Sweet Everlasting (6 page)

He shut the door on the cold, imagining her long, solitary walk home in the dark. She would cry again for her dog, he was sure. She hadn’t finished her tea. He wished he’d thought to give her something to eat.

The paper-wrapped bundle lay on the table. He reached for it—just as a sharp knock sounded behind him and the door squeaked open again.

“Evening, Dr. Wilkes,” his housekeeper greeted him, already unwinding the bulky woolen scarf she’d wound around her neck about seven times.

“Mrs. Quick, how are you this evening?”

“About the same, not that perky. I think I got the dropsy in my shoulder.”

“Your shoulder? Well, I doubt—”

“Aches like the dickens. I can make your supper all right, but I’m not sure I can run the carpet sweeper or scrub this floor tonight.”

“That’s all right, just—”

“By the way.” She’d taken off her boots and hung up her coat, sweater, scarf, hat, and mittens, and she was facing him foursquare with her hands on her wide, white-aproned hips. She fixed him with her wrinkled-prune look, as he thought of it, and he knew he was in for one of her disagreeable diatribes about something or other. He’d inherited Mrs. Quick from Stoneman, who hadn’t minded her because “she’s sourer than I am, and that’s saying something.” She had a million aches and pains, more advice than an almanac, and never a good word to say about anybody.

“I couldn’t help noticing that Wiggins girl coming down your steps just now,” she said aggressively, thrusting out the foremost of her several chins. “Maybe it ain’t my place, but this is a good Christian town, and some might say it don’t look right, you having a young girl up here alone with you in your house.”

Tyler blinked in surprise and annoyance, and a minute particle of guilt. He couldn’t think of a thing to say. Except, “Thank you, Mrs. Quick, for your candor and concern. I’ll certainly consider your advice.”

She nodded, gloomily satisfied. As she began to clear the tea things from the table, he thought of something else to say:
Nobody in this good Christian town would know I had a “young girl” up here unless you told them, you potato-faced busybody.
Instead of saying it, he snatched up Carrie’s parcel from the kitchen table and escaped into the sitting room.

The problem, he thought as he stoked the coal stove and then dropped heavily into his chair, was that the old toad was probably right. Wayne’s Crossing was no more narrow-minded than most country towns its size, but he knew there were plenty of people here who would view his innocent entertainment of Carrie Wiggins this afternoon as compromising.
Compromising.
What a laugh. They’d disapprove of her drinking tea with him in his kitchen, but they wouldn’t think twice if she lay buck naked on his examining table downstairs, with nobody in the room but him. Private doctors in Philadelphia had women assistants present when they examined naked ladies, but there were no such amenities in Wayne’s Crossing. Nobody gave it a thought.

Sighing, he opened Carrie’s package—and smiled, his irritation vanishing, when he found under the paper, carefully wrapped in a square of green velour, a tiny bouquet of dried flowers. He set it on his knee and opened the note she’d fastened to the velour. The large, looping letters—generous, not childish, he decided—were already familiar to him.

Dear Dr. Wilkes,

I knew you weren’t a vet, but Shadow was so sick I couldn’t think what else to do. I’m sure you are a very good doctor. Thank you for taking care of my dog. Very truly yours,

Carrie Wiggins.

P.S. The white flowers are sweet everlasting, the pink ones are wintergreen, and the violet are wild hyacinth. If you rub the white ones in your fingers, they smell like perfume.

He leaned back in his chair, listening to the popping sounds the coal stove made, the intermittent bustling of Mrs. Quick in the kitchen. The weightless bouquet rested on his knee; he found himself repeating the names of the flowers in his mind. Wintergreen, wild hyacinth, and sweet everlasting. He caught a tiny white petal between his thumb and forefinger, and gently massaged it. Subtly, just barely, a sweet, woodsy fragrance teased his nostrils, so faint he thought he might be imagining it. “Perfume,” she called it. His smile faded. He felt a pang of regret, that came and went as swiftly as his sudden, unnerving apprehension of the meagerness of Carrie Wiggins’s life.

Later, long after Mrs. Quick had gone home, Tyler went outside. Barelegged and shivering under his nightshirt and overcoat, he placed the little bouquet on Carrie’s dog’s grave.

