The Whipping Boy by Speer Morgan Page A

concussion,” the doctor said quietly. He sat there a while nursing his pipe, looking out into the night, the SMALL POX sign waving slightly in the breeze above his head. “Can she stand up?”
    â€œNot on her own.”
    The doctor shook his head. “I don’t know what to tell you. I can’t see her. I’ve got eleven people packed in Vaseline in here.”
    â€œI’ve heard there’s a lying-in hospital on Seventh Street.”
    Eldon hesitated. “Yep. That’s Doc Finch. He’ll be about all you’ll find tonight. I’ve had people by here every few minutes. Doctors will be out all over town.”
    â€œSo you reckon that’s the place to go?”
    Eldon again hesitated, and gave a little shrug. “Well, he’ll be there, anyway.”
    With that precarious recommendation, on they went to Seventh Street, where Jake asked the porter to wait while they took the woman inside, with hopes of leaving her.
    Finch’s “hospital” was as busy as Muskogee on a Saturday night. A trail of blood led to a partly shut door, behind which someone was yelling, “Ashes, linen! Hurry up!” Jake learned from others in the waiting room that the doctor was trying to stop the bleeding of a boy who had chopped a hunk out of his ankle.
    Around the room were several kids, some wailing, with mothers trying to calm and shush them. A couple of fathers sat on the back bench, stiff and sleepy, faces emptied of all expression. Jake wondered, as he often had, what it was like to be perpetually tormented by sick and dying children, having to bring them to these carbolic- and liniment-reeking rooms, and so often having to bury them. He’d never had a wife, partly for that reason. To have a family was to sign up for the army of illness and death.
    Tom Freshour sat straight-backed but sleepy on a bench with the woman listing against him, her eyes closed. Even with her leaning on him and his own eyes almost shut, the boy still sat up straight.
    The chief nurse was an angry-faced woman who regarded the three of them with icy displeasure, and her scowl worsened when Jake admitted they didn’t know the injured woman’s name. A fat, full-bearded man careened into the waiting room and glanced around with a wild glint to his eye. His nose was livid, and he smelled and looked like a back-alley drunkard. He was the doctor, it turned out. He took a couple more children by the arms and dragged them into the back room. The chief nurse remained behind her desk, surveying people in the room with disapproval. Two other nurses scuttled here and there, doing the work of the place.
    Jake regretted even coming here. The woman would get better medical care under a railroad trestle than in this sawbones’ joint. By now he was so tired that he could have walked out the door and gone to sleep in a mud puddle in the yard. For a while he stood there looking at the boy, who gazed in sleepy bewilderment at him. Jake let out a big sigh. “Come on. We can’t leave her in this place.”
    ***
    Mrs. Peltier was as decent and kind a landlady as ever lived—as long as her rules weren’t broken. Jake had lived at her Bachelors’ House for thirteen years and was not shy about knocking on her door in the middle of the night. She woke up and attended to the woman without complaint, taking her into the spare bed in her own parlor.
    Jake and the boy sat in exhausted silence at the little table in Mrs. Peltier’s kitchen. They shared a loaf of bread, a couple of apples, and bottles of strawberry-flavored soda water from the icebox. After watching Jake, Tom eventually reached for the bright red soda. He drank it, looked at it in sleepy amazement, and wolfed down some bread.
    â€œWhat will happen to her, Mr. Jaycox?” he asked, blinking his eyes slowly.
    Jake shook his head. “I never heard of anybody killed by an accounts book before, but you never can say for