Later Ella realized, blearily from her comer, that Charles was feeding something other than coal into the furnace. He was stuffing in her clothes and hats, in case some trace of sickness clung to them. There would be nothing left of her. Her body would melt away in a lye-covered layer of a mass grave. There would be no stone with her name on it, there would be no ceremony. Funerals, like all public gatherings, were forbidden, illegal on order of the mayor. Not that any but the very rich could afford coffins — the few that could be found cost as much as Model Ts.
She noticed a darting movement in the shadow between the arc lights. A rat. It approached in tentative sets of steps. She wanted to scream but couldn’t get enough air into or out of her lungs. She tried to unroll herself from the constricting linen, desperate to free her arms, to ward off this creature that, like her employers, couldn’t even wait till she was dead. The rat turned, its ears angling toward the sound of metal wheels, the clomp of horseshoes on cobbles. Then it dashed back into the shadows.
The death wagon had turned onto her street.
Ella knew, from nights watching through the attic window, that two men in rubber boots would climb from the wagon’s benchlike seat. As their horses stomped and fussed, they’d bend over her. From above, she’d look like a rolled carpet or bundle of bedding. Each would pick up one end, then they’d stagger to the open back of the wagon. With a practiced swing or two, they’d hoist her onto the stack. Men had been doing this since the Middle Ages.
And how was 1918 different from 1318? People were dragged away to prison for speaking against their ruler, thanks to the Sedition Act. Girls were burned alive, not at the stake but in locked shirtwaist factories. Men were tortured and lynched by mobs, not of peasants but of Klansmen. The poor fought wars so the rich could divide the spoils. And again, the streets rattled with wagons full of pestilent corpses.
They had been right, at the Anarchists’ Hall. (It was shuttered now, many of her friends deported.) Mamma had taken Ella almost every night — it was where all the immigrants went, it was their social center. They staged plays and songfests, they collected money for strikers and shingle-weavers with cedar lung, they hosted speakers and held rallies. Ella and the other children had rampaged up the halls, jumped down the stairs, played games in the kitchen, and ignored the endless blather. They didn’t care if someday humans treated each other as equals and shared their wealth. Things seemed just fine at the Hall. She couldn’t imagine why the grownups complained all the time.
That was how people like the Kingstons were. They thought all the world was like their happy piece of it. They didn’t understand the fuss — the strikes, the Free Speech Actions, the opposition to the draft. Things around them were good. Why should anyone protest?
Nicky used to say, it’s not enough to tell people things aren’t fine for others. Until trouble’s brought home to them, they can’t understand it. He was in Mexico now, because he wouldn’t fight men who’d done him no harm in a war no one could explain. Someday soon he’d come looking for her. The Kingstons wouldn’t bother pretending that they’d cared for her till the end. They’d simply refuse entry to a tattered-looking man asking after a dead servant.
Her ear on the cold sidewalk made the wagon jarringly loud, the more so because it was different from common street sounds, from the backfires and rumbles of cars, the clatter of trolleys, the staccato of women’s boots on cobbles or cement.
It stopped near the Roosevelt house. Too close. It would come for her next.
She struggled with her shroud until panic kicked her senses out from under her. When she drifted back to consciousness, she couldn’t remember why she was outdoors at night. Mrs. K. was very strict about the servants coming in before dark, she wouldn’t like it. Then Ella heard exclamations, swearing, someone’s low murmur: “Ten for the both of you.”
The sound of horses, their puffing breaths as they stood idle, brought her situation back into focus. Did it cost so much, ten dollars, to have a body hauled away like rubbish?
“And not a word about it,” the voice continued.
“We’d shut our mouths, all right,” a wagon man said, “for ten each.”
After that, for a while Ella listened to the horses shift arrhythmically on shod hooves. Could they smell the dead bodies behind them? Could they smell the disease?
Time passed, maybe only minutes but they seemed like hours. The wind whistled up her nightdress but it didn’t make her cold, she was insulated in her fever. She looked through bars (how had they come to be in her sight?) as the wagon men walked past with a bundle in a sheet. It gave a jerk, like a cocoon suddenly straining to deliver a terrible moth. Were Ella’s eyes playing tricks on her? Was she seeing herself from outside her body? She watched as the shrouded body was slung onto the cart.
Next time she became aware, there was no more champing of horses, only the shuffle of dry leaves over a dusting of snow. She hadn’t noticed snow falling, or that the sky had grown pale enough for the streetlamps to go off. She saw she’d gotten free of her sheet but didn’t recall how or when. She was on the other side of the gate to the service entrance, but she hadn’t made it down the stairs. She was lying on them, the comers cutting into her chest and torso, scraping her calves where her nightdress ended. Her hands had lost all feeling, one clinging to the dirty metal of the fence, the other hooked through the bars. And she was shivering with cold now.
A voice cried, “Oh! Oh, my dear— How did you ever? Oh, my sweet Lord.”
“Cook?” Ella whispered. What was her name? Ella wished she remembered. But the Kingstons called the female help Cook, Nanny, and Maid, as if there were no more to them.
“Come, Nanny,” Cook said. “I don’t know how you lived the night out here, and look, with snow falling, too. But try to stand up, dear, and we’ll get you inside. Cut this gown off you and put you into the bath. However could they have—? The missus said you were dead. Came just now, at this hour, to tell me. I’ve had a good cry already. But let me just tie a kerchief over my mouth and nose. Get you in here before the milkman sees you, starts in all in Russian like he does. However could you survive a freezing night like this? I suppose it cut your fever — saved your life, it may be. But oh my savior and Lord, are those bites on your arm? Rat bites? Oh help us, Joseph and Mary. Come now, we’ll get you cleaned up and into bed. We’ll put you on Charles’s cot. The missus sent him away, she said. Forbid him to tell me himself, in case he picked up the sickness when he carried you down from the attic.” She made a teary gulping sound. “Heaven knows what she’ll say now you’re back. Or who’ll stoke the furnace while my Charles is gone. Maid, poor girl, already has her back half broke from washing everything in the house, every bit of the children’s clothes and bedding yesterday, in case you touched anything. And scrubbing every surface you might have breathed upon. No help from me — missus wouldn’t let me near anything till she made sure I wasn’t coughing. But here I’m complaining when you’ve been outside in this weather all night long.” Ella saw the white cloth over Cook’s nose and mouth soaking with tears where it touched her florid cheeks.