[A letter of four sheets, on Columbus Hospital stationery, Great Falls, Montana, folded small and kept in the same locked drawer as Stefania Pytel's notebooks, behind St. Casimir's. Addressed to "Miss S. Pytel, R.N., Port Hume General Hospital." Postmarked Great Falls, 14 February 1921. Written in English by a Polish hand; a few words in Polish, rendered here in italics.]
Columbus Hospital Great Falls, Montana the eleventh of February, 1921
Kochana Stefciu,
You will forgive the long silence. It is a year since I left the lake and I have written you nothing, and now I write because I have no one here who will hear this in the right spirit, and you were always the one who looked at a patient and said to nie jest to when the doctor had already written what it was.
We have the sleeping sickness here. You will have seen it by now on your wards also, I think — the papers say it is everywhere since the influenza. Fourteen cases on my floor since November. I will not describe the presentation to you; you know it. The lethargy, the eyes that cannot fix, the tremor that comes into the hand before it comes into the face. The doctors write encephalitis on the chart and go on with their day. I am not a doctor. I write down what I see.
What I see is this. They do not all sleep. They sleep at the same hours, and at other hours they are awake in a way I do not like, and it is not the same hours as the town. And when I go along the ward at night with the lamp I have begun to count the ones with their heads turned toward the river.
Stefciu, this town sits in a rock trench with the Missouri at the bottom of it and the falls and the dams all along it, one of them so near you could throw a stone from the Black Eagle houses into the white water. Everyone here says you stop hearing it after a week. I have been here a year. I do not hear it. I feel it — in the sternum, in the teeth, like standing too near the big bell at St. Casimir's after it has stopped. The old lineman in bed 20 of ward 9 says his people never heard it either. His people have been here since before the dams, and before that his grandmother's people came from a lake town in the east, and before that, he says, from a ship. His grandmother kept a memorial card in her Bible for a cousin lost in '72 — the ship found sailing on with no one aboard, off the Azores, the men never found. He thinks it is a family curse. I think it is a family.
He kept a day-book for the power company all his life, the poles and the wire and the ice loads. I have the last volume; his daughter did not want it. The hand is a good hand in the first pages. Then it gets smaller. Then it gets smaller again, and shakes, and it is three weeks after it shrinks before he writes anything about feeling ill. The tremor is in the ink before it is in the words. I keep the book in my apron and I do not know why.
This is the part I would not say to the Sisters. When I came here I had nothing — no lake, no church, no language, no one. I had lost all of it, and what I had left was the two or three people who wrote to me and the girl who shares my room. And I was nearly happy. The old lineman said a thing to me before he stopped speaking. He said: we build it all back, every time, the wire and the dams and the guns, and the only thing we do not build back is each other. I do not know if he was speaking of his family or of the war. I wrote it down. I do not think he knew he had said it.
I have enclosed nothing. There is nothing to enclose. If your wards fill this spring the way ours have, look for the ones who lived their whole lives by the water, and look at their handwriting before you look at their eyes.
Burn this if you like. I only needed one person to have read it.
Twoja, Ludka
[Beneath the signature, in Pytel's own hand, pencil, undated:]
Ward 3, bed 7 — Sosowski, F., 34, docks. Lived his whole life on the Quays. Tremor in the hand first. I looked at his admission signature. It is smaller than the one on his pension card.
[Clipped to the last sheet, a second slip, typed, from the Port Hume County Coroner's office, filed and returned:]
Re: your inquiry of 3 March 1921. The certificate reads "Encephalitis." No further inquiry is contemplated. — J.A.F.