The Winter Sisters

by Tim Westover

  “I need to put the lid on,” said Rebecca. She tapped my shoulder.

  “Oh, yes, of course,” I said, but I wasn’t yet ready to step aside. “I’ve always been interested in cooking. I’ve never had the time to learn.”

  “Well, I can teach you about biscuits and soups and getting out of the way.” Rebecca still held the lid. I knew it was heavy, but I was captive to the smells.

  “I shouldn’t wonder that you’re an excellent cook,” I continued. “An herbalist’s work is not that different from a chef’s. Any doctor, really, is a kind of cook. Diagnosing humors and appetites. Brewing up courses of treatment.”

  “And chicken soup is a panacea. Now, I need to put the lid on, please.”

  “What is in here, besides the potatoes? I see eggplant and tomato.”

  “It’s nightshade stew,” said Rebecca.

  That made me lean away from the rising steam, and Rebecca stepped in to place the lid on the iron pot.

  “You can’t be serious,” I said.

  “Potato is a nightshade. So is eggplant. Tomato. Sweet peppers. They are all cousins.” Rebecca tapped on the side of the closed cauldron with a wooden spoon, ringing it like a school bell though the pot had no music, instead giving off a single muffled thud. “You need to know what parts of the plant to eat and how to prepare them. Potatoes must be eaten before the flesh turns green. A tomato’s leaves and stems will sicken you.”

  “And you’ve put them all into this stew?”

  “It’s an herbalist’s joke, I guess.” Rebecca drew up her skirts and sat down on the hearth, the heat of the fire on her back. “Hilarious, isn’t it.” Her voice was flat.

  My prying had taken the spirit out of her recipes.

  “I’m sorry, dear,” I said, and I was. I sat down beside her.

  A log cracked behind her, sending a burst of steam and sparks up the chimney. Rebecca was unmoved. Wherever her thoughts had retreated, they were far away.

  “I think it’s…” she started, then she stopped.

  “No, please. Go ahead. I’m listening.”

  She paused for a long time, and I could not tell what was transpiring behind her eyes.

  “Rebecca?” I ventured. Was she angry with me or struggling with a delicate phrasing?

  “I think it’s time for seasoning,” she said. “Salt.”

  “That wasn’t what you were going to say.”

  She swallowed, a thin click to her dry lips. “I think that nightshade is perfect. If there were only nightshades in our world, that would be enough. They’re food and medicine and poison. Potato, mandrake, and belladonna. What more do we need?”

  I made no reply.

  “And nightshades have invincible roots. They are hardy, perennial, vast, and spreading.” Rebecca was looking into her palms. “I wish that I could graft nightshade onto our own mortal roots. I wish I could drain the blood out of our veins and replace it with the juice of nightshade’s black pearls.”

  The heat of the fire blazed behind her, and the stew inside the cauldron, boiling vigorously, overflowed its container. Streams of broth ran down into the fire, where it vaporized aromatically. I could have been afraid of those strange sentiments, but I loved Rebecca.

  “Plants are not like people,” said Rebecca. “Plants return and return, never ceasing. They die, but their death is not forever.”

  “Would that Eva had been a flower, not a person,” I said.

  “Will you tell me about her?” Rebecca looked up with eyes shimmering from tears.

  “I wouldn’t… That is, we’re here not for sad memories but a meal together, aren’t we?” I thought I would not get through my tale without some tears of my own, and I did not want them to spoil the sentiment of the evening. I put my hand on top of hers. “Let’s think about who we have, not whom we’ve lost.” But I heard my words ring false and trite even as I spoke them.

  Rebecca’s hand moved beneath mine. She knew, too.

  “Eva was nine years older than me,” I said, drawing her in my memory. “She was… soft. Round and soft. A figure for a kindly person, and Eva, above all, was kind. Her hair was a profusion of ginger curls, unique in our family, and it made me think of fire…”

  Sparks rushed up the chimney. A superstitious person might have thought… but I was not a superstitious person.

