The Winter Sisters

by Tim Westover

  The customers who’d drunk to the end of their ginger ales were content to keep listening, but I was worried. He’d never gone on so long without picking up the banjo and going back into a cheerful tune.

  “And that Brain Salt of Universal Delight, what a marvel it will be. When the mocking hand of death reaches out its fingers, as it must for all us mortals, we’ll go into the abyss with a grin.”

  A gunshot rattled the crowd. The mule, used to quieter places, bucked. Salmon fell. A thousand hands were between him and me. A thousand hands wanted Effie Winter’s Wizard Ginger Ale.

  Perhaps I was not good. Perhaps I was not powerful, either. Others before me might have been powerful, but I, born too late, was only a poor imitation. I'd mixed up a marvelous illusion for myself, thinking that, through water, miracles could be made, and others had believed, which cast the illusion wider and wider. How could I ever know?

  I’d thought I wanted to be happy. I had never tried it. I preferred not to, and I was afraid. If that meant I would never work another miracle, then I had to accept it. If I wanted happiness—and I was willing to give away all honor and power and goodness—then I never deserved to be good or powerful, and I must have been neither.

  The age of miracles is passed. I do not need to live for the world to thrive.

  Epilogue

  1848

  “The same man cannot make both a beginning and an end.”

  —Galen, On the Natural Faculties

  A knock woke me from my nap in the sunlight. The door at Hope Hollow was smooth from all the knocks that had sounded on it over many years—ten thousand knocks of bleeding men, suffering women, children with fevers, babies broken out in bold hives. No one went to the doctor when everything was well. No one went to Hope Hollow without hope for a cure.

  Rebecca came in from the annex, where she’d been mixing up a tonic for Judge Richardson. Liza Jane, our youngest, descended from the loft to see who’d come.

  The three people at the door, two men and a woman, were strangers. They were covered in a dust foreign to Georgia. A hotter, dirtier, and harder place stained their shoes.

  “Are you Miss Winter?” asked the woman. “The herb doctor, Rebecca Winter?”

  Rebecca nodded. “But I’ve been Rebecca Waycross for a long time.”

  The woman exchanged glances with her companions. “We… we’ve come to ask you about your sister,” she said.

  We invited the strangers inside, let them wash their hands and faces, and sat around the table. Liza Jane brought in coffee, and our unexpected guests drank as if they’d gone without any refreshment for days. Rebecca hadn’t touched any form of coffee in years. It brought on her dyspepsia. We let the strangers finish bread and cheese and a little wine before we put any questions to them.

  “So, how’s Sarah?” said Rebecca, folding her hands on the table.

  My wife was testing them. We’d seen Sarah a week before. She was following an expedition from Milledgeville’s 17th Army, which had passed through Lawrenceville on the road up to Rabun Gap. An Indian unpleasantness there threatened to inflame an already incendiary miners’ strike. Sarah had no official post in the army. As a woman, she could not have one. But no soldier, when mortally wounded, concerns himself with the sex of the healer caring for him, and no soldier turns up his nose when a crack shot armed with a ten-foot rifle lays low his enemies.

  No news about Sarah could have come from a trio of wide-eyed fanatics from the far frontier. Rebecca asked about Sarah only because she dared not ask about the other.

  The female stranger—Annie was her name—said, “Your sister, Effie.”

  “Oh?” I said mildly though my blood was coursing at double speed. Liza Jane, who’d never heard a whisper about an Aunt Effie, quivered in her chair.

  “It is strange to call her by her birth name,” said Annie. “We called her the Great Sister though she never liked it.”

  Then Annie told us about Great Sister Effie’s life. She did not have the full history because Great Sister Effie had spoken so little about her past. As near as we could figure, the medicine show had ended at the Mississippi. Rebecca hazarded that Thumb had thrown Effie over, leaving her for a younger and fleshier specimen. Annie disagreed. She believed the Great Sister’s husband was killed in an accident. Effie had a visceral dislike of mules, she said. Perhaps a mule had thrown him.

  Whatever the truth, Effie had drifted west, always by foot, moving as the frontier moved. In the villages she passed through and on the farms where she bedded down for a day, there were happenings. Fevers cooled and poxes healed. Paralytics lifted their hands in greeting when Effie glanced at them. The deaf turned at the sound of her voice. The blind smiled when she bent her head. A girl in the grip of hydrophobia shook off her madness, hugged her brothers, and took a bath in the river.

  She began to attract notice. The faithful came to see what prayers she offered to what god or goddess, but they never heard a prayer. The stink-eyed came to see what sorceries and incantations the witch invoked, but they never saw any spells or charms. The physicians came, a few of them, to see her surgeries, but they saw nothing they could adopt in their practices. The people who came seeking an explanation always left without one. Wherever Effie went, a parade of followers came too, filling town squares with little tents and shelters. Word spread faster than the wind, and those ailing within a hundred miles brought their blisters and bone spurs and brokenness to her.

