edginess as a Deco locket put an end to
time’s weird progression across her chest.
“So,” I tilted up and spoke over the
glass. “Today you’ve come to work
dressed as 1830 to 1930?”
She gave me her hardest look. “Wrong.
Eighteen-thirty-four to nineteen-thirty-
four! Still, for graduate work... You’re at
least the first today to ‘get’ my latest try.”
I laughed. She smirked, and then, in
her piping oboe voice, conceded in a
hurry, half-mechanical, “About this pic-
ture you’re so dead set to blunder into
the story of: Around 1849, no, in 1849,
June 4th, a sailor named Sanders Wool-
sey came home to La Verne from an
eight-month voyage to the Far East.
Sandy’s ship, the John Gray, brought
back tea, Canton ware, and ginger. He’d
sailed into Chicago, which was then a
going port, thanks to their dredging
Canada’s waterways. You can imagine
the meal his mother and sisters fixed
his first night home. Baked chicken, be
my guess. And Sandy, mostlike, so full
of tales: the monkeys, the pagodas, what
have you. They ate that dinner at their
farm three miles due east of here, more
toward Matherville. And it was Sandy
Woolsey who pretty well ruined us out
this way. Was Sandy brought us the
cholera. His poor mother and sisters
would be dead in six days, along with
most of three households, their nearest
neighbors. Two of those homes still
stand, back by the propane distributor-
ship you passed but never noticed. A
new doctor’d just arrived in town. Boy
so recent to practicing medicine he had
price tags still strung on his best surgi-
cal tools.... You think I’m exaggerat-
ing what all I got in here, do you? Think
I made that up about his tools?”
“No, you clearly know your stuff. So
the fellow in this picture isn’t the sailor
but the new town doctor, right? My only
question is whether you’ll need to stand
up to run and fetch that doctor’s bag,
or have you maybe got it tucked some-
where close?”
“Look harder at me, son. I’ve never
‘run’ toward—or, comes to that, from—
anything in my whole life. However,
you’re not totally stupid.”
She bent, first with a broken-backed
degree of inconvenience, then with vis-
ible pain. From beneath the cash regis-
ter, Theodosia lifted a cardboard box
intended for canned green beans. From
it, she hoisted a goodly leather satchel.
Brown, it was bigger than the doctors’
black bags seen in movies and pharma-
ceutical ads. Clanking it atop her glass
counter, she expertly opened its silver
latch. Her eyes never abandoning mine,
she now slid toward me one small saw.
Ash-wood handle, a fine blue Sheffield
blade. Amputation-worthy, that heavy
to the touch. And, along its cutting edge,
one price tag still dangled from string.
“Dollar-fifty,” she read aloud. “Then.”
This implement she whisked from
me and shoved back, as the satchel
dropped to the floor just beneath her
stool. “Doctor’s name was Frederick
Markus Petrie. He’d just turned thirty.
Had been in town less than three weeks
when Ordinary Seaman Sandy Wool-
sey, twenty-one, brought sickness out
here to us. Morning after his homecom-
ing feast, the boy begged to stay in bed
till nine. By noon, admitted he was pretty
sickly. First, the sailor’s older sisters tried
treating him. They were proud girls,
skilled in home arts. Glad, I guess, to
finally lay eyes on the boy who’d been
so far away so long.
“Before the Civil War, we were even
more backward a little place, being out
this far from Kewanee. And just the idea
of a local boy getting to sail clear to China
and home without being drowned, well,
a certain kind of fame must’ve hooked
onto that fellow. And hadn’t he brought
his mother, to dress up her plain farm
mantel, one of those ivory carvings withlittle worlds inside other little worlds
and all shaped from one hunk of tusk?
I have that in back, though it’s not cheap.”
“I’ve seen plenty of those. Please,
go on.”
Now we seemed in this together, se-
rious evening drawing down hard around
us. Opening a box of kitchen matches,
Theodosia lit one candle.
“Pretty soon,” she continued, “‘a lit-
tle feverish’ turns more toward ‘diarrhea.’
And then their bringing another basin
becomes ‘Maybe too much for us. Send
for Doc Eaton.’ But old Eaton, he’d just
retired, see? And there was only that re-
cent graduate, so new he yet boarded
with Hester Brinsley, and was still out
looking for some rental of his own.
“They say the eldest Woolsey girl,
which’d be Dorothea, found the boy
doctor out this way, having just paid his
first month’s rent on a little house not
an eighth of a mile back toward the
Coal Valley turnoff. Dorothea rushes in,
says, ‘We’ve got something. At home,
we tried and take care of it, but Sandy’s
having something bad to where we... ’
and fainted. She had raced out here so
fast, see. Her horse, a nag, was lathered.
So there stands our young Dr. Markus
Petrie. He’d best get prepared. Him not
even all-the-way unpacked. And hav-
ing to replace old Doc Eaton that ev-
erybody loved. Because Eaton’d do ev-
erything you wanted and never tell
another living soul about it. Girls in
trouble used to troop out here on the“But I don’t want our marriage to be featuring Pitbull.”