Oddity

by Eli Brown

  “Tincture of vervain,” Clover muttered, pulling her hat down so he wouldn’t see her tears.

  “You’ll make a good doctor yet,” he said.

  The forest air cooled Clover’s burning cheeks. Even before she heard the mill wheel, she could smell the particular perfume of home: cut pine, smoked fish, and Widow Henshaw’s yeasty doughs.

  It was almost noon when they clopped onto the bridge. The mill wheel turned gaily in the high waters of the river that fed the lake — the ceaseless plish-plash that had been Clover’s lullaby for as long as she could remember. She saw a thin stream of smoke coming from the chimney of their cabin. This meant Widow Henshaw had kept their rooms warm. For all her yearning for adventure, Clover was glad to see home. Soon she would be pulling off her boots and curling under a quilt for a long nap.

  The river was a rapid hiss under the bridge. Clover was trying not to think about the Ice Hook stuck in the mud at the bottom of the lake, when her father pulled his horse to a sudden stop.

  On the far side of the bridge, a band of strangers sat waiting on their horses, blocking the path.

  It was dark under the pines, but Clover could see they were hard men dressed like trappers, with beaver-fur coats and fringed boots.

  “I have a rash that itches terrible!” one of them shouted. He was the only one without a beard. “You have a remedy for that, good doctor?”

  Clover wondered if she was dreaming when she saw rabbit ears coming out of his hat. But when he scratched his neck, Clover saw that the ears had been sewn there.

  Another trapper, big as a bear, laughed. “An’ my urine smells like oysters!”

  “Oh, shut up, Bolete,” the rabbit-eared man said. “The doctor ain’t interested in your urine.”

  Constantine whispered to Clover, “Dismount.”

  “Why —?”

  “Dismount!”

  Clover obeyed, putting her feet on the bridge and patting her nervous horse on the neck.

  Constantine swung himself down and unstrapped his medical bag. Clover pulled her own haversack over her shoulder, her heart pounding.

  “Don’t you have a salve or ointment or some such?” The rabbit-eared man took a pipe from his mouth and used it to scratch the back of his neck. “No cure but the grave, I reckon. Eh, Dr. Elkin?”

  Constantine pressed his medical bag into Clover’s hands. He kept pushing until her back was against the low rail of the bridge.

  “Father, who are those men?”

  “I only kept one oddity,” Constantine whispered, his whiskers against her cheek. “Only one.”

  “What are you saying?” Clover was trembling. She’d never seen her father this way.

  “It is . . . neobkhodimyy,” he said.

  It was one of the few Russian words that Clover knew. It meant “necessary.” Her father used it only for things that really mattered. A heart was neobkhodimyy. An eye, a hand, even a kidney were not.

  He pressed the bag against her until she was hugging it. “It holds hope. You must keep it safe. The Society will protect you.”

  Clover gasped, but he kept talking, his voice gritty with urgency. “Go to Aaron Agate in New Manchester. Look for the canary among doves.”

  The man named Bolete interrupted. “Don’t be rude! Come greet us proper.”

  The rabbit-eared man said, “That is Miniver’s girl there, ain’t it? String me up if I didn’t think you all was dead.”

  “Take a deep breath,” Constantine whispered.

  “Father, I’m sorry,” Clover blurted. “I’ll never touch another oddity —”

  Constantine gripped her shoulders hard, stopping her words.

  “You won’t let them catch you,” he said. “You’ll hide. You will find the Society and you won’t come back here looking for me, ever.” He kissed her forehead, then ducked low and grabbed Clover’s boots.

  Before she knew it, Clover was lifted, toppling over the railing. She turned once in the air and heard the men shouting as she fell.

  The water punched the breath out of her. Clover rolled in a roaring darkness. It was everything she could do to hold on to the bags. She twisted in the current, her shoulder knocking hard against a rock.

  When she found the surface, she gasped and tried to keep her head up as the river shoved her toward the lake. The eddies spun her around, and she saw the bandits seize her father. They struggled. A gunshot cracked the air and an arterial arc of blood leaped from her father’s chest.

