The Winter Sisters

by Tim Westover

  “Pass us that towel, Doctor,” said Argyle. “Don’t hog it all for yourself.”

  I took in a deep draught and passed the ether rag to my fellow men.

  6

  WHETHER I BELIEVE IN IT OR NOT

  “Waycross, grab that pigeon!” shouted Boatwright.

  Poor sleep had left me feeble and my head aching, and the bird escaped my fumbling grasp. It settled upon a rafter and peered down at us with unblinking eyes. The top of the animal was white, but it was gray underneath. As the bird shook its wings, it shed flakes of white.

  I glanced around the church. Ten rows of pews faced a lectern and a simple wooden table. The walls were white, the pews unpainted. Above the final rows of pews, set apart for slaves, Cherokees, and half-breeds, was a rickety balcony, which I would not have ascended even on a bet.

  “Hang it all,” said Boatwright. His frock coat was streaked and disheveled.

  “Begging your pardon.” I paused to consider my question before I asked it, but I saw no reason to turn back. “Did you paint that pigeon?”

  “The Bible does not speak of pigeons,” the pastor answered. “It’s always doves. I was trying to make this little fellow perform. It appears that he has other motives.”

  The pigeon stretched out its wings, unfolding farther than I expected. “They’re the same animal,” I said.

  “Doves are clean and holy. Pigeons fill the woods with droppings.”

  “So you did paint the pigeon,” I said.

  “I gave it a coat of whitewash, yes. So that it would better illustrate my sermon. I wanted a boy to release it from the rafters at a pivotal moment: give the congregation a spectacle since that’s all they seem to be interested in.”

  The painted pigeon started a song and then, distracted by its own biological needs, paused to let loose a series of white streaks onto the floor.

  The farce cleared my dark humor, but I did not let my levity show to the pastor. “I don’t read any trouble in your complexion, so if I cannot be of service to you, I’ll take my leave.”

  “No, Waycross, stay. I need to speak with you.”

  “Do you need more blood taken? Are your bowels in order?”

  “Never mind my bowels.” The pastor gritted his teeth. “I heard from Mrs. Maltbie that the Winter sisters handed out herbs and vocalized magical utterances for two hours while you kept me imprisoned in your surgeon’s chair for that bloodletting.”

  “You were in danger of apoplexy.”

  “And I have also heard that you polluted the Flowing Bowl with a new kind of narcotic last night.”

  “I haven’t…” I was bewildered. “Polluted? Narcotic?”

  “Ether,” said Boatwright, exhaling the word like tobacco smoke.

  “A fundamental error,” I said. “Laudanum is a narcotic. Ether is not. Chemically, it’s—”

  “It is a poison!”

  Boatwright’s voice startled the pigeon, which flew to a farther rafter.

  “I did not summon you here to intoxicate my flock, Waycross. You are meant to help me put the fear of witches and quacks into this congregation. Tell them that quacks are powerless against the devil’s diseases.” Boatwright picked up a clod of earth that a farmer’s boot had tracked into the church. “Because that demon panther is out there, its fangs dripping with disease. It answers only to one master, or rather three masters… the Winter sisters. It is their pet, their familiar. How else could you explain a panther in north Georgia?”

  He was raving, caught up in his own superstition. I studied the white tufts of hair emerging from the pastor’s ears. He was going to throw himself into another apoplexy.

  “Instead, you are consorting with the enemy. Quaffing Thumb’s patent medicines.” Boatwright looked at me as he might a spider just before flicking it into the fireplace. “You are being drawn into their evil, sir.”

  He threw a clod of dirt at the pigeon, but the clod disintegrated in the air and scattered dust over the pews.

  “I have shouted and fulminated and roared my displeasure to my flock, but they love their singing medicine man. They worship their miracle-working witches. What entertainment do I have to offer them in return? A painted pigeon? A phlegmatic doctor anxious to chop their limbs off?” He studied the white splotches on his sleeve. “Waycross, a congregation must not resent its pastor. They mustn’t think me boring or worthless, for the good of their own souls. Your lancets and clysters and bone saws mean you will never be beloved, but that’s no matter, is it? They heal no matter how the patients fear them.”

