Skip Rock Shallows (7 page)

“No. I take good care of her.”

“Yes, you do,” Lilly said as she left. “You’ll let me know if you need anything . . .”

“I expect we’ll do fine. Always do,” Armina said.

Lilly paused at the bottom of the steps. “See you next Thursday.”

“Wednesday,” Armina said with a steely look. “Aunt Orie likes her doctoring done on Wednesday.”

Careful to keep to the footpath, Lilly tramped down the mountain. Halfway home she stopped and took the canteen from her linen satchel; her mouth was dry as talcum powder.

“Bother,” she said, shaking the empty vessel. She’d neglected to refill it at the Eldridges’. Surely there was a spring nearby. She knew the animals and birds didn’t drink their fill at the sour water of Swampy. She hung the canteen around her neck by the strap of its canvas holder and looked around. It would be a nice break from the hustle of the day to spend a few minutes searching for cool, clear water.

Shortly after she stepped off the path, she entered an isolated cove lush with an unspoiled hardwood forest. She wandered farther in, noting oak, buckeye, walnut, sourwood, ash, and beech, as well as the expected underlying scrub cedar and stunted fir. The leafy tops of the soaring hardwoods intermeshed, enclosing her under a protective canopy. As if poured through a heavenly sieve, sprinkles of sunlight glittered through the shadows, pooling like melted butter on the forest floor and highlighting the tips of beech fern with gold.

In awe, she continued into the depths, arms outstretched, trailing her fingers over the sometimes-sleek, sometimes-rough bark of the trees.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
She heard the staccato drum of a woodpecker’s sharp beak probing a hollow limb for insects. She inhaled the ancient, undisturbed, verdant scent of the forest like a history lesson, imagining the passage of time trapped by rings inside the trunks of the trees. More than likely, on this very spot, an Indian scout had crept silently through the trees, his moccasin-covered feet leaving nary a trace. Perhaps the redskin had tracked the wily Daniel Boone or the elusive Simon Kenton; perhaps he had his eye on a sleek deer or a fatted buffalo and stopped where she now stood to insert an arrow into his bow.

Under her feet, a maidenhair fern tickled her ankles with long, drooping leaflets. She stooped to pick one. As a girl, she’d often gathered these fronds to make flowing green wigs for her dolls and once for her dog. Poor Steady had been so embarrassed.

She stopped to remove a worm that inched up her sleeve, measuring her for a new suit of clothes, and deposited him gently on a moss-covered rock. Many times she’d lined her dolls’ beds with just such velvety moss.

The hush of the forest was so deep that the bright notes of a wren amplified accordingly, and a cardinal’s song ricocheted joyously from branch to branch overhead. She strained to hear the slightest splash of water against rock—sure sign of a spring. It was there, she thought, somewhere on the other side of the massive tulip poplar barring her path. A tree fit to hide Goliath himself.

A tiny prickle of fear buzzed her consciousness like a bumblebee searching for a honeysuckle vine. She swallowed hard, disappointed that she had let an unpleasant sentiment enter this hallowed space. It was no use. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t bury her past. Like the stench of rotten fruit, it wouldn’t be ignored.

Feeling abandoned in an unfamiliar place, as unseen walls closed in on her, she panicked and fled. The canteen bounced against her hip, pulling her back to the present. Her anger flared. She’d be tarred and feathered before she would run this time. Instead she pulled up some Corbett grit and shouted, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” Shaking her fist in the face of all fear, she marched right back to the tulip tree.

“‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,’” she recited as she skirted the trunk of the tree. “Thank You, Jesus,” she prayed as her emotions calmed.

Her reward was indeed on the far side of the tulip poplar. A steady stream of water gushed from the base of a rock- and grass-covered hillock. Gray-green lichens and tiny, fossilized shells dotted the surface of the centuries-old stones covering the knoll. Enchanted, Lilly knelt and wet her face in the spring before filling her canteen. The icy water felt and tasted delicious, a rare treat on a summer’s day.

A child popped his head above the knoll. At least Lilly thought it was a boy. Maybe it was the bowl-shaped haircut. As soon as she spied him, he disappeared. Before she could react, he popped up again and did the same maneuver at least half a dozen times before she darted around the hill and caught him in his game. She caught him, but he stunned her.

There was something dreadfully wrong with the lad. His bare chest and arms were splotched with large reddish-purple dots—like hemorrhagic spots of petechiae magnified a dozen times. Her mind searched for answers. The usually pinprick dots of petechiae were indicative of blood-clotting disorders, severe fevers, and—oh, surely not—typhus.

