The Winter Sisters

by Tim Westover

  “Who am I, that I should have the right to choose?” said Effie.

  The table fell silent. By the motion of Sarah’s gums, I could tell she was running her tongue over her teeth, chasing particles of food.

  “Sisters,” said Rebecca, breaking the silence. “Dr. Waycross has brought me an interesting proposal.”

  A piece of potato caught sideways in my gullet. I’d used that word, fraught with romantic connotations, unwittingly. Rebecca must have known how it would affect her sisters.

  Sarah’s eyes widened, and she folded her arms on the table. Effie’s attention was on her supper.

  Rebecca looked from one to the other until they acknowledged her. “Aubrey has asked us to move our practice back to Lawrenceville.”

  “Hell, that’s a step, at least,” said Sarah.

  Effie writhed in her white cotton dress.

  “Well, I think it’s a splendid idea.” Rebecca’s tone was bright.

  I was delighted. A gas bubble tried to escape from me, but I held it back with pressed lips. Rebecca was the eldest, head of the household. Her decision would be final.

  “Witches live in remote mountain hovels,” added Rebecca. “And we are not witches.”

  Sarah sniffed. “They sure believed us last time—”

  “Are you afraid of them, Sarah?” countered Rebecca.

  “I don’t give a squirrel fart about them!” Sarah exclaimed. “Just that, when tempers get hot…”

  Rebecca’s face darkened.

  “Perhaps you’ll agree,” I said cautiously, hoping to diffuse the energy, “that healers should live where they are most useful. Particularly with this crisis of the panther. A city does not put its hospital in the hinterlands.”

  “Yes, precisely. More useful,” Rebecca said.

  “And convenient,” I said, taking a biscuit from the platter Rebecca offered.

  “Yes, convenient.”

  “Rebecca needs some cockle-doodle-doo,” said Sarah. “She’s lonely in her Hope Hollow.”

  “Sarah, that is vulgar and insulting.” Rebecca snatched the platter of biscuits from her sister so that the plate hit the table hard, and I jumped at the noise.

  “Aubrey, are you sure about this?” Sarah grabbed a biscuit and tossed it in the air with her right hand then caught it with her left. “Rebecca can’t tell the difference between plants and people. She’s the lonely petunia in the onion patch.”

  “Rebecca, Sarah,” said Effie. “Please, don’t fight.”

  “All three of you will be under my auspices,” I said. “And you have more friends than you realize. Think about everyone that was lined up outside the confectionary for you. Everyone you’ve helped with your cures. Boatwright and his adherents are a loud minority. The gratitude of the majority is silent but far more powerful.”

  “Every human being is a skin sack stuffed up to the neck with greed and flesh and stupidity.” Sarah scowled. “And what spills out of their face holes are delusions and mistakes.”

  “Then why do you help them?” shot Rebecca.

  “I don’t!” Sarah threw the biscuit hard, and it smashed against the ceiling. A sprinkling of crumbs fell over us like snow. “I make them do foolish dances,” she continued in measured tones, “but they get better anyway. And then more of them come.”

  “We are healers,” said Rebecca, “and we should be where we can do the most good. We’re going to Lawrenceville with Dr. Waycross.”

  Sarah’s innards twisted with each bag she helped to heap onto the mule cart.

  “What are you going to do about your garden, Rebecca?” she said.

  “Wild herbs are more efficacious than tended ones,” Rebecca said. She placed the enormous granite pestle she used for grinding into the cart, and the wagon’s axle groaned under the weight.

  “And what about the house?”

  “It’s a wild house.” Rebecca shrugged.

  “You’re not thinking—”

  “About what?” snapped Rebecca. “Because I have, about everything you are going to say. I am not afraid, Sarah. I didn’t think you would be.”

  Sarah didn’t want to see a dozen people before breakfast and ten times as many before supper. Most of all, she didn’t want those fear-riddled hypocrites to come to Rebecca at all hours of the night. In Hope Hollow was the protection of distance, of wild animals. She did not want to lead Effie back into a town of ordinary mortals.

  “You’re not thinking about Effie. If there were another tragedy or, worse, a miracle, what would Boatwright make of it? What frenzy would Boatwright shout into his sheep about such a happening? There wouldn’t be enough bullets to settle them all.”