  Then I thought of the frog and how the patient must be cured in mind and body. “Sir, you are mistaken. It’s vital that—”

  The pigeon flew over our heads, and a flurry of feathers rained upon us.

  Boatwright swatted at the air and the cascade of feathers. “Confound it all! Why our Lord should choose such a foul and unruly symbol, I shall never know. Why couldn’t the Holy Spirit have descended as, say, a begonia?”

  Boatwright took off his left shoe and chucked it at the enemy. The painted pigeon dodged nimbly and, in the resulting moment of confusion, made its escape. It flew between the pastor and me—I might have caught it if I’d had my hands out at the right moment—and darted through the doorway and into the world beyond—to rejoin its flock, I suppose. I would look for it the next time I took a constitutional. One white pigeon might stand out in a grove of a million.

  The pastor fumed incoherently. He retrieved his shoe, sat upon the first pew, and replaced the shoe on his foot.

  “Waycross, come here,” he said.

  I didn’t care to sit next to him. His violence and buffoonery did not impress me.

  “Waycross, come here!”

  I placed myself in front of him but did not sit down.

  “Understand, Doctor, that evil compels people to seek out the good, to vigilantly purge evil from their midst. It is like a bleeding for the soul, Dr. Waycross. A cut that cures.”

  “The metaphor, sir—”

  “I will cut as deeply as I must, Dr. Waycross. I will bleed this town until its soul is healthy again.”

  Sarah sat in front of the fire, whittling a piece of hickory until the wood fell apart in her fingers. At first, she didn’t notice when the hickory was gone. The bright red of her own blood startled her, and then came the delayed shock of pain, muted because the knife was so sharp.

  “Damn it,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Rebecca, who didn’t look up from the sewing.

  “I cut myself.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Well, don’t feel like you have to drop everything and help.” Sarah stuck her finger in her mouth.

  Gloom still pervaded Rebecca, the smoke and darkness of the mill fire and Everett’s death. Sarah didn’t know how long one was supposed to mourn. She’d never had to mourn. Their mother just… went away, and there was no fit mourning. Everett had been a decent sort but not more decent than Effie, who was of one blood, one bond. Wasn’t six months long enough?

  Sarah took her finger out of her mouth. The bleeding hadn’t stopped. The cut was narrow but deep, and it wasn’t binding itself. Sarah held it up to Rebecca, but Rebecca didn’t move.

  “Maybe I should go into town,” said Sarah, “ask Doctor Waycross if he’ll stitch me up.”

  “He would encourage the bleeding,” muttered Rebecca, “for the sake of your humors.”

  “Naw, he’d stitch me up. They have to teach about stitches in that doctor school, don’t they? It can’t all be amputations and bleeding.”

  “I suppose.”

  “It was nice of him to take Boatwright away, wasn’t it? Maybe we both go into town, and you thank him for his kindness. I’m sure he’d appreciate it.”

  “Why do you care, Sarah?”

  “Because you can’t stay mad at Effie,” said Sarah. “You can’t keep on mourning.”

  Rebecca put down the stockings she was working on. “I’m not mad at Effie—”

  “We
ll, good. All fixed, then.”

  “You wouldn’t understand, Sarah.”

  Sarah put her free hand around her finger and squeezed, applying pressure. Thin rivulets of blood trickled out from between her clenched fingers. “I think you and Aubrey Waycross should see more of each other. Because maybe the wax didn’t mean Everett. Maybe it meant Doctor Waycross, man of blood. And there’s nothing better to forget one man…”

  “Than to swap him for another?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “And then Effie and I will be happy and whole again if I’ve got a new man in my life? Sarah, how can you be so simple? So facile?”

  “Then enlighten me.”

  “Why didn’t she heal him, Sarah?”

  “Maybe she couldn’t heal him,” said Sarah, but even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true. She had seen Effie raise a deer back to its feet, seen the deer flee into the forest with all its life back in its veins. If Effie did that, she could have healed Everett, but she hadn’t.

  Rebecca shook her head. They sat in silence for several minutes. Blood fell from Sarah’s finger and onto to floor in slow, heavy drops.

  Finally, Rebecca spoke. “Did you need some help with that finger? I think spider silk would close up the wound fastest.”

