The Winter Sisters Read online

  No species of poisonous frog was native to Georgia, and if someone wanted to poison Mrs. Snell, there were easier ways.

  “I can promise you,” I said, “that unless you dropped the creature down your own gullet, there’s no frog inside you. And if you did swallow one, it would expire in minutes and not do the least bit of harm.”

  “So, you think I’m being foolish too.” She daubed at her mouth with a handkerchief.

  “My training tells me—”

  “Your training wasn’t out here on the frontier. We’ve got ailments that city folk don’t get. Indian curses. Old whispers in the mountains. Poison frogs. The Winter sisters know all about them. I should go up and see them, but Snell’s too lazy…”

  “Every place has its peculiar miasmas,” I said, “but none of them are borne on curses or whispers. They’re chiefly dependent on the weather.”

  “I didn’t think a fellow like you would understand.”

  Mrs. Snell fell again into a fit of rich, unguent coughing. Her skin was cold and wet. Her perspiration smelled acidic. She was ill. A frog was not poisoning her, but something else was: a spoiled piece of meat, probably. She needed an emetic to turn out her bowels, but an emetic wouldn’t be enough. That might turn the bad food out of her stomach, but it wouldn’t break the superstition’s hold on her mind, and unless I could convince her that the curse was gone, she’d make herself sick again with coughing and moaning and fear. It was nonsense but nonsense that needed a cure.

  The Savannah Poor House and Hospital did not teach us to cure with anything but lancets, emetics, enemas, and blistering agents. Four tools, four humors, four temperaments, four elements, four cardinal directions: a perfect and logical system, recorded in Attic Greek. Those were sure to cure all the infirmities of the body—excepting, of course, hydrophobia.

  While Snell went to get a bucket, I hurried to a nearby marshy spot. A slow spring halfway down the ridge welled up between the roots of old trees. Turning over a few leaves, I found a tiny common toad. Was I brave enough to work this cure? I knew Mrs. Snell needed it, but it was very close to superstition. I reassured myself that it was the best cure for the patient. It was not Hippocratic, but perhaps it would work.

  Back in the cabin, I measured ingredients with shaking hands as Mrs. Snell continued to press her case. “Folks grind up all kinds of baleful creatures,” she said. “Scorpions, turtles, earwigs. Nasty stuff.”

  “Here’s your draught, ma’am,” I said. I handed her the cup. “A third part ipecac, the rest ordinary rum, with a dose of sugar for indigestion.” The rum and sugar entice the patient to finish the whole dose.

  Mrs. Snell swallowed it in a single swig. Her eyes bulged. “Sure is enough rum.”

  “Medically essential, I assure you.”

  She settled back into her seat, and I waited. Borborygmic rumblings rose from her churning bowels. Her head swayed.

  The emetic began its violent action, and Mrs. Snell bent over the basin. An ordinary person would find his own stomach turned when in the presence of odors and fluids like those. Nausea, like yawning, is contagious, but physicians cannot permit squeamishness. Vomit, blood, urine, feces, and pus are our best clues to a patient’s internal state.

  True to my discipline, I peered into the basin to examine the colors and consistency of the expelled humors. At the same time, I let the frog fall from my hand.

  What would the fellows of the Georgia Medical Society think? If they called me to answer for my actions, I would say I was only reassuring the patient with a piece of prestidigitation. It was good medicine mixed with superstition to make it more palatable to the patient. Still, I was nervous. Would I pull off the trick, or would I be caught in the act? Which was worse?

  When Mrs. Snell looked up from her purging, her color was already better, but it improved a further two shades when she saw the frog swimming through her yellow effluvia.

  “You see, Doctor?” she said, her excitement limited by her depleted condition.

  I smiled, perhaps not proudly, but with some satisfaction. “Ah, you were right about the cause but not the malefactor. This is not a cursing frog, for… well, that is… the cursing ones are always black and vile, don’t you know.”

  “Hmm, yes, yes,” said Mrs. Snell, who then retched again into the basin.

