Sweet Everlasting (17 page)

She stood up, reluctantly handing the baby over to Eppy.

“You have to go
now?
You can’t even stay till the butter’s done?”

“Please, Carrie,” begged Charlotte, “can’t you stay?”

No, she really couldn’t, but it took a long time to persuade them. She’d only stopped by to say hi, and to let Charlotte and Emily know what had happened to the rabbits. She’d come prepared with a page-long explanation already written, telling how big they’d gotten, how smart the dark one was—their favorite—and when and where she’d let them go. She gave the folded paper to Charlotte, who took it and immediately ran off to look for her sister.

“What do you say, Charlotte?” her mother called after her.

“Thank you, Carrie!” she screamed back, and kept running.

“You look tired,” Eppy told her at the door, jiggling Fanny on her hip. “Are you all right? Sure? I don’t like the way your eyes look. Would you tell me if anything was wrong? I’m coming up there if you two don’t quit!” she yelled over her shoulder. “Jane’s still sick, and Emily’s bored and can’t quit pestering her. Dr. Wilkes says it isn’t anything serious, so I’m not worried. Well—bye!” she called when Carrie turned away abruptly. “Come back soon, you hear me? Don’t wait so long next time!”

Carrie waved to her from the wagon. Envy was a sin, but it was hard not to feel a pang of it when Eppy kissed her baby’s fat cheek and disappeared into her noisy, sweet-smelling house. Was self-pity a sin, too? Probably. Then she’d try not to think about who was waiting for her at her own house. Try not to miss Shadow. Not remember that her hospital was empty today because the rabbits were gone, and the grackle, and the old gray squirrel. But sometimes she got scared when there was no one to take care of, no one to love. Petey was just a mule, and he didn’t like it when she hugged him too much anyway.

She turned Petey off Broad and onto East Street, heading for the back alley between town and Stoops’s field. Nobody would see her there, or nobody much. Maybe this sadness wouldn’t last. Things could never go back to the way they were before she’d met Dr. Wilkes, because she would always love him and she’d always know that he didn’t even like her. But some sick or wounded wildling would need her soon—she never had to wait long—and then she’d feel better. If that meant she was peculiar, well, there was nothing she could do about it. She had a heart, there was still love in it, and it had to come out somehow. She gave Petey’s rump a swat with the reins and started the long climb up Dreamy Mountain.

“Hm. Ha! Hmmm.”

Tyler looked up from the weak mixture of gin and lemon juice he was swirling in his glass and glanced over the kitchen table at Dr. Stoneman. “What does that mean?”

“Shut up, I’m not finished.”

Tyler slid lower in his chair and leaned his head against the back, smiling tiredly. Stoneman must’ve driven his patients insane during examinations with his incessant humming and hrumphing. He wasn’t examining Ty now—he was reading his paper on the etiology of erysipelas—but he was doing a good job of driving him crazy all the same.

He flexed his shoulders, trying to ease the ache between them. His day had begun at four-thirty this morning with Morton Bittner banging on the door, yelling that his wife was dying in labor. She very nearly was, but it was the postpartum hemorrhage twelve hours later that almost carried her off. Things got complicated when she remembered, somewhat belatedly, Ty couldn’t help thinking, that her religious beliefs wouldn’t allow her to accept medical treatment. Either luck or divine providence had intervened when she’d finally passed out from blood loss, and her distraught husband had lost no time in overriding her scruples. Now she was resting comfortably, with a clear conscience and a healthy new son named Tyler.

A happy ending, but the baby’s namesake was tired to the bone. He’d quailed when he’d come home and found Stoneman leaning on the back porch railing, sipping gin from his flask in the pitch-dark. Ty didn’t want a drink, and he didn’t want to chat; he wanted to fall into bed and sleep until the sun came up. But Stoneman was going away in a few days, off to a Harrisburg sanatorium for an indefinite stay, so his nighttime visits to Tyler’s kitchen were numbered. Trying not to sound grudging, he’d invited him in, and now he was waiting for Stoneman’s unasked-for opinion on the manuscript Ty was about to send off for publication in next month’s
Transactions of the Association of American Physicians.

“Hmm,” he intoned for the fifth or sixth time. “So.”

“Hmm, so, what?”

Stoneman turned the last page and pulled his half glasses to the end of his beaky nose. “It must be good. I don’t understand one word of it.”