  “It was April. I was newly turned six. She and I were walking on River Street. I think she’d bought me licorice because this memory has the scent of anise. It must have been candy for a birthday. And now, I cannot stand that smell. I held her hand. And then I saw the dog, a wharf-hardened cur, ragged and bleeding and vicious, and my sister lifted me into her arms. The dog bit her leg instead of mine. Her face did not change. Her eyes did not look away from mine. I knew that she’d been bitten only because I heard the sound of the teeth. I heard the skin breaking. I heard the change in the cur’s growl as its muzzle pushed against Eva’s plump calf. But Eva never showed me her pain or fear. She did not want to burden me. She’d meant that as a kindness.”

  Rebecca nodded. Her hand softened under mine. She turned her wrist so that our fingers would intertwine.

  “A pair of sailors grabbed the animal, and Eva took me home. The bite was not a severe one. The teeth marks bled, but the leg was not badly hurt. My mother wiped the wounds clean with Tifton’s Tincture of Turpentine and said a prayer, and none of us considered the incident again. I was a child. I couldn’t have known the danger. And Eva said nothing. Because she was kind. Because she did not want to worry us. Not that there was any cure in Savannah for the infection that festered inside her. And it showed itself three weeks later. Eva would not drink. The sight of water made her nauseous. She could not get out of bed. She could not speak. I don’t remember the last words she’d said to me. They were ordinary words, sibling to sibling, that I gave no importance because I had no inkling that they’d be her last, that her mind would die weeks before her body. My mother poured on more Tifton’s Tincture of Turpentine. But, of course, Eva did not improve, and soon unceasing streams of saliva soaked her pillow. And this was when the parade of healers began. My mother summoned anyone with a pitch or a potion or a promise. But they were not bad people. I see that now. Even Boatwright, then, if he was one of the healers who attended us. Even he was not malicious. They were fighting an impossible battle with any possible cure. I should have given them more respect for their bravery in desperation, for the right intentions. But a body is not cured by good intentions.”

  “No matter how much we might wish it,” said Rebecca.

  “Then when it was far too late, my mother brought in a physician. A silver-haired man from the Savannah Poor House and Hospital arrived. He impressed me the most. I crept behind him into Eva’s room. Eva huddled against one of the corner posts. She wore a night garment soiled with her own effluent humors. Her fiery hair was now greasy smoke, dark and knotted. Her breath came in halting sobs. I sat at her bedside and placed a cool cloth on her forehead. Eva’s eyes turned to me, but their kindness was gone. They were now like an animal’s, without intelligence or recognition. She attacked, bellowing with violence and agony. I jumped backward, out of range of her fingernails. The physician tied Eva’s wrists to the bedstead. She began a howling, unearthly madness, thrashing against her bindings, her body contorted. She was the nearest thing to a demon that I had ever seen in this world.”

  I looked up at the ceiling, where nothing was.

  “And he told us that she would die. That there is no cure for hydrophobia, for rabies. Any unguent, any incantation, any patent medicine, is only false hope, a poison. And because he told the truth, gave no hope and broke no promises, I admired this man the most. I wanted to be like him. An ordinary man—a chicken farmer, a grenadier, an emperor—lives only a single life. His value to society will never exceed the span of his own years. But a physician, by his lancets and his sulfur enemas, earns a portion of each life that he saves. I wanted to restore the flush to a pale woman’s cheeks and send breath ba
ck into a pitiable infant. I wanted to see old men straighten up without their canes and grandmothers do a little jig on refreshed knees. I wanted to cure children of the ailments that robbed them of their enjoyment of the world.”

  “And you have,” said Rebecca. “Dozens of times over.” She moved closer to me.

  I laid my head upon her shoulder. “But I wanted to see, one day, a girl delivered from the certain grasp of hydrophobia.”

  “We cannot do what is impossible.”

  The next day, I went back to the Parrs’ cabin to see Ouida Bell. The day was filled with thunder. A hard rain scoured the bare soil from which the harvest had been drawn. The atmosphere was ominous to the point of being cliché, but that couldn’t be helped.

  Ouida Bell Parr was not dead. Her limbs jerked, and her head snapped back and forth, but she could still choke down a little water and eat a biscuit in her more lucid moments, which kept her alive. That meant she was strong, not only in her body, but also in her mind.

  “Stinks in here,” said someone from a gloomy corner. It was Sarah.

