by Laura Briggs
Caught by surprise, she didn’t answer right away, taking in this new facet of his personality, until the silence was filled by a bell’s jingle, the door to the nearby shop opening.
The woman who emerged was middle-aged and somewhat stocky, with auburn tresses pinned beneath a handkerchief.
“Afternoon,” she greeted Jenna, her gaze lighting with recognition when it fell on the craftsman. Going up to him, she squeezed his shoulder in a half hug as she asked, “How are you, dear? Haven’t seen you for some time, not since you brought the white sage by.”
The herb shop must be hers then. Jenna vaguely recalled seeing her with a tray of plants her first morning in town.
Returning the hug, Con asked, “Were they good for business? They look sort of stunted this year.”
“Very popular. They’re rare, you know—takes a special touch to get them established.” Her voice dropped, as if sharing a secret. Taking notice of Jenna again, her lips formed a puzzled smile. “Who’s your friend, then?” she asked.
“Miss Cade needed some advice on headstone symbols,” he replied, gaze flicking apologetically in Jenna’s direction. “She’s doing research for a book.”
“How exciting.” The woman looked more closely, as if deciding whether she recognized her from a book jacket. Of course, most people abandoned this activity once the word non-fiction was mentioned. No one but college students and history buffs were likely to recognize her name, the glamour of fame left to novelists.
Extending a hand, the woman said, “Amelia Girvin. Known as the herb lady to my customers.”
“I like your shop,” Jenna said as she nodded to the display of exotic colored jars. “My grandmother grew herbs in a window box, I remember. She taught me how to crush them for potpourri.”
“Makes for a strong fragrance,” the woman agreed. “I’ll be selling my own special blends at the festival this weekend. Come by the booth if you’re still in town. “
“I will,” she said.
Checking her watch, the herbalist made an exasperated sound. “I’m almost late. You know how I am,” she told Con. “Always late when I have a lunch appointment.”
“I know,” he said. “Better get going.” He squeezed her hand in quiet farewell.
Halfway across the street, she turned back and called, “I’ll keep an eye out for that book.”
Jenna waved, wondering how she knew Con Taggart when no one else bothered to speak to him. Glancing round, she saw he was already walking ahead of her, following the sidewalk to where it turned at the corner.
“You grow herbs,” she said, catching up with him. It was a question as much as a statement, the surprise evident to her own ears. She knew he worked with his hands, but the yard around his farmhouse had seemed almost as neglected as the wooded cemetery.
“They’re some Colleen planted, actually. I don’t have a green thumb, as they say.” His expression was shuttered; he clearly disliked the subject. Or anything that referenced his loss, which ruled out most of the questions she most wanted to ask.
“I guess you’ll be at the festival. I mean, it seems like the whole town turns out for it.”
“Not me,” he answered. “But then, I don’t have roots here, so maybe I can’t understand it.”
“So you think it’s strange?” She looked at the banner waving from the lampposts ahead, remembering Josephine’s words on the community’s darker traditions.
“I think it’s mostly harmless. There’s the potential for harm in the right circumstances—but that’s true of a lot of things in life.”
By this time, the inn had come into view. He was seeing her back to her lodgings, a chivalrous gesture that seemed fitting in their quaint surroundings. It also signaled the end of their meeting. Their steps lagged as they reached the gated entrance.
“You’ve been really helpful to me today,” she told him, handing back the chalk gravestone rubbing as she spoke. “Another piece of the puzzle, so to speak.”
“What happens next?” A casual question, his tone implying he wouldn’t be present to witness the proceedings.
“I check some more sources,” she said, meaning the physician’s daybook and the letters Josephine promised to show her. “I’ll clean the graves, of course. Then comes genealogy and contacting the living descendants…” She trailed off, sensing his thoughts were somewhere else, the distance between them already returning. “Thank you, again,” she said, extending a hand. “I’ll be crediting you in the manuscript—”
“No need,” he interrupted. “I was glad to help.” He pressed her fingers then turned and strode towards the square again. He didn’t glance back or give a final wave.
