The Winter Sisters

by Tim Westover

  Praise for The Winter Sisters

  “The writing is smart and witty … Historical fiction fans will be riveted by this immersive portrait of medicine and superstition in 19th-century rural Georgia."

  Publishers Weekly BookLife, Editor’s Choice

  “A mesmerizing gem of a novel. The author's talent for conveying beauty is striking, [and] his talent for conveying tension, conflict, and fear is equally impressive and used with great skill. This is a fine example of Southern literature at its most moving and vivid and beautiful.”

  Southern Literary Review

  “Solid writing and strong characters buoy this examination of a captivating moment in American history when old beliefs encountered the new. An enthralling, cozy tale set in an era when folklore reigned over science.”

  Kirkus Reviews

  The

  Winter

  Sisters

  A Novel

  Tim Westover

  QW Publishers

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE WINTER SISTERS

  Copyright ©2019 Tim Westover

  QW Publishers

  Lawrenceville, GA USA

  www.QWPublishers.com

  ISBN: 978-0-9849748-9-4

  First edition published in 2019 by Q W Publishers

  To Honeybee

  “It was, of course, a grand and impressive thing to do, to mistrust the

  obvious, and to pin one’s faith in things which could not be seen.”

  —Galen, On the Natural Faculties

  Prologue

  1811

  The fat orange moon, reflected in the silver bowl, seems so small. Effie, the youngest of the three sisters, cups her hands to lift the moon out, but the water slips through her fingers. The ripples break the moon's reflection into streaks of light.

  The sisters work on the bare granite of a clearing, a bald on the mountainside, under a sky rich with stars. People of a superstitious persuasion say the devil once trod on the balds. They say that’s why nothing will grow there and any remnants of trees look lightning blasted and scorched. But the balds have plenty of life. They’re slick with moss and lichens, and the tenacious stems of asafetida and yellow lady’s slipper and jack-in-the-pulpit have taken root in crevices.

  “Leave it alone, little one,” says Rebecca, the eldest. “The water has to be still.”

  Rebecca’s face is yellow from the light of the candle she holds in front of her, and her brown hair falls straight past her shoulders. The bowl is their mother’s, etched with an Old World design none of the sisters understand. Effie had fetched the water from the river, venturing into the rushing current up to her hips. The candle comes from their mother’s trousseau. Rebecca found it hidden in a linen shroud, wrapped together with an ebony-bladed knife and a length of copper wire. They hadn’t opened the trousseau until their mother had been gone for three years. Three is a powerful number. Three years, three sisters. They haven’t found a use for the knife or the wire, but their mother taught them how to pour molten wax into cold water and tell their fortunes from the shapes.

  “It’s only a game,” says Sarah, the middle sister. “Why does it matter if she touches the water? It’s not going to hurt her, is it?”

  “It has to be pure,” says Rebecca.

  “Mother never troubled with the full moon or with river water.”

  “And that’s why she only saw pigeons and salmon and silly things.”

  “I liked the silly things,” says Effie.

  “Are you going to marry a fish?” Rebecca’s voice betrays her impatience. Effie is ten years younger than Rebecca. She is too immature to understand the importance of ceremony.

  Rebecca empties her hand into the water. Crushed sassafras leaves and calendula petals float toward the edges of the bowl. All this is in Mother’s books. Rebecca can’t read the Latin or the Old German, but she recognizes the drawings of the herbs, and she remembers enough of Mother’s craft to serve in her absence.

  Sarah scratches her nose. “You sure this is how you make moonshine?”

  “We’re not making moonshine,” says Rebecca. She wants a solemn mood, appropriate to the ritual. The candle flame flickers in the draughts of her breath.

  “Be better if we were. We could sell it at the crossroads. Maybe buy a gun,” says Sarah.

  “Mother didn’t need a gun,” says Rebecca.

  “Bullets, too. Sell moonshine for lead shot.”

