The Winter Sisters

by Tim Westover

  “Hallo, sir!” I announced. “Are you hurt?”

  He smiled through his discomfort. “Ah, Dr. Waycross! It’s not worth your trouble. I jammed my hand in the door. Caught my fingers.”

  Any injury was worth my trouble, as long as it paid a few pennies. “At least let me examine it, Mister…”

  “Boatwright.” He held up his hand, the bruised fingers drooping.

  I flexed the fingers, squeezed the knuckles, and felt the movements of the joints.

  “No broken bones,” I said, returning his hand. “You’ll be back to your fields in no time.”

  He stood up straighter. “I am no farmer. More of a shepherd. Of men.”

  “Pastor Boatwright, then,” I said.

  A Savannah churchman is never without his parson’s frock. Boatwright did not look like a pastor. It was his addition to the letter, his insistence on the mention of rabies, that had lured me out to this forsaken edge of civilization, beyond any easy rescue. He’d persuaded the mayor to abuse my sympathy. His name meant nothing to me. I studied the man, but I did not recognize him. He must have known me, though, since he’d persuaded the mayor to contact me personally.

  “If you’ll pardon me, sir,” I said, measuring my anger, “I seem to have misplaced our acquaintance. You know me, but I do not know you.”

  “You were only a stripling, Waycross. I do not expect you to remember. But the troubles of your poor sister I will never forget.”

  “Eva?”

  “I was a newcomer to the cloth. I came at your mother’s request—a last resort, I think, because I saw the bottles of patent remedies and smelled the incense of herbalists. Of course, I was too late to intercede. Only an extraordinary act of divine mercy would have saved her, but the Lord did not grant a miracle. We cannot blame Him, Waycross. I saw to her spiritual needs near the last. I washed her forehead, gave her shrift.”

  Then I did know him. He was the Protestant clergyman who had sat at my sister’s side and done nothing for her. He’d prayed aloud, but his words had been lost in Eva’s ravings. He shoved bread and poured wine between her clenched teeth, and she spat it back. She would not drink anything. He questioned Eva about her impure thoughts, her unchastities, her beliefs in false creeds and dark magic, but Eva was guilty only of loving me too much.

  A tide of melancholy swirled in my innards, but I repressed the outward signs.

  “I saw the letter you wrote the mayor,” said Boatwright. “I recognized the name immediately. ‘Well, that young boy’s gone and done something fine with his life. Just the fellow we need in Lawrenceville.’”

  When I received my stamps and seals from the Georgia Medical Society, I’d written to mayors all over the state. I promised them healthful constituents and solid Hippocratic cures. But none had answered me, save Lawrenceville.

  “Because of rabies? Mayor Richardson said that no one has hydrophobia.”

  “Yet,” insisted the pastor. “The mayor dismisses the danger. He’s a nearsighted man. ‘Just shoot the mad dogs,’ he says. Well, we cannot shoot them all. We cannot kill a disease with a bullet, can we? And when a dozen children are suffering like your poor Eva suffered… Waycross, I never wish to see a sight like that again. Do you?”

  I shook my head. Tears threatened to reveal themselves in the corners of my eyes, but I did not want the pastor to see them. I closed my eyelids long enough for the tears to dissipate, and when I opened my eyes again, my vision was no longer blurred.

  “There are no human infections yet, thanks be,” continued the pastor. “But three dogs in three months? It’s breeding in the woods, among the animals. I think this panther is a rumor gone too far. But it’s useful, isn’t it, to keep people from wandering into harm in the woods? Some poor farmhand or field urchin will come down with the hydrophobia before a fortnight is gone.”

  “It’s possible,” I said.

  “It’s inevitable.” Boatwright stretched his fingers, and a wince of pain crossed his face. “Hydrophobia and Waycross. These words are linked together in my mind, Doctor. I consider it more than serendipity that you wrote to Lawrenceville just as that very disease, so terrible a memory for you and me, is awakening in our midst.”

  “What do you suppose that I can do?”

  The pastor knew, as surely as I, that no one, from Hippocrates to today, had been cured of rabies. There is hope for consumption, cancer, dropsy, and blood poisoning. Medicine has remedies for each—not infallible, but often effective. Rabies, though… Against rabies, we are all powerless.

