Sweet Everlasting (13 page)

She gestured him inside. The small cabin was sweet-smelling and spotless, as it had been the last time he’d visited. This time he noticed a curtained alcove to the right of the front door, and through the curtain, a narrow, quilt-covered mattress on top of a bench. With a slight shock, he realized it must be where she slept. Her stepfather was slouched in a chair at the scuffed wooden table, one leg propped up on another chair beside him. “Mr. Wiggins,” Tyler greeted him, with a feigned note of surprise. “How are you today?”
Resembles an ape,
Stoneman had said. An exaggeration, but there was something undeniably simian about Artemis Wiggins’s hulking, long-armed, hair-covered physique. And Carrie lived with him in this cabin on terms of domestic intimacy, cooking his food, washing his clothes, suffering his surly, disagreeable company day after day. The thought was unsettling; something perverse lingered around the edges of it, something close to obscene.

“I’ve been better,” Wiggins growled from his chair. He had bright black eyes, but the brightness came from skepticism and distrust, not good humor.

“Oh?” Tyler made no move toward him and kept his glance away from his propped-up foot. He had the uneasy sensation that protecting Carrie’s innocent ruse was more important than he’d known. More important than it should be.

He could almost hear the creaky turning of suspicious wheels in Wiggins’s brain as he stared between Ty and Carrie, undecided. At length he crossed thick arms across his block of a chest and said belligerently, “Since you’re here, you might as well take a look. At my foot,” he specified impatiently when Tyler looked dumb. “The Lord’ll heal me in His own time, but I guess there’s no sin in letting one of His minions hasten it along.”

“You’ve hurt your foot, have you?” He came forward, wearing the grave and modest demeanor he and Stoneman liked to brag to each other they’d perfected. He couldn’t wait to tell Stoneman he’d been called a “minion” of the Lord. “Yes, I see. A puncture wound. How did you do it? Miss Wiggins, would you mind going out to the buggy and getting my case?”

The wound was clean—he could thank Carrie for that, he felt sure—and a simple perforation, fairly deep but non-purulent and uncomplicated. While he waited for Carrie to fetch his case, he glanced around the cabin, taking unwilling note of its sparseness and poverty, its almost pathetic neatness. His gaze fell on a stack of worn-looking notes on the table beside him. Carrie’s distinctive handwriting caught his attention. They were messages, he saw, thumbing them surreptitiously. “Are you going out?” said one; “Supper now?” asked another—homey, commonplace inquiries and announcements she must use over and over. They depressed him.

“Mr. Wiggins, have you ever asked a doctor to look at Carrie?”

“Why?”

He stared. The question had to be facetious. “Because she can’t speak,” he answered slowly.

Artemis rested his bad foot on his knee and hunched forward, squinting at his wound. “No, I ain’t taken her to no
doctor.
The girl’s affliction is the will of the Lord, and no
doctor
can change that.”

“You must be joking,” Tyler shot back, forgetting his bedside manner. “You can’t seriously believe it’s God’s will that your daughter spend the rest of her life cut off from the world, locked up in a cocoon of silence that a good throat doctor could probably—” He broke off when he heard Carrie on the front porch. Common sense told him he couldn’t win this argument, especially not in his present frame of mind. When he calmed down he’d speak sensibly to Wiggins, out of Carrie’s hearing, and convince the son of a bitch that occasionally doctors actually
implemented
the Lord’s will.

He cleaned the wound and put a light gauze bandage around it, then set about filling a hypodermic syringe with fifteen hundred units of tetanus antitoxin. “Lucky I happen to have this with me,” he mentioned conversationally. “I don’t usually carry it, but I was visiting the Sussmans last evening—their hired man fell on a pitchfork in the—”

“What’s that?” Artemis barked, finally seeing the needle.

“It’s for tetanus. It’s—”

“You’re not sticking that in me. No, put it away! I’m telling you, I won’t have it!”