  “But this little fellow is the color of dirt, the sort that dwells around springs. I think that he must have worked his way into your drinking glass, or maybe he crawled into your mouth while you were asleep. And so, yes, you were cursed by a frog, but not with ill intent. You are a victim of bad circumstances. Please, do not blame Ouida Bell. I think she is innocent on this occasion.”

  Mrs. Snell nodded. She was too nauseated to argue. I bowed to her before taking my leave. When her pallor improved, she would be out in the shop, first thing, to tell one and all about her illness and recovery, and she would tell how she’d been right, that it was a poison frog, but it wasn’t Ouida Bell or the Winter sisters who’d afflicted or cured her—it was that nice Dr. Waycross.

  Out on the porch, Snell clapped me on the back. His hand came down like a hammer blow, and for an instant, I thought I might be under attack, but Snell meant this as a gesture of affection. He shook my hand, and a dime was between his fingers.

  “All right, Doc. You did all right.”

  Yes, I had done all right. Ipecac had worked some cure, but I felt that the rapidity and totality of her cure was not because of the medicine. It was the damned frog, which I had caught, hidden, and prestidigitated. Should I now carry frogs in my medicine kit next to the lancets? Or leave behind the lancets? My hand quivered, and my head ached. I took a small dram of ether to steady my nerves. Yes, I had done all right—I was sure I had done right—but it was not the sort of right that my peers would have accepted. Do they have courts-martial in the medical profession? How would I defend my deviation from my training, from two thousand years of tradition?

  The proof was not in what they’d read in Hippocrates. Being written does not make an assertion right. The proof was in the improvement of the patient, and in an hour, she was fully restored to health, with no mention of any poison or any curse. The illness was not only cured but forgiven and forgotten, a cure in body and in mind. This frog was not science, but…

  No, it was science. If science was the observation of cause and effect in the natural world, then I had performed a perfectly scientific cure. Trusting only what is written in two-thousand-year-old books, even if those books were written by Hippocrates and Galen, would not be science. That would be superstition. That would be faith.

  For my success and for my nagging doubt, I deserved better than my usual lonely bowl of cold porridge for luncheon. I wondered what ten cents would get me at the Flowing Bowl—perhaps a full meal or even a whiskey. As I entered the establishment, lewd jokes and coarse bodily noises interrupted the sound of sloppy eating. Renwick kept order among the tureens of stew, barrels of whiskey, and clientele.

  The serving counter was full, but the burly farmhands and sawyers each scooted an inch so that I would have a place to rest my rump. Far down the table were Pearson and Hodgson. They had tall tankards of water for rinsing down the homebrewed whiskey, and they drank their fill. No signs of hydrophobia yet, then.

  “The special, please,” I said when Renwick noticed me. I didn’t know what the special was, but I wanted to pretend that I did.

  “Sure, Doctor.” His instant, bright response boosted my mood.

  My neighbor turned to me. Against etiquette, he was still wearing his floppy straw hat inside. Sawdust and leaves sprinkled from its brim into his food like seasoning. “Doc Waycross, is it?” he asked. “Fulton, log man.”

  I shook his hand. “How do you do, Mr. Fulton? Pleasure to meet you. Log man, eh? Does that mean you chop down trees?”

  “Naw,” said Fulton. “That’s an axman. I clean up the logs as they come down the chute. Square them up if we’re making planks or lop off the knots to make the log more roun
d if it’s going into a cabin.”

  “Why, with all those squares and circles, you could call yourself a Euclidean geometer.”

  “Yeah,” said Fulton. “I like the sound of that. A geometer.”

  The special appeared in front of me: smoked pork, green onions, carrots, corn, a dinner roll the size of two fists, and a tumbler of whiskey. I salivated, and so did Fulton. He was looking at the whiskey.

  “Mr. Fulton, you’d do me a service if you’d take this beverage and put it toward your health.” I slid my glass toward him.

  “A teetotaler?” said Fulton.

  “No, sir, my geometer friend.” I was warming to the place, the people. “Whiskey is good for sanguine temperaments. But it makes me sleepy, and I need to keep up my wits, should a patient have need of me.”

  “Much obliged, Doctor.” He looked into the whiskey for his own reflection. “Doctor, if it’s not too much trouble to disturb your dinner, I wondered if I could ask you about a sickness that’s been hurtin’ me.”

