Tillie Tippen’s house
was only a short distance farther on, once Lilly walked the quarter of a mile into town. Truthfully, she’d been glad for the excuse of collecting the laundry to get away from the hubbub in her kitchen, where Armina fussed with broom and mop, Mazy primped, Chanis’s sister heated curling irons, and Kip mourned the one that got away.
At the clinic, smoke billowed from charcoal pots of heated brimstone placed strategically all along the foundation. Mr. Tippen’s wagon was gone. Lilly supposed he wanted to fumigate the walls before he put up the new window. Hopefully he wouldn’t fumigate himself.
The Tippens’ white two-story house was grand considering the leaning shotgun houses of their neighbors. The wide
front porch was painted gray and sported two white rocking chairs and a matching swing, suspended by chains from a beam. A banty hen and six half-grown chicks scoured the bountiful flower garden beside the steps for errant ladybugs or hapless wiggle worms. In the side yard, drying laundry fluttered lazily in the sparse hot breeze of the day.
Lilly was too early. She should have waited until evening. She knocked lightly.
“Well, look who’s here,” Tillie Tippen boomed when she opened the door to Lilly. “Come in and set yourself down. You’re looking a little wilted from this heat.”
Lilly was surprised anew each time she heard Tillie’s loud, gruff voice. She was short, less than five feet, and portly
—built like a rain barrel. Half of her had to be lung. Lilly wondered how she managed the high clotheslines. Maybe Mr. Tippen hung the wash and took it in.
Before Lilly could say, “I came to collect the laundry,” she was seated in the parlor, a glass of sweet tea in her hand and a dessert plate of Tillie’s town-renowned yellow cake with coconut icing resting on her knee. As her eyes adjusted from the glare of the sun to the dim interior of the room, she noticed she wasn’t the only visitor. Anne perched on the horsehair sofa directly across from her. Lilly raised her eyebrows in question.
“As I was just telling Tillie, it’s good to have a husband like Cletus, who don’t mind me taking a minute for myself,” Anne said.
“Anne helps me on wash days
—but generally Amy comes
along. You should have brung her. You know that child’s the best part of Monday for me.”
“Maybe next week,” Anne said, standing. “I’ll just go out and take Doc’s linens off the line. They’re more than dry by now. Do you want the sheets and pillowcases sprinkled?”
“No, she don’t like the bedclothes ironed,” Tillie said as if Lilly were a lamp or a chair. “You can put them and the towels and kitchen things, everything that don’t get ironed, in that white wicker basket.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt your work,” Lilly said.
“I love me a bit of company whatever time of day it comes,” Tillie said, taking Anne’s place on the sofa. “Turnip said somebody broke your window.”
“Yes, he’s repairing it now. I closed the office for the afternoon.”
“Turnip’s good at fixing things
—unlike some husbands I know,” Tillie said, jerking her head toward the window, where they could see Anne taking pegs from a sheet.
“Tillie, this cake is delicious, so light, and the icing is divine,” Lilly said, hoping to divert gossip to recipes. “I’ve never tasted better.”
“It’s the coconut with a sprinkle of orange zest; makes all the difference.”
Tillie straightened the doily on the arm of the sofa. “You know Anne’s my sister, don’t you? She’s sixteen years younger, so I feel more like her mother. She’s got that broken-down house to take care of, and little Amy, plus you know she works every hour at the clinic she can get.”
Tillie’s face gathered in a knot of indignation. “Still yet, she needs the money I give her for helping me on Mondays. Ornery, layabout Cletus Becker
—I don’t know why she stays. It’s the same song the old cow died on over and over again. It’s not to be put up with!”
Lilly was at a loss. She took a sip of tea to wash down the sudden lump in her throat. Her silence seemed to egg Tillie on.
“Cletus gambles away every last cent she earns
—and her owing back taxes on that ridge rock he calls a farm. Humph! Turnip’s going to the bank tomorrow.” Tillie kneaded her hands in her lap. “It’s not that we don’t have the means to help, but how long can we keep it up now that Turnip can’t work down the mine? That black coal dust settling in his lungs has just about kilt him.”
She put a finger to her lips. “Don’t say anything
—Anne won’t like me asking
—but I hoped maybe you could put her back on at the clinic. She ain’t worked in what, a week?”
