Tattler's Branch

by Jan Watson

  Grabbing her shears and a vase from the kitchen, she went out the door and around to the bed. The luscious flowers bent double, nearly sweeping the ground with their heavy heads. She should have taken the time to stake them. After cutting a few long stalks, she stripped the lower leaves and put them in the vase.

  Running the V of her fingers up underneath one plump blossom, she let the weight of it rest in her cupped palm. The pink petals were delicate as silk and fragrant with perfume. This one would be nice on her nightstand. She tugged gently, but the bloom disintegrated, showering her feet with disappointment.

  Last year, in this same season, she’d lost her first pregnancy. She’d been so shocked that morning as she dressed for her day to feel the one tugging pain and then the tiny bit of tissue loosing its hold in her womb just as quickly as the peony loosed its petals. The loss felt immeasurable.

  She’d cried for days, holding the pain so tightly to her heart that she could barely catch her breath. She should have told Tern; it was his loss too. But in the pattern familiar to them, he’d been somewhere else. By the time he was home again, she’d stored the words away like flowers drying stiffly in an attic.

  To this day Lilly blamed herself. She supposed that’s why she hadn’t told Tern or even her mother. The day before her miscarriage, some bow hunters had carried another man into the clinic. He’d been shot through the chest from behind. The arrow rose and fell with each of his shuddering breaths.

  “I thought he was a bear,” one man kept repeating. “I mistook him for a bear.”

  Lilly hadn’t felt at all well that morning, but she’d still come in. Who would do her job if she wasn’t there? The man presented an interesting case. What if the arrow had pierced his aorta and was now serving as a tamponade to arrest bleeding? Would he hemorrhage and go into shock when the weapon was removed?

  His hunting companions struggled to hold him upright on the surgical table while Lilly worked to sever the sharp tip from the wooden shank with her small bone saw. The man was corpulent. Fat jiggled with each back-and-forth movement of her saw. Rivers of sweat coursed down his chest, making the operative site slick as grease. Lilly struggled to keep the saw steady. Her fingers cramped with the effort. Her own perspiration stung her eyes. Finally free, the chiseled flint clattered when she dropped it into a waiting metal basin.

  Moving to the man’s back, Lilly grasped the wooden rod just above the feathered end. Her patient rested his chin on a buddy’s shoulder. The other fellow kept a steadying hand on his arm. Lilly pulled. It was harder to do than she thought it would be. The rod resisted removal. It made an odd sucking sound when she pulled harder, and the man groaned.

  It all went bad at once. The man with the steadying hand turned white as a sheet and fell backward, hitting the floor like a felled tree. As Lilly pulled the arrow, her patient came with it and so did his companion. In no time they were all in a heap behind the surgical table. Lilly was on the bottom, clutching the bloody arrow to her chest.

  With great good fortune, it wasn’t the disaster it could have been. The men crawled out from behind the table. The fainter recovered. They picked Lilly up and dusted her off. The arrowed man didn’t hemorrhage, unless a person could hemorrhage embarrassment. Lilly dressed his wound and sent them all on their way. They promised deer meat in season as well as squirrel and wild turkey for Thanksgiving.

  Everything had turned out okay, or so it seemed, until the next morning when Lilly lost her baby. She had been so foolish to think she could carry on as if being pregnant didn’t change anything—as if she could manage the same way she always had. As if pluck and determination alone would carry her baby to term. Of course she blamed herself—who else was there?

  And now here she was, a scant year later, still doing the very same thing. There was a lesson to be learned, but obviously she was reluctant to learn it. It all came down to responsibility, and she was responsible to many. If she could just hold on until Ned came home, everything would be all right. He would take much of the day-to-day burden from her.

  The breeze teased the petals just out of reach when she bent to pick them up. They danced across the yard and out of sight. Lilly lifted the vase and studied the peonies. They wouldn’t last long either, but they were no less lovely, no less significant, for the briefness of their time. She would enjoy them while she could.