  Joy blossomed inside me. “I would be delighted!” The clientele of the Flowing Bowl turned toward us. “Ah, would you prefer to continue in my office?” I said, abashed.

  “Ain’t nothing these folks don’t already know about,” said Fulton. He glanced left and right down the counter as all ears in the Flowing Bowl followed our conversation.

  “Hey, Fullie! You showing him your scales?” called a compatriot.

  “I’m eatin’ here, Fullie! Put ’em away,” said another.

  “Don’t turn my customers off their supper,” said Renwick, running mugs of coffee to scattered tables.

  “My office is more private,” I repeated.

  But Fulton removed his hat, and his hairless pate was covered with cracked green skin. I kept my reaction in check.

  “What do you think, Doc?” he asked.

  I hadn’t the slightest idea. Perhaps a frog might help.

  “There was this lizard, one of the little green ones, and he got under my hat, and I whopped myself on my own head to get rid of him ’cause I was surprised, you know? I got lizard guts all over my hair. Do you think that’s the problem?”

  “Hmm,” I said. I knew less about lizards than frogs.

  “I shampooed twice a day with Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic, but it didn’t do any good, and I think the bathing was doing me harm elsewhere, so I stopped.”

  “Quite right,” I said. “Better to keep one’s own oils as a barrier.”

  From three seats down came a long eructation then guffaws of laughter at the splendid timing. I smiled in harmony with the humor of the Flowing Bowl, the challenge of a diagnosis, and the new confidence the town had in me.

  “Mr. Fulton,” I said, “we should treat this like a poison, as if the blood of your local fauna has irritated your skin. Come on up to the office after you’re finished eating, and I’ll make up a preparation. Tar, I think, for the base, then white vitriol to cleanse the affected flesh. And a moderate bleeding from the feet, which will draw the poison down out of the body.”

  “Why, that would be right kind of you, Doctor,” said Fulton.

  “It’s my pleasure, the least I could do.” I shook his hand again then ran a chunk of dinner roll through soft yellow butter.

  “But if you get all fixed up, Fullie, who’re we gonna laugh at?” asked a bar mate.

  “I don’t give a right damn. Maybe Buck, with his gimpy leg. Buck, do us a dance.”

  A white-whiskered oldster rose from his stool. “Maestro?” said Buck.

  The men at the bar began clapping. They already knew the rhythm. Then Buck started his dance, a one-legged clog. His floppy right leg followed his left in exaggerated, loose motions, the way a rider flops along with his runaway horse. Then Buck threw the leg over his shoulder so that his foot flopped beside his ear. The Flowing Bowl shuddered with the applause.

  “Another turn, Buck?” asked a farmer to my left from beneath a fine mustache.

  “Naw, P, I’m worn out,” said Buck. “Let me sit a spell.”

  “What’s P short for?” I asked the man with the fine mustache.

  “Nothing.” His mustache turned upward to reflect the grin beneath. “My daddy said that the clerk who was writing down my name dropped dead right there in the county office, and he’d written only that one letter.”

  He laughed at his own fate, and I joined in. P and I shook hands, then I shook hands in turn with two dozen fellows. I caught a few names then though I would come to learn them all: Masters, Neal, Curtis, Patterson, Maltbie, and Born. Half a dozen of them offered to stand me a whiskey. I offered the same. Cards and dice came out, and while I didn’t lay any stakes, I followed the games as if my fortunes hung on them. We told tales of great horses and greater fish, fortunes stolen and squandered, women desired and despised. I was astonished by the easy camaraderie I had with the men. They did not seem to hate me more than any other man nor fear me nor think me an outsider, a city mouse, or a foreigner. The loquaciousness the liquor evoked was certainly an aid.

  When everyone’s taste for ordinary spirits had waned, the best wares appeared from below the counter. There was a fifty-year-old cognac and some clear potion that, when held up to the light, shone a luminous blue. Men drained tall bottles of Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic in single, satisfied draughts.

  “Gentleman, gentlemen!” I said. “I have a dram better than Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic.”

