Page 2 of Stay Buried

I fought the urge to grab his coat, tell him there was nothing we could do there, drag him back home for a hot cup of tea by the fire with Aunt Margaret, try to get the images—and the smell—of the horses out of our minds.

We shouldn’t have come. I longed to tell him how Aunt Margaret had warned me just this morning, before Jim even came knocking on the door. We were cutting biscuits, brewing the coffee on the big kitchen stove, when my aunt had pulled her shawl around her tight, said something bad was coming, the bones had told her so. It was a pastime she’d picked up from one of the older women in town: keeping a small bundle of animal bones in a bag, dumping the bag, and reading the future from the shapes they made when they fell. Aunt Margaret knew better than to tell Thomas about them. She kept them hidden inside a little leather bag tucked into an old tin of cornmeal in the kitchen. The fact that she read them was a secret she shared only with me.

The last time I had accompanied Uncle Thomas out to the St. James place was two years earlier, when Luther was trying to break a new mare. She’d kicked him in the head and knocked him unconscious. Uncle Thomas had given Luther seventeen sutures and ordered bed rest until the headaches and dizziness subsided. Uncle Thomas and I both knew I should have done the stitching. Though I was new to it at the time, I had a natural gift with the needle. My sutures were smaller, tidier, left less of a scar. But Luther wanted the real doctor tosew him up. Not some girl in boys’ clothing.

The mare that kicked Luther had been deemed unbreakable and sent off to the knackerman.

My nausea intensified as I followed my uncle through the muddy paddock. I pulled the collar of my heavy wool coat up and around my nose, and was grateful for the thick leather boots on my feet. All of it—the coat, boots, trousers, shirt, and belt—had once belonged to Uncle Thomas. He graciously gave me all of his castoffs, which I repaired and tailored to fit my smaller frame.

I am not a person who is easily unsettled—I pride myself on my calm mind and steady hands, characteristics that Uncle Thomas promises will make me a fine physician one day. But as I walked through the field and toward the barn, I had to swallow down bile, shove my hands deep into the pockets of my coat to hide the trembling.

I have seen plenty of terrible things in my eighteen years on this earth. I helped my uncle when half the town came down with Spanish influenza last fall. We lost fourteen residents—young and old, all terrible deaths. Within hours, I had watched a strong man whose only symptom had been a sore throat begin struggling for breath, mahogany spots materializing on his cheekbones, his whole coloring soon turning bluish-black as he suffocated before me; Julia McGregor, only twenty-four and the mother of three small children, hemorrhaged from her eyes, crying blood before she died. Her husband, William, when he saw it, suggested she’d laid eyes on the devil, had perhaps been consorting with him.

Over the last four years, I’ve assisted Uncle Thomas with births—some ending well, and some ending badly—with suturing wounds of all kinds, even helped him amputate Raymond Whitaker’s arm after it had been caught in the thresher. But the most terrible death I’ve witnessed, and my earliest memory, was watching my own mother die of pneumonia, her lips blue as she gasped, drowning in her own secretions.

But as I walked through the field and saw those horses, I felt cold all over in a new way—as if a great shadow had blocked out not only the sun, but all light from the world. Human suffering to me is terrible, but the suffering of animals somehow feels worse. As I looked down at the dead animals, I thought of the horse I’d first learned to ride on: Daisy, her name was, a sleek black mare who seemed to intuit just what I wanted her to do. She hardly needed prompting from me, just the gentlest pull on the reins to guide her. And how grand I’d felt up there on her back, the strength of her vibrating through my whole body as if we were not two creatures, but one.

“They were all fine last night.” Luther St. James’s words swam around me. “But when we came in this morning at dawn, there was something wrong. They were anxious—kicking at the stalls, making terrible noises. Didn’t want their grain. We let them out and then… they wereateach other. Had to shoot ’em.” He was shaking his head slowly. “No choice.”

He didn’t look at me as he spoke—people rarely did—but at Uncle Thomas.

