I consider myself guilty of plenty of things, but probably not the crimes you’d assume. I don’t regret sending Robert Morgan to meet the Maker, for instance. I don’t regret it a bit. After all, it was his original idea. As for the other two souls I’ve doctored, well, each case came with its own dark face for me to stare down.
Is what I’ve done right? Maybe. Some people in Aberdeen call it a mercy. Some mutter that it’s the doing of witches and devils—the work of Tabitha Morgan and her infernal quilt all over again. And in a sense, they’re correct. It is, after all, her recipes that I use, both for giving comfort and for darker purposes. But here’s something I’ve never done—I’ve never made a decision for anyone one way or another. People come to me first and foremost, sometimes for healing, sometimes for more, but they are the ones who do the asking. Why don’t I refuse? you might wonder. Why don’t I just say, “No, I won’t, end of story”?
Believe me, I think about it sometimes, but there is this to consider: There is the unrivaled power of death to even out the past. In particular, my past. I used to think I couldn’t change my history, that the things that happened to me were as good as grooved in my bones, but each time I take a life, I find otherwise. I uncover another long-lost layer of my past, another strip of my soul.
Usually, it’s no mystery why someone wants life to end. Sickness, for the most part. Sometimes debt, although I won’t take those cases. It’s not my business to judge, only to determine. But I can’t discount the weight of the past on the present moment—it’s nothing I can see, but always there all the same, like an invisible stone sinking a ship. And it’s never the people I suspect of meddling with the past who are guilty of it, either. Friend or foe, anyone is capable of scuttling a few innocent details, omitting one or two facts, and changing a life forever. It’s another thing entirely whether they choose to admit it.
Before I moved in with the doctor, I wouldn’t have called myself vengeful, but the longer I was under his roof, the more I began to feel spite tugging on my sleeve like a fitful child. Mostly it was because of the absence of my sister, which lingered in the house like a rank odor we all tried to ignore. The doctor accomplished this by alternating vast periods of silence with harangues about my weight, my looks, my cooking, and my general existence.
“A big bird for a big woman,” he snickered when I brought out the turkey I’d roasted for Thanksgiving. “Your sister always made Cornish hens, but I guess that would be nothing more than a light snack for the likes of you, Truly. Son”—he lifted up a piece of breast meat and turned to Bobbie—“pass your plate and prepare to be stuffed!” He chuckled a little at his seasonal joke, disregarding the tears hanging in the corners of Bobbie’s eyes and completely overlooking the fact that Bobbie was still getting over the loss of his mother.
“Thanks,” Bobbie mumbled, his voice as dry as the meat on his plate, and then proceeded to eat nothing, not even the pumpkin pie or the fudge I’d made special for the day.
After every maddening meal, after every one of the doctor’s humiliating medical exams, I took the opportunity to retreat to the warmth of my bedroom and Tabitha’s quilt, studying its strange botanical whorls and lines while I tried to pound the malice inside me back down to a manageable ball.
Thanks to Marcus, I had become familiar with the names of the herbs, but the overall design of the thing still puzzled me. The plants in the middle of the quilt were easy. Everything I expected to be there pretty much was. There was peppermint, and comfrey, sage, and lavender, borage, chamomile, and rosemary. Lined up in neat little rows, sewn demurely on neat white squares, they suggested a host of remedies. With Marcus’s help, I had dried a measure of herbs in individual jars and stored them in the pantry next to the spices. During my quiet evenings, I went over the lists of plants and body parts I had made, trying to decode the quilt.
The stitched eye stood for vision, I figured, so the herbs underneath it must have been good for sight. I wrote down bilberries, chrysanthemum, honeysuckle, and horsetail. And sure enough, when I developed a sty on my left eyelid, a poultice of these plants soon took down the swelling. Encouraged by my success, I used the mixture I’d made for the cut on my own finger to soothe Bobbie’s scraped knees, warning him not to tell his father. I hadn’t yet gotten a chance to try any of the remedies underneath the quilt’s bone, but I figured Tabitha had meant those plants to be used for fractures and breaks. Likewise, I was guessing that the heart stood for circulation and blood. The hand denoted skin to me, and the lips suggested eating and therefore the stomach. Every night before I went to sleep, I drank a cup of peppermint-chamomile tea, as the quilt suggested, and while my digestion was always just fine, I was sorry to find that the size of my appetite remained the same.