  Chapter 13

  Armina stopped chopping weeds long enough to pluck a grasshopper from an ear of corn. The insect glowed oddly in the pinky-lavender twilight. He cocked his tiny head and looked at her straight on as if to say, “What? Is there not enough for both of us?” She didn’t have the heart to twist his head off. Instead she flicked him through the air. To spite her, he left a spew of brown sap on the heel of her hand.

  Though the ear of corn was still tiny with unformed kernels, she shucked it, slicked off the tender silks, and tasted of what would soon be summer’s bounty. A body had to be quick to get corn for the table—one day it’d be plump and juicy, fine for roasting ears and corn pudding, and next it would turn tough and chewy, the milk dried up and the meat sticking between your teeth. And past that, in the fall, the corn would be rich as gold and ready to harvest. Even her small crop would yield enough to supplement her chickens’ feed all winter. For her own use, she’d grind some into cornmeal and boil some with lye to make hominy.

  Later on, when the weather turned bitter, she’d pass the time weaving chair bottoms from dried shucks. She had two busted-out chairs of her own, and one of Doc’s, sitting in the shed, waiting to be rescued. And just you wait, as soon as word got around that she was weaving, a neighbor or two would drop by with their own worn-out seats. That was okay. It made a body feel useful and kept idleness at bay—devil’s workshop and all that.

  Armina parted two cornstalks and looked to see where Hannah might be. There she was, plucking pole beans from a tepee and dropping them into her gathered-up apron. The silly thing had tried to turn Armina’s mind away from the garden. She wanted to sit on the porch and fiddle around with the embroidery they’d started that morning—colorful flowers and birds on the hems of pillow slips. To Armina’s mind that was foul-weather work, like weaving with husks. Who would choose to fritter away a fine evening like this on fancywork? Especially when weeds were getting the jump on the garden. From the looks of things, Armina had lain idle a little too long.

  Armina hated worse than anything to admit, even to herself, that the nurse was right, but she had used up all her strength. Her legs were weak as day-old kittens, and here she’d barely scratched the ground with her hoe. She wished she’d brought a milk pail so she could upend it and take a seat. If she could rest for a minute, her head would clear up.

  When she first started feeling poorly, around the time she’d planted the corn seed in the spring, she’d carried a milk stool from end of row to end of row. She’d push herself down the furrows, even when she thought her body would plumb give out, by promising a rest on that stool. She could have just sat on the ground, except if she got that low down, she had a dickens of a time getting up. She’d have to turn over into a crawl and heave herself to her knees and then to a crouch and finally straight. She’d be mortified if somebody caught her in such a humiliating position, looking like an oversize baby.

  “Ha,” she shouted in glee. There was the stool poking out from the weeds at the end of the row just ahead.

  “Miz Tippen?” she heard Hannah call. “You okay? You ready to head in?”

  “A few more minutes,” she said. “It ain’t dark yet.”

  “You need me, you holler.”

  “Sure thing,” Armina said, wishing the woman would keep still. Gabbing back and forth was using up all her lung reserves.

  The T-shaped milk stool felt good and solid beneath her weight, and from where she sat, she could see Turnip Tippen’s cow pasture and his herd of a dozen fawn-colored Jerseys. Jerseys were her favorite kind of cow; their milk made the best butter bar none. Guernseys were okay too, but she d
idn’t much care for the splotchy black-and-white Holsteins with their high rumps and long legs. She liked a cow a little closer to the ground.

  The round-bellied Jerseys were on the other side of the fence, all bunched up under a tree, murmuring low to each other. The lead cow shifted from foot to foot, jarring the bell around her neck. Armina had always taken pleasure in cow talk, but you’d think if cows had sense enough to converse, they’d be smart enough to stay out from under trees. One pop-up storm, one bolt out of the blue, and the whole bunch would be hamburger meat.

  As the cows stirred, insects shot out from the pasture grass and weeds. A brown-headed cowbird darted around the herd plucking bugs from the air. Armina fairly hated those pirates of the sky for stealing the nests of smaller birds, the finches, warblers, and wrens. The songbirds hunted and gathered from daylight to dark just to have their nests taken over by such trash. The cowbirds were clever, though; she’d give them that. Generally they’d lay just one egg in as many as five borrowed nests, spreading their brood over half an acre. Then they were off scot-free while songbirds hatched and fed their wayward, aggressive young, often to the detriment of their own nestlings. She’d climbed many a tree in her time plucking the oversize eggs from among the valid ones and pitching them to the ground.

