Eutopia - A novel of terrible optimism Read online

  ChiZine Publications

  FIRST EDITION

  Eutopia © 2011 by David Nickle

  Cover artwork © 2010 by Erik Mohr

  Cover design © 2011 by Corey Beep

  Interior artwork © 2011 by Lawrence Nickle

  All Rights Reserved.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Nickle, David

  Eutopia / David Nickle.

  eISBN 978-1-926851-40-2

  I. Title.

  PS8615.A883F43 2011 C813'.6 C2011-900685-5

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  Toronto, Canada

  www.chizinepub.com

  [email protected]

  Edited and copyedited by Sandra Kasturi

  Proofread by Chris Edwards

  Converted to mobipocket and epub by Ryan McFadden http://ryanmcfadden.com

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

  To Tobin, in hope and love

  Table of Contents

  1 - Mister Juke

  2 - A Damn Germ

  3 - The Horror at Cracked Wheel

  4 - Utopia's Daughter

  5 - Baby Wakes

  6 - The Feeger Girls

  7 - The Hippocratic Oath

  8 - The Lesson of Minos

  9 - The Quarantine Obscenity

  10 - The Autopsy

  11 - Love Among the Feegers

  12 - Aunty's Tears

  13 - The Mercy of Sam Green

  14 - The Faerie King's Bride

  15 - A Wicked Cut

  16 - Saint Lothar

  17 - The Dauphin's Women

  18 - Compassion. Community. Hygiene.

  19 - The Rite of Spring

  20 - The Secret Terror

  21 - The "Germe de grotte"

  22 - The Prodigal

  23 - The Incident with the Shotgun

  24 - The Test of Faith

  25 - The Gospel According to Nils

  26 - The Pickle Jar

  27 - Gods and Oracles

  28 - The Old Man

  29 - The Oracle Frets

  30 - Rapture of the Juke

  31 - The Cruelty of Sam Green

  32 - Death and Resurrection

  Acknowledgements

  Dr. Charles Davenport

  c/o The Eugenics Records Office

  Cold Spring Harbor, NY

  August 15, 1910

  Dear Charles,

  The infant is safe.

  I want to set that down before anything else. I shall write it again, and swear to it, and underscore it, so there can be no doubt:

  The infant is safe.

  I trust this will set your mind at ease. After the communiqué that you will have doubtless received from Garrison Harper by now, I can only imagine you must be gravely concerned. We have had words here in my library, Harper and I.

  I believe that I have answered his accusations, primarily concerning my methodology in dealing with the Trout Lake investigation. But I am under no illusion that he went off satisfied. No doubt he is sitting at his desk in that vulgar mansion of his on the hill, composing his libel as I write this. He will send his letter off with a rider this evening. I must wait until morning. Thus will you receive Harper's account before mine.

  I might predict what it will tell you: that the doctor, in a fit of depravity, abandoned his scientific observation of the mountain people, against the express orders of Harper, and invaded their community—plied them with drink, beat a young mother with a walking stick, snatched her baby from its cradle, and ran, like a madman, into the deep mountain night.

  The doctor (Harper will have written), in so doing, violated the very principles of Compassion, Community and Hygiene, upon which the fair Eliada rests.

  Harper will beg you to agree to the doctor's dismissal. He will insist that you send a physician who will content himself seeing to those principles—a physician who does not preoccupy himself with matters of science—who understands the practicalities of administering society take precedence over all. He will question the doctor's—my—fitness. He will tell you that I have harmed an infant.

  These are lies, Charles. I did not feed liquor to mountain men. I did not strike a woman with my stick.

  The infant is safe.

  If all goes well, shortly I will provide you with the testimony of the men who had accompanied me: Mr. Bury and Mr. Wilkens. They will attest as true, that when we found the infant, it was abandoned—left in a bed of dried needles and sap at the base of a pine tree.

  Really, can one be surprised? The people of these hills are degenerate. They are the flotsam of the wagon trains of the last century, left here to fester in their immorality, for generations.

  Bury found it. He was scouting the edge of our camp at dusk. Bury came running back as Wilkens and I were heating tins of stew on the kerosene cook stove and admiring the view of the Kootenai River Valley in the vanishing light.

  He was in a state of near hysteria, which was unusual—for Mr. Bury is as hard a man as Eliada sustains. At first, he was unable to explain what it was he found. It was a fire that produced no heat; a great bird, that cried out in song, with a voice like a woman's; a beast; and some other things also, which he could not clearly describe.

  I did feed Bury a small jigger of whiskey then, but only to calm his nerves such that he could lead us back to the spot, where I might observe this thing he'd found firsthand.

  It was some distance from the camp—further than Bury ought to have ventured in a simple patrol. He intimated that he may have been following the song, which caused him to stray, and he became quite apologetic.

  The pine tree where the infant rested was part of a small copse of them, growing from a flat ledge near a stream. Facing the east, it was in growing shadow. The infant lay on its back there, staring up into the pines. It cried out, pitiably, as we approached. Bury pointed, his hand shaking, and I confess that I scolded him.

