Ghosts of Graveyards Past

by Laura Briggs

  Nell watched her come and go, at one point saddling her father’s horse and leading it out to her in the muddy yard. “Take Fergus for your other deliveries, or even let me go for you instead,” she urged. “You can’t help others if you run yourself ragged.”

  This was true—more so than Mariah wished to let on. She couldn’t accept the offer for practical reasons. The horse was likely to have trouble navigating the steep paths she traveled through Crooked Wood. “I cannot take him where I’m going,” she explained, handing the reins back to the disappointed girl. “Although,” she said, sliding her hand inside her satchel, “if you like—it would help me greatly if you could deliver this parcel.”

  As she spoke, she removed a small box from her satchel, the name of Widlow written across its brown paper. Inside was a jar of liniment for the woman’s rheumatism, the kind supplied to her in years before by the town apothecary.

  Understanding passed over the girl’s face when she saw the name scrawled on the package. “I’ll take it right away,” she said, mounting the horse she’d already saddled, a light kick sending the stallion trotting in the direction of town. When she returned later that evening, she handed the doctor a few coins from the patient, lingering in the doorway to tell her, “There was no news. I asked the Widlows if they heard anything, but they get no letters, they say.”

  Surprised, Mariah had dropped the coins in the jar on her desk before she answered, “Thank you. For taking the package, I mean.” She leaned back over her work, aware that Nell watched her a moment longer before retreating to the hall.

  Part of her felt guilty for ignoring this small gesture of trust. If she confided in anyone about her worries for Arthur, it should be the one who shared her devotion for him. She knew of the girl’s feelings for Arthur—not those of a friend, but those of love, shared for a heart that could belong to only one of them. There was no resentment in her glance, only a quiet need to shoulder some of the pain that threatened to take him from both their lives forever.

  After a while, they fell into a pattern, with Nell dispensing medicines to homes within riding distance, and to those who complained of something other than a fever. Nell took her duty to heart, riding through storms, and sometimes staying to boil medicinal teas for the ailing from her grandmother’s supply of herbs. Often, she finished her work as late as the doctor herself, their suppers taken in the kitchen hours after the rest of the household had gone to bed.

  “I took Mrs. Tate the calamus for her baby’s colic today. She read me part of a letter her husband sent from the battlefield.” Nell spoke these words softly over a plate of cold beans and bread. An oil lamp burned low in the middle of the table, casting her expression into shadow. Her voice was enough to betray what she felt, threatening to break as she said, “He wrote that Mrs. Camden’s son was killed in the skirmish. That he helped to bury him, and that he heard that others from Sylvan Spring were badly hurt.”

  There was no other news.

  Nell’s hands trembled as she took a long sip of the tea Granny Clare had brewed for them in her daily quest to be of help to the younger women.

  Mariah left her own cup untouched, silverware set aside with the clink of metal against ceramic.

  November 19th 1862: Mrs. Tate and her baby continue to do well, and concern continues on my part for the schoolteacher, Miss Mitchell. I hear she does no better, and all aid on my part is adamantly declined.

  Black smoke billows from the farms and fields, like storm clouds on the horizon. It comes from the bonfires lit every morning in hopes of purging the air of whatever disease stalks us. There is little I can say for this plan, except that it shows no effect on the illness and poses a threat to those who are careless in their movements.

  The girl with the crown of braids was how Mariah recognized the patient who was ushered hurriedly into the Darrow’s parlor. Tall for her eleven years of age, Annie Cray was one of five daughters born to a farming family who lived a mile north of the schoolhouse. Her skirt was singed, her hands red with blisters where they tried to smother the flames from one of the bonfires.

  “We soaked them in the spring,” her mother fretted, turning her small hands over for the doctor’s inspection. “Look how they weep, though, how red they’ve grown. I’ve got no wrapping at the house, nothing to bind them with—”

  “Let me tend them with some lard,” Mariah said. She led the girl to a chair by the desk, where she had to push against reluctant shoulders to make her sit down. Fright and distrust covered the girl’s features, with no sign of that curious smile she wore that day at the schoolyard.