  “When the plague comes,” said Boatwright, “you can offer comfort, Doctor, and perhaps I can offer a cure.” He raised an outstretched right palm reverently toward the sky. “From there shall come our hope and deliverance. Not from Thumb’s patent medicines and not from the Winter sisters’ soups and swills. Rabies will prove them powerless. You saw it yourself, Waycross: the parade of hucksters and charlatans, each of whom wrought a particular failure upon Eva.”

  I did not like this man when he’d ministered to Eva, and I did not like this man now. He’d been one more charlatan among many. His Protestant prayers had done no better than a mustard plaster or turpentine tonic, but one cannot speak much against the dominant religion, even in our enlightened era.

  I turned back to Boatwright. “So, I am here as a witness to the failures of quackery?”

  “You’ve already begun. You’d been in town but five minutes before you inveighed against Thumb’s spectacle. I was right to bring you here.”

  “I’ve already seen Thumb’s game,” I said. “But what kind of superstition do the Winter sisters favor? Patent medicines? Herbs? Incantations?”

  “If only, sir. Songs and spirits are damaging to the soul.” The pastor exploded into a full coughing fit. “But witchcraft—that’s far worse.”

  “Witchcraft?” I bit my lip. “But there is no such thing as—”

  “Potions!” His ears had turned bright red. “Candles. Dancing. Long silences. What would you call that?”

  I allowed a long silence. “Children’s games.”

  “It smacks of devilment and superstition, that’s what.” He paused to let his words sink in. “Those who pretend at witchcraft lead people into false beliefs, which are bad for their souls and bad for their bodies. Don’t you agree?”

  I traded my weight from foot to foot in silence.

  “The hags’ influence was stronger before I came,” said Boatwright. “They were living here in this town. My predecessor in the pulpit did not take a hard line with his congregation. He permitted shadowy dealings on the courthouse square. Well, I will have none of it. I haven’t yet been able to eliminate their sway though I did see to it that they were run out of Lawrenceville. The more credulous townsfolk ascribe miraculous powers to these witches. Drawing out poisons and infections. Reattaching severed limbs. Making the lame to walk and the blind to see, I’d venture. It’s idolatry.”

  “Hucksterism,” I said. “No one can stitch an arm back onto a stump.”

  Perhaps those sisters once had a stroke of luck in treating an infected limb, and the story grew, through rumor and hope, into a miracle, but the age of miracles is passed.

  “They are charlatans and heretics, and they will fail the test of rabies.” He took on the stentorian tones of a sermon. “But you and I, we can help where they cannot. You treat the body, and I treat the soul. And together, we will stand against the lure of superstition.”

  The pastor stuck out his hand as though we’d negotiated an alliance. I do not care about souls—show me one in a glass jar. But I needed an ally, even a flawed one. I took his hand and shook it in a limp, reluctant agreement.

  Our business finished, I took my leave quickly and went back to my makeshift office. I passed the day organizing my books and bottles. My mind was not in my work, which was only useless rearranging. Boatwright had irritated the memories of Eva that I had thought healed. What if a case of hydrophobia appeared among the children of Lawrenceville? What if this
supposed panther—certainly some other kind of woodland creature, for it was a scientific impossibility for there to be a panther in Lawrenceville, Georgia—put its teeth into human flesh? What if, in their benightedness, the afflicted went to the Winter sisters for treatment? These so-called witches might spread the contagion with some superstition about pouring out blood at a crossroads.

  I held out hope of rescue back to Savannah. Still, I could begin the work of discrediting the Winter sisters now. I could earn the trust of some influential patients and cure them, and by their wagging tongues, news of the efficacy of scientific medicine would spread through the town. Furthermore, I should find out how these Winter sisters treated their patients so that I could hold up their cures as ludicrous superstitions. My remonstrations against Thumb had not gone well, but next time, I would not be caught unprepared and, perhaps, not up on a stage.

  The only witnesses to my labors and ruminations were the hogs. I took pity on a runty one, paler than her kin, who was laboring in her breathing and leaking mucus from her nostrils. I treated her with a bloodletting.

