by Laura Briggs
“Thank you,” Jenna said. She opened the cover. No date or name was inscribed to give her a clue how it related to her work. Still, Josephine must have thought it would be helpful. That was reason enough to look through it, and to cherish it in the memory of the history-driven figure who was so thrilled by her research.
“Are you ready to check out?” The clerk was peering expectantly at her over the cash register.
Mollie gave her a last hug. “Good luck, hon. I’ll be looking for your book to come out.”
Was it coincidence? Jenna kept the book in her hand as she checked out, feeling the leather that was rough, but fragile at the same time. Instead of exiting, she took her bag to one of the chairs in the small sitting room. She stared out the window, the book resting on her lap. Her agent expected her to be in Louisiana by nightfall, already booking a room for her at a local hotel. She should save this for later, yet she didn’t move.
Why couldn’t she let this go? All the other cemeteries had loose ends, with graves she couldn’t identify. This place had been special, somehow. Personal in a way that none of her research projects ever were before.
She looked down at the book she held, afraid to open it and find another glimpse of the truth that always managed to evade her. Steeling herself for disappointment, she flipped past brittle pages, where handwriting was crammed to fit the space in small loops.
A woman’s hand, but not as elegant as the doctor’s had been. She scanned the page for clues to its author, breath catching when she saw the year noted at the beginning of each entry.
Eighteen sixty-two: the same year as the epidemic, and Arthur’s enlistment in the Confederacy.
Its narrative, though plain, gave a vivid sketch of the one who wrote it down. Jenna pictured a girl on the verge of womanhood, shy and modest by nature. A heart that felt deep devotion for its Creator, and for the family that was split apart when the war claimed her brother’s service in arms.
Summer gave way to fall with a flip of the pages. On November 1st came a brief account of the Mischief Night prank, the journal’s owner writing:
This symbol is not familiar to my own eyes, but Granny Clare saw it once on a grave in the Highlands. I don’t much care for the look of it. The dye the children used is almost the same color as blood, and I wish someone would scrub it off. No one does, though, so I must get used to it, I suppose.
Jenna paused. This was familiar to her; not just the phrases, but something about the writing itself. She felt as if it was tugging at her sleeve, some remembrance just beyond her reach.
She turned the page. Further down, she noted the first signs of the epidemic. The boy Charley’s death, the school teacher, and another name she recognized from the gravestone rubbings she had made. The words were tumbling into her mind faster now as she read them.
November 16th 1862: They found Mr. Roan today. Two boys peeked through his window on a dare, and saw the poor body lying on the floor. I heard they buried him in the grove where his family rests, and that someone has cut that same mark into the stone that Papa uses for those in the cemetery. No one seems to grieve his loss, but I feel sorry for Mr. Roan that he left no friend to mourn him.
Jenna continued on, forgetting to breathe as she read.
Many come to see the doctor or to stick a note under the door asking for medicine. It is terrible to see how she wears herself out, hardly sleeping or eating between the work she does. I help her as best I can, but there is little for it except to pray this illness will soon leave our midst.
Jenna leaned closer, silently mouthing the words preserved in the long-ago journal. Other guests who passed by offered her strange looks, but she didn’t care. Her only concern was for the hundred and fifty year old secret that might be buried somewhere in the faded binding. Not knowing what to expect, she turned another page.
25
The doctor took ill last night.
Nell’s pencil hovered above the page, hesitant to finish this painful thought. She blinked back tears, fighting the urge to give in to her emotions—a mixture of sadness and, strangely enough, hope, despite all that had transpired.
Hours before, she had left the doctor resting upstairs, the letter from Arthur clasped between her hands. The awful news it bore made Nell wonder if either of them would ever see him again. She could not help thinking of him dying in a crowded hospital corridor miles from home. It was a pain that paled only when compared to the loss of faith he described so bitterly according to Mariah’s words.
Nell tried to write him, crouched over a candle’s flame at the parlor’s desk. All the words of comfort seemed stale, so she laid her pen down mid-sentence to stare at the dying embers in the hearth. Eyes drifting closed in silent prayer, she pictured a dark-haired youth in a hospital bed, his features battered and weary. He was lost right now, scarred in ways other than physical injury. She believed his faith was deep rooted, though, too long entrenched to simply die without a fight. Let him see Your hand guiding him, she thought. Leaning her head against the desk, she let the hair fall across her face, blocking the dim view of the parlor.
She woke in early morning to the sound of a heavy thud upstairs. Half-asleep, she imagined it was Henry rising—only there was no Henry, not upstairs anyway. With this realization, she was awake again, listening. The sound of movement was coming from Henry’s old room, the doctor’s quarters.
Nell took the stairs with haste. Pushing open the door to the doctor’s room, she found Mariah sprawled beside the writing desk.
“Please,” Mariah said weakly, glancing up at her. “The daybook. I need to write—”
“You need to rest,” Nell corrected. Gently, she pulled the sick woman to a sitting position, supporting her slender frame. She wondered whether to call for her father’s help. He would be in the barn already, tending the livestock before his ride to the smithy forge. Her mother would be with him. Granny Clare still asleep in the bedroom downstairs, where the heavy quilts were her best defense against rheumatism on winter mornings.
