Page 86 - Fever 1793

cheek. Stay inside, Nathaniel, I thought. Stop tossing flowers out the window at passing girls and stay inside where you are safe.
I smelled the cloth, but found no trace of Mother. Where was she? Was she alive? I had so much to tell her, so much to talk about. I would have traded anything to hear her swift footsteps across the floor. I laid my head on the kitchen table.
As soon as I fell asleep, Eliza nudged my shoulder. “Wake up,” she said.
I sprang to my feet and followed her into the front room. “How are they?” I asked.
Eliza opened Robert’s eyelids and then Williams. Their eyes were bloodshot and yellow-stained. “They are full of the pestilence,” she said grimly. “Nell seems to be faring better, but there is no
question she has it too.” She pressed her lips together to hold back the tears.
“It will be fine, Eliza. Think of all the people we’ve cared for. I survived this, Joseph survived, and
so did thousands of others. We can do this. I know exactly what you’re going to tell me to do. Stoke the fire and prepare to wash more dirty sheets.”
Caring for the children was harder than caring for any other patients we had visited. Just as Robert fell asleep, William would wake crying. As soon as he was made comfortable enough to drift off, Robert would stiffen and jolt awake with a piercing scream. Nell didn’t recognize me. She woke from terrible dreams and looked around the room blindly, crying for her mother.
Night melted into day. Day surrendered to night. The small bodies gave off heat like an iron stove no matter what we used to bring down the fever. I hauled up bucket after bucket of cold well water until the rope blistered my hands and the blisters burst and bled. The floor beneath the mattress was a pool of water. We used up all the linens in the house, which I rinsed in vinegar and hung outside to dry.
Eliza fashioned a fan that kept the bugs off the children and cooled them a bit, but it was so large and heavy that we could only wave it for a few minutes at a time. But as soon as we lay the fan down, they would whimper and cry.
The food Mother Smith had hastily packed soon ran low, along with the cask of vinegar that Eliza had brought with us. I kept one eye on the window, watching for a Society member carrying bread or dried meat for them. Eliza was more concerned about the dwindling supply of medicines, the mercury and calomel. She dosed the boys regularly and gently to purge the putrid bile from their bodies, but it seemed to have little effect. The twins cried in pain, in confusion, in terror. It was impossible to give Nell any medicine. We tried forcing it down her mouth, but it came right back up at us. It was all we could do to keep water in her stomach.
On the fourth day—no, it must have been the fifth—an ominous silence pressed in on the room as the fever penetrated deeper. The boys turned frail, their skin ashen and their cheeks sinking, as their bodies burned up under the infection. They didn’t have the strength to suck their thumbs. Eliza moved William closer to Robert so they could draw some comfort from each other. Nell lay on her back, her breath coming in shallow pants.
I set the fan on the floor. I had lost track of when I last ate or slept. Eliza picked it up and waved it over the tiny bodies until her arms shook with the effort. She set the fan on the foot of the mattress.
“I think we should find a doctor,” Eliza said. “They should be bled.”
“No, Eliza, don’t bleed them. It will kill them for sure. It won’t work.”
“I don’t like the thought of cutting them either, but it may be our only hope. Dr. Rush recommends it; he
was bled himself when he was ill.”
“But the French doctors say bleeding kills people. Think of all the patients you’ve seen who died after
the doctors bled them. They didn’t bleed me and I’m alive. Don’t do it, Eliza.”
Eliza stared into the light of the sputtering candle. “They took twenty ounces of blood from Joseph,
and he will live for years.”
“If Joseph is alive, it is in spite of the bleeding, not because of it.” I grabbed Eliza’s hands. “Think of