Ellen was in a panic. ‘Mary … not Mary!’ she said to Louisa. ‘We must do something … Otherwise …’ She didn’t finish the sentence, couldn’t admit her fear out loud that Mary must soon follow Abner Seaborn unless they could arrest the disease taking hold.
Serum, she needed serum. In vain she enquired of Dr Sawyer.
‘I will go anywhere – walk night and day to get it. Only tell me where!’ she pleaded.
‘I cannot, Mrs Lavelle,’ he replied. ‘I simply don’t know. Maybe at Richmond – Chimborazo – one of the other hospitals. The Surgeon-General dispenses what small supply of crusts he gets.’
‘Crusts?’ she queried.
‘Yes … crusts!’ he answered again. ‘They take the scabs of the pox from those already infected and use them as an antidote.’
‘But where does he get the crusts?’
‘I don’t know,’ Dr Sawyer responded. ‘Nobody enquires too much.’ He paused … ‘There are stories.’
‘Tell me, Doctor! Tell me!’ she demanded. ‘My child is dying … and you would let her die rather than betray some military confidence.’
She found Dr Licoix.
Ten miles she had trudged. Dr Sawyer had not told her much. Enough so she could track down the dapper doctor with the gruff moustache. It was oversized for his mouth, so that you could not see his upper lip move when he spoke. As if the sound came out of some pink burrow, thatched with hair.
He was cautious of her at first. Who was she? Who had sent her? What did she know?
She convinced him that her errand was one of mercy only, for her own daughter. That she was not employed by any agency to spy on him or his work – and swore herself to secrecy, if he would only help her.
Dr Licoix would – but for a price.
‘I have the money,’ she said.
It was a strange set-up. For a doctor, he was well off the beaten track. A tumbledown shack with weathered fences and a garden patch where something must once have grown. There was no sign, nothing to signify the occupant was a practitioner of medicine.
At a distance apart from the house by some fifty yards or so, stood two other shanty-type shacks. These were almost secluded from view by a draping copse of mixed bushes. Aloft from one of them floated a white flag. Her heart lifted – a hospital. Within it what she most desperately needed for Mary – the smallpox antidote.
Dr Licoix seemed in no hurry. Said not a word as he set off towards these buildings. The mahogany medicine case, carried in his right hand, caused his upper body to tilt slightly to the right. With his left hand he fumbled in his pocket, as if checking that he hadn’t forgotten something. She followed him in silence across the divide between the house and the hospital.
As they approached she could hear rising murmurings of sound from within the two buildings. Not until they were through the clearing and almost there did she notice the padlocked doors.
The back of Dr Licoix, labouring under his load, moved ahead of her. Nothing she could discern in his tilted gait, suggested that this was anything other than usual. Unease at the whole situation gripped her – the house, its condition, the hospital buildings in front of her – the little lop-sided doctor with the too big moustache.
Ellen steeled herself for whatever might come. She was here for Mary. That was all that mattered. Already had she witnessed what harsh horrors war – ‘humanity stripped away from itself’ – could confront her with.
‘Roll up your sleeve!’ Dr Licoix ordered the young negro boy.
The child, eight, maybe nine years old, did as he was told. Not once, not twice, but six times the needle punctured the boy’s arm, drawing tears from his eyes.
‘Now, the other arm … quickly!’ the doctor barked, jabbing the needle into the bottle which held the cow-serum.
Fearfully the boy obeyed.
‘Hurry up, boy, I’ve others to do!’ the man said, startling the child even further. Dr Licoix reached over, impatiently ripping the flimsy homespun from the boy’s shoulder, forcing him to cower away.
‘Now, see what you’ve caused!’ the physician said angrily. ‘Extend your arm to me. Now!’
As he administered six further vaccinations to the boy’s shaking arm. Dr Licoix raised a mottled eyebrow and looked about the small cabin.
Runaways … contrabands of war these, their children, forfeit. It was a brilliant idea, this, his Crust Farm. It saved hundreds of lives, maybe thousands of soldiers, who might die from the smallpox were it not for his crusts.
