“No, ma’am, there’s hardly been the time.” He stuck his finger under the collar of his shirt and eased it away from his throat. “Plus, to tell you the truth, I’ve never been tempted before.”
“Tempted?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed as the blush rose to cover his cheeks. “I meant to say interested. I’ve never been so interested. I can’t seem to get her off my mind.” He swallowed
hard, his discomfort palpable. “I don’t usually talk so much
—you’ll think I’m addled.”
“Not at all, Chanis. Mazy is a memorable girl.”
Kip danced excitedly when Mazy returned and attached the lead to his collar.
Lilly noticed a fresh gloss of color on her sister’s lips. Mazy seemed a bit too eager. Lilly would keep a close eye on her
—and on Chanis Clay. “Enjoy your walk,” she said.
Armina was up
and eating silver-dollar pancakes when Lilly stopped by the next morning.
“No thank you,” Lilly said when Hannah offered breakfast. “I’ve eaten, but I’ll take a cup of tea.”
Once the nurse had poured Lilly’s tea, she left the room.
Armina leaned in close. “What’s that woman doing flipping flapjacks in my kitchen?”
They could hear a window being raised in the bedroom followed by a mighty plumping of pillows.
“Hannah’s been staying with you because you’ve been ill, Armina. I can see you’re much better today.”
“I’m fine as frog’s hair,” Armina said, upending the syrup pitcher. “I didn’t take her to raise.”
“Let’s give it a couple more days. You need to gather your strength.”
“I won’t get no strength from that woman’s cooking.” She took her fork and stabbed one of the little cakes. “Look at these pitiful things, and this syrup’s thin as water.”
“I’m sure I saw some sorghum in your pantry.”
“I know, but I ain’t about to ask, and I didn’t feel up to crossing the floor to get it.”
“That’s exactly why you need someone with you for a little while longer.”
The seesawing squeak of a drawer being tugged from its base emanated from the room beyond. “I reckon she don’t even know how to candle the bottom of a dresser drawer,” Armina said.
“I’m sure you could teach her lots of things. She’s really very nice.”
Armina poured some of her coffee into her saucer and blew across it. “I could start with this here brew, which is all coffee. I’ve got dried dandelion root and chicory right in the cupboard there. One part to four parts and a body can stretch a pound of joe for weeks.” She looked over the rim of her saucer at Lilly. “Nobody wants to fool with making hard-times coffee anymore. But that’s pure wasteful, and wasteful’s right next door to sinful.”
“Hmm,” Lilly said as she absently traced a circle with her index finger on the cherry-printed oilcloth table topper. She needed to proceed with caution. “I can’t help but wonder where you were when you fell ill on Monday, Armina.”
“You’ve got your days mixed up, Doc. This here’s Monday, and I ain’t been out of the house.” Armina pointed her fork toward the bedroom door. “I can’t go anywheres until that woman goes on home. She’d probably steal me blind. You can’t trust nobody no more.” She took a long draw of coffee. “Why she wants to clean my house is a mystery to me.”
Lilly got up and took the advertising calendar from a nail on the door of the pantry.
Scarboro Beach Clam Chowder: A Reminder of Old New England
was emblazoned in red print across the top of the calendar. At the bottom, under the blocks of days, in black it read:
Real Clam Flavor. Sample Can Postpaid 10 Cents. Booklet Free.
Ned must have brought the calendar back as a souvenir from when he was in Boston receiving follow-up care for his prosthetic limb, a very successful trip. One could hardly tell that Ned once walked on a wooden peg.
She removed Armina’s sticky plate and put the calendar on the table. It was time to orient her friend to time and place. Lilly tapped a day block. “This is today, Armina. It’s Thursday.” She ran her finger back to Monday. “On this day you fell ill. Mazy found you on your parlor floor. This was late on Monday. Mr. Tippen carried you across the street
—”
“Hold on a minute,” Armina interrupted. “I remember Monday now. Something was amiss on Monday.” Her face gathered in a knot of concentration.
Lilly watched Armina closely. If she showed any sign of relapse, Lilly had laudanum available in her kit. She wouldn’t
let it go so far as to have to put Armina in restraints again. But Armina seemed fine, just puzzled.
“Yep, something was dead wrong with Monday.”
Hannah hovered just inside the bedroom door. She raised her brows in question. Lilly barely shook her head as if to say,
“Don’t interrupt
—we’re finally going to get some answers.”
Armina turned her face from one side to the other like a prizefighter releasing tension from strained neck muscles. Her eyes flashed with anger. “Turnip Tippen! Well, that just makes me mad enough to spit. I’ve got about as much use for Turnip Tippen as a hog has for a sidesaddle.”
“You were too weak to walk, remember? Mr. Tippen simply helped us get you to my house. He was very respectful.”