Tyler laughed. He didn’t believe it, but if that was the tack Stoneman wanted to take, it was all right with him. “Do you want anything to eat? A sandwich, a glass of milk?” The old man’s gray flesh hung on his bones these days like rags on a scarecrow.

He snorted and waved the suggestion aside, as usual. “Tell me, Doctor, do you like it here? Are you satisfied with the work you’re doing in our little town?”

Tyler eyed him in surprise. “That’s two different questions,” he hedged.

“I’ll take two different answers.”

“All right. Yes. And no.”

“Ha! Just what I thought.”

Tyler held his glass up and peered through watery gin at the kitchen light. The subject of his professional dissatisfaction was one he’d put off thinking seriously about for months; he felt little inclination to confront it this very minute for Stoneman’s benefit.

“Don’t take this wrong, but I never did think you were cut out for country doctoring. I’m not saying you aren’t good at it; you’re better now than I was when I quit, and I did it for forty years. And if you repeat that to anybody, I’ll call you a damn liar and sue you for slander.”

“Your secret’s safe,” Ty grinned. “But I don’t agree with you—I think you were a fine doctor.” It wasn’t a polite lie; he’d been here long enough to have heard a hundred stories about the old doc’s tirelessness and dedication. If good doctoring were measured by devotion to duty, Benjamin Stoneman had been one of the best.

“I thank you for that.” Stoneman’s sallow cheeks turned faintly pink. He poured more gin into his glass and lifted it in a toast. “But you, now, you ought to be practicing in a big city, Washington or New York, treating high-society hypochondriacs for astronomical fees. You could join all the prestigious medical societies and boil yourself down to a specialty, like diseases of the right thumbnail or the anterior earlobe. Think how rich you’d be!
Richer,
I should say.”

Medical specialties were another of Stoneman’s reactionary pet peeves. But Ty was too tired to rise to the bait tonight; he got up and went to the sink to throw his drink away and pour a glass of water. “If you want to know the truth, I don’t want to practice the clinical side of medicine anywhere anymore,” he decided to admit. “If I did, I’d do it right here, because the need is greater and the life suits me. But the fact is, I don’t want to be a country doctor
or
a city doctor.”

“Well, what the hell do you want?” Stoneman’s irritation came partly from puzzlement, partly from watching good gin go down the drain.

Tyler looked at him speculatively, gauging his likeliest reaction. “What do I want to do? I want to look for cures for diseases,” he said combatively, “not treat the symptoms after they’ve already been contracted. I want to eliminate typhoid fever by finding out what causes it and then developing an antitoxin. And malaria and yellow fever and tuberculosis—they can all be prevented, we know that now, if we could find the bacteriological keys to their causes. That’s what I want to do.” He folded his arms, preparing himself for his colleague’s cynical rebuttal.

But Stoneman disarmed him. “Then do it! You want to study epidemiology, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“Then study it! I haven’t any doubt that you’ll succeed. It pains me to admit it, but you’ve got too good a mind to spend your life lancing boils and setting bones and delivering babies.” He poked a stiff finger at the air to make his point. “A man with ideas has no business wasting his time treating sick people. The best that can happen is that once in a while you’ll save a life. But truth is eternal, and besides that, it’s got more applications.”

Tyler almost laughed, he was so surprised. And gratified, and inexplicably moved. “If I didn’t know better,” he said gruffly, “I’d say you just gave me a compliment.”

“You must be hearing things.”

They smiled at each other.

Stoneman pushed his chair back abruptly and got to his feet. “You look tired, Doctor,” he observed almost gently. “You ought to get more rest.”

“Look who’s talking.” He stopped himself from reaching out for the old man’s arm and helping him up. “When do you leave for Harrisburg?”

“Monday, ten o’clock train.” He slanted him a sardonic look. “Think you’ll still be here when I get back?”

“Of course I will.”

“Maybe not. I might be up in that hawker’s prison for months and months, and when I get back you could be long gone.”

“Oh, I doubt—”

“Then again, they might ship me home in a pine box in a week or two.”

“That’s true. Or an urn. An urn wouldn’t take up as much room in the boneyard.”

Stoneman made a sour face. He hated it when Tyler undercut his morbidity by parodying it.

