Oddity

by Eli Brown

  “What’s the trick?” Clover wanted to know. “How do you survive the bite? It’s not the tonic.”

  Nessa hesitated, then turned the jar slightly. The snake writhed angrily at the disturbance. “Look from this angle,” Nessa said. “What do you see?”

  “It’s all heaped up on one side . . .” Clover said.

  “There’s a glass partition right down the middle. If I slide my hand into the safe side, the snake strikes the glass. It only looks like I get bit. Now you know.” Nessa shut the panel, closing the snake safely in the wagon. Her hand rested on the latch as if to keep everything from bursting forth. “I wasn’t supposed to show that.”

  “It’s a shame, what happened to your uncle,” Clover said, wishing she had medicine for grieving hearts.

  “It feels good to talk about these things.”

  “Secrets can be hard to carry,” Clover said. “Especially for an openhearted person.”

  Nessa’s eyes sparkled in the lantern light. “I am openhearted, aren’t I?”

  “I would say so,” Clover said.

  Nessa considered this for a moment. “Marsh wine!” she blurted, cracking into a guilty grin. “There, I said it. Bleakerman’s Cure-All Tonic is marsh wine mixed with a little molasses to take the pucker out!”

  “But I saw you drink it!” Clover gasped.

  “It’s not so bad,” Nessa said, giggling. “I strain the chunky bits out. The trick is not to breathe through your nose.”

  Nessa was now laughing so hard she snorted, which made Clover laugh too. And soon they couldn’t stop. Clover’s heart was a tired tangle, and the laughter kept coming as they stumbled back to the light of the fire. Nessa brayed until she coughed. Clover found this hilarious. She was crying as she laughed, coming completely undone . . . but then, who was there to be tidy for? Hannibal’s startled expression only tickled her more. Trying to stop laughing was like trying to get a cork back into one of Widow Henshaw’s root beers. She let the laughter tumble out, opening her mouth wide to the sky and howling, startling the roosting pigeons out of the trees. The bewildered birds tumbled around them, like laughter made visible.

  “So you’ve seen the Wine Marsh?” Clover asked, wiping her cheeks dry. “Seen it with your own eyes?”

  “And smelled it!” Nessa said. “Law and lye, what a stench! A sea of wine turning to vinegar in the sun. Nothing lives there but flies and fiends.”

  Clover remembered her father’s lectures about the catastrophe that made the marsh. “A Wineglass that is always full,” he’d said. “It seems like a wonderful oddity, no? But someone left it overturned, and the wine pours out and out. Like a river, day and night, the wine gushes, knowing no decency, knowing no limits! A leak becomes a lake. Now the valley is flooded with it, and the marsh just grows year after year . . .”

  “So the stories are true,” Clover said.

  “A vast sea of scum,” Hannibal said. “They should call it the vinegar marsh. Many have tried to find that Wineglass. But the marsh has a way of turning a person around until they get lost and die of thirst. Even geese drop out of the sky above it, killed by the vapors.”

  “How can you sell that as medicine?” Clover asked.

  Nessa was quiet for a long time.

  “I am in debt to some unkind men. If I don’t pay them . . .” She left the consequences unspoken. “Used to be, I worked for Uncle, and every day was stories and songs — and now I have to pay for the wagon repairs and the sick horses. This is the fate that fell to me. I don’t have to apologize for it; I only have to survive it.”

  Her face flushed, her freckles seeming to multiply as emotion filled her.

  “How much is your debt, child?” Hannibal asked gently.

  “I don’t rightly know.” Nessa sniffed. “They fixed the wagon after the accident and told me they’d let me know when I was done paying them off.”

  “Why, you’re getting robbed,” Hannibal said.

  “I know that.” Nessa poked the fire with a stick, sending firefly cinders into the air.

  “Why do you keep paying them?” Clover asked.

  “Didn’t I just say that they are unkind?”

  “Mighty unkind, I guess,” Clover said, trying to sound understanding.

  “They’re the meanest.” With that, Nessa led the horses to a low-hanging oak to feed and tie them for the night. Then she unfurled a bedroll and sat sulking with her knees drawn to her chest.