She set her face in a grimace. “I’d druther you left me on the porch.”
Lilly felt they were making progress. Even though Armina was fixating on the wrong thing, at least she was remembering something. Given time and patience, the rest of what happened on Monday would come into focus. “It was threatening rain or I would have left you right there like a potted plant.”
“What kind of potted plant do you reckon I’d be?”
“I suspect Mr. Tippen would say a cactus.”
Armina hiccuped a giggle, then laughed out loud. “I’d like to be a big old spiny cactus like them ones in the desert.”
“My cousin has a cactus patch growing on a rocky hillside,” Hannah said. “They have the prettiest orange blossoms every summer.”
“There you go,” Armina said with a coy smile. “I could be prickly and pleasing at the same time.”
Hearing her friend’s laughter was a balm to Lilly’s soul. She was definitely on the mend. The nurse could be dismissed from Armina’s care soon, and Ned would be home in a week or so.
“Well, enough thinking out loud,” Armina said, wincing as she stood. “I’m going to sweep the porch.”
“Let her go,”
Lilly mouthed to Hannah as they watched Armina steadying herself on various pieces of furniture and then the wall to make her way across the room.
The screen door squeaked open. “It’s going to be a hot one. Wonder what’s going on in the garden.”
“Bless her heart,” Hannah said when the door closed. “She packs a grudge like a ten-dollar mule. I don’t believe she even knew Ned when his accident happened.”
Lilly listened to Armina’s broom swoosh across the porch floor. She was not one to encourage idle talk, but she’d always wondered why Armina disliked Mr. Tippen. Her curiosity got the better of her. “What do you mean?”
“Years back when Ned Tippen lost his leg in a cave-in, story was that his uncle Turnip ran for his life, leaving him behind. Now that’s the way I heard it. Ned doesn’t seem to bear any ill will toward his uncle, though.”
“A mine accident is a scary thing. One never knows what one would do in such a circumstance.”
“You do, Dr. Still. I’ve heard tell that you run in instead of out.”
Lilly pushed back from the table and carried her teacup and saucer to the sink. “That’s my job, Hannah. I’m here in Skip Rock because of the mines.”
“I don’t know another woman who’d do what you do, Doc. I’m right proud to know you.”
“Speaking of what I do, I’d best get to the clinic,” Lilly said while rinsing out her cup. “Keep an eye on Armina. Don’t let her wander too far.”
“If she does, I’ll wander with her. How about that?”
“I should have thought of this before: you can use the telephone in my house to call the clinic if you need me. That would be the best way to handle an emergency. The number to my office is posted on the wall right over the telephone.”
“Oh, Doc, I couldn’t. I don’t hardly believe in them things. My pastor says they’re the work of the devil. Pastor says soon enough folks will have ears big as elephants’ from pressing up against those machines. I’ll send somebody after you if need be.”
Lilly straightened her jacket and walked to the door. She’d keep her thoughts about the pastor’s teaching to herself. “Right now Armina’s sitting in the rocker. Could be she’s decided she isn’t as strong as she thought she was.”
“I’ll take some yarn out there and sit with her. Maybe she’d like to do something with her hands to pass the time.”
Lilly loved
her early morning walks to work when everything seemed fresh and new. A smoky haze obscured the mountain ridges in undulating ribbons of blue and gray. The fine mist bathed her face and titillated her nose with the scent of clear mountain streams, unturned loam, bedrock so solid it supported the world, and hidden dark seams of black diamond coal. It was a smell as familiar to her as her own breath.
It was good to have a few moments of quiet time before she started work. As she rounded the corner, she could tell it would be a busy day. A line of folks waited outside the clinic although the cardboard sign in the window said Closed. The nurse must not be here yet, nor Mazy. It was still early. Lilly was glad to be able to slip in the back door.
Mazy followed closely behind. She was dressed in an embroidered, hand-tucked, sheer-lawn shirtwaist over a heliotrope slip. Her skirt was black lightweight wool. Lilly recognized the ensemble because it came from her closet. She’d tried the skirt on just this morning and laid it aside when she couldn’t get it to snap.
“You might have asked before going into my closet, Mazy.”
“But, Sister, you weren’t home, and besides, I knew you’d say yes.” She danced through the office, letting the skirt twirl around her ankles. “We’re the exact same size except for shoes. Your feet are too big.”
“Thank goodness for small favors,” Lilly said.
Mazy leaned over the desk and kissed Lilly’s cheek. “I look so mature in your clothes. Don’t you think?”
Lilly didn’t want to burst Mazy’s bubble, but with those Goldilocks curls framing her face, Mazy looked exactly her age, and that was a good thing. “You look very professional, Mazy.”
“Can I flip the sign now?” she asked. “I love flipping that sign. Nurse let me do that yesterday when we closed at noon.”
