Springwater Seasons

by Linda Lael Miller

  “You jest hold it right there!” warned a thin, wavery voice.

  Jacob and Pres didn’t have to draw up on the reins—Jacob had to fight Nero to keep him from wheeling around and laying tracks back to Springwater, and the mare did a little sideways dance that might have been amusing, if it hadn’t been for that crazy old woman up ahead, wielding a gun.

  “Now, Granny,” Jacob yelled good-naturedly, “put that thing aside. It’s me, Jacob McCaffrey. I’ve brought a doctor to have a look at your rheumatiz!”

  A brief silence followed, then Granny’s brittle old voice crackled through the morning chill, spreading itself in a gradually widening web of sound like a hairline fracture in an egg shell. “What sort of doctor?”

  Jacob gave Pres a sidelong look, as though assessing him so as to give an honest answer. “The real kind, I reckon, with proper schoolin’ and plenty of practice behind him.” He waited a heartbeat or two, letting his words sink in. Then he spurred the mule forward. “Now, Granny,” he called out, “we’re comin’. You put a nick in my hide and you’ll have Miss June-bug to deal with, so you just leave off shootin’ right now.”

  Pres was fascinated by the spectacle of a scrawny little woman wielding a gun that was bigger than she was. He wanted, for some ridiculous reason, to laugh out loud.

  When it was plain that no more potshots were forthcoming, he persuaded the little mare to follow Jacob’s mule, along a narrower, upward-curving path, through clouds of rich green leaves and the clean, Christmas-scent of fir trees.

  The old woman stood on the sagging porch of her shack, even smaller than she’d appeared from a distance, a wizened, toothless little creature in a poke bonnet and a dress made of mismatched flour sacks stitched none-too-neatly together. On her tiny left foot she wore a black, lace-up boot, on her right, a slipper of some sort.

  Pres met her gaze and held it.

  “Granny, this here is Prescott Parrish,” Jacob announced. “He’s a doctor, like I said. We mean to keep him around Springwater as long as we can.”

  Granny looked Pres over and apparently found him wanting, judging by the little harumph sound she made. He hid a grin and inclined his head slightly.

  “Morning, Mrs. Johnson,” he said, in respectful tones.

  She squinted at him, as though trying to discern his innermost motives, though it was more likely that she simply needed spectacles. “You a Yankee?” she demanded, bristling with suspicion.

  Pres heaved a sigh. “No, ma’am. I’m not a Confederate, either. Just a plain American, I guess.”

  She hobbled forward a few steps, peering from beneath the wide brim of her bonnet. “I ain’t never been seen to by no doctor,” she said. “Never had the need. But I reckon if Jacob McCaffrey will keep company with you, you’re probably a decent feller.”

  Pres’s natural bent toward the practice of medicine had edged aside his own discomforts; he dismounted, tethered the mare to a sapling that grew beside an old, rusted water pump, and untied his bag, having lashed it to the saddle horn before setting out from Springwater. He stood before Granny, looking up because she was on the step and he was still on the ground, and addressed her bluntly, as he did all his patients. “Have you got the rheumatism all through your system, or just in that foot?” He nodded to indicate her slippered foot.

  “My whole right side pains me some,” Granny admitted, though grudgingly. “It’s a sight worse from my hip on down, though.”

  Pres nodded again. “Well, let’s have a look,” he said.

  Granny’s dried-apple face showed alarm. “You mean, you want to see my bare hide?”

  He swallowed a chuckle. “Your virtue is safe with me, Mrs. Johnson. I’m a doctor.”

  Granny squinted at Jacob, still towering against the lightening sky on the back of that mule. He looked, to Pres, like an Old Testament prophet, a solemn herald of wrath and destruction. “You’ll come a-runnin’ if I holler for you?” the old lady asked.

  To his credit, Jacob cracked a smile. He swung down off the mule’s back and tethered both his mount and Pres’s to a hitching rail that didn’t look strong enough to restrain a spindly-legged calf. “Yup,” Jacob said.

  Granny pondered. “Well,” she said, at long last, “all right, then. You come on in, Doc, and I’ll hitch up my skirts.”