The only motif I couldn’t figure out were the wings that fluttered along the edges of the quilt. Maybe they were just a decoration, I reasoned. Or maybe they meant nothing at all. The plants on the outskirts of the quilt certainly weren’t as well behaved as the ones in the middle. Actually, they were more like weeds. They twisted and seethed, tangled their roots, seeds, and bulbs, and spread themselves into a snarl. Furthermore, not one of them could boast of anything but a bad reputation—like devil’s trumpet, a white scoop of flower whose seeds could pickle a hippo. And there were hemlock leaves, and belladonna, the oblong shapes of oleander leaves, and raggedy nightshade. Marcus had refused to dry any of these plants for me.
“I don’t know what you’re doing with all this stuff,” he said, dumping a long fistful of rosemary on the kitchen counter, “but there’s no way I’m bringing you a heap of hemlock leaves. Between you and the doctor, I don’t know, one of you just might take it in mind to kill the other one. That’s how Socrates committed suicide, you know, after the Athenians put him on trial.”
A fluttering started up at the base of my skull right then, and for a moment I thought I might be coming down with one of my migraines, but an image of the quilt’s unkempt border swam into my mind’s eye, along with the pale host of wings, and with it came a clarity of understanding so sharp, it was almost eye splitting. I knew that hemlock was fatal from reading one of the herbal guides Marcus had brought me from the library, but it was also sometimes used as a sedative. And belladonna and digitalis, just as deadly as hemlock, were also sometimes used for medicine. The art, of course, lay in getting the dose right. Or maybe not.
“Oh,” I breathed, and reached out for the edge of the counter. “Oh, my goodness.”
Marcus was immediately by my side, tender concern unfurling across his face. “What is it?” he asked, and lightly put one of his hands on the small of my back.
I straightened up, surprised by how simultaneously familiar and strange his touch was. Part of me wanted him to put his hand on my back again, but another piece of me was scared I would bust. I smoothed my apron over my hips. “Nothing. Sorry. I’m fine. I just remembered something, that’s all.”
Marcus looked at me quizzically but then shoved his hat back on his head. He hesitated as if he wanted to say something more, but the moment passed, and he flung the door open to the wind and the garden. A faint, moldy smell of compost trickled under my nose. It was the same smell I always caught out at the graveyard—an odor of burial and decay, but also of rejuvenation and life. A subject Tabitha Morgan had apparently known plenty about and which I was determined to learn.
We in Aberdeen are pure creatures of habit. Saturdays, for instance, are for gardening committee meetings and library outings. Fridays are street-sweeping days. Wednesday is garbage collection, and on Sunday mornings, while the rest of Aberdeen was praying, or sleeping, or loading leather bags of golf clubs into the trunks of their cars, I got a chance to reunite with Amelia. Sunday mornings were her hours to clean Robert Morgan’s clinic, but we always took the opportunity to flap our gums a little afterward and catch up.
She brought her own equipment from the farm—buckets, mops, and dusters and bleach, vinegar, and baking soda. Amelia held no faith in modern concoctions for the household. She simply cleaned the way her mother had—with lemon oil, and salt, and old-fashioned elbow grease. Still, as a concession to the doctor’s medical ways, she consented to swabbing the floors and surfaces of the examining room with the pine-scented disinfectant he ordered from one of his catalogs, her face screwed up in protest the whole time and both windows thrown open.
After work, she always sat in the kitchen with me to drink a cup of bitter coffee, the steam rolling over the rims of the mugs and misting up our eyes until everything looked better. It was a trick we’d learned at the farm—an optical illusion of necessity that was still serving us well. Amelia would give me the news, and the worst news of all came on the day she told me that she’d had Hitching Post put down.
