The Winter Sisters Page 13

  “Willow bark’s not an instant cure,” Rebecca cautioned me. “Let it work half an hour.”

  “Half an hour would be a joy,” I said, fishing the flecks of powder from between my teeth. “I’ve struggled with this headache. Even ether can’t make me forget it.”

  The space between us fell silent. A bird overhead made a short, sharp, and unmusical noise. In the far distance was the report of a gunshot.

  “Would you walk with me for a ways, Miss Winter?” I asked. “If I may steal you away from your herb gathering? To make sure I don’t faint from the willow bark. Or get eaten by…”

  “It would be dangerous to faint out here in the woods,” said Rebecca, taking my proffered arm. “There are bandits and panthers and strange women everywhere.”

  We followed no particular path in our stroll or in our conversation. Talking was a relief. It allowed the pent-up troubles of my weeks in Lawrenceville to ooze out.

  The pain across my brain seemed to dissipate as I spoke. “If the sick won’t come see me, should I be making house calls? Do you venture out from Hope Hollow to attend to your patients?”

  “Not usually,” said Rebecca. “That day at the candy store—that was an exception.”

  “You were certainly very popular,” I said.

  “Thank you for distracting Boatwright and his faction. As for house calls, people don’t want us to visit them. They will take the witches’ cures, live or die by their advice, but they won’t have them over for supper.”

  “But there’s no such thing as witches,” I said.

  “There are people who believe in them nonetheless.” Rebecca turned her head and stared into the distance though one could not see but a few hundred feet before brush and bracken and hill and valley obstructed the view. “That does them more harm than a real witch would.”

  I risked an impertinent question. “Rebecca, do you enjoy living in Hope Hollow?”

  “It’s where we’ve spent most of our lives. The walls are painted thick with memories. It is quiet, but I have plenty to read.” She considered her fingers. “Sometimes, I might wish to have more visitors.”

  “There’s no reason that you should live in exile unless you prefer it. Wouldn’t it be simpler for you and for your patients if your practice was in town?”

  Rebecca skipped a step in her gait, and I stumbled to match her pace.

  “We have tried before, Aubrey, but I’m sure you heard what happened.”

  I had heard the whole sad matter, and I nodded. “Boatwright told the story, but from his slant. He told me about the fire, about the mob, about how he made you leave town.”

  “We chose to leave town,” said Rebecca, “because it seemed wiser. Because there was nothing left for us in town. No reason for me to be there, since—”

  “Since Everett?”

  Rebecca’s pace slowed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “That was a tragic accident, I understand, and Boatwright exploited it shamefully. I won’t say any more about it. But I must tell you, there is something else that he’s exploiting. He’s telling a story that this panther is a demon familiar, a servant to witches. It’s utter foolishness, a blackguard lie, but it’s bound to be received by certain people and spread with the speed of any vicious rumor.”

  “How do you suppose we quash it?”

  “If you lived in town again, I think, the superstitions would not find any fertile ground in which to grow. Even the most credulous would see that you and your sisters are not strange women. Not witches, certainly.”

  Rebecca started walking again. That thought seemed to brighten her face, but it clouded again in a moment. “Many of the townsfolk don’t want us nearby.”

  “They are wrong, though,” I said. “They are a splinter spreading infection to the rest of the body. Root them out, and I think you’ll find that you are, on the whole, loved by the town. Doesn’t the crowd at the confectionary prove that? You aren’t witches because there’s no such thing. Why let these few scare you away? You should not let a man like Boatwright be victorious. He still revels in his success, that he was able to drive you away.”

  “I thought you and Boatwright were allies. You said a town’s doctor and a town’s pastor ought to be.”

  “Boatwright means to exploit superstition while I mean to cure them of it. Do not call that man my ally. We are at contrary purposes at every step.”

  “But I thought you have a much longer acquaintance than your time here in Lawrenceville.”

