But I secretly wanted to solve another mystery: was Clarens really a hospital, and was there really a dead house?
I learned early on that during the war the garage, which stood about 30 yards from our house, had served as a "dead house," a place where the bodies of Union soldiers were stored before burial.
And strangely, the lack of hard evidence that Clarens functioned in the Civil War as a hospital or had a dead house has only strengthened my belief in the family lore that it did.
I quickly discovered that none of the remaining records of the War Department mentioned Clarens or indicated that it was the hospital at Fort Williams, let alone that there was a dead house.
In one flashback we find out that when she and Henry first met, in the jail drunk- tank, she pronounced Henry dead: "Dead for 20 years, a dead man living in a dead house".
A prisoner may be a prisoner, but as Dostoevsky so pointedly wrote in Notes from a Dead House, "no brands, no fetters will make him forget that he is a man".
We know that the largest number of sick at Fort Williams between May 1864 and June 1865 came from the Fourth Massachusetts Heavy Artillery and the 136th Ohio National Guard, and that the bodies of those who died from typhoid fever and malaria filled a dead house somewhere nearby.
"How long do you have to have a dead house on your street?" The Other Economy Upstate New York, a vast, diverse landscape of old cities, small towns, farms and forests stretching from Buffalo to Albany and north to the Canadian border, was once one of the most populous and prosperous regions of the country.
If a person suffers from an injury then there is a need to move him/her to a hospital or even if a person dies then he needs to be moved to a dead house in a hospital.
MoveToHospital(P, H) == Person P is moved to the hospital H. MoveToDeadHouse P, H) == Person P is moved to a dead house in the hospital H. Formal specification of the proposed model is described using VDM-SL in this section.
