American Struggle Read online

  “We’ll take care of it. And we’ll make sure the cellar is dry,” Rob said.

  Emma knew Rob didn’t want to go down into the cellar, just in case they had missed a snake when they were draining the place. He opened the outside door and then hesitated at the top of the stairs. Emma pushed by him with a lantern held high and descended the steps into the gloominess. A musty, rancid smell made her nose wrinkle. The dirt floor was still muddy, and puddles of water stood in every hollow. She looked around for snakes, but all she saw were spider webs hanging in the corners.

  “It’s still wet,” she said as she went back up the stairs. Rob nodded and went to tell the sisters.

  “We’ll keep the outside door open during daylight hours,” Miss Ruthann said. “A few days ought to dry it out. When does Dr. Drake say the cholera will come?”

  “He doesn’t know. He just says it will come.”

  On Sunday, the minister commented on the flurry in Cincinnati as townspeople cleaned up the garbage in the streets and aired out cellars.

  “But it isn’t enough for you good people to take care of your own. You must reach out to those less fortunate and help them. Down by the river is an area of filth that must be taken care of.”

  Emma knew where the pastor meant. She and Rob had passed near it when they went to the river to measure the depth, but both of their mothers had warned them to stay away from the squalor and degradation of that area. Now she was filled with curiosity.

  “Let’s go see for ourselves,” she whispered to Rob.

  Later that afternoon, the two children walked purposefully to the edge of what could only be described as a shantytown. Men sat outside small clustered shacks and drank liquor. Women cuddled up beside them. Dead animals rotted in the gutters. Garbage stank in the hot sun.

  “My mother would skin me alive if she knew I was down here,” Rob said.

  Emma nodded. “I just wanted to see what the preacher was talking about. This sure is a place where the invisible cholera insects could breed.”

  “It’s the stink that’s the worst,” Rob said. “Let’s get out of here.” The children quickly marked down their observations in their notebooks, then hurried back to Rob’s house.

  A few days later, Emma was back in town on market day. She was to deliver some fresh eggs to the Davis sisters, but she had walked by Rob’s house early that morning to accompany him to measure the river.

  “Let’s walk by the shantytown again,” she said. “There’s probably nobody there,” Rob said. “They’d be working today.”

  But they weren’t working. Even so early in the morning, groups of men, with a few women here and there, sat around on crates. The stench was as great as it had been on Sunday—maybe worse, as more fly-covered garbage had been added to the stinking piles around the shacks.

  “Why are they here?” Emma asked. “Maybe they don’t have jobs,” Rob said.

  “They could come to the country and farm. There’s land enough for everybody. Don’t they know that?”

  “Hey, whatcha got there?” a rough-looking man hollered. He staggered toward them so unsteady on his feet that Emma thought he must be sick.

  All Rob held was his pencil and the paper he made his daily observations on, and he quickly stuffed them in his pocket. Emma stuck the small basket of eggs for the Davis sisters behind her back.

  “Gimme those, girlie,” the ruffian demanded and grabbed Emma’s arm.

  She screamed and dropped the basket. Rob jumped on the man, but the burly fellow shook him off. With the basket in his grip, the man turned around, and Emma yelled, “Run!”

  With Rob close on her heels, she raced down the street away from the shantytown. She could still hear the awful man’s boisterous laughter follow them.

  They didn’t stop running until they were two streets away from the shantytown.

  “Are you all right?” Rob asked when he could catch his breath.

  “Yes, but Mama’s going to be mad about that basket. And what will I tell Miss Clara about her eggs?” She shook her head. “That thief got a bunch of broken eggs. I dropped that basket hard.”

  “You shouldn’t have gone over there again,” Rob said.

  “You shouldn’t have come with me if you thought it was such a bad idea.”

  “I couldn’t let you go alone. It wouldn’t be proper for a girl.”

  “A girl! I’m nearly a year older than you, Rob Etingoff, and I know how to take care of myself just as well as you do.”

