Chapter 6

6

WITH MORE FOOD IN HER BELLY AND LESS MONEY IN HER SACK, ADA WALKED ALONG the main street in Empire. One mammee apple was not so much, but it was something, and it had tasted as good as anything Ada had ever eaten, except maybe for her mother’s black cake, a treat that her mother made once a year for Christmas and that Ada spent all the 364 days in between looking forward to. A ripe mammee apple, when she was as hungry as she had been, was second only to that.

As Ada walked, she wished she had not thrown out the pit and instead had thought to save it in her pocket so she could suck it again. Maybe there would have been some flavor left, some little trace she had missed. Maybe she should go back and look for the pit, or maybe buy a second mammee apple, she thought, but she didn’t. Her stomach was quiet for the moment at least, so she kept walking ahead.

Judging by the sun, it was just about noon. The heat in Panama, it seemed to Ada, was equal to the heat in Barbados, but the air was more humid, so thick that if she had reached out and closed her hand, she would not have been at all surprised to be able to grab ahold of it like a clump of mud. But even in the sluggish air, the street was bustling just the same as in Bridgetown. Carriages led by horses clapped down the road, and carts led by mules in turn led by men rattled and clanked. Women walked about carrying baskets on their backs or their heads or in the crooks of their arms. Well-attired people stood on street corners and talked. Every building looked clean and brand new.

Even before leaving home, Ada had heard that the most common job for a woman in Panama was doing the wash. She disliked doing the wash, but she would not be choosy, she told herself. If work as a washerwoman was the only work she could get, she would take it. On washday at home, her mother sent Ada and Millicent to the basin behind the house, where they were supposed to scrub their dresses clean. Millicent was dutiful in this, scrubbing all around the hem and the collar, coaxing out the grime of the days, but Ada usually just dunked her dress in the water, watching the fabric balloon up where the air got trapped underneath, swishing it around the whole basin once before drawing it out and declaring she was done. Millicent would sometimes shake her head and tell Ada to drop the dress back down. Then she would let go of her own dress and work on Ada’s instead. She would soak it again, rubbing her thumb in the spaces between each button, biting her lip as she worked. She did it with love, and Ada let her. She always let Millicent take care. Now Ada wanted to take care of her sister the way her sister had always taken care of her.

***

WHEN MILLICENT HAD first fallen ill, no one had been alarmed. A bit of congestion required tea and a good night’s rest, that was all. But little by little, Millicent kept getting worse. After a few days, she developed a cough, wet-sounding and loose, and she no longer had the energy to even get out of bed. Mrs. Pennington and Mrs. Callender, both of whom lived across the street, and even Mrs. Wimple, who lived farther west down the road, all came to the house to see if they could help. They brought teas they had brewed, but none of them—not the sage tea, not the lemongrass tea, not the bay leaf tea—made any difference as far as anyone could tell. Mrs. Wimple suggested an Obeah man she knew, but Ada’s mother did not believe in such things and she told Mrs. Wimple so. Mrs. Wimple had shaken her head and said that Ada’s mother was not “saltwater true,” a charge Ada had often heard levied against her mother, who did not always behave or dress or live in the way other people expected her to. It was a charge that boiled down to one thing, Ada thought, and it was her favorite thing about her mother: She was independent of mind. Mrs. Callender, whose own children were grown, had gone into the bedroom to see Millicent, and when she came out she had laid her hand gently on Ada’s mother’s shoulder and said, “You need a doctor just now.” And Ada had watched her mother nod once, as though Mrs. Callender had simply said out loud something she already knew.

It was not until a week later that a doctor finally arrived at the house. He was a white doctor from town who charged 10 shillings for an in-house examination in addition to the cost for mileage to get there. He was smartly dressed in a suit and necktie, and he strode into the bedroom with an air of authority and briskly did his exam. The year before, there had been an outbreak of typhoid fever that touched more than five hundred souls. Four years earlier, a scourge of smallpox swept through the island. There was always something, it seemed. Ada and her mother had sat in the bedroom, her mother twisting her fingers and Ada’s stomach in knots, waiting to see what was wrong. Millicent was weak, lying on her side in the bed, her body bent like a sickle.

When the exam was complete, the doctor turned toward them and asked, “How long the cough?”

“Two weeks,” Ada’s mother had said.

The doctor nodded as though he had expected as much. “She developed pneumonia. I cannot say how.”

“Pneumonia?”

“The good news is that she survived it. The worst of the pneumatic infection itself has passed. The bad news, I am afraid, is that she has residual fluid in her chest. It cannot remain there. The mortality rate is quite high in that case.” Ada’s mother had gasped, but the doctor went on. “She needs surgery. A rib resection it is called, to remove the excess fluid.”