  From the churning water, she watched her father fall lifeless.

  Clover choked on her scream and felt herself going numb. She saw herself from above, as a doll twisting in the pitiless river.

  The paddle of the waterwheel chopped down, bruising her arm and bringing Clover back to her body. She looked up to see the next paddle dropping like a hammer. She dove deep to avoid being clobbered. When she emerged, sputtering, on the other side, she could no longer see the bridge.

  Suddenly, the rabbit-eared man appeared on the bank just a few yards away. He held a smoldering match in his hand. Not even a hummingbird could have darted around the mill that quickly. He had somehow snapped from one place to the other in an instant.

  With a snarl, he dropped the blackened match and dashed into the water to grab at Clover. Terror blurred her vision as the current pulled her just out of his reach.

  He tried to wade after her, holding his pistol and a box of matches over his head. He was up to his belt and hollered to the others, “Hurry, boys, I can’t swim! She’s floatin’ away!”

  The river raked her over a rocky shoal, and then Clover found herself in the wide lake. The rush of the current continued to push her far from shore, until she could no longer see the murderous men on the riverbank. With the bags weighing her down, she struggled to keep her head above the water. The boats were on the other side of the lake, chasing the schools of lunkhead fish, too far away to hear her screams.

  The northern bank was so muddy that Clover scrambled on her hands and knees to keep from losing her boots in the sludge, dragging her bags behind her. From this side of the lake, the village looked like a handful of chestnuts scattered on shore. When she could finally stand, Clover found herself stumbling over something slick and uneven.

  The shore of the lake was covered with stranded fish.

  Heaps of them lay dead and dying, their mouths open in dumb surprise. Striped bass and bluegills shimmered in the afternoon light. So many crowded the shore that Clover kicked them aside as she made her way up the bank. Thousands of eyes stared unblinking at the sky. Pickerels and perch, even a deep-water catfish the size of her leg. Their heads pointed away from the water, as if they’d all gotten the mad notion to up and walk away from their home.

  A steam of panic rose, cooking Clover from the inside. She could not draw the attention of those monsters on the other side of the lake. With her braid between her teeth to muffle her wails, she ran into the forest.

  In just a minute, Father will appear behind that crooked oak yonder, Clover thought, sobbing. He’ll be waxing his mustache and he’ll explain.

  She crashed through huckleberry and bracken fern. Her shoulder ached where it had hit the stone. She hoped it was only a contusion and not a fracture. The bags had doubled their weight by soaking up water, and they tugged with every step.

  . . . it holds hope.

  How could he have kept an oddity? It must have been in the medical bag all this time. That was why he’d pushed it into her hands. But Clover couldn’t look for it now. She kept moving.

  He’ll be just behind that tree, she assured herself.

  But Constantine was not waiting behind any of the trees she passed. He was not sitting in the lee of the fallen birch or sipping water from the moss-cushioned spring.

  Clover followed a deer trail, little more than stitches of dust woven into the mulch, hoping it would lead her to a path she knew. The mud dried and fell from her boots in flakes.

  She considered cleaning her boots to make them presen
table — a ridiculous notion. Her medical training told her that delirium was setting in. A violent shock could make a person daft. The best treatment was to wrap the patient in a warm blanket near a fire and administer brandy. Such a patient should never be left alone.

  The sound of a galloping horse made her stop.

  Help was near! She pushed through a bramble toward an open dirt trail and was about to call out when she saw one of the bandits charging toward her.

  Clover dropped into the bushes, praying she hadn’t been seen. As the rider thundered past, she froze. Terror gripped her throat as she heard the hooves rumble to a stop. The murderer was coming back.

  The tangles of the winceberry bush were too thick to run through. The thorns left beads of blood on her arms, but Clover pressed deeper into the thicket.

  The bandit pulled the horse to a stop just three feet from Clover, scanning the foliage for movement. He was the big one, called Bolete, breathing as heavily as his horse. Clover was close enough to see the man’s nostrils flaring, close enough to see, through the trembling leaves, the skulls of rodents that he’d knotted into his greasy beard.

