Eutopia Read Online Free PDF

uncles.
    Jason wished she might have. But he supposed this was as good a time as any to meet one of them—he was in need of relations now as never before.
    He gathered Germaine Frost’s revolver, her bag, and carried both to the cabin. Germaine—Aunt Germaine—followed at a respectful distance. As they came to the stoop, she asked him to stop a moment.
    “Have you washed inside?” she asked.
    “Washed—”
    “Inside,” she said. “The house. It is a plague house, after all. It may still be infected.”
    “Infected?”
    “With the disease that took my dear sister. Although not you, young master—Jason, is it?”
    “Yes ma’am. Jason Thistledown’s my name. And no ma’am. I did not wash. Not especially, inside I mean.” He shuffled his feet. “It’s pretty ripe in there I guess.”
    “Well, Jason,” she said, and put out her hand, “let’s have a look. Please hand me my bag.”
    Aunt Germaine set the bag down in a drift. She took a little handful of snow, and scrubbed the handles of the bag where Jason had held it. Then she took more snow and rubbed it in her gloved hands before opening the bag. She rooted through some neatly folded cloth until she pulled out a small handkerchief, with strings coming out of each corner. Jason watched as she placed the cloth over her mouth, then reached up and tied it behind her head like she was doing her hair. In the end, the little handkerchief covered her mouth and her nose. Finally, she pulled off her hat and took off her coat, and set them down atop the carpet bag.
    “Very good,” she said, her voice muffled by the cloth. “Now let us see how you have been getting by, Jason.”
    Jason stepped aside to let Aunt Germaine through. She did not get far inside.
    “Oh my,” she said. “Where does one start?”
    Jason looked past her to see what she meant. The cabin was a simple enough place to his eye. One long pine table with a couple of chairs, the wood stove in the middle of it, a tiny windowsill and the beds at one end of it. All in one room.
    “This,” she said, “is a breeding place for germs. The ground itself is your floor! Had you been staying outside all the time, Jason?”
    “No ma’am.”
    “Did you isolate your dear mother as she was ill?”
    “No ma’am.”
    She turned to him. Her eyes seemed very large behind the glasses. “And after she passed. You’ve remained here for how long after that?”
    “Don’t know.”
    “Weeks?”
    “Months.”
    “Oh my.”
    She stepped back outside, and leaned close to him. “It is all right, my dear,” she said. “I am well-trained. Open your mouth. And turn to the sun, please, so I can better see.”
    §
    Two hours later, Jason Thistledown was naked as the day he was born, up to his breast-bone in a tub of scalding hot water that Aunt Germaine had made him boil up on the wood stove and haul to a level spot in the lee of the house, and rubbing himself down with a black, stinging bar of soap from the carpet bag.
    Jason tried to argue. “I’m not sick,” he said. “If I was carrying this germ, wouldn’t it make sense for me to be sick? It’s got to be gone now!”
    “No,” said Germaine, “it does not. You clearly have an immunity.”
    “How can you know that?” he demanded. “And how would it be on my clothes?”
    She pointed back at the house. “Fetch the water, Jason. And get in it. This is not a discussion.” She clapped her hands. “Hop to it.”
    Now, sitting in the water, Jason wondered how in the course of less than an hour he could have moved from contemplating shooting a woman to hopping to it when she hollered.
    Part of it, he suspected, was that she did seem to know what she was doing. She examined him like she was a doctor, and when he asked about that she said that back in Philadelphia she had worked as a nurse. She seemed to know a lot about germs, and when he asked about that she made a joke about them being her namesake. “The girls used to call me Germy behind my back,”