  “We won’t let that happen again. We won’t be frightened away. Aubrey says we have friends. The town is trying for respectability.”

  “But what about Aubrey? What if he suspected a miracle, a wonder cure? It would fascinate him.”

  “I wouldn’t care,” said Rebecca, too suddenly. “This wasn’t that sort of proposal. It’s not a romantic understanding. It’s a partnership for medicine.” Rebecca turned to go back inside.

  Sarah called out to her, “Wait.”

  “What?”

  “There was a deer. I found Effie with this dead deer by the creek. I think it was dead.” Sarah hesitated.

  “And what was she doing with this dead deer by the creek? Giving it a bath?”

  “I… don’t know. The deer got up. It ran into the forest.”

  “Then it wasn’t dead, was it?”

  Rebecca turned away again, and Sarah did not call her back.

  I made arrangements with Mrs. Snell to put up the Winter sisters in the Snells’ garret. On the day of the move, I helped load their essential possessions into a mule cart, a weather-worn relic of pioneer days. On the surface of the pile, I could see glass vessels—some fluted like a flower, some squat like a melon, some stuffed with varicolored powders, and some empty. An apothecary’s chest was wrapped in a bolt of cloth. Wooden drying racks were wedged among shears and hand scythes, mesh strainers, pill presses, and drinking vessels of copper, clay, ivory, and stone. Rebecca had packed an enormous mortar, deep enough to bathe a child. I offered her the use of my own, but she insisted that certain instruments were personal, like a chamber pot.

  Sarah’s contributions included a silver bowl and matching silver ewer and another pair in pewter. She had knives ranging in length from needle to rapier. Canvas sacks were crammed with threads and yarns—not only cottons and wools in crimson, saffron, and black, but also cords that looked like dried vines and threads so fine that they must have been spider silk or human hair. She had a wooden case of pins, tipped with gemstones. A trio of animal skulls stared back at me: a ram, a raccoon, and an unknown carnivore. Strangest of all, though, was an iron cage containing a common passenger pigeon. I wondered why Sarah needed to keep one when nature provided a limitless supply just down the path.

  Effie’s belongings must have been at the center of the pile, either less fragile or more structural. What is she bringing? That question supplanted the mystery of passenger pigeons and animal skulls.

  The mule knew his own way. No one needed to drive him. Rebecca and I walked ahead of the cart. We couldn’t see Sarah. She was sulking on the rear running board, behind the mountain of their possessions. Effie was using her entire body to keep the pile from tumbling, pinning down a threatening tower of cooking utensils with her left elbow while holding back a carved wooden chair with her right foot.

  The cart creaked in distress whenever the angle of the road changed. We trundled over a knot of hemlock roots, and the cart shuddered.

  “Oh!” said Effie.

  I turned in time to see a burlap sack beginning to fall. With unusual alacrity, I leaped forward and caught it. Glass clinked inside.

  “What’s in here?” I asked.

  “Bottles,” said Rebecca, smiling. “So many bottles.”

  “A fellow collector. Wonderful! I look forward to showing you my cut-glass phia
ls. The Venetians have refined glassmaking—”

  Sarah rolled her eyes, and the mule kicked the dirt and started again.

  I motioned to Rebecca that we should hurry ahead of the cart to talk in privacy. “Sarah hasn’t threatened to quit her practice, has she?”

  “Every hour. But she can no more leave behind her work than you or I can.”

  Rebecca and I were the first to round the chestnut-shaded bend and see the Alcovy creek, where another wagon was about to start the crossing, coming the other way.

  “Ahoy, ahoy!” It was Salmon Thumb and his medicine-show stage. “You’ve saved me the trouble of crossing. I was coming up to see you.”

  “You have found me, sir.” I swung my hat in greeting as I called back across the waters. “How may I be at your service?”

  “Flattered, Doctor!” shouted Thumb. “But I meant the Winters. Though it’s ever a joy to see your smile.”

  Rebecca chuckled, but I was less amused. What business did he have with the Winter sisters?

  Thumb left his mule on the north side of the river and hustled across the creek to meet us, churning up white foam around his knees in his haste. “I’ll take your fella from here. What’s his name?”

