The Winter Sisters

by Tim Westover

  Before I could begin, though, Rebecca reappeared, holding a slice of mold-covered bread.

  “Now, this won’t hurt a bit, Eudoxia,” she said.

  In my astonishment, I forgot about the carbolic acid. The mold was hoary blue-white fuzz interspersed with dark-green circles. She wet the bread with water from a pitcher, then she wrapped the whole of it, injury and bread, in clean bandages.

  I was speechless, dumbstruck. I wondered if and when I should intervene, for surely no doctor would consent to the use of moldy bread for an infected leg. Such a bizarre superstition deserved to be ripped from the pages of whatever cursed herbal Rebecca had found it in.

  While Rebecca worked and I gaped, Eudoxia talked. “I miss you, ever since Henry. You should have come by to see us. Pa misses you, too.”

  “I’m sorry, little one,” said Rebecca. “It’s… not so easy.”

  “Who’s Henry?” I sputtered.

  “He never liked his given name,” said Rebecca. “We never used it. He was just Everett.”

  “Henry,” said Eudoxia weakly.

  “Shh, don’t you worry about it,” Rebecca told her patient.

  “Why don’t you come up to see us?” asked Eudoxia. “We used to see you all the time.”

  Rebecca flushed. “You’re feverish, little one. Just rest. Dr. Waycross will be up to see you in a couple days.”

  “Not you?”

  Rebecca shook her head. “I’ll come by and by. But Dr. Waycross will see to you. He’s a nice man.”

  “What’s his whole name?”

  “Aubrey,” I said, interrupting at the sign of Rebecca’s distress. “You can call me Aubrey if you like.”

  “Aubrey sounds like Henry,” said Eudoxia.

  The work finished, Rebecca nodded at Pa Everett. I thought they might exchange a few words, but it wasn’t needed. Pa Everett—given name unknown—returned the respectful gesture. Evidently, he trusted enough in that strange moldy treatment, or in the healer administering it, that he did not question it. I, on the other hand, was festering with doubt.

  I could barely wait until Pa and Eudoxia had left. I had made many discoveries with Rebecca during the last few weeks—willow bark, balm of Gilead, witch hazel, valerian—but she had not applied a wholesome botanical. It was moldy bread. But Rebecca acted quite precisely. She gave no explanations. She applied the bread, wrapped the leg, and sent Eudoxia away with a smile.

  “Rebecca, you know that I have every trust in your cures, but this particular one, given the severity of the girl’s condition—”

  She heard the accusation in my voice. “It often effects a full cure. It depends on the mold, I think, but I’m not certain of the difference yet. The whitish growth, as on this bread, seems very promising.”

  “But maybe your affections for the girl have clouded your judgment. I know that you don’t want to inflict pain on a family that has already had so much, but think of the consequences.”

  “I have considered them. I trust this cure more than I trust your carbolic acid.”

  I wasn’t satisfied. “I feel that, by doing nothing, we’ve increased the chances of amputation. And please trust, my dear, that I have seen your cures perform good works, but moldy bread? How can it debride the flesh or rebalance the humors?”

  “Neither of those are necessary,” said Rebecca. “And it’s not nothing. The bread will be enough. It sees to the infection.”

  “Dear, in almost a third of cases where the cut is inflamed like Eudoxia’s—”

  “And don’t think that ‘dear’ and ‘darling’ and other sweet nothings will convince me to give up on my cures. Have more respect for me than that.”

  “Rebecca, then. Miss Winter. As I meant to say, in up to a third of cases, the carbolic acid prevents blood poisoning by burning away the necrotic flesh and avoiding amputation, even in the most severe cases.”

  “A third?” said Rebecca. “If a third of the ax wounds that came to Hope Hollow turned to blood poisoning, this would be a ghost town.”

  A dark choler swirled in my stomach. The town had not yet forgiven me for what I’d done to Pendleton, nor did they trust I would not amputate in every case that I saw. But there I was, on the cusp of mangling this poor Eudoxia Everett because I did not trust what Rebecca said was a good cure. If I were really to learn, to humble myself, I must trust her medicine not only in the smaller matters of warts and dyspepsia, but also in cases of life and death.