  The argument would have continued because Emma was just warming up, but when they turned down another street, they saw a commotion a couple of blocks away. A crowd was gathering.

  “Smoke!” Rob yelled. Spirals of black curled toward the sky.

  “The hotel!” Emma shouted as they raced down the street.

  Men and women alike poured out of nearby buildings. Many carried buckets, and one man yelled above the roar of the crowd, “Form a line! Start a brigade!”

  Rob and Emma joined the ranks of townspeople who stretched in a line to the river. A couple of men filled buckets and handed them to the head of the line. At first, Rob had to carry the bucket twenty feet to Emma, but soon others filled in the gaps and the sloshing buckets changed hands quickly. Another line had formed to the closest brick cistern, but it soon ran out of water, and the line shifted to another cistern. The fire was raging. From her place in line, Emma could see flames on the roof and hear windows shattering from the heat.

  Emma’s shoes were wet. Her skirt was damp and stuck to her legs. But the cold river water that spilled on her felt good in the early August heat. She glanced at Rob, who was working as hard as she was, passing the full buckets toward the hotel and passing the empty buckets back toward the river. Farther down the line, she saw Papa and Uncle Anthony and the men from the shipyard all working as fast as they could to move the buckets along. The entire town had turned out to help put out the fire—but they didn’t seem to be making any headway. At least the wind wasn’t blowing. There was hardly a breeze. It hadn’t even moved Rob’s wind scale that morning when they’d recorded the reading.

  Within two hours, the hotel had burned to the ground. Thanks to the townspeople’s tenacity, the buildings around it hadn’t caught on fire. They had doused them with water once they saw there was no hope of saving the hotel. Now the lines disbanded and groups milled around while the charred remains of the building continued to smolder and send thin wisps of smoke heavenward.

  Emma and Rob hurried to join their fathers, who stood in a group with some other men.

  “We’ve got to do something about it,” Papa was saying. “We could patrol the areas at night, since most of the fires occur then. It’s odd someone could start this one without being seen, but from the way it went up, it had to have been set.”

  “Someone set the fire?” Rob asked.

  “It appears that way,” his father said. “It started at two different ends of the hotel. That’s mighty suspicious. Hard to believe that two accidental fires could start at about the same time in the same hotel.”

  “The sawmill went up the same way,” Papa said.

  “And that steamship,” another man added.

  “There’s definitely an arsonist on the loose,” Rob’s father said. “And now there’s one more area to clean up before the cholera comes.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Cholera!

  More fires were set through August, even though a volunteer group including Emma’s and Rob’s fathers patrolled the downtown area at night. Emma and Rob watched the elegant Pearl Street House burn to the ground, but they heard rumors that it would be rebuilt. Two more steamboats burned, and then it seemed the arsonist had done all the damage he wanted. By September, the volunteer arsonist control group disbanded without ever catching the arsonist, and the men were home again at night.

  Life settled into a new routine as school started the fall session. Mama had sprinkled chloride of lime in the yard, the cellar, and the outhouse as part of her c
leanup and as a possible deterrent to the cholera. Emma got the white powder on her shoes every morning when she walked out to the wagon to go school. Then she left footprints wherever she went.

  Of course, the stuff was spread in other places, too, since many townspeople thought it would keep them safe from the cholera. Emma saw a few areas where it was dumped on top of garbage instead of the garbage being taken to the middle of the river.

  Rob and Emma continued their practice of going to the river twice a day to measure the depth and record the air temperature, the cloud formations, and the wind direction. The skies had never been brighter nor the air as clean as on a late September afternoon after school when Emma and Rob stood on the wharf making notations.

  They watched a steamship approach and dock. There wasn’t the usual activity aboard. Something was odd. A man wearing a captain’s hat scurried off the boat and looked about in a frantic manner.

  “Hey, boy!” he called out.

  “Me?” Rob answered, pointing a thumb at his chest. The captain came quickly to his side and said in a quiet voice, “We need a doctor. Can you fetch one?” Emma gasped. “Is it the cholera?”