But Ty didn’t miss the faint gleam of optimism in his emaciated countenance, hard as he tried to hide it. It had been like pulling teeth to convince him the Winslow Sanatorium had something to offer, not only because Stoneman’s nature was deeply cynical but also because, as a physician, he’d arrived at the impartial conclusion that his time was up. He’d all but reconciled himself to dying, and resurrecting hope at this late hour was a responsibility Tyler didn’t take lightly. All he could do was trust that Dr. Winslow knew what he was doing, and pray that he himself hadn’t set his friend up for a tragic disappointment.

As if reading his thoughts, Stoneman rumbled, “I’m holding you personally accountable for my full recovery, you know. You and this Winslow friend of yours.”

“Colleague, not friend.”

“I’m sorry you told me he’s on the ‘cutting edge.’ That’s an expression I’ve never much cared for.”

“Now, Doctor, squeamishness doesn’t become you.” He followed Stoneman to the door. “You know the first thing Winslow’s going to insist on is that you get rid of that.” He nodded at the flask Stoneman was sliding into his coat pocket.

He snorted; the very idea put him in a bad mood. “I should never have let you talk me into this,” he muttered. “You know they make you sleep in little revolving shelters out in the open, all the doors and windows wide open? And they make you drink
beef juice
all the time.” He swore softly but foully. “I’d rather die in my own town, where at least a few people know me, than up there with a bunch of spitting, hacking strangers.” He started down the porch steps, ignoring Tyler’s hand. “Turn the damn light on before I break my damn neck.”

“Good night, Doctor.”

“Hah.”

“I’ll see you before you go.”

“Maybe!” His gaunt figure merged with the darkness and disappeared.

A low half-moon floated behind pink clouds and the fat leaves of the sycamore tree in Tyler’s backyard. Leaning on the railing, he watched the fireflies flicker on and off, mirroring the flickering stars over his head. To his left, the soft outline of High Dreamer, vaguely breast-shaped, rose into a mist. Carrie lived about three-quarters of the way up, right about … there. He wondered if she was sleeping now, on that narrow bench behind the curtain in her little cabin. It was late; he hoped she was sleeping.

Stoneman’s abrupt departure had taken the decision he’d been trying to make—whether or not to tell him about Carrie—out of his hands. Remembering her desperate plea for secrecy, he was glad now he’d missed the opportunity, even though the need to share the astonishing truth about her with someone, especially someone who cared about her, was still strong. But his anger was gone, dissipated in the night sometime between yesterday and today, and he’d spent most of the day asking himself
why
his first reaction to her amazing revelation had been indignation.

The answer didn’t flatter him, which was why he’d resisted looking at it as long as he had. What it boiled down to was hurt pride. It had pleased him to be among the pathetically small number of people whom Carrie trusted; when she’d shown him her hospital and shyly confided that he was the first person to see it, he’d felt at least as much self-satisfaction as uneasiness. But discovering she had an even bigger secret that she had no intention of confiding in anyone,
even him,
had wounded his vanity. Simple as that.

The binoculars and the cryptic note he’d found tonight from Mrs. Quick—”Wiggins girl left this”—deeply distressed him. After the things he’d said, it couldn’t have been easy for her to come here and return his gift. He could imagine her state of mind and the mix of her emotions when she’d encountered his surly housekeeper instead of him. Now all he could think about was seeing her and making her understand that he was
glad
she could speak, not morally outraged. He didn’t care anymore what had compelled her to begin living such an intricate, life-involving deception; whatever it was, she’d suffered for it, and he’d callously added to her pain by scorning her. He had failed Carrie at a time when she had never needed him more, and the hours between now and the next time he saw her were going to be his penance.

Lou was scratching in the ivy at the side of the house. It was very late, time to bring the dog in and go to bed. “Here, boy,” he called. “Here, Louie,
come.
Come on, boy!” Lou ignored him, as usual. Whistling and clapping had no effect. Sighing, Tyler descended the porch steps, located the puppy in the dark ivy, snatched him up, and carried him back up the steps. It wasn’t the dog’s fault he wouldn’t mind; Ty’s schedule left him no time to train him. He should’ve found him a real home after Wiggins wouldn’t let Carrie keep him.

He yawned, and Lou tried to lick his face. With his chin on the puppy’s knobby head, he took a last look at the glimmering firefly spectacle, a last sniff of the flower-soft air. Tomorrow was another all-day inoculation day—he scheduled them every other Tuesday—but with luck he could be finished by five or six. He’d have a quick dinner at home, hire a horse from Hoyle Taber’s livery. Then he’d ride up to Carrie’s cabin on High Dreamer and make her his friend again.