The Winter Sisters

by Tim Westover

  Thumb fell silent. He kicked at a pebble next to his right foot. “So, that’s what I think,” he said. Then, his expression brightened. “I just don’t think about it.”

  He clapped me on the back, which dislodged an eructation I had been suppressing. A brassy belch rang out, my entire person vibrating with the sound. The wagon resonated, too, and the enormous fiddle continued it, and the trees and limbs and leaves. I made the world to ring with my mighty burp in B-flat. A breeze carried it up and up to dissolve amid the endless frolicking stupidity of the stars.

  The garden at Hope Hollow was sick with abundance. The nightshades had profited the most from the absence of the gardener. Tomatoes, red as blisters even in the fading fall, choked out the corn stalks. Eggplants, fit to burst from their overstretched skins, grew where sweet potatoes should have been. The rows of herbs—celandine and snakeroot and angelica—grasped for light among the thickets of belladonna, far too much belladonna.

  When Sarah came upon her sister working in the garden, day was already passed, and the evening had vanished by the time she’d sorted away her possessions. Anyone else would have left the gardening until the morning, but Rebecca could not abide the disorder, couldn’t sleep until she’d settled the worst of the weeds.

  Under the silver moon, Rebecca worked with a silver spade. She’d pushed up her sleeves. Her arms were filthy past her elbows. Sap, thorns, and thistles scratched her forearms. The last of the fireflies wished each other farewell in their arcane language of light.

  “There is something so unwholesome,” said Sarah, “about gardening at night.”

  Rebecca pushed her hair out of her face as she looked up at her sister. “I thought you might have been Aubrey,” said Rebecca. “I hoped you were.”

  Sarah shook her head. “No decent lady should be weeding her rose beds after midnight.”

  “Then I suppose I’m not a decent lady. But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

  Sarah nodded. “I’m not staying. I’m only here to get a few things, and then I’ll be gone.”

  “You don’t have to leave in the middle of the night,” said Rebecca. “You can stay until morning.”

  “What if Aubrey comes?” said Sarah.

  Rebecca sighed. “He will blather and dither, waver on indecisiveness. Perhaps he’ll come tonight, but I doubt it. Maybe tomorrow, maybe never.”

  “And would you be happy with that?”

  “I tend my own garden,” said Rebecca.

  “But with no sisters, no Everett, no Waycross—what will you do?”

  “What I always have, Sister, but alone.”

  “Do you want me to stay?” said Sarah.

  Rebecca wondered at that. “No. I don’t think Hope Hollow is your home anymore, nor Effie’s. I’m the one to stay behind, alone or not.”

  Sarah knelt by the pile of waste that Rebecca’s garden tending had created: broken branches, twisted vines, and sticky fruit. She picked out a twig of belladonna on which clusters of black berries clung in a heavy harvest. “Effie says that nightshades are full of hate.” She turned over the branch in her palms, considering each berry. “Not when they’re cut, I think.”

  “Because they’re dead,” said Rebecca.

  “Maybe nightshades are happier when they are let wild. Maybe their hate comes from being planted in rows.” Sarah dropped the belladonna twig back on the bracken.

  “We tried to plant Effie in a row,” said Rebecca, “but she never thrived, did she?”

  “That’s your way to put it,” said Sarah. “I think I’m most to blame. I started to believe, you see. In the bond, like it was magic. It wasn’t ever real magic. No such thing. A person’s just a person unless everybody else thinks otherwise.”

  “I shouldn’t have blamed Effie,” said Rebecca. “I shouldn’t have let her have that power. It would have been better to let Everett be the victim of powerlessness rather than cruelty.”

  “I was worse. I believed that she would always need me to take care of her. That she would always need someone to look after her. That was the promise that Mother made me give. And that was a damn-fool promise. Mother didn’t ever think we would grow up. She didn’t ever think that we’d need to be apart.”

  “Let her be happy if she can,” said Rebecca. “Her happiness isn’t here. Let me be happy, so long as I can.”

  Sarah looked up into the sky. “And where does that leave me?”

  I awoke when a pigeon alighted on my head.

  It had a clump of my hair in its beak and was trying to remove it for its nest. The hairs somehow connected to raw nerves in the center of my brain, and my headache was excruciating. I batted at the vile winged beast, and it squawked and took to the sky. A hundred of its brethren ascended with it, the air shaken into a tempest. I covered my head until the world settled again.

  I was on the dirt between Thumb’s wagon and the extinguished ashes of the fire. A blanket was tangled around my legs. Thumb must have thrown it over me when I fell asleep.

  I unwound myself from the blanket. My legs held my weight, but they were displeased by it. I could not mistake the hydrophobia then. It had come on swiftly. I felt ragged and panicked. I needed Effie. I made my way to Thumb’s wagon.

  “Morning, sunshine.” Thumb opened the little door.

  I was standing too close, and it hit me in the nose. I stepped back, pinching the injured part with my right hand.

  “I thought you would’ve slept till noon, Aubrey.”

  He thought I was suffering a hangover. Whiskey had never caused a man to foam at the mouth.