  The captain ignored her question. “Can you get a doctor?” he asked Rob.

  “Yes. I’ll be right back,” Rob said. Both children ran as fast as they could to Vine Street. “Dr. Drake, Dr. Drake!” Rob yelled the entire block before they reached the house.

  Dr. Drake met him on the porch.

  “Rob, what’s the matter? You could raise the dead with that kind of shouting.”

  Rob glanced first one direction, then the other. “I think the cholera is here,” he whispered. “A steamboat captain has asked for a doctor.”

  Dr. Drake turned white, then laid his hand over his heart. “God help us through the soul-trying days ahead. Take me to him. Then I want you to run as fast as you can away from there.”

  “But you said we couldn’t catch it from other people.”

  “That’s true. But we don’t know where the invisible insects may be.”

  When the children and the doctor got to the river, no one from the ship was on land. But as soon as they clomped onto the wooden wharf, the captain appeared on deck and disembarked again.

  “I’m Dr. Daniel Drake. What is it? The cholera?” the doctor asked without waiting for the captain to identify himself.

  “We need to bury three, and two more are ill.”

  “We are as ready as we’ll ever be,” Dr. Drake said with a sigh. “I have a pesthouse set up, and the red flag is ready. I’ll get a wagon.”

  The captain returned to the ship, and Dr. Drake looked off in the distance, then down at Emma and Rob.

  “Go. Go quickly. Now! Go!” With each word, his voice grew stronger, and the children turned and ran. Emma was sweating in the September sun, but at the same time she was shivering.

  When they were a block away, she tugged on Rob’s elbow and pulled him behind the corner of a building. “Let’s see what Dr. Drake does,” she whispered.

  They waited for Dr. Drake to return with a wagon. A few minutes later, Emma saw the victims being taken ashore and placed in the wagon. It rumbled off in the opposite direction from their hiding place. She didn’t know where the quarantine house was, but she’d heard talk that no one wanted it near them, so she suspected it was on the edge of town. Maybe it was even near her own house.

  Rob’s father would know. “Come on!” she hissed in Rob’s ear, and together they raced to the shipyard. When they saw Rob’s father, Rob didn’t yell his news this time. He whispered it in a voice that was filled with the fear.

  “Dr. Drake just took two people from a steamboat to the pesthouse. Three more are dead.”

  “The cholera?” His father’s voice was quiet.

  Rob nodded.

  “Go tell your mother, and stay at home the rest of today.” He turned to Emma. “You need to find your father and get on home.”

  “But what about the sweeping up?” Rob asked.

  “Go on home. Go!” Emma heard the same urgency in Uncle Anthony’s voice that had been in Dr. Drake’s.

  They started walking back to Rob’s house, but they had only gone a few yards when they both quickened their steps. Without a word between them, they were suddenly running. They rushed inside the house, and Rob slammed the door behind them.

  Sue Ellen poked her head from the kitchen doorway. “What’s wrong? You both look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “We’ve seen cholera,” Rob said.

  “Cholera?” Sue Ellen seemed to choke on the word. She turned back into the kitchen. “Mother …”

  “Where is it?” Rob’s mother demanded in a low voice as she walked toward Rob.

  “Brought in on a ship, just like Dr. Drake predicted. He’s taking two people to the pesthouse.”

  Rob’s mother sat down hard on a chair in the parlor. “We need to warn the others. Did you tell Father?”

  “Yes, he sent me home and said to stay here.”

  “All right. Get the lime and spread it in the yard and on the street in front of here. I’m going to tell the Davis sisters and warn the preacher. Emma, you stay here until your father gets back from the market.”

  Once his mother left, Rob got the bag of chloride of lime, and Emma helped him sprinkle it outside. Would it kill the invisible cholera insects? she wondered. Or would it keep the vapors that attracted the insects from forming? Dr. Drake had mentioned that atmospheric conditions affected the spread of cholera. But it was a beautiful Indian summer day outside. How could there be any disease in this clear air?

