The Winter Sisters

by Tim Westover

  Once resolved, we integrated them by theme. Rebecca’s notes on Indian physic, copied from missionaries’ diaries, leaned against my Galen and Avicenna. Her old almanacs accompanied my astronomical tables. A good many of her cures came from those notes and books. I perused them all, committing to memory all that I could, but many more of her ways and wiles were not written anywhere, excepting when I wrote down what I saw. Those cures she’d learned from her mother, or she’d perfected herself, or she’d heard from someone: an ancient Cherokee or a young Creek mother, a German homesteader, an itinerant Irishman, or a English goodwife recently arrived to the frontier. She had a vast intellect to collect, sort, remember, and refine all these superstitions into cures. That was just what I hoped to do with the Winter sisters’ cures, but passed through the alembics of my own scientific and logical reasoning.

  The greatest delight in combining our libraries was finding duplicate volumes between our collections. She had a Culpeper herbal older than mine. Her Paracelsus was in German, the relic of an Old World immigrant, while mine was in Latin. We compared the volumes and found intriguing differences. A handsome Trismegistus in her possession smelled of fire, which gave it an authority that my schoolbook edition lacked. She had no Hippocrates, but that was no great matter. I had all the Hippocrates we needed inside my own head. That we shared several volumes, that some of our cures sprang from the same pages, gladdened my heart.

  Nowhere was there any mention of prestidigitating a frog. That had been my own invention, and I still felt rather proud of it. I could write it into a pamphlet with my own name on the front. Rebecca, of course, could write a much longer volume, but the frog was mine.

  After weeks of working side by side, we had fallen into a rhythm. Most days, we all saw to the early-morning patients, then from afternoon through evening, Rebecca and I stayed close to the office, tied to our materials, while Sarah and Effie went their own ways.

  Thus, that evening, Rebecca and I were alone. We had no patients waiting on us, but we had every reason to be together there, in privacy—a respectable time for courtship.

  I looked over the rim of my cup at her. “I’ve been thumbing through your books for cholera.”

  We were sitting in the shadow of the bookshelf, gathering near it like a hearth and drinking coffee. Mine was brewed from Arabian beans. Hers was an amalgam of nuts and herbs that pretended to the title of “coffee.” She was habituated to the imitation, so the genuine tasted false.

  “There are many contradicting cures and twice as many theories as to the cause,” I said. “What do you think it is?”

  “Bad water,” she said, as though that were not a puzzle that had bothered the brightest minds since the days of the pyramids.

  “But what is ‘bad’ water?” That was a familiar debate from my apprenticeship at the Poor House and Hospital. I knew my evidence. “Cholera has broken out in new settlements, where the water is clear and sweet. It’s broken out in brackish places and dry places and cold places, winter or summer. So, if we cannot agree on the character of this bad water—”

  Rebecca stood up to refill her bark brew, and the argument faded inside me. I didn’t want to talk about cholera, either. I was sitting there, in privacy, with a young lady of my own age and temperament, with whom I had a romantic understanding. I should not have been debating cholera with her. We should have been talking about… whatever constitutes normal conversation.

  She sat down again across from me with a fresh cup. “So, what else have you found?”

  I looked over the shelves to refresh my memory.

  “I don’t mean in the books.” She smiled to cover a flicker of exasperation. “Or not only in the books. In Lawrenceville. In the woods. Anywhere.”

  She had a specific topic in mind, which she meant for me to divine from the atmosphere. Cholera came again to my mind, but I pushed it away. I could offer praise for her feminine qualities. I could not remember when I had done that. I tried to arrange some compliments in my head. Her cheeks were rosy, like an acute dermal infection of erysipelas. Her teeth were the pure white of a perfect blister raised from mustard oil on the smooth skin of the underarm. Also, her secondary sex characteristics showed admirable development…

  I scrambled for another topic—mountains, fauna, flora… a fact or fancy, new and surprising, that would show that I cared about the world outside my office.

  She scratched at the back of her neck. I’d never seen her do that before. Her attentions, for a minute, seemed far away. “Dr. Waycross, I’ve heard that respectable people, all the best houses in Savannah and Milledgeville, share a most respectable pastime.”

