“Open wide, doll,” Dr. Elkins asked.
I obeyed, volunteering an “ahhh” as the doctor’s tongue compressor stabbed my cheek, leaving behind a splinter. I wasn’t entirely sure why my tonsils were being examined, but if it would help me, I was willing to do whatever it took.I just wanted to get better.
“Now hon, look into this light for me.”
Elkins flashed a bright light into my eyes.
I struggled to keep my eyelids open as he prodded around with his scope.
“Eyes open, Ethel,” my husband, Michael, ordered.
It felt like my eyes were already as open as they could be, but I tried harder, resisting the urge to shut them tight and curl back up into the fetal position.
That was the way I’d spent most of evenings now, the ones I could remember.
Already growing impatient, Michael groaned and lit another cigarette, leaving us alone in the study.
“Mikey wants what’s best for you, you know. To get better.”
“I know,” I said, having to raise my voice over the radio from the kitchen. Michael had just turned up the volume, already returning to his beloved baseball game.
“Now, is there anything from your childhood, perhaps? Something that you might not be aware that’s left you… well, bothered… all these years later?”
“It’s just this house,” I said, probably for the third time. “Ever since Michael moved us here.”
Elkins shook his head as he began to pack up his instruments.
“Ethel, if every housewife in this town needed a checkup ‘cause she lacked her perfect home, perfect car, or perfect stand mixer, I’d be a millionaire.”
“But-“
“It’s time you appreciated what Michael has done for you and the kids. This must be the nicest home in all of Savannah.”
I had appreciated Michael, my children, and so many other niceties of life that I’d enjoyed since marrying an architect. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t something wrong.
Something truly, deeply wrong.
“Thank you, doctor.”
I didn’t follow Elkins into the kitchen. I could only sit and stare out the window as green ivy slowly climbed our windowsill, dots of light from the scope still spotting my eyelids with each passing blink.
“Mike, I’m afraid it’s a classic case of hysterics.”
I wondered if the doctor thought I was out of earshot, or maybe he just didn’t care.
Michael cussed under his breath, turning down the radio.
“Hysterics, I knew it.”
I hated that word. I’d asked Michael not to say it.
He didn’t give a damn.
I had plenty to be hysterical about: working to the bone to meet every single one of my abrasive husband’s demands, raising his children without so little as a helping hand, and cleaning a three-story historic home just the way he dictated… those all made the top of that long list.
But I wasn’t hysterical about what had been happening.
That wasn’t the diagnosis I’d desperately needed from our doctor, the only man that might have a chance of changing my husband’s stubborn mind about what was happening to me.
My heart sank as soon as the H-word had wafted into the study. It would be another night of terror, as unexplainable as it was isolating. The things I saw and felt since we’d moved to the Antebellum mansion… they weren’t shared by the other members of my family.
Worse, Michael ridiculed me for it.
“I’m so glad to finally’ve seen the inside of this place. It’s a beaut, Mikey.”
“Thanks, Doc. You know the story?” Michael asked, his favorite question when he wanted to impress anyone unlucky enough to step through our front door.
“No sir, do enlighten me!”
“Well,” Michael began, the same way he always did, “In the early days of the war between the states, I’m talking what– almost a hundred years ago now? The Rebs weren’t getting their asses handed to ‘em by those damn yanks. Our boys were winning, and handily.”
Elkins chuckled, the clink of ice cubes being dropped into one of their liquor glasses.
I had failed to discern Michael’s penchant for history during our brief courtship. Moreover, I’d badly overlooked his quiet allegiance to a long-defeated Confederacy, one which curdled my blood every time it resurfaced.
“This house, the Jones-Green Mansion, it was Robert E. Lee’s private quarters just weeks after Bull Run. You believe that? Greatest General of the century, living on this very spot!”
“How ‘bout it,” Elkins volunteered, between sips of his midday glass of whiskey.
I was tired of the worship of the late general, not to mention the history that was supposed to be told by the victors, yet remained maligned by the conquered.
If only to add insult to injury, Michael’s loquacious oral histories surreptitiously avoided what came later in that Civil War: bloody defeats, devastating sieges, and a pitiful end suffered by any soldier unlucky enough to be clad in Confederate gray.
