[Draft of a letter, three sheets, in Stefania Pytel's hand, folded inside the Montana letter it answers and kept with it in the locked drawer behind St. Casimir's. Polish and English intermixed; Polish rendered in italics. Whether a fair copy was ever posted to Great Falls is not recorded. The draft is dated; it is not signed.]
Port Hume, 9 April 1921
Ludko,
Your letter came the third week of February and I have carried it in my apron since. I did not answer because I did not want to answer with feeling. You did not write me with feeling. You wrote me with what you saw. I will do the same, and then I will tell you where I stop.
What I have seen. Ward 3 has had nine cases since Christmas that Dr. Linden writes as encephalitis and that I write in my own book by what they do. Six sleep in the day and wake at night. Three the reverse. Seven have the tremor. Of the seven, I have now looked at the admission signature against something older for five of them — a pension card, a marriage line in the parish book, a pawn ticket — and in four the hand has grown smaller. In the fifth it has not, and he is the worst of them, so you see I am not choosing my evidence.
Sosowski, F., is still on the ward. His wife brought me his father's pension card without my asking. She said, "You are the one who looks at the hands." I did not know I had a reputation. The father's hand is large and square. The son's is a third the size and climbs the line. He does not know I have compared them. I have not told Dr. Linden. Dr. Linden does not want to know what a nurse compares.
I went to the coroner's clerk in March with a question, as you see from the slip I have pinned to your letter. Mr. Fairfax is a decent man and answered me the way the office answers. I did not go to the detective. I went to him once, in 1919, and he was fair, and it was closed over his head anyway, and he has a tireder face now. There is no one in this city to whom I can bring a pattern. There is only the drawer.
Now where I stop.
You wrote "look for the ones who lived their whole lives by the water." I did. I made a list. Of the nine, five have. Four have not; one came from Kraków in 1913 and has never seen the lake except from the Quays. So it is not the water, Ludko, or it is not only the water, and I am a nurse and not a priest and I will not build a church on five of nine.
But I will tell you the thing I cannot put in my book. Of the five who lived by the water, four are the four whose hands grew smaller. And the one whose hand did not is the one from Kraków.
I do not believe in rivers. I do not believe in your lineman's grandmother's ship. I have seen a dozen theories on the wards from people who wanted the disease to mean something, and the disease does not mean anything, it is a disease. I say that to you as your friend and as the woman who said to nie jest to to Dr. Linden and was right. I say it, and I look at my list, and I cannot make the list say what I say. Nie mogę tego wykluczyć. I cannot rule it out. That is not agreement. It is only that I am honest, and honesty has a floor under it, and I have found the floor.
Keep the lineman's book. Do not give it to the daughter and do not give it to a doctor. Keep it as you keep your own, in the apron, where it is no one's evidence yet. I will keep my list the same way. If one of us is ever asked by someone who has the standing to ask, we will each have something to hand over that was written before we knew what it was for. That is the only kind of record that is believed.
Your mother is right that you should not have gone so far. Your mother is wrong that you should come home. There is nothing here to come home to that is not also there.
Burn nothing. I only needed one person to have written it.
[unsigned; below, in pencil, later, the same hand:]
Sosowski discharged 2 June, "improved." Walked home to the Quays. His wife has the father's card back. I kept a tracing of the son's name. It is behind this letter.