  Pres tossed a wry glance to Jacob over one shoulder, and followed Granny into her cabin. The inside was typical of such places, he supposed, and certainly better than he was used to after four years of improvised military hospitals, set up in everything from open fields to musty tents and appropriated horse barns. There was no bed, just a straw pallet on the floor, with one quilt for a cover, and that so worn that it was colorless, and the stuffing showed through. The woodstove was hardly bigger than a milk bucket, giving off only a promise of heat. Pres caught the unmistakable smell of a chamber pot too long unemptied, underlaid with the musty odor peculiar to elderly recluses like Granny.

  “When was the last time you had something to eat?” he asked, in a deliberately gruff tone that implied she might have feasted on any number of delicacies, had she but chosen to do so. In actual fact, he didn’t feel sorry for her, except when it came to the pain of her rheumatism. She seemed happy enough to him, otherwise.

  “I been eatin’ right along,” Granny said, none too graciously. “Miss June-bug McCaffrey was up here recentlike, and she brought me some victuals and made me take them. I just used up the last of ’em this mornin’.”

  “You like living out here, all by yourself?” Pres said, in what was for him a companionable tone of voice. He heard Jacob out on the porch, caught the tantalizing scent of pipe smoke.

  Granny seemed to relax a little. “This here’s my home. Ain’t lived nowhere else in all the time since I got hitched. I ain’t goin’ to town, so don’t you start in on me about it.”

  He grinned. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. Then he set his medical kit on an upended crate, weathered to gray, and snapped the catch. Something of his father always rose to meet him when he opened it, a scent maybe, too subtle to discern consciously, or the ghost of a faded memory.

  “Jacob!” Granny whooped, all of the sudden.

  The old man opened the door, though slowly. He and Pres exchanged glances. “What?”

  Granny made a shooing motion with one hand. “You can go on,” she said. “I’ve taken a likin’ to the doc here. I reckon he’s all right.”

  Jacob’s eyes smiled, if his mouth didn’t. He nodded. “I’ll go and catch one of those chickens out there,” he said, pausing on the threshold. “I could put the bird on to stew before the doc and me head back down to Springwater.”

  “Don’t you go slaughterin’ one of my layin’ hens by mistake, Jacob McCaffrey,” Granny warned, peering at her old friend. “You chase down that old red one with the missin’ wing.”

  Pres wanted to laugh, not from derision, not from irony, but for the joy of it, for all the reasons he used to laugh, before the titans of the North and the South had driven their children into bloody conflict, leaving him and others like him to attend to the horrific consequences. The memories would always be with him, he knew that; he had absorbed and assimilated them into his very being, like food he’d eaten and air he’d breathed. But, oddly, they seemed more deeply buried in those mundane moments, far less immediate than usual. Maybe it had begun, this deep-seated and mysterious change in him, when he’d delivered Miranda Leebrook’s baby, though it more likely had to do with Savannah, and the kiss they’d shared.

  “Lie down on that pallet over there,” he told Granny quietly, “and let’s see that hip of yours.”

  Jacob pursed his mouth, but his Indian-dark eyes were sparkling as he retreated to assassinate an unsuspecting chicken, closing the door behind him.

  Granny gave Pres one more looking-over, then made that harumph sound again and hobbled over to the pallet. She lay down on her left side, facing the wall, and hiked up her skirts.

  Pres had expected inflammation, but he was unpr
epared for the degree of swelling he actually found. Granny Johnson weighed about as much as a tobacco pouch full of dried bird bones, and her crepe-paper skin looked fragile enough to crumble into dust at a touch, but the flesh covering her hip and the length of her thigh was distended, hard and hot. The pain, he thought, swallowing a low whistle of exclamation, must have been excruciating.

  He yearned, in those moments, for proper supplies—opiates, camphor, and the like, but he was down to a quarter bottle of laudanum and a few tinctures and powders. His equipment consisted of the most basic tools of the trade: scalpels, various needles and catgut for sutures, a stethoscope, a mallet for testing reflexes. A saw. God help him, always and forever, a saw.

  “Well?” Granny demanded, fractious again. He didn’t blame her, there being no kind of grace in her position. “You through lookin’ yet? It ain’t like I don’t feel the breeze.”