“Surgery? When?”

“She will likely be stable for a few weeks. But the longer the fluid is allowed to pool, the worse it will get. Eventually it will entrap the lung, which will almost certainly lead to collapse.” He had stood up then as if he had said all there was to say.

“You can’t do it now?” Ada’s mother had asked, jumping up when he stood.

“The surgery?”

“Yes. I can pay you directly.”

“The fee for that particular surgery is fifteen pounds.”

At the sound of the number, Ada watched her mother’s face drop.

“You could take her to the General Hospital, of course. As she is no longer infectious, they may well admit her.”

“But you can do it yourself?”

“Yes, but—”

“I rather you do it here, then.”

“They have made many improvements in the hospital in the last years. It is perfectly safe.”

But Ada knew that her mother did not trust the hospital, just as she did not trust the bank or any institution aside from school and the church. To her, the hospital, overcrowded with the infirm, was simply the place where people went to die.

“Fifteen pounds?” her mother asked again.

“Yes. And the cost for mileage, naturally.”

After the physician had gone, Ada knelt next to Millicent’s bed and stroked her hand lightly along Millicent’s back. She had thought her sister had fallen asleep, but after a few minutes Millicent whispered, “I’m scared.”

Ada slowed her hand. “Don’t be,” she said.

“It’s coming for me.”

Even without asking, Ada knew what she meant. She reached down and squeezed Millicent’s hand. “It’s far away yet.” Ada swallowed hard. Softly she said, “It won’t be coming for a well long time.”

Millicent said nothing, and because she was kneeling anyway, in her mind Ada started saying a prayer. But in the middle of the prayer, through the open window, Ada heard a strange, muffled sound. Her mother had not come back inside after seeing the doctor out to his carriage, and now, Ada realized, standing in the garden behind the house where she thought no one could hear her, her mother was crying. In all Ada’s sixteen years, she had never heard her mother cry, but she was sure, as she knelt there, that that was what the sound was.

It was the very next day that Ada packed her things and boarded the ship.

***

SHE WAS STILL walking, still looking for signs in shop windows advertising employment within when, up ahead in the middle of the road, Ada saw a swarm of people bunched like bees on a scrap of honeycomb, shouting and gesturing down at the ground. If Millicent had been with her, she would have tugged Ada’s elbow and urged her to keep walking, to steer clear of a scene that had nothing whatsoever to do with them, but Millicent was always trying to stay out of trouble and Ada, according to her mother, was the opposite. Forever running toward something, her mother often said.

Ada walked up to the edge of the crowd and stood on her toes, straining to see. There were maybe a dozen people standing around, talking over each other and pointing, and in the center of everyone, Ada saw a young man lying still on the ground, his eyes closed, his hat halfway off his head.

“What happened?” she asked.

No one answered her.

Besides the hat, the young man was wearing a dirty blue work shirt and khaki trousers crusted with mud.

“He dead?” Ada asked, but again no one answered her. Then she saw the man twitch. She glanced around at all the people standing over him, men and women alike, dark faces and light, all of them shouting and waving but doing nothing to help. Without thinking twice, Ada shoved her way through the crowd and knelt down next to the man.

Somebody gasped. A man yelled, “Don’t touch him! He’s sick as a dog!”

Up close, Ada could see his chest rise and fall. His hands were clenched at his side. His olive skin was slick with either rainwater or sweat.

Ada leaned over the sack on top of her thighs and said to him, “It’s all right.”

Around her, the people in the crowd kept clamoring—“Leave him be!” “You’re a fool!”—but Ada ignored them. She stayed bent forward and watched the man’s face. Then, softly, she started to sing a hymn she knew. Her mother often cautioned Ada and Millicent not to sing in front of other people anywhere but in church. “God is the only one who can forgive voices like ours,” she said laughingly. But hearing the songs in church always made Ada feel better, and as this man was suffering, Ada thought maybe the smallest bit of a song would bring him some peace. When the man unclenched his hands, she was pleased to see she was right. She glanced at his chest. Still breathing, it seemed.

Ada sat back on her heels and peered up at the faces around her. “He needs a doctor,” she said.

Several people nodded, but nobody moved.

“We need to get him to a hospital,” she said.

“There’s a field hospital near,” someone shouted.

“No, if he sick with Chagres fever, he need the hospital at Ancón,” another voice said.

From the ground, Ada asked, “How far is Ancón?”

A man wearing suspenders at the front edge of the crowd said, “Too far to walk. He got to go on a hospital train. They come regular, but I don’t know myself when the next one arrives.” He blinked with each word that he spoke.