As soon as the boy realized Lilly was on his side of the hill, he laughed and dashed away. Lilly gave chase, discarding each hypothesis as she went. He was too vibrant to be very ill. Winded, she slowed her pace and, instead of chasing the boy, followed the runnels in the grass left by his flying feet.

Soon she came to a meadow rimmed by the forest. Wildflowers of every sort grew there in wild abandon. Smack in the middle of the meadow was a tumble-down cabin with a wide plank porch that listed to one side like a boat in a storm. And smack in the middle of the porch was a bearded man holding a shotgun with the barrel pointed her way.

“Stop where ye are!” he said in a voice as deadly as the gun.

Lilly didn’t have to be told twice. She stood stock-still at the edge of the yard.

“State your business,” he said with a slight wave of the gun as if she needed encouragement. “If’n you’re with the gov’ment, I’ll finish you off where you stand.”

“I was following the boy,” Lilly said. “I’m a doctor.”

“Ain’t no such thing as a woman doctor,” the man said with a guffaw. “’Sides, we ain’t got no call for any doctoring.”

The man weaved or the gun weaved; Lilly wasn’t sure which. She held her doctor’s bag at chest level. “Is your boy sick, mister?”

The man yelled over his shoulder, “Cleve! Get out here!”

The boy popped out of the open door. “Yeah, Daddy?”

“Air ye sick?”

“No, sir.”

Lilly noticed odd circles under the lad’s eyes. They were the same alarming color as the rash on his chest and arms.

“He ain’t sick. Be on your way.”

A woman appeared in the doorway. A fretful toddler straddled her hip, and she was obviously close to term with another child. “Hiram, you loggerdy head,” she barked. “Put that gun away and ask our guest in. Honestly, you got the manners of a porcupine.” She pinched the boy’s earlobe. “You been aggravating the lady, Cleve?”

“No, ma’am.” He hopped around the porch while rubbing his ear. “Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!”

The man staggered a little as he broke the shotgun and removed some shells. Lilly wondered if he was drunk.

With a generous wave, the lady motioned Lilly inside. There were two straight-backed chairs at the kitchen table, which was laid for dinner with the scrubbed-clean lids of lard buckets, rims up, and a few assorted utensils.
Brilliant,
Lilly thought of the lard can plates.
I never would have thought of that.
A dough board packed full of reddish grape-size fruit decorated the center of the table. A packing crate pushed up against the wall held the water bucket and a wash pan. The only other furnishings in the room were a mirrored wardrobe, a coal cookstove, and a corn-shuck mattress on the packed dirt floor. The flue pipe that accessed the chimney to the cookstove lay in pieces atop the stove. A can of blacking, a long-handled brush, and a soiled rag made Lilly think she’d interrupted the lady cleaning the segmented pipe. She remembered how her mother would chase all the kids outside when she took on the same chore every spring. The black suet made a terrible mess. It had to be done yearly, however, or the pipe could catch on fire.

Hiram ceremoniously pulled out a chair for Lilly before he plopped down in the other. “Air ye a doctor for real?” he asked.

“For real,” she said.

“Then mayhap ye can doctor me,” he said.

“What seems to be the problem?”

Lilly observed the boy while his father prattled on about bouts of dizziness and ringing in his ears. “Tobacco juice ain’t helping,” he said.

“Pardon me?” she asked.

“Lynn biled some tobacco and a big sweet onion for a poultice, but it don’t cut the pain no more.” He covered his right ear, which was stained dark brown, with his hand. “Used to work good,” he said with a puzzled look.

The baby cried and rubbed her tiny red nose against her mother’s shoulder. The whole family needed doctoring from what Lilly could tell.

“This quare woman was a-drinking from the spring,” Cleve chimed in.

“Well, we all forgot our manners,” Lynn said. “Hiram, take this girl child while I fix the doctor a drink.”

Lilly reached for the baby instead. “May I take a look at the little one?” she asked.

The boy leaned against her arm while she searched in her kit for the otoscope. The baby shrieked in terror as Lilly attempted to look inside her ear with the tip of the pointed instrument.

“Do mine first.” Hiram scooted his chair closer to Lilly’s. “She won’t be so scared if she sees me have it done.”

The mother set an assortment of cracked cups and mugs on the table, stuck her finger in one, and popped it in the little girl’s mouth. “Don’t study everything so hard, Hiram.”