  "It's a baby," I said. I crouched beneath the branches and finally approached the infant on hands and knees, met its eye for the first time. "Nothing more."

  And so I ordered Wilkens to give me his coat. Folding it into a makeshift blanket around the infant, I lifted it to my chest and made my way back to my men. Then we returned to the camp, and I took the infant inside the tent.

  This, Charles, is what transpired. The infant was abandoned. I saw to it that it came to no harm.

  When we returned to Eliada, I brought the infant straight to the hospital. It sits here at my side now, in a cradle brought up from the nursery. I do not even entrust its care to the nurses here. I will not so much as permit them to see this child—and I shall not let it out of my sight—because here is the truth of the matter:

  This infant that we found in the woods—on the side of mountain . . . it is magnificent. Where the indigenous folk here are bent and degenerate, subject to the gigantism and the harelip and criminality which is a consequence of their breeding . . . this child is, how shall I say? It is perfection. It is the height of nature. It is a Mystery, or—dare I say it—a Miracle.

  Rest assured—no matter what Harper suspects, now or later . . . this child will come to no harm. I will not allow it. The infant is safe and I shall ensure that safety with my life—with all the life I have.
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br />   Were I so equipped, Charles, I swear that I would suckle this child myself.

  Yours in Service,

  Nils

  Dr. Nils Bergstrom

  Chief Physician-in-Residence

  Eliada Hospital

  Eliada, Idaho

  Part 1

  Nurture

  1 - Mister Juke

  APRIL, 1911

  Not ghosts.

  Although their owners might have pretended otherwise, Dr. Andrew Waggoner knew it. The sheets that loitered and whistled and kicked at the mud on this dark hillside in northern Idaho tonight were not ghosts; nor were they devils, nor duppies, nor spectral things of any kind.

  When Andrew was a good deal younger, his Uncle Elmer had told him: ghosts were what the Ku Klux Klan originally intended with those sheets they wore. They wanted to make the poor Negroes think they were beset by the implacable spirits of the dead, Devils straight up from Hell—and not merely small-souled white men with lynching on their minds.

  Maybe on some other Negro, the evil light of the kerosene flame in the twilight would make a mix with all those flapping sheets, that eerie un-musical whistling noise they were making, and that would be enough. But Andrew Waggoner was not that kind of Negro and he knew.

  These were not ghosts.

  They’d got Andrew just outside the hospital—done the deed as the last of the sun fell toward the pine-toothed edge of the Selkirk Mountains, west of Eliada. If he’d been paying better heed, not been smoking and brooding and keeping to himself, Andrew might have seen who they were. He didn’t think anyone would be caught wearing their mama’s bedsheets that close to town.

  It didn’t really matter much, of course. The truth of his predicament was awful in its simplicity: five men in sheets. One Negro, tied and on his knees. How does something like that end well?

  Andrew did not think of himself as a religious man, but as one of those sheets bent down in front of him, he thought about praying.

  As matters resolved, however, he didn’t have to pray or even make up his mind on the matter. If God was paying any attention at all, He spared Andrew the indignity of supplication by tossing down a bone.

  “You are going to watch this, Dr. Nigger.”

  The man in the sheet spoke in a voice Andrew thought he might recognize.

  “It is Waggoner,” said Andrew. “Dr. Waggoner.”

  He said “doctor” slowly, because he wanted to make that part of his name especially clear right now. Andrew Waggoner was a doctor, trained by some of the finest surgeons at Paris Medical School, graduated with honours, Class of 1908; he had been a resident here at Eliada’s hospital for nearly a year. He was not some hog-tied vagabond nigger that these men could feel right about killing.

  “This isn’t right, Robert,” he said. “You got to know that.”

  The sheet rustled like it was in the wind. The two eyes peering out through holes in it narrowed. “You don’t know names,” said the sheet. “You don’t know nothing.”

  Andrew let himself smile. He was right. Robert Vernon was the man behind that sheet and that gave him something to grasp.

  “Robert,” Andrew said, “you sweep floors at the hospital. You got a sister in Lewiston with a wedding coming up—it’s Harriet, am I right? Harriet Ver—”

  Andrew didn’t get the last name of “Vernon” out, because at that moment the sheet drove its fist into his gut. He wished he could have stood up to it, but it was a vicious punch and it sent the air whooping out of his lungs and made him bend and fall hard on his behind.

  For an instant, looking up at the sheet, he hated himself as much as the rest of them hated him. Getting on a first-name basis with white men in whiter sheets wasn’t going to get him anything. He was going to die, die twitching at the end of a rope, and there was nothing he could do about it—and he had it coming, stupid weak nigger that he was.

  It was only for an instant. As soon as he heard the whimpering, wheedling sounds coming from behind that sheet, he remembered how Vernon slouched and limped behind his broom and wouldn’t meet a man’s eye in the light of day. Andrew had a fine idea who the weak idiot was in this conversation. And it sure as hell was not the one with the medical degree from Paris.