  Effie tried to elude her followers. She would wake early, wrap herself in straw, and creep away from whatever town she had spent the night in with the herd animals. Or she would cling to the bottom of a wagon bound for a far market. Or she would run, run away into the forest or the prairie and vanish for days. Her followers would scatter in every direction to search for her. They always found her again. Rumors would surface of children delivered from yellow fever or catarrh or blood poisoning, and the followers would come. Effie never seemed distressed when she was found. Then, a week later, she would slip away again.

  Her reluctance and humility were essential to her following, said Annie. One who demands a following never deserves it. Effie never claimed any special powers or skills or connections to divine mysteries, and that, too, magnified her fame. Thus, by running away, Effie found more followers, and by doing nothing, she healed multitudes, and by claiming nothing, all power and honor were ascribed to her.

  Then she and her camp arrived in a town where silver was in the hills and guns were in the streets. Effie and her followers arrived when one mine was proven rich and three others proven false, and fortunes turned out to be phantoms, and the streets turned into a riot.

  The authorities blamed the uprisings on the new strangers and their prophetess. Armed men arrested Effie in the night and confined her in an old powder storehouse.

  The followers of Great Sister Winter could not stand idle. They found guns of their own and marched on the powder storehouse, and shots were fired. The jail doors were opened, and reinforcements came on all sides. The air was a cloud of sulfur smoke, and when there were no more bullets to fire, Effie—and only Effie—was dead.

  Liza Jane clapped a hand over her mouth. Rebecca and I had already guessed the end.

  “We don’t know who fired at the Great Sister,” said Annie. “We don’t know if it was on purpose or if the Great Sister was a victim of the confusion and crossfire. I had a gun. I was fighting for her, but I might have… It might have been me…”

  Annie shuddered under the weight of her confession and her doubt.

  Rebecca picked up a cup of cold coffee and looked into its depths for secrets that were not there. “So, why are you here?” she asked. “We can’t bring the dead back to life.”

  Annie shifted in her seat. She looked to her companions, but they shrank away. “We thought that Great Sister Winter might have run away again. She might have come back east, back home?”

  “Is Effie dead,” demanded Rebecca, “or isn’t she?”

  “I saw her
dead.” Annie bowed her head. “But I have also seen her wonders, which are greater than death.”

  Liza Jane, my daughter, took the stranger’s hands. They communed in silence, grieving a loss they did not presume to understand.

  O Physician! Do not leave us so unsatisfied. Promise that not even death should be our end.

  Author’s Note

  In 1846, a Boston dentist demonstrated the world’s first painless surgery. Before a fascinated public of eminent medical men, William Morton removed a tumor from the neck of a patient made unconscious by inhaled ether. The press was rhapsodic with the news of a successful surgical anesthetic. Ether freed the patient and doctor from the strictures of pain. The surgeon could take care with his work, for the patient would not struggle against the scalpel. New surgeries were possible: the opening of the abdominal cavity, explorations into the skull, and the removal of tumors in the most delicate of places. With that one marvelous invention, the possibilities of medicine had enlarged tenfold.

  But Morton was not the first man to operate painlessly on a patient using ether. In 1842, four years prior to Morton’s demonstration, a Georgia country doctor named Crawford Long had removed a neck tumor from his own patient.

  Crawford Long, young and unmarried, was known to indulge in the custom of ether frolics in little Jefferson, Georgia. Following a particularly rambunctious and hilarious party, the doctor found himself covered in bruises. He couldn’t recall how he had acquired them. While he was pondering, a patient arrived in trepidation over the scheduled excision of the neck tumor. Dr. Long offered him a rag soaked in ether, a remnant from the last evening, and the patient awoke an hour later, reporting no memory of the procedure. Long continued to use ether in other surgeries and for amputations and childbirth. He shared the discovery with his colleagues, but the practice did not spread. To some, Dr. Long’s discovery was too much like witchcraft. Others objected on religious grounds. God had ordained that women were to suffer the pain of childbirth as penance for Eve’s transgression, and it was not for mortals to contradict that.

  Morton’s later but more public demonstrations complicated the issue of who should receive credit for the discovery. Dr. Long did not publish his findings until 1849, but numerous credible witnesses proved he had been the first to use surgical ether. No one before Dr. Long had seen how ether could be turned from entertainment to usefulness. Because it was such a fine toy, no one thought of ether as a tool.

  A statue of Crawford Long, donated by the state of Georgia, is part of the special National Statuary Collection housed throughout the United States Capitol. Dr. Long stands vigil in the capitol’s crypt. Atlanta’s Crawford W. Long Hospital was renamed Emory University Hospital Midtown in 2009.

  About the Author

  I’m an adopted Southerner writing novels about ancient spirits, humble ghosts, singing trees, medicine-show men, haunted pianos, and miraculous sisters in the 19th century.

  I take inspiration from tall tales, Southern myths and legends, small towns, folklore, fantasy, magic, and the real-life history of the South’s backroads and byways.

  Also by Tim Westover

  Auraria: A Novel (2012)

  Connect with the author at:

  TimWestover.com

  “μήποτε ‘οὔποτε’ εἴπῃς, καὶ σπανίως ‘οὔποτε πάλιν’.”