I sloshed coffee on the table. I’d been living at the doctor’s house for four years by then, and of course some things around town had changed, but not as much as you might imagine. The firehouse bells still clogged up in the summer. The newspaper still had the same masthead, and even the neighborhood dogs and cats rarely ventured away from their haunts. An image of Hitching Post’s crooked forelegs and swayback rose up so powerfully in my mind that I could almost believe he was standing before me, runny nostrils and all. I had almost come to think of him as an extension of the barn, I realized. I took a slurp of coffee. “What was wrong with him?”
Amelia sighed. “He was starting to go lame, and we just couldn’t take it anymore. Besides, hay isn’t so cheap. And Ma’s getting older, and I don’t like the horses. Never have.”
I bit my lip. “Still.”
“It was quick, though. One bullet. And then we buried him.”
I frowned. “Where?”
“Right next to Dad.”
At that, my lips twitched. I pictured August in the underworld, frantically juggling chits and bets, inviting all comers. “He would have liked that.”
Amelia smiled, too. “I know.” She lapsed into silence, then swilled the rest of her coffee and slid her red bandanna off her hair. The doctor made her wear it. He was particular and didn’t like her to drop any hairs in his clinic. Sunday was Amelia’s longest day, but she got paid by the hour, so the additional labor meant extra cash. More than that, she enjoyed the extended period of quiet it granted her.
In spite of Miss Sparrow’s years of torturous dictations and elocution lessons, Amelia never did become a chatterbox. Far from it. In fact, as if to spite Miss Sparrow and prove herself the victor, Amelia generally spoke only under duress—sometimes even with me. That’s why cleaning suited her so well, for it allowed her the time and space to pay attention to life’s tiniest details, leaving nothing undusted, nothing unscrubbed. The thing about cleaning for Amelia was that it was a delicate business. People wanted their spaces made fresh and new, but they also didn’t want anyone snooping around in their personal dirt, and that was the true genius of Amelia. She could give the illusion that absolutely nothing had been touched, nothing moved—that the sparkling light fixtures and gleaming tabletops simply happened by magical accident—even while she turned entire rooms upside down.
Precision was particularly important for the doctor. Once, Amelia moved a canister of cotton balls from the left to the right side of the counter in his examining room, and Robert Morgan met her at the clinic door the next Sunday, his jaw locked up tighter than Fort Knox. “Do you see the order in which these are arranged?” he asked, pointing to the glass containers of cotton balls, cotton swabs, tongue depressors, and individually packaged alcohol swabs. He spoke slowly and loudly, as if Amelia were stupid or from a foreign country, but she was used to that. It was the way most people spoke to her.
Amelia nodded and gave Robert Morgan the thumbs-up sign. “No problem,” she croaked. “It won’t happen again.”
Her chapped voice surprised Robert Morgan, but I knew her better than he did. For Amelia, words were something to use sparingly. They were like vinegar or bleach. A tiny amount could clean up almost anything, but dump out more than that, and you could have one ungodly mess on your hands.
After that incident, Amelia was more careful to measure the distance of the canisters from the counter’s edge, to put the doctor’s chair back in exactly the same spot, and to memorize the order of the books on the shelves before she restacked them. Amelia loved books, and other people’s books offered a world of information above and beyond what was printed on their pages. I never would have guessed, for instance, that the ancient Reverend Pickerton and his wife were hiding a copy of the Kama Sutra under their bed or that the twin-setted Vi Vickers checked trashy science fiction novels out of the library. “They’re for my son,” she said, blushing, when Amelia ran her duster over the stack of them. “He just keeps them on my desk.” But Amelia said nothing. What was it to her if Vi Vickers wanted to lose herself in Amazon space warriors?
Robert Morgan’s shelves, however, harbored no such indiscretions. With the doctor, what you saw was what you got, and after Amelia perused the books once, she quickly grew tired of looking at cross-sectioned illustrations of internal organs. I’ve often thought that people would be better off if they left nature well alone, but I guess it’s a matter of personal preference. Amelia, for example, used no cosmetics, dressed in a black skirt and white top every day, and hadn’t even trimmed her hair in six years. Nevertheless, the skin on her cheeks was as taut and shiny as an apple, and her eyes were as clear as well water.
