The Winter Sisters

by Tim Westover

  14

  IT LETS THE DEVIL KNOW WHO TO HUNT

  I didn’t see Rebecca for three days following the incident of the letter. She hadn’t appeared for her medical duties. That fact was no great matter for the patients, who had other doctors, but it was a great concern to me. Sarah said Rebecca was out harvesting late-summer roots and collecting the leaves that would wilt when the season began to turn for fall. If I went looking for her, I was likely to be eaten by the rabid panther, said Sarah, and I didn’t doubt her. I could not move in the woods with the grace of its native—or adopted—daughters.

  She was testing my heart or forcing me to test it myself. Would her absence make my heart grow fonder? It did. I hadn’t appreciated how much Rebecca’s kindred spirit had helped to ease my days. I could find her sharp intelligence and her kind affections not in Savannah or Milledgeville or Charleston, but only there in Lawrenceville. My head pounded with consequences. The sanguine humor that flooded my brain, driving such emotional responses, hissed and sputtered in veins accustomed to the cold humors of reason and thought. Ether was the only balm I could give them—chemical quietness. I could not sleep without it, and I woke up dry mouthed, off my appetite, itchy, and irritated, which another dose of ether helped to quell.

  I’d run through a gallon of the stuff by the time Rebecca returned. She entered the office with her herb satchel stuffed with greens. I peered down from the hayloft, my vision blurred, my thoughts groggy, filled with a happiness I did not ascribe, entirely, to the prodigious quantities of ether.

  “I wouldn’t miss P’s corn shucking,” she said as explanation for her reappearance. “The first of the season is always the best party.”

  When a farmer declares his harvest ready, the corn has to be shucked the same day so that it does not rot in its web of wet silks. P was of Hungarian extraction, and he and his wife, Catherine, kept several practices that conflicted with the general opinion. Every year, he announced he would harvest his corn early, just at the end of August, before the homunculi got it. Fellow farmers knew his real motive: he wanted the first corn shucking. In theory, every farmer cuts on a different day, and everyone contributes to each other’s harvest, but in practice, Rebecca told me, the later the season, the fewer the workers. The first shucking always has a splendid turnout. It is as much festival as farmwork. Men and boys walk the fields, plucking corn and throwing the cobs into passing wagons. They take breaks to shoot at squirrels, hoot for the best hits, and jeer at the flagrant misses.

  I knew I was not fully forgiven for the letter to the Georgia Medical Society, but on the day of the first shucking, Rebecca and I went to P’s swept yard together. All the sweethearts went.

  The August evening was fine, with a long twilight that filled the sky with orange and reflected health onto those below. Young girls tore open the husks and pulled out the silks. The women, sitting in a circle around the growing pile of corn, tended to other necessary affairs: soaking the husks, stacking cobs, patching, quilting, debating news, rumors, and tales, and putting aside their piecework to rehearse the forms of a square dance. P and Catherine had to feed the masses. P fretted over a whole hog roasting over an anemic fire as Catherine tended a dozen boiling cauldrons, borrowed from neighbors. Their children scrubbed potatoes, cleaned beans, peeled apples, and watched stewing cabbages. Effie hovered at the rim of the cauldrons as the cabbage boiled down. Sarah was out with the sharpshooters, collecting squirrels for an after-dinner pudding.

  A good number of the cobs were rotten with fungus, and those the youngest boys collected with delighted squeals. They stomped the rotten cobs flat, rubbing their toes in the soft leavings, and some they set alight with a brand taken from the bonfire. The rotten cobs took the flame greedily, and the boys heaved them into the cow pond. Sounds of hissing and popping filled the air.

  Pastor Boatwright watched their antics from near the lakeside, frowning. He appeared to be studying the boys’ game for a sign—not the unavoidable burned fingertips or eyebrows, but a more menacing one. Rebecca and I left him alone in his reflections. We’d profit nothing by confronting him.

  Rebecca joined the circle of women. I stood nearby, catching passing threads of talk dealing with preparations for the seasons—pickling and brining, getting salt out of the dirt in the smokehouse floor—supplemented by romantic gossip. Rebecca laughed and smiled and retorted and rejoined, as lively as any of her peers.

  “What’s happening to your garden now that you’ve come down from the mountain?” asked Old Elizabeth. “Are you letting it go fallow?”