  “As you say, then,” I said to Rebecca. “As you say.”

  When I traveled up to the Everetts’ farm two days later, alone, I was not going with the hope of performing an alternate cure. Either Rebecca’s moldy-bread poultice had saved the child’s life, or I would be attending at a deathbed.

  The cabin they lived in was slipshod and rotting. The uneven cuts of its logs made the facade slump to the west. Two chickens, gone savage, were struggling with each other in a tussle of wings and beaks and feathers. The steps by the door were coated in slime, and as I tried to ascend to the porch, I saw a woman huddled against one of the corner posts. She wore a night garment soiled at the hem with red clay. Tears streamed unbidden down her cheeks, wetted her dark hair into slick strands, and stained her fingers.

  “Ma’am, can I help you?”

  The woman lowered her hands and opened her mouth. Her terrible cry of agony shattered the evening with a high, single note. I’d heard such a scream two other times. The first was when I’d watched a master surgeon remove a tumor from a woman’s abdomen. She expired on the operating theater’s table. The second was from Eva, mad with hydrophobia.

  The wailing woman was coming toward me as the door to the cabin opened. Yellow light spilled across my vision.

  “I thought I heard a noise out here,” said Pa Everett, yelling over the terrible wails. “Is that you, Doctor?” He motioned toward the woman with a nod and said into my ear, “We’re not going to say anything about that, Doctor. We’re going to go right inside.”

  The cabin accepted us into its glow, and the door closed. The keening ceased as soon as we were out of sight.

  Inside, I saw a hearth, a table, a rope bedstead, and a ladder up to a loft, as well as a few bags, boxes, and a wooden chest. They were ordinary objects, but I could not make sense of them as the cry of the woman was echoing inside my head.

  “Can I get you a drink, Doctor?” asked Pa Everett “Coffee? Cup of sugar? We already ate our supper, and the children finished every crumb, but there might be a biscuit hidden away.”

  There was no possible way I could eat. He was behaving as though porch banshees were an everyday occurrence.

  I steadied myself against a chair. “But who? What? What in the hell—”

  “Doctor, we’re not going to say anything about it.”

  “But, sir—” I stammered.

  “Not one word more. What would you like to drink?”

  “I’d take… a coffee if you have it ready.”

  Small wonder that Rebecca had not been a frequent visitor. That grief-stricken mother, or banshee or whatever it was, howling in Rebecca’s face…

  Pa Everett went to the hearth, where a percolator was hanging low over the embers. While his back was turned, I took my flask out, stole a sip of ether, corked it, and hid it away. A veil of tranquility fluttered over my mind, and a gauzy vagueness covered the memory of… out there.

  I winced as I took the scalding cup Pa Everett handed me. Not wanting to offend, I drank. The ether must have had a numbing effect on my tongue. The coffee was neither molten nor offensive.

  Pa Everett sat at the bench next to the dinner table. “You didn’t come up all this way to chitchat, now, did you?”

  After sitting beside him, I tented my fingers and rested my chin upon them to look studious. I was giving the ether a little more time. Pa Everett let me ponder through another three swallows of coffee.

  “I came to ask after Eudoxia, sir,” I said.

  “Eudoxia always had a shine for Rebecca, too,” he
said, clearing his throat. “Looked up to her. When she and our Everett were courting.”

  “I am so sorry about your son,” I said.

  “You don’t have to tiptoe around dead folks, Doctor. You’d always be on your tiptoes.”

  Still, we gave a moment’s reverence to Everett’s memory. Then I inclined my head toward the door, toward the crying woman. “Is she—”

  “We’re not going to say anything about that, Doctor.”

  “But—”

  “That’s something else. Someone else. I don’t know what that is.” He sprang up from the bench. “You wanted to see Eudoxia.”

  He called up the loft ladder, but he needn’t have bothered. All the children were listening above us. Eudoxia scampered down on her own two feet and across the cabin floor. The motion of air through my lungs ceased.

  “Eudoxia, go ahead and show him your leg,” said Pa Everett.

  She tossed the heel of her right leg up onto my knee. My hands were shaking, despite the ether. Her skin was all fresh and pink—no tenderness, no inflammation, no fever. I couldn’t see a trace of the wound, the ragged and raw flesh, the foul-smelling pus.