  A warm zephyr, shepherding in a hint of rain, stirred the air around Armina’s feet and waltzed through the treetops. Leaves sighed in pleasure. The cowbell tolled dully, its sound muted by a dozen thickset bodies. One cow mooed softly and another replied.

  Oh, but for lack of vigor, Armina would climb the fence and go stand among the cows. As soon as Ned got back, she’d tell him she wanted a cow of her own. He’d say, “But Uncle Turnip gives us plenty of milk.” Which would be true enough, but she’d never liked being beholden to his family. Besides which, there was more benefit to keeping a cow than milk. A cow got you up in the morning and called you in of an evening. They had straightforward needs and when those needs were met, they gave straightforward reward.

  Besides, by the time Turnip got around to their house with his leftover bucket, it was no longer fresh. Armina liked her milk still warm and swirled with yellow. Turnip skimmed the cream from the top and sold it at the cream station over on Market Street. She just knew it. You couldn’t churn the stuff long enough to make the butter rise.

  Why was her brainpan circling in on itself to dredge up thoughts of Turnip Tippen? Here she was on a fine summer evening with her piece of the world spread out before her like a picnic supper, but instead of offering psalms, she was entertaining herself with bits of aged aggravation.

  A couple walking down the road distracted her. She could see them clearly from where she sat. It was Mazy and a fellow—that young lawman. What was his name? She screwed up her face and concentrated. It started with a C—didn’t it? Canny or Cholly, something unusual-like.

  Mazy giggled and he responded, his deep-throated laugh an undercurrent to Mazy’s light one. When they came to the red metal gate that led to the pasture, Mazy tucked Kip under her arm and stepped up on the bottom rung. Her companion unlatched the gate and swung it back and forth. Mazy shrieked with delight like she was on a carnival ride. The cows stirred but did not leave the comfort of the tree.

  Armina supposed she needn’t worry about the livestock. Surely a man with a badge on his chest wouldn’t forget to close the gate. Nor should she worry about Mazy; they were just playing the fool like all courting couples did, as she and Ned had done not so long ago. No way would Doc Lilly let her sister step out with Chanis Clay until she’d given him the once-over twice.

  How about that? She’d remembered the fellow’s name: Chanis Clay. Her brainpan was cranking again. Maybe she’d been trying too hard. Speaking of hard—Chanis had him a hard act to follow. His daddy had been a stand-up guy and tough as groundhog leather. One time, on a Sunday afternoon, she and Ned had come upon a couple of swags slugging it out on the church lawn, fighting over a quart of whiskey. The church lawn! On Sunday! Who would have thought of such? Then came the sheriff, busting out of a deacons’ meeting, grabbing a collar of each of the bums, and tossing them over the graveyard fence—and not gently, either. He made those old boys stay in the graveyard all night—told them if they stepped one foot out, it would be three days in the hoosegow. Come the next Sunday, those two boys had been in the first row.

  Poor Chanis. Everybody expected him to be his daddy all over again. And now he had all his brothers and sisters and his sickly ma to take care of. Armina wondered if Chanis even wanted to be a lawman. He seemed a bit tender for the job.

  Mazy hopped off the gate and put Kip down in a tangled heap. Chanis stooped to free Kip’s leash. The dog held up each foot in order like he knew exactly what needed done. When Chanis straightened, he brushed against Mazy. Armina held her breath. Surely Mazy would move away. But she didn’t. It was just a brushing of his lips against her cheek until Mazy turned the other cheek. Armina was sure she could see sparks, but no, it was just a thousand lightning bugs rising languidly from the pasture grass, testing out their tiny lanterns.

  Well! If Chanis Clay had a hard job now, just wait and see what would happen if he took Mazy Pelfrey into the mix. Mazy was pretty as a speckled pup tied to a red wagon, but she needed a lot of attention. And what if his mother’s health continued to decline? Mazy would break like a dry limb in a windstorm under that kind of pressure. Armina was not sure if the girl could boil water without scorching it.

