Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (69 page)

ON SEPTEMBER 16, OUR
front door closed for the first time. It was a thing of beauty, solid oak, planed and sanded smooth as glass. Jamie and Bobby Higgins had put in the hinges and hung the door before lunch, and had finished installing the knob, lock, and mortise plate (the lock purchased at hideous expense from a locksmith in Cross Creek) just before sunset. Jamie swung the door closed with an impressive
thud
and threw the bolt with a ceremonious flourish, to the applause of the assembled family—which at the moment included Bobby and his three sons, invited to share supper with us and provide a little company for Fanny, as she missed Germain, Jem, and Mandy cruelly.

We’d laid wagers over supper as to who might be the first person to knock at our new front door, with guesses ranging from Aodh MacLennan (who spent more time with us than with his own family—“Why would he bother to knock, Sassenach?”) to Pastor Gottfried—an outsider at twenty to one, as he lived in Salem. At dawn the next morning, Jamie had drawn the bolt and gone out to tend the stock, but now we were finishing our noon meal, and no strange step had ventured yet upon our virgin threshold.

I was peering into the depths of my cauldron to see how much soup was left, repressing an urge to declaim the witches’ speech from
Macbeth
—largely because I couldn’t remember any more of it than “Double, Double, toil and trouble,” with scanty additional recollections of eyes of newt and toes of frog—when suddenly a measured
bam-bam-bam
echoed through the house.

“Eee!” Orrie leapt up—spilling his soup—but Aidan, Rob, and Fanny were all faster, and hit the hall at a dead heat, squabbling over who should answer the door.

“The manners of you, ye wee gomerels,” Jamie said mildly, coming up behind them. He grabbed both boys by the shoulders and pushed them aside. “And you, too, Frances, what are ye thinking, scrabbling wi’ the lads?” Fanny blushed and gave way, allowing him the honor of answering his own front door.

I’d come out into the hall, curious to see who our caller was. Jamie was so tall that I couldn’t see past him, but I heard him greet whoever it was in Gaelic, with a formal honorific. He sounded surprised.

I was surprised, too, when he stepped back and gestured Hiram Crombie into the hall.

Hiram lived toward the west end of the cove, well down the slope, and usually ventured away from his own neck of the woods only to come to church of a Sunday. I didn’t think he’d ever come to the house before.

A spare, dour-looking man, he was the
de facto
headman of the village of fisher-folk who had emigrated,
en masse,
from the far north near Thurso, to settle at the Ridge. I looked automatically over my shoulder for Roger; the fisher-folk were all rock-ribbed Presbyterians, who tended to keep to themselves; Roger was probably the only person in the household who could be thought of as being on truly cordial terms with Hiram—though Mr. Crombie would at least speak to me, after the events surrounding his mother-in-law’s funeral.

Roger was gone, though. And it appeared that, in fact, Hiram had things other than religion on his mind.

He’d doffed his hat—his good hat, I saw—when he came in, and gave me a small nod of acknowledgment, then cast a glance at the knot of children, blinked without changing expression, and turned to Jamie.

“A word with ye,
a mhaighister
?”

“Oh. Aye, of course, Mr. Crombie.” He stepped back and gestured toward the door of his study—known to all and sundry as the speak-a-word room. He met my eyes as he followed Hiram into the study, and gave me a wide-eyed shrug in response to my questioning look.
Hell if I know,
it said.

I SHOOED THE
children off to the creek to look for crawdads, leeches, cress, and anything else that seemed useful, and retired into my surgery, seizing the rare moment of leisure to ramble through the pages of my precious new
Merck Manual,
keeping one ear out in case Jamie wanted anything for Hiram.

One of the unusual accoutrements of my new surgery was a cane-bottomed rocking chair. Jamie had made it for me—in the evenings, over a period of months—from ashwood, with rockers of rock maple, and got Graham Harris, the local expert, to cane the bottom, assuring me that the chair would outlast me and any number of subsequent generations, rock maple being called that because it was hard as stone. The chair was remarkably helpful for soothing babies or small, wiggly children that I wanted to examine—and just as helpful for calming my own mind when I had to retreat from the stresses of daily life, in order to avoid throttling people.

At the moment, though, I was content in mind and body, and absorbed in finding out what the modern treatment for interstitial cystitis might be.

Lifestyle adjustment

Up to 90% of patients improve with treatment, but cure is rare. Treatment should involve encouraging awareness and avoidance of potential triggers, such as tobacco, alcohol, foods with high potassium content, and spicy foods.

Drug therapies…

Granted, there was nothing I could actually
do
with much of the information—no one on the Ridge ate spicy food to start with, but my chances of talking any of them out of using tobacco, alcohol, or raisins were low. As for drugs, the only applicable substance I had was my reliable willow-bark tea. Beyond curiosity, though, there was somehow a great comfort in the sense of authority in the book; the feeling that there was someone—many someones—who had blazed a trail for me; I wasn’t completely alone in the daily struggle between life and death.

