The Winter Sisters

by Tim Westover

  I let out tasteless eructations as I reviewed my hasty notes from the previous week. They were not proper case studies. There’d been so many that I hadn’t had the time to turn my jumble of ailments, adjectives, and arrows into a narrative. I’d circled “red-hot poker” for a reason I couldn’t recall. Next to “catarrh,” I’d written “juniper,” but I had learned that juniper had leaves, seeds, roots, berries, shoots, and sprouts. They could be crushed and ingested, steeped, smeared on as a poultice, or smoked and the vapor inhaled. For the time, it was enough to remember that juniper might be useful.

  Even after Rebecca, Sarah, and Effie had seen to all the visitors on their first day back, an equal crowd appeared the following morning and the next. I found Rebecca’s treatments the most attractive, for they seemed the most like my own—an active principle applied to the affliction—therefore, I spent the most time standing close to her, observing. The patients, though, diagnosed another reason for our closeness besides curiosity, and thus was the knowledge of a romantic understanding between us communicated to the town at large.

  At Rebecca’s prescription, the millers suffering from summer complaint took arrowroot and cinquefoil in copious quantities of water. This flushed the complaint from their bodies faster than my purgatives. Eliza Green, Pendleton’s niece, was wasted to skin and bones. Rebecca ordered a regimen of sassafras tea and sorghum molasses, which started to restore healthy flesh to the young woman’s frame inside of a week. She cleared up two acute cases of quinsy with goose grease rubbed on the throat. Parkerhouse had a fearsome case of gravel, and I couldn’t stand the thought of all the delicate lancet work needed to clean out the man’s urinary passages. But Rebecca had all the gravel out in three days with corn-silk tea. The silks, mind you—not the kernels or the husks but the silks, boiled in water with a little cream and sugar. Every gentleman on Earth would prefer tea, no matter what kind, to a prolonged surgery on his genitals.

  Just as I was considering that, a knock came at the door. Other people might rest from their labors at mealtime, but a doctor never can. I remembered the last time a knock had come like that. It had ended with the amputation of Pendleton’s arm, my shame and disgrace. My meal suddenly sat heavy and cold in my stomach, all the humors of digestion rushing elsewhere, to my head and my bowel, but I could not ignore the knocking. I opened the door.

  Rebecca was there, holding hands with one of P’s scampering children. The anxious parents, P and Catherine, were just behind them.

  “This little one’s got a broken leg,” said Rebecca. “They came to the Snells while we were at supper, but I said that Doctor Waycross is the one to set a broken bone straight.”

  I took two steps backward. “Rebecca, you needn’t… It’s only… but I’m sure you could see to it.”

  “That’s right,” she said, “Doctor Waycross will set it right. Now, Doctor, will you see to the bone while I make up a draught that will help him sleep?”

  The parents lifted the boy into the surgery chair by the window, not that the window afforded any advantage since it was dark outside. Rebecca brought over more candles before she went to work on the soporific dram. The fracture was simple, only a single clean break, from what I could feel with my gentlest palpations. No bone protruded from the skin. The limb was of good shape and color. I set the bone in the Hippocratic way, a bandage stiffened with flour and water, and I showed Catherine how to change the dressing daily.

  Rebecca returned with a steaming drink of chicory and spices. The boy wrinkled his nose, but P shook him by the shoulder, and the boy drank. He was asleep before I’d finished giving all my instructions to Catherine.

  They left, P carrying the boy and Catherine close behind. As soon as I’d slid the door closed behind them, I turned to Rebecca. “You needn’t have brought them here for a simple fracture.”

  “No, Aubrey, I did need to. They needed to come to you. They didn’t want to because of—”

  “Pendleton,” I finished. “But I was hardly saving this limb. It was a simple treatment. And one limb doesn’t atone for another.”

  “One doesn’t, but a hundred do. And this is the first. Lawrenceville must trust you, Aubrey. You’re the right one for so many cures. I cannot do surgery. I cannot bleed or balance humors. There is good in your hands.”

  I reached out and touched her arm. Her dress was warm from where she’d been making the hot draught at the fire. When I touched her, she stepped a little closer, into my touch, and my heart quickened.