  Later, Sarah stared at her finger, contemplating the cooling embers of the fire. Her finger hurt too badly to sleep. Rebecca had wrapped up the cut in spider silk, but that hadn’t taken away any of the sting. Sarah had a handful of good cures for pain, but her cures didn’t work on herself. Reading out of the Bible, jumping a knife, burying a bloody bandage by the crossroads: these were all for people who believed in such magic, not for the people who worked it. She should have asked Effie to fix her up. She could have done better than spider silk if she’d wanted to.

  Sarah climbed the ladder to the upstairs room, with their one large bed. Rebecca and Effie were both sleeping. They got along well enough to sleep beside each other. If only their waking hours could be so peaceable.

  Effie could have mended the wound. Sarah was sure of it. Effie’s works were subtle. Sarah couldn’t say how they accomplished her ends. The most terrible of wounds had come to Hope Hollow. That man with the nearly severed leg—the bone was whole, but nearly all the flesh was separated. Effie wrapped it up in wet cloths, and that had been all he needed. Also, the girl with blood poisoning—Effie had sat with her, and before the night was gone, the girl’s pallor became ruddy and hale. But no one else had been like Everett, so badly injured in the mill fire, clinging to a feeble breath when he’d been brought to Rebecca.

  Sarah worried at the spider-silk bandages. The cut stung. She wondered if she shouldn’t wake Effie, but she was afraid. What would it mean if Effie healed her cut? What if she didn’t?

  Maybe Waycross needed some encouragement in his wooing. Perhaps one love does not replace another, but certainly one love is better than none.

  My dealings with Boatwright made my dreams more solid. They did not dispel until late in the morning and left behind a fearsome headache. I relived the moment of meeting the panther. In my nightmares, the creature put its fangs into my leg, and I could feel, in the haze of my sleep, the poison of hydrophobia run into my body, like an injection of prussic acid. If not of the panther, my dreams were of fire. Flames rose from greasy torches, and three effigies hung in the willow tree—I’d seen those effigies. They were still hanging by the burned-out cabin. I saw Rebecca, only ever she, fleeing into the darkness in bare feet and a night dress, and I wanted to reach out to her, but she was too fast, and the smoke clouded my vision, and I woke coughing and sputtering.

  I bled myself, the usual treatment for nightmares. I took three ounces from my left arm, and on alternate days, I took four ounces from my right. That was not enough, for the dreams kept coming. Ether helped to ease me to sleep, but it lost its efficaciousness before the morning. What I really needed to do to settle my dreams and resolve my headache was take the blood from lower down in the circulation, where the humor was coagulating. It’s a quirk of anatomy that the sanguine humor collects at the chordate root, better known as the anus.

  My office door did not have a lock, so I wedged a chair beneath the handle to secure my privacy and threw a blanket over the window. The mirror I fetched to help me work showed a gaunt face with sunken cheeks, an illusion caused by the gloom. I was certain I did not look so bad in daylight.

  My treatment was unpleasant under even the best circumstances, but that I had to administer it to myself posed greater problems. I lowered my breeches and bent forward, far enough to clasp my ankles. Then I took out my lancet and tried to find an angle that would open a vein just inside the anal opening. I made a cut, but it was shallow and hesitating. No blood flowed.

  No sooner had I set the blade than a knock came at the door. Startled, I tried to right myself, but a sharp pain took the wind out of me. My lancet blade was stuck into my buttocks.

  “Anybody in there?” someone asked.

  I’d made a terrible mistake. I’d jammed the door handle by wedging a chair beneath it, but a chair would not stop anyone determined from getting inside. My buttocks waving in the air—I’d be the laughingstock of the town for the rest of my days.

  The knock sounded again, more insistent. “Aubrey?” The voice was a woman’s—so much the worse!

  “I’m indisposed!” I shouted. The lancet clattered to the floor. “Please, come back later.”

  “Do you need help, Doc? Got your foot stuck in a bear trap?”

  Then I recognized the voice. It was Sarah Winter. What did she need? What could possibly bring her here, at this least opportune of all moments?