  “Effie, please,” I croaked, my voice unused to speech.

  “She’s not back yet,” said Thumb.

  “What? It can’t be.”

  Thumb threw up his hands. I could see the whole interior of the wagon, with nowhere to hide.

  “What if something terrible has happened?” I said.

  “I’m sure she’s fine.”

  “I have to find her. You don’t need to come with me, sir,” I told him. “This is a task I must complete on my own.”

  “Who said anything about coming with you?” He retreated a half step from the door and fell back into a hummock of pillows. He placed his hat over his face and waved blindly to me. “Go make your peace, Doc. But have a little water before you go, or that headache is going to get worse.”

  My body shivered in revulsion. The animal particles or vaporous spirits or malignant miasmas pulsed inside my temples.

  Yet again, I followed the forest paths. It occurred to me that I had done more walking in Lawrenceville than curing.

  Overnight, winter had settled in for a long spell. I dragged my feet through the leaves, mashing them into dirt beneath my heels. Nuts and acorns cracked as I passed over them, making the same sound as my creaking bones. When I was near the ruins of Tribble Mill, I saw that rain or snow higher in the Appalachians had swelled the river to a torrent. It crashed over the old dam, leaping and splattering. The water ran so fast and frightful that the millrace roared again. The ruins themselves were invisible beneath the swollen current. Great trees rose around me, and the sky was slate colored and smooth. The trilling laughter of pigeons sounded overhead.

  Effie was kneeling at the riverside.

  Again and again, she put her hands into the water and drew them out. She was performing a ceremonial ablution in the frenetic water. Washing one’s hands can be harmful. The blood, chilled in the extremities, brings the chill back to the heart. Perhaps Effie owed her cold complexion and melancholy moods to her compulsion for handwashing.

  I searched for footing among the slick stones.

  I came closer. Effie still hadn’t noticed me—or hadn’t deigned to notice me. She rubbed her fingers and scraped under her nails. Her clothing was a simple white dress. The fabric was too light for the chilliness of the day, the cold splash of the water, the wind that curled through the forest. Her hair was pulled back through a silver band.

  I stopped breathing, and the si
lence drew her attention.

  “Hello, Aubrey.” Her expression was inscrutable. “How’s everything?”

  “Fine,” I said as a reflex and then, “I’m dying of rabies.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, standing up. Her voice was light, out of character with the sober surroundings. “And this dying of rabies—you would prefer not to?”

  “I would prefer not to,” I said.

  She held her arms against herself. The fingers of her right hand scratched her left elbow, leaving red marks in her pale skin. “What do you think will happen, Aubrey?”

  “I am not worthy of a cure. I nearly let fascination consume me. I would have let the panther bite me and then come to you to test you, to see if you would cure me and if I, in the curing, would learn your secrets. If I’d risked everything like I’d planned, I would have been in your total fascination and not worthy of your cure.”

  “But you’re still sick, aren’t you? Ouida Bell bit you.”

  “Yes. But I’m not here for my own sake. I’m here for Rebecca.”

  “For Rebecca?”

  “My sickness is fascination, and I wish for a cure for it. I think that is a cure that only you can work.” My hands ached at my side. They begged to be fretting, supplicating, praying, and not hanging idly.

  Effie closed her eyes. “Go see Rebecca. She’ll do more good for you than I can.”

  “If you cure me, I can go to Rebecca as a whole person, not one half crazed with fascination.”

  “You need a doctor, Aubrey, not me. Rebecca is a doctor.”

  Effie’s false humility rang hollow. I fought it with truth. “You are the greatest physician who has ever lived. I’d smash all busts of Hippocrates and Galen and put yours in their place.”

  “That would be a waste of plaster.”

  I could not tell if that was a joke.

  I shifted my weight from my right leg to my left and back again. I couldn’t remember which one I’d hurt when I slipped into the Alcovy on my first journey to Hope Hollow. I’d credited my own body for its repair that night. She’d healed me then, without my knowing, and I knew she would heal me again since my need was so much greater.

  The pigeons, emboldened by the continuing silence, crept from concealment and peered down at us. Some started a song, a melody of food and sex and other animal concerns.

  My headache pulsed anew. I was thirsty. The last water I’d had was hours, days before. Then my hydrophobic brain spat back, and the thirst turned into a sour taste. A bit of spittle collected beside my teeth, but I couldn’t swallow it. The rolling crash of the river matched the pulsation of my head and the ragged fear in my breathing.

  “What if I do nothing?” The breeze stirred a susurration of leaves to blend with her voice.

  “Effie, I know you are kind and good.” I willed myself to move closer. “You’ll cure me.”

  “I am kind and good if I heal all the sick of the world. I’m wicked and cruel if I do not?”

  “No, I mean—”

  “All mortals die. They die of old age or misadventure. They die in war or excitement. They die of foolishness and curiosity. The universe condemns them to oblivion, sooner or later. So what’s the use of doing anything?”

  “I’d rather die in my old age, resting on my bed of good works, than in my prime, before my useful years have begun.”

  “But you almost chose to risk that old age for… a secret.”

