Three days later, Una waited as a small black tugboat pulled up alongside the wharf. Hope was painted on the bow. A grimly ironic name. She handed the morgue keeper the remaining three dollars she owed him for sparing Deidre’s remains the indignity of dissection along with another dollar for securing her passage on the tug.
“You sure you want to go?” he said, pocketing the money. “Ain’t much of a sight.”
Una nodded, tightened the knot of her scarf, and stepped aboard. The tug hugged the river’s shoreline, backing up to the long wooden building that sat beside the morgue. The boatmen laid a long plank between the building and the deck. Workers from the morgue shoved coffins down the slide, the bodies thudding against the side of their rude receptacles when they struck the deck.
Each evening for the past three days, Una had come to the morgue’s viewing window on Twenty-Sixth Street and stood among the passersby. She daren’t go inside and risk another run-in with that beak-nosed pathologist. It was easy to identify those who’d flocked to the window out of perverse curiosity from those with earnest intent. The curious pressed their grimy faces against the glass, leaving behind trails of snot and smudge prints. Or walked by quickly as if they had somewhere else to be and just happened upon this out-of-the-way sight, heads forward but eyes straining at the corners of their sockets.
Those truly searching lingered. They studied the pictures on the wall, the bodies beyond the glass, the clothes hanging on the pegs, at once both hopeful and terrified they might recognize something. Their husband’s shirt. Their daughter’s face. Their old chum’s bright red hair.
Each evening, Una prayed Deidre’s body would be gone, claimed by a distant family member or one of Marm Blei’s crew. Other bodies came and went. But Deidre’s remained.
Una hadn’t forgotten Deidre’s plan to extort her or how she’d lied to the police. But she couldn’t shake this empty, aching feeling, as if her insides had withered away, leaving her hollow. It could just as easily be her lying there on that slab, a constant stream of water dripping onto her breast to keep her flesh from rotting. Just another of the city’s riffraff, unclaimed and forgotten.
The morning of the fourth day, before the tug arrived, Una had insisted on seeing Deidre’s corpse. She didn’t trust the morgue keeper to hold up his end of the bargain any more than she trusted a drunk with a bottle. He’d opened half a dozen coffins in the deadhouse, adding to the already pervasive stench, before finding hers. Deidre’s bloodshot eyes were still open, and her skin had taken on a greenish hue. Over the past days, Una had watched the bruising on her neck grow more pronounced, then spread and fade. On final examination, it was hard to distinguish from the general putrefaction that had begun, mocking Una’s certainty that Deidre had been strangled.
After the morgue keeper had closed the coffin and nailed it shut again, he’d drawn an X on the lid with a brittle piece of chalk. Now, standing on the deck of the Hope, Una watched as coffins were shoved down the ramp and stacked in haphazard piles. The trim of the boat seemed the only thought in their placement. Deidre’s coffin, with its white X, was one of the last brought aboard. She winced as the deckhands heaped it atop the rest as if it were nothing more than a crate of turnips.
With a puff of steam, the tugboat departed from the hospital, chugging upriver amid the chunks of winter ice. It stopped at Blackwell’s Island for another load of coffins—typhus victims from the pesthouse and deceased inmates from the prisons—then continued onward.
The sky was clear, and the sun glaringly bright. Seabirds circled overhead, squawking and cawing. Una had never had a tender stomach, but her breakfast roiled with the sway of the boat. Or perhaps it was the smell of its cargo.
Staring out at the river, she remembered a joke from her youth. “If you want to go to Hart Island, break your leg and go to the hospital. The doctors’ll get you there quick enough.” The humor of it was gone now. But the truth in it remained. Deidre had come to Bellevue whole and healthy, albeit very drunk. Now she was dead. Murdered, if Una’s suspicions were correct.
She rattled her head and trained her eyes on the small island in the distance. Even though part of her still hated Deidre, she’d resolved to see her buried. Everyone, even a two-timing swindler, deserved to have someone with them at the end. Hopefully someone would do as much for her. Once this awful day was done, then she’d think about the bruising, what it meant and what she should do.
At Hart Island, the tugboat eased up alongside a crude wharf, and the coffins were unloaded. Workmen from the island transported them to the cemetery with the same efficiency as busy porters at a train depot. Una followed behind with the captain. In the commotion, she lost track of which cart held Deidre’s coffin but reassured herself she’d find it again once they reached the burial grounds.
Una hadn’t expected ornate tombstones or flower-filled urns, but the starkness of Potter’s Field unsettled her. There were no trees or greenery of any kind, no markers or rough-hewn crosses. Several mangy dogs—mastiffs, judging by their size—wandered freely around the grounds.
“There’s not even a fence,” she muttered.
“Aye,” the captain replied. “But then, what’s the point? Those on the outside aren’t trying to get in, and those inside aren’t in any position to get out. Besides, the dogs do a good enough job patrolling the place.”
They stopped beside two long trenches, fifteen feet deep and six feet wide. Una’s breakfast threatened to rise in her throat. Surely this wasn’t where the bodies were meant to be laid to rest.
As if in response, the workers began tossing the coffins into the trench like fuel into a coal pit. Once the first row was in place, a few barrows of dirt were scattered over the coffins, and a new row began. The noise of clattering wood and falling soil was deafening. One of the dogs trotted over, dropping a stick to sniff around the edge of the trench. Another dog approached, attempting to steal the stick, but was chased off with a snarl. The first dog nosed around in the dirt a bit more before picking up the stick.
No, not a stick, Una realized as he wandered off. A human bone.
She staggered a few feet away from the captain and vomited, a mix of biscuits, coffee, and bile. She wiped her mouth with her hankie and returned to the trench just in time to see Deidre’s coffin, its white X smudged, being heaved inside. Dirt rained down over it, pummeling the wood like frozen rain. She cursed herself for not bringing a flower or ribbon to lay on top, but any such token would have been crushed by the weight of another coffin. All she could do was offer a brief prayer, cross herself, and retreat back to the tugboat.
