Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

A place the size of a state, with no more than a handful of settlements: small clusters of people amid a thousand lakes and hundreds of peaks. The opposite of Ireland, she thought. How could there be so much empty land? She flipped through the pages, eyeing the chapter titles. In the back she found advertisements for fishing tackle and hunting rifles, recommendations for reliable guides, descriptions of the few modest inns. She read, uncomprehendingly at first— You can’t imagine it, she later told Elizabeth, you cannot imagine what this felt like —these words:

THE NORTHVIEW INN

Boats, Guides, Provisions, etc furnished for

CAMPING PARTIES

Comfortable ROOMS

Hunting and Fishing Trophies PREPARED ON-SITE,as Desired

Terms per DAYor per WEEK

Innkeeper: Ned Kynd.

3

Dinner was lovely, the leg of mutton perfectly tender and the gravy smooth; everyone was pleased. But although Elizabeth brought a tray to Martin, and although mutton had always been his favorite, he didn’t take a bite. She brought the tray down untouched and said nothing to Andrew, who as always presided buoyantly over the table.

Once dinner was over, though, once Andrew rose and headed, like the others, for the inevitable afternoon’s rest in bed, Elizabeth put on her boots and her heavy cloak and left the house. Now she walks swiftly through the village — past the new hotel, past the lumber mill, past the boardinghouses rising nearby. Here, as everywhere else, there are far more patients than places for them. Despite the private sanatorium up on the hill, run by the famous doctor; despite the enormous, state-sponsored sanatorium for the destitute, and the one for sick foresters, and the one for children; despite the one that is really a prison, taking in consumptive inmates from all over the state; and despite the dozens of private rest-cure homes like her own, the hotel still bulges with invalids awaiting admission to a more permanent place. A newly built spur of the railway brings health-seekers right to the center of her adopted village: now a well-known center for the cure.

Around her are cure-porches, cure-chairs, the shops that build the chairs and the offices of the doctors who treat the patients lying on the chairs that line the porches. Dr. Davis, who calls on her boarders each week, displays his name on a bold brass plaque — befitting, he must think, the size of his practice. Yet so far he’s been no help in finding a replacement for Mrs. Temple. She might have known better than to ask him. All his energy goes into lecturing his patients, which he does in a folksy tone she finds annoying.

Consumption, he likes to say, when he gathers her boarders together — but let us call it by its modern scientific name, tuberculosis— is caused by a germ, the tubercle bacillus. In our lungs the bacilli cause tiny dots of disease which the lung tries to wall off with scar tissue: these dots we call tubercles, little tubers. Your recovery depends on maintaining and strengthening this scar tissue, which is at first as delicate as a spider’s web. Which is why you must rest. Why you must not exert yourselves or give in to anxiety or do anything, such as pick up an eager child — months ago he publicly, infuriatingly, chided Martin Sawyer — to cause a sudden deep breath or contract your chest muscles. Break the delicate scars and the germs escape, seeding disease in other parts of the lung. Build up your resistance; let the lungs make walls so perfect, so strong, that the germs are starved to death.

Some days, when his mood is particularly bouncy, he’ll cast the germs as slow but sturdy hoplites undermining the lungs; the ones who break out as anomalous fleet-heeled messengers spreading deadly news. Stop the messengers! he barks at his invalids. Starve out the troops! It’s almost touching, the faith he has in words. He passes out pamphlets, magazines, and his own private exhortations, which he prints on colored cards. Each of her boarders’ rooms boasts an example of his latest:

REMEMBER!

If treatment is begun early most cases of tuberculosis can be cured, but it requires determination, perseverance, and often self-denial to accomplish it. There are no known specifics which will cure tuberculosis in the sense of directly affecting its exciting cause (the tubercle bacillus). The only known treatment is the indirect one of developing and maintaining a resistance to the toxemia of the infection — a method we call “the out-door life” or “the cure.”

The four essentials of this treatment are—

Follow your doctor’s advice absolutely

Breathe pure out-door air both night and day

Take an abundance of nourishing food

Rest, rest, rest

Most patients must devote their entire time to getting well.

Elizabeth might embrace his advice more wholeheartedly — here she rounds the bend in the river and passes the house that once belonged to Dr. Kopeckny — if she’d not already seen so much change. Every few years she’s had to adapt her furnishings and her schedule to reflect the latest medical theories. Often she wishes she’d been present for the crucial early years, when Dorrie’s mother first started taking in boarders and Nora was first visiting them. No one knew what caused consumption then, never mind what cured it. Nora, recollecting those times, once painted a picture for her of a typical February afternoon.

In six houses, on four different streets, eight men suffering from consumption are sitting out in the clear, cold air. Patient, bored, patiently bored, they’re so muffled in blankets and coats as to be almost indistinguishable. The smallest happening, Nora said — three pigeons wheeling in concert across the sky, a squirrel skittering up a tree — is seized on as entertainment. What else is there to do? The village, in those years which Elizabeth can only imagine, consists of one store, two sawmills, five streets, a handful of houses. A small hotel, open only in summer, which looks across the river to a few farms dotting the valley and the lower slopes. The healthy residents have boats to build, land to till, livestock to tend, and game to shoot; houses and clothing and implements to make and repair: there is always work. The strangers sitting idly among them have only these long blank hours. The quiet is meant to cure them. The sweet freezing air, the constant, uplifting, improving sight of the stony mountains— And us, Nora said. To help them, besides the air and the quiet, they had us.

Sometimes, Elizabeth imagines now, the invalids must have gathered on a single porch, gossiping with each other; this would have helped. Sometimes they must have been cheered by the sight of Nora walking toward them along the river, a pack-basket on her back and her gray-striped hair blowing messily in the wind. Those who spent more than one winter here would learn tricks, which they’d pass to the new arrivals. Fur coats they found excellent, sheepskin and mink and raccoon. Best if the collar comes up over the ears and the pockets are big. Loose woolen mittens, worn inside deerskin mittens, are ideal. The hat — what about the hat? A wool cap, a knitted stocking cap, a fur hat with ear flaps. They trade among themselves as they see what works best.

Still they do this, Elizabeth thinks. Some parts of the cure never change, no matter what the doctors discover.

Then, as now, they wrote to their relatives with requests; then too the village residents adapted to the invalids’ shifting tastes. Someone began to tan sheepskins for jackets. Someone else started making gloves, someone imported woolen sleeping bags and hot-water bottles. Now the livery caters to the sick, the builders specialize in storm enclosures. The hardware store sells sled robes and foot warmers while the drugstore sells cod-liver oil and pasteboard sputum boxes. The cobbler makes enormous sheepskin-lined moccasins and the carpenter makes coffins. Of which there are, Elizabeth belatedly realizes, two at the depot, awaiting a train — patients from one of the sanatoriums, returning home to their families.