  Mrs. Cray sat in a chair by the hearth, where the blacksmith’s wife and mother tried their best to calm her nerves with a cup of tea.

  Nell was not with them, having gone to the dry goods store to barter for a jug of molasses for the upcoming holidays. She had met the Crays on the road, though, and seeing the mother was almost frantic with worry, had given them her horse to ride back to the house.

  “Such a scare it was,” their guest sighed, stroking her porcelain cup with worried fingers. “To hear her scream that way, as if she were dying—she could have, you know. My sister’s youngest burned to death when his coat sparked from the hearth—”

  “Do not think of it,” Granny Clare soothed, hand reaching to pat her arm from the chair beside her. “She’s safe now and won’t be likely to venture so close again. There’s only the blisters to show for it, and those will fade in time.”

  Mariah doubted this last part, but said nothing as she smeared lard into the badly-damaged skin. The motion brought to mind a flash of imagery from the letters she read at night: Arthur dressing the wounds of a soldier caught in a wildfire, feeling the breath leave their body as he cradled it on the hard ground.

  She wiped her hands on her apron and then reached inside her satchel for a roll of cotton dressing. Beginning to unwind it, she said, “You will need to apply the lard twice a day until the skin is healed. The bandages will keep an infection from getting in, so you must see that they’re tightly wound, and try to keep them dry.”

  Her patient gave no answer and seemed not to realize she’d even spoke.

  “Annie?” She frowned, searching the pale features across from her. “Do you hear what I say? Your hands will need—”

  “Listen.” The child spoke in a whisper, head inclined to the figures seated by the hearth. “They’re talking of the sickness and whether it’s a curse for some kind of wrong doing.”

  Confused, Mariah tilted her head in the same direction. She caught their murmurs, soft and serious, the sound of the girl’s mother saying, “…and she told me how she’d only seen the symbol on graves before, and that it wasn’t natural to paint it on a door that way. She said no child would do such a thing of its own mind. She knew a great deal of children, Miss Mitchell, though she had none of her own, bless her.”

  The schoolgirl drew a sharp breath at the mention of her teacher, who was now interred beneath the cemetery’s cold ground as the latest victim of the unknown sickness.

  Gently, the doctor began to wrap the bandage around one of Annie’s hands. She was about to repeat her instructions for the lard as a means of distracting her from the other’s talk, when Granny Clare’s voice joined the conversation across the room.

  “My papa used to say, ‘Dunna look for evil, less you look for death.’ Not often a churchgoing man,” she said with a soft chuckle, “but one with an eye for the signs of trouble.” The woman’s Scottish brogue seemed thicker than usual, perhaps strengthened by the nature of her memories. With a sigh, she told them, “He could find trouble in the cry of the owl, my papa could. He knew when a storm was coming by the color of the sky, and what the crops would yield by the changes in the moon.”

  “What of the plat-eye, then?” Mrs. Darrow wondered, sewing forgotten on her lap in the course of their speculation. “There was more than one saw it on the road before all this come about. Might be it was a harbinger for our troubles, if the old folk
s’ ways are to be believed.”

  “My husband seen it,” Annie’s mother agreed, setting her teacup down on the worn table. “A great one for seeing things, he is. Likes to tell of his boyhood in Bowmore where he came upon the bean nighe washing a coat in the stream. He saw the coat was the same as his granddad’s and knew it meant the man would die soon—and so he did, not a week later. “

  “The washerwoman.” A soft clucking sound escaped Granny Clare’s tongue. “That’s what they called her in my village, and what a fear I had of seeing her. A hag’s face, all spotted and gray, her long hair all tangled in knots.” She leaned forward as she talked, eyes straining as if searching for the same picture that formed inside her head. “The washer woman was only to be found beside a deserted stream, they said, and wailing her sad song as she scrubbed the burial clothes of some poor soul. It was said the garments she washed belonged to soldiers who would die in battle, and that’s why they were stained with blood.”