  A rush of blood traced the artery that ran over my ear. Despite the pain, I did not risk breathing, blinking.

  “If you knew this secret,” she said, “would you work these cures yourself? Not for fame or fortune, but for the sake of others, so that they may frolic and feast?”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “When a child’s face bears the scars of smallpox, you’ll make them disappear.”

  “Yes.”

  “When a maiden froths at the mouth from rabies, you’ll cool her mind.”

  “Yes.”

  “And whenever a soul stands at the edge of eternal bliss, ready to shuck its tired body and step into the light of heaven, you will take that person’s shoulder and say, ‘Sir, not yet?’”

  A white pigeon—a dove—landed precisely above my head. The naked hickory branch bobbled under its weight. I looked up and found myself staring into its tail feathers, directly in harm’s way, but I dared not move, lest the rapture of the moment change.

  “Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die,” I said.

  “But they must die, Aubrey.”

  She said my name, but she was not talking to me. Behind me were the empty woods, the dead branches, the leaden sky, and behind the sky, the void. She addressed the infinite.

  “And when they do, you bear the stain of their deaths because you could have cured them this one time, this one more time. Choosing who lives, who dies, and when, and how—Aubrey, I will not give you this disease.”

  “But why must anyone die?” My voice rose louder than I wished. “Teach the secret to me, and then I will teach it to the next, and she the next, and he the next. Then no one need bear these stains of death. Why must mortals be mortal? And do not give me a mystical answer. Do not say that immortality is a crime against nature and the soul or that the gods will not abide new rivals. That is all hoodoo and superstition. What natural reason condemns us to die?”

  The slate sky filled her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Unacceptable!”

  My cry shook the air. The dove above my head let loose its bowels. Shit trickled down my temple. My eyebrows might have stopped it from oozing down further, but they’d been singed off in the fire. The bird crap dribbled into the outside crease of my eye and down my cheek, but I did not move. I bore the shame of being shat upon.

  Effie’s laugh began as a lonely sound, yet it was infectious like a yawn.

  “Oh, Aubrey,” Effie said, and I smiled, too. “Here, let me help you.” She knelt to the river, leaning far over so that her arms disappeared into the current. The toes of one bare foot curled on the slick, mossy surface of a stone. Her other foot rested on sand.

  When she arose, she held her palms in front of her. Water drained from between her fingers, and the wind flung droplets back into the river. Then with her wet, clean hands, she wiped bird shit from my forehead. Her fingers ran through my hair. She cleaned the corner of my eye with her thumb, the skin so thin that her blood looked an iridescent purple. I did not move under these ministrations. My humors stood still in my veins. The orbits of my skull resonated with her tenderness and humility.

  Then using the sleeves of her own plain dress, she daubed at my dirtied clothes so that, when she had finished, I looked no worse for my sufferings, and she… she was dirty and wet. Her hands were stained. Effie brushed her palms against the sides of her dress, but that did not make them clean. She smiled at me, and that smile was the only lie she told me. Her eyes betrayed her.

  “Don’t worry, Aubrey,” she said. “I won’t tell.”

  I had only been to Hope Hollow in the summer, when the green leaves and jewel-like fruits had attracted no special notice. In the wan winter sunlight, though, those things glimmered. It was well past fall, yet the orange trees there were heavy with fat, round spheres, swollen with juice. The lemon trees, too, were gilded with perfect specimens. One must be exceedingly clever to grow oranges and lemons in Lawrenceville, Georgia. It’s too far north, too susceptible to frost. A hard-luck farmer or struggling goodwife would see that rich grove and mutter, “Witchcraft, sorcery,” but I saw only a mortal’s cleverness.

  Sassafras and yellow lady’s slipper and nightshade and foxglove bloomed in neat rows. The tomatoes were ripe—the corn, high and ready. Pole beans, cabbage, lettuce, and turnips had all peaked though they should have come of age in different seasons.

  I reached up to pluck an orange from a low branch. It came away in my hand without resistance. The skin peeled away eagerly, and the sweet juice trickled down my palms. The fr
uit was warm and tasted of afternoon sunlight.

  A firefly lighted on my nose. I’d thought they had all died for the year. I blew it away with a short breath, and a willow tree laughed at me.

  My heart skipped three beats. Rebecca was leaning against the willow’s trunk, her curves melding with the tree’s own, like a caryatid. She approached me with a callipygian sway.

  “I’m sorry, Aubrey,” she said. “You looked happy. Silly, but happy.”

  “I am indeed happy,” I said. “I am enjoying a little summertime. How do you do it?”

  “Pigeon guano,” she said. “You can scoop it by the shovelful in the groves around here.”

  Bees flitted between branches, visiting flowers that, against nature, were still blooming. “I’m sick, Rebecca,” I confessed. “Diseased.”

  “Exhaustion. Nausea. Paleness of the face. Irregular breathing.” She put her hands on my neck. “Low pulse. Cold skin.” She lifted my chin so that she could look into my face. “Salivation. Copious salivation. Headache?”

  I nodded, the movement of my chin rubbing against her palm.

  “I know, Aubrey. I should have intervened sooner.”