  “I left the nightshade in charge,” said Rebecca. “Nothing misbehaves for the nightshade.”

  “Ha ha!” I laughed too loudly so that the women in the circle would think she’d told a joke.

  A grubby adolescent, who’d done his best to scrub away his grubbiness, approached the women’s circle and addressed Mrs. Parr. “Ma’am, where’s Ouida Bell tonight?” His hat was between his hands. “She wasn’t at the store today. I wanted to buy her some peanuts.”

  “Why, Stephen, she’s feeling under the weather, so she stayed back at home,” said Mrs. Parr. “But I’ll tell her you were asking after her.”

  The adolescent flushed. “Nah, that’s all right, ma’am. You don’t need to tell her. Think flowers might make her feel better? What’s the name of the purple ones? Prosies?”

  Mrs. Parr and Old Elizabeth and Young Elizabeth and Liza Jane and Rebecca all laughed, and the boy scuttled away into the roil of dust and games and anonymity.

  “My, you have a handful with all the suitors for your Ouida Bell,” said Old Elizabeth.

  “She doesn’t encourage it, but it can’t be helped,” said Mrs. Parr. “It’s the way of boys and girls.”

  “Ouida Bell’s so fetching,” said Young Elizabeth. “Prettiest girl in town, I’d say.”

  Mrs. Parr shot a cold glance at the compliment.

  Seeing the perplexity on my face, Rebecca whispered into my ear, “Evil eye. Never praise or boast. It lets the devil know who to hunt.”

  “And what are you two whispering about over there?” teased Old Elizabeth.

  “Oh, nothing,” said Rebecca.

  I shifted in my shoes. Rebecca’s shoulders pulled back. She tore the silks from an ear of corn with both hands. The naked cob dropped into her lap.

  “Sweet nothings, I’d guess,” sang Mrs. Parr.

  I put my hand on Rebecca’s left arm, a public gesture of allegiance and support for her. Yes, the whole town supposed they knew our circumstances, but I wanted Rebecca to know as well. I meant to stay with her. Words were a poor apology. Actions were better.

  Lizbeth, of the tailless cow, coughed conspicuously from across the circle. “Mrs. Parr, what’s Ouida Bell got?”

  “I don’t rightly know,” said Mrs. Parr. “A seasonal complaint, I figure. Weakness. Feeling puny. She’ll be right in a few days. Sarah’s been by, but she hasn’t seemed to do much.”

  “If you’d like, we’d be happy to call on her,” I said. “Rebecca and I can visit in the morning.”

  “Maybe you’ve already been out to the Parr’s,” said Lizbeth darkly. “Or maybe you just did it while she was walking home from the confectionary.”

  “I don’t follow your meaning—” I started to say, but Rebecca hushed me with the swat of her arm.

  “Pastor’s told me about Ouida Bell,” said Lizbeth, enjoying her ominousness and the attention it brought. “It’s an evil creeping on her, an evil that Dr. Waycross knows very well.”

  Old Elizabeth tutted. “Lizbeth, really, you oughtn’t to spread such gossip.”

  “A hex. A poison. A witching. On the prettiest girl in town. Everybody thinks it was Sarah that worked the evil charm, what with that burying in the churchyard, but I know it started with the panther’s bite. It’s still your magic, though. The panther is your familiar, your dark hand reaching from hellish places. Why’d Sarah command the beast to bite Ouida Bell? Jealousy? No, pure wicked delight, I figure. Al
l of you are just like her, haunting after the sick. Who’ll be the next victim? I wouldn’t touch this corn if I were you, after her kind’s touched it. Maybe they’ve hexed it, just like they’ve hexed Ouida Bell.”

  “Lizbeth, hush yourself,” said Old Elizabeth.

  “Ma’am,” I said, fuming, “of course you know there is no—”

  “Tell that to Everett.” Lizbeth stood. “Ask about when all the doors and windows locked up tight on his cabin for three days and nights and nobody could get out. About the milk that is making me sick.”

  “Your cows are eating white snakeroot, Miss Lizbeth,” said Rebecca. “I’ve seen it growing in your yard. It harms their circulation and comes out in their milk. Stop letting your cows eat poison.”

  “I’ll bet you know all the poisons of the world,” she said, venomous. “Snakeroot? I believe you planted it.”