“I’m sure things will pick up soon,” Lilly said, thinking about the folded bills she’d seen Anne hiding in the oven. “The hospital beds never stay empty for long.”
Lilly regretted having put Anne in such an awkward position
—having to pretend to not have work so that she was free to care for the baby. She suspected Tillie minded more of her younger sister’s business than she should.
Tillie refilled Lilly’s glass. “Now about your skirts. Do you want me to cut out the fronts and bind around the hole, add some ties? Or I could set buttonholes around the waist
and sew buttons to match on your blouses. Have you seen that done?”
“Forevermore, Tillie, I just came for the laundry. I haven’t told a soul.”
Tillie leaned forward and put her hand on Lilly’s knee. “I can help you hide it for a short time by adjusting your skirts, but I’d say that pot you got a-cooking won’t stay under the lid for long.”
Suddenly it all seemed very real and permanent to Lilly. She was almost glad that someone knew
—even if that someone was the biggest talebearer in Skip Rock. “I had hoped to tell my husband first.”
“Of course you do, honey. But shared joy is a double joy. And what if, God forbid, something goes awry? Shared sorrow is half a sorrow. I can hold my tongue when need be. But folks will guess soon enough. You got that look. It’s written all over your face.”
The
honey
weakened Lilly. She wished she could put her head on Tillie’s shoulder, let Tillie pat her back as her mother would do. “I guess you should get started on those skirts, then, Tillie.”
“I’ll do one directly and have Turnip bring it by so you’ll have it for tomorrow. I’m a good hand with my Singer sewing machine. Come back by one day and we’ll look at patterns for your maternity clothes.”
After supper, Armina was across the road gathering her night things, Mazy was weeping again, and Lilly was taking
the charts from her linen bag when she heard Kip at the back door, barking.
What now?
Lilly wondered as Mrs. Blair rushed Timmy through the door. The boy looked peaked and out of breath.
“First he can catch his breath and then he can’t,” Mrs. Blair said. “He says he swallowed a dime.”
Timmy’s eyes were as big as the quarter Lilly had given him earlier. “It’s a-resting right here, Doc,” he said huskily, pointing to the area on his chest that would be in line with the bifurcation point of the right bronchus. “It’s stuck.” The effort to speak sent the boy into a fit of sneezing so violent it left him limp in his mother’s arms.
“Do something, Doc! He’s going to die before my eyes.”
The kitchen grew still as death. Armina and Mazy came in, standing back, watching with eyes as big as Timmy’s. Even Kip was still. Lilly’s mind scrambled backward to a time in medical school when she’d seen a case such as this one. A policeman had come into her mentor’s office complaining of swallowing a coin after he tossed it up and caught it in his mouth. He’d accidentally thrown the coin back into the pharynx, where, coming in contact with the posterior nasal orifices, it excited a strong disposition to sneeze. The spasmodic inspiration that followed drew the piece through the windpipe and lodged it at the separation of the bronchus. Sneezing made the coin rise but also made suffocation imminent; thus the man would be forced to let the piece fall back. Fortunately the officer didn’t realize how close to death he was before he was induced to vomit, which brought forth the coin.
Lilly grabbed the castor oil and poured a tablespoonful. Timmy grimaced and clamped his mouth tight, as any child would, as soon as he smelled the vile oily liquid.
“Timothy Blair, open your mouth and swallow,” Mrs. Blair said.
Tears squirting out the corners of his eyes, Timmy opened and swallowed, soon retching and coughing violently until the dime flew out and hit the far wall. The retching was followed by copious vomiting that Lilly nearly caught in the dishpan. Nearly.
“Did you learn your lesson, Son?” Mrs. Blair asked when Timmy had recovered.
“Yes, ma’am. I should not have bought chocolate bars with that quarter. I should have saved it for Sunday school.”
In the middle of the muddle, Turnip Tippen came by with Lilly’s altered outfit. “You got a nice new window and lots of dead termites,” he said proudly. “Say, Armina, how’d you find them morels I brung you?”
“A-sitting on the porch.”
“I meant, was they good?”
“They fried up tasty. Thank ye. Now I got work to do.”
Turnip took his leave, and Armina and Mrs. Blair scuffled lightly over the mop. Armina won and began to clean the floor once again. She was back to her force-of-nature self, physically anyway.