“Goodbye—I guess.” Jenna spoke too softly for anyone to hear. Her fingers were still warm from his touch as she watched him disappear around the corner.
11
February 3rd 1862: Have heard enough of the former apothecary’s remedies as to be thoroughly mystified. If cutting and burying a lock of one’s hair relieves a headache, I can only imagine what is required to eliminate abdominal pain. It is a wonder more graves do not populate the community burial ground.
Jenna glanced up as rain drummed the window panes of the historical society. She was not the only patron this morning; a handful of other researchers were scattered throughout the reading area. Seated at a corner table, she struggled to concentrate on the doctor’s long-ago narrative.
No word from her agent combined with the morning rain had left her feeling listless. A troubling question echoed persistently through her mind: if she couldn’t interest a professional stone carver in the cemetery’s fate, what hope was there for the average citizen to care?
One stranger’s ambivalence had touched the underlying fear that no one shared her passion for restoring these old monuments. That Sylvan Spring’s wooded graveyard, and other places like it, would stay hidden, their beauty languishing in secret like the garden from the beloved children’s book.
“Sorry,” another patron mumbled, as they bumped her table on their way past, a young girl with glasses and a heavy-looking spiral notebook.
Jarred from her thoughts, Jenna forced them back to the ledger in her hands. There was a lot of ground to cover, the doctor’s narrative spanning a series of months, if not a year. Sighing, she huddled over it, with an eye for the more personal details jotted in between the lines of medical jargon.
February 8t, 1862: Did not expect my first patient here to be one of a different species. The Hinkle’s milk cow was most cooperative, attempting only one half-hearted kick as I stitched its wound. Afterward, the fee was met by a jar of preserves rather than the usual currency. I wonder what other oddities to expect as I settle into these new surroundings...
The letter had come at a time that some would have deemed as providential. To Mariah Moore, who retained only a distant memory of faith in a higher power, it was merely the only choice left after her father failed to wake from his nap one harsh winter afternoon.
Addressed to Dr. Barnaby Moore, it came from a minister claiming to have known him long ago, through a relative who underwent consumption treatments at the clinic. If it wasn’t asking too much—and begging his pardon for the irregular nature of this request—would the doctor care to recommend any from among his medical students to oversee the needs of a community numbering roughly forty-eight households?
Room and board would be provided by a local family so long as the physician was unencumbered by wife or children. There was a post office for handling supply orders, and of course, an account would be registered to them at the dry goods store for everyday necessities.
Mariah had read the letter twice then looked up the postmark on a set of old county maps in her father’s study. Unrolling large sheets of Northern Alabama territory, she found the place to be a few miles of farmland and outlying homesteads, the body of water for which it was named appearing as a gray squiggle through a stretch of woods.
She scrawled the same addre
ss on an envelope the next morning, a single sheet tucked inside that bore her response. It was signed with only her initials, an act of deception she knew could backfire once the truth was known. A risk, to be sure, but one she had to take as she paid the postage to send it northward.
Two weeks later, she followed in person, a single trunk and her father’s old medical bag all that rode with her on the stage coach that made its stop at a trading post in a bigger town. There, she waited on a bench, wondering if the blacksmith might withdraw his offer of room and board once he saw the doctor wore a skirt instead of men’s trousers and work boots.
Only it wasn’t the smithy who came for her. A girl about Mariah’s age, plain but neatly dressed, her eyes wide with uncertainty, was the one who greeted her. She helped Mariah load the heavy trunk into the back of the cart, seeming nervous rather than angry at the discovery. Afterwards, her gaze was clamped on the narrow dirt lane as the cart she drove rattled past acres of farmland and crops.
“Your room is upstairs,” the girl said, speaking for only the third time as they neared a small, two-story farmhouse of the white clapboard variety. Timidly, she added, “My brother—he is in the regiment now—has no need of it at the moment. We packed up some of his things, but more can be put away if you want.”