  When Sarah came into her and her sisters’ cabin at Hope Hollow, the first thing she saw was Rebecca’s rump. The eldest sister was leaning over their largest iron kettle, stirring the boiling contents with a wooden paddle. The odor was not pleasant. It smelled of too many herbs all at once, basil and rosemary mixed with an overpowering lavender, as well as the spiciness of rhododendron, the sharp tang of pine, and the musk of something decocted from a toadstool.

  “Which poor fellow is going to have to swallow that mess?” asked Sarah. “And what’s he sick with to need such doctoring?”

  “You’re the poor fellow,” said Rebecca, straightening up. “And me. And Effie. It’s dinner.”

  Sarah stuck out her tongue.

  “You don’t have to eat it,” said Rebecca. “You can go hungry. You can get yourself a cold biscuit. Or shoot a pigeon and cook it up yourself.”

  Sarah went closer to the cauldron and sniffed again. The aromas blended together better—the lavender and rhododendron and pine were coming from other tinctures cooling in other places. The basil and rosemary were in the cook pot, along with tomato and some root vegetables in a kind of stew. It was still early for tomatoes, at least for most gardeners, but Rebecca’s crop was ripe, and it would stay ripe all the way until November. Her success was owed to more than just the guano she used on the soil. It was cleverness.

  “Effie’s not going to have but two spoonfuls,” said Sarah. “Why are you making up such a big pot of stew?”

  “Effie will creep down at night and eat three bowls when she doesn’t think any of us will know.” Rebecca looked into the cook pot again and seemed satisfied. Then she crossed over to the kitchen table, where a dozen glass bottles, all mismatched, were set out. Each was filled with a different color of liquid. From these the variegated herbal odors were coming, oils and essences that Rebecca used in her work and occasionally in their supper.

  “Why do you need to cook up so many medicines?” asked Sarah. “All a Hippocratic doctor needs is a lancet and a bone saw.”

  “Since when are you an expert on Hippocratic medicine?”

  “I met the new doctor,” said Sarah. “Remember, I said that they were sending for one. He’s here now.”

  “You don’t suppose he’ll be any trouble, do you? Like the new pastor was?”

  “Not any trouble. He’s a fool, and not even a convincing fool.” Sarah told her sister about the stage show, the spectacle with Thumb, and how the poor doctor was stunned into defeat by a banjo tune.

  “He’s your age, Rebecca, which is old enough to be married by now, but he isn’t. And he’s not bad-looking, if you don’t mind that his hair is thinning up top and that his favorite pastime is shouting at medicine-show men.”

  Rebecca didn’t say anything.

  Sarah continued, “And what’s more… he’s a man of blood.”

  “What on earth do you mean?” asked Rebecca as a reflex, but her eyes betrayed that she knew what Sarah meant. “That scrying… that was a saw, and that meant Everett.”

  “Could have been any kind of blade, you said. And Effie said it was a man of blood, and Everett wasn’t a man of blood. Now a doctor, there’s a man of blood. And pus and puke and piss and every other fluid you can squeeze out of a man or woman. Who wouldn’t want to marry a man like that?”

  “You thought it was a silly game,” said Rebecca. “You thought all of it was a silly game.”

  “It still is a silly game.”

  “Even when people die? Even when people run out of town so there’s no more killing?”

  Sarah fell silent, knowing that her needling had pressed too far, but she couldn’t keep silent for long. “All I meant was I don’t think we have to worry about this man of blood.”

  Rebecca nodded slowly.

  “Where’s Effie?” asked Sarah.

  “I haven’t seen her since this morning. Pendleton came up with a three-inch locust splinter in his arm, and it was hot with infection. I was two hours getting the splinter out and then cleaning up the wound. Honey to dry it out and keep it clean.”

  “I wish you cared about your little sister as much as you cared about every stranger that wanders up to Hope Hollow.”

  “Those strangers need doctoring,” said Rebecca. “And she’s not here to reattach an arm that’s about to fall off or to drive out a blood infection or glumly stare the hydrophobia out of someone, is she? She’s gone someplace—I don’t know where. So while she’s gone and you’re out meeting the new doctor, the man of blood, then it’s up to me to be making supper and making cures, isn’t it?”

