American Struggle Read online

  “Leave it alone!” Emma yelled.

  “What’s wrong?” Miss Ruthann called from upstairs as Rob banged through the door.

  “A snake!” Miss Clara screamed.

  “It’s not poisonous,” Emma said. “It’s a harmless water snake.” She poked the end of a broom into the cupboard where the snake was hiding. “Maybe I can get it outside.”

  “Kill it, Rob!” Miss Clara squealed.

  “It isn’t hurting anything,” Emma said. “I’ll get it out. Do you have a bag we can put it in? I’ll take it to the river.”

  “Kill it!” Miss Clara demanded in a stronger voice.

  “There’s no need to kill anything,” Miss Ruthann declared, standing in the kitchen doorway. “That’s an innocent snake.”

  “If I had a flour sack, I could put the snake inside and take it to the river,” Emma said over her shoulder. She had not taken her eyes off the snake, which had now coiled around the broom handle.

  “There’s one in this cupboard,” Miss Ruthann said. She made her way to another cupboard and tried to open the door. “It’s swollen shut. Rob? Can you open it?”

  Rob pried the door open and took out a soggy, stinky bag. He held the sides out so that Emma could stick the end of the broom handle in it and force the snake off. His face was white, and Emma gave him a tiny grin. She might be a girl, but at least she wasn’t afraid of something as harmless as a snake.

  Once the snake dropped into the bag, Rob twisted the top, and Miss Ruthann handed him a piece of twine she had gotten from the cupboard. Rob took the snake bag out the back door and laid it on the step. “All right,” he said to Emma when he came back in, “you can take it to the river when we leave.”

  “Why don’t you clean up that stove so we can have a fire?” Miss Ruthann was obviously used to being in charge. “Heat would help dry this place out. What about the fireplace in the parlor, Rob? Can you build a fire in there yet?”

  “I’ll get right to it.” Rob hurried out to the new woodpile, and after a moment, Emma followed him. They picked up armfuls of wood and some lighter twigs for kindling. Rob’s father had brought wood yesterday, and other members of their church congregation had also brought firewood to replenish the Davis sisters’ supply.

  Emma spent a few minutes wiping off the hearth and the wooden mantel before Rob started a fire. Soon the snap and crackle of little twigs told them the fire was burning, but it took some time and a lot of smoke up the chimney before some of the larger, damp pieces of wood caught fire.

  Emma had turned to go back to the kitchen when she heard Rob let out a startled screech.

  “What is it now?” Emma asked him.

  “Two more,” he choked out.

  “Two more what?” She followed the direction of his horrified gaze and saw two curled S-shapes twined around each other in the corner. “Oh, snakes. They must have been on the smoke shelf in the chimney.”

  “I’ll get the sack,” Rob offered and ran from the room.

  “What is it?” Miss Clara appeared in the doorway.

  “Another snake,” Emma said, feeling it was better to tell a half-truth than mention that there were two. “It was in the chimney,” she added quickly. “They go for closed-in spaces, so I’m sure that’s the last one.”

  Miss Clara’s eyes got bigger.

  “We’ll look in all the small areas as soon as we get these out,” Emma assured her.

  Miss Clara glanced nervously around the room and hurried upstairs.

  Rob came back into the parlor, holding the snake bag gingerly at arm’s length. He watched as Emma expertly poked at one snake until it wrapped around the broom handle.

  “How do you know how to do that?” he asked.

  “We have snakes at the creek. They’re sluggish this time of year, or they’d probably be slithering all over this place instead of staying in the corner.”

  “Why aren’t you afraid of them like most girls?” Rob asked.

  “They’re just animals, like rabbits or dogs,” she said in a low voice, thinking of the secret she had never shared with anyone.

  Before he untied the twine, Rob shook the snake down to the bottom of the flour sack and then held it open so Emma could drop the second snake inside. He repeated the same procedure for the third snake, then quickly retied the twine.

  “I told Miss Clara we’d look in other tight places for any other snakes,” Emma told him.

  She was glad they’d carried so much furniture upstairs, but there was still a buffet in the dining room. Gingerly, Rob and Emma looked through the filthy tablecloths and doilies that were stored there, but they found no other snakes.

