“Dr. Birdsong?”
“Yes’m. That’s her doctor. The children’s doctor, too. Mine, too, do I need him. The whole family, but he’s been her friend forever. They go so far back, they might’ve been in diapers together.” Analee chuckled as she changed out yet another round of cloths. “He don’t live too far. Office is in the house. I can tell you how to go, if we see we need him. He’d be here in the pitch-dark night, should we send for him.”
Alice had grown accustomed to feeling a bit confident. Her skills had given her a foundation here, but now she felt only her inexperience. She glanced at Analee and saw compassion in her expression.
“Why don’t you fetch some fresh cold water, Miss Alice? I got this.”
CHAPTER 43
Constance’s face remained flushed. Her body shivered in what Analee called a fever-frost, no matter the blankets and quilts the two women laid over her. In those shivers, Constance moaned, seemingly unwilling to move her head because of the pain that extended through her neck and down her back. It seemed to Alice and Analee that the pain was all over Constance’s body. Just the readjustment of the covers or an adjustment to arrange the pillow under her neck for a bit more support elicited groans, at times an outcry, which made Alice cringe. The girls were still asleep, so Alice was the one who wet the cloths and wrung them out for Analee as she applied them to Constance’s face and neck.
Alice had seen influenza in her father once. She remembered her mother’s gentle, unceasing ministrations. Her mother had sat beside the bed all day, leaving only for brief trips to the outhouse, then again all night, sleeping in that straight-backed chair to wake at her husband’s slightest movement, to swaddle his burning head in cold cloths. It had been Alice’s job, then, like it was now, to keep fresh cold water available for the change out of the cloths. She had stayed by her mother except for her own trips to the outhouse, when she had breathed in the clean fresh air of the outdoors before opening the creaking wooden door to the fetid air inside, and then had primed the pump and hauled the pail of fresh water to her father’s bedside. She could hear the clang of it hitting the planks of the flooring, her mother shushing her as the water sloshed over the edge. Now she was in the sophisticated city of New Orleans, an adult, a skilled and talented woman, but she felt just as helpless now as she had out there on the prairie as a child.
“What do you suppose is the matter, Analee? You think this is the flu?”
Alice tucked the blankets a bit tighter around Constance’s shivering form. She touched her flushed cheeks again. So hot, so hot. People weren’t supposed to get that hot. Yet Constance shivered with cold. Analee lifted the folded cloth from Constance’s forehead, replaced it with a fresh one from Alice.
“Don’t rightly know, Miss Alice. Looks to be, but if it is, it’s fierce.” Analee changed another warm, damp cloth.
Alice made up her mind. This could not continue. “I’m going for Dr. Birdsong, Analee. It’s time.”
Analee touched her arm reassuringly.
“Thank you, Analee.” Alice turned away from the bed. “Should I get the girls up and fed before I go? You won’t be able to go downstairs to feed them if they wake and come in.”
“They’ll be all right, Miss Alice. I’ll just put them to work fetching water. They ain’t generally too hungry right away. You won’t be long, and best to get him fore he got a office full of folks.”
Alice nodded. She was disconcerted at having to leave, having to negotiate the streets of the Marigny, though they were not difficult, but she always became uneasy when she needed to remember the number of blocks before turning right, and which names of which streets came in what order. The same had been true in Chicago; she had always been on edge that she would wind up in some unfamiliar, possibly dangerous, neighborhood. The closed, organized blocks of that city seemed so systematic and easy, since they were in numerical order or followed the alphabet, so one always knew the distance and direction to the state line, for example. Why that had been important eluded her. She had learned the system yet had never quite trusted herself in a place where all you could see was the next building, next corner, and never the wide horizons far from you, the wide sky, which could orient you, make you sure of the direction you were headed. In the city she felt closed in, as one street followed the next, every turn determined by how the street was laid out, how tall the buildings were, how wide the lots. But it was the sky she missed most of all, that immense sky, which somehow grounded her, made her feel that she belonged to the earth.
For that reason, she had welcomed her few trips to the wharves here. In spite of their crowded clutter and incessant noise—the cries and commands of the longshoremen and supervisors, the bone-clenching slam of lumber and uncut sections of tree trunk, the repeating heavy thud of cotton bales, the banging of chains and boats—yes, in spite of the din, there was the sky, the sky opening out above and past that great river, past its prison of buildings and trees. The sky, no matter what color it was, no matter if it was clear or cloudy, that same sky gave her a sense of belonging to the earth.
Constance gave a small cry as Analee adjusted the damp pillow again, and Alice pulled herself back into the enclosed air of the room.
“All right. Just tell me clearly how to go.”
“You just take a right out the front gate. Go three blocks and then left. Two more blocks and it’ll be on the left. You don’t need no number. Sign at the gate say Martin D. Birdsong, Doctor of Medicine. Plain as day. You got that?”
Alice nodded and backed away from the bed. She handed Analee one last cool cloth as she repeated in her head, Right three blocks, left two blocks, like a child memorizing a nursery rhyme.
In truth, Alice had no difficulty finding Dr. Birdsong. At her knock, he answered the door himself, it being early and there being no patients yet. Before she had time to explain, this dark-haired, clean-shaven man had his bag in hand and was leading her down the front steps, then holding the gate for her. His pace was such that Alice had difficulty keeping up and answered his quickly appraising questions somewhat out of breath, but he did not slow his steps to accommodate her. By the time they had reached the house, he had pulled every detail she knew from her and had left the ones she did not tucked carefully beside the ones she did. At the gate he waited only momentarily for Alice to come through. Then Alice watched in astonishment as he simply opened the front door as if the house were his own, and mounted the stairs two at a time. As if he simply belongs here, she thought.
Alice followed more slowly, lifting her skirt with one hand to assure a firm footing, gripping the rail with the other. She could not afford another fall. She would not chance it. This child she carried was all in life that was truly hers. She had experienced the dire unpredictability of a life broken and unspooling.