by Pamela Morsi
“Correct, Aunt Will wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the geology of this place.”
Camryn looked skeptical.
“The rock that’s beneath the surface of the Ozarks is a lot older than in the regions around it. It’s mostly soluble rock, rock that can be dissolved, and that allows a lot of ground water to flow beneath the surface.”
Jesse looked over at Camryn to make sure she was listening.
“Okay,” the girl said.
“The water moving through the rocks makes for lots of hollow places, holes and caves.”
“Yeah.”
“Because of that, the surface can’t support much weight. If the topsoil starts getting too deep, it collapses into a sinkhole.”
“Right,” Camryn agreed.
“So, with rough terrain and shallow topsoil, nobody can make a living up here at commercial agriculture. No agribusinesses are going to be able to move in on this place, the geology precludes anything but small subsistence farms, like Aunt Will’s.”
Camryn’s expression was thoughtful and she nodded.
“Without this specific geology, Aunt Will wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t be here.”
The teenager grinned. “And these stupid tomatoes would have to pull themselves out of the ground.”
13
It was still daylight when Piney closed the clinic. There was unexpected sharpness to the wind and he pulled up his collar against it. The day had not been particularly busy. No mix-ups, emergencies or snafus. He was neither keyed up nor tired. Since both of those two were frequent companions at quitting time, he felt especially good. He gave no credit to the events of the previous evening, where he’d had the good fortune to have an intelligent conversation with a very attractive woman. But he did vividly recall her nearness in the darkness. He was attracted to her. He admitted that to himself. And that was okay. Sometimes it was important to be reminded that he was a man. Not simply somebody’s dad. Or everybody’s health care provider. He was an actual man who could be pruriently interested in a sexy-looking young woman.
He began whistling.
She was a looker, he decided. He wasn’t sure what he liked best. Those long, long legs sure set his imagination into gear. And that unexpectedly round butt, he really liked that, too. Even her voice, there was something incredibly desirable in the sound that came out of her throat. Momentarily he imagined some sounds he’d like to hear from her. But he pushed the thoughts back. This was not a train of thought relevant for the track his day was on. His workday was done. And he had a hungry teenager in the house, so meals were never optional.
When he stepped through the door of his place, Tree was waiting for him in the living room. His son was solemn and he was pacing.
The happy song on Piney’s lips faded away.
Tree turned to him immediately. “Have you heard?” His tone was concerned and his question ominous.
“No, what?”
The teenager sighed heavily in relief. “I wanted to tell you myself, but I was afraid one of those gossips at the clinic would beat me to it.”
“No,” Piney told him, choosing his own words cautiously. “Nobody has said anything to me about anything. So it seems you’re up.”
Tree swallowed. “Last night, after the game, Cammy picked me up and we hung out for a while and she brought me home.”
Calmly, deliberately, Piney walked over to his favorite armchair and took a seat. His brain was running a mile a minute. None of the scenarios he came up with were to his liking.
“She was in this car that I didn’t recognize,” Tree said. “But I didn’t think anything about it. She said she borrowed it and I didn’t give it another thought, honestly.”
Piney nodded.
“We kind of had a fight. So when she wasn’t at school today I thought that maybe she was still mad at me or something. I called her at home. Her mom answered and her mom’s like screaming mad. Somebody left their car in the store lot and Cammy stole the keys and snuck out.” Tree began pacing again. “I had no idea, Dad, really. I didn’t ask her to do it. We never, ever talked about doing anything like that. I never would have got in the car if I thought she’d stolen it.” Tree plopped onto the couch, his expression miserable. “I mean, I guess I did know that she sneaked out. She sneaks out a lot. So I’m guilty there, but I really didn’t know anything about the car. Honest.”
“Okay,” Piney said. “I believe you.”
Tree eased back in the cushions in relief.
“So what’s Marcy going to do?” he asked his son. “I guess Camryn is grounded.”