Michael also conveniently forgot to mention, during these pseudo-history lectures, that the flooring under our feet remained spotted with blood, blood which was still preserved all these decades later. Wartime amputees had gushed bodily fluids in this room from wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling, their arms and legs severed with an unclean bone saw or axe before being tossed onto a rotting pile upstairs.
You see, once Lee was forced to retreat, Jones-Green became a defacto military hospital for a badly beaten army. And that was well before the dawn of modern medicine.
Elkins sounded like he was ready to leave, now desperate to free himself from Michael’s mandatory lecture. Michael poured him another glass though, based on the clinking sound of more ice emerging from the ice box.
“Hey Doc, before you go, there has to be something else you can do. I’m not sleeping most nights, with how bad she’s gotten.”
Sleep wasn’t something I had enjoyed since the night we moved in.
“You already tried the tincture, from my first visit?”
“All of it,” Michael professed, not realizing I’d spit out as much of the laudanum as I could.
I wasn’t prepared to be an addict in addition to my more pressing issues.
“And you stopped her smoking?” Elkins prodded.
“Cold turkey. She had headaches, but those passed.”
That was a lie too. My headaches had very much persisted, and without the nicotine to relax me, my episodes had only grown more nerve-racking.
“Well, I’d lie if I said I’d seen this before, Mikey,” Elkins confessed. “Your Ethel is a special case. I hate to volunteer…“
“Volunteer away,” Michael bellowed.
I wasn’t afraid of what the doctor would say next, at least, not as afraid as I was of the stench that had freshly surged into the study.
That was always how my episodes started: a rancid smell, what I later learned was the unmistakable scent of rotting human flesh.
“I can recommend that they commit Ethel…”
Next came the heavy footsteps on the stairs, the doctor’s sparse sentences barely reaching my ears in between.
“…the church would likely dissolve the marriage…”
A large bearded man finally entered the study. He limped on a severed leg, using an antique wooden crutch to make his way toward me.
“…even the children can be sent to an orphanage. Of course, one that’s out of the state…”
The beastly man lumbered from the doorway to an adjoining sofa, groaning in pain with each step, and the smell only suffocating me further.
The man didn’t look at me, though. He only stared out the window toward the climbing ivy and the setting sun, resting his chin on the crutch and wheezing pneumatically.
“Well one thing’s for sure,” Michael stated. “I’m not moving out of this house.”
“Of course not,” Elkins agreed. “No matter how much she begs. It’s not right. She’ll need to just… get over it.”
The amputee raised his injured leg to rest it on the coffee table. With a slam, blood and maggots splashed across the glass, the bandage unable to restrain his festering wound.
“Now, I know she was coy about it, Mike. But if I am going to have her sent to the asylum, I’ll need to know exactly what it is she’s going on about, you know, so I can have those folks sort her with her, well… her sort.”
Michael sighed as my gaze was drawn toward the horrendous figure. This was the part when I couldn’t look away, as hard as I might try.
“Doc, no.”
My trance broke, if only for a moment.
My heart leapt at Michael’s rejection of Elkins’ cruel suggestions.
Might my husband redouble his efforts to care for me? It was all I could ever wish for, at long last.
“Ethel going to the asylum just wouldn’t look right. Folks would talk. The woman is going to live in this house, and the two of us will die in it, at the Lord’s hour. That’s what’s proper.”
My heart sank as quickly as it had risen.
Somehow, that was a worse fate, even more so than electric shock therapy in some mental ward.
“But I’ll tell you Doc, so long as it’s between us.”
“Scout’s honor. On my mother,” Elkins swore.
The amputee turned toward me. My breathing grew shallow as I struggled to avert my eyes.
I couldn’t look away. I never can.
“Ethel says she’s seeing dying men, from some kind of war hospital… She hears their shouts as they’re operated on, she watches them kill each other for scraps of food, she’s covered in amputated arms and legs… I mean, just nasty, unholy visions.”
Elkins went quiet just as my head began to ring, a demonic shriek engrossing my consciousness.
I struggled to hear Elkins’ final words before I’d lose all grip on reality.
I desperately hoped he might take my husband’s revelation seriously, that it might change his mind.
“You ever heard of something like that, doc?”
The last thing I heard from the kitchen was a derisive, roaring laugh.
In tandem, the dead man’s lips peeled apart, revealing liquor-soaked teeth, most of which had been shattered by a musket ball.
The sun set below the horizon, plunging the house into darkness.
And the dead man began to laugh with them.