Mariah nodded, fingers laced through the handle of the medical bag in her lap. “There is not much to unpack, you see. Just a few personal items and then some additional medical supplies I am having sent by post from my former home.”
These would need to be stored in a cabinet, preferably in the room where her consultations would take place. She hesitated to bring this up, unsure it would even be allowed once the community discovered the trick she had played on them. Women doctors were a rarity—more than once she had encountered patients who would rather be left untreated if her father was unavailable.
The couple waiting inside was certainly astonished by her introduction. She couldn’t help but notice the wife, Mrs. Darrow, in particular seemed displeased and disappointed when the woman ushered her into the parlor of threadbare furnishings, with a pretty, but inexpensive china tea service on its curio shelf and pile of firewood before its stone hearth. Her husband, the local blacksmith, lowered his clay pipe to offer a curt greeting and then rose to carry Mariah’s trunk up the stairs.
“My grandmother is asleep already for the evening,” said the girl, whose name was Nell, as she recalled from their brief exchange at the trading post. “With my brother away, there are only the four of us living here. Except, of course, you will be here to make it five again. “
Her room was the second door on the left, a bed and small table arranged against the far wall. Across from these was a dresser and mirror, a writing desk, and shelves that held a collection of dog-eared paperbacks. The blacksmith deposited her trunk at the foot of the bed, a slight nod his only parting sign before he turned to go.
“Your journey must have been tiring,” Nell said, studying her in the light of the hall’s oil lamp. She couldn’t possibly guess Mariah’s reasons for being here, since Mariah’s letter had communicated only the barest facts of her life, including her father’s death. Yet she spoke as if she somehow knew, offering, “Is there anything I can get for you? A plate from the kitchen, a cup of Granny’s tea—”
“I think I’ll rest, actually,” Mariah said, stepping past the threshold to set her medical bag on the desk. “The journey was a long one, as you said, and there is still so much to be arranged.” Such as where I shall go once your family sends me packing, she thought, biting her lip unconsciously.
“Good night, then. We take our breakfast at six,” the girl called over her shoulder, the timid appearance returning to her features.
Alone and surrounded by a stranger’s possessions, Mariah sank onto the trunk she had brought. Her fingers played with the brass latch, her thoughts wandering to the items she knew were packed inside. Dresses sewn from a fabric more practical than what she usually wore, and boots sturdy enough for walking long distances. The textbooks from the shelf above her father’s writing desk, a tintype photo from his younger days tucked between one of the covers. In a separate stack, a faded Bible, its pages untouched by any hand for nearly fifteen years.
She stiffened at the sound of conversation taking place below, the blacksmith’s gruff tones rumbling slightly above the high pitch of his wife’s voice. Only their tone was audible, the meaning of the words lost to the grains in the pine boards. Not that it was hard to guess what they spoke of, considering the looks on their faces when she stepped into the parlor that night.
Would they tell her to board the next stage or even hire a cart to take her elsewhere? She imagined they were as confused as she was about what happened next, yet she felt comforted by the daughter’s small gesture of kindness. Words spoken softly, if a little less formal than the ones used by her father’s more well-to-do patients in Mobile.
Buttoning her nightgown, Mariah let amber curls tumble past her face and shoulders. Without turning back the covers, she curled herself onto the worn mattress, a single breath all that was needed to snuff the candle flickering on the table.
February 10th 1862: It would seem a female doctor is not cut from the same cloth as a midwife, or even a yarb woman. They seem to believe that only superstitious ‘gifts’ can make a woman any sort of medical consultant and think that medical training is for men alone. I can only hope that circumstances will temper some of this dislike, since my work is badly needed in a place where the aged work long hours in the field, and children strain their strength beyond its capabilities.