“Yeah,” Tree answered. “For a month. I don’t know if that means school, too. Or basketball. She didn’t say I couldn’t see her. But we can’t go out.”
Piney nodded. “Did you talk to her?”
“She wasn’t there. Mrs. B. didn’t say where she was and I was too scared to ask. I’ve texted her like ten times and no answer. So, I dunno. Maybe she lost her phone privileges, too.”
“Well, I’m sure it will all work itself out,” Piney said. “But this should be a heads-up for you. When you’re…associated with someone, their mistakes may reflect upon you.”
“But it wasn’t my mistake. I didn’t even know about it.”
“I agree,” Piney said. “But lots of people won’t make that distinction.”
“That doesn’t seem fair,” Tree said.
Piney had not thought it to be fair, either. However, it was one of life’s unpleasant truths. He hoped his son could learn it in a less dire fashion than Piney had in his own life.
“You and I know the truth, so we may have to be satisfied with that.”
Tree agreed. But his father’s lack of anger or blame didn’t seem to lighten his mood at all. While Piney cooked dinner, Tree concentrated on his homework. They ate companionably, the subjects of conversation deliberately neutral.
As Tree cleaned up the kitchen, Piney stepped out on the front porch for fresh air. He immediately came back inside and got his coat.
“Did you see the weather report?” he called out to the kitchen.
“Missed it” was the reply.
“It’s really gotten cold out there. I’m going out to make sure the outside hydrants are covered.”
* * *
It was a good thing he did. By morning a surprising three inches of gleaming white snow blanketed everything.
Piney got the coffee going and turned on the television. The news reporters were in high gear standing in front of the camera in parkas, lamenting the traffic problems around Rogers and Bentonville. While reiterating the warnings about dangerous driving conditions, they couldn’t seem to stop from almost delighting in the prediction that an early snow often means a harsh winter. Piney chalked it up to enthusiasm for the first snowfall.
He stood in the dim light of his living room, sipping coffee and watching the ticker scrolling at the bottom of the screen. When he saw what he was waiting for, he walked across the floor to his son’s bedroom door. After a couple of warning taps he opened it up. With the shades drawn, it was completely shrouded in darkness.
With a moan, Tree rolled over.
“Might as well sleep in,” Piney told him. “School’s canceled.”
“Huh?”
“Canceled. Snow day.”
Piney quietly shut the door and walked into the kitchen. He poured himself a second cup of coffee and decided to make pancakes. By the time he got the batter stirred up, a wide-awake Tree joined him. His son might be taller than most grown-ups, but there was still a lot of little kid lurking inside him. It was the first snow of the year and he could hardly wait to be out in it.
They made pancakes together and Tree ate six of them with maple syrup before he felt fortified enough to face the day.
In coats and gloves the two went outside and swept the doorway to the clinic and the row of parking spaces right in front.
“There’s no need to shovel any more than that,” Piney said. “
As warm as the ground is, most of this will be gone by tomorrow.”
Tree was okay with giving up the work, but he couldn’t resist lobbing several snowballs in his father’s direction. Piney immediately retaliated and for about ten minutes it was an all-out battle of the frozen precipitation.
Wet and laughing, Piney finally retreated into the safety of the clinic. At the reception desk the answering machine was lit up as brightly as a Christmas tree. Emergencies would have been transferred to his cell phone. These were all the appointments being canceled and the questions about the safety of snow ice cream or strange-smelling furnaces. Piney returned calls for more than an hour. Everybody seemed eager to chat about how surprised they were and how their trees, truck, pond or garden looked. Like a lot of men, he found telephone socializing to be an unfamiliar pastime. But he shrugged off any awkwardness by reminding himself that the first snowfall of the year always had a kind of holiday atmosphere to it.
After finishing up with the call-backs, he went through the paperwork that arrived via the fax machine. It was mostly lab and radiology results for tests that were too complex to be done in-house. He carefully looked through them, mostly finding exactly what he expected, and then attached the paper to the appropriate patient chart.
