1875
GEO. WHITMARK, UNDERTAKER, read the weather-bleached shingle above the door. Below, in ragged knife-carved lettering: SCALAWAG.
Effie shuddered, but knocked nonetheless. No answer. She turned the knob. Locked. A crack snaked across the storefront window. She wiped the dusty glass with her hankie and peered inside. An hour past noon and already the interior lamps were dampened. Several caskets stood on display in the shadows. Older models, bare of adornment.
A few paces beyond the front entry, she found the gate to the carriageway ajar and slipped inside. It led to a back courtyard and outbuildings. She ducked beneath a limp, green-tinged clothesline and laid down her luggage. “Colonel Whitmark?”
A rustling sounded from the residence above the shop and she called out again.
“Put the delivery in the storeroom and be gone with you,” a voice hollered from the upstairs gallery.
“I’ve not come with a delivery, I . . .” She stepped beyond the canopy of an overgrown fig tree and looked up. A man with an untrimmed mustache and bloodshot eyes leaned over the balustrade. “Colonel Whitmark?”
“Who are you?”
“Euphemia Jones, sir. I’ve come to offer my services as—”
“No, thank you. I’m not looking for a maid.”
Effie pursed her lips. The dirt-crusted pavers, untamed garden, and grimy windows spoke otherwise. “I’m not a maid. I—”
“How’d you get in?”
“The gate was open, sir. I believe you were waiting for a delivery.”
“Was I?” He shook his head and swilled from a brown bottle. “Close it on your way out, won’t you?” He pushed off from the balustrade and stumbled backward out of sight.
Effie glanced down the shadowy carriageway. She’d come directly from the steamboat, fighting the tide of buggies and wagons, her trunk and embalming cabinet in tow. Would that she might find work elsewhere. But who else in New Orleans would hire her—a Yankee, a woman, a Negro? The thin stash of bills hidden in her petticoat pocket couldn’t buy a steamboat ticket back to Indiana. Not that she’d return. Not for all the bank notes in the South.
“I believe”—she hesitated, hating to mention the connection—“you knew my former employer. During the War. Captain Kinyon.”
The clatter above went silent. “Kinyon did you say?” More silence. “John Kinyon, of Indiana?”
“Yes, sir. I worked as his assistant going on nine years.”
He peeked his head back over the balustrade, looked at her, and chuckled. “By assistant you mean maid?”
Effie slipped a hand into her skirt pocket and clenched the cool brass button tucked within. “No, sir. As an embalmer. I even mix my own preserving fluid, and to far better effect than that premade slop you have stacked in your storeroom.”
“Ha! And that there’s an alligator.” He jutted his chin in the direction of a small green lizard scurrying up the stucco outbuilding.
“No, sir. That’s a lizard. Anolis carolinensis, I believe.”
“It’s an expression, Miss . . .”
“Jones.”
“It means . . . never mind.” He took another swig from his bottle. Even from a dozen feet below, Effie smelled the sharp fumes.
“What makes you think I’m in need of an assistant any more than I am a maid?”
She squeezed the button again, then let it roll back into the corner of her pocket. “Colonel Whitmark—”
“No one calls me colonel anymore,” he said, an edge rising in his voice. “It’s Mister. Or better yet, nothing at all.”
A cold breeze stirred the air, agitating the leaves. Effie glanced at her battered trunk. Thirteen hundred and fifty miles she’d traveled, and for what? To be turned out like a beggar?
“Col—Mr. Whitmark, your showpieces are outmoded and dusty. Your desk is cluttered with invoices. You’ve got feathers and crepe heaped about as if you run a junk shop, not a funerary establishment—and that’s just what I could see through the front window.” She stamped across the courtyard and flung wide the storeroom door. An acrid smell stung her nose. “These empty fluid jars are in sore need of rinsing. As are your instruments, which you haven’t bothered to pack away. And when was the last time you oiled the hinges of your cooling table or laundered the canopy?” She turned back to the gallery. “Whatever your objections to my employment, Mr. Whitmark, it’s clear you’re in want of an assistant.”
The colonel’s lips flattened and his nostrils flared, but Effie paid no mind. She’d not leave without saying her peace. “If it’s my sex that offends, I can assure you my skill with the syringe matches that of any man. If it’s my color, I can only wonder to what end you fought if not the freedom and advancement of my kind.”
