Chapter 12
The waiting room was the front half of the surgery, cut off by a curtain. There was a bench along the wall, and a stove that Olivia kept lit.
Nobody had told Antonia she could sit there.
Nobody had told her she could not. It was warm.
It was out of the way. The men who came to wait for the doctor did not care what was in the corner, so long as it did not move.
So she sat on the end of the bench with her hands around her knees and became part of the wall.
She found she was good at it. She had practiced.
The men talked. They talked the way men talk when they are waiting, to fill the time, to keep from thinking about whatever was wrong with them. And because the men of Galena Springs had all gone down the same shaft, they talked about the shaft.
"Ground's running heavy on the east side. Brandt won't hear it."
"Brandt never hears anything. He's behind on his count."
"I heard it Tuesday. Timbers talking. You know that tick they make. Like a clock, only slower."
"Timbers talk before they break. My daddy said so. Any man that don't listen to a timber is a fool or a Pemberton."
"Rats went out of the west stope in eighty-one, day before it came down. Went out in a river. You could have walked on them."
"Rats know. Rats always know. They leave bad ground first."
Antonia heard all of it.
She heard it the way she had heard Toby Griggs on the train and Mrs. Feeney on the cobbles.
She did not know why it stayed with her.
She only knew that when a word was said in her hearing, it went in and did not come out.
Her head was full of a great many remarks that other people had made and forgotten.
Timbers talk before they break. Rats leave bad ground first. Never trust a Tuesday blast, because the powder monkey drinks on Monday. If your lamp burns blue, walk, don't run. Half of it she did not understand. She kept it anyway.
There was no book to write it in. So she wrote it on the backs of the doctor's old prescription slips, which he threw in the basket by the desk. She kept them in her stocking with the button.
* * *
The old men were the best.
There were three of them, too old for the shaft, who came to the surgery for their chests and stayed for the stove. They had worked camps she had never heard of. Leadville. Caribou. Places in Nevada that were not there anymore. And every one of those places had a story that ended the same way.
"They knew. That's what I'm telling you. The shift boss knew, the foreman knew, half the men knew. Ground was talking for a week. And the super said, I've got a contract, and sent them in."
"How many?"
"Nineteen."
"Nineteen."
"Nineteen, and one of them was my brother's boy. So don't tell me about counts."
Mr. Hollis came in on a Thursday with a cut hand and sat on the bench to wait. The old men told it again for his benefit. He listened with his eyes on the floor. When they had done, he said, "I know it. I know it," and nothing else.
Antonia waited until the old men had gone in to the doctor.
Then she said, from her corner, "Mr. Hollis."
He looked around. He had forgotten she was there. Everyone always did.
"Why do men listen to rats," she asked, "and not to children?"
She asked it gravely. She had thought about it for four days.
Hollis opened his mouth. Then he shut it again. He looked at the floor and turned his hat over in his hands.
The curtain moved. The doctor said, "Hollis." The foreman got up and went in.
He had not answered. She put it on the back of a prescription slip with the rest, under the rats and the timbers. Mr. Hollis did not know either. That seemed important, though she could not have said why.
* * *
Toby Griggs had been placed with a family called Sloat on Silver Street, and set to work on the sorting floor.
He was good at it, Antonia gathered. Big hands, and no fear of the noise. The Sloats were pleased with him. Once, he came into the surgery with a splinter the size of a nail through his thumb. He saw her in the corner, and his face did what it had done on the train.
He kept the word jinx behind his teeth. Not in the doctor's house. He said, "Well, look who's here," and sat as far down the bench as he could get.
But he said it elsewhere.
Olivia heard it first at the mercantile, from the younger woman who looked at the floor.
The Griggs boy was telling the sorting floor that the jinx sat in the doctor's surgery all day, touching the instruments.
Touching the bandages. Touching the bottles.
Sitting on the bench where a man had to sit, so that whatever she had got into the wood and then into him.
"It's foolishness, missus. I know it's foolishness."
"But."
"But the Carrolls have gone to the druggist in Leadville for their medicine. Four hours on the train each way, with the baby. And the Dunnes too, I hear."
Olivia said that she was sorry to hear it. She paid for her thread and walked home up the gulch with her jaw set. She kept it from the doctor. He would find out. Two families in a practice of eleven hundred was not a great many, but it was two more than there had been.