When he got to Aunt Will’s latest blood samples, he grimaced. Just two days ago, Dr. Mo had told her that she was only slightly worse. But the results from the outside lab revealed even more deterioration than they thought. He wanted to curse, but he knew it was a waste of effort. It was the nature of medicine that people didn’t always get well. Many diseases had no cure. And despite every cure, death was the outcome that every patient would ultimately reach. Piney was not an adherent of postponing the inevitable at all costs. He’d been around long enough to recognize pain as the bigger enemy. And for some, demise was preferable over facing disability or surrendering dignity. Still, he would jump through some very narrow, unwelcoming hoops to try to keep his patients among the living. Especially so for Aunt Will.
He wished he could talk to Jesse about her. He felt certain that she would stay if she had any idea that her aunt would probably not make it through the winter. But he couldn’t say a word. Aunt Will was guaranteed the right to keep her medical information private. And even if that hadn’t been the law, Piney knew he wouldn’t go against the old woman’s wishes, even for her own good.
He was still thinking about Aunt Will when he put the sign on the clinic’s front door and locked up. He wondered if she and Jesse were all right up there. The snowstorm hadn’t been horrible, but anything unexpected could cause problems. And they’d be stuck up there with no way to get help.
Suddenly, he had an idea. In the kitchen, Tree was heating up canned chili on the stove. It smelled like a pretty good idea to Piney.
“After lunch, I’m hiking up to Aunt Will’s to make sure she’s all right,” he told Tree. “You want to come with me?”
The teenager barely bothered to consider.
“Yeah, sure,” he answered. “There’s nothing on TV and I still haven’t heard from Cammy. I might as well.”
14
When the last tomato plant had been ripped from the ground, stripped of its fruit and thrown on the compost pile, Jesse had been ready to offer an old school cheer and a shout of celebration. They combined what they’d gathered to discover they had a heaping bushel of green tomatoes. Some of them were as big as Jesse’s fist and only days away from ripening. But most were undersized ranging from a pea to a baseball. It felt like a tremendous accomplishment and both of them were grinning, pleased with themselves.
If Aunt Will was impressed, she didn’t say so. By the time they got back to the cabin, she was not only awake but had a long list of things for them to do. None of which was particularly welcome to the tired backs thinking they were done for the day.
The worse part for Jesse was that most of what she wanted involved bringing a strange array of items up from the dusty, scary, spider-infested cellar to the cabin.
“Let’s just do this tomorrow,” Jesse suggested.
Aunt Will would have none of it.
“You won’t want to be tromping around on these steps tomorrow. Best get everything in the house tonight.”
So with only a bit of under-their-breath muttering, Jesse and Camryn carried up huge metal pots, crates full of dusty jars, various other paraphernalia for grating, sieving, dipping and a couple of strings of onions.
By the time they’d brought up everything on the list, the kitchen area was overrun and stuff was stacked everywhere.
Aunt Will made good on her threat to fry the leftover cornmeal mush, but added a generous addition of ham and black-eyed peas. Jesse was so hungry, she thought she could eat a dirt sandwich and be glad to get it. But she was surprisingly pleased with the fried mush, which she thought tasted an awful lot like the polenta she’d been served at fancy restaurants in Tulsa.
After dinner, Jesse was ready to hit the sack, but Aunt Will had one more chore.
“You girls go out and bring some wood down to stack on the porch. We’ll be needing a fire in here by morning.”
If she hadn’t been so tired, Jesse might have argued. Camryn didn’t even try. The cabin was toasty with just the heat from the cookstove. As pleasant as the day had been, it didn’t seem likely that they’d need to use the fireplace.
When they opened the cabin door, however, an unexpected blast of cold air took their breath away.
“Wow! It’s really gotten chilly out here,” Camryn said.
The brisk air certainly cured the sluggishness with which they’d approached the task. They filled the wheelbarrow, rolled it to the porch, restacked the wood there and then went back for more.
“That’s got to be enough,” Camryn said, with an exhausted sigh.
