Voices from the Past Part 98

Sallow yellow:

Men, women and children dying in the streets:

Church bells tolling.

Three men drag a dead youth to the Avon River,

pitch him in.

Church steeple, reflected in the water, sways:

The church registry lists column after column of dead:

Not a sound.

I

n Stratford, the plague moved down Mill Lane, b.u.t.t Lane, Rother Street, jumped to Henley and then Church Street.

Father and I worked on Mill Lane: finding Charles collapsed by the whipping post, we lugged him out of the sun...s.h.i.+vering...sweating...vomiting...and we could not find anything to cover him, and he begged us for a cover.

"Something to cover me, Will...just something?"

"But there's nothing left for you."

"Everything used up?"

"All used, Charles."

"So many of us sick?"

"Lie still. I'll bring you hot sack. That'll help you feel better...there's a rug..."

"I'll see if I can find something to cover him."

"No, you're tired. I'll bring hot sack and a cover."

Pigeons swooped low, then rose: were they afraid?

Six people had died that day.

During the week twenty-six died, men, women, and children. Our town heard the bell toll morning and afternoon and evening. At times the tolling seemed to be right in my ears; at times I forgot it, bringing water or food, medicine or cover, anything to help. Father and I worked together as much as possible...his word or nod kept me going.

The Avon seemed blotched and diseased for there, there was the plague's mucous caulking the water and the water was grey and beaten and unmoving, locked in its own foetidness, dead by the weir, dead by the church and underneath the bridge.

Stratford

February 14, 1615

I remember the plague, how, with our theatre closed, I worked to aid the sick and cart away the London dead.

Appleton...I remember his red beard, his cough, his scared grin. Meerie, talking Irish, blamed us, saying "there's narra a plague in Ireland-it's your filthy London-you d.a.m.n filthy foreigners!" Miller cursed the altar and the saints behind his head, as he struggled to breathe. And that gargoyle-like fellow, Fackler, crawled off to die or recover, we never learned: he said the open field was the proper place to get well, or die.

The Cheney twins died right outside the Globe: they had been working as stage hands: clever lads from Suss.e.x, faithful, hard-working: they got sick on Tuesday; as the bells tolled on Thursday evening they were dead, dying a few minutes apart, their hands clasped, eighteen years old, flax-headed, tall.

Why did that young woman, with hair to her waist, run about laughing, eating handfuls of earth? Why did that Dorsets.h.i.+re man stab himself with a dirk? How did the graves of the Boothby children get left open, deserted for days? Was G.o.d in the heavenly lectern those days...to save us of our sins!

For days the sun chewed us in Blackwell. It gave us a chance to kill some of the rats. Caesar, don't let one bite you! Worms crawled out of the earth. Caesar, beware!

Whenever I pa.s.sed our cemetery I smelled new, raw earth- as terrifying as the death smell. 'Sblood, how many deaths does it take to satisfy the earth?

YOUTH-

What is this vomit, this black gunk pouring out of your mouth? Are you only fourteen...with death on your face?

This is our boy, Slade, who walked to school last week and fished where I fished.

"Papa, let's carry him into the shade. We'll cool his hot face and give him water. Our medicine has to make him well. We need him, to grow up and catch perch and pike, and marry Jenny."