She told the child even less. But the child had been sitting in the corner when the Griggs boy came in with his thumb. The child, as Olivia was learning, did not need telling.
* * *
The schoolhouse stood at the bottom of Silver Street, below the church, with a fence around a yard of trampled snow.
Olivia had not meant to go there. She was on her way to the depot with a letter to Bridget. But there were children in the yard, a dozen of them, in a ring, and they were chanting. She heard the words before she saw who was in the middle.
"Jinx Jenkins, Jinx Jenkins, don't look at her, she'll burn you..."
Nobody was in the middle. That was what held Olivia at the fence. Antonia was not there. She was at home on her stool with the atlas. The children were chanting at nothing. At the idea of her. At a girl who had walked past the fence once with her hand in Olivia's and had never come back.
Olivia stood at the fence until they saw her. Then she turned around and walked home.
She walked at her usual pace. There was no need for more. When she got there, she said, "Antonia. Your coat," in a voice the child had not heard her use. Antonia got her coat. The two of them walked back down Silver Street to the schoolhouse without a word between them.
The schoolmistress was a thin young woman named Miss Perrin. She taught children from six to nearly grown in one room, and had not been in the camp a year. She looked at the child in the doorway, then at the woman behind her. Her hand went to her collar.
"Mrs. Aldridge. I'm afraid... that is, we are quite full, and the term is half gone, and..."
"You have twenty-two pupils. The reverend told me.
The room was built for forty. This child reads, writes a fair hand, and can do sums that your oldest boys cannot.
She is eight years old. She has not sat in a schoolroom since September, and she is going to sit in this one.
" Olivia's voice stayed level. It had gone cold, cold as the passes in January, with a Boston civility on it like a skin of ice. "Where shall she put her coat?"
Miss Perrin turned to the children. They had come in from the yard and were standing along the wall.
"The other parents…" she began.
"Are not here. I am. And Dr. Aldridge, who has sat up with half of these children's fevers, will be here on Monday if it has not resolved itself by then." Olivia took her hand off Antonia's shoulder. "Antonia, find yourself a seat. Miss Perrin, good morning. I'll be back at three."
She walked out. On the step, she stopped and drew a breath. Her hands were shaking. That surprised her. Her hands never shook.
Well, she thought. There is a first time for most things.
* * *
Charles began taking the child on his rounds in the week before Christmas.
He told himself it was to spare Olivia. The school let out at three. His afternoon calls ran until dark. It was no kindness to a woman with a house to keep to have a child underfoot for four hours. So he said, "Get your coat," on a Tuesday, and Antonia got her coat. After that she simply came.
She sat in the wagon while he went into the cabins.
She held the horse. When it was too cold to sit, she came in and stood by the door with her hands folded.
The patients had crossed the street from her a week ago.
Now they found that they did not like to say so in front of the doctor, and let her stand.
On the third day, he found out what she was doing there.
He had come out of a cabin on the creek where a man had a bad chest. He was going through his daybook with his pencil, trying to recall what he had given the man last time. The man himself did not know. Antonia was at his elbow.
"A drachm of the syrup, twice," she said. "And you told him to keep the window open at night, and he didn't."
Charles stared at her.
"That was a week ago Thursday. You were in the surgery. He came with his wife." She said it without any pride at all. "The one before him had the cough with the whistle in it. You gave him nothing. You said it would pass."
He looked down at his daybook. A drachm, twice. Window. It was there, in his small hand, exactly as she had said.
"How many do you remember?"
She thought about it.
"All of them," she said. "Since October. I don't know how to not."
Charles put the pencil away. He stood in the snow by the wagon and studied the child. Her red hair came out from under the cap Olivia had knitted. Her gray-green eyes waited to see what he would do.
What he would do, he did not know. He was beginning to suspect that he had not known for some time.
"Get in the wagon," he said at last. "The Kinney baby's next, and I've forgotten what I gave the mother."
"Chamomile," Antonia said, and climbed up. "For the baby."
"For the mother." Charles took the reins. "Chamomile will send a baby to sleep and leave the colic exactly where it was. It was the mother who wasn't sleeping. You had the dose and the wrong patient."
She was quiet for the length of a cabin. Then she nodded once, the way she did when a fact went in and found its place.
The horse leaned into the collar. The wagon went on up the creek in the failing light, with the two of them side by side on the seat, saying nothing. It occurred to him, somewhere past the second cabin, that it was the first time in three years he had not minded the quiet.