Love to Water My Soul (Dreamcatcher) Page 28

  He is called to care for those with mind sicknesses as best he can in the confines of a hospital’s brick buildings in Oregon’s capital city.

  “If it’s what will please you while I’m here.”

  “Good. Good. Though just having you here is a spree. Only wish it happened more often, Alice.”

  His smooth hand with shiny nails lifted my chin. He ran his left thumb along my dark marking hidden by the wax and face powder I put on when I visited. I looked into his hazel eyes which expressed more than a wish, looked like a demand.

  “You promised, Thomas Crickett.”

  “I know, I know,” he said and dropped his hands, disgusted with himself more than with me. “But then I see how their eyes sparkle when you bend your ear to them. How much more animated their drawings are when you stand next to them. They take your comments. I know exactly how they feel because I feel the—”

  “We agreed.”

  “We did, but I didn’t expect it would take so long to win you over. Six years!”

  He became aware of my silence. His deep voice added more gently, “I’m not accusing, Alice. Truly, I’m not.”

  “It has worked, I think.” My eyes were not on his, examined instead the hemline of my silk dress, the pointy toes of my uncomfortable shoes.

  “Yes, it works,” he said and sighed. Then changing his mood to lightness, he kissed me gently on the nose. “And I am still luckier than most.”

  He smiled then, his mouth a pink line buried in a tangle of graying mustache and muttonchops. “I overheard some men waiting at the ferry in Portland yesterday. One said, ‘I hope I look as good as you when I’m eighty,’ and the other said, ‘If you’re lucky, you’ll be dead by eighty,’ and they both laughed.”

  He put on his frock coat and began to button it, still awkwardly manipulating his right hand, minus a thumb. “I intend to live that long and resist the gout and wind in my stomach and hopefully feel lucky when I’m eighty.”

  He bent to pat the cocker spaniel, Benny, and brushed lint from the dark wool of his pants on the way.

  “I’m a lucky man, truly, aren’t I, Benny ol’ boy? Afterall, I was just a short, fat, round man when I wooed your mother.” He swooped to lift the dog.

  “A fluffy man, Sunmiet would say.”

  “Fluffy?” He patted his wide stomach that needed no stuffing when he played Saint Nicholas for the children on the wards. “Fluffy, yes,” he confirmed wiggling his eyebrows up and down to the dog who panted happily, barked one short greeting. “Your observations never cease to amaze me, Alice. All the more reason I invite your company today.”

  “I accept,” I said touching the abalone combs that held the braid of my hair piled high on my head. I leaned to kiss his cheek. The dog squirmed and jumped down so nothing stood between my husband and me except the separation of our lives.

  I’d made the bed in our home—his home—that sits on the hospital grounds in Salem, brought his pipe around, slipped my arm through his as we descended winding stairs, my smooth leather shoes sliding cautiously on carpet, thinning like my husband’s hair.

  When with him, I wore the leather shoes, the corset that bound my insides tight beneath my added bustle. My clothes confined my body as the tall firs and pines confined my spirit when I spent time in this region of rolling hills, thick underbrush of brambles and berries, and the shadows of majestic timber.

  Together, we entered the dining area splashed with light mottled by a spring shower and the huge fir grove just outside the french doors. “It amazes me it can rain while the sun shines,” I told him. “Rainbow weather.”

  “We take what sun we get, even if it comes freshly washed. Especially after the winter we’ve had. I doubt we saw the sun once the entire month of February! Did you?”

  “It is one thing I most like about Sherar’s Bridge, how much the sun shines even with snow on the ground.”

  “You get your share of fog, though,” he said. I nodded agreement, grateful we had moved on to speaking of ailments and the weather, subjects without tension, promise, or reminder.

  One of the patients had placed hot biscuits on the table, a platter of eggs and bacon for him, and already strained the hops tea I liked to break my fast when I came to this wet valley on the west side of the Cascade Mountains.

  The frail-looking man with hunched shoulders served us and smiled and nodded politely when I asked his name and thanked him for the tea.