  Ah, she was getting ahead of herself. It wasn’t even a real kiss. They hadn’t jumped the broom. Every little thing would work out if it was meant to be. Just look at her and Ned.

  Night was creeping down the mountain like a thief stealing light as he went. She might as well go in while she could still see the way. From a high exposed perch, a female cowbird let loose with a harsh, rattling glug-glug-glee. Armina shook her fist, wishing for a rock to toss at the noisy thing—sounding brass, tinkling cymbal—no care in its heart for its fellow creatures.

  The milk stool wobbled beneath her. Without a thought, she reached down for her walking stick to steady her rising. Her fingers skimmed the weeds she’d left drying in the row and scrabbled through clods of dirt but felt no familiar trusted aid. What had she done with her sycamore stick? And furthermore, how would she ever get up from her own exposed perch? Oh, to have the wings of a bird.

  As if she could read Armina’s mind, Hannah appeared and offered a supportive hand. Armina had no choice but to submit. She felt like a useless old codger as she clung to the nurse’s arm.

  “Should I bring in the seat?” Hannah asked.

  “Leave it. I’ll need it again.” With a kick of her foot, Armina moved the small wooden stool back up under a row. “Ha, the old gal’s got some kick left.”

  Hannah patted her arm. “You’re far from old, Miz Tippen. You did real good today. We’ll soon get you set right again.”

  Armina was in no position to chide Hannah for her patronizing way. They shuffled down the row, scrunching their shoulders tight to escape the green pointed blades. It would sting like a hundred paper cuts if you got sliced by one.

  “Say, isn’t that Mazy with Chanis Clay?” Hannah asked as they came out of the garden.

  “Mazy,” they could hear a voice calling through the dusk. “Mazy Pelfrey!”

  “Yep,” Armina said, “and that’s Doc Lilly calling her in.”

  “They make a cute couple,” Hannah said.

  Armina nodded. She’d keep the kiss to herself. “Yep.”

  Hannah patted the bundle of beans tied up in her apron. “We’ll have a good dinner tomorrow. I’ll scratch up some new potatoes to go with.”

  Armina let go of Hannah’s arm. The woman’s constant attention had just about wooled her to death. She might bust a gut, but she’d walk the rest of the way home on her own. And when she got there, she’d find her sycamore walking stick.

  Chapter 14

  Shade Harmon crossed his arms, leaned one shoulder against the side of the
building, and waited. From where he stood in the alley between the Market Street Commissary and the cream station, he could easily watch the doctor’s office. It was Saturday night. You could tell even if you didn’t already know by the faint sounds of rowdy music from a couple streets over. You’d think the office would be closed on a Saturday night, but the light still shone in the window.

  An hour later, he was still watching. Although the shade at the window was pulled to the sill, he could see a flicker of shadow—the manifestation of the doctor, he was sure. He could tell it was her by the way she carried herself, like she was in charge of something important. Even in shadow, she appeared sure of herself. It was different to see a woman that way. Tuesday, when she’d treated him for his wounds, she’d looked him straight in the eye without as much as a blink, and her hands had been strong and steady when she worked. And whoa, Nellie, she was a looker with that dark hair and those gray eyes. What impressed him most, though, was that she didn’t ask his name—like she didn’t give a hoot if he was the governor or Jack Sprat.

  He liked to study people. Some might think he was too quiet, even standoffish—like he cared what anybody else thought—but the truth was, he was taking their measure. Like a snake hiding under a riffle, he was waiting to strike.

  Working one finger between the buttons of his blue chambray shirt, he rubbed around one of his wounds. They itched worse than a mosquito bite, but he was afraid to scratch them. Scratching might start up the bleeding again.

  The stench of sulfur in the alley bothered him. Coffee grounds, eggshells, and apple cores littered the area around an overflowing garbage bin. Unbound newspapers were piled on top of the bin—just waiting for a storm to blow them all over town. People were so lazy. To his mind there was no excuse for being slovenly—he liked things clean and orderly.