Starting in 1801, Provincetown was afflicted by a number of smallpox epidemics. Around 1848, a “Pest House” was built outside of town to contain and isolate people stricken by the disease, across what is now Route 6 in the woods of the National Seashore. Between 1855 and 1873, around 14 people died and were buried there in numbered and nameless graves. It’s not the sort of place you might stumble across as you walk the trails in the forest. You have to know it’s there and how to find it. It’s quite a way off the beaten path, overgrown with catbriar and patrolled by armies of mosquitos and horseflies in the summer months.
You will see the cellar hole of the Pest House, a place so decrepit and miserable that by the 1870s, nurses could not be found who were willing to stay in it. And not far away, a tidy row of small limestone grave markers, carved only with numbers.
No. 5
No. 9
No. 10
Only three or four of the small markers remain intact, others broken or consumed by the underbrush.
Forgotten people, forgotten lives, in this sad, hushed forgotten corner of the woods.
And the mind whirls with thought, with questions. Who were these people? What were their days and nights like: cast out, banished to this lonely place, wondering if they will live to see another sunrise, left to die alone.
I try to absolve the town and its people. They did what they did from fear, from a need for self-preservation, not out of malice or hatred. But then I wonder why- who decided that these people should lose their names, that 22 year-old Antone Domingo should be diminished forever, known only to the world
as No. 6?
I couldn’t escape the parallels, between this world of a century and a half ago and my own. People shunned and feared and despised because they got sick. Lives, full ordinary lives built out of work and sex and Christmases and mistakes and first kisses, ending alone and untouched. Beautiful bodies made ugly. A two-inch by four-inch limestone stake, a three-foot by six-foot panel in a quilt.
There are places in the world which are haunted, not by poltergeists or restless spirits, but by regret and sadness and the memory of how unkind one human being can be to another. I imagine that there are ruins of camps in Poland where joy dissipates like morning mist. I felt it at Ground Zero in New York, back when it was just a big hole in the ground filled with the anguish of an entire nation, a palpable, almost sacred sorrow. And here, in a small, unmarked, unbounded area in the middle of the woods, I felt the despair of someone who slept for the first night in a strange bed in a frightening and isolated house. There was a moment in that person’s life when they realized they had been put where they had been put to be forgotten. And for at least 14 people, a moment when they knew that they would never go home again.