  Pres smiled and replaced the time-grayed petticoat and tattered skirts as gently as he could. “You have a washtub around this place, Mrs. Johnson?” he asked, when she rolled over and sat up, her bright chicken eyes narrowed. “Something you could bathe in?”

  “You remarkin’ upon somethin’ personal?” she wanted to know.

  “I wouldn’t think of it,” Pres disavowed, though, of course, he’d been doing precisely that all along. More than Granny’s temperament had gone sour; she probably hadn’t taken a bar of soap to that leathery hide of hers since before Lincoln left Springfield. “Hot water might ease you a little, let you rest.”

  “Corn whiskey’ll do the same,” Granny responded, sitting up and settling her skirts modestly around her. “Don’t need no fancy Yankee-fied doctor telling me how to look after myself, neither.” She paused, peering at him speculatively. “’Less, of course, you happen to have some corn whiskey in that bag of your’n.”

  Pres had dealt with much more obdurate types than Granny, and he wasn’t afraid to let her know it. Unruffled, he looked her straight in the eye and said, “No whiskey. Furthermore, if I have to haul you down to Springwater and dunk you in hot water myself, I’ll do it.”

  Granny glared at him for a long time before finally settling her feathers. “All right, then,” she said. “But if I die of the pneumonia, my passin’ll be on your conscience.”

  *

  Savannah wore the garnet gown with the black lace, that first day as mistress of the Brimstone Saloon, just to get it over with. She painted her face and piled all her hair on top of her head in a saucy tumble of curls, and pulled on fishnet stockings and high-heeled slippers for effect.

  The first person she met, leaving her room, was June-bug, who couldn’t quite hide her misgivings. Miranda, a surprisingly resilient soul, had already emerged from her confinement, and was sitting at one of the trestle tables, puzzling over an open book.

  “Joseph and all his brothers!” June-bug exclaimed softly, upon seeing Savannah, one hand splayed over the bosom of her own modest, everyday dress. It was a brown and white calico print with touches of blue that accented the color of her eyes. “You don’t even look like the same person as before.”

  Miranda looked up, then down again, quickly. It was plain enough, though, that she was as startled as June-bug had been.

  Savannah could have told her friend—at least, she hoped Mrs. McCaffrey was still her friend—that indeed she was looking upon someone quite different from the Savannah she was just beginning to know. It seemed futile to explain that this was merely a costume she wore, for a role she played, in order to earn a living. She could have solved the problem by marrying—she’d had more offers than she could count over the years—but for her, entering into matrimony with a man she didn’t love would have been a very real sort of whoring. Besides that, even though she mostly knew better, she was still afraid.

  When Savannah didn’t speak, couldn’t speak, June-bug peered into her face, squinting a little. “You all right?” she asked. “You look as if your knees might be saggin’ just a little.”

  Savannah swallowed. “There are reasons for who—what I am,” she finally said, in misery.

  June-bug laid a hand on her shoulder, left all but bare by the dress. “I reckon that’s true of all of us,” she said. “For better and for worse.”

  Already, the sounds of horses could be heard in the road out front, underlaid by the more distant bawling of cattle. That meant thirsty cowboys, willing to pay for a song or two as well as copious amounts of whiskey. Trey had warned her that large and small herds would be driven through town deep into the fall, there being a plentitude of water at the springs.

  Savannah wanted to stay, wanted to pour it all out to June-bug, how Burke had said he loved her, when all the while he was lying, and the law was after him. How her father had blamed her, not Burke, and refused to speak to her until the day he died, and how the grief of it all had killed her grandmother. In the end, though, she couldn’t risk it.

  “You don’t have to do this,” June-bug said. “Trey’s been runnin’ that place right along, and he can go on doin’ it.” Miranda had closed her book and was no longer even pretending not to listen.

  Savannah sighed, then shook her head. “I’ve got to do my part,” she said, as much to herself as to June-bug. “Half the business is mine, after all.”

  June-bug had taken both Savannah’s hands in her own, and she held on to them for a moment longer, dropping them only after a final, fierce squeeze. “Them cowboys, they might not understand about you being a lady,” she said softly.