For a long while, he was silent. Across the street, a shoe-shiner hollered out to customers. A cat mewled from a nearby yard. Unlatched shutters knocked about in the breeze. When at last Mr. Whitmark spoke, his voice was flat, tired. “I fought for the preservation of the Union, Miss Jones. Nothing more, nothing less.”
“I see.” She held his gaze until he looked away and gulped again from his bottle. With a slow step, she crossed the courtyard, tucked her embalming cabinet beneath her arm, and reached for her trunk.
“John really taught you how to elevate an artery and inject preserving fluid?”
Effie turned. “I can embalm any body you lay before me, Mr. Whitmark. Start to finish.”
His gray eyes glinted. “This I have a mind to see.”
Winter’s chill followed them from the shop to the morgue. Inside, overhead kerosene lamps cast a fickle glow on the rows of bodies laid out for recognition. Wooden blocks were wedged beneath their necks, keeping their faces upturned and visible. Their death-day shirts and hats and petticoats hung limp from nearby hooks.
Despite the dank air, Effie removed her coat. Neither Colonel Whitmark nor the bespectacled coroner offered to take it for her. Foolish to expect such consideration coming South. She hung her coat apart from the others on a rusty nail jutting from the plaster wall and followed the men across the morgue. They stopped before a body at the far end. Its purple-tinged arm lolled over the edge of the examination table. A grimy sheet covered its bulbous legs.
“Have you an apron?” she asked.
The coroner gaped a moment, then fetched her a balled-up wad of checkered linen. Stained, but seemingly laundered. Effie flapped open the apron, sending a whiplike snap echoing through the room. Gooseflesh prickled her skin. But surely, that was just the cold.
She tied the apron around her waist and rolled up her dress sleeves. A sweet, fetid odor rose from the body, overwhelming the burning kerosene and stench of corn juice bleeding from Colonel Whitmark’s pores.
Not Colonel. Mister.
His bloodshot eyes followed her, steady, even as his body swayed. Undoubtedly, he was waiting for her to faint or fall into hysterics. Then he might dismiss her and return home to his bottle.
Such scrutiny seldom bothered her. She’d spent enough time in bedrooms and parlors crowded with the living—bereft widows, curious children, nosey in-laws—that ignoring them was second nature. Once they realized she didn’t mean to slice open the body but only make a tiny cut to lift the artery, they’d leave her in peace. But Mr. Whitmark remained intent. Hands twitching. Watching. Waiting.
She plucked a few strands of slimy foliage from the body’s auburn hair and probed the skin. Two days dead, maybe more depending on the temperature of the water. “He drowned.”
It was not a question, but both Mr. Whitmark and the coroner nodded.
“Did you drain the water from the lungs and stomach?” she asked.
“Bien sûr,” the coroner said. “Of course.”
Taking care to keep the head elevated, she turned the body on its side and pressed her knee just below the sternum. Dark water bubbled from its lips onto the cracked tile floor, splattering her boots and the hem of her skirt.
Mr. Whitmark chuckled. “Looks like you missed some, Lafitte.”
She pulled over a rickety side table and wiped away the flecks of dried blood before opening her instrument case. A bulb syringe and long rubber tubing lay neatly coiled in the bed of the case beside a spool of silk thread. Her other tools—tweezers, scissors, trocar, needles, catheters, and scalpel—were fastened with elastic loops to the underside of the lid. The long journey had left the scissors and one of the catheters askew. She realigned them with the others, then withdrew the long metal trocar. “First, I’ll tap the abdomen to draw off the gas. Then the injection. Four pints should be sufficient.”
Mr. Whitmark’s gray eyes narrowed. Hitherto he’d regarded her with that jovial indifference common to drunkards, as if she were merely an amusing, though somewhat tedious, apparition.
“You do want that I should continue?” she asked.
He ran an unsteady hand over his flushed cheeks, whiskers rasping against his palm. “I’ll get the jars of fluid from the wagon.”
He shambled off and the coroner with him, leaving her at last alone to work.
She found a pail of clean water and a few strips of linen on a cluttered workbench nearby. Her hands trembled as she dunked the linen and wrung it out. Careful not to damage the fragile, discolored skin, she set about wiping the mud from the body. Soon her hands steadied. This was what she was good at—her work among the dead.