The remedies of their forefathers were still greatly favored, and it appeared only special cases would require Mariah’s attention. A widow who split her foot chopping firewood; a schoolgirl who broke her collarbone falling from a tree on the playground. Before either of these came a farm wife, frantic over the second best milk cow tearing its udder while her husband was away to another town’s market.
“It’s me fault for latching the gate poorly,” she explained, hovering over Mariah’s shoulder in the musty barn. “She never would have gotten into the Cray’s fencing if I had checked it like he said to. Whatever will I tell ‘im?”
Mariah had no idea what to say, pretending to be absorbed in the task of stitching layers of skin back together. Her father’s patients had never spoken so freely of their troubles, society ladies in gloves and hats, their hands folded primly in their laps as they waited to consult the doctor.
She received a jar of preserves in exchange for stitching the cow’s udder, the first of many such payments in a place where Confederate notes were rare as a diamond pendant. Soldier’s wives had yet to receive any of their husband’s military pay, most of them compiling the last of their resources into a care package for the absent loved ones.
The doctor felt the pinch of hard times in ways different from her neighbors. Back home, she had taken a bath once a week, in water that was heated and poured in the cast iron tub by a hired girl. Here, a wash basin and sponge on the bedroom dresser were all she could expect, at least in the winter months. The water was cold, drawn from the well at the town square, which had a brackish taste compared to the pump a few miles away in Crooked Wood.
“Only tolerable when it’s stewed for tea,” the family’s grandmother had explained, pouring her a cup with hands that spilled a fair amount into the saucer. “But tea’s the healthiest draught for a body, as I always have said, better than cold spring water, even. Braces you for troubled times and fair weather alike.” Her tongue bore traces of an accent that was wholly unfamiliar, her eyes gazing somewhere past the doctor when she nudged the cup gently in her direction.
“How long since your sight began to trouble you?” Mariah wondered, forgetting for a moment that this was her hostess, so to speak, and not a patient from her father’s clinic.
“Too long,” the woman replied, with a soft chuckle. “Naught to do about it now, if ever there was in the first place.” She seemed cont
ent despite her loss, busying herself with the herb garden planted just outside the family’s kitchen. Her joints were too stiff most of the time for bending among the rows of plants, but the granddaughter would gather baskets of clippings for her to sort and dry on the scrubbed pine table. Little jars of spices lined the cupboard shelves, fresh bundles of rosemary and sassafras strung to dry above the kitchen window.
The rest of the family labored in the field of crops adjacent to the small yard, as well as tending the livestock that were penned behind the house. Mr. Darrow’s smithy work took him away by mid-morning until six o’clock, when he returned for the supper prepared by his wife’s hands in between the day’s worth of sewing and housework.
As part of the household, Mariah was expected to perform some of these chores. She learned first to clean ash from the hearth then to scrub laundry with the washboard kept on the porch. All the while, she felt as if she were an unwanted guest, her appearance at the dinner table and later, the evening fire, causing most conversations to dwindle to near silence.
An outsider, strange in her habits as well as her beliefs—or rather, her lack of them. Her absence from Sunday worship proved uncomfortable for the blacksmith’s family. Mrs. Darrow’s jaw was grimly set on Sundays, a familiar sight to Mariah whenever the family piled into the cart for weekly services. Her face wore the same expression whenever she found Mariah reading a scientific book in the parlor or buying a pamphlet on abolitionism from a traveling man, for instance.
“You must hate it here,” Nell observed, her smile one of sympathy across the chicken they plucked for a winter stew. She had wrung the bird’s neck herself, a swift motion that spoke of compassion for the creature’s life. “I hope you will not always find things so hard with us,” she added, wiping her hands on a soiled apron. “Life can still bring its joys to those of us here, even with just the dirt under our feet.”
A child-like view of things, Mariah told herself, lying in the bed she still expected to be her old one each morning she woke. To share her thoughts with someone as freely as she once did with her father was all the joy she looked for now. Except nothing seemed less likely in these surroundings. She did sometimes speak aloud to the darkness but with no real hope that anyone listened.