  “These linens need to be washed, and we need to carry this buffet outside so it can dry in the sun,” Emma said.

  With Miss Clara’s help, they wrestled the thing between them and got it out in the backyard. Miss Ruthann came down and said she’d stir the linen in the washtub if Rob would draw water from the well. He lowered the bucket and pulled it up. The water was a little murky, but Miss Ruthann decided it was fine for the laundry.

  By lunchtime, Rob and Emma had hung out the washing, started a fire in the cookstove, and finished shoveling out the parlor. As soon as the group had eaten their bowls of soup upstairs in the bedroom, Rob and Emma returned downstairs to work while the sisters took a brief rest.

  “We always lie down after lunch,” Miss Clara said. “At our age, it’s necessary.”

  Emma had never thought about needing a nap, but she thought she could use a little shut-eye herself after putting in a hard morning’s work. She wanted to go to sleep and forget the flood had ever happened. If she could close her eyes, maybe the sludge that covered the floors, the streets, and the yards would disappear. She just wanted life to return to normal so she and Rob could go back to school. With a sigh, she pulled her thoughts back to the snakes.

  “What about the cellar?” she asked Rob. “There are apt to be snakes hiding down there.”

  “I think that’s the door over there.” Rob pointed to a narrow door near the stove.

  Emma opened the door and looked down into the darkness below. “We’ll need a lamp,” she said.

  Rob lit a lamp and carried it to the head of the narrow stairs, but it did little to illuminate the cellar’s blackness. One step down, two, then three. On the fourth one, she saw him step into water. He backed up one step and stooped down, holding the lamp in front of him.

  “There’s something in the water.” His voice sounded thin and shaky.

  Emma squeezed close beside him. Circles in the water showed that something had surfaced then submerged again. “More snakes?” she asked.

  “I think so.” He held the lamp out as far as his arm would reach, and Emma saw a snake’s head, its two eyes yellow in the lamplight. Rob’s hand shook so hard he almost dropped the lamp. He grabbed it with his free hand and would have lost his balance if Emma hadn’t pulled him back.

  “Let’s close this door.” She didn’t mind snakes in the daylight, but down here in the darkness, even she felt a little spooked.

  They lost no time climbing back up the few steps to the kitchen, and Rob shut the cellar door.

  “You can’t catch that one with the broomstick, can you?”

  “No, and that gap’s big enough for a snake to come right through,” Emma said, “but I think they’ll stay down there. They’ll be afraid of the light and noise up here.”

  Just the same, though, Emma grabbed the rag Miss Clara had used to clean the stove and stuffed it at the bottom of the door.

  “We can’t tell the sisters,” Rob said. “They’ve been living with snakes here all this time. There’s nothing we can do, except scare them.”

  “Or at least scare Miss Clara,” Emma said. “Miss Ruthann seems able to stand anything.” Miss Clara was certainly the stronger-bodied of the two, but Miss Ruthann was stronger when it came to taking things in stride.

  “This room is looking good,” Rob said glancing around the kitchen. �
�I’ll get back to the dining room.”

  Emma went back to scrubbing the walls and cupboards with lye soap. At least the soap’s strong smell drowned the mud’s rotten smell.

  By late afternoon, Rob and Emma had put in a full day’s work. Miss Clara had come back downstairs, but her sister stayed upstairs.

  “What a difference this day has made,” she said. “We can cook supper down here. I can bake bread tomorrow.”

  “Except Mother told me to ask you to Sunday dinner,” Rob said. “And she said she won’t take excuses. She said that it was time you two got out of this house, and Father will pick you up at the usual time for church.”

  “Then we’ll be waiting for him,” Miss Clara said with a laugh. “I’ll bake bread on Monday. You’ll be back then, won’t you, Rob?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “You, too, Emma?” “I’ll ask Mama.”

  Miss Clara thanked them for their help and reminded them to take the snake bag off the back porch.

  Rob stuck the bag in one of the water pails, and he and Emma carried it to the river, just a few blocks away. Emma carefully untied the sack, then shook it upside down. The snakes plopped into the water. She watched them swim away.

