Crossing Point by James Glickman

Author:James Glickman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2017-10-17T22:07:14+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

Sam awoke with a sour, rusty taste in his mouth. His gums were bleeding again. The giant spider-shaped brown blotch on the ceiling over his head had not changed. His bed was stacked on top of two others like bunks in a ship’s hold so his face was inches away. He put his hands behind his head and stared. He tried to think of Phebe, but her face would not come clear. He could tell dawn was nearing. There were some things he had gotten used to with the thirty-six officers jammed into a small room—the smell of shit and piss and unwashed bodies, the loss of freedom to do anything except when the guards said they could. And there was one principle thing he had not gotten used to: the complete and fundamental uncertainty.

The simple uncertainty of everyday life was true everywhere, but it got magnified here. Within days of their imprisonment, a deadly smallpox epidemic broke out. Dearborn talked Sam into writing up a petition asking to be inoculated. Dearborn said that seven or eight times as many people died who got the disease the natural way, and in their closed quarters the disease would go through them like a fire through dry straw. A local physician came in, made a small incision between Sam’s index finger and thumb, and carefully introduced some yellowish variloid matter from a smallpox pustule. An assistant tied Sam’s hand with a clean strip of cloth and the doctor went on to the next man.

Sam was permitted to stay with the others just long enough to witness from his barred window the solemn funeral for General Montgomery. They had already seen sleds and carioles pass up their snow-covered street loaded with bodies, American soldiers tossed like cordwood to be taken to the Dead House. The Dead House was where their frozen, uncoffined corpses would be kept until the Canadian ground thawed enough for them to be put in the earth. It was a scene Sam found difficult to forget: the men still in their uniforms, heaped together and frozen in the position they assumed in their death throes. When he saw Tom Shepherd pass, still clutching his belly, his gray face a fixed and frozen mask of pain, he could not look any more.

The next day he and twenty other inoculated men were moved to remote quarters to await their fate. One of their waiters, a boy from Maine, a private who was chosen to serve the officers, reported not feeling well. The next day, his face ballooned to twice its normal size and he was covered with great red pox that seemed, almost as they watched, to grow into a single swelling. Soon delirious with fever, he called plaintively for his “mothah” in a northern country accent. They carried him to the hospital in his pus-stained sheets. A day later he was dead. By nightfall, they all had raging sore throats, fevers, aching joints, and skin that was sore to the lightest touch.

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