  “I’m scared,” Sue Ellen said when they went back inside. “What do we do? Can we go to school tomorrow?” “I don’t know,” Rob replied.

  At supper, Papa prayed for the safety of Cincinnati, then shared his news from the quarantined house.

  “Dr. Drake has treated everyone on board the steamship with calomel, and the ship has anchored near the Kentucky side of the river. The dead have already been buried and all their belongings burned.”

  “What’s calomel?” Emma asked.

  “A laxative. It makes you go to the bathroom,” Papa explained. Emma made a face.

  “Dr. Drake says the disease feels like poisoning,” he continued. “A person’s insides hurt something fierce.”

  “Can we go to school tomorrow?” Emma asked.

  Mama and Papa exchanged a glance, and then Mama said, “We are not going to panic about this. Perhaps Dr. Drake can isolate the cases and it won’t spread. You can go to school, and we’ll wait and see what happens.”

  “It’s not contagious,” Emma said. “It can’t be spread from one person to the next. Dr. Drake is certain of that.”

  “It seems awfully strange to me,” Mother said. “I don’t understand how invisible insects can cause it. Wouldn’t the insects be carried by one person to the next? Isn’t that what contagious means? Like smallpox?”

  Emma wasn’t sure herself, but she had heard Dr. Drake speak to this question many times, and she quoted his words. “Once you get smallpox, you can’t get it again. But you can catch cholera over and over.”

  “Then why have the pesthouse?” Mama asked.

  Papa answered that one. “It’s so the townspeople won’t panic. So that they feel there is something being done. Dr. Drake had a hard time finding a building, and the one he got is run-down. But it will serve the purpose.”

  “Where is it?” Emma asked.

  “On a side road, just outside of town.”

  On Sunday, the preacher led the congregation in prayer and then preached about the cholera as a divine imposition.

  “This plague is a punishment from God’s own hand,” he boomed. “It is a scourge to the thoughtless and immoral among us. Those who have weakened themselves by intemperance and living in filth have called this punishment on themselves.

  “There have been four deaths in the squalor down by the river,” he announced, and the congregation gave a collective gasp.
r />   Emma caught Rob’s eye. “We need to talk to Dr. Drake,” she whispered. Her parents usually ate Sunday dinner with the Etingoffs. After she and Rob recorded their daily observations, they could walk over to the doctor’s house.

  “We will observe our own day for prayer and fasting since President Jackson will not declare one for the nation,” the preacher continued. “On Wednesday our congregation will lead the way by fasting and praying to avert the cholera.”

  Over Sunday dinner, Sue Ellen asked why the president wouldn’t help the nation get over the cholera.

  “That’s not exactly what the preacher meant,” her father said. “President Jackson wouldn’t declare a day of prayer because he thought that decision should be left to churches. Our country was founded on religious freedom, and I believe the president was right in keeping government and churches separate. We don’t want another church’s beliefs forced on us. We won’t tell other churches when to have a day of prayer, and they sure can’t tell us.”

  Discussion followed about the cholera and what could be done about it. After his second piece of blackberry cobbler, Rob pushed his chair back and said they were going to record the observations.

  “You don’t need to go to the river,” his mother said. “I thought Dr. Drake wanted your observation reports as something to do with the cholera coming. Well, it’s come.” She sounded angry, as if the reports were supposed to stop the cholera, and they hadn’t.

  “Father?” Rob appealed to his other parent. “I won’t go near Shantytown. I promise.”

  His father looked at his mother, while Emma’s parents looked at each other. Emma could read their answer on their faces. “I don’t think you need to measure the river today.” Mama’s voice told Emma there was no point arguing.

  “However,” Rob’s father said, “I’ll go with you if you want to talk to Dr. Drake.”

  How had he known what they wanted to do? Their wonder must have shown on their faces, because Uncle Anthony said with a grin, “I want to talk to him myself.”

  “And so do I,” Papa said.