  “You don’t know nothing! You don’t know my family name you dirty God-damn nigger!” Vernon hollered.

  A foot came out from beneath the sheet and caught him in the side. That hurt worse than the gut punch—it might have cracked a rib—but Andrew held on. He still had a chance. A slim one, but things were not as bad—not yet—as they were for poor little Maryanne Leonard.

  §

  It had been an awful day for the poor thing, started bad enough and ended up as bad as it could get. She was pregnant, with a child that no man in Eliada owned up to.

  There was talk that she’d been raped by one of the bachelors who worked the mill, or maybe by one of the hill folk passing through. Maybe someone nearer.

  Her brothers said they’d found her that morning in the privy, bent over herself as she squatted on the hole, just weeping and crying and cursing Jesus who she said had come one night and done this to her. There was blood coming out of her middle parts and they reported an awful smell coming up from the pit. So they brought her to the hospital on Sunday morning, hoping to find Dr. Bergstrom maybe. But when they got there, Dr. Andrew Waggoner was the only doctor in the house.

  He should have been more wary of the sick girl. Even in New York, a Negro doctor touching a white woman’s privates would cause a problem. But in New York, it would never get that far because the doctors wouldn’t be so scarce that there was any need for a Negro doctor in the hospital. That was what sent ambitious young Dr. Andrew Waggoner here to this little Idaho mill town of Eliada, improbably blessed with a decently equipped hospital where he might learn and develop his craft.

  He should have stopped. But listening to the story they told him, and looking at the girl, he couldn’t turn her away.

  Doing so would mean leaving Maryanne Leonard in the care of her brothers, one of whom likely as not was complicit in giving the poor girl what Andrew was pretty sure was an outhouse abortion.

  So Andrew smiled deferentially, told them: Bring her in. And he got ready to do what he could, which as it turned out was nothing much.

  §

  “Leave him,” said another sheet. “He’s got to be awake to see how he’s going to die.”

  This sheet was taller, and wider too. Andrew did not know who this one was by his voice, and as he looked up at it he realized: he had been gone a spell. The boot had come again and again, in the ribs and in the back and the chest, and there had been a forest of pain, and it had hit in his head, and he must have fallen unconscious. Now he was back.

  Through swollen lips, Andrew asked the new sheet: “Who are you? You the Grand Dragon or something?”

  “Quiet,” said the new sheet. He leaned in very close—so close that Andrew could smell his breath (not liquored, but ugly, soured as it was with coffee and seasoned with tobacco) and see the flesh around his eye (it was lined, used to squinting at sun, and tufted with a thick black eyebrow whose hairs poked out through the torn-out eye hole in the sheet) and feel the heat off him.

  The stranger in the sheet stood up.

  “You are one unlucky nigger,” he said, aloud. “Yesterday, we might have just put the scare in you—run you from town. But after what you done to pretty little Maryanne . . .”

  Andrew started to protest:

  He hadn’t done that thing to her abdomen. He hadn’t done anything but try and give her some comfort with a shot of morphine; try and find the source of the bleeding and make it stop; look at that opening like a caesarean cut (if the blade that had made it were blunt, and handed to her baby who used it to cut itself out from the inside) and tried to clean it, cover it, stitch it. “Jesus done it to me!” she’d screamed, thrashing on the table in the hospital’s operating theatre. “Jeee-Susss!” She said that again and again, even as the morphine took hold
, even as the life went out of her.

  Andrew had wanted to go out to the brothers after that, and ask: Any of you boys named Jesus?

  “It wasn’t me. She was gone,” Andrew said. “She’d lost too much blood. Her womb was ripped. Somebody did it . . . but nobody could have—”

  He stopped before the sheet’s raised hand could come down in his face.

  “You know,” said the sheet, his voice low now, “that’s the first true thing that came out of your nigger mouth since we brought you here. It wasn’t you that did this to her. We do know that. We ain’t fools.”

  “Then why—?”

  The sheet looked over his shoulder, wagged his head. “Get him up. And bring out the freak.”

  Andrew almost screamed in pain as two of them hoisted him up to his knees. Two others walked around behind him, to the wagon. He tried to look but his head wouldn’t quite turn the way it should, so he had to listen to the rustling of the tarpaulin, some grunting, and a sliding sound.

  As he listened, he realized:

  They’re not taking out a picture book here. They’ve got someone else in there.

  The person had been quiet when they’d hauled Andrew along, thrown him in the back—but Andrew didn’t have a sense about how he’d have missed him even so.

  Andrew turned his head just a little, and watched as he came into his view.

  The sheets were hauling a tall man, thin as sticks. White or Negro, Andrew couldn’t tell because he was not only tied like Andrew, but had a sack pulled down over his head. His legs moved strangely, like they’d been broken at the calf and had a joint added there. The high whistling noise that Andrew had thought was coming from the Klansmen got louder, and Andrew worked it out—it was not, had never been, coming from one of them. It was coming from under the sack.

  “So what,” said the sheet, “can you tell us about this fellow here?”

  “Will it make a difference?”

  “May it might.”