She lit another lamp for better light and pierced the body’s bloated abdomen, just above the navel. Gas whistled through the trocar and the body began to deflate. Effie didn’t flinch at the foul odor. Mr. Whitmark returned with the embalming fluid, setting the jars beside her before slumping onto a stool in the corner. She did her best to ignore him, even as he began to snore.
Her hands worked almost by rote, her mind drifting from the mechanics of the task, from the well-known map of arteries and organs beneath the skin, to the man dead before her.
Had he jumped into the river, well aware of the swift tides and swirling eddies beneath the water’s surface? Had he slipped or fallen? Had someone pushed him in and watched as he drowned?
Surely he had a wife at home wondering at his absence. A mother or uncle or cousin awaiting his return. Yet here he lay, unclaimed.
Perhaps he too was alone. An orphan, a vagabond. Nameless and faceless in this overcrowded city. She drew her scalpel over the neck, revealing the carotid artery, and readied her catheter and syringe pump. Better that way, alone. No one to mourn you in death meant no one to hurt you in life.
After completing the injection and soaking the skin with embalming fluid–saturated rags, the body’s purple hue had all but vanished. For a man two days’ drowned, the corpse looked downright handsome.
Mr. Whitmark startled awake and staggered over when she announced that she was finished. He probed the body’s now-hardened flesh. Sniffed the soap-scented air. Peered at her impeccable sutures. Effie waited, shoulders back, chin high, fingers clasped around her brass button.
“I’d be mad as a March hare to take on a carpetbagger Negress as my assistant,” Mr. Whitmark said, shaking his head. He poked a few more times at the body, then glanced at her. The set of his stubbled jaw softened. “Come by the shop tomorrow.”
Dusk had just begun to settle on the city when Effie reached the shop. The smell of roasting duck perfumed the cool air. Firecrackers popped in the distance, and tin whistles crooned from the streets. In Indiana, Christmas Eve had been a staider affair. The festivities here in New Orleans, chief among them the noise, unnerved her.
In the three weeks since Mr. Whitmark had hired her on, she’d come to know the American Sector well. Newspaper Row on Camp Street. The Cotton District, still fledgling after the War and recent recession. The tiny Chinatown to the northwest, just beyond the commercial bustle.
Immigrants crowded around the business district—Irishmen, Germans, Italians—living in rundown cottages or subdivided townhomes once occupied by Americans who’d since fled to the suburban reaches of the city. Her kind, the freedmen, lived back-of-town, where the city petered out to swampland.
The French Quarter was different. Creoles of every color lived side by side. But Mr. Whitmark had few clients in that part of the city, and Effie had ventured past Canal Street only once to procure embalming chemicals from a pharmacist there.
Work had been inconstant, a dribble of clients some days, none others. The first body they’d been called to, Mr. Whitmark embalmed entirely himself, lecturing her as he worked, as if she’d never seen a syringe pump or mixed a quart of preservative. His technique was solid, if a bit outdated, but his execution sloppy. He cut too large an incision, and his sutures ran uneven. His hand tottered as he worked. No doubt from the liquor.
The next call—a man dead of apoplexy—began the same. Mr. Whitmark bid her stand aside and watch as he demonstrated how to puncture the heart. He’d been called away by the family before retrieving his trocar from the case, though. When he returned, Effie had already drained the right ventricle, injected fluid into the cavity, and cannulated the brachial artery. Thereafter, he’d left the embalming to her.
Days when they hadn’t a case, he didn’t wake till noon and retired before the bells of nearby St. Patrick’s tolled six. Sooner if he found his bottle empty. While he slept, she dusted and polished and swept. She oiled the squeaky hinges about the shop, organized the storeroom, and righted his account books. She repainted the sign and sanded away the word Scalawag. She sent for new catalogs from the casket makers. After airing out the wrinkled, moth-eaten skirts from the storeroom, she fastened them around the showpieces in the shop so they didn’t look so naked through the newly scrubbed windows.
If Mr. Whitmark noticed these things, he didn’t say. But he paid her a dollar at the end of each day and said she might as well come back tomorrow. A man of her skill would earn more than twice that sum. Yet with her position so tenuous, she dared not squabble. Besides, it was more than she’d ever made. Captain Kinyon hadn’t paid her at all. Theirs was a family business. At the time, Effie hadn’t minded. It allowed her the delusion she was more to the captain than an apprentice or assistant.