  “Mr. Kaiser will be leaving soon,” I suggested to Thomas Crickett when the inmate backed through the dining doors to the kitchen out of sight.

  “Has left,” my husband told me. “Several times. Lasted almost six months last time. Totally trustworthy here. I think he’d stay out longer if his family could handle the occasional melancholy. They startle about when he seems to want private time, closets himself away. End up recommitting him. As soon as he’s back here, helping on the wards, talking with the kitchen staff, chatting with new patients, whatever, he seems to do fine.”

  “What would he need to feel as at home away from here as here, I wonder?”

  Thomas Crickett looked at me, the surprise and admiration of his eyes shot an arrow of warmth into my heart. “And doesn’t that just say it all,” he said.

  He slapped the tablecloth beside his plate, causing Benny to lift his head from his pillow in the corner. “Exactly what I’ve talked with Superintendent about, that this has become home for him, a place he thinks he belongs and needs to have. We’ve got to find a way to take the qualities that work here, out there.” He nodded his head toward Center Street’s sounds of delivery wagons, dogs barking and men shouting, people helping each other get unstuck in the muddy side streets. “That’s his real home. Dr. Lane thinks I’ve lost my mind.” He shook his head. “Common sense, that’s all it is.”

  He put his knife and fork down, reached to hold my hand, the stump of his thumb pointing like a pinkie to the tin-pressed ceiling. “Well, perhaps you can help me find a better way to say it so the trained mind of a single-thumbed-surgeon-turned-mind-doctor will have the same level of understanding as a young wife just visiting her husband!”

  “I will do my best,” I said with a small bow and tipped up my Wedgwood china cup steaming with hops tea.

  Mine was the strangest life which began on New Year’s Day of 1881, when with Susan Ella Turner Sherar Grimes as my attendant, my name changed once again. This time to Mrs. Thomas Crickett.

  It was not without some pain I took those steps.

  Something lured my future husband to Sherar’s Bridge the fall following Crickett’s death. He was a smallish man, the real Dr. Crickett. Older than me by several years, his hair had already left him just a tidy row around his head and a few brown whispers across the top. I first greeted him as he stepped off the stage coming from The Dalles. “Pretty Dick” Barter drove the rig, and Dr. Crickett seemed none the less for wear, a rare sight for a first-time passenger delivered by Dick down Tygh Ridge at breakneck speed.

  The other passengers were ushered inside by Mrs. Sherar, but that one remained behind. The little doctor—as I fondly came to call him—removed his bowler hat, held it gently in his fingers, one of which flashed a shiny ring. He brushed the dust from his pants with his hat, and I noticed his right hand worked without a thumb. He straightened, stuck a lower lip out to blow some dust from his spectacles still perched like a butterfly on his wide nose. His face, clean shaven, revealed the pale skin of someone not blessed with work to take him much outdoors.

  “I’m Thomas Crickett, M.D.,” he said, bowed slightly.

  I must have blinked, surprised by hearing the name of someone so recently deceased.

  “I believe you have a cat of mine,” he said, his voice surprisingly deep. “Or so I’ve been led to believe by the family of a former patient who stopped by this way some time back. It seems he took my luggage, my cat, and even used my name.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I hope he had more fun with it than I’ve had lately.”

  I
didn’t respond, simply stood wondering why he’d be coming now to see the cat.

  “I’m sorry he met an untimely demise.”

  “He died,” I said.

  “So he did.” One bushy brown eyebrow lifted. His lips the color of choke cherries formed into a gentle smile. “So he did. And said much more directly by your words, I might add. He was a good man, and I’m sorry he chose to take his life. It’s always a tragedy when someone loses hope.”

  He did not condemn. His hazel eyes with flecks of brown were bright and kind and lacked the arrogance created by intelligent men missing compassion. His face wore a mixture of curiosity and care.

  “Spirit’s near the front porch,” I told him, pointing politely with all my fingers, hoping my disappointment at losing the cat’s companionship didn’t show.