  Clover pulled a pear-yellow shawl from her haversack, one that Widow Henshaw had knitted years ago. It was still damp, but Clover drew it over her shoulders, knowing that wet wool was better than nothing. The smoke of the fire was between them. “Someday you’ll put this behind you and sing opera instead,” Clover said. “You could learn Italian.”

  “That voice of yours is one treasure that cannot be stolen,” Hannibal said over his shoulder as he strutted away from the firelight. “Until morning, brave soldiers!”

  When Hannibal had roosted in the branches near the horses, Clover lay down, trying to ignore the dampness that crept through her shawl. Nessa lay with her back just a few feet from the embers, but Clover did not trust any fire enough to get that close.

  They were back on the road shortly after sunrise. The dew adorned the grass and the horses gave off the comforting smell of animal warmth. Nessa was in a foul mood, having woken with an ant in her ear, and Hannibal was pacing in restless circles on the roof of the wagon, so they rode in silence, which was fine with Clover, who liked a morning unsullied by talk.

  Having examined everything else in her father’s bag, Clover pulled out something she knew wasn’t an oddity: a vial of dandelion seeds, no bigger than her little finger. She’d remembered it in the middle of the night but hadn’t wanted to lose it in the darkness. Now she rolled it in the morning light, the fairy-fragile seeds shifting behind the thin glass, and the memory of her father’s last patient washed over her.

  “Clean towel!” Constantine called. “The baby will come soon.”

  The towels had not been clean for hours, but hot was almost as good as clean. Clover wrung the scalding water out of the rag before handing it to Constantine at the foot of the Washoes’ corn-husk mattress.

  The baby had gotten lost on its way into the world. Mrs. Washoe was so drained by her three days of labor that she opened her eyes only to moan and holler, as if trying to wake from a nightmare. Occasionally the horses outside added their huffs to her groans, but the only other sound was the muffled growl of the rain on the earthen walls.

  Buffalo-shaped clouds shook sheets of water onto the grasslands. Puddles had already begun to seep up through the packed-clay floor. Clover didn’t trust sod houses, slabs of earth leaning together like something a badger might hibernate in. The front door was only a stiff cowhide curtain, but Mrs. Washoe had decorated the walls with plaited grass wreaths and fragrant bundles of bee balm.

  “And if the walls slip and bury us alive?” Clover muttered, but the men paid no attention; they were watching Mrs. Washoe fall asleep between contractions.

  The Sawtooth Prairie was disputed territory, straddling the no-man’s-land separating Louisiana from the eleven unified states. It was as lawless as it was shadeless; only locusts and cougars were really at home here. With no trees in sight, the rare houses were cut from the earth itself, and the cooking fires burned cow dung. Yet the free and arable soil still tempted some, like the Washoes, to try their luck farming the tattered edge of the Unified States. From a distance, their home looked as stubborn and exposed as a tick on a horse’s back.

  Mrs. Washoe whimpered. The baby had never turned the right way, which made things dangerous. Mr. Washoe was a stringy man with a sloppy beard like a used dish towel. Because there was no room to pace, he rocked on his heels, his loving eyes fixed on his laboring wife.

  “The midwife never came?” Clover asked.

  Mr. Washoe shook his head miserably.

  “Because your wife is Louisianan,” Constantine announced.

&
nbsp; “You know?”

  “The pile of boiled snail shells in the yard tells your secret,” Constantine said. “Do you season the escargot with wild mustard?”

  Mr. Washoe nodded, stunned.

  “Ils ont meilleur goût de cette façon.” Constantine patted Mrs. Washoe’s arm reassuringly. “They taste better that way. Twenty years since the war, and still people are poisoned by hate. Maybe this baby will be the one to show us how to live together, yes? Light!”

  Clover turned the wick up until the flame danced in the glass and held it just over her father’s shoulder.

  She envied the little naps Mrs. Washoe was getting. She watched her father pull the woman’s eyelid back and mutter, “Good, good.”

  Gute, gute.

  Clover hardly noticed his accent, but she knew patients respected it. When their own remedies failed, they were glad to have the Old World medicines, and just the sight of his heavy leather bag with its steel implements and glass ampules was enough to make some of them feel better.