“What’s your secret?” Vi always begged her, but Amelia just smiled and pressed her lips together. Vi wouldn’t have liked the answer anyway, which was hard work and harder living. That and a general avoidance of mirrors.
The day she told me about Hitching Post, however, Amelia was rushing through her work. As she reached for the last book on the doctor’s shelf, she leaned so far over the top of the stepladder that she fell off balance and dropped it. She watched it thud to the floor, facedown, and then saw a bundle of envelopes slide from its pages. She climbed down and retrieved them, turning them over one by one, an expression of alarm and surprise scribbled on her face. Suddenly, without any warning, the doctor’s black shoes appeared in her peripheral vision.
“I don’t pay you to snoop.”
Amelia’s cheeks burned. She tried to hide the wad of papers in her fist, then gave up and simply stood shaking. The doctor’s nostrils flared—always a bad sign. “Now that I think about it, however, I’m really quite happy you found them. It’s serendipitous, really. Because now you can get rid of them for me.”
Amelia blanched. “Sir?”
“Isn’t that what I pay you to do? Clear out my trash?”
Amelia bowed her head. She worked her mouth, forming words with difficulty. “But these—”
The air exploded as the doctor flung a crystal ashtray—a wedding gift—across the room. It didn’t shatter, however. Merely cracked with an ugly fracture running down its underside like a scar. Without taking her eyes off the doctor, Amelia picked it up and replaced it on the desk. She was August’s daughter. She didn’t scare easily. She worked her gums for a minute, wetting her tongue, and then her voice rose up thick and determined, like a cloud of mosquitoes. “I want what you promised me. I’ve been waiting for four years, and now I want the papers to the farm. I know you have them in your desk. I seen them there.”
The doctor waited a moment before responding, as if he were trying to decide between a display of righteous fury or icy disdain. In the end, he surprised Amelia. He smiled, flashing those long teeth of his like a bear that’s set on winning you over before it digs into your hide. “Well, well, well,” he droned, the tight set of his eyes a dead contrast to the honeyed lilt coming out of him. “I must say, this is a real surprise. I seem to have finally found myself a worthy adversary here in Aberdeen. And in quiet little Amelia Dyerson to boot. Maybe you have more of your father’s genes in you than I previously thought.”
At the mention of her father’s name, Amelia cocked her chin and pointed it straight at the doctor, like a gun. Robert Morgan rubbed the back of his neck. “Fine. You’ve got yourself a deal. But on one condition. I want you to burn those papers. While I watch. Only then will I sign the deed over to you.”
At that moment, the buttery scent of apple pie wafted through the clinic’s open window. Startled, Amelia looked through it to see me waving at her from the kitchen, a hot pie balanced on the sill. I remember I swept an arm through the air to tell her to hurry, to come on over. Amelia crooked a finger in the air back at me and, without my noticing, dropped the bundle of yellow paper at her feet, sweeping it together like yesterday’s ghosts.
I’ve often considered what would have happened if Amelia had made a different decision that afternoon, but it’s easy to solve the past in the present, and when you do, you sometimes forget to leave room for forgiveness. What kind of a mess would she have made if she had brought that bundle of paper inside and shared it over a piece of pie, I wonder, and what price would she have had to pay for it?
Glancing through the kitchen window, I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. All I saw was Amelia cleaning up the way she always did—straightening out the books and streaking beeswax on the shelves while the doctor watched, his usual sour expression pickling his features. I watched her line the books back up in order, their spines all level, the tops of them brushed free of cobwebs, taking special care with the last book. She stepped off her ladder and surveyed her work, then swept a pile of rubbish into a brown grocery sack. The doctor followed her into the house, leaving the room empty, and soon I heard them conversing in the parlor and smelled the rich smoke of a fire being started.
“What are you doing in here?” I poked my head through the door. “Why are you making a fire so early? I’ve got pie.”
