It's Not a Good Time to be Alive

            Before the light of day a blinding flash of electrifying lightning bolted across the tar black sky like fireworks and lit up a second-floor bedroom where Wilma was rolling a dead man into a shitty smelling blanket soaked with urine. As a gust of wind and a downpour of heavy rain battered the windowpanes the lights flickered in the unheated mansion and went out. Cursing the dark, Wilma blindly dragged the guy across the bedroom floor, down the dark hallway to a steep flight of stairs. As she pulled him down the narrow staircase the sound of the stiff thumping against each step was deafening, and when he landed with a thud in the front entryway she stopped to catch her breath.

           When she opened the front door to the porch overlooking the quiet neighborhood, the putrefying stench of decomposing bodies slapped her in the face. Firmly pressing her gauze mask against her nose she watched in horror as a rat scurried across their yard and disappeared amongst the rotting bodies stacked along the roadside like cords of wood. Feeling repugnant she gagged back the bitter tasting stomach acid that burned her throat. It was not a good time to be alive. People were dying everywhere. Some were dropping dead at work, passing away in their bed, or falling headfirst into a plate of food at their kitchen table. Everyone was scared of dying. One could wakeup fine in the morning and be dead before nightfall, and for all she knew she’d be the next one to kick the bucket. 

           As she lugged the stiff across the windy porch to his deceased wife who died the night before, a gust of blustery wind blew off her nursing cap that rolled like a tumbleweed across the yard into the street. When it disappeared out of sight she left the corpse beside his wife and tied a white towel around the outside doorknob to warn neighbors that the Sherman Hill Boarding House was under quarantine. This scared her. She was the only renter that wasn’t sick or dying, and she wondered how much longer she could hang on without coming down with the Spanish flu. 

           Shivering from the rainstorm that chilled her to the bone she wrapped her sweater around her uniform and buttoned it. On the other side of the porch she sat on a swing that overlooked downtown Des Moines hidden by a layer of early morning fog.  With her mask pulled down she lit a Camel cigarette that filled her lungs with the delicious taste of nicotine. While she smoked a savage flash of lightening lit up the early morning sky, and the deafening sound of thunder masked the cries of a flock of squawking black birds flying south over towering trees, shedding their yellow and orange leaves that blew wildly across neighborhood lawns.  

           As the wind dwindled to a light breeze a misty haze crept into the neighborhood and made her feel downhearted and pathetically ill-equipped. In nursing school she learned about the bubonic plague and other contagious diseases, but nothing prepared her for this nightmare. Many people of all ages were well in the morning and dead before nighttime and there was little, if anything she could do to save them. She let herself down in nursing school too. The fourth year she feared she’d flunk out, not because she didn’t do her homework or work hard, but because she was lucky. With long hours and little sleep there just wasn’t enough time left over to study for the final exams. 

           As she lit one cig off another she listened to the sleet pounding against the porch roof. The community was eerily quiet. There were no pedestrians or traffic, and when a horse-drawn wagon clambered up the street and parked in front of the mansion she watched with interest as two men leaped from the jump seat. Wearing gloves they tossed several corpses and decaying body parts into the wagon’s backend. When they were almost finished Wilma left the porch and trotted across the yard in the misty rain to talk with them. The closer she got the worse the smell, so she put her mask back on. “Can you take the two on the porch?” She shouted, as a gust of wind grabbed the hem of her ankle-length skirt, exposing her white petty-coat and swollen ankles.

           The skinny guy dressed in baggy overalls and muddy boots looked at her with pity. “Lady, if those are your parents you’re better off burying them in the backyard. There ain’t no more coffins so we’re throwing these poor souls into a mass grave. Ain’t no dignity for the dead.”

           “They’re no kin of mine,” she said, her braided hair wet and her uniform soaked to the skin. “It’s an elderly couple who were renting a room.”

           The other muddy fella with missing teeth lit a rolled cigarette. “Sure, we’ll take them off your hands, and if you could spare a little cash we’d sure appreciate it. We get five cents a body, but that barely buys food for our families, or feeds our horses.”

           “I’m really sorry, but I’ve only got enough to last me until payday. I’m the only nurse living in the boarding house so I’m not getting paid to do this. In fact, since I might be the next one to croak I’ll just leave you guys some money under my pillow.”

           Both men chuckled a little at her sick sense of humor, and after they removed the couple from the porch she heard a baby crying from somewhere upstairs. Back inside she kicked off her wet shoes and slowly climbed the steps in her stocking feet to the second floor. She felt cold, tired and sorry for herself. Since five o’clock this morning she had been rushing around between unheated rooms; taking temperatures, giving vitals and administering medications. And now she had no time to change into dry clothes because she had a baby screaming at the top of its lungs.  

           In the hallway she rapped on a door and when no one answered she went into the stuffy and gloomy room darkened by window shades. She flipped them up and cracked open a window to let in fresh air. The parents were both in bed and when she leaned over to check their vitals the mother was dead and the father was barely breathing. In the crib the infant was trembling from the cold, and when she changed the diaper maggots were swarming in the feces. With no time to deal with the couple she changed the diaper and carried the fussy little girl wrapped in a blanket to her rented room where she laid the child on her bed. The room was cold and she quickly peeled off her wet clothes and slipped into a corduroy bathrobe and a pair of slippers. With a towel wrapped around her wet head she took the baby from the mattress and went downstairs to the unheated kitchen. While stoking a fire in the wood stove, she perked coffee and heated a bottle of cold milk in a pan of simmering water.  

           As she drank her first cup of hot coffee in the kitchen-nook she fed the baby its bottle and read yesterday’s newspaper. Most everything in the Des Moines Register was bad news. Sick veterans were returning home from the war to find their wives ill from the Spanish flu and their children starving. Fit parents were healthy one day and dead the next.  Fathers went to work in the morning and never returned. Funeral homes were running out of coffins and stacks of dead bodies were stored outside for the meat wagons to pick up. The only good news was that WWI was ending and many soldiers were returning home to their Iowa farms. This meant that Doctor Bob Waldman, missing in action, might be returning home.