  Mariah heard a slight gasp and felt the half-bandaged hand twist in her grasp. It was only then she realized how tight she’d been holding it. Muttering an apology, she began to wrap it again, face turned away from the hearth, though her ears continued to strain for the sound of the women’s conversation.

  “I suppose…yes, I’m sure I’ve heard that tale before.” Mrs. Darrow spoke in a halting manner, no doubt thinking of her son. His recent escape in battle made no promise of future safety, and the image of uniforms soaked in blood must seem a harbinger of doom in its own right. She gave a faint laugh. “I learned the story myself from a man who worked alongside my father at the docks. He smoked a ceramic pipe, great puffs clouding the air when he talked of the old ways. The faerie, and the bean nighe, which he said was the spirit of a woman that died giving birth. All old Scottish tales, they were.”

  Her audience waited as she took up her mending again, a needle passing through the cloak she held with quiet precision. Her gaze was fixed on it when she spoke again, perhaps seeing the bloodstained shroud of the washerwoman in the threads she stitched slowly back together. “The way he told it,” she recalled, “to see the washer woman meant only two things: that the garment she washed belonged to one who would soon die, and that if you saw her washing it, the garment belonged to you.”

  

  Mariah plunged her hands into the washbasin, dark clouds rising to meet the surface. Frozen, she watched her reflection in the grimy water. Hair escaping its pins, eyes made puffy by sleeplessness. A mouth that seemed pinched and drawn as a woman twice her age. The image wavered and then broke apart as she pulled strips of fabric to the surface and wrung them out.

  Salvaged from an old work dress of Nell’s, they would serve as cold cloths and makeshift bandages in the doctor’s scant supplies.

  She draped them over the backs of kitchen chairs, water dripping from hands that were chapped from bathing so many fevered brows the past week. Ten women, six men, eight children. That was how many people she knew for certain were infected by the disease.

  There were others, of course. Those who requested medicine but not the presence of the physician, and those who never called on her at all, who chose instead to rely on remedies from their own cupboard. If their suffering took a turn for the worse, she would know it by the sight of fresh dirt mounded in the wooded cemetery when she stood with other mourners around an open grave or saw the long hills and rough gravestones in the yards of a neighboring homestead as she passed by.

  Poring over her father’s text books yielded nothing but sleepless nights. She found herself drafting letters to every apothecary within fifty miles, asking for news of a fever outbreak among their communities. It would be weeks before she got a response, if any ever did come, and by then it might be too late.

  Whole towns had been wiped out from epidemics. She knew this from newspaper clippings in her father’s old study, the stories sent to him by colleagues who witnessed such events. One place in Georgia had boasted more than a hundred in its population before a wave of cholera left just four families to rebuild the ruins.

  Sylvan Spring had fifty households at best. How quickly disease might spread in such a place and what disaster it might leave in its wake, left her breathless with worry. Her medical supplies were limited, the shipment from Mobile perhaps a month from arriving. Alternative means would have to be found, the reason she took to the garden one morning, Granny Clare close to her side.

  “For aiding the stomach,” the woman told her, piling sprigs of yarrow beside her on the ground. “Used by my mama in the old village for the babies’ colic. More times than naught, it soothed their cries.”

  “I will try it,” Mariah promised, binding the stems together with a piece of thread.

  The gnarled hands searched the dirt for the right plants. The woman identified most through smell, occasionally touching a leaf to her tongue when doubtful. Her eyes bore a calm Mariah could only wonder at, the mind behind them as sharp as her own.

  There were herbs for digestion and dysentery, for coughs and fevers.

  Mariah gathered them all, pounding each beneath a mortar and pestle with a frantic rhythm that matched the pace of her thoughts. Funneled into paper packets, they served as teas for patients who could keep nothing else down. A few went into her pocket, slipped into her evening brew while the food on her plate went mostly untouched.