It was nearly time for lunch. Lilly was removing tar from the scalp of a three-year-old boy. Last evening, his mother had noticed an outbreak of scald head, and using an old-time remedy, she’d boiled a quart of urine along with half a cup of lard and a lump of tar before smearing the concoction
all along the child’s hairline. Thank goodness she’d let it cool first. Lilly had seen third-degree burns from some such treatments.
The mother relayed that the child had cried most of the night. His bony chest shuddered with hiccups as Lilly worked the tar loose with mild castile soap and water. When she finished, she applied rose ointment and gave the rest of the small tub of cream to the mother. “Use this mornings and evenings on the pustules,” she said.
The mother eyed the just-used soap.
Lilly folded the wrapper around it. “And take this, too.”
“Thank ye kindly,” the mother said, inhaling the scent of the soap bar. “It smells so pretty.”
Lilly had just handed the boy a gingersnap from the cookie jar on her desk when four long blasts of a train whistle caught their attention. The whistle was followed by a mighty screech of metal against metal. The lad stuffed the cookie into his mouth and then clapped his hands over his ears.
“Sounds like somebody pulled the emergency brake,” the mother said, swinging her son up to her hip. “It takes a mighty effort to stop a train.”
Lilly opened the door and ushered the family out. “Come back if need be,” she said as she watched folks spill out of the commissary across the street and rush toward the railroad tracks. Even her waiting room was emptying. She’d see if any emergent cases had stayed and then head that way.
The crow-fly way to where the train was stopped was through a farmer’s field. As Lilly maneuvered between
horseweeds and cowpats, she saw a gang of boys running pell-mell in her direction. Timmy Blair was in the lead. The lad’s face was slick with sweat and pale as Cream of Wheat. He stopped on a dime when he saw her, the other boys packing up behind him.
“Doc! Doc!” Timmy gasped. “The sheriff sent me to fetch you! We saw the whole thing. It’s the . . . It’s the . . .”
“Timmy, take a breath.”
“It’s the gandy dancer,” one of the bigger boys shouted out.
Timmy turned on him. “I was telling her. I seen it first. I got dibs.”
“Timmy?”
“See, Doc, me and the fellows was just going over to check out Mr. Griggs’s watermelon patch
—”
“Stupid, you ain’t supposed to tell that part,” a boy said, giving Timmy’s head a thump with his middle knuckle.
“You’re stupider,” Timmy said. “Mommy gave me a nickel to pay.”
“The cowcatcher caught the gandy dancer!” the bigger boy said.
“Dibs!” Timmy’s eyes blazed. “You broke dibs.”
“You can’t have dibs on words,” the big boy argued.
“Timmy, you may show me the way,” Lilly said.
Social order restored, Timmy conceded. He grabbed Lilly’s hand and tugged her forward. “Come on, fellows. Time’s a-wasting.”
They walked alongside the stalled train. The air was thick
with the smell of hot ash and grease. Cinders flew about like lightning bugs. Lilly shielded her eyes.
“Look,” Timmy said, pointing to a rimmed metal wheel lying amid some broken boards in the weeds beside the tracks. “There should be three more.”
“They might be t’other side,” the big boy said.
“Yeah, right,” Timmy said. “I wonder, did the gandy dancer live?”
Up ahead, Lilly could see the sheriff motioning gawkers to back away. Several men in striped coveralls milled around. A woman was lying on the ground a few feet from the front of the engine, with a man kneeling beside her. Lilly started toward them.
“Leave her,” Chanis Clay said. “She only fainted. Her husband’s tending to her.” He motioned toward a sheet-covered mound on the other side of the tracks. “You’ll want to pronounce him.”
“Send the boys away,” Lilly said.
“They’ve already seen,” Chanis said. “This’ll make men of them.” The sheriff took her elbow. “Careful; the tracks are slippery.”
She knelt beside the still form and raised a corner of the sheet. The railroad men removed their soft-billed caps. “Does anyone recognize him?” she asked.
“It’s Dewey Clover,” a man replied hoarsely. “He was a section crewman checking the tracks from the hand truck. I don’t know why he got caught out here. Surely he knew the train was coming.”
“Strange things happen,” another said. “You get so used to the noise and the hubbub.”
Lilly lifted the watch that was attached to her blouse by a fob and noted the time. “It’s 12:15 p.m.,” she said.
“What’d you boys see?” Chanis asked, taking his notepad from his pocket.
“He come a-flying up from yonder way,” the big boy said, pointing up the track. “He was pumping the handle of the handcart for all it was worth. That can of axle grease on the cart
—it fell off and crude splattered everywhere. Good thing it weren’t turpentine. We’d all be blowed to kingdom come.”
“There weren’t nothing to be done,” Timmy said. “We all commenced jumping and screaming and waving our arms when we saw the train a-coming round the bend. He looked back when the first whistle sounded, but it was too late.”