  Sarah felt peevish, for all that day, she’d seen only warts. Children, old folks, didn’t matter—a wart is a wart, damn ugly, and Sarah could do nothing to make them disappear. Effie, maybe, could wipe one away like a smudge of dirt, but no one asked for her anymore when it came to warts. Folks seemed to have decided that they shouldn’t trouble Effie with minor ailments. They asked for Sarah to fix their warts. She could tell them the only real cure was to wrap it up and don’t pick at it, and it would get better in six months if they left it alone, but folks never want to hear that the only cure is time. They mistrust your important cures if you tell them there’s nothing you can do about a little wart.

  Thus, the best cure was to tell a patient to steal a dishrag, wash with it then tear off a strip, wrap the wart in that strip of dishrag, and not take it off but once a week. The other part of the dishrag they should bury at a crossroads until it rots away. In Sarah’s reckoning, no one would call the constable over a stolen dishrag, but the act of stealing was enough transgression to clarify the mind, to bring it to attention. The part wrapped around the wart keeps the patient from picking at it, and the rest, buried in well-trod earth, rots away in about six months, just when the wart goes away on its own. That was a neat solution, not in the least painful, and much preferable to Waycross’s cauterizing iron.

  The fifth time Sarah told someone to steal a dishrag, she still enjoyed the idea of the dishrag crime spree she was unleashing, but by the tenth time, she was bored. Folks would just be stealing each other’s dishrags back and forth. She started tearing strips from a rag at hand and making up tales to explain its healing properties.

  During a lull in patients, she decided to slip away. Rebecca wouldn’t notice she was missing. Rebecca’s patients had a hundred complaints from pestilent to priapic, and Waycross was glued to her side. Sarah had seen his eyes sparkling with delight whenever Rebecca smashed some lard and sulfur into a raw rash or steeped linseed tea for a whooping cough, and she noticed her sister was thrilled when Waycross lanced a boil and the pus came out clear, as if that was a talent possessed only by the city doctor. Sticking knives into people didn’t take any skill—everyone knew that. By then, all their patients had seen Waycross and Rebecca mooning over each other.

  Sarah put an apple and a bottle of Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic into a sack, provisions for her excursion. She wondered if she should leave Effie. What if the tomato-throwers come back? Boatwright was fuming. He’d told off Waycross. He’d kept to his fairy tale about the panther as the Winters’ familiar, and the rhetoric was hot. He might try some subterfuge, but they’d been there for weeks, and Boatwright hadn’t mustered much righteous anger in the townsfolk. Lawrenceville and Effie would be safe from each other for a few hours.

  Sarah set off into the forest. The fear of the panther ensured that no one would bother her on her constitutional—on her walk. “Constitutional” was Waycross’s word, and Rebecca had taken to it as well. They took their “constitutionals” together in the evening after supper, walking ruts in the roads around the town square.

  A little ways west of town was the Yellow River. Most rivers had decent Cherokee names, like Altamaha or Chattahoochee or even Alcovy. The Yellow River had to spoil it, which was a damn shame. A yellow river was something that should flow into a latrine, not a lake. Maybe that’s why folks stayed away from the Yellow River. Like the Alcovy, the Yellow River wasn’t any good for boats or fish—too shallow and too rocky. One of the rockiest sections nearest town was called
Hurricane Shoals. A dozen rivers had their own Hurricane Shoals. Another was up in Jefferson, on the Oconee, but the Yellow River’s was particularly unpleasant. The swift main channel spurted erratically and noisily between jagged granite boulders. The lesser flows swirled in slower side eddies and moist pools. Pine pollen lay thick on the slow water. Maybe that was why it was the Yellow River. Mosquitoes clustered there, too, along with pieces of bone and fur and half a gnawed fish. It smelled of mud and rot. Sarah didn’t like Hurricane Shoals, but at least no warts would be there to trouble her.

  A shallow-rooted pine had fallen over just upstream of the shoals. She clambered over the root ball and sat down on the truck to let her feet dangle over the white spray.

  “Stinks out here.”

  Sarah whirled around and saw Thumb on the eastern bank, coming out of the woods.