Robert Morgan hastily threw a log onto the crackling pile of kindling, sending blue smoke curling up the chimney. When he turned to me, it was with the snarling, open-toothed determination of a hyena. “Did I ask for you?”
I took a small step back. “No, but—”
“Then leave before I make you.”
I wrinkled my brow. Something was definitely wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on what. In the far corner of the room, Amelia was crouched at the doctor’s feet like a much-maligned serf, silent as ever, watching the growing flames lick and swallow the log with a curious expression of grief washed over her face.
The doctor paced across the room and put his hand on the door. “Amelia will be out shortly. Right now she’s busy tidying up a few of the household’s loose ends. After all, isn’t that what I pay her for? A clean slate.” And with that, he slammed the door, leaving me alone with the nostalgic, hopeful scent of pie filling up the air around me.
Across town, Priscilla Sparrow was beginning to have trouble squeezing her foot into its spectator pump. Every morning she twisted and wriggled it, but to no avail. The shoe refused to accommodate the bunion on her left metatarsal, and she was given no choice but to don the pair of wide-toed black oxfords she’d purchased two days before the start of Aberdeen’s new school year—her twenty-third in the classroom, but her first in ugly shoes. Her feet weren’t the only things slipping. Some mornings she had trouble twirling the wiry shock of gray hairs into a respectable chignon. Some mornings the Satin Primrose lipstick looked a little garish on the thin set of her mouth; and some days she even needed to band a girdle around her little paunch of belly. Already, she’d twice replaced the tweed skirts in her closet with one size larger, but every year her body betrayed her and spread another inch. This month, she was following the cabbage diet, and in the depth of her bowels, she could feel a rebellion brewing. She belched discreetly, then blushed, even though she was alone.
Just as I was learning the ropes of loneliness, so was Priscilla Sparrow. At one time, in the early sixties, the little schoolhouse at the edge of town had boasted a full range of pupils, but these days the town offered only ten children to instruct. Now, after the third grade, the pupils were bussed to the middle school in Hansen, where they were able to socialize with children their own ages and take advantage of art classes and a physical education program. If Priscilla Sparrow was going to be honest with herself, she’d have to admit that her current students would also probably be in Hansen if it weren’t for the intervention of the late great Dick Crane, who’d played poker with the superintendent of education. To thank Dick, Prissy had knitted him a particularly fine Shetland wool cardigan, but when she’d gone to drop it off at his house, Estelle, his wife, had answered the door with a sour look and raised eyebrows, and Priscilla never saw the sweater again.
She sighed and gave up her struggle with the spectator pump, kicking it under the bed and reaching for the hated black oxfords. She smoothed her hair along her temples and hooked her pearl earrings through her lobes. She’d bought them for herself as a present to mark her five-year teaching anniversary. She’d spied them in the window of the jewelry store in Hansen and had known immediately that they were just the kind of thing Dick would have picked out, had he been at liberty to do so. But, of course, he wasn’t. Despite her best efforts, he’d gone home every evening to silver-framed wedding photographs, afghans draped over easy chairs, and a martini mixed by Estelle exactly the way he liked it.
In her darker moments, it pained Prissy to have to admit that she had no idea how to blend a martini or any other cocktail, for that matter. She stuck mainly to sherry and a glass of port at Christmas. She cleared her throat and reached for the heavy telephone on her vanity, finally resigned to calling Dr. Morgan and doing something about her darned foot. Really, she thought, she ought to get one of those lighter touch-tone phones, but one hated to waste, and this phone still worked fine. Everyone has one lie they tell themselves, and that was Prissy’s—that everything still worked fine, just fine. As fine as fine could be. Still, a visit to the young Dr. Morgan couldn’t hurt, she reasoned. What could he possibly tell her that she didn’t already know?
When Robert Morgan’s patients came to the house, sometimes they’d step onto the porch if I was sitting out there and make a little conversation. Priscilla Sparrow, however, wasn’t one of those people. The day of her appointment, I watched her mince up to the clinic door without even saying hello, her eyes as pinched as ever at their corners, and I immediately knew in my heart—time was not on her side.