Now, with the overgrown foliage and high courtyard walls buffering the Christmas Eve din, she laid down her equipment, shook out her weary arms, and set about cleaning. She scrubbed and polished her tools. Flushed the rubber tubing. Plunged her smock and the dirtied floor sheet into the washbasin.
Christmas carols sounded from an open window a few buildings down, the accompanying piano slightly out of tune. The carolers seemed not to mind and sang on gaily, punctuating each song with laughter and applause. She raked the fabric over the washboard until her fingers were numb and every stain vanished, then cranked it through the ringer and draped it over the line.
“That you, Effie?” Mr. Whitmark appeared on the gallery dressed in only his shirtsleeves and wrinkled trousers. “It’s Christmas Eve. What are you still doing here?”
She frowned. Wasn’t that obvious? “I’m attending to the supplies.”
He shambled down the stairs. “This can wait. Go home. Celebrate.”
Home seemed too sentimental an appellation for the boardinghouse where she lodged. The roof was sound, the floorboards solid, the bed free of fleas, and the food palatable. She wasn’t in want of much else. Certainly not celebration.
She heaved the sudsy water into the gutter flowing to the street. “I’m nearly done.”
“If you insist on finishing up, at least have a drink with me.” Mr. Whitmark shuffled to the kitchen and rummaged through the cupboards.
“I don’t drink,” she called, but he paid her no mind, returning with a bottle of brandy and tin cup.
He handed her the cup, filled it halfway, then clanked it against the bottle in a toast. “Merry Christmas, Effie.”
She took a cautious sip. It tasted like horse piss—or what she imagined horse piss to taste like—and she spat it out onto the stone pavers.
Mr. Whitmark laughed and drank a long swill. “I gather John and the missus didn’t drink.”
“Teetotalers,” she said. Never mind the whiskey the captain kept tucked away in his study.
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
A firecracker popped from a neighboring courtyard. Mr. Whitmark flinched. “Blasted toys.”
“The captain hated them too.”
“You called him that? Captain? ” He plopped into a creaky rocker. “Even as his ward?”
Effie paused, then set to packing up the instruments she’d laid out to dry. “What else should I have called him?”
“I don’t know . . . papa, father. You were just a girl, weren’t you, when he took you in?”
Effie didn’t know how old she’d been. Seven? Eight? Too young to remember much of what came before. And though he’d been the closest thing to a father she’d known, he’d never said she might call him papa. “I called him sir sometimes.”
Whitmark chuckled again. “He was a bit of a fussy fellow. So serious all the time. What’d he do to send you running?”
Her stomach clenched. “Nothing, I—”
“Most Negroes with any money and a lick of sense are pulling up stakes these days and heading North.”
“I just . . .” She took another sip of brandy, regretting it the moment the rancid liquor hit her tongue. “Wanted to see the land where I was born.”
More than that, she’d wanted to find a place where she could blend in. Disappear. Belong. Where people, well-meaning or not, wouldn’t regard her as a specimen.
But Mr. Whitmark seemed satisfied with her answer, for he leaned back in his chair and nodded. The wicker groaned beneath his weight, as if it had been decades since someone had last sat and rocked in it. “This is where he found you?”
“Nearby, I believe.”
“What of your own folk?”
Effie looked down at the amber liquid in her cup. She hadn’t any folk, any kin, any true family. None she could name or remember. “I haven’t much recollection before the War, sir.”
“Don’t you go calling me sir now too.” He took another drink from his bottle and stood, swaying a moment before finding his balance. “I have something for you.” He fished in his trouser pocket and tossed her a small paperboard box. “Merry Christmas.”
Effie held the box in her palm and examined it. It was light, almost weightless. One corner mashed and rounded, the string tying it shut fashioned in a sloppy bow. She glanced back at him. His hooded eyes glinted with a kindness she’d hitherto overlooked. “I . . . thank you.”
He flapped a hand, his cheeks flushing beyond their usual ruddiness. “It’s only a trifle.”
She set aside her cup and untied the bow. Inside was a large brass button with an embossed eagle in the center. In one talon, it clutched three sharpened arrows. In the other, an olive branch.
“I’ve seen the other buttons you keep tucked in your pocket and thought . . . well, you might like this one too.”
“You didn’t take this from your uniform, did you?”
“Ain’t doing nothing but gathering dust. Hell, I was surprised I still had the damn thing.”
Effie turned the button over in her hand. Angled it toward the light. The years had tarnished it some, but otherwise it was unblemished. She closed her fingers around it and cradled it in her palm. “It’s beautiful.”