Ada said, “The hospital train... it comes to the station here?”

“Yes.”

The station was only two blocks away. “Okay, then, let’s go.”

The man stopped his blinking and opened his eyes wide as two moons. “I’m not touching him, no.”

“But you said it yourself. We have to get him onto the hospital train.”

The man shook his head. “He got the fever from what I can see.”

Frustrated, still kneeling, Ada scanned the crowd, and when she spotted two of the strongest-looking men in it, she pointed to each of them and said, “Come and help me lift him now.”

The two men were Albert Laurence from Port-au-Prince and Wesley Barbier from Fort-Liberté. Though they had both come from Haiti, they were strangers to each other before that day—Albert worked at one of the machine shops in Empire and Wesley was stationed at Culebra setting off dynamite—but after that day they would become lifelong friends, and years on they would still reminisce about the time a young girl with the determination of the apostle Paul and the courage of Ruth plucked the two of them out of a crowd and enlisted them do something that both of them were terrified to do.

The pair stepped forward and lifted the sick man up. One held his armpits and the other his feet, and together they started down the street toward the station house. Ada hurried next to them. They had to stop twice to adjust their grip. Neither of them spoke, but Ada saw them exchange wordless glances every now and again. Numerous people from the crowd followed behind.

Soon they were at the railroad station, a small wooden depot where a locomotive idled. Two passenger cars were coupled to the engine and behind those, two empty flatcars. The men hoisted the young man up onto the bed of one of the flatcars, and Albert, who knew English well enough to get by, asked the engineer, who was seated in the cab up front, to take the man to the hospital at Ancón.

“This is not a hospital train!” the engineer shouted down.

With her heart beating fast, Ada strode up to the engine herself. “There’s a man on this train who needs the hospital now.”

“But I have told you already, this is not a hospital train.”

“He needs a doctor.”

“I am sorry, but that is not me.”

“Please!”

“He will have to arrive there some other way. This is not a hospital train. This is a passenger train, I’m afraid.”

Ada gritted her teeth. “You have your passenger.”

The engineer shrugged.

Ada huffed and glanced back at the flatcar. Everyone from the street who had walked to the station was huddled around.

Then someone shouted, “His lips gone blue!”

Ada turned to the engineer again, sitting high in his cab. “He’s dying!” she said.

The engineer poked his head out the window and looked back to see, but he gave no indication that he was willing to move.

Indignation spiraled up within Ada. She had half a mind to yank open the door of the engine and drive the train herself. Instead, she opened her sack and dug her hand deep inside and pulled out one of the two crowns she had left. She took a deep breath and held it up. “If I give you this, you will take him?”

The engineer looked down. He leaned out of the cab far enough to snatch the coin from Ada’s hand. For an instant, she had the sinking thought that he had taken her money and even so would not do what she had asked, but then she heard the blast of the whistle. Suddenly, the train lurched ahead.

It was still in her sight when Albert, whose name Ada would never know, walked up to her, smiling, and shook her hand. She smiled in return before watching him walk away.

She hadn’t realized how hard her heart had been beating until the crowd fully dispersed. The sun was high in the sky. In less than one day, she had spent more than half of her money—one coin to save herself from starving and another to hopefully save a young man’s life. The skirt of her dress was filthy where she had knelt down, and her boots were caked to the ankles with mud.

Carrying her sack, Ada stepped down off the train platform. Directly across the street was a white man in a crisp white linen suit staring at her. He had one hand in his breast pocket beneath his lapel. He slid it out and started walking toward her. Ada tightened her jaw, bracing herself for something, though she was not sure what. Notice from the ship captain that she had not paid her passage? Something else she had already done wrong?

When the man crossed the street and came to where Ada stood, he stopped. “You weren’t frightened?” he asked.

Through brass-rimmed spectacles that glinted beneath the brim of his pristine white hat, he peered at her with cool blue eyes. He was somebody important. That much was clear. “He was sick, you know. With malaria, no doubt.”

Ada nodded.

“But you were not frightened of catching it yourself?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I believe the Lord will take care.”

The man pushed up his spectacles, though they had not slid down and thus had nowhere to go. “Where are you from?”

“Bridgetown, Barbados.”

“And what is your name?”

“Ada Bunting.”

“You are here for the purposes of the canal, I presume?”

“I am here for the purposes of finding a job. I heard there is plenty of work in Panama.”

“And do you have a job? Currently?”

“Currently no, but I am looking for one.”

The man arched an eyebrow and beneath his clipped mustache gave away the barest hint of a smile. “I believe you can stop looking,” he said. “Come with me.”