  Mr. Washoe wrung his felt hat to a sorry wad, the portrait of desperation. Clover had seen men like that faint, and she’d also seen them lash out, breaking tables or bones with sudden violence. Neither mother nor baby was out of the woods, but it was this husband that worried Clover. She wished he would faint so they could drag him outside and be done with his panic.

  “The baby’s bungled because we slept in the moonlight,” Mr. Washoe admitted suddenly. He stooped under the low ceiling, chewing his bottom lip. “It’s my fault; I should have known better. A full moon and everything.”

  Clover waited for her father to set him straight. Constantine usually swatted superstitions down with the same ruthlessness he afforded horseflies. But, to her surprise, Constantine nodded and said, “In that case, we must have the dandelion seeds.”

  Clover straightened up, baffled. “The what?”

  “Dan-de-lion,” Constantine pronounced. “Don’t tell me we have none?”

  Before Clover could protest that they’d never carried such a remedy, Constantine grabbed an empty vial and shoved it into Mr. Washoe’s hands. “Fill this with dandelion seeds. Go now.”

  And just like that, Mr. Washoe rushed out into the squelching prairie. Constantine examined Mrs. Washoe’s belly again, placing the French stethoscope, like a little trumpet, above her navel until he could confirm the infant’s heartbeat through the copper tube.

  Clover waited until he was done and then whispered, “Dandelion seeds? It’s a fool’s errand to keep him out of our hair!”

  “No,” Constantine chided her. “The seeds are not for us. They are for him. Fear is its own agony and deserves treatment. When people are afraid, they need something to do.”

  Six contractions later, Mr. Washoe was back with a full vial, and Clover saw that the medicine had worked. Standing useless, Mr. Washoe had been as twitchy as a trapped rat, but now he was flushed and proud, his tortured hat back on his head where it belonged. The rain would have knocked every flower flat, and yet he had somehow found enough seeds to fill the glass.

  “It’s all I could get,” he panted.

  “It is enough.” Constantine gave him a solemn nod and slipped the vial under Mrs. Washoe’s pillow. “Good, good.”

  And then, as if the seeds really were magic, Mrs. Washoe woke with a new kind of wail, as if she were being torn in half. Clover held the lamp, and her father announced, “The child shows its arse at last! She is having a joke at us.”

  “But isn’t that backward?” Mr. Washoe asked.

  “It’s far too late for forward,” said Constantine, taking the lamp and surrendering his stool to Clover.

  Clover had never caught a baby before, but she knew this test had been coming. She sat just in time for a slick leg to emerge. She tried to keep pressure in the right places, as she had seen her father do. The arse came out like an unripe peach, and the other leg, then the rest of the baby, all at once.

  The baby mewled, alive and whole, a girl with a rumpled gray scowl already turning pink. Clover quickly wrapped her in a quilt that had been warming near the fire. When she tried to hand the bundle to Constantine, her father said, “It’s not my baby! Put her on the mother’s chest, first thing. Mother is the baby’s best medicine.”

  He washed his hands with the last of the brandy, giving Clover a nod of approval before taking his seat on the stool to cut the cord and check for bad bleeding.

  Clover helped Mrs. Washoe position the baby as it wailed. Welcome ruckus! Soon the baby was suckling to the sound of the parents’ wet-eyed laughter. Everyone was alive and breathing. Clover saw then how Constantine had been taking care of them all in that sodden room. In all her life, he had never let Clover feel useless or afraid.

  When the afterbirth came, Mrs. Washoe hardly noticed. She was weeping with a mix of exhaustion and love that Clover couldn’t look away from. She’d seen it before with healthy births, and it made any woman, no matter how smeared, shine like the full moon. Had Miniver looked just this way when she first held Clover?

  But Clover was exhausted too, and she spoke without thinking: “Born butt first in the middle of a gulley washer. I hope you have a good name for her.”

  “We’ll name her Dandelion,” Mrs. Washoe said, giving Clover a knowing smile. She’d heard everything.