  “He’d only need a name if we had more than one mule,” said Sarah.

  Thumb took the bridle from where it dangled beside the Winters’ mule’s face. “Why, that’s no good. You’d still have a name even if you didn’t have any sisters, now wouldn’t you?”

  The question hovered in the air like smoke, and several moments passed before the wind took it away unanswered.

  “I’d give him a name if I were you,” said Thumb. “What do you think, miss?” He looked up at Effie, perched upon the mountain of possessions, and smiled. If he was being a showman, I knew no purpose in it.

  Effie pressed the palms of her hands together and put them below her chin. She seemed to be hard in thought, but the thoughts conducted her only to further silence.

  “What about ‘Sonny’?” asked Thumb. “Lots of mules named Sonny. He wouldn’t feel like a stranger. He wouldn’t stick out. Just a nice, ordinary name. What do you think about that, Miss… Effie, right?”

  Effie moved her hands to her lap. “Yes,” she said.

  “Sonny it is! Better than no name, anyway.” Thumb clapped his hands. “Let’s get you across this river, Sonny.” The mule recognized in Thumb a better master than any of us, and he traversed the river, shallow and swift, with ease. “Now, that’s a good boy,” said Thumb, piloting our crossing. Not once did the stack of possessions threaten to topple. Effie rode in tranquility.

  Thumb scratched Sonny behind the ears as he climbed out of the water and onto the northern bank. “Good boy. Isn’t Sonny a good boy, Miss Effie?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I still had no answer for why Thumb had been on the way to Hope Hollow, business or courtesy. Perhaps he was suffering with some ailment that Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic couldn’t cure in either man or beast.

  “I hope you’re well, Mr. Thumb?” I asked.

  “Doctor, I’m right as rain,” said Thumb. “Not a complaint in the world.”

  “So why—”

  “Questions, Doctor! There’s no reason, really. I’m just being neighborly.” He steered Sonny and the wagon to a shady place beside the stream, and Thumb’s mule, Holtzclaw, followed of his own volition. “Now that we’re across, I’d be obliged if you’d sit a spell and have a little refreshment. I’ve got Elixir Salutis. Good for what ails you, especially if what ails you is hard work on a hot day. No charge, before you even think such a thing. No charge at all.”

  “Well, good,” said Sarah. “Let’s sit a spell. I’m parched.”

  Thumb opened a wooden crate at the back of his wagon, and bottles clinked against each other. He tossed out libations with a high lob and a flourish of the wrist.

  Provisioned, Rebecca found a dry log beside the water, and I joined her. The river sparkled as it ran. Pebbles beneath the water shone like jewels. To sit in such a place with one as charming and intelligent as Rebecca Winter—the scene belonged in a pastoral novel.

  Rebecca faced the water, and glimmering sunlight framed her head. Loose wisps of hair near her ears were illuminated and resplendent. I placed a hand upon her shoulder. I tried to alight with no pressure or force, as though I were a bird landing on a fragile limb. In my fingers, I felt a quickening of her pulse. She leaned toward me, accepting the light embrace.

  We turned as a pair toward the wagons. The mules Holtzclaw and Sonny were gossiping together. Upriver, Thumb squatted on his haunches next to Effie, who was seated on the moss at the edge of the riverbank, her legs turned demurely to the side. I saw her lips move and his head nod. Then, Thumb poured his Elixir Salutis into the river. The wind caught the narrow falling stream and swirled the patent medicine into mist. Effie poured her bottle out then filled and emptied it again, rinsing it clean. Then she and Thumb unloaded the rest of his stock from his wagon. They threw the bottles one by one into the river, where the glass shattered against the rocks.

  “Thumb, all your medicines!” I cried.

  “Who needs ’em?” He held up his hands, and I saw that his once-crippled pinky fingers were straight as young saplings. The rheumatism was gone.

  “Has Effie done that?” I asked, amazed. Rebecca squeezed my hand, pulling me backward.

  “Such a clever lady!” Thumb beamed as bright as a hog in sunshine.

  The Elixir Salutis was an oily smear on the face of the water, and as the roiling river broke the bottle glass into finer and finer shards, the water blazed with light. I could not stand to look at it, so bright and wonderful and vast was the destruction.