Ellen, aghast, stood back from it all in the farthest corner of the room. At first she had started to speak, say something about what was happening before her very eyes.
‘Silence!’ he barked at her, without looking up from the task at hand. ‘You came to me, Madame … and now you must be quiet … not interfere with Science.’
And so she had crouched back like a crippled thing, unable to intervene, reasoning that this scene would have been played out, had she been there or not.
But to be here … to witness it.
‘Next!’ Dr Licoix ordered from beneath his moustache, ignoring her presence, musing still on his own brilliance.
‘Next,’ was a tousle-headed girl.
He mussed her hair playfully. ‘Now, li’l Maybelline, you show those wet-eyed boys the sterner stuff you little piccaninny girls are made of,’ he coaxed.
Li’l Maybelline, all of six years old and bright as a button nodded her head. ‘Yas’n, suh, Doctor,’ the child said, her eyes downcast, not looking at the boys, nor him.
When he had finished with the fifteen or so children, he smiled, waved, and with a ‘See y’all in two weeks!’ beckoned Ellen to follow him, padlocking the door behind them, as she did. With a similar key – and no explanation – he unlocked the door to the adjacent cabin. As previously, the children, all black, withdrew into a corner away from him.
Again he smiled. ‘Come, come, children, who’s your friend?’ he began. ‘Who brings you nice things?’
He put his hand into his pocket and held it there. At that the children surged forward, arms outstretched. He grabbed one of the arms.
‘No! No! No … ! Wait … ! Let’s see what surprises you have for me first,’ he teased.
The boy whose arm he had seized tried to withdraw it.
‘Oh no, Jason! Fair Jason – you cannot desert the ship. For in your possession you have the Golden Fleece.’
Ellen waited in fascinated horror for what would happen next.
Gingerly Dr Licoix lifted the sleeve of the boy’s shirt. ‘Excellent, Jason! Excellent!’ the doctor purred, well pleased with what he saw. ‘A host of golden fleeces … and you, Jason, shall have your reward when we have removed them.’
It had been two weeks since he had infected the boy with the cow-serum and now the six scabs had perfectly formed, and were ready for harvesting. Ellen watched as Dr Licoix opened his operating case, its corners edged in protective brass. The maroon lining with the American Eagle design was in dull contrast to the glittering array of instruments displayed. Ellen recognised the implements of the surgeons’ trade: the Herstein Capital Blade Saw, with its interchangeable blade for the larger bones of arms and legs; there too the ebony-handled chainsaw for bones inaccessible to the blade saw; then, the eel-like staves of solid German silver for locating calcific deposits in the urinary bladder. She wondered if – and where – he used them. Imagined he must.
Dr Licoix delayed, waiting for the boy’s eyes to settle on the neatly stacked set of surgical scalpels.
Maybe the boy would be a doctor one day … maybe!
If only he was white.
Jason was a bright boy, Dr Licoix knew.
From amongst the assorted sizes and shapes, he selected a scalpel. One with a long ivory handle and the shortest blade.
‘This won’t hurt, Jason, you know that! We can’t damage the harvest you’ve so carefully grown.’ With that, the man gently cut away from the boy’s flesh the crust containing the cultivated smallpox scab. Before completely severing it, he safely secured the valuable crust in the grip of a dissecting forceps, used normally for holding tissue during operations. Now, like an artist, he completed the procedure. The boy felt nothing. Only a slight nip as the crust came finally away from its donor.
Carefully the harvester placed his yield on a piece of tinfoil sheeting. In silence, deftly and beautifully, he removed each of the other five crusts from the boy’s arm.
‘Now, the other arm, Jason!’ Dr Licoix said, benevolently. ‘Then you get your reward.’
The boy hesitated.
‘Now that didn’t hurt, did it, Jason? I never nicked you the once,’ the doctor soothed, feigning some hurt.
Still the boy made no move to roll up his other sleeve.
‘Do it, Jason!’ the doctor said, still smiling – but at the thatch of his mouth only, Ellen noticed.