  “Lizbeth,” said Old Elizabeth. She flailed with one hand as though trying to fan out a candle. “She’s trying to help you. Let’s not spoil a nice evening.”

  Lizbeth stalked off into the fields, uttering dark prayers to herself.

  “There’s no pleasing some folks,” said Mrs. Snell, who’d been drawn by the commotion. “I knew it was the snakeroot that was to blame. I have Snell pull it up from our yard. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Parr? You don’t have any snakeroot, do you? It’s not milk sickness for Ouida Bell?”

  Mrs. Parr shook her head. “Not that. I don’t know what. Just feeling puny. Shaking, like she’s cold, or sweating.”

  “Shall we see her in the morning?” I asked. “I’m sure that, among us, we’d find a suitable remedy for her affliction.”

  Mrs. Parr wavered, though. Lizbeth’s superstitious words had slipped into her ears. The silence lasted only a few moments, but I’m sure Rebecca felt, as I did, the tension among the members of the party. The talk at the circle drifted back to prognostications for the coming season, the thickness of caterpillar fuzz, the prevalence of butterflies in the noonday meadows. Rebecca joined in when she could, and she laughed as she must, but the animation had gone from her voice, and the silks she ripped from the corn cobs fluttered lifelessly to the red clay beneath her feet.

  Then, when the memory of Lizbeth’s unpleasantness was just at the edge of our minds, the sour woman returned with reinforcements. She’d stormed off to find Boatwright by the cow pond, and she brought him to the firelight. I took Rebecca’s hand as a reflex, wanting the weight of my office to protect her from shame.

  “They laughed at me, Pastor,” said Lizbeth.

  “Now, no one laughed—” Mrs. Parr said.

  “They didn’t listen. They don’t see the danger. Tell them what you told me.”

  The pastor waggled his fingers. He was not courageous enough to repeat what he’d said to his most faithful congregants in front of those he accused. Rebecca’s pulse beneath my hand was fast. She kept quiet, but not out of fear.

  “Tell them how the devil’s been whispering,” said Lizbeth. “How he told the Winter sisters and their familiar, the panther, to bring death to the beautiful because we spill more tears for the beautiful.”

  “Yes,” said Boatwright, “yes.”

  Mrs. Parr’s face drained of blood. I worried she might faint and, in her fainting, fall into the fire. I stepped closer to her, but she was startled by my gesture. Boatwright took her fear for his strength.

  “You see?” he said. “You feel the devil, too.”

  “I don’t feel anything,” said Mrs. Parr. “What is it? Do you know what’s afflicting her?”

  “The pastor doesn’t know,” I said. “We doctors shall examine her in the morning. And we doctors shall take every necessary measure.” My hand tightened around Rebecca’s.

  “You won’t be able to do any more for her than you could do for your own sister, than any mortal could do for your sister. Death is inevitable, and the hydrophobia proves it.”

  “Hydrophobia?” said Rebecca, breaking her silence. “There are a hundred ailments more likely than rabies. Surely, it’s not rabies.”

  “But it is, just like Eva’s,” said Boatwright.

  I released Rebecca’s hand and clenched my left fist, feeling the bite of my overlong fingernails in my palm. “I forbid you from ever speaking of Eva again.”

  “Who are you to command and forbid, Waycross?” asked the pastor. “Can you heal a mortal soul of death? No, you cannot, no matter how much you love them.”

  Mrs. Parr cried out, and Mrs. Snell wrapped her in her expansive arms.

  “Pastor, if you do not speak more plainly—”

  “Ouida Bell. Go see her, Doctor, and tell me if I’m mistaken.”

  The pastor stepped closer to the fire. His eyes lit up yellow, and his lips drooped with shadow. Sparks from a snapping piece of greenwood threatened to set his hair alight. “I think you know. I think you understood the devil took your sister. Instead of quelling the devil, you’ve incited him, you and your women. You’ve played with twigs and teas, and all the while, the hydrophobia has been stalking Ouida Bell. She will die, like Eva died, and she will not be the last. This wicked town will burn, burn, burn.”

  “This isn’t Salem, sir.”

  “Would that it were, Waycross,” he said. “Would that it were.”

  The next morning, Rebecca and I went to see Ouida Bell at the Parrs’ cabin. Mrs. Parr was in tears, for the disease had turned sharply worse overnight. Ouida Bell lay in darkness, barely moving.

