Chapter 39
Okee
By late August, the paint on Lula’s sign had cured hard in the sun.
WILD CARD APOTHECARY
Tonics, Teas, Tinctures & Midwifery
Lula painted the sign herself, standing on a crate in the street while Boone held her waist as if she might tumble to her death from a height of twelve inches.
The shop stands directly beside the Gemini because Goldie owns half the block.
When Lula told her she meant to open an apothecary, Goldie evicted a tenant who sold cracked saddles and bad tobacco.
Within a week, Goldie had men scrubbing the walls, washing the windows, and building a proper counter along the back.
Goldie would not hear of Lula starting small.
She invested in the business, paid for shelving, glass bottles, and enough stock to make Lula stand in the middle of the room with one hand pressed to her mouth.
In exchange, Goldie took twenty-five percent of the business. She’d drawn it up for fifty, but Lula tore up the contract and threatened to open a Methodist mission for fallen women across the street.
Now Wild Card Apothecary stands close enough to the Gemini that music and laughter pass through the walls after sundown.
During the day, the shop smells of dried mint and camphor.
Shelves line the walls from floor to ceiling, crowded with jars, packets, and little brown bottles stoppered tight.
Above the door hang bunches of cedar, sweet grass, horehound, and willow bark tied with twine.
Her name is painted on the front window.
Lula Clay, Proprietress.
Sometimes I catch her standing in the street admiring it. Boone and I help where we can. I keep the accounts, copy labels, and mix powders. Boone hauls crates, sweeps poorly, and charms customers he ought not charm.
When Lula is called away to attend a birth, or goes out to forage what cannot be bought, Boone and I mind the shop between other work.
Legitimate work, mostly.
Goldie has a great many errands that require strong backs, steady hands, and a flexible understanding of civic duty. Security. Debt collection.
I sit at the counter, copying labels in my neatest hand. In the heat, shirtsleeves rolled to my forearms. Sweat gathers beneath my collar. Outside, the street lies bright and punishing beneath the late sun.
I pull a page of labels and find most of them filled.
Tinkchure
Ekinasha
Hoor hownd
“Love, did Lula ask you to write labels?” I say, without glancing up.
“She tried,” Boone says, grinding a large granite pestle behind me.
I bite my lip and admire the page. For a moment I’m returned to our meager barracks where I’d have Boone read chapters aloud. We read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables by candlelight.
“This ain’t even English,” he complained, showing me the word and making an attempt. “Them-there-deers?”
“Thénardiers.”
He flushed. “Ain’t even close. Sounds fancy when you say it.”
It was sweet, defying the bravado of soldiers in close quarters. By all accounts, Boone was a joker and a hothead. He never shied away from a brawl. But at night, when everything fell to a hush and it was just us for an hour in a private corner, I saw who he really was.
The one who struggled, felt embarrassed, but kept at it. At first, every correction raised his hackles. Later, he only glared, repeated the word, and waited for my nod. I liked being the one who could give him something no one had bothered to give him before.
My chest swells with affection for him now, reading his misspelled labels.
“I can tell you were sounding the words out. Nice work, partner.”
He grins to himself as he smashes herbs for Lula’s tinctures. “Thank you. I told Lula, ain’t my fault folks decided not to spell words how you say them.”
“You’re right, it’s not.”
The shop bell rings as the door swings open. For one suspended moment, my mind refuses the sight before me.
My father stands inside Lula’s shop in a dark summer suit too fine for the dust on the road. His beard has gone mostly white, neatly trimmed along his jaw. His hat is brushed clean. His gloves are pale. His eyes move over the room, at the herbs, the jars. At Boone.
Then at me.
“Okee,” he says.
The room changes.
Boone’s pestle goes still in the mortar. My own pen hovers above the page, ink gathering dangerously at the nib. I set it down with care.
“Father.”
He steps farther inside, removing his hat and steadying himself on a cane—carved wood with an ornate silver grip. “I had to see for myself.”
“See what?”
His gaze moves over me with an efficiency I remember from childhood. Rolled sleeves. Ink-stained fingers. The labels beneath my hand. The staircase at the back.
Then Boone.
“The papers said Hollister’s company collapsed. Timber fraud. False surveys. Bribed lawmen.” His mouth tightens. He reaches into his coat and withdraws a folded newspaper, worn soft at the creases.
He sets it on the counter.
WIDOW AND WANTED MEN IMPLICATE HOLLISTER TIMBER IN MASSIVE FRAUD
Father spins slowly around the shop again, studying everything with curiosity.