Inside the office, she changed into the paper gown provided for her, remembering when Robert Morgan had been a chattering boy with gangly elbows. It must have been strange for her to see him attired like his father and running a medical office, but with the same chin and eyes he’d had as a child. There was a tentative knock on the door, and then Robert Morgan’s gravelly voice asked if she was decent. Priscilla cleared her throat and twittered, “Yes. Of course. Yes.”
She tugged the gown a little tighter around the back of her, feeling even more naked than she would have without it—a feeling I knew well. All around Prissy’s shoulders, the stiff edges of the garment stuck out like wings, and whenever she moved, she crackled. She looked around the room, uneasy with the hard edges and metal. She was used to the knotty wood of the schoolroom and its heady smell of chalk dust, pencil grindings, and bananas. On the table, Priscilla slumped a little as Robert Morgan prepared a dizzying array of instruments with which to check her, none of which looked at all familiar. She felt her head swim and put a hand down to steady herself, and I recognized that feeling, too—when you realize that the future has gone on and happened without you.
Robert Morgan thumped her clavicle with his knuckles. “How long has it been since your last medical exam, Miss Sparrow?”
The inside of her chest rang and reverberated like a hollow urn. “Years.”
“I couldn’t find your records in our files.” Robert Morgan put his stethoscope in his ears and averted his eyes while he slipped the disk between her wrinkled breasts.
“Oh, I used to go to a doctor in Albany, but it’s so far. I thought I’d just come here. I’m only having a little bunion trouble, you know. I have to wear those ugly shoes.” She tilted her chin toward the hated black oxfords squatting in the corner.
Robert Morgan turned his head and removed the stethoscope. “They don’t look so bad.”
“Oh, but they are. They really are.” How could Prissy explain that the awful black shoes were insinuating themselves into her life with the brassy arrogance of crows? She opened her mouth to elucidate but saw him frowning while he ran his fingers over her spine, the oxfords already forgotten as he concentrated on something in her back.
“Does this hurt?” He pressed on one of her vertebrae, eliciting a small universe of pain.
“Oh!” A ball of fire rumbled down the tracks of her central nervous system. It was the same sensation she’d been having in her foot, only from the top down, as if by switching direction, the pain were trying to cheat her—and Priscilla Sparrow hated cheaters.
“Sorry.” Robert Morgan pulled his fingers away and closed the edges of her gown back together again. He frowned some more while he made notes. “Do you ever have dizzy spells, or breathlessness?”
Well, come to think of it, lately she had. “I’ve been on a diet,” she explained. “Cabbage.”
Robert Morgan stared down the length of his nose at her. “That’s not healthy.”
“Neither is being fat, young man.” Her voice smacked like a ruler. By now, the unyielding corset of a schoolteacher’s voice was easy enough for Prissy to slip into.
“I think you need to see a specialist.”
“What? Why?”
“An oncologist. I can give you some names, but you’ll have to travel. There isn’t even one in Hansen.”
Priscilla scowled. “An oncologist? But that’s for cancer. I just have a little problem with my foot.”
Robert Morgan shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He paused, giving the news time to sink in, then flipped open his prescription pad and wrote down a name and phone number. “I’d call this guy first. He’s the best, and if you tell him you’re a patient of mine, he’ll fit you in right away.” He tried to hand the paper to Prissy, but her fingers were stiff, and she dropped it. Undeterred, Robert Morgan bent over and retrieved it, making sure she held on to it this time. Every time he broke bad news to a patient, it was the same thing. They dropped the name of the referral or they lost it. Quite often, he had me call the person to make sure he or she followed up. Robert Morgan wouldn’t have that problem with Priscilla Sparrow, though. She was a rule follower through and through, right down to her cancerous bones. Just the kind of patient he liked.
“If he absolutely can’t fit you in, call me, and I’ll give you the name of someone else,” Robert Morgan said, and swept out of the room.
I watched Priscilla Sparrow emerge into the afternoon stunned, her face crumpled at its edges like a wad of wrapping paper waiting to be burned, and although it seemed impossible that the two of us would ever share anything in common, I somehow knew just how she felt.