  Effie crouches in front of the chestnut stump in which the bowl is cradled and looks at her reflection in the water. The moon sits atop her head like a jewel in a crown. She reaches out a finger, and her face disappears at its touch.

  “Effie, stop it.” Rebecca’s voice rasps. “Just sit there and do nothing.”

  Effie withdraws, wrapping her arms around her knees. Her plain white dress gathers moss stains.

  Wax drips from the candle onto Rebecca’s finger. She hisses, but the pain fades quickly. The next drop, falling onto the same piece of skin, rolls away.

  Sarah makes a show of cleaning dirt from her fingernails with a kitchen knife as Rebecca tips the candle. The wax touches the water and sputters.

  “Why is the candle red?” asks Sarah. “Is it made from blood?”

  “Don’t be silly,” says Rebecca. “Be quiet and watch.”

  The globules of wax have already finished their work and have congealed at the bottom of the bowl.

  “Looks like a passel of nothing,” says Sarah. “Waste of time.”

  “It isn’t nothing.” Rebecca reaches into the water and takes out the largest piece. “What do you see?”

  “A damn piece of wax.”

  “Hush your mouth.” Rebecca studies the thin piece of wax between her fingers. One side is jagged, the other straight. “Looks like a saw. Think they’re going to build a sawmill down at the crossroads once other people move up here?”

  “There’s plenty of trees,” says Sarah. “Of course they’re going to build a sawmill. The air will fill up with sawdust so thick you can’t breathe. Doesn’t take a prophecy to tell us that.”

  “Could be a kind of knife,” says Rebecca. “Any kind of blade.”

  “A man of blood,” says Effie, trying to take it.

  “Don’t touch it,” says Rebecca, frustrated.

  “She’s not going to hurt herself on a piece of wax,” says Sarah. “I’d watch out for real knives.” She ruffles Effie’s hair.

  “So I’m going to marry a man with a blade,” says Rebecca. “A man of blood, says Effie.”

  “Why are you so fixed on marrying?” asks Sarah. “Hasn’t done anyone I know a bit of good.”

  “Who do you know that’s married? A Cherokee?” says Rebecca. “Now, are you going to choose a piece of wax or not?”

  “Hell no. Waste of time.”

  “Where did you learn such a filthy mouth?”

  “Effie taught me,” says Sarah.

  Effie looks up at the mention of her name but says nothing.

  “Are you going to get a piece?” Rebecca asks Effie.

  Effie puts her fingertips into the water. A piece of wax floats into her grasp. She pulls it out. It has an improbable shape—a flat disk, formed when the wax settled at the bottom, has joined to a long, thin piece.

  “A banjo,” she says, turning it over in her palm. “Nothing else it could be.”

  Affliction

  “Although the art of healing is the most noble of all the arts, yet because of the ignorance both of its professors and of their rash critics, it has at this time fallen into the least repute of them all.”

  —Hippocrates


  April 2, 1822

  Dear Doctor Waycross,

  Your February letter arrived here yesterday. The mail is slow to these parts. I don’t know about what all you wrote, scientific methods and the latest cures, but the truth is, we need a doctor here. Goodness knows folks up here couldn’t afford to pay you what you might be getting in the city, but I figure that if you’re writing to us, way out here, that you must need a job.

  The healers we used to have—well, there was some bad business that I’m sure you’ll hear about. So we’ve got no one now in town to look to the snotty noses and blood poisoning.

  This is a little town. Maybe with your help and some luck, it’ll be a bigger town. I’ll tell you that there’s plenty of forest. Plenty of pigeons, if you like pigeons. A wagon show rolls through every few weeks—that’s our best entertainment. We grow vegetables bigger than any you’ve ever seen. Some of the sweet potatoes that come out of the ground are bigger than a man’s head, and once I saw a watermelon as big as a hog. Why not come see that, Doctor, and stay for the doctoring?

