Tess

The water came from a well on the north side of the property, and in the winter of 2003 the well did something. I have never known what. There was a test that came back, and a man from the county came and stood in the kitchen with Mr. Crane for twenty minutes, and after that the water was boiled in a big pot on the stove every morning and poured into a crock, and the crock sat at the end of the serving table, and we drank it, and it tasted like a boiled pot.

In February the diarrhea started. It went through the younger dormitory in four days, which was nineteen girls and one toilet at each end of the hall, and after that it went through the older dormitory, and Miss Farraday set up the classroom as a ward with mattresses on the floor, because the infirmary had four beds and there were thirty-one of us sick. That was the first week. Nobody died in the first week.

Then it changed, and I want to put down how it changed, because I saw it and I have thought about it ever since. Diarrhea is a thing you can talk about. What came next was a fever that did not come down, and a headache that made the older girls hold their own heads with both hands, and a stiffness in the neck that Miss Farraday tested with her fingers by rolling your chin to your chest, and if you could not do it she wrote your name on a different sheet of paper than the first one.

The paper was the important thing. There were two sheets. One was the list of girls who were sick. The other was the list of girls who were sick and would need a hospital, and Mr. Crane kept the second sheet in his coat pocket and did not post it.

Tess got it on a Thursday. She was in the bed beside mine by Saturday night, and the two beds were eight inches apart, and I could hear her breathing across the eight inches the way you hear water moving in a wall.

Her fever went up on Sunday. She talked. Some of it made sense and most of it did not. The parts that made sense were about a dog she had when she was small. The parts that did not were about a bus, and a swimming place, and a woman she called by a name that was not in her family and never was. Once, in the middle of the afternoon, she sat up and looked at me and asked who I was, and I said Ruth, and she said, “All right,” and lay back down. I do not blame her for that and I have never pretended otherwise. That is the part nobody warns you about. The person can be taken out of the body in a day and a half, and what is left will still be warm and still be in the right bed.

On Sunday night there was a car in the drive at nine o’clock, and Mr. Crane came to the door of the ward and stood there with his coat still on, and I was awake, and this is the whole of what happened.

Miss Farraday said, “We need to call an ambulance.”

And Mr. Crane said, “I have made a call to the doctor and he is coming in the morning.”

And Miss Farraday said, “It is ten hours until morning and I have nine girls over 103.”

And he said, “Delia.” He said her name in a certain way, which was the way he said everything that mattered, which was gently, and quietly, so that whatever he wanted done was done by the person he was talking to and not by him. “Delia,” he said, “do you know what the board will do. Do you know what the county will do. Two weeks of this and they will take the whole place apart. Where do the children go then. Do you know, because I do not.”

She stood there for a while. Then she turned around and went back to the beds.

I have wanted to tell this part to people and I have not, and I will put it here once and be done with it. I was eleven years old and lying beside a girl who did not know my name, and I heard a grown woman make the right argument and lose it to a man who was afraid of a form on a wall. I learned that evening what I have never been able to unlearn, which is that institutions are not run by the cruel. They are run by the frightened, and the frightened are more reliable.

The doctor came at seven in the morning. Tess went in the car at nine.

She died the following night, back in the ward, in the bed eight inches from mine, because the hospital in Buffalo did not have a bed for her and sent her back. I know the order of those facts because I asked. I was told later by a woman in the office who should not have told me that she died somewhere around two in the morning, and that the nurse on the second floor was with two other girls at the time and checked on her at the half hour.

I was asleep when it happened. Tess had stopped talking the day before, and I had done what you do, which is to lie facing the wall, because the other person’s arm is in the way and there is no room to turn.

The funeral was on the hill behind the chapel, in the last week of February. It was cold and there was no snow on the ground yet, and Mr. Crane did the service because he did every service. He spoke for eleven minutes about a young life gathered early into a purpose we cannot see. I counted. Eleven minutes, and he used the word purpose four times, and he did not once say her name in the way you say a name when you knew the person. He said it the way you say the name of a girl who has become a number on a form you no longer have to explain to a board.

There were thirty-four of us at that grave and I would say thirty of us did not hear a word of it. We were doing the arithmetic, the same arithmetic we did in the dormitory, and it said: thirty-one sick, two sheets of paper, one man with a coat pocket.

Tess had told me the useful thing earlier, on a good evening in November before any of this, when we were both fifteen minutes late for the bell and standing in the pantry with the door on the latch. She was talking about Miss Kessel and the ruler, and she said, “You can go at her or you can keep the book. You can’t do both.”

And then she said the rest of it, which is the reason I am writing any of this down at all. She said, “There is a lot of unfair in the world. You put the ones you can’t carry in your pocket and you leave them there. Then some year when you have something to hold in your hand, you take one out and you move it.”

I was eleven when she said it and it was a sentence to me, the same size as everything else. It took me ten years to understand that it was a method.

They filled the grave, and we went back down the hill, and the snow came that night, the real snow, and lay on the new dirt and made it smooth, and the next morning from the classroom window you could not tell which part of the hill was the graveyard and which part was the pasture. I stood at that window and I decided something I had never decided before. I had spent my whole life deciding how to get through the next hour. That morning I decided I was going to get out of that place on my feet and not in a sheet, and I said nothing to anybody. For the next seven years I ran a little column of numbers in my head the way a person runs a household. Every hour of study and every point on the wall and every good grade I ever got at Ellerslie after February of 2003 was one unit deposited against the day I would walk out through the iron gate with my own coat and my own name and no tag in the collar.

That is a cold thing to say at a grave. I have had twenty years to warm it up and it is still cold, and I find that I do not want it warm.