“I felt terrible for not having believed you, but then I heard the rest. That the woman survivor had opened an apothecary beside a business of ill repute. That the two men Hollister accused were living above it with her.” His gaze settles on me.
“I expected to hear from you in spring.”
I look down at the newspaper, though I am no longer reading it.
“When I did not,” Father says, “I assumed you had made your choice.”
“I had.”
“I see,” he says. “I was passing through Fort Gibson to return home. I thought I could make sense of it somehow if I could only see it with my own eyes.”
“Make sense of what?”
He sighs, as if I’ve backed him into a corner. “This arrangement.” His expression sours, as if the word has an unpleasant taste.
Boone laughs.
“Is something humorous?” Alfred asks.
Boone stays silent. I see the tension in his shoulders, the veins and sinews in his forearms as he quietly tightens his fists.
“You were offered a position, Okee,” he says. “A lawful one. Meaningful work. Work suited to your education. Your abilities. I made inquiries on your behalf.”
“I know.”
“You were meant to come to Okmulgee.”
“I know.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Behind him, the Wild Card sign creaks in the late-summer wind. Next door, the Gemini is quiet in the afternoon heat, sleeping off the night before. Inside the shop, Boone stands very still.
I think of spring. Of the letter I did not write. Of the road to Okmulgee opening once the mud dried and the creeks lowered. Of the respectable position waiting like a clean, freshly spun noose around my throat.
“I did not come,” I say, “because you made the terms plain.”
Father’s hand tightens on the head of his cane. “I offered you work.”
“You asked me to abandon Boone.”
I feel Boone staring at me now, but I do not look away from my father. The shop seems to narrow around the words.
Father’s expression draws tight, a faint disgust moving across his face. “Enough—”
“No. You came here to understand, so understand this. Boone is not a habit to outgrow. He is not a wartime attachment. He has stood beside me through every low, lawless, godforsaken season of my life, and I love him.”
“Perhaps he was useful to you in war,” Father says, almost pleading. “I understand that. But he is not your equal, son. You do not repay a man by lowering yourself to him.”
“Careful,” I warn him. My blood pumps molten hot, hot enough to consume me if I let it. I cannot let him see me falter.
But he presses on. “He’s catered to your appetites and you have mistaken it for love.”
I don’t miss Boone’s faint wince, an almost imperceptible drop of his head, as if a part of him always feared this could be true.
That is what does it.
“What appetites, Father?”
“Do not play the fool.”
“Say it.”
A flush works beneath his beard. “Sodomy,” he says at last, low and clipped. “Buggery. Infamous conduct. Choose the term you prefer. The law has several.”
“I know the law.”
“Then you admit it.”
“I know what I have done. I know the vows I have taken,” I say. “Law or no, we belong to each other, and what lies between us in our bed is not your concern.”
The cane comes up fast. One clean crack across my face.
The shop goes white at the edges, and I grip the counter to keep my footing.
Boone is moving before the pain reaches me.
I lift one hand. “No.”
He stops, nostrils flared, lips tight. He cracks his knuckles as the cords of his neck flare.
Father lowers the cane, breathing hard through his nose. I taste blood.
He looks less satisfied than I expect. Perhaps he thought striking me would put the world back in order.
Boone’s body trembles, seething.
“You have always known how to drag him down to your level,” Alfred taunts him between ragged breaths. “This is a family matter now. Best you let me continue this conversation with my son in private.”
I wipe a warm trickle of blood from my cheek.
“You and I are not family, Alfred Collins. I was never your son. I was a specimen. Something to give a clever name, something to measure and put behind glass. Mother too. She was never your wife. She was your credential. A feather in your cap. I became a problem for you the moment I refused to become the polished political instrument you’d hoped I would be.
A living example of Dr. Collins’s infinite brilliance. ”
He flinches then, the first honest thing he has done all afternoon.
“What a vile thing to claim.”
“Yes. It is. What’s worse is that it’s true. But Boone has never asked me to be anyone else.”
“Why would he criticize the hand that feeds him? He has no name worth protecting, so he has fastened himself to yours. Look at him,” he spits. “He is not silent out of dignity. He is silent because some part of him knows I am right.”
I don’t think. My hand closes around the cold granite of the pestle Boone left behind.
Father’s eyes flick down at it in my grip. “Okee.”
I come over the counter before he can say another word. Not around it. Over.
“You come to our place of business, to our home, to announce your disapproval? Get your sanctimonious ass the hell out of here before I split your skull!”
He backs away quickly as I chase him out of the store. The bell above the door gives a frantic little cry as my father backs through it.