  It was a brave thing they were doing, an American and a Louisianan making a family here in the unforgiving borderlands where the grass had been trampled red long ago. But, Clover thought, dandelions had a way of surviving.

  “Keep baby clean, but warm is more important,” Constantine told Mr. Washoe before taking up his medical bag and dropping the vial into it. “Mother needs to eat meat, but she drinks only boiled water. Teas and broth. Understood? Baby drinks only mother’s milk.”

  The storm had wrung itself out, and Clover was glad to be saddling the horses in nothing more than a drizzle. Constantine emerged and began strapping the bags to the horses. The long bedside vigil had bent his mustache, making him look like a clock dropped off the back of a wagon. But he was smiling.

  “Your mother taught me that,” he said. “The dandelions. She was helping during the cholera in New Manchester, a terrible time. We’d set up an emergency clinic in a church, and the pews were filled with families waiting, worried. Miniver saw their suffering, the suffering of the healthy. The whole churchyard was picked clean of dandelions that week!” Constantine chuckled, and the memory of that precious sound carried Clover into the present.

  Now, clutching the vial to her chest, Clover could almost hear it. She felt all of them together, Miniver, Constantine, and herself, held close for just a moment, seeds from the same flower. Then, like her father’s laughter, the feeling faltered and was gone.

  With the wagon rocking her, Clover tied the glass vial to a leather cord and hung it around her neck, making a necklace of her family. It was not an oddity, but it was powerful, proof of the goodness she had come from.

  Clover filled her lungs with morning air and wanted music. “Do you have a song for us, Nessa?”

  Nessa thought for a moment and then leaped into an anthem: “What bright lights will lead us through the night, and what hope yet glimmers on the water?” Nessa’s throat trembled as she forged the silver notes. “Press on, press on. Hope glimmers on the water!”

  “Do you know what water that is, children?” Hannibal interrupted. “That song recounts the battle of Herrod’s Lake, during which I led a fleet of canoes under cover of night against the French fort in —”

  “It’s a war song?” Nessa looked disappointed.

  “It is a patriotic commemoration of a key victory against Louisiana.”

  “It takes two to make a war,” Nessa said.

  “Another of your uncle’s sayings?” Hannibal asked. “And just what was he doing during the Louisiana War?”

  “My grandparents owned an inn on the Melapoma River,” Nessa answered proudly. “Twenty clean rooms and hot food for the folks trading on the river. Music every
night. But when the war came, neither side wanted the other to use the docks, so the inn was shelled from east and west, shot all to splinters. My grandparents were buried in rubble, and Uncle hid in a pickle barrel in a ditch for three days, listening to the muskets crackle. Then he ran barefoot all the way to New Manchester.”

  “Your uncle could have picked up a rifle and joined his country against Bonaparte.” Hannibal’s talons clicked on the top of the wagon as he paced in a tight circle. “Or, better yet, secured those docks for our boats.”

  Nessa shrugged. “Uncle had a short leg, and anyway, he said his time in the barrel put him off pickles and guns for the rest of his life.”

  “Pickles and guns?” Hannibal was offended.

  “When Uncle got to New Manchester,” Nessa said, “the opera hall was boarded up, but musicians were still practicing on the marble steps, playing free for anyone who cared to listen. Uncle said that the musicians were the brave ones.”

  “Musicians do not advance the front lines!” The hackles on Hannibal’s neck frilled in exasperation.

  “All I know is that both sides shot at the inn while my uncle waved a white kerchief out the attic window, begging them to stop. If not for that, my grandparents might be alive. Uncle might not have started selling Bleakerman’s and he might be alive. I could be baking bread and singing for the guests and sleeping on a down bed every night, instead of riding this wagon over the bony ribs of the world.”

  The argument was interrupted when they turned a corner and had to pull the horses up abruptly. The highway was choked with travelers waiting for their turn at a borderland security checkpoint. Dozens of brusque soldiers had detained merchants on their way into the city, and some looked like they’d been sitting in the sun for hours. They watched as the soldiers cut open sacks of buckwheat and cornmeal in a field littered with possessions. Clover was relieved that the guards recognized Hannibal right away and waved Nessa’s wagon through.