“Like I said, it’s nothing to me now.” He drained half of the remaining brandy in his bottle with one guzzle.
She winced, recalling all the bloated, jaundiced bodies she’d attended over the years. “You ought to read Dr. Benner’s report on diseases of the liver. He contends that hot climates and excessive consumption of spirits are chief among—”
“I know what causes cirrhosis, Effie.”
“Then why do you drink so much?”
He sighed and smiled at her. “We all do things that aren’t in our best interest.”
“That’s illogical.”
“Maybe, but it’s the only damned thing that separates us from the rest of the beasts of the world.”
She frowned. “Mr. Darwin has posited we differ from animals in ways of degree not kind. In—”
Mr. Whitmark threw up his arms, the remaining liquor sloshing against the sides of his bottle. “I yield, I yield! Off with you. Surely you’ve better things to do on your Christmas Eve than debate naturalism with a surly old man like me.”
To the contrary, she quite liked the topic and hadn’t anyplace more pressing to be. But she ventured not to say so. She stowed the button back in its box, closed the latches on her embalming cabinet, and grabbed her coat from the storeroom. “Day after tomorrow, then?”
He nodded. “You’re an odd fish, Miss Jones, but a damn fine worker. Whatever your reasons for coming here, John was a fool to let you go.”
“Merry Christmas,” she said, glad he didn’t pry further. “Happy tidings to you and . . .” Yours, so went the saying. But he hadn’t a wife or children or family of any kind, as best she could tell.
“Same to you.”
She left through the carriageway and rambled down Carondelet Street in the opposite direction of her boardinghouse. The carolers from down the way had ceased their crooning, but an occasional peel of laughter still rang from the window. A group of young boys blaring their horns and whistles dashed past.
An odd fish. Would she ever escape such a stigma? Life had laid the course. She simply followed and made the best of it. In the War years, helping in Captain Kinyon’s surgery tent had saved her from the cotton fields and contraband camps. Her deft little fingers and quick step proved useful to a man already middle-aged and suffering from rheumatism. That, and she didn’t recoil at the sight of blood. Only natural that when he took her North with him after the War she’d continued as his assistant, even as he traded his surgeon’s saw for an embalmer’s syringe.
Perhaps she was odd. But at least she had another day’s promise of work.
Most of the shops and businesses had closed early. Garlands of holly and evergreen decorated their darkened windows. The smell of baking bread and turtle soup set to simmer until after midnight mass made her stomach grumble, but she had little desire to turn around. The other lodgers at her boardinghouse—all maids in the big houses that lined St. Charles Street—would undoubtedly be in, chewing over the trivialities of their days.
Her housemates’ incessant conversation baffled Effie as much as the Christmas noise. As with most things, the Kinyons had been sparing with their words, leaving her unschooled in the art of chatter. The dead afforded no practice either.
She wandered down Gravier Street toward the river. Carriages rolled past at frequent intervals, and small groups of revelers loped along the sidewalks. No, not sidewalks. Banquettes, they called them here. Ahead in the distance a train whistle blared. She walked, and daylight retreated. Fewer people passed by. The air turned smoky from the bonfires alight on the levee, welcoming Père Noël.
Effie relished this sliver of time, when night had wrestled all but a few smudges of light from the sky, when families were home around their supper tables and street urchins had returned to their dens, when no one yet thought to don their opera coat or leave the saloon. When the streets were entirely hers. She enjoyed the rhythmic clack of her boot heels upon the pavers, the cool air in her lungs, the scent of honeysuckle or wintersweet wafting from courtyards. In Indiana, spring alone hoarded such pleasures.
She turned up Common Street to wend her way to the boardinghouse. This part of the city was unfamiliar to her. The lamplighters had yet to make their pass, leaving her to navigate by the pallid moonlight. Some ways on, a narrow, two-story building flanked by a high brick wall caught her eye. Her feet faltered. The air no longer smelled of honeysuckle or smoke, but of dust and excrement. Her heart sped until she felt it like a paddle wheel against her breastbone. Curiosity propelled her from the banquette and across the street toward the building, even as her muscles tensed in protest.
