will be destroyed, the rooms fumigated, but there is no other course if epidemics are to be controlled. They will ask, even before they administer the anti-toxin, who performed the intubation, and the mother will pass on the name he gave to her. The official who informed him of the licensing difficulties clearly did not believe he was a physician, even with the references from fellow McGill alumni, and went into detail outlining the punishments that would ensue if he were caught impersonating one.

“I’d like to report a case of diphtheria,” he says when a male voice asks why he has called. “This is Dr. Bonkers, Dr. Jeremiah Bonkers—”