  “No, but thank you for your concern!” I said, forcing a chuckle. “I can’t see any patients at the moment. Please, I crave your pardon, Miss W—Madam.”

  “It’ll only take a minute, Aubrey.” A hand was on the door handle. Wood creaked.

  “Please, I beg you, come back later!”

  From the other side of the door came a muffled, angry sound. Sarah Winter retreated. I could not make out her words, but the tone, passing through the walls well enough, suggested vivid, foul oaths.

  I shuddered in revulsion, muttering oaths of my own. Slowly, I found my composure. The shallow cuts were not so painful once washed with a little cold water, but my headache was worse than ever. Each heartbeat sent a fresh jolt of pain across my skull. I winced against the exertion, the surprise, the shame… but most of all, the stupidity. What if Sarah were not acquainted with this Hippocratic treatment and instead only saw a supposedly learned man putting a lancet into his own asshole? To cure a headache! It was more bizarre than any old wives’ cure I’d heard for headaches: mustard plasters, cabbage juice, a good night’s sleep, a frog slipped into an emesis basis. She’d never let me hear the end of it. She’d torment and tease me for as long as I stayed in Lawrenceville.

  I slumped into a chair, but a shot of pain made me leap up again, so I had no choice but to stay on my feet. A constitutional would help my circulation and perhaps restore my heartbeat to its regular pace.

  I couldn’t take my constitutional in town. My gait was lopsided, owing to my own failed treatment. Passersby would have awkward questions, and I had no wish to answer them. I did not think the details of a lancet to the buttocks would persuade anyone to seek my cures, no matter how my reputation might be improving, so the forest was the only option. I would stay close to town, where the panther was not likely to be lurking. And if he was? Perhaps a dose of fear was the cure I needed for my mind, as the constitutional would be a cure for my body. Boatwright’s belief that the panther was the sisters’ demon familiar was catching. I’d heard Mrs. Maltbie repeating it to Lizbeth Samples. Some proof of the foolishness of that assertion would be helpful. Maybe I would come across the creature dead from its disease. That would dispel the rumors.

  I followed paths as they twisted around chestnuts and between close-pressed poplars—the marks of hunting trails, tur
key-driving runs, and the wanderings of furtive lovers on their sylvan rendezvous. I set my course by the sun, aiming south.

  I wondered how Hippocrates had persuaded the first patient to submit to a bleeding from the buttocks. Perhaps his reputation excused any proposed cure, no matter how ludicrous, or perhaps learned men of the time decried his foolish treatments, but their objections have just been lost in the ages since. Why haven’t we physicians, in two millennia, found a treatment for a headache more suited to human dignity? A dram to swallow or an ointment applied to the forehead? I wondered if some cure existed that I could trick myself into taking and believing—swallowing a frog or a bottle of Elixir Salutis.

  I emerged from a rhododendron tunnel and saw a shadowy figure crouching at the base of a stunted tree.

  “Aubrey?” The shape shifted, and a sharp nose and angular features were silhouetted.

  “Miss Winter, is that you?”

  It was Rebecca, kitted for an expedition. Leather sacks and satchels hung around her shoulders. She stood and dusted debris from her skirts. “What brings you to the deep thickets?”

  “A constitutional,” I confessed. “I have a headache that’s plagued me for days.”

  “Did you lose your lancet?”

  I clenched my buttocks. “It might be time to try something else. Anything else.” I looked around. We were alone in the forest—no hunters, no gossips. “What would you give?”

  “Even a remedy that you don’t believe in?”

  “If it’s medicine, it will work whether I believe in it or not.” Nothing in her pharmacopeia could be more demeaning than the Hippocratic cure.

  She nodded, a smile touching her face. Then she rummaged through her satchels, withdrawing a cinched leather pouch. She untied the knot and measured out half a pennyweight of gray-brown powder. “Willow bark. Stripped, dried, ground, sifted.”

  “And I swallow it?” The powder was light in my palm, like a heap of ash. It couldn’t be worse than being caught with my britches down.

  Rebecca offered me her waterskin, and I recalled the apothegm, “If she shares her cup with you, that’s as good as kissing you.” I felt my face stretch with a wide smile—then I grimaced involuntarily as I swallowed the bitter powder.