A cry rang out from behind the tall wall, high-pitched and plaintive. Had a woman made that noise? It came again and Effie nearly retched. She stumbled forward and braced herself against the wall. The rough brick with its crumbling mortar felt . . . familiar. Not familiar in the abstract. These bricks and this smell and that frightful sound—she’d been here before. A dark, crowded enclosure flashed in her mind. A short, bone-thin finger following the lines of mortar as if it were a maze. She felt the sensation of sweat trickling along her hairline, but when she brought her hand to her forehead it was cool and dry. The stench of human shit and . . . frying bacon filled her nose. A new sound came—grunting—and when she closed her eyes shadowy figures shambled across the black backdrop of her lids.
She pulled her hand away from the brick and tried to steady her breath. A few yards down the wall gave way to a short stretch of rotting picket fence, offering her a glimpse into what lay behind the high wall.
Effie stepped forward, rallied her courage, and took another step. The grunts and squeals grew louder. A shiver pricked its way across her skin. Ghosts didn’t exist. She’d sat with death enough to know. But as she neared the opening and peeked into the blackness, certainty abandoned her.
The smell rose even stronger here and again her stomach heaved. Shapes took form in the darkness. She shuffled back from the pen and blinked.
Pigs.
Only pigs.
Effie forced a laugh and turned back the way she’d come, her quick step and clammy palms betraying the calm she strived to muster. Ghosts, monsters—how foolish! She pulled her coat tightly closed and headed home, keeping to well-lit and familiar streets.
Her heart had not yet stilled by the time she reached the boardinghouse. She hesitated a moment on the porch, leaning against one of the colonnades and drawing in a succession of slow breaths. A residue of terror remained in her bones.
Ridiculous, she told herself. Irrational. What harm could there possibly be in a dirty old pig yard? She pinned back her shoulders and went inside.
A cacophony of chatter and music and clanking glassware struck her upon entry. Roasting mirlitons perfumed the air, but Effie didn’t trust her stomach. She tiptoed past the parlor, where the other boarders had gathered. One woman—Effie couldn’t remember her name, only that her voice had the shrill quality of a parrot—sat before the rickety piano plucking out the melody line of a Christmas hymn. The others sang along, giggling when they missed a note or forgot the words.
Effie shimmied around the loose floorboard at the base of the stairs and skipped over the creaky third step. She’d almost made it to the landing when she heard her name. She winced and turned around.
Another boarder, Meg, stood grinning at the base of the stairs. “Come join us. Mrs. Neale’s done cooked up some eggnog.”
When Effie had first arrived at the house, the landlady, Mrs. Neale, bid Meg show Effie around. Meg took hostage her arm and—before they’d even made it out of the foyer—had told Effie her name, Margaret Louise Talbot; that she’d grown up in Livingston Parish; that she worked for the Clarksons down on Fourth Street; and that her favorite color was blue . . . or maybe purple. By that point, Effie had stopped listening.
“No,” Effie said now, and then as an afterthought, “thank you.”
“You don’t have to drink no eggnog. Just come sing with us. We’s—”
“I don’t sing.”
“You ain’t need to have a perdy voice.” She glanced over her shoulder, then whispered, “Maybelle sho don’t.”
“No, I don’t partake in singing.”
Meg gave a confused look and patted down her fluffy bangs. “Oh . . . Well, we’s heading to midnight mass later if you wanna come.”
“I’m not a Catholic.”
“Oh . . .”
Effie turned and finished up the stairs. To think, only hours before she’d pitied Mr. Whitmark his solitude.
“Happy Christmas Eve!” Meg called after her.
She hesitated on the landing but did not turn around. “Good night.”
Gray clouds muted the afternoon sun. Winter’s chill hung in the air. Talk about town was of tomorrow’s Twelfth Night parade and ball. Effie had made the mistake of asking Meg about this peculiar celebration and suffered a quarter hour’s explanation that meandered from the feast of the Epiphany to something about a golden bean and the beginning of Carnival. Had she not cut Meg off mid-sentence and walked away, Effie suspected she’d still be trapped in the parlor listening to an endless history of every krewe in the city.
Now, she hurried toward the business district. She’d not had a day off in well over a week, and her list of errands was tiresomely long. While others had filled the Christmas and New Year’s holidays with social calls and parties, Effie had traipsed from one end of the city to the other with her cooling table and embalming tools.
Death knows no respite, Captain Kinyon had said to her some years back in Indiana, and she found the same to be true here in the South. Lockjaw, consumption, childbed fever, grippe—so many cases they blurred together in her mind. More lasting were the sideways stares and all
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