Jesse silently agreed.
Inside, the teenager took the shakedown mattress Aunt Will offered and climbed the ladder into the loft.
Jesse settled in for her poultice of hot, sticky, smelly stuff. She watched Aunt Will at the stove, calmly, almost carelessly throwing a pinch of this and a fistful of that into the heavy cast iron pot she used exclusively for potions. As the ingredients began to heat up, the odor of it began to fill the room.
“What makes it smell so bad?”
“It’s mostly the oil,” Aunt Will said, holding up the tall thin vial with a cork stopper in the top. The liquid inside was a dark muddy brown. “It’s what we use in black drawing salve. It’ll pull out a stinger or a splinter in nothing flat.”
Jesse nodded slowly. “I’ve heard of black salve,” she admitted.
Aunt Will turned to her, eyebrows raised. “Don’t be confusing black salve with black drawing salve. Black salve comes from bloodroot. It’ll burn off skin tumors and tags of all kinds. But you don’t put it on healthy flesh, ever. Black drawing salve is much safer on your skin, but it does stain your clothes and stinks to high heaven.”
Jesse could testify to both of those facts. “What kind of plant does the black drawing salve come from?”
“No plant at all,” she answered. “It’s from one of those rocks you’re so fond of, DuJess. I distill it from graveled shale.”
“Really?” Jesse was surprised. “I knew you used roots and barks and leaves. But I guess I never thought about you using rocks.”
“It’s all nature,” Aunt Will said. “And unless you’re some kind of chemist or cloner, a person’s going to have to use the bounty that she’s got on hand.” She turned the fire out beneath the stinking pot on the stove, but continued to stir it with a stick. “The oil can draw out a boil to lancing overnight. And it can draw out every feeling that you ever had for that no-account man who hurt you.”
The old woman’s tone was surprisingly light, as if the whole poultice regime was one great joke. Jesse was pretty certain who the joke was on, still dutifully she lay across Aunt Will’s bed and allowed her to slather on the hot, stinky goop once again.
“You’re more than halfw
ay through,” Aunt Will reminded her. “I bet you’re noticing that you’re thinking of him less and less.”
In fact, she hadn’t noticed. But once Aunt Will said it, Jesse realized that she’d hardly given Greg a thought all day. They had been very busy, though. That was more likely the reason. She’d been too involved with what she was doing to think about him. Still, the tomato pulling was a more or less mindless activity. It wasn’t as if her thoughts hadn’t been elsewhere. But the place that they’d gone was not in the vicinity of Greg Wilkinson. In truth, she’d spent more time thinking about her conversation with the physician’s assistant. He was an interesting guy. Smart. Funny. And she liked that he was close to Aunt Will. She was glad that he was going to be here watching out for her when Jesse couldn’t.
Aunt Will pressed the steamy, damp rag to her chest to cover the smelly muck. Jesse shuddered with the contrast of the cool air and the hot poultice.
“I’ve laid a fire in the hearth,” Aunt Will told her. “There’s kindling in the basket. You’re likely the first one up tomorrow, DuJess, so get it going, if you would.”
She readily agreed, although the suggestion was unexpected. Aunt Will was always up before the chickens. But maybe the old woman felt even more tired than Jesse did.
In the dim light from Aunt Will’s bedroom, she climbed the ladder to the loft.
Camryn had spread her lumpy shakedown a few feet from her own. The teenager lay on her side, facing the wall. Her even breathing indicated sleeping, so Jesse tried to be as quiet as possible. Apparently hearing was not the only sense that could startle a person awake.
“Good gawd, what is that smell?”
The girl rolled over, her face contorted in disgust.
“Sorry,” Jesse said. “Aunt Will is treating me with a poultice.”
“Gah-rose!” Camryn stated adamantly. “What have you got? The plague or something?”
“No, nothing that serious.”
“It sure smells serious. Phew!”
“Well, take it as a warning, you better be careful about meeting up with that boyfriend of yours.”