  I hadn’t known she was there.

  “Her caretakers have had greater concerns than housekeeping or hygiene,” I said. “You’re welcome to come back with a broom, once matters of life and death are settled.”

  The damp blanket over Ouida Bell’s chest rose and fell in irregular rhythms. Red splotches stood out from her sallow complexion.

  “I always thought she was vain,” said Sarah. “Always in a dress cinched too tight for any real work except flirtation.”

  “Except when you buried her naked in the graveyard.”

  “Yes, except for then.” Sarah’s face softened for an instant, and she looked back toward the bed, toward the feeble and dying patient that slept there, and her chin set into hard tension. “Let’s go, Aubrey. Nothing we can do for her.”

  “But we must try.”

  “Horseshit. It’s not going to do any good. Let’s go.”

  “I thought you and Ouida Bell had a friendship.”

  “Ouida Bell, but not whatever this flesh-and-bones thing is.”

  “Sarah, please,” I said in low tones. “Have a measure of compassion.”

  “Ouida Bell can’t hear us if the rabies has gone far enough.” She tapped a knuckle against Ouida Bell’s forehead.

  The girl shivered down her back. Her eyes opened. They were black, like the eyes of an animal.

  I pushed Sarah away from the bed as I grabbed a cup of water. “Can you drink?” I asked. “It will help.”

  I brought the cup closer to her. Her breath hastened, each inhalation sharper and shorter than the last, an ominous sign. It reminded me of Eva huddling against her bedpost. Trembling, I put the rim of the tin cup to Ouida Bell’s lips.

  At the touch of the metal, Ouida’s hand, rigid like a claw, smacked the cup from my grasp. My heart pounded as her back arched like a shell, and her limbs twisted at unnatural angles. Her sweat-soaked nightdress covered her like a thin layer of mucus.

  I put my right hand, ever so lightly, onto her shoulder. Her neck snapped as her head spun, and she landed her teeth in the flabby skin between my thumb and index finger.

  “Damn!” I recoiled from the sudden movement and pain.

  I stepped back, and Ouida Bell came at me again, but her frail body couldn’t keep up the attack. She fell backward into the bed as I was pressed up against the side of the cabin, heart pounding at the suddenness of the assault.

  I looked at my hand and found a little blood from the bite marks. I took out my handkerchief and applied pressure. In a moment, the blood had stopped. I did not think of rabies then. That was a disease spread by mangy curs and mysterious panthers, ragged in their flesh and mind, and Ouida Bell was still human despite the disease assailing her. I did not think of rabies, but I should have.

  Sarah’s expression hadn’t changed from fixed annoyance. After the attack ceased, she sighed. “Why did you come here, Aubrey? What did you think you could do?”

  “Because I’m a healer, and she’s a person in need of healing.”

  “What are you going to do, then?”

  “Nothing, I suppose.”

  I looked at the skin of my hand, where I’d been bitten. A droplet of blood squeezed out of my wound.

  “What would you try, Sarah?”

  “I have nothing. Rebecca’s got nothing. You’ve got nothing. And Effie is the master of nothing.”

  “But if you could try anything, what would you try?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Why do you not, Sarah?”

  Sarah glared at me as though I were a perched pigeon—a vulnerable, stupid creature. Then she contorted her face into a hideous leer. Her jaw dropped and skewed to the left. She twisted up her brow so that one eye was bulging. “Affrat! Fraset! Frasset!” Her arms rose straight in the air, and she hopped from one foot to the other. “Affrat! Fraset! Frasset! Ferret! Farfat! Tafrat! Fatsat! Fartart!”

  “What on Earth?” I put my hands over my ears. “Is that gibberish?”

  “You begged me to do something. You can’t complain if you don’t like it.” Sarah stomped around the perimeter of the bed, leering and howling and spouting spells. I thought she’d gone half mad herself. I’d never seen her so worked up.

  Ouida Bell made no response, as of course she wouldn’t, to this utter nonsense.

  “What are the words supposed to do?” I asked through gritted teeth.

  “Be believed. And people have believed in them since before the Ishtar Gate. They’re Babylonian words. Prayers, maybe. Or curses.”

  “Sarah, stop it. Stop it. It’s not helping.”