  “Ombre?”

  “No, one that you know better than ombre.”

  I brought down the bottle of ether from its place among the anatomies and lectures. When I uncorked it, the bottle exhaled its sweet smell, the vapors almost visible in the air. The smell is too sweet to be pleasant, like a mountain of blueberries left to rot in the sun.

  “Are you sharing, Dr. Waycross?”

  I gave her the bottle. She inhaled, and then I took my turn.

  A tide of good feelings washes over me, drenches me. It swirls in my ears and splashes between my toes and gets into my nostrils. Nature crawls in through the holes in the roof and the cracks in the wall. The cawing of the night birds blends into a symphony of forest sounds. A sleepy turkey calls from a thicket. The whoosh of skittering squirrels, desperate for their nests, scatter pine needles.

  There is a hog under the laboratory table. Together, we shoo it out and chase it around the yard. We try to ride it. Soft breezes make the trees to sway, opening the canopy of the forest to columns of moonlight. Crickets sing their love songs, each to each. The sky turns dark and light a thousand times, as we watch stars and planets and fireflies and clouds and ages play out above our heads.

  Rebecca begins buck-dancing alone, following a melody that only she can hear. I sit on the floor, crossed-legged, as I haven’t sat for years, and clap to the hypnotic rhythm of her footfalls. When she kicks up her heels, I can see black riding boots, laced high up.

  A galaxy of purple spots stutters and winks close to my face and grows and shrinks and changes hue from midnight to lilac and back, and they buzz like bees, but they are singing. Rebecca has a sack filled with flour, or straw, or the feather pillow from my bed, and I have a similar one, and by swinging it, I shoo away the purple spots, which giggle and scatter. Rebecca strikes me over the head, causing me to stumble in glee, and I retaliate, and she falls over, and I catch her.

  I do not fall in love with Rebecca because of chemicals or purple spots. The rise of a lover’s affections is more mysterious than the workings of ether. I fall in love with her cleverness, her kindness, and her nature that is kindred to mine. We have both lost people that are dear to us. We have both turned to medicine as a cure for our own hurts. But all these abstracts are forgotten. When her library meets mine and mingles, I know that it is true.

  What you need, Ouida Bell, is some graveyard dirt.”

  Ouida Bell had hiked up her skirts, unashamed that time, so Sarah could see the rash—a field of angry red dots scattered discontinuously over her legs. Sarah ran her hands over the damaged area. There was no tender inflammation, no raised wounds. The worst of the rash was near where the panther had bit her, but that wound, which had been only a playful nip, had healed weeks before. It was a coincidence. The rash certainly was not blood poisoning from the animal bite since no fever was present. Nor was it erysipelas or ringworm. It also wasn’t… that other disease, the one Sarah shook out of mind the moment it blinked across her imagination. No, the rash was a symptom of hand-foot-and-mouth disease. If Waycross or Rebecca were treating the girl, they would say it was of no real concern. Like warts, hand-foot-and-mouth always goes away on its own, but Sarah never felt that kind of answer was good enough to satisfy a patient—especially Ouida Bell. Also, to her mind, the more folks digging around the churchyard, the better.

  “What
will happen if I don’t put grave dirt on it?”

  “Climb up your legs,” said Sarah. “And then you’ll see it on your palms because you can’t leave your legs alone and you’re itching at them. And then the pox will be crawling out your mouth, all around your lips and nose.”

  “Oh, God!” Aghast, Ouida Bell put her hands to her mouth then shrieked. She held her hands out in front of her and shook them as if flinging off plague water. “Is it scarring?”

  “Not usually, but you can never figure on it. Anyway, why worry about some pox marks on your lips? That’ll help keep the boys away.”

  “I haven’t had trouble with the boys since I started with the asafetida. So, it’s graveyard dirt for this… this rash?”

  “Yes. And not just a little bit, either. I think we need to bury you.”

  “Bury me?”

  “Under the cover of moonlight. You and I must go to Lawrenceville’s churchyard. We will dig a hole five feet deep, wide enough for your shoulders. And then you will strip—”

  “Why must I do that?”

  “For the cure to work, you must be naked as the beasts of the woods, naked as the lilies of the field.”