  November 21st 1862: Where a cure cannot be found, the means to comfort becomes key. That is what I tell myself as more cases began to slip beyond my influence. Some improve for reasons I cannot explain, while others given the same course of treatment take a violent turn for the worse. It is terrible to watch the suffering of those who are ill and know their fate depends on chance more than anything. I will not abandon my search for the cause of this outbreak and must hope there is strength enough left in me to find it.

  “Are you all right, Miss Moore?”

  Geneva Kendrick studied the doctor with concern from her seat on the parlor’s worn settee. She had answered the door herself, well enough now to receive visitors in the parlor instead of her bed chamber. The fever had left her, and only a slight weariness haunted the youthful features to recall what had happened.

  The patient did not see the same promise in Mariah’s appearance, however. “You look so pale,” she told her. “Let me pour you another cup of tea. It has done me such good, especially the one made from ginger root.”

  “I am fine,” Mariah assured her. Her voice wasn’t very convincing, she knew, strained from the coughing that kept her awake at night. She was able to control it during the day, but the cold air in her bedroom made it impossible to fight the weakness dragging her down.

  “You must take care of yourself,” the younger girl urged. “It does no good to tax your strength this way. Your friend spoke of it yesterday—how you rest but a few hours each day and seldom eat anything.”

  “My friend.” Mariah’s brow wrinkled, struggling to imagine who she meant. The only one she could think of was miles away on a battlefield, where letters came few and far between to those who waited at home.

  “The blacksmith’s daughter,” Geneva explained. “She came here yesterday to see how I did and to bring some of the tea from her grandmother’s garden.”

  “Miss Darrow has been a great help to me,” the doctor answered, realizing how true it was as she spoke. Nell’s heart lent itself naturally to the task of healing, with patients trusting her more than they would an outsider, something Mariah was still considered to be, despite living among them for so long now.

  “She spoke so hopefully of our predicament,” Geneva continued, “that I began to be hopeful myself. It was different from what everyone else says. About the curse, I mean.”

  “What is it they say?” The words came out funny, slurred almost. She raised the cup to her mouth, attempting to disguise the sudden lapse.

  Fortunately, the farmer’s wife was more concerned with how to answer, her fingers playing nervously with one of the threads on her s
hawl. “It is idle talk,” she said, winding and unwinding the same thread as she continued, “They are saying—and I do not believe it—that the houses with the Celtic mark are ones belonging to people who will die of the fever. That the symbol is a—a kind of prophecy, placed there by a spirit...or devil...that brings the sickness.” She glanced down, cheeks coloring as she added, “That is why I have gotten better, they say. Because there was no mark put on our door that night.”

  Mariah could not speak, mouth open from disbelief. The stories of washerwomen and plat-eyes seemed nothing compared to such cruel speculation. Those who believed in it might simply lose heart to fight the illness, sealing their own fate through superstition.

  Geneva assured her, “I pay no mind to what they say. If anyone mentions it before me, I am quick to tell them that Miss Moore’s skill is responsible for my being well again.”

  “Thank you.” She set her tea cup back on the table, sloshing a little into the saucer. “I have been thinking,” she began, “that considering the circumstances—and how often we have spoken these past weeks—you might…well, you might call me Mariah. If you still wish it.”

  The girl’s eyes brightened with the suggestion. “Yes, of course.” With a surprised laugh, she added, “Mariah. It is a pretty name.”

  “From my mother’s aunt,” she remembered. “A midwife in their small community. So it was a fitting choice, in a way.”

  “Doctoring seems to run in your blood.” Her young patient smiled. “My father was a clergyman, as was my grandfather. I should wish very much to have guidance from either of them now.” Her face grew wistful with the thought.

  Mariah hesitated before she spoke. “My father—he left his wisdom to me in the form of text books and writings from his medical career. Your father, I am sure, would advise you to look to the same book he trained from as a clergyman.” How can you say such a thing? She scolded inwardly for recommending a path she had never followed herself.