  “Are we sure it’s hydrophobia?” Rebecca stepped back from the bedside and joined me against the wall of the cabin.

  “The symptoms fit,” I said, nodding.

  I had hoped we would see only a complication of the hand-foot-and-mouth disease, which Sarah’s scandalous treatment had, despite my horror, seemed to alleviate. The red pox had gone away, but it’s not impossible that the disease, or some other impurity caught from her descent into the clay, had created an excess of phlegmatic humors. I saw immediately that my hopes were in vain. I should have known better than to hope. She’d been infected ever since the panther’s bite, and we hadn’t seen it, and she was dying. Ouida Bell Parr’s face was flushed red with fever, and the corners of her mouth were smeared with saliva. She thrashed beneath her blankets. Mrs. Parr laid cloths dampened in spring water on her daughter’s forehead, but Ouida Bell didn’t bear them well. Her neck would spasm, and she’d fling away the cloth, adding it to the growing pile beside her bed. I had seen it before, through a child’s eyes, which record impressions with greater color and clarity than the clouded eyes of an adult. I had seen those spasms in Eva, and I knew what they foretold.

  Boatwright had been right. He’d diagnosed rabies in Ouida Bell, and I hated that he was right, hated him more than the panther or the disease.

  Rebecca leaned in closer to me. “Have you examined her?”

  “I thought you should do the examination,” I said.

  I could not examine Ouida Bell’s necessities without breaching decorum. A Savannah doctor would never dare to examine a woman’s person beneath her clothes. A physician relied on outward signs, examination of effluvia, and perhaps the use of an ear trumpet to listen to breathing sounds without pressing an ear to the female’s chest.

  Rebecca studied the horror on my face then said, “For goodness’ sake.”

  I left her with Ouida Bella and Mrs. Parr.

  As I waited on Rebecca, I circumambulated the Parr house and yard. A trio of chickens followed behind me, taking me for their leader. We wandered behind the spring house then back. I picked up my pace, and the chickens followed. Two contradictory humors alternated through my temples. Each brought its own clarity and its own sharp pains. I was fearful, of course. The prognosis of rabies is a medical certainty, leading always to death, and where one case is found, many more may follow. I was afraid of how the pastor would use Ouida Bell’s death for his own gains against the Winter sisters—and against me, their benefactor and ally. But growing against the fear was a sanguine excitement
. The rhymes of life had delivered to me a patient like my lost sister, but now, I had the hope of curing her. In the Winter sisters, I had seen cures I’d never thought possible.

  The door clattered, and I came to a sudden halt. The chickens that had been following me crashed into my legs, and my trousers got soiled with chickenshit.

  “It’s certainly the same bite,” said Rebecca grimly as she came out the door. “The one I saw when she said she’d been nipped by the panther. Healed over, but that’s how the rabies got in. The bite, even though it wasn’t deep, and the rash, and then the summer cold, and now—”

  “How do you propose we should treat it?” I said. “Moldy bread?”

  “Are you making fun of me, Aubrey?” She stepped right up into my face.

  “What? No! It worked for Eudoxia’s leg. I’d call it a miracle, but I know it’s not. And if you can reattach a severed foot to its owner—”

  “I’ve never reattached a foot,” said Rebecca. “That’s a tale gone too far.”

  “But there must be something like moldy bread that you use for hydrophobia,” I insisted. I was talking too fast, and my tongue tripped over my words. “A rabies rum or some such.”

  “Nothing that I have seen work. Nothing that I trust.” She turned and walked several paces away from me.

  I ran through the herbs of the past weeks. “We could try Seneca root. You said it draws out poison. Or we could pack her wound in a plaster of lobelia and cider vinegar, like in that Cherokee—”

  “No.”

  I held my ground but raised my voice. “Nature has stuffed the world with millions of flowers and shrubs, but none of them is a cure for hydrophobia?”

  “None of them,” she barked back, frightening the chickens in the yard.

  “Then what do you give hopeless patients?” I spoke more tenderly as I approached her.

  “I never treat hopeless cases. The age of miracles is passed.”

  “We don’t need a miracle, Rebecca.” I touched her shoulder. “Hydrophobia is not a demon, no matter what Boatwright preaches. The universe would not be so imperfect as to afflict us with an incurable disease.”