  I flushed. “And even then, we were at odds. He did nothing efficacious for my poor sister. He prayed for her, which is as good as nothing, and he berated her for her sins, of which she had none. I think he was the worst of all the hucksters and quacks my mother begged for aid, because we were supposed to believe him, believe his superstitions above all others, for they have the greatest force of tradition. Poor Eva. Nothing could have saved her—no doctor, no herb, no miracle. She was doomed. But he needn’t have given us false hope.”

  Rebecca and I were walking arm in arm, and she placed her other hand on top of mine. “I’m sorry about Eva.”

  “I’m sorry about Everett.”

  “Will you tell me the whole story someday, when you are ready?”

  “If you promise the same, Miss Winter.”

  She nodded.

  We walked on several paces farther, passing under a high bower of chestnuts.

  “I would like, Miss Winter…”

  Eight weeks had passed since my letter was posted to the Georgia Medical Society, with no response. What deliverance could it promise: some third-rate post as a corpse washer? My prospects in Lawrenceville, though not shining, were not so dim. I was a doctor there, with patients and cures. I was settling into the story of the town. I cured a woman with ipecac and a frog. There was a drama there yet to be played, one that involved the pastor, the panther, the Winters, hydrophobia, and the credulousness of the town.

  Rebecca gave me a cockeyed glance. “Like what, Dr. Waycross?”

  She had spoken lightly, in jest, yet I stumbled in my reply. “It’s only that… it would be nice to… have the company of a kindred spirit in town.”

  “Are we kindred spirits?” said Rebecca.

  “I treated Mrs. Snell for a cursed frog,” I confessed.

  Rebecca arched her eyebrow. “How?”

  “By emetics. To cure her real symptoms. But a bit of prestidigitation convinced her I’d solved her false symptom, too.”

  Rebecca laughed as I explained how I’d hidden the frog in the basin. “What would the medical men of Savannah say?”

  My smile faltered. “What would you have done, in my place?”

  “I might have chosen a gentler emetic, probably Seneca root. They call it mountain flax around here. It’s also a valuable treatment for snakebite, on much the same purgative principle. Being foreign to the body, Seneca root is expelled by our organism, taking with it the poison.”

  I felt a quiet thrill when she said “emetic” and “purgative” and “organism.”

  We came under the branches of a vast oak. Its arching canopy spread out above us, and the ground beneath our feet was level and clear, starved of light by the shadow of the ancient tree. We were in a theater of branches, woven just for us. Rebecca and I walked three turns around the perimeter of the oak’s shadow, saying nothing.

  “Miss Winter,” I began, “I would like to ask you if… if you would consider…” But I couldn’t go on.

  Rebecca smiled, but her eyes revealed her disenchantment. “How’s your headache?”

  I hadn’t thought about it in several minutes. “Why, it’s much improved. Do I owe that to the willow bark or the charming company?”

  “The willow bark,” said Rebecca.

  “Either way, Miss Winter, you have saved me a bleeding.”

  “Keep your blood inside you, Aubrey. It does more good there.”

  Sarah rested her chin in her hands and her elbows on the railing of the porch. She watched Effie c
ircumambulate the rocky bald, a little ways away, where an old stump and the scrying bowl still stood. Effie kept her eyes on the ground, and every so often, she’d pluck up a green shoot, sniff it, frown, and toss it away into the woods. Sarah watched the display for a quarter hour before she finally went out to meet her sister.

  “It’s the onions,” said Effie. “I don’t like them.”

  Sarah was relieved. That was a minor folly, one of the eccentricities by which she’d always known her sister: a girl who didn’t like onions and didn’t like eggplant, who would rather sit quietly on the porch than chase after the chickens.

  “Not something Rebecca planted, is it?” asked Sarah. “Rebecca wouldn’t want you to be rooting around in the garden. Even I’ve got the good sense to stay out of there.”

  “No, wild onions.”

  “I guess she can’t be mad at you for pulling up wild onions.”

  Effie turned back to her work. She lifted her eyes to a cluster of chestnuts growing closer to the water. “There’s a whole passel of them there. They haven’t pushed up yet.”

  “How do you know?”

  Effie tapped her nose. She scurried to the chestnuts and rooted in the dirt with her fingers. She brought up three brown, fleshy nubbins, each about the size of an egg.