  “What, a kind of medicine, Doc Waycross?”

  “No, not medicine: entertainment. The latest science.” I refrained from telling them that it came from high society in Savannah. This crowd would consider that pedigree a black mark, as if one’s whiskey came from New York City or one’s cloth was woven in an English mill.

  “How much does it cost? I’ve only got a dime.”

  “No charge,” I said.

  “First bottle gratis,” said Renwick. “That’s what they always say at the medicine shows.”

  “No charge, sirs,” I repeated. “Not now or ever. Consider it my gift, a presentation of the merits of chemistry. Ether’s a lot better than tobacco because it doesn’t yellow your teeth. And no persistent headaches the next day, as with alcohol. Neither wife nor preacher could object to a substance so good and mild. Perfection through science, sirs.”

  My audience looked from one to another, parsing my pitch.

  “It’s a hell of fun, gentlemen,” I said. “Hell of fun!”

  I dashed back to my office and obtained the largest bottle of ether from among my shelves.

  “Doctor, this isn’t going to cut into my whiskey business, is it?” asked Renwick as I returned with my burden.

  “If anything, it will make your clients more thirsty,” I said.

  I doused a cloth heavily with the spirits, and we passed it around among us. The fine houses in Savannah likely passed a silken handkerchief using tongs and a silver tray, but our rustic application had no adverse impact on our joviality. A friendly spirit took hold of the company. We clapped each other on the back, shook hands like fast friends, and ran ten-step footraces between the bar and the far wall. Men stood on chairs and balanced on one foot, and there was laughter—gales of it. Ether is a hygienic happiness. The teetotalers should have been pleased that I had enlivened the drunks with chemical cheerfulness. Maltbie crashed into Argyle, and both sprawled to the floor, giggling like children.

  “Watch out, that’s my refixed arm,” said Argyle. “Don’t want it coming off again.”

  “Tell the doc,” said the crowd, who already knew the story. “Tell us one more time.”

  Argyle rolled up his sleeve to show his forearm and a bright-pink scar. “Board saw,” he said. “It went clear through me. Didn’t hurt none because I didn’t have an arm left. I got to Hope Hollow an hour after my arm did. But that didn’t make no matter.”

  “Bullshit,” said Renwick.

  “Ain’t, neither,” said P solemnly. “I was the one who found the arm.”

  “And the Wi
nter sisters reattached it?” I said, incredulous. That was beyond the medicine of superstition. It was a tall tale grown too tall.

  Claggers slipped out of his boots and wiggled his ten pale toes. “Effie got it stuck back on there. Find a feather, and I’ll show you that it’s ticklish.”

  “I ain’t tickling you,” said Renwick. “Tickle yourself.”

  “Can’t tickle yourself,” said Argyle. “Scientific impossibility.”

  “I bet you a double whiskey you can, too, tickle yourself,” muttered P. “Somebody got a feather?”

  “How?” I asked.

  “How what? Reattach it? Why does that matter, how? If I don’t know how, it’s because they don’t want me to know how. And I don’t much care how.”

  My mind could not be satisfied with ignorance, though.

  “I still think it’s bullshit,” said Renwick.

  Claggers asked, “How many stumps do you see in Lawrenceville?”

  “Portman’s only got one arm.”

  “Never grew,” said Claggers. “A defect from birth.”

  “How about Gartener?”

  “That leg was lost at King’s Mountain. British cannonball blew it off.”

  “So why didn’t he just put it in a burlap sack and save it till the Winters could stick it back on?” demanded Renwick.

  Claggers had an answer: “Nobody was in any shape after King’s Mountain to find all the pieces.”

  Even through the ether, a thought troubled me. A town the size of Lawrenceville should have a dozen maimed men and women wandering its streets. In Savannah, which was not as fraught with rifles and sickles and board saws, many people were missing a limb. They were daily sights in the markets and on the squares. People in Lawrenceville were no less skilled at injuring themselves, but they did not suffer the consequences. Here were men, ether-frolicking men, who told me their limbs had been reattached by the Winter sisters. In vino veritas, it was said, but I’ve come to no conclusion about ether.