  Savannah could have kissed the woman, just for assuming the best the way she had. For believing. “I’ve dealt with many a cowboy and lived to tell the tale,” she answered, with a slight smile. “Most of them are just harmless kids, you know, trying to figure out how to be men.” She didn’t add that she was carrying the derringer in the pocket hidden among the folds of her dress. She had never shot another human being, man nor boy, and she prayed that the necessity would not arise, but she was ready nonetheless.

  “And some are no better’n outlaws,” June-bug added. “I’ve seen bitter, hard-eyed men ridin’ with these herds since me and Jacob have been out here. The war done somethin’ to their souls, made killin’ an everyday matter.”

  There was nothing Savannah could say to that, for she knew it was true. It would be a hundred years at least, she reckoned, before the scars of the great conflict were properly healed. Maybe longer.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said, and turned from June-bug, with a nod to Miranda, turned from quiet pleasures, household tasks like sweeping and cooking and putting food by for winter. From tea-drinking and quilt-stitching and gentle talk. There were tears in her eyes as she set her face for the Brimstone Saloon. Trey was across the road from the station, shovel in hand, digging the foundation for his and Rachel’s mail-order house, but Savannah pretended not to see him and went on.

  She entered the saloon—her saloon—by the front doors, and was greeted by a nod from the bartender and the interested leers of a dozen pimply-faced boys, hardly old enough to wear long pants, let alone drink rotgut whiskey, chew tobacco, and gamble away their paltry wages.

  One of them made an audacious whooping sound upon seeing Savannah walk in, and then added a suggestive comment; she sought, found, and advanced upon the culprit with such pride and purpose that he backed up hard against the bar and went right on trying to retreat. His compatriots chuckled among themselves. Color climbed the cowboy’s grimy face, and his eyes glittered, as though with fever. His Adam’s apple bobbed up to his tonsils and back down again. Savannah felt the weight of the silk-swathed derringer against her hip, but she knew she would not be required to use it. The kid wasn’t mean, merely ill mannered, and if she was going to start shooting people for that, she’d soon run out of customers.

  “What’s your name?” she demanded, hands on her hips.

  “J-Jimmy,” said the boy. “Jimmy Franks.”

  “Well, Jimmy Franks,” Savannah went on, “it seems to me that your manners leave some
thing to be desired. You’d best address me respectfully from now on, if you don’t want me to toss you head first into the horse trough.”

  The others laughed and, after a nervous interval, during which his face got even redder than before, so did Jimmy. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and doffed his filthy, weather-beaten hat to her.

  Savannah winked at the bartender. “Give this man a drink,” she said. “On me.” With that, she went to the piano, raised the lid, and sat down on the rickety stool with a flounce of her red-ruffled skirts. After flexing her fingers briefly, she began to play a sprightly tune, and then to sing, and soon all the cowboys were singing with her.

  When they reluctantly took their leave, sometime in the early afternoon, they were promptly replaced by the men they had relieved. The herd was a constant presence, a low rumble filling the sky with dirt.

  Trey came to look in on Savannah just as the changing of the guard was taking place, bringing a sandwich wrapped in a cloth napkin, compliments of June-bug. “Looks like a lively crew,” he said, assessing the dirty, travel-worn revelers.

  Savannah, seated at the only empty table, with Trey across from her, delicately unwrapped the sandwich. Egg salad, with onions and plenty of butter. She nodded in agreement to Trey’s statement and bit in appreciatively. She had not realized, until the food arrived, that she was ravenous.

  “You have any trouble with them?” Trey prompted, meaning the cowboys, of course.

  Savannah chewed, swallowed, and dabbed at her mouth with the napkin before shaking her head. “They’re just a bunch of overgrown boys,” she said. “Nobody here I can’t handle.”

  Trey’s expression was solemn. “Rachel doesn’t think you ought to be left here alone,” he said. “I’ll come and take over for you in an hour or so, after I’ve had time to wash up and rest awhile.”

  Savannah was touched by his concern, and especially by Rachel’s, yearning for respectable woman friends as she did, but she was more than equal to a room full of saddle-sore cowboys, rowdy or not, and by her accounting, Trey deserved some time off from the Brimstone. “You just stay away,” she ordered good-naturedly, “and give me a chance to get the feel of this place. I sunk a fair bit of money into it, after all, and I’ll do my part to run it, with no special favors asked.”