  If that doesn’t convince you, our pastor is on a tear about these rabid dogs. He says that’s key, to put in the letter about the rabid dogs. And the panther. Come quick as you can, says the pastor. Rabies, he says. Hydrophobia.

  Come at all, is what I say. I need a doctor. He doesn’t even need to be a good one.

  Richardson, Mayor

  Lawrenceville, Georgia

  1

  HOT DAMN AND PASS THE PEPPER SAUCE

  The coachman hadn’t wanted to make the journey to Lawrenceville in the first place. It had taken all my money to persuade him. Perhaps from nervousness, he hadn’t hushed his mouth for the entire journey through the forest, babbling about all the dangers.

  Bandits, of course, although not many because there were not many travelers foolish enough to come all this way. Animals: skunk bears, mountain lions, polecats, and a plat-eye, whatever that was. Hunters with guns and hair triggers. Slippery creeks to ford, where a hapless traveler was likely to fall and break his leg. Weird groves with oranges and lemons in the middle of winter. How these latter were really dangerous escaped me, but I found that asking any questions only provoked another garrulous rant.

  The people of Lawrenceville were no better, said the coachman. They’ve got witches—used to have them living right on the town square in a little house. Ghosts too, a few of them, and now this panther terrorizing the forest might be a ghost, too. It certainly seemed to be everywhere at once. Every townsperson had seen it or heard it or smelled it.

  He wouldn’t tell me anything about Mayor Richardson or the pastor, and most infuriatingly, he knew nothing about the mad dogs.

  “Maybe it’s got to do with that panther,” he said.

  “The hydrophobia?”

  “I don’t even know what that is, Doctor.”

  “It means rabies. Fear of water is a symptom, so we sometimes call the disease hydrophobia.”

  “A city-folk word. Is that why you got your doctor’s diploma, so you could say ‘hydrophobia’ instead of ‘mad dog?’”

  We crossed a little rise, and suddenly I could see the town of Lawrenceville emerge from the wild forest pressing on it from all sides. In two minutes, we were in the town square.

  “Well, here we are, Doctor. Safe and sound.”

  I climbed down from the coach, every joint protesting the vigor of the rough travel. I would have to bleed myself later to restore my shaken humors to their right places. The coachman unloaded my boxes and crates, which immediately began sinking into the mud. I thanked him for the safe passage, in which we’d encountered not a single one of the dangers he’d predicted, and told him I had no more money to give. He touched his hat crisply and mounted up his coach again.

  “You just be careful, Doctor,” he said. The clattering wagon disappeared in a splatter of grime.

  Lawrenceville was empty. I was alone in the town square, save for the hogs. A great herd of them rooted around the muddy field, pushing their snouts against the walls of a clapboard courthouse. Having lived all my life in Savannah, I had hoped for a life in a place more civilized than this. If I traveled any farther north, I’d enter the wild mountains of Cherokee territory. That, perhaps, would have been a forest worth fearing, filled with savages and wild animals rather than rumors and bad dreams.

  My journey had been long and harrowing. Passenger coaches carried me over worn routes from Savannah to Louisville, the old state capital. Pine trees separated fields of rice and corn and cotton. Slaves and freemen, all under the same overseers, worked the land. I rode another scheduled service to Milledgeville, the lately appointed capital, where well-dressed people hurried from restaurants to factories and supervised the sales of corn and cotton. The voyage onward was more difficult. No regular coach service proceeded farther north. I persuaded the mail carrier, on the strength of my charitable profession, to take me as far as Eatonton.