Late summer heat spills in. Dust. Street noise. The smell of horse manure and sun-baked wood.
He turns on the boardwalk. “You will regret this display,” he says, pointing his cane at me to keep me out of striking distance.
I step out after him, the pestle still in my hand. As he backs away off the boardwalk, he slips, falling on his back in the mud with a wet thud.
The sunlight strikes bright enough to make me squint. Outside, two men across the street at the livery look on.
Good. Let them see. Let them all see.
Then a voice cuts across the street.
“Okee?”
Lula stands at the edge of the boardwalk with a basket over one arm, bonnet ribbons loose beneath her chin, cheeks pink from the heat. A bundle of gathered herbs sticks out of the basket in wild green sprays. She takes in the scene at a glance: me with a pestle in my fist, Father in the mud.
She narrows her eyes at me. “I leave for one hour and you’re bludgeoning customers?” She rushes over.
“He is not a customer,” I say. “He’s my father.”
Rolling about slightly like a turtle flipped on its shell, Alfred groans. “My back.”
Lula’s eyes go from his muddy coat to the angle of his hip, then to the cane half buried near his hand.
“Do not move,” she says.
Alfred grimaces. “I beg your pardon?”
“That was not a request. Did you strike your head?”
“No.”
“Can you feel both feet?”
His pride suffers more visibly than his spine. “Yes.”
“Can you move them?”
He does, barely, boots dragging in the mud then kicking like a newborn in the air.
“Good.”
Boone mutters from the doorway, “Shame.”
“You will need help standing,” she says.
“I require no assistance.”
“You are currently arguing from a puddle of horse shit.”
“I am perfectly capable—”
He plants the cane, attempts to rise, and immediately sinks back down into the mud with a sound that is half grunt and half curse.
Lula sighs.
“All right. That's enough. Boone, help him up.”
“The hell I will.”
“Okee?”
“No.”
She glowers at both of us.
“Leave me,” Alfred groans. “I merely strained something.”
Lula sets her basket on the boardwalk, walks over and grabs his arm with both hands. “Come on. Let’s get you inside.”
“No,” I say.
“No,” Boone agrees.
“Unhand me,” Alfred says.
Lula closes her eyes. For a moment she simply stands there breathing. Then a door bangs open above the Gemini.
“Well now,” Goldie calls from the balcony. “What in God's name is all this racket? It’s 11:30 in the morning. Don’t you know some people are trying to get their beauty sleep?”
Every head turns upward.
Goldie leans over the railing in a silk wrapper, cigarette in one hand and a coffee cup in the other. She squints down at Alfred lying in the mud.
“What happened to him?”
“Momma, this is Dr. Alfred Collins. Okee’s father,” Lula calls back.
Goldie's eyebrows shoot up as she takes a thoughtful drag. The cigarette bounces between her lips as she mutters, “Well then. We’re practically in-laws. Pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
Alfred closes his eyes, chest heaving as he settles, going limp as a starfish with defeat.
“You in any pain?” Goldie asks.
“Quite a bit, yes.”
She disappears from the balcony. A moment later her voice echoes from inside.
“Doris! Bring me the laudanum!”
Alfred's head lifts.
There is a pause.
Then: “Laudanum?”
Lula offers a hand again. “I’d have made you a cup of willow bark tea. What momma has is a sight stronger.”
At last, Alfred accepts her help.
Lula squares herself before him, plants her boots, and drops into a slight crouch as though she has been hoisting half-dead men twice her size all her life.
Knowing Lula, she probably has.
Boone and I stand aside with our arms crossed, watching the pair of them negotiate the task with all the dignity two proud people can muster while one of them is injured and the other barely reaches his shoulder.
If she ends up in the mud with him, well.
That will be the natural consequence of her choices.
Goldie reappears, holding the bottle triumphantly over her head. “We have a winner.”
Stepping back onto the boardwalk, hunched forward slightly with the back half of his summer suit painted brown, he sighs and lifts his chin. I can see the gears turn slowly in that judgmental head of his.
“You want it, or you going to keep looking at me like I milked it from Satan?”
“Momma,” Lula chides.
“What? This is the good shit. Despite my daughter’s infamy, I can assure you we do not peddle in poison at the Gemini, Mr. Collins. It would be bad for business.”
A spasm seems to take hold of him a moment as his upper body jerks oddly over his hip. He wriggles with a pinched expression. A strangled sound dies in his throat before he exhales, sweat beading on his forehead.
“My apologies, madam. I greatly appreciate your generosity.”
“All right then,” she says, ashing her cigarette over the balcony. “I’ll be over directly.”