“Hold onto me,” she instructed, draping the doctor’s arm around her own small shoulders. Staggering upward, she pulled them both to a standing position and moved to the bed, where the covers had been left in disarray. Tangled up with a shawl was a large volume that Nell quickly placed aside as she eased the doctor against a stack of pillows. “Let me fetch the others from the barn—”
“No, wait.” A hand gripped her arm, pleading with her to stay. “There is something I must tell you, before I have not the strength left. This fever muddles my thoughts, but I am certain that what happened—what I saw—was more than imagination.”
“What did you see?” Nell asked, troubled from the intensity in her gaze. The boy, Charley, had been the same, she realized. His mind wandered to other times and places while she clasped his hand beside the bed.
“It was a dream,” Mariah said. “But a sign, as well, I think. An answer to prayer.”
Had she misheard? Nell could think of no response, her glance falling on the leather volume still open on the bed. The Bible she read aloud from the night before and then placed on the side table when she left. Meaning Mariah had opened it again later that night, despite the doubt she expressed when they talked.
“I prayed He would guide me,” Mariah said, words coming fast between breaths, “and then I had such a strange dream. Of a river with soldiers drowned below, and a washerwoman on the shore to clean the burial clothes.”
This reference to the bean nighe made Nell shiver, as if talk of superstition from the doctor’s lips confirmed her fears.
The doctor looked as if she might faint with the recollection of her dream. “They died in the water,” she gasped, “water stained with crimson—”
“This is too distressing for you,” Nell interrupted, wishing she would let her go for help. The hand clinging to her was so desperate, though, she couldn’t leave even to call for help from a window.
“When I woke, I knew.” Mariah’s voice was hoarse. “Kne
w the water has caused our suffering these past weeks.”
“The water,” Nell repeated, not understanding the claim. “We have always drank from the spring, and never had trouble.”
The doctor shook her head. Her fingers clutched at the girl’s sleeve, drawing her close.
“Contaminated. It has been contaminated,” she said, slowly. “I read of it long ago in a medical journal...but somehow forgot. The water, not the air, is what makes us sick.” Her words thickened, stumbling over themselves as she spoke.
To Nell’s ear this seemed nonsense; but then she knew too little of science to doubt it as others might. “What can be done?” she asked “Many have no other means of water aside from the spring. It is only a few that have a different source, and they are so far away, on the edges of town—”
“There can be no water consumed from the spring that has not been boiled first,” the doctor replied. “Your grandmother saved you all. She made tea because she loved it more than fresh water...even from the pump. I took her tea at mealtimes but drank the pump’s water at the homesteads. That’s why...why I am sick.”
Nell sank onto the bed. Taking the doctor’s hand, she found its skin to be callused as her own. “You say this answer comes from God,” she said, softly, “yet I have heard you speak many times of His indifference to our troubles. Why do you think He has told you this? Why do you believe it?” She had to know the answer. Not just for the sake of explaining to others that the doctor condemned their water supply, but because the woman lying before her was a friend.
“Many things have changed my mind,” Mariah answered slowly. “Some of them from my life here and others from the life I knew as a girl.” She closed her eyes and drew a clearer breath. The cough in her chest was momentarily gone, it seemed, her hand remaining in Nell’s clasp. “My mother’s faith is what I remember most about her, even more so than the illness that took her from me. You have often spoken of things she believed, things she wanted me to believe.” Drawing another breath, she continued, “My doubt had been sealed with her death, my child’s mind thinking she was misguided those times when she spoke of God’s healing. It was despair that drove me to seek His aid last night, though I had wished for it many other times, but—but I did not know how—”
Nell let her talk without interruption, pressing her fingers in reassurance. Forgiveness was all she lacked it seemed, for the heart to make itself right.
“It is difficult,” she said, face still damp from crying. “The prayer I knew from childhood seems too simple for such a request.”
“Since we must believe as children do, nothing is wrong in such a prayer,” Nell answered. “If you wish to say it now, I will help. I will help in any way that I can.”
Gratitude flitted briefly over the doctor’s worn features. They were so altered in such little time, Nell realized, from those of the young woman who had been waiting at the station. Pain and fatigue had made them older, yet this moment of confession had begun to ease those lines.
After a moment, Mariah closed her eyes again. Bowing her head, her lips moved to find the words of repentance. “My life I give to Your keeping—do with it as You see fit.” This whisper at the close of the prayer faltered, its words as quiet as the ones Nell had heard softly, brokenly spoken in the seconds before.
Tears escaped Nell’s eyes. She let them fall unchecked, relief outweighing the sadness that led to this moment.
When Mariah had grown quiet after her prayer, they sat in silence, the clock chiming the hour from downstairs.
Five in the morning. Her family would return in another hour expecting to find breakfast ready. Across from her, the doctor leaned her head back against the pillows. “I can rest now,” Mariah spoke again, this time to Nell. She let go of the girl’s hand with a faint smile. “Find Mr. Darrow. Tell him about the spring. He will know how best to tell others.”
