Ghosts of Graveyards Past

by Laura Briggs

  The doctor saw it before she reached the farmhouse.

  Blood red and scrawled in the shape of a half moon, a broken arrow laced through it to resemble a letter ‘V’. Not frightening, but strange and childish, somehow. As if small, careless fingers had painted it there.

  Her hand avoided touching it as she rapped on the door. Footsteps pounded on the other side, the door opening to reveal a boy’s somber face.

  Blain, the couple’s only child and sixteen years old—enlistment age, in some people’s estimation, answered the door. “Mama’s in the kitchen,” he told her. His gaze shifting to the mark on the door with a sense of distaste. “Strange, ain’t it, Miss Mariah? Put there by nobody knows who.”

  “Very odd,” she agreed. “Why would they do such a thing, Blain?”

  A slyness appeared in the boy’s face. He turned away, motioning for her to follow, as he said, “For a prank, ‘course. Same as always this time of year. You never heard of it?”

  “Of Mischief Night?” she asked. “No, not before I came here.”

  Nell’s grandmother had spoken of a similar ritual from the Scottish Highlands. The broken buckets left by the Darrow’s gate that evening had been a sort of offering to the children in search of something to steal or burn. Harmless fun, so they said.

  “Never heard of it?” Blain glanced back at her, wonder in his eyes. “I thought everyone did the same as us.”

  Smiling at his disbelief, she followed him through the narrow hall to the kitchen. Here, the farm wife shelled peas into a bowl while her husband read the county newspaper from a rocking chair by the hearth.

  Mariah glanced at the headline, heart catching as she read the words ”Skirmishes Rumored Along Northern River” in bold print. She had already heard it spoken of many times, the details vague enough to leave equal room for both hope and worry.

  “You have seen it then,” the farm wife said, rising from her chair as they entered the room. “That ugly-looking mark on the door. More than a week now, and still he refuses to sand it off.” This was said with an exasperated look to the fireplace.

  Mr. Lesley continued to read, a slight narrowing of the eyes the only indication he heard his wife’s complaint .

  “I have never seen such a drawing before,” Mariah admitted, setting her bag on the table. “What does it mean?”

  “Never seen it anywhere but on graves,” the woman confided. “Not natural to find it elsewhere—a bad sign. Work of youngins, I suppose, but ‘tis work of the devil all the same.” With a sigh, she took her seat at the table again. The collar to her dress had been loosened, revealing skin that was badly inflamed below the neckline. “All across here, it goes,” she said, running a hand over the upper part of the gown’s bodice. “Itches something fierce.”

  “How long has it been this way?” Mariah asked.

  “Since yesterday,” the woman replied. “Tried buttermilk and it only grows worse.”

  It was likely from contact with a plant. The foliage that grew by the spring was rife with plants of a poisonous or prickly nature. One might have become tangled with the garment during washing, or else transferred through the woman’s touch.

  “I know of a tried and true method,” Mariah began, knowing the Lesleys preferred medicine of a traditional nature. “I will need your hearth to prepare it.”

  Wordlessly, Mr. Lesley scooted his chair towards the wall, freeing a space for her to work by the fireplace. No doubt, he disapproved of her being summoned in the first place. But his wife was not one to suffer in silence as Mariah knew from the morning’s conversation.

  The boy was seated on a wooden stool by the door, watching her combine the lard and sulfur. His gaze searched her features with a quiet admiration that went unnoticed by his mother as she continued to rant about the children’s mischief.

  “I can hardly understand why they should go and spoil our door, not after we left a whole gate for the bonfire. What should make them draw such an evil thing?”

  “Oh, quit your worrying, woman,” came the response of her husband. “It’s an old symbol with more than just the grave to give it meaning. Stands for the changes in the weather, I’ve heard.”

  “Means death,” the woman insisted, “and I’ll not be having it on my door. Be it by children or the devil that it came there.”