  No words would come to me. Was this magic, a miracle? Neither was possible. The cure was a good one, but that was faint comfort to me. My educated brain had wanted Rebecca’s ridiculous cure to fail, as it should have. Hippocrates had never mentioned moldy bread, and Galen must have thrown in the garbage heap a remedy that could have saved gladiators and emperors. The best and ancient minds of medical science would have maimed this child with surgery or let her die of blood poisoning because no other treatments were available. Evidentially, though, they were wrong.

  “Hell of a thing, ain’t it?” said Pa Everett. “Moldy bread. I’ll try it myself next time.”

  Pa Everett shooed Eudoxia away with a wave of his hat, and she fled, giggling. “You tell that Rebecca she doesn’t have to be a stranger,” he said. “Don’t have to wait on a visit until somebody needs a slap with old bread.”

  When I stepped onto the porch, a rush of darkness came toward me, and a black shape was right at my ear, screaming and howling. I felt cold breath and flecks of spittle land on my cheek. The wail was a blast of lightning. My temples lit up in electrification and pain.

  “Keep right on walking, Doctor,” said Pa Everett, over the rending wails of the crying woman. “We’re not going to say anything about that.”

  12

  THE ELDEST LEADS

  I’d memorized the rules of ombre and practiced a dozen hands with Rebecca. That fashionable game of Savannah had never been played before in Lawrenceville, but if Lawrenceville wanted to be the county seat, it needed to be ready to accept fashionable people. We were ready to introduce the respectable pastime to the town. Mayor Richardson and his wife offered to host the game, and I asked Mr. and Mrs. Snell to join us. That was a fitting party of six, but then I thought Effie belonged there, too. It made the pairs awkward, but Effie needed more exposure to decent people, and decent people needed to see her. I invited Sarah, as I felt I must, but was glad when she laughed in my face. She wouldn’t keep her wit in check long enough for respectable company.

  I’d reconciled with Rebecca after seeing the wonder of her cure, and she hadn’t blamed me for my doubt. That was only my nature, she said. Rebecca was dressed in vibrant yellow, the color of a sunflower. Her bonnet was trimmed in peerless white lace, and she wore white gloves that came to her elbows. Mrs. Richardson’s gloves were not so nice. Mrs. Snell’s kidskin gloves only reached her wrists. Mayor Richardson looked as though he would have preferred to sleep. Snell was up for a lark. He mocked the way I shuffled the cards.

  “Don’t just smash them together,” he said, laughing. “You look like a schoolboy. Riffle them like this.” He took away the deck, and the cards clattered in an orderly manner among his fingers. “There you go, Doctor. Safe to say you’re not a gambling man.”

  We chuckled out of duty, and I dealt the cards among us. But the presence of an audience, even a friendly one, made me uncomfortable.

  Rebecca picked up her hand and said, “Wait, Aubrey. You are supposed to take the eights out. And the nines and tens.”

  “Ah, drat, that’s right.”

  Her foot found mine under the table, and she placed her boot atop my shoe, a gesture that simultaneously showed affection and calmed the nervous tapping of my toe.

  I collected what I’d distributed so far and searched the deck for the eights, nines, and tens and started again. “Now, the eldest leads with the first trick. Who’s the eldest?”

  Mayor Richardson looked at his wife, and she looked at Snell, and in the uncomfortable pause, Effie placed the three of clubs into the middle of the table.

  “Ha, well that’s fine!” I blurted. “The youngest, of course! Much more polite than the eldest.”

  No one else seemed to share my delight at the fine solution. Even Effie wrinkled her brow. Richardson, who was sitting to Effie’s right, inched his chair toward his wife.

  “Now what, Doctor?” said Rebecca.

  “Ah, the ombre, which I suppose to be Effie, may call for ‘ask leave.’ That is calling a king to seek a partner, but if none is found, then she proceeds ‘solo.’ And she must win five tricks while the rest of us seek to thwart her.”

  “Doctor, I don’t know what in the hell you just said,” snorted Snell.

  Mrs. Snell flicked his ear for the vulgarity.

  “Put a higher card on top. She has to top it to win the trick,” said Mrs. Richardson.