  Ouida Bell scratched nervously at her legs then pulled her hand away, blushing.

  “Then you will climb down into the hole, standing up, and I will bury you up to your neck. You must stay there until the coldest hour of dawn.” That whole time, you won’t be able to scratch.

  “When can we do it?” whispered Ouida Bell.

  Ouida Bell brought a lantern. Sarah had half a dozen tallow candles and two narrow-bladed shovels. They met at the Parrs’ cabin. Though she’d been its only human victim, Ouida Bell did not confess any fear of the panther in the twilight gloom. She’d survived one attack, and Sarah had brought her gun.

  “If this panther really is your demon familiar, like Boatwright says,” teased Ouida Bell, “then you didn’t need to bring your gun. You could just tell it to sit, roll over, play dead, couldn’t you?”

  Sarah smiled. “But I did bring my gun.”

  Unlike confectionaries, graveyards do not call out to passersby for their custom. Lawrenceville’s graveyard was a quarter mile from the town center, set back a good ways from the road and hidden behind a small rise. Four granite stones marked the corners, but the rest of the fence had never been built. A wooden scaffold there held up an iron bell: the burying bell. It tolled to summon the town: men to dig the grave, women to mourn, children to leer, the pastor to intone about the fragility of life, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  Lawrenceville’s graveyard bell had rung for Everett. Afterward, the funeral crowd marched, in a mass, to the Winters’ cabin, with Boatwright at the head of the procession. Sarah had her rifle. She could have lined up graves next to Everett’s: for Boatwright and for anyone else that spoke hate against her and her sisters, but Rebecca did not want blood to follow blood. Life is not restored by death.

  “Right about here ought to do.”

  Sarah sank her shovel blade into the earth about ten feet from Everett’s headstone. The town didn’t have a funerary mason, so the headstone was actually a boulder in which was artlessly carved “Evrt.” Rebecca had done that. She was worthless with a chisel.

  Ouida Bell picked up the other shovel and joined in. Their blades clanged against each other immediately, sending sudden sparks up against the lantern light. “Sorry,” Ouida Bell said.

  “We’ve got to find a rhythm, else there’s no good two of us working on it.”

  “It’s my cure, so I don’t mind doing the digging.” Ouida Bell paused to push up the sleeves of her evening gown then attacked the loamy top layer of soil. When she reached the red clay, she slowed. Each shovelful was heavier.

  “Let me take a try now,” Sarah said.

  “You’re going to be burying me and digging me back up, right?”

  “So?”

  “So I’ll do the digging now.” Ouida Bell grunted. “I don’t want you plum tuckered when it’s time to get me out.”

  Sarah leaned on her shovel and watched. Three feet down, Ouida Bell started having a hard time with the angles. Sarah should have thought to bring a bucket. Truth was, she had never buried anyone in the churchyard before. Usually, just the threat of a burying was enough to stay anyone from scratching, and that’s all that Ouida Bell needed to do: not scratch it, even when it itched like the devil. If only people could control themselves, half of the world’s curing wouldn’t be needed, nor half the world’s guns.

  Ouida Bell heaved up a sprinkling of red clay. Clay is cool and close, damp from the nearness of water. “It presses against all the itching at once,” Sarah’s mother had always said. “It calms all the nerves. It immobilizes the fingers so they can’t scratch and spread.”

  “This better work,” muttered Ouida Bell.

  “Nothing’s better than a graveyard burying for what you’ve got.” Sarah started to pity the poor girl, smeared with clay, dirt running in sweaty streaks from her forehead.

  “What if it scars? What will I have then?” asked Ouida Bell. “What if it scars my lips?”

  “Folks have scars and live a fine, full life.”

  “But I won’t. If I don’t get rid of this hoof-and-mouth—”

  “Hand-foot-and-mouth. You’re not a cow.”

  “If my face gets scarred up, I will be. I’ll be like some animal. All I have is my face, Sarah. My momma says, ‘She’s the prettiest one in town,’ and all the boys say, ‘Why, isn’t she the belle of the ball?’ and the church ladies coo and pet my cheeks. They twirl my hair, and I think maybe they’d really rather pull it out by the roots. Because that’s who I am: pretty Ouida Bell, prettiest girl in town.” Her shovel bit in deep. “If there’s no pretty face, then there’s no Ouida Bell.”