  “Spirit?” he asked. His eyes followed my hand, then caught my face. “Oh, so that’s what he called him. I’m sorry if you’ve become attached. I really should have sent word I’d want him back. Once I heard for sure he’d been brought here, I did try to come, but I just couldn’t get myself away from the hospital.”

  He whistled then, and I saw the cat jump from the rock wall surrounding the inn and bound to him. He squatted low and swooped the cat up into his arms, burying his face in the fur. “O Hamartolos! Hamartolos!” he said. “How I have missed you!”

  Spirit—or Hamartolos—licked at the man’s nose, eyes, pushed his head into Thomas Crickett’s neck, bumping and biting. Even from a distance I could hear the cat purr-purring in satisfaction. Dr. Crickett held him away from him for a moment, looking into the cat’s face, the long gray tail twitching, urging return to the man’s chest.

  “Not a bad alias, ‘Spirit,’ ” he said. “But you’re still Hamartolos to me! I do appreciate your looking after him,” he said then, “and of course I’ll want to pay for his care.”

  “He paid for his own keep,” I said. “I will take your bags.” I wanted to avoid seeing this exchange of devotion between feline and man, to begin dealing with new loss.

  “Oh my, no! I can take that myself,” he said, moving the cat with one hand to carry him under his arm, reaching for his valise in the other. “But I would appreciate knowing where my room is and who I have to thank for the wonderful care of my Hamartolos.”

  “It is a name I have not heard before,” I told him as we started through the gate in the rock wall toward the inn, “this ‘Hamartolos.’ ”

  “Greek word,” he answered quickly, and I could tell he liked sharing the information. “Used by an archer to mean the arrow has missed its mark or that a traveler has left a familiar road and gotten lost along some twisted path. Certainly fits for this one arriving down that reptile road I just came on!” He laughed again, looked back at the dust-covered stagecoach.

  “Some translate the word as ‘sinner.’ Actually, that’s how it’s used by the Greek Christians. I thought it had a profound sound to it—Hamartolos—like something to be shouted from the stage in a Greek tragedy, not to mention the variety of meanings about taking different trails. Cats certainly do that, now don’t they? So it’s what I’ve called him. But Spirit’s fine, too, if that’s how you know him. I think the names are compatible, however different.”

  And that was how the courtship—such as it was—of two compatible though very different people began.

  Thomas Crickett, M.D., had eastern degrees made possible by his deceased mother’s estate and his being an only child growing up in luxury in Boston. He studied Latin and Greek as part of his medical training to become a surgeon. He’d worked in eastern hospitals and had a good practice, he said, when not six years previous, just before his fortieth birthday, he’d lost his thumb to an infection that had started out so simply, then could not be stopped short of amputation.

  “Affected both my work and my pleasure,” he told me, holding the thumb out for us to look at like it did not belong to him. “Can’t play the oboe now either nor shoot birds the way I like. But at least I didn’t need it for this new science of psychiatry. May even help me understand better the deficits people think they have.”

  He worked with Drs. Hawthorne and Loryea at first, in the East Portland Clinic in the medicine of working with people’s minds.

  “Strange business, really. Quite a challenge for people trained in surgery. Dr. Loryea believes we must actually model how we live with our patients,” Dr. Crickett shared with us that first supper. “He plays with the children, invites inmates—though I prefer to call them patients—to his home to share meals with his family. They live right there on the grounds, you see. Even pets are allowed.” He smiled at the cat curled in the early evening sun beneath the foliage of the corner fern. “There are quite a few who have missed Hamartolos—this Spirit.”

  “So it is not a difficult place to stay,” I said, “like living in a home.” We had moved to the porch outside, and at his request I stayed to share the porch swing with him. His slender fingers held a paper fan to move the hot evening air from side to side.