I
T WAS THE LAST DAY
of March, a half-and-half day in a changeable month of an untrustworthy season. The wind blustered in fits and starts, driving clouds across a bright sun and chilling the unfrozen earth at inconstant intervals. Upwards of two hundred people alternately shivered and basked in the capricious breeze, spread out across Bob Stoops’s cornfield on blankets, stools, and chairs lugged from home, waiting for the show to start again. If the Holy and Evangelical Ministry had come to town one week later, Reverend Ewing would’ve had to stage it somewhere else, because Bob Stoops was set to start spring plowing next Saturday. As it was, the bumpy ground was just right for sitting on, not too hard, not too cold, and not spongy yet from the spring rains.

Reverend Ewing’s revival meeting was an all-day affair. This morning there had been preaching and baptizing; this afternoon there would be more preaching and then healing, and finally the Big Saving. It was the reverend’s third or fourth visit to Wayne’s Crossing, an annual event at least as social as it was religious, and each year, everybody agreed, it got bigger and better. This year it was being held out in the open, because for the first time the crowd was too big for a tent to contain it.

Dr. Wilkes had seen handbills posted around town for weeks, blaring the news that the Holy and Evangelical Ministry was coming; he hadn’t paid them any mind, and had no intention of attending—fundamentalist religious revivals hadn’t figured much in his Anglican, upper-class Philadelphia upbringing. But Bob Stoops’s field abutted the dirt track he was traveling on his way back to town after a sick call on Mrs. Butts, the sheriff’s wife, over toward Five Corners. The spectacle of two hundred townsfolk gathered around a wooden platform in the middle of a cornfield was too interesting to pass by. Especially when Dr. Stoneman spied Ty’s rented buggy from a distance and started waving at him to make him stop. He found a space for his horse and buggy among all the other conveyances tied up to Stoops’s rusty fence and walked toward Stoneman—who was striding out to meet him, weaving carelessly through the scattered chairs and blankets of his neighbors.

“Doctor!” Stoneman greeted him—a little too enthusiastically, Tyler thought; his elderly friend must have brought along his hip flask. “This is wonderful! Never been to one of these shows, have you? No, I thought not, not quite your thing. My boy, you’re in for a treat. Come over here, the view’s better. You haven’t got a patient waiting for you someplace, have you? Good, excellent. Believe me, you don’t want to miss a minute of this.”

Tyler allowed himself to be pulled along, smiling and nodding to the townspeople he knew. Even the ones he didn’t know smiled back, no doubt because of something comfortable and changeless in the sight of the old and the new doc getting along well together. Stoneman led him to a choice spot in the center of things, a rusting corn reaper against which they could lean their backs, about forty feet from Reverend Ewing’s makeshift stage. A trio of husky farm boys was already there, but Stoneman shooed them away—“Make room for a sick old man and his doctor!”—and in short order they had the corn reaper to themselves.

“Where’ve you been?” Stoneman demanded. He still took a proprietary interest in his replacement’s daily schedule.

Tyler told him about Mrs. Butts’s ischiorectal abscess. “She was a wreck when I got there, completely miserable, swore she was ready to kill herself. All I did was drain it. She felt so much better, she thought I saved her life.”

“I trust you didn’t dispute her opinion.”

“Certainly not.”

“That’s the ticket! Look grave and modest, and take all the credit you can get.”

“Absolutely.”

“It all balances out anyway—as many times as they’ll praise you for doing nothing, they’ll curse you for the failures you can’t help. So never correct anybody’s conviction that you’re a genius, that’s my advice.”

Both men stared off into the woods beyond the field, nodding sagely.

“Well, look here, if it isn’t a fullness of physicians. A plethora of practitioners. A brace of bonesetters!”

Stoneman groaned and said, “Hello, Frank,” in pretended dismay, not bothering to turn around. “What brings you out into the so-called real world? Shouldn’t you be sitting in your darkened office, wearing a visor and writing featherbrained editorials for the amusement of your, quote, readers, unquote?”

“A surfeit of surgeons. A congestion of consultants. A—What brings me out here? I’m
covering
this event, as we journalists say.” Frank Odell, owner, publisher, and editor of the Wayne’s Crossing
Clarion,
shifted his youngest daughter from his right arm to his left. “Coming, Eppy!” he called over his shoulder, anticipating his wife’s summons. “Hi, Dr. Wilkes, how’re you doing? I take it you’re here in hopes that the reverend can give you a few pointers in the healing arts?”