  “What in the hell are you doing out here?”

  “I’ve been trying to get your notice ever since I saw you leaving the square,” said Thumb. “I was calling your name for a quarter mile. But you must have been lost in your thoughts. And you walk so fast I couldn’t keep up.”

  “So you followed me all the way from town? Got a wart that couldn’t wait?”

  Thumb reddened. “Not a wart. I’ve got a question. A favor, really.”

  “One that couldn’t wait?”

  “If you want me to go, I’ll go. I don’t mean to be a bother.”

  “You’re more of a bother when you keep blabbering on. Just tell me what you want, I’ll tell you to screw off, and then you won’t be a bother anymore.”

  “I don’t know what I did to get on your mean side, Miss Sarah. Maybe I’m wasting my time asking for favors from you.”

  “All mortal flesh is on my mean side, Salmon Thumb. Don’t think you’re special.”

  Thumb took a step forward and hooked his thumbs under his suspender loops as if he were about to speechify. Sarah knew how long his speeches could be. She held up a hand.

  “Short as you can, sir.”

  “I want your blessing to court your sister,” he said.

  “She’s swollen up like a pumpkin for Aubrey Waycross. You could probably duel him, twenty paces with pistols, but I think Rebecca wouldn’t be much impressed by that.”

  “I meant Effie,” said Thumb quietly.

  “I know you did, but I wanted you to say it.”

  Thumb flushed.

  “I saw you at the river,” said Sarah, “when you tipped out all your medicine. I’ve seen you sulking around the square when you ought to have taken your mule and your banjo and moved on to the next town.”

  Hurricane Shoals gurgled beneath her. She’d eaten her apple down to the core and threw it into one of the stagnant pools, startling a pair of dragonflies.

  “Why are you asking me?” said Sarah. “Rebecca’s the oldest.”

  “While I’ve been sulking around,” said Thumb peevishly, “I figured out that Rebecca’s not the one to ask, not when it comes to Effie.”

  Sarah felt a deep quaking in her bowels, a sudden nervousness. Their mother had drawn them into a circle together. She’d bound them together in a promise of protection for them all. When Rebecca had stepped from the circle before, that was Everett. Now, it was Waycross. With Thumb wanting to court Effie… an acrid memory of smoke came back to her.

  “Effie can choose for herself whether she wants you courting her or not,” said Sarah.

  “Is that your blessing?”

  “It’s not a blessing, and it’s not a curse. Two people can do whatever they damn well please, if’n both are willing.”

  “So, it is a blessing?” Thumb grinned.

  “I can take your head off your neck from a hundred yards,” said Sarah, “and I won’t regret it. I’d only need one word from Effie. You’d never see me, never see the bullet.”

  Thumb tipped his cap to her in reverence and in thanks.

  Wouldn’t matter if I did shoot his head off, thought Sarah. Effie would just stick it right back on if she preferred.

  I’m supposed to quit drinking,” said Maltbie morbidly as he came into our office.

  He looked like a sack of corn, his body lumpy and overstuffed, with stubby arms and legs. A peek out the door confirmed that he’d arrived like a sack, too—on the back of the blacksmith’s wagon. The smith must have loaded him up behind the Flowing Bowl and sent him to us. Maltbie’s wife would have scalded and tanned him had he arrived back home in his state—better to deliver him to the doctors, where we would, first, do no harm.

  “And how successful have you been in quitting drinking?” I asked, helping him to a seat. His pungent breath, rich enough to set me on fire, answered the question.

  “Not drinking is powerful,” said Sarah, playing up a rural manner. “It works much heavier on a drunk than a drink does on a teetotaler.”

  “That’s the truth,” said Maltbie. He collapsed into the chair. “I get these headaches. Damn, the whiskey, it’s my medicine for the headaches. I tell that to the missus, but she won’t have it. That’s why I started in the first place, and now, it’s why I can’t quit.” Maltbie held up his fingers and wiggled them. “What if a bird’s gotten hold of me?”

  “That could be serious,” said Sarah, nodding. “If a bird gets hold of your hair and builds a nest with it, you’ll never have peace until that nest is abandoned.”