Tyler laid the syringe on the table and leveled a speculative eye at Wiggins. Children always balked at needles, but occasionally adults did, too. Most just feared the pain, but a few objected on quasi-religious grounds—like Hoyle Taber and his distrust of pills because they weren’t “natural.” He could see a self-righteous lecture coming from Wiggins about the arrogance of doctors and the will of the Lord. To forestall it, he folded his arms and asked calmly, “Have you ever watched tetanus run its course through a human being, Mr. Wiggins? It starts with a little stiffness in the throat muscles, a little yawning, some difficulty in swallowing. Pretty soon the lower jaw becomes spasmodically fixed—that’s why they call it lockjaw—and after that the spasms spread to the face, then the neck, the trunk, and finally the whole body. The pain is indescribable. The victim looks like he’s grinning, or screaming. He can’t move his head or his neck, he’s
locked
in place. Sometimes he’s bent backward at the waist, frozen that way. But his mind’s clear the whole time. What finally kills him is exhaustion—that’s if he doesn’t strangle to death because of the chest spasms. If he makes it beyond ten days, his chances of surviving increase. It’s not something you’d wish on a dog, Mr. Wiggins, and I can virtually guarantee it won’t happen to you if you’ll agree to let me stick this little pin in your arm for about three seconds. What do you say?”

He said yes, with little grace and no gratitude, and after the injection he lumbered out of his chair and hobbled toward his room. “I’m going to sleep, I want peace and quiet,” he snarled without turning, and banged the door shut behind him.

“Give him one of these when he wakes up,” Tyler told Carrie with a sigh, measuring out four fifteen-grain doses of calcium bromide. “It’ll keep him quiet. Another tonight and one in the morning. He’ll limp for a few days, but I expect he’ll be good as new by the end of the week. If you should notice any of the symptoms I described, come and get me immediately.”

For the first time, he noticed her agitation. She had both hands over her mouth; when she lowered them to nod, he saw a haunted, abstracted fear in her face that struck him as extreme and inappropriate in the circumstances.

“I’m sure he’ll be
fine,”
he repeated. “The tetanus injection was just a precaution, Carrie.”

She nodded again, still pale, and walked over to the kitchen area, where she took down a clay jar from a shelf over the cook stove. When she began to take money out of the jar, he closed his case with a snap and said, “That’s not necessary. You asked me to come over ‘in a friendly way,’ and that’s what I did.”

She shook her head firmly. Marching back to the table, she snatched up a small slate and a piece of chalk and started scribbling.

“Oh hell, give me a dollar and be done with it.”

She glanced up sharply, surprised by his tone. But she gave a brisk nod and went back to the jar. Apparently there were no bills inside; it took forever for her to count out a dollar in nickels, pennies, and a couple of dimes. His impatience gathered; he didn’t want the money, and the longer it took her to parcel it out, the more he wanted to stuff it all back in her damn jar. When she finished, she needed both hands to give it to him. He slid the heavy pile of coins into his pocket, annoyed with the lopsided sag it made in his coat.

But Carrie looked so pleased with herself, he had to smile—which brought on one of her rapturous smiles in return. He was beginning to find them unsettling. On the chalk tablet she wrote,
Do you have to go right away?

He had no office hours today, and no other patients to see on the mountain. “No, not really. Why?”

Would you like to see something?

“What?”

A secret,
she wrote. Her eyes flashed with excitement.
A surprise.

He folded his arms and grinned at her. “How can I resist?”

Whirling, she all but skipped out the door. Tyler picked up his bag and followed more slowly, intrigued.

At first he thought they were going for a walk on the meandering deer trail that led into the woods behind the cabin’s outbuildings. But before long, with nothing to mark the sudden turnoff except an immense weathered boulder, Carrie plunged into the trees and set off eastward on a rugged, overgrown path he wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t been guiding him. They climbed steeply for about forty feet and then turned south, following approximately the wandering track of a stream. Trees bordered it on both sides; he recognized sassafras and oak and hickory, but the names of the others eluded him. Carrie, of course, would know them all. After a little while they left the stream to cross a boulder field seamed with deep ravines and thick, tangled undergrowth.

The three o’clock sun blazed hot in a corner of the cloudless sky; Tyler took off his coat and slung it over his shoulder, and marveled at the fluid, long-legged grace with which Carrie moved across a terrain that had him panting and sweating to keep up with her. He didn’t even have his bad leg to blame it on, either, because his wound had troubled him hardly at all in the past few weeks. It chafed a little to be bested by a slip of a girl, who moved like a healthy young doe through the stony woodland.

When they reached the top of a narrow ridge, the going got easier. There was even a path he could see, although just barely. The trees thickened, became all but impenetrable at precisely the point where the vague sometime-path gave out.

