Sweet Everlasting

  She had to touch his raggedy sleeve to get his attention. When he straightened up, he smacked his head on top of the can. “Ow! Hi!” That fast, his pained expression turned into a wide, gap-toothed grin. “Hi, Carrie! I’m working! See? I’m hard at work.”

  She nodded, showing how impressed she was. Mr. Needy, who owned the metal salvage yard, was paying Broom a nickel for every hundred tin cans he collected. Carrie didn’t think it sounded like a very good deal, but Broom was so pleased because he had a “job,” she didn’t have the heart to tell him.

  “Guess what happened! I thought Mrs. Hawbaker’s gate was scrap and I tried to take it, I did take it, and she found out and come after me! Mr. Needy was gonna pay a dollar, Carrie, a dollar for the whole thing, but in she comes runnin’, carrying on, yellin’ about her gate, her gate!”

  Carrie made an amazed face.

  “I thought it was junk. You seen that gate, Carrie? All bent and rusty and spokes gone and dirty and all?” She nodded, although she couldn’t really picture Mrs. Hawbaker’s gate. “So they made me take it back and put it where it was, and I could hardly make it stand up. And then Mr. Needy said I wasn’t to look for nothing but cans from now on. Say, you got any cans today, Carrie?”

  She shook her head; she was saving some for him, but she hadn’t thought to bring them down today.

  “That’s okay, I got plenty anyway. Listen, write down how many this is, okay?” She raised her brows, asking why. “Because, just because.” He shuffled his feet and stuck his finger in his ear. “Sometimes I might get mixed up. Sometimes I might think I got more than he pays me for. That’s what he says.”

  Carrie frowned, wondering if Mr. Needy was counting wrong on purpose. She counted the cans on the ground, and then the ones in the burlap sack Broom had already collected. She wrote 64 on a page of her notebook and handed it to him. She wished she could caution him about her suspicions, but she didn’t know how—Broom couldn’t read. But he would surely show his boss the paper and tell him all about how she’d counted the cans for him, and maybe that would make Mr. Needy think twice the next time about shorting him—if he was even doing that. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe Broom was the one who was counting wrong.

  He started telling her about all the places where he’d found cans today and yesterday, and all the places he had in mind to try tomorrow. She listened as long as she could, but finally she had to go. She put her hand oh his skinny arm. He shut right up and grabbed her into one of his fierce, jerky hugs. She hugged him back, feeling how pitifully thin he was. There was hardly enough meat on his bones these days to keep him standing up straight. She worried about him often, but she could never think of what to do to help him.

  “Bye, Carrie! I’ll see you!”

  She waved until he was out of sight, and then she went through the high privet hedges and up the Odells’ walk to the front door. It was open, as usual, and through it she could hear the sounds of chaos that were a standard, everyday thing in the Odell household. From the sweet cinnamon smells, she guessed Eppy was in the kitchen, making something with apples. Through the parlor door she caught sight of Charlotte, the oldest child, trying to play one-a-cat with a pillow instead of a puck. Upstairs, Emily and Jane were having a shouting match, and from somewhere in the back of the house Fanny, the baby, was squalling. All the Odell children had literary names, and Frank Odell said if the next one was another girl he was going to call her George. That had mystified Carrie until Eppy explained that George Eliot, who was a famous writer, was really a woman. For the child’s sake, Carrie hoped Mr. Odell was joking.

  There wasn’t any point in knocking, nobody would hear, so she walked right in and started down the hall toward the kitchen. Charlotte saw her from the parlor. “Carrie!” she yelled, dropping the stick she’d been beating the pillow with and dashing out the door. Her sturdy, seven-year-old body almost knocked Carrie over. “I was hoping you’d come soon, I haven’t seen you in ages. Do you like my dress? Mama made it so I could wear it to Gramma Odell’s birthday party, but now I can wear it anytime I want. The party was lots of fun, we got to stay overnight, and Jane threw up in the bed. The next day Gram made fried pears for breakfast, and Jane threw up again, right at the table. Come on, Mama’s making apple butter, and it’s almost time for the tasting!”

  Carrie let herself be pulled into the kitchen, where Eppy was standing in front of the stove, trying to stir the big iron kettle with one hand and hold Fanny with the other. As soon as Carrie took her, the baby stopped screaming.

  “Praise God,” laughed Eppy, pushing damp hair back from her forehead. “I’ll never question the power of prayer again, Lord, and that’s a promise. Carrie, you are a sight for sore eyes. That child’s not wet, is she? She couldn’t be, I just changed her ten minutes ago. Is this butter dark enough, do you think? It’s been six hours. Charlotte, get down, I told you, before you pull that kettle over and scald yourself to death.”

  The baby wasn’t wet, just cross, and Carrie had already coaxed a smile out of her by tickling her belly button. Wonderful smells came from the oven, where fresh biscuits were baking; soon it would be “tasting time”—an excuse to spread hot apple butter on warm bread and pretend to consider whether the apples were a rich enough brown or the cinnamon was overpowering the sugar.

  Eppy gave the pot a final stir, then dropped into a chair at the big kitchen table, wiping her face with a towel. “I swear, this is the last time I put up apple butter in the middle of summer. What possessed me? Charlotte, move that chair over so I can put my feet up. Sit down, Carrie, I haven’t seen you in weeks. What’ve you been doing?”

  She tried to shrug, but it was hard with Charlotte standing behind her, hugging her around the neck. Eppy, who loved to talk, didn’t wait for Carrie to fish out her notebook; she launched right into a recitation of all the Odell family doings in the last two weeks, including the trip to Chambersburg for old Mrs. Odell’s birthday, progress on the renovation of the pantry downstairs into a tiny bedroom for Charlotte and Emily after the new baby came, the female typesetter Frank had hired last week at the Clarion, the string bean blight, Emily’s new tooth, Jane’s sleepwalking, and how hard the baby had kicked last night. “I swear, I thought I was going to fall out of bed. Frank woke straight up and said, ‘What the devil was that?’ ”

  “Gram says it’s a boy this time,” Charlotte told Carrie. “Oh, I hope, hope, hope so! I’m so tired of girls, I really, really hope it’s a boy.”

  “We’ll love it whatever it is,” Eppy said automatically, as if it was something she’d said many times before.

  Carrie looked down at the apple-cheeked child in her arms, thinking she could have a hundred girls and never get tired of them, or boys either. Would there ever come a day when she was so old, she wouldn’t care that she had no children? She hoped so. But she couldn’t really imagine it.

  “And now Frank’s talking about turning that old two-horse stable in the backyard into a study for himself. Can you beat that? He goes to his nice, quiet office every day of the week while I’m home with four and a half children, and he needs a study.”

  Carrie shook her head in sympathy.

  “You’ll stay to supper,” Eppy announced, getting up to stir the apple butter again. “Frank’s coming home early, he says, so we can probably eat early. You can’t? Why not?” She leaned over to peer at the word Artemis Carrie scribbled in her notebook. She scowled. “How is he?” Carrie lifted her shoulders and made a noncommittal face. Eppy said, “Hmpf,” but nothing else. She never had a good word to say about Carrie’s stepfather, but when her children were around she tried to keep her opinion to herself. Carrie wondered what she would say if she told Eppy that last night Artemis had gotten drunk on the front porch with one of his shiftless friends from the sawmill. She’d overheard them plotting mean things to do later to Willis Haight—burn his outhouse, trample his garden, kill his chickens—but they’d both passed out cold before the moon rose.

  She stood up, reluctantly h
anding 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.