  “If you hadn’t been there today, I would have killed them,” Rob said.

  “Then I’m glad I was there,” Emma said, “although I’m tired and ready to go back to the farm. Cleaning up after this flood is hard work.” But she knew there was other work waiting for her at the farm, her own secret chores that no one else knew she did.

  They started back toward Rob’s house, again dodging huge piles of sludge.

  “Look around,” Emma said. “This will take years to clean up. Where are they going to put all this stinky stuff? They can’t leave it here on the streets.”

  “Father’s going to a meeting about it tonight at Dr. Drake’s house,” Rob said. “They’ll decide how to get rid of it.”

  “Still, it’ll take years,” Emma said. “How can you stand living here in all this?”

  Rob opened his mouth as though he was going to argue with her, but then he just sighed and closed it again. Emma felt a little guilty for picking a fight with him when he was so tired. Sometimes, though, she couldn’t seem to keep her mouth from saying pointy, little comments she knew irritated him.

  “Father and Dr. Drake will know what to do,” was all he said this time. “It’ll get better.”

  But the next time Emma hitched a ride to Rob’s house, she learned that it could get worse.

  “Dr. Drake says cholera is in England,” Rob told her. “It will reach the East Coast this summer. He’s sure of it. And he says it’s just a matter of time before it will come here.”

  “What’s cholera?” Emma asked.

  “It’s a disease that can kill people in hours. Dr. Drake says someone can get it in the morning and be dead by night.” Rob’s voice sounded even more scared than it had when he saw the snakes. “And Dr. Drake says it’s coming here. He doesn’t know when, but it’s coming here.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Rob’s Opportunity

  On Sunday morning, Emma went in the wagon with her family to church. She hadn’t told anyone about the snake in the cellar, and the omission weighed on her. She’d even lied when she told Miss Clara there was one snake in the chimney when there were two.

  It didn’t help her conscience any that the sermon was about the Ten Commandments. It seemed to Emma that the preacher shouted extra loud when he got to the commandment about lying. Emma squirmed on the hard bench and looked down at the floor.

  “If we all lived by the Golden Rule, we would have no quarrel with our neighbor,” Preacher Wood said. “We would have no problems in Cincinnati over the flood cleanup. Everyone would help his neighbor in the same way that he would want to be helped if his own house had flooded. We all use the streets. Shouldn’t we all help clean them up? We should help our neighbors; we should help our friends; we should help our enemies.”

  While the preacher talked about enemies for a while, Emma didn’t listen. She turned her thoughts back to the Golden Rule. She was helping Rob with the cleanup work. Of course, Mama and Papa had told her to do it, but she was willingly helping, at least most of the time. Did that make up for the lying? If she were living in a house that had a snake in the cellar, would she want to know?

  She finally decided that if there was nothing she could do about it until the water went down, she wouldn’t want to worry about it. And the Davis sisters would worry if they knew, especially Miss Clara. Miss Clara was more afraid of snakes than Rob was. Was it really lying if she was hiding the truth for someone’s own good?

  But Miss Ruthann wasn’t all that scared, Emma mused. Maybe she should confess to her, and Miss Ruthann could decide whether to tell Miss Clara or not.

  Her attention returned to the preacher when she heard a collective murmur from the congregation, like the wind moving through the trees before a storm.

  “Dr. Daniel Drake has told me that cholera breeds in filthy places,” Preacher Wood was saying, “and our recently flooded areas are perfect places for it. He urges everyone to dispose of the sludge in the middle of the river. If it’s dumped at the edge, it could wash back up on the banks.” The preacher leaned forward over the pulpit and looked sternly at his congregation. “If we obey the Golden Rule, we’ll all help each other get Cincinnati back to normal and lessen the effect cholera has on our town.”

  After the sermon, church members buzzed with talk of cholera. Emma heard one man say that cholera could kill someone in a matter of minutes. Surely that wasn’t so.