  Folding his paper, the man stood with the finality of one preparing to depart. “Better to have a bit of paint on the door then to find the wheels removed from the wagon. Or wake to find the cattle let out of your pasture as Martin Cray done found.” Smacking the newspaper lightly against his son’s head, he ordered, “Help me mend that hole in the fence, ‘fore our livestock’s out roaming the town.”

  Blain straggled sullenly after his father.

  The doctor felt sorry for him, wondering if his parents always carried on this way. The Darrow household, for all its flaws, was gentler in its words of unhappiness than those she heard exchanged here.

  When the visit drew to a close, the patient handed her a basket of eggs in payment. Looping it over her arm, Mariah advised, “Send for me again if there is no improvement within the week.” As she left, her gaze wandered to the symbol on the door with its lurid shade of red.

  Mariah saw it again when she called at the Tate’s cabin further down the spring. Heavy with child, the lady of the house could barely rise to answer the door, her only companion a girl of five. Her son, Billy, was already in school.

  “The pain is so bad at times,” she explained, “and my fingers swell so, I cannot even write to my husband in the camp. Billy takes it down for me, but one can hardly say all they wish through another’s hand.”

  Mariah felt herself pale with the words. She picked up a corn shuck doll the girl had dropped nearby. “Does your husband write of the camp’s movements? One hears such talk of battle. It seems everyone’s chief worry these days.”

  The lady shook her head. “Word has not come in almost two months’ time, nor pay, goodness knows.”

  This was a hint that no fee would be met for today’s visit.

  The doctor collected her bag, returning the doll to its owner’s small hands. The little girl’s dress seemed as rumpled as the corn shuck, her pale eyes gazing at Mariah before she turned to go.

  

  November 10th , 1862: One thirty, a new patient, a female of nineteen years, arrived lately from Jefferson County to wed Mr. Lucas Kendrick. Patient complains of a cough and abdominal pains. I have started Mrs. Kendrick on castor oil and quinine, with a promise to call again tomorrow…

  Geneva Kendrick’s girlish figure and hazel eyes reminded the doctor of her own mother. Or rather, what she remembered her mother looking like from when she was a child of five years, sitting on her lap in the foyer outside her father’s study.

  She knew the delicate features were similar, the brown hair wound into a coiffure. If the too-pale complexion was also familiar, she didn’t linger on the thought.

  “I have been ill before,” Geneva told her, hands clasped in her lap. “At finishing school last February. A fever dimmed my eyesight for more than a week.”

  “But you fully recovered it?” Mariah asked, looking closely at the girl’s dark orbs, seeing only anxiety to mar their depths.

  “Oh, yes. As clear as before, or even better, since I learned to appreciate it more.”

  They were sitting in the parlor to Lucas Kendrick’s house, a room furnished with articles belonging to the man’s former wife. Common knowledge said the first Mrs. Kendrick died several winters back from an unsuccessful childbirth. In her absence, the curtains and rugs, tables, chairs and other accessories had grown pitifully old-fashioned and faded.

  “Have you been ill since the time in February?” Mariah asked, pulling a stethoscope from her bag.

  The girl frowned. “Not physically. There was a…a time after my parents’ accident when I was greatly indisposed. I had no appetite and took to my bed more often than I should.”

  “That is quite unders
tandable.” Mariah’s tone was softer than she usually allowed with patients. “I lost both my parents, my father quite recently. You need not explain the cause of such weariness.”

  Geneva said nothing, but squeezed her hand briefly in response. She was still a child in most ways. Her marriage to the older farmer had likely been a means of surviving poverty when her parents’ lives were claimed in a carriage mishap.

  “I began corresponding with Mr. Kendrick two months ago,” Geneva told her, chattering nervously. “My aunt saw his advertisement in a newspaper and advised me to answer it.”

  Mariah didn’t comment on this, listening for the patient’s pulse through her stethoscope. It was a trifle fast, but that was explained by nervousness as much as the illness.

  “He is a very gentle man,” Geneva continued, more to herself. “Kind and patient, as well. I think he must have been lonely here without a companion for so long.” She sounded lonely herself, a hollow ring to the words of praise for her new spouse.