  “Those are onions?” asked Sarah.

  “No. I don’t know what they are. I’ll give them to Rebecca. She’ll know. Maybe they’re medicine.”

  Rebecca was returning just then. Effie had heard her first, and Sarah knew the rhythm of her footsteps. No animal moved like any other, their noises as singular as their flesh. Rebecca trotted right past Sarah and Effie, not noticing them.

  Sarah picked up a granite pebble and slung it sidearm at Rebecca’s feet. It bounced off her boot heel, and Rebecca whirled around.

  “Not even going to say hello?” asked Sarah. “Look, Effie’s got something to show you.”

  Effie hesitated. She brought the three little objects close to her chest, as if to shelter them.

  “It’s all right, Effie.” Rebecca moved her satchel to the other shoulder, shifting the weight, and met her sister.

  Slowly, Effie unfolded her palms. “What are they?”

  Rebecca touched one. Its flesh yielded under her fingertip. “Garlic bulbs, but they’re rotten. Weevils got to them.”

  “Will you take them?” said Effie.

  “I don’t have much use for bug-ridden garlic, Effie.”

  “But… you can take them. You might need them.”

  Rebecca took the offered bulbs and placed them into a pocket on her satchel, among the fennel and the sassafras and the ginseng. “The woods were full today. I even ran into Aubrey.”

  Sarah concealed a smile.

  “He had a headache,” said Rebecca, “and thought he could walk it off. I gave him some willow bark, and it seemed to do him right.”

  “Hell, a headache is simple,” said Sarah. “Half an hour will cure just about any headache, willow bark or no. You could have had more fun with him than that.”

  “We were fine, Sarah. Aubrey said something else, though. He said that Boatwright is trying to poison the town against us again. The pastor’s saying that we’ve, I don’t know, summoned this demon panther as our familiar, our servant to spread fear and pestilence and evil in the forest.”

  “Rat bastard,” muttered Sarah. “Some of those idiots are going to believe him, aren’t they?”

  “Such people were never our friends,” said Rebecca. “But I wonder if the best solution isn’t the direct one.”

  “I kill the panther and put its head on Boatwright’s stoop? How’s that for direct?”

  Rebecca shook her head. “No one’s been able to kill it yet, not even you. That’s odd, isn’t it? You two come on in. Wash up while I get supper on.”

  Effie trotted at Rebecca’s heels while Sarah lingered behind. Everett had been trouble, no question. In life, a little. In death, so much more. He’d made a wound that couldn’t heal, but Waycross might be a salve for Rebecca’s pain. There was no better cure than forgetting.

  Late that evening, Pendleton rapped at my door. I recognized him from the Flowing Bowl. The man was in obvious pain, and in deference to his discomfort, I hid my satisfaction that he was entrusting his health to me.

  “Pendleton, good fellow!” I said a touch too brightly. “How may I be of service?”

  He held his forearms up, palms toward his face. They were bloody and wet like raw meat and filthy with dirt. “Rifle blew up in my face,” he said between gritted teeth. Removing his hasty dressing stirred fresh blood. “I had sight of that panther. Pulled the trigger, and it’s Yorktown all over again, right at my nose.”

  “Oh, not so bad as Yorktown,” I said. My headache had vanished completely—Rebecca’s willow bark was remarkable—and my spirits were high. “Fellows at Yorktown had their arms blown clear off. No danger of that here, good sir. Go to the light over there. Let me get a little water.”

  I brought an ewer of spring water and a length of clean cloth. Beneath the blood, Pendleton’s arms were in good condition. Most of the damage was superficial: ordinary abrasions and a few splinters of metal. Less happily, one piece of debris had traveled up the left forearm, leaving a long gash and then opening a cut in the thin skin near the elbow. Dirty black powder was mixed into the ragged flesh. I could see through the epidermis and fat into the muscles below. They pulsed with crimson droplets in rhythm with Pendleton’s heartbeats.