Slowly the boy drew the shirtsleeve up along his arm.
‘So that’s it!’ Dr Licoix’s mien changed when he saw not six scabs … but four.
‘You’ve lost them! God damn you, you’ve lost them!’ he roared at the frightened child. Violently, he whipped the boy’s arm towards him, careful not to dislodge the four remaining cultivars.
‘I should have known that entreating don’t work with nigger whelps. Now I gotta teach you!’
With that the man savagely scalpelled the scabs still intact on the boy’s arm, taking with them slivers of skin. The boy screamed with pain, until the physician cast him aside, throwing some bandaging linen after him. ‘Fix yourself up! I’ll need that arm again!’
‘Stop it! Stop it!’ Ellen shouted, running to the boy. ‘It’s horrible! All too horrible!’
She busied herself with bandaging the boy’s arm while Dr Licoix addressed the frightened children as a whole, admonishing them vehemently. ‘I’ve told you young niggers about fightin’ and roughhousin’… but you won’t listen! You just won’t listen!’
Ellen, when she had fixed the boy and comforted him, stood close now to Dr Licoix, holding the children’s arms. By assisting him, she could at least make sure he was careful.
On he worked, reaping his grim harvest, berating them, and piling his crusts, like poxed manna into the protective sanctuary of his tinfoiled chalice.
At length the reaper, his harvest gathered, nodded to Ellen that they were leaving. She had not the hypocrisy of heart to say anything to them. Only to get away from this place.
At the door Dr Licoix turned to face his ‘harvesters’. All hope in their faces dashed at what they knew was coming.
‘The crop was poor, the labourers found wanting. The Good Master rewards only those servants who are just and fruitful. Now do your dance!’ he ordered.
Ellen watched as the fearful children gathered in a circle. Slowly at first they began to move. Awkward in front of the white mistress who came with their captor. Then, grotesquely they began to bob and sway, making strange bird-like motions with their heads and arms.
‘It’s their smallpox dance,’ Dr Licoix explained. ‘They do it – all those itching and scratching motions to ward off the coming of the Smallpox God.’ He laughed. ‘That’s the little black savages for you.’
Ellen grabbed the door handle, flinging open her escape from this wretched place, and ran out. Behind her, Dr Licoix calmly locked the door on his unworthy servants, leaving them dancing to a more fearsome master still – the Smallpox God.
Outside, he released his grip on the crumbled chocolate he had held in his pocket. He had been tempted to throw them a fistful. But that would have rewarded their erroneous ways. And how would they ever learn if he displayed weakness through unearned kindness?
He mentally counted the smallpox crusts he had harvested from the eleven children in his ‘farm’. One hundred and thirty-two he should have had for a full crop. That Jason had cost him two. So too, that older, full-blooded girl with the blue-black skin. That girl would be trouble when she grew older still. Three of the younger girls had picked off a crust apiece. Scratching themselves, he guessed. Seven lost in all. One hundred and twenty-five he had left, at five dollars a piece from the Surgeon-General, because of the shortage.
One hand grasping the mahogany case with its valuable crop, and Ellen at a distance behind him, Dr Licoix jauntily made his way back to his house.
Feeling the stickiness in his other hand he removed it from his pocket. This damn weather … too hot by far. He examined his smudge-stained fingers and smiled. Then, as he went, he licked them clean, savouring the melted chocolate, well satisfied with the day’s pickings.
Ellen couldn’t wait to get away from the place, from him. He stopped by the rickety railing, hand outstretched, offering her a bruised piece of chocolate. Seemed unoffended when she refused.
‘Twenty dollars!’ he said.
She fumbled for the money and thrust it at him. He pocketed it away from the chocolate, opened his cache of crusts and singled out two for her. With what she had just witnessed, she hadn’t the heart to argue the price with him.
‘Mind it well, Madame Lavelle!’ he counselled. Then, nodding backwards towards the place from which they had come, added, ‘The supply is not inexhaustible.’
She snatched the life-saving hosts from him, wrapped them in her kerchief and ran down the road towards where Mary lay waiting.