Nell nodded. “After that, I will come back and sit with you,” she promised. The ashen features beneath the curls worried her, even with the doctor’s expression once again calm. “There must be something more I can do to help. Something to bring down the fever.” She looked towards the vials of medicine on the nearby table.
“All that can be done for me has been,” Mariah said. She wasn’t looking at the table, but the Bible tumbled open on the blankets. She closed the cover, fingers resting there.
She was no better when Nell returned.
Mariah did rest for a time, but her sleep was broken with bouts of sickness. Coughing left her unable to speak, the medicine Nell gave her impossible to keep down.
Nell bathed her brow, pushing back the curls she had sometimes envied.
Granny Clare brewed her healing tea, while Mrs. Darrow heated bricks and wrapped them in rags to warm the foot of the bed.
Mariah seemed not to notice these attempts at soothing, her mind roaming as freely as the gaze that searched the four pine walls. Mostly, she looked for Arthur, his name escaping her lips more than once as she woke from sleep. Other times, she called for her mother. There was no distress in her voice to Nell’s ear, her tone hopeful as she peered at the growing light from the window. The clock chimed the hour of six, then seven. Five minutes to eight, the hands were stopped to mark the moment her struggle ceased.
Mirrors were covered, the curtains drawn so that candles burned at mid-morning. Granny Clare rang the hand bell from the old country twenty-one times in reference to the doctor’s short life. Its mournful sound carried through the house, reaching Nell’s ears as she stretched a sheet across the lifeless form.
Papa has agreed to speak in Mariah’s stead at the town meeting this afternoon. He and mama set off directly after lunch, and I sit alone in the parlor, since Granny has retired for a nap. Never has the house felt so still, with the doctor’s poor body lying upstairs.
Tomorrow, we prepare her for burial, a task I can bear only by knowing she found her faith those final hours. It amazes me still how she let the Savior guide her to the solution for our troubles. This dream of water she described, and her realization that our wooded spring has caused this sickness among us, is the closest thing to a miracle I have witnessed my entire life.
Even now, she could hardly believe such a thing had happened in this place, and to people that she knew and cared about. She tried to imagine what the doctor’s mind understood so readily from the vision of the dead beneath the water and found nothing except pain in the picture.
What if no one believed Mariah’s final piece of advice? Superstition ran strong in these parts, the wandering spirit of the plat-eye more likely to gain credence than a young woman’s theory of water being polluted. What if nothing was found, or could ever be found to prove it was so? Would people keep drinking the water and dying?
Anxious, she glanced to the window. It was a pointless gesture since the curtains were drawn and blocked the outside view. Her parents had been gone for roughly an hour, long enough to deliver their news to those who gathered at the meeting in town.
It is useless to worry, I know, when already God has seen fit to reveal this piece of information. He worked in the heart of a skeptic, a woman as firm in her disbelief as my own heart has been in its faith all this time. Yet I continue to question His ability to implement His Will—to believe He will make a way for our neighbors to receive this message that even Mariah herself accepted without delay. I must shake this doubt, and learn to trust no matter the outcome of this crisis we face.
The sound of the front door banging shut made her push away from the desk and her half-finished journal entry. Her family had returned from the meeting, and with them brought the answer she wrestled with even now. Bracing herself for what might be said, she passed quickly through the hall, where a tall shadow was cast from the person standing in the entryway.
She was almost upon them when she saw her mistake.
The figure that lingered in the hall was not her father, or, for that matter, any other member of the Darrow household.
It was som
eone Nell did not recognize at all.
26
A ragged youth clutched the wooden bench by the door, face half-hidden by a dingy hat. His jaw was unshaved, his clothes far too big for the scarecrow frame beneath. A cloth bundle rested on his back, a knife sheathed in the belt looped through his trousers.
Nell’s thoughts flew to stories of deserters and enemy soldiers who broke into homes in search of food and other goods. Scream frozen in her lungs, she stumbled backwards, accidentally knocking a candlestick from the hall table.
At the sound, a pair of eyes—coal black and instantly familiar—rose to meet hers.
“Arthur,” she said, breathless with the realization. Frozen, she stared as if a phantom of the convict hung in Crooked Wood, who used to haunt her dreams, had materialized—the plat-eye or the washerwoman from tales of old. After a moment, her common sense returned to the soldier’s obvious distress.
Taking his arm, she helped him to the bench, seeing he all but clung to the nearest support to hold himself upright. “You are here,” she cried in disbelief. She sank down beside him, still holding onto him. “We thought—that is, I was so afraid you would not come back to us. That you would stay at the hospital or—”
He shook his head, returning the touch with gentle pressure from his calloused fingers. “Nothing could keep me from leaving that place,” he said, voice hoarse with exhaustion. “Even if I had not been given a furlough, I would have come home.” This was said with a colder manner. Eyes narrowing, he asked, “Do you think it wrong of me to admit it?”
“I think all that matters is you are here now,” she said, faltering under the bitterness in his tone. Clearly, he expected her to scold him; perhaps he even wanted her to, knowing deep down that such a sentiment was mistaken.