  The murderer whistled a lonesome trill, as if summoning a wayward hound. “Girly?” he called. “Is that you?”

  For thirty seconds, a minute, Clover didn’t breathe. Despite the fire in her lungs, she held stone-still. A minute stretched toward two. Her heart slammed itself into her ribs, desperate for air.

  The horse stamped, impatient, but the bandit didn’t move. He was listening, watching. “Olly olly oxen free!” he called.

  Purple spots crowded into Clover’s vision. In a few seconds, she knew she would pass out. If she did, Bolete would hear her collapse into the branches and it would be over.

  Clover closed her eyes and turned inward, looking for silent strength. Instead of silence, she heard the grinding of a millstone.

  When Clover was nine years old, she and her father had been called to the bedside of a miller who had lost a duel. The bullet had missed the liver but not the kidney.

  “Find the source of the bleeding,” Constantine lectured as he worked. The surgery lasted almost ten hours, and the blood and screaming washed over Clover, but the thump and groan of the grain mill in the next room rattled her. There the miller’s wife was turning barley into flour because she could not afford to stop working. The relentless growl of that mill, like bone against bone, whispered something to Clover about life and death and hunger that she wished she hadn’t heard.

  And after all of her effort, tying the miller’s hands to the bedposts, pouring brandy into him until he couldn’t speak, preparing the poultices, holding the lamp and the scalpel, boiling rags, and after all of Constantine’s immaculate focus, his steady implements searching for the bullet without nicking the arteries, peering into that lurid cavern hour upon hour while the mill shook the walls, after all of that, the miller up and died. He’d waited until the bullet was out at last, dropped like a cherry pit onto the plate Clover held. He’d waited until the last suture was knotted, and the poultice was applied, and the bandage tied snug, then he’d heaved an impatient sigh and died.

  Clover hated him for it. And she hated the wife who had worked all night long. She hated that cold grindstone, even hated the powdery sacks of flour. She knew it wasn’t right, but she couldn’t help it. She packed up their supplies in a hurry while Constantine whispered to the new widow, refusing payment as he always did when things didn’t go well.

  On the way home, Clover felt the shudder of the mill in her ribs, turning into something icy. She spent three days in bed with a bad fever, nightmares of grinding teeth.

  Find the source of the bleeding.

  When she woke, she saw that her father had gone off again to attend to some distant suffering, leaving their neighbor and landlord, Widow Henshaw, to wipe her brow.

  The widow, fond of poems and boiled nettles, was so old that her face looked like a bowl of steamed prunes. She had been born into slavery but purchased and freed by northern abolitionists as a girl. She’d lived in New Manchester most of her life, working as a midwife, until her sons died in the Louisiana War. After that, grief drove Mrs. Henshaw and her husband to the quiet village by the lake, where they took solace in the filtered light and frog song.

  Mr. Henshaw cleared trees and built half the houses in the village. When he fell from a rooftop, the properties passed to his widow. Folks generally paid their rent in salted fish, dried mushrooms, and firewood.

  “What hurts?” Widow Henshaw asked. The pewter locket around her neck had tinted the skin there midnight blue.

  “That miller’s wife,” Clover said. “She wouldn’t stop working, even to hold his dying hand. I asked Father, and he just said, ‘See to the body before you.’”

  Widow Henshaw dipped the cloth in lemon balm tea and pressed it to Clover’s hot cheeks.

  “Your father heals the broken bone, the rattling lungs. Those are the battles he can win,” Widow Henshaw said. “He doesn’t have medicine for poverty, for war, for the broken heart.”

  Hearing this, Clover felt ashamed for judging that miller woman. She felt small in the shadow of her father, who gave his best even to the hopeless cases. Then Clover heard herself say something she’d been afraid to even think. “What if I’m not strong enough?”