They stopped. Carrie faced him, breathless with something other than exertion. He had never seen her so animated before, so lit up with anticipation. Or so beautiful—there really was no other word for it. “See-through skin,” his mother called that kind of fragile, almost translucent complexion, the cheeks deepened by excitement now to the shade of rose petals. She put both hands over her shining eyes, then took them away and looked at him expectantly.

“Close my eyes?” he guessed. She nodded; he obeyed. He felt her hand on his arm, light and shy, and a second later she reached around his back to take his other arm. Urging him forward, moving beside him, she led him in a direction that seemed to be straight into the trees. He felt a branch slide past his shoulder, a leaf graze his cheek. She went slowly so he wouldn’t stumble, holding his arms in her gentle grip; he had the sense sometimes that she was pulling tree limbs out of his path and guiding him around unknown obstacles on the ground.

They stopped. Her hands dropped away. A moment passed, and then he felt the light touch of her fingers on his cheek. He opened his eyes.

Color and light. The dazzle of a butterfly flickering in and out of sun bars. Bird music. Water rushing. The perfumed odor of flowers.

An involuntary sound escaped him, a heady, wondering laugh. He had to blink to believe his eyes. Carrie clapped her hands once and gripped them tight under her chin, beaming at him, tense with excitement.

She’d made paradise. Everywhere he looked there was beauty and brilliance and wild, exquisite symmetry. He was in a glade, a natural clearing surrounded by woodland, where flowers burgeoned and flourished in banks and cunning tiers on every side. Colors dazzled—violet and lavender, amethyst, azure and jade, scarlet, gold, lemon and ivory. And lush, voluptuous greens, aquatic, almost overwhelming. Luxuriant ferns and emerald-green mosses sprawled under the low branches of mountain laurel and wild azalea, while overhead the sun filtered down through the spines of a colossal spruce in slants of dusty golden light. Somewhere close by a stream splashed and bubbled, cooling the air with the smell of damp earth.

He began to pick out details, to separate one object of inexpressible loveliness from the rest. “Those, Carrie,” he said, soft-voiced, “what are they?” He pointed to a low, cloudy heap of pink, orchid-like flowers.
Dragon’s mouth,
she wrote in her notebook. “And those?”
Indian pipe.
She knew them all, and scribbled their names as fast as he could ask them: wild columbine, meadowsweet, bloodroot, mayapple, lady’s slipper, wild geranium. The ancient limestone boulder was a chair, he realized, the long fallen pine with its bark peeled away a bench. She’d strung a canvas hammock between a wild apple tree and a chestnut oak; from it her view of the sky would shift with the seasons, lush and tangled in summer, stark in the winter. Bird houses, bird feeders, bird baths stretched the length of one leafy wall of the glade; the feathered tenants had scattered to the treetops, but birdsong sounded from everywhere, excited and—he fancied—welcoming.

Carrie wrote a new note—
This is my hospital!
—and now he could see that what he’d taken for a low stone wall was a line of handmade shelves; and under the cover of fresh pine boughs he’d thought belonged to a tree lay a rubber tarpaulin that sheltered half a dozen wooden boxes, elevated from the ground with piled stones. Beds for her patients?

Yes. She slid the nearest box toward her and separated the two boards covering it far enough apart so he could see inside. A bird squawked and fluttered its wings—startling Ty and causing him to jump back. Carrie laughed her silent laugh.
Grackle,
she wrote.
Broken beak.

“What are you doing for it?” he asked, fascinated.

Nothing—feeding him till he heals by himself.

“Who’s in here?” He pointed to the next box.

Her smile dissolved.
Gray squirrel. Dying. Old age? Just keeping him comfortable.

He felt like comforting her. “And this one?”

She shook her head and gestured, indicating that the other boxes were empty—her hospital was sparsely populated today. She wrote,
Sit down!
and led him to a tree stump with a canvas-covered pillow on it—the seat of honor, he could tell, in her beautiful glade.

Beside him on a wooden crate rested something small under a covering of gauze. Carrie peeped underneath the gauze, and Ty caught a glimpse of three sky-blue eggs in a nest of twigs. She shook her head and carried the nest to the limestone boulder, which still caught the full afternoon sun.
Robins,
she scrawled for his benefit.
Orphans.