Distracted, the toddler let Lilly probe her ears. “She has an ear infection. I suspect you do too,” she said to Hiram before she examined him. His ears looked worse than the baby’s. No wonder he was dizzy. “How about you, Cleve? Do your ears ache?”

“Nah,” he said, “but I’d like to look through that there thing.”

Hiram held his head to one side while Cleve took a look-see. Lilly was struck by the father’s tenderness in the midst of such poverty—even if he didn’t offer his wife a chair. Lynn slid a cup of pinkish liquid in front of Lilly.

“Umm,” Lilly said, stalling for time, “this looks tasty.”

“Sumac-ade.” The boy swallowed a large draught. “It’s good.”

“My word, I thought sumac was poison.”

The man picked a bunch of fruit from the dough board. “Red is safe; see how the fruit grows on the twig tips? Unless you strive to be as big a fool as Adam in the Garden, don’t dare to taste the white sumac. You’ll know it even if it’s not ripe, for it’ll dangle loosely and not from the tips.” He pulled a tiny winged projection from the stem and held it up for all to see. “The poison sumac don’t have wings either.”

If she hadn’t been holding the toddler, Lilly would have smacked her own forehead. The boy had decorated his body with sumac juice in the same manner that she and her childhood friends once dipped feather quills into the purple ink of the pokeberry plant. She’d spent many a hot summer afternoon with her friend Kate decorating rocks and writing notes on the underside of sycamore leaves to send to make-believe pen pals in foreign lands.

“Drink up,” the man said. “Lynn here mellows the juice with honey.”

Lilly took a small bottle of wine of opium mixed with anise and sweet oil and set it on the table. “Let me write instructions for treating your earache first.” She never liked to leave medicine of any type without specific written directions. When she was a student, she’d left a glycerin suppository bedside only to have her patient swallow it whole. No harm done; everything came out all right in the end, as the saying goes, but it scared her silly nonetheless.

Shake well,
she printed on a pad,
and drop three to five drops into the affected ear. If no relief in five or ten minutes, repeat, and follow along as needed.

Lynn studied the script as seriously as if she were memorizing a Bible verse. Carefully she unscrewed the dropper from the glass bottle and drew up a minute amount. Watching her mother intently from Lilly’s lap, the little girl opened her mouth wide as a baby bird’s.

“Do I put it on her tongue?” Lynn asked.

“Goodness,” Lilly said, “I forgot the most important part.” She uncapped her fountain pen again and drew a picture of the dropper and three drops dripping into an exaggerated ear canal. “This should be clearer.”

Lynn treated her husband first, letting the little girl watch. The toddler turned up first one ear and then the other in perfect imitation of her daddy.

“Good job,” Lilly said, picking up the white stoneware mug full of pink sumac-ade. Surprisingly, it tasted refreshing, but too sweet for her taste.

After half an hour of nonstop dialog, Hiram pushed back his chair and retrieved the shotgun from behind the door. “Come on, Cleve; supper ain’t catching itself.”

“I saw a squirrel big as a fattening hen on that pin oak by the spring, Daddy,” Cleve said, pulling a shirt on over his head.

“Let’s go get him, Son. Time’s a-wasting.”

“You’ll have to make a spit to cook him on outside,” Lynn said. “I ain’t going to have the stove put back together before suppertime.”

“Be on the lookout for apple trees, Son. Meat roasted over dried apple wood will flat out melt in your mouth.” He slid shells into the breech, allowing Cleve to pocket extras. “You might not think it, but an apple tree drops a lot of wood—branches fall off in the slightest wind.”

The screen door slapped closed behind Hiram and Cleve. Lilly was glad to have a moment alone with Lynn, and she was glad for a break from Hiram. The man surely loved the sound of his own voice.

“Ye can go if you need to,” Lynn said. “Hiram’s careful where he shoots.”

“I’d love to visit a moment. I could help you black the stovepipe.”

“That’s real nice, but you’d ruin your clothes. It can wait. Want some more ade? There’s plenty.”

Lilly held her palm over her mug. “No, I’m good.”

“So where are you from?” Lynn asked. “I heard tell there was a new doctor in Skip Rock, but I never figured on a lady.”

“I grew up on Troublesome Creek, in Breathitt County. Do you know of it?”

“I can’t say as I do. We come from Virginia. We ain’t been here a year yet.”

“Do you have someone to help with your confinement?”