“Come by tomorrow, Timmy, so that I can listen to your chest and take another look at your arm,” Lilly said.
“Good, this here sling is slowing me down.”
“Oh, Doc Still,” Timmy’s mother replied, “maybe you’d best just leave it on.”
“Nobody even noticed my hair,” Mazy said later, fiddling with her tight blonde curls.
“You look quite modern,” Lilly said.
“I guess I’ll have to wear hats for a while.” Mazy turned her head this way and that at Lilly’s dresser. “Can I borrow yours?”
“They’re in the closet. We’ll get the boxes down tomorrow. But listen, Mazy; I need a favor.”
Mazy’s shoulders slumped. “I’ve got a feeling this means more work.”
“Not more, just different. Armina dismissed Hannah today, but I’m not comfortable leaving her alone yet. Would you . . . ?”
“Watch out for Armina? Yes, I will. I’m not ready to show my face at the office.” Leaving the bench seat, she gave Lilly a kiss on the cheek. “I’m going to pray that God will restore my hair, but I don’t think that will work. I think maybe He wants me to learn a lesson like Timmy did.” She dabbed at the corner of one eye with a fancy hankie. “Oh, Sister, life is so hard.”
Lilly slept fitfully. She had never found a private minute to look at the charts, and now they beckoned, interrupting her rest like a dripping faucet. Kip didn’t stir as she padded from the room. The coal-oil lamp that Chanis’s sister had used to
heat the curling irons was still on the kitchen table. Dreading the harsh glare of the electric light, Lilly lit the lamp instead, put the teakettle on the stove to heat, and opened the first chart.
Nothing in the pages but progress notes on elderly Mrs. Clark’s battle with scrofula. The last inscription noted that the mix of sulfur, cream of tartar, licorice, and one-quarter part nitrite all mushed in honey, taken in a regimen of three days on and three days off, was helping. The next time she came in, Lilly would need to lower the dose, else the poor thing’s bowels would get too loose. Scrofula was a nasty, multiform disease. No wonder the old-timers called it the king’s evil.
The kettle whistled. She spooned black oolong leaves into a tea ball and selected a mug. Three charts later, her cup was nearly empty, and she had discovered nothing.
Weary, Lilly crossed her arms and rested her chin on her stacked wrists. She’d been so sure she’d find a clue to the break-in in the charts. Why else had they been disturbed? With the clarity of afterthought, she doubted her instincts. It made no sense that someone would be interested in another person’s medical history. Like a blind coonhound, she was barking up the wrong tree.
Idly she pulled the textbooks closer. On Saturday night, she’d begun to research the malady that plagued baby Glory. The unfortunate infant was beset with three distinct medical issues
—two of which, mongolism and heart murmur, often went hand in hand. Cleft palate, while not unusual, was not a marker. Because of the mongolism, the baby would certainly
be slowed in her intellectual and physical development. But because of the heart condition, she mightn’t live long enough for that to matter. The cleft palate was simply a complicating factor.
She flipped through the pages of the first book. The thumb card she was sure she’d left to mark her place was gone . . . and so was the page.
Startled, Lilly jarred the teacup with her elbow. The remaining tea sloshed over the side and dripped to the floor. She jumped up to grab a dish towel. With one hand, she wiped tea from the table as with the other, she turned pages in the textbook. One page
—just one
—had been ripped from the spine, leaving jagged margins but no script. A smear of red stained the page next in turn, creating a marker of another sort.
An eerie feeling inched up her spine, one bony knob at a time. This was too, too strange. The only page missing was the one she’d studied Saturday night, the one with images of mongoloid children and text clarifying their unique condition.
Lilly took a deep, steadying breath, but still her hands shook with nerves as she poured more tea into her cup. The room was closing in. Carrying her teacup, Lilly inched open the kitchen door and gingerly pushed against the screen. Despite her precaution, it screeched its screen door warning, alerting Kip that something was amiss. She heard him thump from the bed to the floor. He followed her outside and took off lickety-split for the lilac bush.
Gathering her robe around her, she took a seat on the top porch step.
How was she to interpret the broken window, the missing page? Why wouldn’t the baby’s mother just come to her and ask after her daughter? For surely it was the mother, regardless of Chanis’s supposition of a drifter breaking in.