  Mariah wondered that she had attempted no changes thus far to the house, big enough despite its plainness. Perhaps loneliness left her with no enthusiasm for such tasks as homemaking.

  Listening to Geneva’s chest and lungs, Mariah heard a rattle each time a breath was drawn. When she pressed a hand to the patient’s forehead, she felt warmth that might only be from the parlor’s hearth.

  “Does your husband share any of your symptoms?” she wondered.

  “No—that is, he says nothing to suggest it.”

  Mariah knew the farmer was unlikely to seek her advice, even if he suffered the same illness. Few men consulted her and only one had shown faith in her work’s results. The same one who made her presence here bearable after months of rejection, his loving correspondence now the only consolation for the absence of his touch.

  “Are you married, doctor?”

  The question snapped her out of the memory. Laughing, she said, “How could I be? I would hardly be a doctor if I were married, you know.”

  Geneva echoed the laugh, though hers was raspy sounding. “I only ask,” she explained, “because I know so many here have seen their husbands go to battle.”

  “They have,” she agreed, slipping the stethoscope from around her neck. How close she had come to sharing their same fate wasn’t something she cared to think about.

  “I am fortunate that my husband does not have to enlist,” her patient ventured, referencing the farmer’s misshapen leg, the result of a haying accident in his youth. “It is nothing to be ashamed of, I tell him. Though I fear he sees it that way.”

  “Perhaps, it’s only natural for him to do so,” Mariah advised, thinking the girl must know little of men after so many years in a finishing school. “He must feel obligated to protect his home.”

  Geneva fell silent as if mulling this over. Hands twisted in her lap as she waited the doctor’s verdict on her examination.

  “I do not detect a fever,” Mariah told her. “That is a good sign, at least. But you must send someone to fetch me immediately if you began to feel the symptoms of one.”

  “Of course.”

  At this point, Geneva turned away to cough, a hoarse sound the doctor had heard only twice since their consultation begin. “I am sorry,” she said, words muffled by the handkerchief applied to her mouth. “It is worse in the evening. I could not sleep last night.”

  Quinine and castor oil were the favorite solutions for this type of case, and Mariah supplied both. Her patient seemed instantly at ease, turning the glass vials over with a kind of wonder.

  “I will come back this same time tomorrow,” Mariah told her, repacking her bag’s contents. “If it’s convenient for yourself and Mr. Kendrick, that is.”

  “It is fine,” the girl answered. In a confidential tone, she added, “Please do not think me impertinent, but I must tell you how glad I was to learn of your being the physician. It is much easier to speak of such things with another woman, you understand.”

  Surprised, Mariah could think of no immediate answer. “I am glad to hear it,” she said at last, accepting the coins the girl fished from her skirt pocket.

  Mariah saw her wave once more from the parlor window, feeling the sad gaze watch her further down the path. She would not come back the same way until dusk due to another visit to the Tate’s cabin spent reassuring the restless mother-to-be.

  A raven cawed somewhere in the woods, making Mariah quicken her pace. This was a shortcut back to her lodgings, its path rockier than the road that cut around the spring. She pulled her coat closer as something splashed in the water flowing below.

  “Hello, Rufus.” She stooped to pet the dog that bounded suddenly up the spring’s embankment. Its coat was damp and muddy as were the feet of its owner, who appeared behind it moments later.

  Mariah had not seen the Hinkle boy since she removed the stitches from his injured leg. The desired scar had appeared in a raised, pink line below his left knee. It was caked in grime, as was the rest of his skin.

  “Evening doctor,” he said, showing his toothy grin. “Been to the Tates’?”

  She nodded, wondering if her movements were always known among the neighboring homesteads. It was to be expected, yet she found it distasteful for her patients’ sake as much as her own, considering the personal nature of the visits.

  “Thought maybe you had seen the plat-eye,” he said, voice hopeful with the suggestion. “Billy saw it down by the cavern one night. Said it came at ‘em from the water.”