I’d felt such reassurance for the first time when I, a fledgling nurse, was given a copy of the U.S. Army’s
Handbook for the Sanitary Troops
by a Yank medic I’d met during my first posting during the War.
My
War, as I always thought of it.

That’s what the Yanks called us—the enlisted medical support—the sanitary troops. After the first week in a field hospital, I wanted to laugh (when I wasn’t crying with my head under a pillow) at the name, but it wasn’t wrong. We were fighting with everything we had, and cleanliness was not the least of our tools.

Nor was it now the least of mine.

The amount of water needed by the average man daily for drinking purposes varies according to the amount of exercise he takes and the temperature of the atmosphere; a fair average is three or four pints in addition to that which he takes in food. On the march the amount is limited by the capacity of the canteen to about one quart, and this quantity should be very carefully husbanded.

A water is said to be potable when it is fit to drink. A potable water is an uncontaminated water; no matter how clear, bright, and sparkling a water may be, it is not potable if it is so situated that it can be fouled by fecal matter, urine, or the drainage from manured lands. There is a very common error that all spring water is pure; many springs, especially those which are not constantly flowing, draw their water from surface sources.

I should copy that out in my own casebook, I thought, glancing toward the big black book on the shelf above the leech jars. It was a comforting thought, that someday that casebook, too, might give a sense of authority to another physician, arming them with the gift of my own experience, my own knowledge.

I flipped Merck’s pages slowly, and paused, my eye caught by the heading
Malaria.
Was there anything new in the treatment of malaria? I’d seen Lizzie Beardsley two weeks ago, and she’d assured me that she’d taken the Jesuit bark that Mrs. Cunningham had given me…but she was pale and her hands trembled when she changed the diaper on little Hubertus, and when I pressed her, she’d admitted to feeling “a bit dizzy, now and then.”

“Small wonder,” I muttered to myself. The eldest of her four children was not quite five, and while one of the Beardsley boys—well, one of her husbands, why not be blunt about it?—was usually at home to be doing the outside chores while the other hunted or fished or ran traplines, Lizzie did virtually all of the heavy household work, alone, while nursing a new infant and feeding and minding the others.

“Enough to make anyone dizzy,” I said out loud. Being in the Beardsley cabin for more than a few minutes made
me
dizzy.

I could hear noises, voices in the hallway. Mr. Crombie had done his business with Jamie, then. They sounded cordial enough…

Who
would
read my writings? I wondered. Not only the casebook, but the small book of domestic medicine that I’d had published in Edinburgh two years before? That one had a number of helpful remarks on the importance of handwashing and cooking one’s food thoroughly—but the casebook had more valuable things: my notes on the production of penicillin (crude as my efforts were), drawings of bacteria and pathogenic microorganisms with a brief exegesis on Germ Theory, the administration of ether as an anesthetic (rather than an internally applied remedy for seasickness, its principal use at the moment), and…

“Oh,
there
ye are, Sassenach.” Jamie’s head poked into the surgery, wearing an expression that made me shut Merck abruptly and sit up.

“What on earth’s happened?” I said. “Is something wrong with one of the Crombies?” I was making a quick mental inventory of my first-aid kit as I got to my feet, but Jamie shook his head. He came all the way in and shut the door carefully behind him.

“The Crombies are thriving,” he assured me. “And so are all the Wilsons and the Baikies. And the Greigs, too.”

“Oh, good.” I sank back into my rocking chair. “What did Hiram want, then?”

“Well,” he said, with a resumption of the odd expression, “Frances.”

“SHE’S
TWELVE,
FOR
God’s sake!” I said. “What do you mean, he wants permission for his brother to court her? What brother, for that matter? I didn’t think he had one.”

“Oh, aye. Half brother, I should ha’ said. Cyrus. The tall one that looks like a stem of barley gone to seed. They call him
a’ Chraobh Ard.
D’ye not have anything drinkable in here, Sassenach?”

“That one,” I said, pointing at a black bottle with a menacing skull-and-crossbones marked in white chalk. “It’s rhubarb gin.
A’ Chraobh Ard
?” I smiled, despite the situation. The young man in question—and he was a
very
young man; I didn’t think he could be more than fifteen himself—was indeed very tall; he topped Jamie by an inch or two—but spindly as a willow shoot.

“What can Hiram be thinking?” I asked. “His brother surely isn’t old enough to marry anybody, even if Fanny was, which she isn’t.”

“Aye.” He picked up a cup from the counter, looked suspiciously into it, and smelled it before putting it down and pouring a measure of gin into it. “He admits as much. He says that Cyrus saw the lassie at kirk and would like to come a-visiting—in an official way, ken?—but Hiram doesna want his attention to be misunderstood or taken for disrespect.”

“Oh, yes?” I got up and poured a small splash of gin for myself. It had a lovely fragrance to match its flavor—sweet but with a noticeably tart edge. “What does he
really
have in mind?”