Ty grinned and shook hands. “That’s right. I figure it had to be divine intervention that kept Stoneman from killing
all
his patients, so it behooves me to come and see what this faith healing’s all about.”

“Balls,” enunciated Stoneman. He reached into his pocket for his flask, remembered where he was, and jerked his hand out empty, scowling.

Frank laughed and jiggled his little girl up and down. Father and daughter had identical pug noses and carrot-orange hair. “Are you coming to the game on Thursday evening, Ty?”

“I hope I can make it—if I’ve got no emergencies that night, I’ll be there.”

“Good! We could use some new blood in our hoary old poker game. Right, Doc?”

Stoneman hunched his shoulders. “Depends on whose blood.”

“Frank!”

“Coming, Eppy.”

“I see your wife’s pregnant again,” Stoneman noted sourly. “Maybe you ought to get the young doc here to explain how that works, Frank. There’s a
causal relationship,
as we physicians say, which you don’t seem to have grasped.”

“Thanks, Doc, I’ll keep that in mind. Good to see you both.” He started backing away. “It’s always nice to see a surplus of sawbones. A morass of medics. A—”

“Frank!” called Eppy.

The editor saluted them, spun around, and walked off to join his family.

Stoneman made a rusty noise in his throat that might have been a chuckle. “I hope you appreciate the singular honor that’s been bestowed upon you, Dr. Wilkes,” he rumbled.

“What honor is that, Doc?”

“That poker game’s been going on for twenty-five years. Except for me and Jim Durkee, the original six players are all dead. Frank Odell’s been in it for ten years, Peter Mueller and Hoyle Taber for about fifteen. And every one of us has lived in this town for longer than you’ve been alive.”

“Well, now, I didn’t realize that. I’m glad you told me,” Ty said, without irony. There were aspects of his new life that dissatisfied him, and voids in it he’d overlooked at first that he’d lately begun to find intolerable. But about one thing he couldn’t complain: the town’s wholehearted and all but instantaneous acceptance of him. He’d never tried to endear himself to people by pretending to be just like them, and most of Wayne’s Crossing could probably tell that Tyler Arbuthnot Wilkes’s social background accustomed him more to tennis matches and cotillions than outdoor revivals and barn dances. And yet in a matter of months he’d been made to feel welcome and appreciated. Stoneman was joking about the poker game, but the truth was, he
did
feel honored.

“Oh, excellent, it’s starting.” Stoneman gloated, rubbing his hands together.

“Why do you like this so much?” Tyler asked, laughing at him.

“Why? You can ask
why?
Look around! How often do you get to see this many people in one place making complete asses of themselves?”

“That’s a little cynical, isn’t it?”

“Cynical? You’re saying you believe this charlatan’s going to
heal
people?”

Tyler rubbed his chin, pretending to consider. “I’d have to say I don’t absolutely rule it out.”

Stoneman spat in disgust.

“No, listen,” Ty insisted, “yesterday an old lady with a uterine myoma came to see me. She’d never seen a stethoscope in her life. I listened to her heart, and when I was through she thanked me and said she felt much better. She thought I was finished—she thought I’d
cured
her. She started to pay me!”

“I could tell you a hundred stories just like that,” Stoneman scoffed.

“There you are. That just proves my point.”

“Nonsense. Your old lady
felt
better, but she’s still got her tumor.” He turned his back on him before Ty could say more. “Shut up and watch this. I’m telling you, Doc, it’s the best show in town.”

The Evangelical Ministry’s afternoon programme began with hymn singing, led by Reverend Ewing himself and enlivened by his wife Roxanne’s enthusiastic harmonica playing. “There’s a son, too,” Stoneman informed Tyler gleefully. “Young Todd—see him over there? Passes the collection basket and helps the infirm up on the stage to get healed. It’s a family affair.”

When the singing ended, Reverend Ewing swung immediately into a loud and fervid sermon on the power of faith to heal anyone who had Jesus in his heart. No podium for him; he was of the moving school of preachers, a strider, a strutter, a ceaseless walker back and forth across his wooden platform. His voice was a little thin, a little too high for really effective exhorting, but he compensated for it with big dramatic arm gestures, and by inducing the audience to repeat his deepest profundities—”humdingers,” Stoneman called them—back to him over and over.