  8

  DID YOU HURT ALL THESE PEOPLE ALREADY?

  The wind brought wave after wave of heavy rain, and Sarah could almost imagine it as a creature on the roof—pacing, scampering, leaping in the night.

  Yet she was pleased that not a drop fell on them through the ceiling. Unlike at Hope Hollow, the Snells had put tar paper under their pine shingles—no leaks. The Snells also had other fine luxuries to offer: two windows with glass in them, a free-standing wardrobe with cedar drawers, a washstand with a ceramic basin, and a fat iron stove with a chimney piping away the smoke—and all this on the second floor, in the spare bedroom. A spare bedroom itself was an extravagance, and to have such excellent and expensive things put up there was a marvel. Sarah admitted she had not thought that any in Lawrenceville lived so well.

  Waycross had been abashed when he’d seen just how fine the Snells’ spare bedroom was. And why shouldn’t he? Sarah thought. He’d been living in their hog barn for months.

  “I’m quite used to the hayloft now,” he’d said three or four times, failing to convince anyone.

  Mrs. Snell had offered no explanation or apology. “You three ladies will be very snug and tidy here,” was what she said.

  They were indeed snug. The bed was not as big as they were accustomed to. Rebecca took the side nearest the windows, Effie laid herself on the farther side, and Sarah took the middle. Rebecca told Sarah to sleep on her side rather than her back so that they would have more room.

  “I can’t sleep on my side. All my humors will pool up. I’ll get a cataplexy. Hey, I bet Waycross has plenty of extra hay if you want to go cuddle up with him.”

  “Quiet, you.”

  “We moved all the way down the mountain so you two lovebirds can be closer, and now you stop in the last hundred feet? Go on. The last six inches are the hardest, so I’ve heard.”

  “That’s indecent and rude. I would not participate in anything so shocking—”

  “Fine.” Sarah couldn’t see her face in the darkness. “Did you believe Mrs. Snell when she told us it’ll be handy having us so close by?”

  “I believe she thinks Ouida Bell puts hexes on her. So yes, she’ll find it handy having us as her guests.”

  “The old bat. Said to our faces she ‘thought it terrible’ wha
t happened to us last time we lived in town. Said ‘superstition got the better of a bad lot.’”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, later, when I was passing through on my way to the outhouse, I overheard Mrs. Snell talking to her husband.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said, ‘if there’s a scene like the last one, what should we do? Turning them out’s not charitable. But I’m not letting a mob tear down our house.’”

  The sisters waited each other out in silence. When they’d last lived in Lawrenceville, they hadn’t needed to be guests in anyone’s home. They had the cabin Everett had built them, but that was a burned-out wreck now. Someone had cut down the effigies from the willow tree. Sarah wondered who had finally done it.

  The rain swelled again, washing down the roof and spattering against the window glass.

  “Sarah, if you’d just roll over…”

  “I’ll sleep on the floor,” said Effie, shuffling.

  “If anyone, it’s Rebecca who should sleep on the floor,” said Sarah. “She’s the one who thought it was such a fine thing to come back to Lawrenceville.”

  “You didn’t have to come,” said Rebecca. “Nobody’s put you at gunpoint. Stay up in Hope Hollow, for all I care.”

  Then they stayed quiet for a long time. A single, distant rumble played against the driving wind of the rain. Effie’s breathing caught in her throat. She’d fallen asleep and was snoring.

  “You and Effie would combust if I didn’t keep between you,” Sarah whispered.

  Effie’s snoring stood out against the rhythmic ebb and rise of the rain, a harsh counterpoint.

  What if it had rained that day when the mill caught fire? What if the rain had purged the air of the fine, flammable dust, ready to take to any spark? Then it would have caught fire some other day. The mill wasn’t the first to suddenly catch flame like that, and it wouldn’t be the last.

  But the townsfolk muttered, of course, whispering, “It must have been a lover’s quarrel. Rebecca’s anger set into fire. Spontaneous combustion, a hex of witch’s fire, the evil eye set alight.”

  Their stupid hypocrisy made Sarah burn. They couldn’t see a simple matter for what it was, an accident.