Free FSF, March-April 2010 by Spilogale Authors Page B

lying in his hammock, parchment colored, burning with fever and bringing up black vomit—Yellow Jack's classic symptom. The Floradora was immediately quarantined and the sick man removed to an isolation ward. Of course Schulz had no way of knowing about that, or whether a few mosquitoes might have fluttered ashore during the Floradora' s brief stay at île du Sable. And wouldn't have cared anyway, for as yet nobody on earth knew how the fever spread.
    Corman based his vivid account of these happenings on a log that Schulz kept, with a meticulous day-to-day and even hour-to-hour record of events at Fort Clay. Wrapped in oilcloth and locked in a metal dispatch box, the log had survived the catastrophe and ended up in the National Archives, along with the other records of the Department of the Gulf. So Corman knew that during the next few days, the weather had been sunlit but oppressively hot and still. And then the Gulf began to change. Long ripples running up from the south slowly grew into waves, then into rollers. By the end of the week, breakers were pounding the dock and chewing at the coarse sea grass that anchored the dunes. The sky to the south turned from the dull sheen of pewter to the blue-black of gunmetal.
    Sure now that the storm was heading his way, Schulz set his men to work, blocking the cannon ports with wooden barriers braced by logs wedged against the carriages of the big guns. They covered the muzzles and plugged the firing vents, then went to work on the fort itself—barring the main gate, moving their carbines and swords from the underground magazine to the barracks’ upper floor, closing and nailing the shutters on the windows of the barracks and the officers’ quarters. Since the wooden cistern that supplied them drinking water might be toppled by the wind, Schulz had the men fill barrels with water, muscle them into the barracks, and store them between their bunks. He couldn't have known that Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that spreads yellow fever, is a domestic sort of creature and likes nothing better than to breed in artificial containers close to its blood source. For all his forethought and common sense, he'd created a nursery for Yellow Jack right where his men slept.
    On the Sunday before the storm, with breakers smashing against the south and southeast walls of the fort, salt spray leaping higher than the parapet, and the wind moaning, Schulz ordered the American flag taken down before it was torn apart, and summoned his fifteen men to a service of prayer and supplication. They met in Casemate Five, with Letourneau watching from his cell. Corporal Quant delivered a rousing sermon asking God to spare them, like Jonah, from the wind and waves—and also (with a glance at Letourneau) from the terror that walketh about in darkness. They sang Old Hundred and the Doxology, and the men's strong voices resounded from the shadowy arches and set echoes careening around the whole circuit of the fort, with the final Amen returning in ghostly fashion again and again for a full minute after they fell silent.
    Then from his cell, the prisoner in a deep sonorous bass began to chant the Dies Irae. Perhaps he'd learned the sounds like a parrot in church, with no idea what the words meant. But the sergeant had had a bit of Latin flogged into him at a Catholic school in Cincinnati, and he admitted that the chant filled him with dread. When his men asked him what the loony was singing, he muttered that he didn't know, fearing to reveal that the words meant Day of Wrath .
    * * * *
    Saffron sat with the bag of equipment at her feet, the empty Evian bottle in her hand, her mouth half open and her eyes distant. I have to do the book, she thought. This is too good to pass up—I have to do the book.
    Schulz (Corman continued) had become fascinated with the Headsman. That night he and Quant went down to Casemate Five, carrying pistols, a lighted candle, and a loaf of bread. Letourneau was pathetically grateful for the