  The next morning, my luck held out. An attachment of Georgia’s militia was heading to the new state of Alabama, which the Federals had recently created. Their clean uniforms and stiff boots told me it was their first campaign. The captain permitted me to join them as far as Jug Tavern, a town just a day away from Lawrenceville. I balanced my baggage on top of the ammunition wagon and trudged along with the infantry for three days, sharing their goober peas. When I reached Jug Tavern, I’d been two weeks on the road and was anxious to complete my travels, but there my good fortune finally expired. I’d missed the mail wagon, and no traders were heading through anytime soon. My sole option was to engage a private coach from the only fellow brave enough to make the trip, which depleted the bulk of my funds. I could not have walked the last twenty-five miles, given all the equipment I was bringing, and I had no need for money upon arrival, embraced by a grateful town.

  I wondered why the coachman was so fearful. The town was an unremarkable frontier outpost. Now that I was in Lawrenceville, all I could see—besides the swine—were shoddy rows of stores forming the west and south sides of the square. To the north were a few houses that looked more respectable. A church slumped in the northeast corner. All stood empty of human life. I was befuddled. Perhaps the farmers in Lawrenceville stayed home and sent their hogs to town for shopping and gossip.

  Then I heard a shout accompanied by strained chords of music and applause. “Glory, hallelujah!” Ah, the welcoming committee. But when the noise persisted with no sign of greeters, I took the risk of leaving my baggage and followed the sound to its source.

  I found myself in a narrow space enclosed on one side by muck-filled stalls and on the other by the back walls of Lawrenceville’s shops. A riotous crowd encircled a stage made of a few boards thrown on top of a mule-drawn wagon. A canvas backdrop was meant to evoke a doctor’s study. The painting showed shelves of leather-bound books, anatomical samples floating in jars, a leering skull, and a bust of Hippocrates. The canvas was wrinkled and spotted with rot.

  I turned to the fellow nearest me. “What is this place called?”

  “Honest Alley,” he replied.

  I could not hear anything else he said because the denizens of Lawrenceville were applauding a wiry huckster on the stage.

  “Glory, hallelujah! Hot damn and pass the pepper sauce!”

  Boys climbed atop each other for the best view. Daughters begged for seats on their fathers’ shoulders. Sun-crisped farmers clambered up the clapboard stores to get above their neighbors, and a pair of Negroes, along with a Cherokee trader dressed in a white man’s clothes, struggled for a place from which they could see. I noticed a woman with a kerchief drawn across most of her face. What physical ailment was she hiding beneath that red cloth? Consumption? Warts? An infected sore? She saw me looking at her and moved her kerchief, which concealed nothing unusual, so that she could stick out her tongue at me. Affronted and disconcerted, I turned my face back to the presentation.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” The entertainer crashed his right hand down on the strings
so hard that his banjo contorted into the loudest chord I’d ever heard. “You don’t want a remedy that only promises a single cure, not when there are so many troubles in the world. Well, for all that’s got you hot and bothered, there’s Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic!”

  I snorted, but no one marked me.

  “Take a spoonful, morning, noon, and night, to ward off dyspepsia, lumbago, scrofula, catarrh, flatulence, worms, and brain congestion. For starters!” At the mention of each disease, he jabbed his finger toward a different member of the crowd, diagnosing us all in one swoop.

  I should have expected no better from rustics on the frontier. Such quacks knew nothing of suffering, only of entertainment and easy cures. For the best years of my life, all through my official training as a doctor, I’d suffered for knowledge and for science. I paid my tuition by working as an apothecary’s apprentice, learning the mixtures that purged, blistered, and flushed away our infirmities. After I bought the volumes of Hippocrates and Galen and acquired the necessary chemical apparatus and assorted lancets, I rarely had much money left for food. I did not mind the deprivations, for they left me lean and hungry for my true purpose. I disassembled hogs to study their viscera. I apprenticed with the bone saw and the cauterizing iron, practicing on spoiled poultry. I memorized the contents of the doctor’s pharmacy—mercury, calomel, sugar of lead, blistering oils—and distilled my own supply according to the proven recipes.

  This medicine showman, though, with no such experience to his name, sang out to his credulous crowd:

  “Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic will add years to your life, and Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic will make those years worth living.”