  “Plenty of menfolk don’t care about a pretty face if the rest of a lady’s parts work hard enough.” Sarah regretted the jibe. It was too harsh. “You could learn to play the piano. Start a sawmill or a liquor still. There’s a thousand useful things—anything you like.”

  “What if I want to stay pretty? Just as good a choice as playing the piano.”

  Sarah peered into the hole. “Maybe with two shovels.”

  Together, in half an hour, they finished the hole five feet deep. It was clay down to the bottom, where the granite started. A little water was pooling in the hole already.

  “Ready?” Sarah asked.

  Ouida Bell nodded and slipped her evening gown over her head. The fine hairs of her flesh glimmered in the candlelight. She folded her arms across herself against the night air. Ouida Bell climbed down into the hole.

  Sarah scooped the first shovelful of dirt back into the hole and then a dozen more, working quickly as Ouida Bell shivered. “Is it cold?”

  Ouida Bell nodded. “But it gets warmer the more dirt you add. And it tickles. It’s the strangest feeling. Like nothing else I’ve ever felt.”

  “I’d wonder if it were familiar. Who else is going to be burying you in graveyard dirt?”

  They chattered and laughed while Sarah packed in the dirt around Ouida Bell, and when the work was done, Sarah lay down beside Ouida Bell’s head and rested her chin on her hands.

  “Do you know, Ouida Bell, that I’ve never prescribed a graveyard burying before, much less had the patient consent to it? They’ve taken a little graveyard dirt but never been buried up to their neck in it. You are a brave woman.”

  Ouida Bell tried to nod, but she bumped her chin on the ground, which sent both her and Sarah into gales of laughter. When Ouida Bell laughed, the earth around her trembled from the movement of her body beneath.

  Sarah saw a light bobbing on the road. The sun was not yet on the horizon, but the eastern sky already had the milky gray of dawn.

  “What in the devil is this?” cried Pastor Boatwright, running up to them.

  He dropped his lamp in shock. All he saw was an animated head upon the ground and Sarah beside it. She waved him a fine toodle-oo, and Ouida Bell g
rinned with all her teeth.

  11

  A SLAP WITH OLD BREAD

  Eudoxia Everett came to us in the arms of her father, who’d run all the way from their farm. The ten-year-old had been splitting wood, he said, and the new ax blade wanted its taste of blood. It had jumped a locust log and sunk itself into her leg. That was not the trouble. Pa Everett could clean an ax wound. Eudoxia, bandaged up, was back to her labors within an hour, but the next day brought fever and pain. The leg was hot to the touch. Pa Everett feared blood poisoning.

  When I unwrapped the dressings, I knew infection was already deep in the leg. The bandages dripped with pus—not the laudable, flowing sort, but the sweet-smelling pus of putrefaction. The edges of the wound were black and ragged and crusted with vile matter. If I didn’t take her leg, she’d die. If I did, she’d be a burden, unmarriageable, a source of sorrow to herself and to her family. Pendleton’s disembodied arm returned as if in a vision. What if I mangled the poor girl’s leg as badly as I’d mangled Pendleton? The family had already been visited by tragedy. They were the father and youngest sister of the late Everett, Rebecca Winter’s suitor, who’d died in the mill fire.

  “The best course is debridement and scouring by carbolic acid,” I said, intending to ease them into the truth of the situation.

  But as I rose to fetch the carbolic acid, Rebecca stopped me. “Let me see her,” she said, her voice wavering.

  Eudoxia smiled when Rebecca came to the side of the examination table. Rebecca smiled back, but the smile quivered just as her voice had. Rebecca put her fingers close to the black edges of the wound. I knew she could feel the heat of infection, the pulse of corruption. She knew the treatment needed to be as terrible as the wound.

  Rebecca squeezed the girl’s hand and stepped away from the table, then she disappeared behind some shelves. I took that as a signal that I was to administer the treatment. Rebecca, perhaps because of her affection for the family of which Eudoxia Everett was a part, hadn’t the stomach for inflicting pain, even when that pain was necessary and curative.