  “Like a home?” he said, then chuckled. “If you read the Oregonian, you might wonder. But the state investigators who report to the legislature each year always give us a good review. The rooms are spacious. We’ve only restrained one person at all this past half year and that was a sailor dropped from a Portuguese ship who couldn’t seem to tell us what he needed. Batted at invisible things, he did. Netted him a nurse with a black eye before we subdued him.” He chuckled to himself, saw the look of uncertainty on my face. “Oh, she’s fine. Truly. Just an elbow landing where it shouldn’t have. Poor fellow felt worse about that than about being in restraints for a few hours, I’d say.”

  Before us, near the falls twisting like a rabbit rope through the basalt boulders of the river, a blue heron stood, one leg hidden, waiting for the perfect moment to dip its slender beak into the water.

  “Must be like living in another world,” he said. “All new environment, food, people, smells. I’m not at all sure we do them justice bringing them to such strangeness. They don’t see the world the way we do, can’t seem to make sense of ordinary things. Fragile, like porcelain cups some of them. Others strong as oxen but with minds of little children. Something they’ve seen or where they’ve been’s affected them, I suspect.”

  “Kahkwa Pelton,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “A Chinookan word. It means ‘Like Pelton,’ or ‘out of one’s mind,’ foolish, like the one they say was first found confused in this Oregon place.”

  “Fascinating,” he said, turning to look at me. “However would you know that?”

  I shrugged my shoulders, too soon to share too much.

  He fanned himself and me, grunted in question, then continued. “Dr. Loryea believes in giving patients lots of time and kindness, hopes that will help them step back into the world they left but see it through different eyes, hopefully stronger eyes.”

  “Perhaps they look at what is offered and decide it is more frightening than where they are,” I said.

  “Well, that is a dilemma now, isn’t it? An insightful observation at that.”

  “Perhaps bad spirits speak to their souls.”

  He looked at me, adjusted his glasses, furrows in his forehead. “Well, that province of healing has been discussed in some foreign clinics we correspond with. We haven’t had much luck in using the spirit as a healing source. Or to quiet some of those terrifying voices our patients tell us about, but who knows what might work in the future?”

  I thought of Wren, of Wuzzie and his dream-like trance.

  “It is one of the things I like about this work,” he said. “The possibilities. The hope. Have you lived here long, Alice?”

  “Almost eight years.”

  “And before that?”

  “I stayed … with friends.”

  “You work here? It seems you’re family and yet … or am I prying?”

  I looked at him and his many questions, not sure if I found his interest annoying o
r some effort at alliance. His eyes held an earnest look and genuine interest, and so I trusted what I saw, heard my Spirit say, Tell him who you are.

  “I do some work here. Also some healing of my own.”

  Cicada songs washed over the canyon, competing for our attention with the sunset. Spirit lay sleeping draped across Thomas Crickett’s pants, the hot breeze from the man’s fan brushing the hair of Spirit’s tail.

  “I’d say we were all in the process of some kind of healing,” Thomas Crickett said, seeing past the meaning of my words into the fabric of my heart. “Human nature to be wounded and still survive.”

  Thomas Crickett stayed at the inn for only a week that first time, then made his way to the river every month or so, staying a day or two. He fished. We walked and sat some on the porch.

  “Couldn’t leave the hospital to find his cat,” Mother Sherar said once, her voice a mix of joy and tease, “but he’s had no trouble making it here since he found you, even with Dick’s wild driving.”

  And then one day Thomas Crickett, M.D., asked if I would marry him, come live in Salem as his wife.

  I had known somehow the request would come and wondered how I’d answer. But my own words surprised me when I heard them said out loud.

  “Yes. I will marry you, Thomas Crickett, but I will not charm you. You should know of who I am.”

  “You sound so serious, Alice,” he said, smiling.

  We had taken a buggy to Finnigan, packed a picnic lunch of slabs of cold beef spread with whipped oil and egg and pressed between home-baked bread. The scent of it and the fresh blackberry pie wafted up from the covered basket setting before us while we lounged on the blanket.

  “What could a little thing like you have possibly done that bears the weight of such a heavy voice?” he said.

  He pulled a pipe from his vest pocket and tapped tobacco into the bowl.

  “Hamartolos,” I said.