“Do not be so certain, Jason.”
“And what did he mean about interbreeding?” asked Jason. “What consequences are those?”
Aunt Germaine sat back.
“You and your mother raised swine,” she said. “Perhaps I can explain it that way. How is it that you get a prize pig? Do you pray for one? Do you purchase two inferior pigs and mate them? No. You feed and keep a good sow. And from time to time you bring in a prize boar.”
“If there’s one around,” said Jason.
“All right,” said Aunt Germaine. “If there’s one around. If there is not—and you mate your beautiful sow with some—oh, some stringy, undersized, sickly little pig… what sort of offspring would you expect?”
“Not so fine,” he said. “I expect.”
“There is a saying that Dr. Davenport coined some time after that. Breed a white woman with a Negro—the baby’s a Negro. A German with an Italian: Italian. A white fellow with an Indian squaw?”
Jason guessed: “A baby squaw?”
Aunt Germaine clapped.
“You mean to tell me Dr. Davenport was talking about breeding people the way farmers breed pigs.”
Aunt Germaine beamed. “It is a science,” she said. “A new science.”
“A new science.” Jason shook his head. “That’s something.”
“Do you know what it’s called?”
He shrugged. “Breeding, I guess.”
“It is called that. But there is a better word.”
Aunt Germaine leaned forward, her hand on Jason’s arm.
“Eugenics,” she said. Her eyebrows sprang up over the top of her glasses for an instant, and she smiled. “Eugenics, Nephew.”
“And now there’s a Eugenics Records Office,” said Jason. “I guess it caught on.”
The ERO as Aunt Germaine called it had started up officially in the last year. But it had been a dream of Dr. Davenport’s for more than ten years.
“Dr. Davenport contacted me personally,” said Aunt Germaine, “to join his crusade.”
“Crusade?”
“A figure of speech. Call it a mission. The mission, then, of the ERO was to compile an immense list—of every man, woman and child in America. Divided, of course, into segments.”
“Segments.”
“Of the population. Am I speaking too scientifically for you to follow, Jason?”
“I’m following.” Jason took a sip of coffee. “Dr. Davenport contacted you to help him make this list with segments and all.”
“Very good. Last year, he engaged a number of very proficient researchers—nurses, biologists, breeders, and so on—to travel out to the far corners of this nation, and compile this list. We all gathered at Cold Spring Harbor. We learned how to gather the information so as to be most useful to the enterprise. And then, one by one, we set out.”
“To Sing Sing?”
“Among other places, but yes. Sing Sing and prisons and hospitals are places that we have visited. It is particularly important to understand the scope of the criminal and the infirm, after all. For those—illness and stupidity and criminality—are among the things we hope to one day eradicate.”
“I thought you were eradicating ignorance.”
“Do not be disrespectful, Nephew.”
“I’m sorry, Aunt.”
That box of cards contained Aunt Germaine’s contribution to Dr. Davenport’s bold enterprise. The numbers—fully eleven digits long—were each one of them different from the next, and matched up with particular folks. The descriptions underneath (Habitual Criminal, Rapist and so on) were indications of what was wrong with them.
The percentage numbers said how good that person was overall. One of the things that the ERO was on the lookout for, said Germaine, was all the people that fell into the very lowest percentage. Jason couldn’t figure that.
“Why not look for the highest percentage?” he asked, and Aunt Germaine nodded and smiled at that.
“Why not indeed?” she said, and went back to work, entering the names and ages of the poor people of Cracked Wheel. They weren’t exactly murderers or habitual criminals or sufferers of epilepsy, but they weren’t the top of the percent either. They couldn’t have been that special. The germ had killed them all.
Jason only ever saw one of them before he and Aunt Germaine finally left Cracked Wheel. Several times he had nearly summoned the will to enter the saloon, and see what Aunt Germaine meant when she called it a charnel house. But each time he turned away—hands stuffed in his pockets or in fists at his hips—fear inhabiting his gut like a ball of raw dough—and stomped, defeated, through the ever-muddier street back to the town office.
It was finally in the Dempsey store that he confronted the dead of Cracked Wheel. It was only one of them, but one was enough.
Jason went into the store as prepared as he could be. He wore one of Aunt Germaine’s handkerchiefs over his face, and he’d dipped it in the juice from a jar of pickled onion (which she had said would help kill the smell). To make sure he didn’t stumble over anything in the dark, he carried the kerosene lamp in one hand. And so he wouldn’t have to make more trips than one, he carried a big sack in the other. He was on an errand for a few items that, as Aunt Germaine put it, they could not do without.
First, they needed more food and ammunition. It was going to be a week’s journey anyhow to Helena and the rail station and they couldn’t make it on what supplies they’d found in the town office.
And second, Jason needed a decent suit of clothes. If he were going to get on a train with Aunt Germaine, he could not be wearing his mama’s home-sewn duds. Jason, having proved his own immunity to the germ, was the one who would have to go inside.
“It is possible that the store is as safe as the town office. I simply cannot say for certain because I have not been inside,” his aunt said.
So under a crisp blue sky, hands full and shaking, Jason made his way across the muddy road and to the store. The shades were open, but the awning cast a shadow to make it entirely black within. So Jason stopped to light the lamp and then pulled open the door. He wondered as he entered if this would be enough to put “Thief” next to his name on the card that Aunt Germaine wrote for him. The sign on the door said “Open”—and that, he thought, should count for something.
Jason glanced back to where Germaine stood at the stoop of the town office, wringing her gloves nervously. “Courage,” she mouthed at him. Then Jason stepped into the dark.
The pickle juice helped mask it, but the minute he crossed the threshold Jason could tell he was not alone in the store. The smell reminded him of his mama at the end, only sweeter, if sweet could make a fellow upchuck his breakfast.
Jason’s inclination was to stop breathing it, so he stood there still for a moment, breath caught in his throat. He held the lantern high and surveyed the room.
The Dempsey store was pretty big, with a ceiling maybe a dozen feet up and shelves running all the way up every wall. Free-standing shelves held blankets and clothing and made a dark little alcove in the back. And there was a long counter with a box for money and a little balance scale on it for folks that still liked to pay with metals. Jason could see everywhere but behind the counter and in that little cubbyhole in the back—and there were no bodies he could see. He worried about those other spots, though: behind the counter, behind the shelves. Anything could be in there, and he didn’t think it would be anything he wanted to see.
His lungs were burning, so he took a big gulping breath and that set him coughing—the air from the pickle juice stung fierce, and the smell was only worse for gulping it in. All right, Jason thought, no point dawdling. He set to work.