66 THENEWYORKER,M AY4, 2020
train clear from Chicago, stay in Hes-
ter Brinsley’s pretty rooms, and she’d
look in on them for the day before and
after, till they appeared strong enough
to climb back on that train alone. (Eaton
did his little operations right at Brins-
ley’s boarding house after dark, leaving
his buggy out of sight in Hester’s barn,
we heard, with her getting a small cut,
so to speak, out of every lost child.)
“But Eaton had lately grown too
shaky to even fake acting able, being so
up in years. And here’s this new boy,
Petrie. They’d advised all the young fel-
lows graduating from state med school
to grow facial hair—that’d make a kid
look older, so’s people would trust him
more. Important, trust. Anyways, young
Petrie, mustache and silly new goatee,
helps the sailor’s sister rise up. He ties
her horse behind his new-leased pha-
eton and a rental bay from Brinsley’s
stable. Petrie walks in, and here is the
Woolseys’ parlor strewn with fine red-
and-gold silks that Sandy’s just brought
home, cloth still tossed everywhere
and... no, I don’t have those in back,
since somebody careless left them in
direct sun and they pretty much fell to
pieces. But Petrie goes in the room, and
there are basins set all round the iron
bed, and the poor mother, burning up
herself, is working hard, washing a naked
boy, who’s embarrassed and, you can see
he knows it, losing his life at both ends.
This going to be too much for you?”
“Nothing is too much
for me. Yet, I mean. And
this? Is the... portrait of
that very doctor, you say?”
“Didn’t say. Getting
to that. But answer me
this—you think you’re so
smart—how did young
Markus Petrie know it was
cholera and from halfway
cross the room? Hmm?”
I shook my head one
sideways swipe. (Never contradict or
upstage your teller. Besides, I hadn’t
a clue.)
“Because in the bowls, mixing bowls
and pans pressed into service to spare
the home’s one good mattress, the doc-
tor saw ‘rice stool.’”
“Which is...”
“Which is where the person has al-
ready been so emptied of food that noth-
ing but what’s clear is left to come out,
and here’s the cholera part: it’s only clear
broth but with little white bits of dis-
solving intestines that look like rice and
float just like rice.”
“A trip home from the Orient with
rice stools.”
“That’s it. But, of course, what hap-
pened, the sailor was already near to
dead, and his sisters and mother went
soon after, and then it was the two neigh-
boring farms downhill of their ground-
water and all that scrubbing and suds
the brave Woolsey women loosed on
that poor boy’s leavings, then let seep
into the soil and stream downhill. Back
in Chicago, the disease was going wild,
folks falling by the hundreds. Eigh-
teen-forty-nine, nobody knew the word
‘bacteria.’ Pasteur still hardly more than
a student, if my dates are right. Their
sad idea of a cure? Mustard plasters, hot
as you could stand, then ‘bleed’ the pa-
tient to calm him good. No, up Chicago
way? The panic eventually got so bad,
town fathers voted to pump in drinking
water, not from that little latrine Chi-
cago River downtown but from clear
cold Lake Michigan. Officials were that
desperate, and, for once, the bigwigs got
it right. But they had money and city
ways. Out here? Our folks, well, we only
just had Petrie.
“That young doctor was so new
among us he’d not made arrangements
to get his laundry done. And yet already
Markus was giving us whatever we were
going to get of hope. All of
us were strangers to him,
all. Looking after mortally
sick people you love, that is
hard enough. (I should
know.) But to get some ad-
dress in writing that’s on a
street you don’t know how
to find, even in a town as
tiny as La Verne, and to
walk in there and discover
another whole family puk-
ing and voiding in plain view?
“They were so grateful there was
somebody to send for. And, when he did
turn up, Markus was a fine looker, with
a deep voice. Sober and polite and right
out of an accredited Illinois school—
well, it reassured. Little beard, such dark
eyes. And with a plain way that out
this far means real skill. No wonder the
worship started! Even old Doc Eaton
couldn’t have got such a sudden follow-ing. Old Eaton, see, people still tipped
a hat to him downtown. Hadn’t he de-
livered most of the folks in sight? But
they knew about his serving those fam-
ily-way city girls, and about certain other
mistakes he’d buried. Plus, there was a
drug habit he got into real bad at the
end. Strange, somebody like that wait-
ing so late to find a vice. Like some de-
layed vacation for him to retire into. Old
Eaton soon drifted into falling asleep
while standing there mid-operation,
hands’d fly up all of a sudden palsied, so
the mayor and a committee had sent,
just in time, for Petrie, fresh as paint out
of university. Fourth in his class, too.
“But, even if Doc Petrie had come
during a normal healthy season around
here, he woulda been quite a standout.
I mean, unmarried, fine-looking as still
shows here, if in a darker-than-Swed-
ish kind of way—but that would’ve been
romantic to all these towheaded braided
girls for miles hereabouts.
“He kept asking locals to please, please
just call him Mark, but ‘doctor’ was a
godly word by then. And those folks of
ours that hadn’t yet come down with the
cholera? Instead of hiding from Petrie,
they took to bringing him fresh-dug
beets from out their gardens and send-
ing their daughters over with the food.
Matchmaking! And here it was the mid-
dle of our terrible epidemic year. I guess
it was superstition. Because the more
folks got sick the healthier and taller did
that boy look. He’d turn up at church,
and, my mother’s mother told me, they
clapped. Dr. Petrie, white shirt, black tie,
black suit like you see here, he walked
into the Lutheran chapel and the whole
place, choir and sourpuss preacher and
all, applauded.... It made him stay away,
of course. Man never set foot in there
again. And he’d only come into their
sanctuary hoping to find a little support
from On High, a little quiet, relief from
farm folks that were turning gray and
becoming a puddle at both ends. See,
that’s what the cholera bug does to you,
I guess. Liquefies. It’s awful catching.
And the doctor was soon the only per-
son brave or fool enough to duck under
the orange quarantine ropes, ignoring
warning signs he himself had nailed to
the doors of those farmhouses worst hit.
“Locals were real glad Doc Petrie
was up on the techniques of 1849 from
our best state school. Taxpayer money