  “He said nothing about it to me,” she replied. “But then, his mother may forbid him to spin such yarns beneath her roof. She is a sensible woman, I think.”

  “Guess she don’t believe in spirits,” Charley said thoughtfully. “Reckon you don’t, either.”

  She smiled at his obvious disappointment. “It is not my way. Not in my blood, as you might say.”

  This explanation seemed to satisfy him. Ruffling the dog’s fur, he said, “Rufus caught a fish. Caught two myself but threw ‘em back.” A wheezing sound punctuated this last part, the boy smothering it with his jacket sleeve.

  “When did that start, Charley?” As she spoke, the doctor scrutinized his face. There were no signs of illness like those of the young Mrs. Kendrick. His eyes were bright, cheeks flushed from the exercise.

  “Dunno, really,” he told her. “Sort of comes and goes.”

  “Anything else troubling you?” Absent-mindedly, she stroked the dog’s fur, her gaze focused on the boy to see his answer.

  It was one of indecision before he spoke again. “Sometimes my leg hurts. Where the stitches were, I mean,” he said, fingers tapping the jagged line.

  She shook her head, relieved. “That will stop soon. I promise.” As an afterthought, she told him, “You should stay out of the water on cold nights, Charley.”

  It must be the dampness causing that slight rattle in his breath. Surely, that was all.

  “Yes, ma’am. I’ll try.” He looked at the dog, its fur rising in response to a creature stirring in the hollow nearby. A rabbit poked its head from the foliage, then streaked down the path. Rufus pursued with deep barks.

  Neglecting to say good-bye, the boy chased after his pet into the gathering darkness.

  13

  November 11th 1862: Must use the buggy to retrieve an order of medicines from the dry goods store. Supplies from Mobile come few and far between, but anything is lucky to make it through our muddled postal routes. More welcome would be news from the regiment. How much longer shall we be forced to wait for tidings of our young men?

  Mariah pulled away from the sudden brush of fingers against her arm at the dry goods counter. She turned to find a woman of middle age, fair hair tucked beneath a sun bonnet. “Mrs. Camden,” she said, matching the face to one of her more recent medical cases. “How is your wrist?”

  “As if it never broke,” the woman replied. Hesitating a moment, she folded some bills into Mariah’s palm. “I can finally repay your kindness.”

&n
bsp; Mariah had not seen so large a sum since her days in Mobile. It was not one a widow whose only son had gone off to war should be able to pay, however. “Surely this is needed in your household,” she said.

  “It is all right.” Pride in her voice, the woman said, “Wray sends me his soldier’s pay, what he gets of it, anyhow. I only wish he wrote more of himself in the letters that bring it. Too much like his father, all silence and strength.” Her voice dropped slightly with this reference to her deceased husband. His violent death was still spoken of in whispers by some in the community, his grave isolated from the others in the cemetery.

  “Your son sounds a fine sort of man,” she said.

  “Oh, he is. Blessed in character and looks, both. More than one heart was broke when he left us for the regiment.” She glanced out the window. “I must be on my way now. My neighbors wait to drive me home, as you see.”

  She referred to the cart outside, Mr. and Mrs. Widlow visible behind the reins. The two families shared a property line and a drinking well, though it was deep friendship that bound them closer than the proximity of their homesteads.

  Mariah’s relationship with the Widlows had been one of begrudging acceptance that quickly vanished once their son was no longer under her care. At times, she wondered if they would have preferred his slow death to the bronchial infection rather than the danger he now faced.

  Twelve o’clock: Have gone to the Kendricks to find patient is worse. Became feverish last night and complains of dysentery, in addition to the cough and stomach pains. More alarming still is a revelation that makes me certain she is not the only one from our community to suffer this affliction...

  “You should have told me about this before.” Mariah’s tone was accusing, as she folded back the collar to the girl’s calico dress. Beneath the lace, a patch of red, mottled skin traveled beyond her sight.