I have grown used to this. When people aren’t sure what to make of you, it is often easier for them to studiously ignore you.

The horses lay strewn about the paddock, some of them atop one another, their once shining chestnut coats ruined by gaping wounds, ripped flesh, strips of muscle and tendon hanging, exposing bone. One of them stared up at me, its huge, wild eye rimmed with blood. I could see the shadow of my own reflection there in the poor creature’s eye.

I leaned down for a closer look and noted the variously placed bullet holes. The smell of blood and opened bowels, a cloyingly sweet, burned-sugar sort of smell that made my throat constrict.

“Do you smell that?” I asked, taking a step back.

Both men nodded. “Sweet,” Luther said, “and ruined at the same time.”

I pulled out my pocket notebook and jotted down the facts:5 dead horses. Lack of appetite. Sudden madness. Violence. Sickly sweetsmell, like apples left to rot on the ground, then singed in a fire.

Later, I would transcribe all of these details into my diary—my place to record everything I learned with my uncle and catalog each case we encountered.

“Can’t say I ever smelled anything quite like it,” Luther added.

Luther was a man of fifty-seven who had been farming all his life. He was not given to sentiment, but it was obvious he cared deeply for his animals. He took pride in his farm. The place was well-kept, fresh paint on the house and barn, not one fence post rotten or broken. His herd of Holsteins roamed the front field, digging through the snow with their great hooves, looking for bits of grass beneath.

The scar on Luther’s forehead from my uncle’s long-ago sutures was raised and pale against his flushed, sweating face. He kept shaking his head, repeating, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

I turned to my uncle, and it was clear from his expression that he hadn’t either.

Uncle Thomas had been in Boone’s Ferry for just over five years, and I knew he’d seen his share of shocking things here, before he took me on as his apprentice: people stuffing infected wounds with peat from the bog, carrying potatoes in their pockets to ward off rheumatism, tying tar-covered strings around their throats to cure laryngitis. When the town was ravaged with Spanish influenza last fall, people attempted to treat it with mustard plasters and greased cloths on the chest, licorice tea, and a tonic of sulfur and molasses to purify the blood. There had been no doctor in Boone’s Ferry before he arrived, only the old midwife—Charlotte Albone—who, in addition to birthing babies, doled out herbal remedies to the townspeople, and insisted most sickness could be cured if the afflicted slept with their heads pointing north. She made pouches of camphor and mint for people to wear about their necks during the influenza outbreak, and Uncle Thomas and I had walked in on her treating one very ill patient with bloodletting. My uncle pronounced the treatment barbaric and demanded that she step away from the patient before murdering him.The man was dead hours later and it was my uncle his wife blamed, insisting that the old midwife might have saved him. There were many in town who didn’t come to my uncle when they were ill or injured, because they didn’t trust him yet, had more faith in the old ways.

I have never traveled beyond the hills that surround Boone’s Ferry, and it was Charlotte Albone who brought me into the world and tended to every childhood ailment I’d had with herbs and tinctures, so none of those practices seemed strange to me. Not until I began seeing things through Uncle Thomas’s eyes. Not until he began to train me as he had been trained: in the science of medicine.

“What is it, Doc?” Luther asked. “What did this to my horses?” I was suddenly aware of the sharp sound of whining.

Uncle Thomas cleared his throat. “I’m not a veterinarian,” he reminded Luther, his voice quavering slightly. “I—I don’t know a thing about horses.”

“You’re the only medical man in town,” Luther said, eyes desperate. “There’s one horse left,” he continued, lifting his chin toward the back of the barn. “In the farthest stall. Never let her out once we saw what was happening with the others. Please take a look, Tom?”

Thomas nodded.

What else was he to do?

“We call her Shirley.” The whining was growing more frantic as we approached the lone standing horse. Peering in at the white mare over the gate of her pen, Luther clucked his tongue and spoke in a low, soothing voice. “Good girl, shh. Good Shirley. Easy now.”