  She glowered at me. “Well, then, here’s the best magic spell. The most powerful that ever there was.” She fumbled in her pouch for a scrap of paper, and she borrowed a pencil from me. On the paper, she wrote out a grid of letters:

  S A T O R

  A R E P O

  T E N E T

  O P E R A

  R O T A S

  “Do you know this one, Aubrey? It’s a palindrome, same up and down, left and right.”

  “Is that important?”

  “No, of course not, except that a hundred generations thought it was. Gamblers put this square in their shoes for good luck. Kings etched it under their plates to save them from an assassin’s poison. Dying men burned the paper and swallowed the ashes to cure their mortal wounds. Here, I’ll wad it up and stick it under Ouida Bell’s armpit.”

  Sarah lifted up Ouida Bell’s right arm and shoved the paper into the fold of her axilla. The arm fell across Ouida Bell’s torso at an unnatural angle, limp.

  “Let’s see if it saves her life,” she said. “It’s nothing. It’s foolishness. I only do what I can get folks to believe in, what they already believe in. But when there’s no mind left…”

  “She has survived this long.”

  “And it’s been torture. I would take her out and shoot her. Put her out of her misery.” Sarah’s eyes were red, and I knew enough of people, whatever else my ignorance, to see it as a sign of great distress.

  “Bullets are not cures,” I said.

  “Any good end is a cure,” said Sarah, “and death is the best end Ouida Bell has left.”

  “I did not think you were so heartless,” I said, ashamed of the faint hope I’d entertained.

  “I’m not heartless. It’s only… Ask Effie. I can’t…”

  “Effie can cure her?”

  “I can’t. Rebecca can’t. Neither of us could do anything for Everett, either. We put him in front of Effie, and he died. And maybe Effie could have cured him but didn’t, or maybe she knew she couldn’t cure him, and so she did nothing. But leave it to her. Let Effie save Ouida Bell’s life or let her take the weight of her dying. Because I can’t.”

  Sarah flew out of the cabin. The door slammed, and the walls shuddered. Ouida Bell, or the shade of her, struggled for her life in the darkness with me.

  Chapter 16

  ORDINARY
WATER IN AN ORDINARY WORLD

  Nothing resolved, nothing gained, but what could I have expected? I’d gone to Ouida Bell’s bedside with no hopes of a miracle, and none was given. Sarah’s behavior had been shameful, but she was grieving. I could not judge her. Also, I came away with an injury of my own, a shallow bite in the fleshy part of my hand. I did not think that such a bite could pass the contagion of hydrophobia, but as soon as I returned to my hayloft, I bled myself from my thumb and forefinger, taking far more than would have been needed, even for a snakebite.

  The next day, and the next, I was relieved to take up station in my office, hoping for a few patients with ordinary complaints—gout, diarrhea, dyspepsia—that could be handled with ordinary medicine or an herbal concoction. I needed curable diseases to reaffirm my belief in my usefulness. I saw to them and felt restored. My hand was healing well, with no signs of corruption.

  Effie was the only Winter sister attending with me at the office. Rebecca had been called away to an imminent childbirth. It was the first birth she’d ever attended, and she considered being invited a great privilege. No one would’ve invited a witch to be present at such a liminal event. One would invite only a trusted and respected healer. I was happy for her. Childbearing is the happiest sort of medicine, a painful condition that would soon be cured with smiles and laughter and handshakes and coos.

  “Are you hoping to see many visitors today, Effie?” I asked, rubbing my hands together. I offered her coffee to shake off the chill. She’d placed herself upon one of the hams that still lingered around the office, reminding us all it had once been Snell’s storehouse. Only the two of us were there, and Effie’s hair was wet. I noted that not out of disapproval but because it felt strangely intimate. I’d never before seen a woman with wet hair except for my sister. My mother, in her superstitions, rarely bathed.

  “I hope never to see anyone.”

  I coughed, hearing the indictment of my enthusiasm. “You mean, only suffering people come to see a doctor, and you would not wish suffering on anyone?” I brought her the coffee, and she held the cup close to her chest. “That’s generous, but someone is always suffering. It’s the mortal’s lot in life, to suffer unto death.”