  Maltbie nodded in agreement.

  “Meantime, the chicks’ peeping, pecking at the nest, twisting your hair around—all that comes back to your head. That would give you the worst headache of your life.”

  “But that’s nonsense—”

  The twin stares of Sarah and Maltbie fixed upon me.

  “I mean, that’s nonsense because, sir, you have rather little.” I scratched the top of my head, near my own thinning spot.

  Maltbie reflected the gesture. His only hairs were a few stragglers behind the ears.

  “And what could you do?” said Sarah, wrinkling her button nose. “Shoot every bird, knock down every nest?”

  “There’s millions of birds here,” said Maltbie. “I’d never find it if a hair had gone missing. It could be in any one of a hundred thousand nests in that grove.”

  “Nothing we could do unless we burned the forest down,” I said dryly.

  “We’ll try that if it comes to it,” said Sarah, “but until then, let’s suppose it’s not a bird that’s got hold of your hair. Because if we suppose that, there might be a way we can help you.”

  “Yes, suppose that,” said Maltbie. “Then what can we do?”

  Sarah put her hands behind her back and strutted in thoughtful perambulation. She stopped and was about to speak but started up her pacing again. At an arbitrary moment, she spun around to Maltbie. “What does it feel like, when you’re having your worst headache?”

  “Like someone putting a nail through my skull. Right here.” He put his finger on his temple near his left eye.

  “Then, that’s where we’ll work.” Sarah dashed over to a reinforced tea chest in the corner. She threw open the lid, keeping her bent form positioned to block any view into the chest’s contents. After a minute, she righted herself and closed the chest with her foot. In one hand, she held a hammer, in her mouth, an iron nail, and in her other hand, a human skull.

  “Where on Earth did you get that skull?” I demanded.

  “Take this one, Maltbie,” said Sarah. “I have plenty.”

  “Where on Earth did you get plenty of skulls?”

  “Folks will part with a skull if you ask,” said Sarah. “People that don’t need theirs anymore. Now, Maltbie, watch me.” She put the skull on the table indelicately. “Take this nail and line it up right where you feel the headache. If, one day, your headache moves, line up the nail there instead. And then—”

  Without looking, Sarah brought the hammer down on the nail aimed at Maltbie’s surrogate skull. The sound of splintering bone was unmistakable, known to all physicians.

  Sarah withdrew the nail from the
skull. The hole it’d made was round and clean. Only a few hairline fractures had spread from the site of impact.

  “I’m glad I’m not him.” Maltbie whistled his dismay.

  “When this skull gets too full of holes and comes apart into a thousand pieces, that’s what you want. Means you’ve broken through your own headache. It might take a week or a month. Keep going.”

  Sarah handed him the skull. Maltbie held it up and looked into its hollow sockets. “Sure glad I’m not him,” he said again.

  He left the office with his useless cure. I stood beside the window and watched him walk round the hog yard and wave to the friendly animals. His gait was unsteady, but he didn’t need a wagon to get him where he was going.

  “Do you believe you did him any good?” I asked Sarah, who was jostling against me at the window.

  “Maltbie does, and that’s enough. I found a cure that he likes.”

  “Isn’t his wife one of Boatwright’s most ardent partisans? She’s not going to like her husband bringing home a human skull and pounding it with nails, is she? She’s going to think that’s witchcraft.”

  “So we should have given him a benediction and sent him home with nothing?”

  “Isn’t it dangerous to incite one of his supporters like this?”

  “Dangerous? To make a little busybody like Mrs. Maltbie angry? Because she might go whisper about it to Boatwright and her friends at the corn shucking? I’m not going to give up on a good cure because Mrs. Maltbie might be mad. What’s the worst she could do?”

  “She might throw more than a tomato,” I said.

  10

  GRAVEYARD DIRT

  A library is an identity in linear feet. A phrenologist would do better to read his patient’s library than his skull. Rebecca and I chose to intermingle our books on the office shelves so that we might both consult them. I fretted over the matter before committing to the arrangement. The mingling of her books with mine—or mine with hers, for she had far more than I did—was a profoundly intimate act.