“The cowcatcher caught him from behind,” the big boy said.
Timmy blinked back tears and ground a grubby fist into his eyes. “Dewey Clover won’t never dance the tracks no more.”
Lilly made sure all the children walked back to town with her. They had seen quite enough.
The boys fell silent until they were nearly to the clinic. “I don’t know why God would let the railroad man die thataway,” one finally said. “It makes me sore at Him.”
Lilly searched her mind for the right words to say. The child needed reassurance.
“It ain’t God’s fault he was on the tracks,” Timmy said,
picking at the sling on his arm. “My daddy says a body will pay a high price for being foolhardy. I reckon God would have liked for the gandy dancer to jump free and leave the handcart to fend for itself.”
“That cart was first-rate, though.”
“Yeah,” Timmy said.
“I’ve got a bellyache,” the smallest boy said.
“You boys go over to the commissary,” Lilly said, wiping a smear of grease from Timmy’s cheek with her thumb. “Tell the clerk to give you each an iced root beer soda. Timmy, tell her to put them on my tab.”
“Should I bring you one, Doc? I can pay,” Timmy said, holding forth the aforementioned nickel.
“No, but come by later and I’ll put a clean sling on your arm.”
“Did I tell you how I broke this here arm?” Timmy asked as the boys headed off.
“That ain’t nothing,” the big boy scoffed. “I once fell out of the hayloft. I almost wound up like the gandy dancer.”
“Did not,” Timmy said.
“Did too!”
“Last one in’s a rotten egg,” Timmy shouted, starting a stampede of barefooted boys.
Lilly watched them go. She had a bellyache herself that soda pop wouldn’t help. She’d borne witness to sudden deaths, lingering deaths, accidental deaths, and once death by a person’s own hand. By now, you’d think she would be used to it, but she wasn’t. When she’d uncovered the section
worker’s body, she’d fought an urge to gather him in her arms and sing him into that long sleep with a lullaby. But of course, she didn’t. He was already gone, and besides, doctors didn’t do such things. What she needed was a moment alone with her Bible.
Last winter, she had attended to a young girl who’d suffered terrible burns. According to the parents, the child had been wearing a too-long, hand-me-down nightdress. It was a bitter cold night. Sleet tapped at the windows with icy fingers like a witch demanding entrance. The girl’s father held a long-handled, wire-mesh corn popper over the fireplace coals. The girl danced with delight when the first kernel popped. The mother mixed cocoa and sugar together. A pan of milk steamed on a burner of the cookstove. All of this the family remembered and repeated over and over again like a mantra of recrimination.
Lilly remembered the charred smell of the child’s flesh mingling with the scorched milk forgotten on the stove. The girl lingered through the night and into the next morning. Lilly plied her with morphine and salve of aloe. The morphine took the edge off her pain. The aloe cooled her skin and gave hope to her mother.
Finally, despite the icy roads, the preacher came. He was a burly man with an air of authority, dressed all in black and carrying a large black Bible. The Bible’s leather cover was worn and cracked with use. Lilly was never so glad to see anyone. He bore solace more powerful than all the medicines in her doctor’s kit.
The preacher spoke to the parents each in turn and heard the oft-repeated sequence of events. By now there were others present in the room: worried grandparents, stunned neighbors, a few children shocked into silence. He offered up no false reassurance, no self-indulgent words of understanding.
The preacher went to the bed on which the child lay and spoke to her with great tenderness. “Gillian, remember last summer when I baptized you into the Lord?” With the pad of his thumb, he stroked the only part of the child not burned, her sweet right hand. “You’re going to that selfsame place tonight. First you’ll go down into the deep
—remember the dark water? Remember you were afraid? But just like on your baptismal day, you’ll come up again into the light and it will be more beauteous than anything you’ve ever seen. The Lord Jesus has gone before you. He has prepared a place for you.”
He had the parents kneel, one on either side of the bed, and joined their hands, making a bridge across the girl with their arms. Then the preacher lifted his big black Bible. He didn’t have to search for the Scripture he wanted. He just palmed the open book and held it aloft.
“Hear the truth of the Word as it is spoken in Isaiah,” he said. “‘The Lord shall give thee rest from thy sorrow, and from thy fear, and from the hard bondage wherein thou wast made to serve.’”
The preacher closed his Bible and spoke directly to the girl. “Godspeed, child of God.”
That very day, Lilly had marked Isaiah 14:3 in her own Bible. It never failed to give comfort.
Now, she turned to the task at hand, though there was probably no one sitting in the waiting room. Even her nurse had been at the site of the accident. It was understandable. Here in Skip Rock, folks were either kin or close as kin. She knew the gandy dancer’s family would not grieve alone. That was a comfort in itself.