  “I think she’s going to win anyway,” said Snell.

  His wife flicked him again.

  “Waycross will tell you if you do something wrong,” teased Mayor Richardson, to a loud general agreement.

  After she played her card, Mrs. Snell asked, “Mayor, any news from Milledgeville?”

  He scratched behind his left ear, and one of his shirtfront buttons came undone. “These things move rather slowly. It’s terribly important to us, you understand, but for the men in the House, only a trifling affair. They have the Cherokee to the north, the Alabamians to the south, the British still sailing off the Savannah coast.”

  “Not even a rumor about the county seat?” I asked.

  “Rest Haven is making a campaign, and they have a strong case. They’re suited well on Suwanee Creek, which can take small boats to the Chattahoochee. They’ve a greater population, too. But Lawrenceville is in the center of the county. And we have promising industries. The tannery. The sawmill. Several excellent farms. And not one, but four doctors.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Mrs. Richardson. She passed a plate of molasses balls to Rebecca.

  “Boatwright came to me, fuming,” confessed Mayor Richardson. “He thinks unorthodox healers in our midst is a travesty. Burying our virtuous girls in the graveyard. Actually, he used words much less polite.”

  “What did you tell him?” I asked.

  “That as long as there was more good than harm, I saw no reason to interfere. And that I didn’t want any trouble… from him or from you. Though I must say that putting people in the graveyard in the middle of the night sure sounds more like witchcraft than medicine.”

  “We are doctors, sir.” I said. “I cannot explain all of Sarah’s methods, and she has a certain mischievousness that I think may be inseparable from them. But above all, because we are doctors, we do no harm.”

  “You sure have a lot of lancets for doing no harm.” Snell laughed, and the rest of us were supposed to laugh, too.

  Mrs. Richardson brought in a plate bearing delicate wafers topped with fruit compote and a sprinkling of rare white sugar. Effie took one, then I noticed the tray circulated around the table without anyone else taking a wafer. Neither Snell nor Richardson nor their wives took one after Effie had served herself. I wondered if we hadn’t run afoul of some country taboo, where the guests were supposed to politely demur to the host or to the person of highest social standing, or what have you. It was all foolishness.


  “These look splendid,” I said. “Rebecca, won’t you have one?”

  “No, thank you, Aubrey.”

  I was burdened with no such need for gentility. I just ate. “More for Effie and me. Effie, we’ll have to eat a dozen each, won’t we?” Then I said, “Boatwright doesn’t know how much this town benefits from four doctors. How much all of medicine will benefit.”

  “You were up at the Everetts the other day, weren’t you?” said Mrs. Richardson. “How is poor Eudoxia?”

  “Cured! And all thanks to moldy—”

  Rebecca’s eyes widened. I read her expression, which said, “Hush your mouth, Waycross.”

  I wanted our hosts to know of Rebecca’s accomplishment, which was a thousand times better than graveyard dirt and better even than the lancet for this poor girl. I wanted them to know how clever Rebecca was, what talent she said, but Rebecca, I supposed, did not want them to know. Perhaps moldy bread did not belong in polite company as it felt too much like a superstitious cure.

  “Those poor Everetts,” said Mrs. Snell, trolling her voice slowly. “They’ve had enough pain, what with their boy and the mill fire, and the mother before that.”

  “What happened to the mother?”

  “Ma Everett died of puerperal fever a week after a stillbirth,” said Rebecca.

  “But if it’s not Ma Everett on the porch, who is it?”

  Richardson scratched his head. “Her ghost, I suppose. She came with the rest of the family, moved right along with them.”

  “But that’s nonsense. It isn’t a ghost. Rebecca, tell them it’s not a ghost.”

  “I haven’t been to the house in ages,” she said. “I couldn’t say.” The weight of her boot pressed down onto my toes, showing her displeasure and desperation.

  I coughed, and the table looked at me. “Mayor Richardson, I believe it’s your turn to play,” I said, recovering.

  Richardson played a king with a leer, but Effie tossed down the ace of spades, collecting another trick. She pulled a card to start another, but I held up my hand. “That’s the fifth trick you’ve taken, Effie. I think that makes you the winner.”