  I placed my finger into the forearm wound, which made Pendleton yelp as though it were a red-hot poker. “The pain is an excellent sign. It means that your sensations are intact.” I repeated the experiment by digging my fingernails into his palm on the same hand. Pendleton winced, but it was a wince that brought us both relief.

  “So, what will you do?”

  “Debridement first. Then I’ll clean the wounds with a solution of carbolic acid, and then I will remove any tissue at risk of necrosis with the scalpel.”

  “Will that hurt?”

  “A good deal,” I admitted. “If it did not, we would wonder if we’d used enough carbolic acid.”

  I asked Pendleton if he wanted a swallow of whiskey before we began. He shook it away. I made Pendleton lean forward and brace his forearms against his knees. He turned his head so that he wouldn’t have to watch the operation. I didn’t blame him for this weakness. He kept his reserve and let me work without flinching or screaming. It was a textbook debridement. The sizzle of the chemicals was the sound of cleanliness, of harsh purity.

  I waited a long time, many minutes, until the bloom of pain started to fade from Pendleton’s face. Then I poured a measure of water over his forearms, washing away the acid, and Pendleton’s eyes thanked me for it. The flesh was clean, the large part of the dirt removed. Next, I needed to trim away the dead skin so that necrosis would have no chance of setting in.

  I placed my nose close to his quivering muscles as I worked along the gash. My position blocked my light, but I did not need to see. I felt through my scalpel, the living portions resisting the blade and the dead portions yielding to it.

  The flow of my work was interrupted by a sudden resistance. My scalpel blade was entangled with the tendons of the elbow. I’d pushed too far into living tissue. I pulled the blade back, and it scraped against raw bone. I finished the operation with closer attention, flicking away the pieces of dead skin and metal splinters, and then leaned back to admire my work. The deep red of dried blood and the ash of the powder were gone, replaced with the moist pink that promised regeneration and health.

  “Pendleton, I commend you on your stalwart composition,” I said, wiping the scalpel blade clean. “I’ve seen hardened criminals bawl their eyes out on the operating table. You’ve comported yourself admirably.”

  “I thought you hadn’t started yet, Doc,” he said, turning and seeing, with surprise, the change in his wound. “I felt a few little stabs at the beginning but then nothing.”

  “I h
ad a blade up against your bone!” I said. My face must have turned ashen because Pendleton’s did the same.

  We repeated the experiments from earlier, and he showed no sign of feeling. The arm was dead. A putrid humor rose in the back of my throat. It was my slip of the scalpel, a bit too much living tissue taken near a nerve, the misvoyage into the bones…

  A dead arm, besides being of no use to its owner, is ripe for necrosis. It is no longer an arm but a sack of corruption waiting to spoil and spread.

  “Pendleton—” I started.

  “You can’t cut it off, Doc.” He commenced shaking in his chair. “Couldn’t we wait? See if it cures itself?”

  “I’m so sorry, Pendleton. But it’s hopeless. What’s dead cannot be brought back to life.”

  Pendleton kept talking, but I couldn’t hear his words—only accusations, guilt, and failure. I was a failure at my chosen profession, clumsy and foolish, inexperienced and overeager.

  The amputation was a terror. It required three strong men from the Flowing Bowl to hold Pendleton down. He thrashed under the bite of the bone saw. My guilt made me hesitate when I should have been decisive, hack when I should have sliced. The hogs squealed as the patient cursed his fate, his doctor, his Lord, and his life. Long after his stump had been cauterized and he had been helped to the boarding house, after I’d buried the arm beneath a pine tree, after I’d climbed into the hayloft and tried to settle my mind with ether—long after, I could hear those animal noises, echoing.

  Ouida Bell came running into the clearing of Hope Hollow. Effie looked up from her washing. Rebecca put on water to boil and brought out clean cloths for compresses. Sarah ran out to catch the terrified girl and bring her in.

  “What’s happened? What’s happened?” asked Sarah.

  “Just… and the panther…”

  “What with the panther?” Sarah sighed as Ouida Bell’s full weight crumpled into her arms.

  “It… it bit me…”

  “It bit you?”

  “I was coming because… and then there it was, in the rhododendrons, and I was rooted… and it bit me.”