  As promised, the Davis sisters joined Rob’s family for Sunday dinner, and so did Emma’s family. Talk centered on the cleanup and the cholera epidemic in Europe. After dinner, Emma had a chance to speak with Miss Ruthann alone. She helped her to the parlor and made sure the others were still occupied in the other room. Then she confessed what she and Rob had found. Miss Ruthann listened to what she said, and then she stared at Emma a moment before she spoke.

  “Well, Emma, Clara didn’t ask you directly if there were any more snakes, so I reckon you did the right thing in not volunteering the information. But you also did the right thing in telling me. Now I can be on the lookout but not let on to Clara.”

  A load lifted off Emma’s shoulders just as if someone had lifted a ten-pound harness off her.

  Miss Ruthann smiled at her. “You’ve sure been good help to us with this flood. I knew it was going to be a big one.”

  While the adults talked, Emma and Rob sat on the porch and read some magazines Dr. Drake had left. Rob’s father and Dr. Drake had been friends since they were boys. Uncle Anthony had told the children about the winter of the earthquakes and how Dr. Drake had shown him how to set up pendulums so he’d know when an earthquake was coming, although most of them came in the night when he wasn’t near his pendulums. Dr. Drake was always doing experiments.

  Now Emma and Rob looked at the medical magazines that were full of news from Europe about the cholera epidemic. Different doctors wrote about their views on how the disease spread. “You’ll have to ask Dr. Drake what he thinks,” Emma said. “I can’t understand all these technical words.”

  “I think I get the gist of it,” Rob said soberly. “But I’d like to talk to Dr. Drake.”

  It was several days before they had an opportunity to see Dr. Drake. First, they had to check on the Davises. When they looked at the cellar, the water had only gone down a foot.

  Rob’s and Emma’s mothers joined the discussion at the cellar door. Aunt Patricia knew what to do. “We’ll never get this place smelling better if we don’t get rid of that water and all those rotting vegetables down there. Rob, take a pail to the outside cellar door and dip that water out. The place won’t dry if we don’t. And according to what Dr. Drake told Father, that’s where cholera can breed.”

  That word brought fear to Emma’s heart. She didn’t know how people caught the disease. The articles in Dr. Drake’s
magazines had said it was not contagious, so it couldn’t spread from one person to the next. So how could they know it was coming to Cincinnati if it wasn’t carried by someone? It didn’t make sense.

  “Should we dump the water in the backyard?” Rob asked.

  Emma didn’t see how it could hurt. They still had mounds of sludge everywhere. Uncle Anthony had said that as soon as he finished at the shipyard, he’d bring the wagon and some men over. Then they’d take that stuff to the middle of the river like Dr. Drake suggested.

  “Just dump it away from the house,” Mama said.

  Emma carried a bucket outside, and Rob lifted the heavy cellar door and propped it open. Water reached to the top step, so Rob stood in the yard and dipped his pail in. He handed it to Emma, and she emptied it a few yards away where the sun had dried out the mud, while Rob filled the second bucket.

  “Watch for that snake,” Emma warned him.

  “I am.”

  After a while they traded positions, and Emma dipped and Rob carried the water off to empty it. The cellar wasn’t a large area—maybe six feet long by four feet wide—but it held a lot of water. After an hour of dipping, they had only lowered the water by half, and the backyard was looking as if it had been flooded again.

  “Maybe we ought to let the water sink into the ground before we do any more of this,” Emma said, and Rob agreed.

  “You two have been working hard,” Aunt Patricia said when she checked on them. “We’re going to wash curtains. Would you two take those magazines back to Dr. Drake? I said I’d take them today before we went back home.”

  Rob took the magazines from the mantel where his mother had put them out of harm’s way, and he and Emma fairly skipped out the front door, relieved to be released from the cleanup work.

  It wasn’t far from Plum Street to Dr. Drake’s house on Vine, and they found him on the front porch as he was about to leave to check on some patients.

  Rob handed the magazines to Dr. Drake. “Father says thank you for letting him read them.”

  “What did he think?” Dr. Drake asked.

  “He said we should all be working together to clean up the flood areas before the cholera gets here.” Rob hesitated and then asked the question he and Emma had been discussing the last few days, “Can cholera really kill a person in a few minutes? I didn’t read that anywhere in there, but I heard a man say it at church.”