  Rebecca cooks, and Rebecca doctors, thought Sarah, which for her amount to nearly the same thing. And if she quits either one, she leaves room for unrepeatable sadness to creep in.

  By late afternoon, the heat of the day had made my office uncomfortable. I laced up my boots and pushed the creases out of my hat. A constitutional perambulation would clear my head and help me learn the land. As Galen wrote, exercise is good both for the evacuation of the excrements and for improving the condition of the firm parts of the body.

  Which way should I go? Galen, I supposed, would have taken his constitutionals around the Forum and the Coliseum—urban places. Lawrenceville, outside of its clapboard courthouse, the four dirt paths bordering it, and a few stores, was wilderness. I sighed. Savannah was not Rome or London, but it was a city: orderly streets, rows of shopfronts, manicured parks, and a bustling quayside. It was not a place free from danger, but I knew those dangers. Here, I knew only that the woods, which began not three hundred yards down any dusty lane, might conceal any number of dangers—not a panther, certainly, but a mountain lion or rabid dog. Bandits. Cherokee. Belligerent farmers with shotguns and ideals about their property rights.

  I decided it was prudent and in no way cowardly to confine my constitutional to Lawrenceville’s square. I completed one perambulation and began a second, numbering the public establishments. The Rhodes Hotel on the south side. Next to that, a narrow storefront with a simple sign: Parr’s Confectionary. A place called the Flowing Bowl. A tanning yard with open pools of chemicals oozing their vapors into the atmosphere. The catawampus church. A tree sporting three little straw poppets—perhaps to entertain children. A cabin with a red door, which might have been a schoolhouse or a turkey hostelry, for all I knew. Wheelwright, blacksmith. And back to Snell’s Merchandise. The storefronts were no different on my third pass or my fifth.

  Finally, I stopped in front of the confectionary, for that was the most unusual, a strange luxury for a frontier town. I peeked in the window. The cakes and pies and treacly concoctions displayed made my stomach rumble. Inside, a young girl was keeping the counter. Her curls were the color of daffodils.

  “That’s Mrs. Parr’s daughter, Ouida Bell,” said a Negro man, who sidled up beside me. “If I could get her to work for me at the Flowing Bowl, I’d be doing even better business. I think most of th
e candies that Ouida Bell sells, she gets back as presents from her suitors. She’s what finally made you stop, huh?” As I must have looked puzzled, the man laughed. “You’ve been walking a circle around this square. I’ve seen you pass my window a dozen times.”

  Though it had been only eleven times, I did not correct him.

  “I came out to see if you were all right or if you were looking for something. Maybe you lost your glasses or your dog.”

  “Nothing lost, sir.” I tipped the brim of my hat and introduced myself. “Dr. Waycross.”

  “I know it. Can’t keep the Flowing Bowl folks from talking, and it seems that, between them, they know just about everything, if you can sort truth out from the lies. I’m Renwick.”

  “What’s the Flowing Bowl? An eatery?”

  “Walked by a dozen times but didn’t poke your head inside,” clucked Renwick. “See, if Ouida Bell were working for me, you would have stopped. Yeah, it’s an eatery. We’ve always got pork, biscuits, and whiskey.” He fiddled with the ends of his shirt collar, which were starched and crisp. “The rest of the menu is whatever I think up that morning. Say, you’re not one of those doctors that are on about the evils of drink, are you?”

  I shook my head. “Drink, in moderation, can be beneficial for the constitution. It is hot and, thus, restorative for certain phlegmatic conditions. Of course, anything in excess can be destructive. Drink. Smoking. Exertion—”

  “Walking around the square a dozen times. Don’t you want a change of scenery, or is the sight of Ouida Bell what you’re really after?”

  I piqued under his needling. “No, not at all. I needed a constitutional, for my health. If I’ve offended you, Mr. Renwick—”

  “Offended, nah. Doctor, I’m just looking out for me and my own, you know?” His jocular manner did not comfort me. “You’re going to wear out our roads. They’re already not so good. Drifts of mule shit and hog slop. Puddles big enough that a fellow can go fishing in them after a good rain. You keep going another dozen times, and there will be a rut right down the middle.”