  The widow didn’t answer right away. She never hurried; she endured. “You’ll have your own battles to win,” Widow Henshaw finally said. “And lose.” She lifted a spoonful of duck soup to Clover’s lips. “Now eat.”

  Clover could hold it no longer — air burst from her and she gasped, filling her lungs as she opened her eyes. The memory of the widow’s bedside tenderness had given her a few more seconds. Just enough. The bandit was gone.

  Clover drew ragged breaths as she freed herself from the briar. “You are hunted, Clover Elkin,” she whispered to herself. “No trails. No roads. No more stupid mistakes.”

  She pushed through the forest, making a confused course that even a fox would have trouble tracking.

  When the ground began to slope upward, Clover knew she’d reached the edge of the little valley she’d called home. Before her loomed the breathless expanse of the Centurion Mountains, stretching north through the state of Farrington. Sometimes called “the shrouded mountains” because of the veils of fog that furled through its valleys, the range formed a natural barrier between the French plains and the American cities of the East Coast. The Centurions were largely unmapped, untamed, dense with bears and crumbling cliffs and worse. She’d never been this deep in the woods alone.

  A robin in the leaves startled her into motion again. She tied her haversack to the medical bag so she could wear both over her shoulders like a yoke and pushed deeper into the woodland, where, even at midday, crickets trilled in the shadows.

  She realized that a good tracker might be able to follow the flakes of mud from her boots, so she scrubbed them hard on a rotten log and then wiped them clean with a wad of fern, staining them green.

  Staying off trail made it impossible to get her bearings. “When unsure of your position,” Clover reminded herself, “the best course of action is to stay put. Build a fire.” Clover did the opposite. She stamped through a little creek, zigzagged up into dells she was sure no one had walked before.

  Clover got herself good and lost.

  It was late afternoon when she found a lightning-struck oak whose hollow trunk created a den with a carpet of leaves and lichen. At last, she set the bags down.

  She sat, surrounded by a shield of gray wood. Everything hurt: her legs, her shoulder, the blisters on her heels, the chafing where the bags had hung from her neck, but none of that mattered. There was nowhere to hide from the awful fact.

  “Father is dead.”

  She choked on her tears until she felt like a wrung-out rag and the shadows leaned toward dusk.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry . . .” She chewed her braid until it was soaked with spit.

  She tried to make sense of his l
ast words. Why would he have kept an oddity? Why would he send her to Aaron Agate if he despised collectors? Agate had been an explorer in his younger days, charting the Melapoma River in a bearskin canoe. He’d edited the journals Clover had secretly read. She’d studied the portrait of Mr. Agate in a beaver-skin hat and had longed to shake his hand someday. If she had known this was how her wish would be granted, she would have burned those journals herself.

  “So sorry . . .”

  The answers were in the medical bag. Clover snapped open the brass latch. The odors were comforting: the mink oil her father applied to keep the leather supple, camphor and turpentine, mercury salts. The implements, blurred by tears, swam before her as if still under water. She grabbed the first thing her fingers grazed: a bundle of mustard plasters. The medicated gauze was usually placed on the chest to pull infection out of the lungs.

  Clover gasped. The gauze was heavier than it ought to be. Her hand began tingling, then burning . . .

  Then she realized her mistake and threw it back into the bag, feeling foolish. The plasters weren’t odd, they were just soggy. The lake water was activating the mustard powder, irritating her skin. They were useless now, ruined.

  Clover tried again, reaching in and retrieving the silver-plated pincers. Could they be the oddity her father meant? They’d pulled splinters, chips of bone, and bullets from hundreds of patients. With trembling hands, Clover gripped her thumbnail with the pincers and gave it a painful tug. She tugged the hem of her shirt, and then her hair. Nothing. She placed them back in the bag, just so.

  Clover shook her head, baffled. Constantine was a man who would sterilize tools with vinegar if hot water wasn’t available, who would happily survive on dry oats and manzanita berries for days at a time. For him, few things were truly necessary. He used the word neobkhodimyy only for things he couldn’t do without: clean hands, patience . . .