Allie Pleiter - The Doctor's Undoing

Restless, Ida closed the drawer and returned to her bedroom windows. She opened them as wide as they would go, hoping to catch Charleston’s famed off-the-water evening breeze, but the night’s stillness prevailed. The heat was like a living thing here, pressing against one’s chest, pulling a soul down. Ida found she had to deliberately fight it, the same way a war nurse deliberately fought against sadness and despair. “Not even a foothold,” her nursing teacher would always say. “Mind your thoughts as much as you mind your sanitation, for both can infect with equal power.”

Guard my heart, Lord , Ida prayed as she slipped into bed, thinking even the thin sheet too much tonight. Already her night shift felt as if it were cementing itself to her arms. And if it’s not too much trouble, send a breeze.

An hour later, Ida turned over yet again, unable to get comfortable in the thick night air. No matter how much she needed sleep, it was nowhere to be found tonight. Her ability to nod off in even the worst of conditions had been a blessing at Camp Jackson—Ida couldn’t remember the last time she had trouble catching winks. “Fine!” she declared to the dark room, sitting up and reaching for the light. “Now what?”

She didn’t feel like reading. She’d already organized most of her things, and that sounded as if it would make too much noise anyhow. There wasn’t enough light to paint properly, and the black and white of sketching sounded entirely unappealing.

It wasn’t a breeze that the Good Lord sent, but an idea with just as much refreshment. Dashing to the bottom drawer of her bureau, Ida found her knitting needles. Leanne had taught her the craft at Camp Jackson, where many of the nurses worked in their free time to make socks for the thousands of soldiers who fought for freedom on tired, cold feet. Ida had become a competent knitter, even if the required soldier colors of navy, black and olive left much to be desired.

Now that the war was over, colored yarn had become one of life’s everyday luxuries. As a matter of fact, Ida was pretty sure she had just enough... “Aha!” she cried, as her hand found the small ball of bright pink yarn. It had been a gift from Leanne. A cheery bright pink was just the thing to lift her spirits.

Trouble was, the only thing Ida really knew how to make from memory were socks, and this ball wasn’t enough for a full-size pair, nor was it the proper thickness.

Unless the feet were very small. Surely, somewhere in all those children in all those sizes was a pair of feet tiny enough to fit whatever socks emerged from this yarn.

Grinning and wide awake, Ida peered at the ball and her needles, calculating if her memorized sock pattern could be adapted just enough to create a pair of small pink socks. “There’s only one way to find out,” Ida told the yarn in her hands. “I’m ready if you are, and it surely beats staring at the ceiling.”

Adjusting her lamp, Ida tucked herself into the chair by the window and began to knit.

* * *

Saturday morning had brought a drenching rain, a sweet relief to the choking heat that had pushed children and staff to the limits of their manners. While Daniel could always do without the mud puddles and the leak that invariably sprung in one roof or another, he was always grateful for the way a good “gully washer” could rinse the world fresh and clean. A smile found its way across his face as he walked in the welcome shade of the afternoon. Midsummer like this, rain perked up the plants around the grounds, coaxing out a few of the blooms that still graced the yards from the years when the property had been a grand estate. “The Home still has the bones of a great lady,” Mother was fond of saying, even though both women were showing their age. Time hadn’t been kind to either of them, and Daniel felt that sting more fiercely with every passing month.

“See how that makes a circle right there? How it meets that line from the other side?” He caught Miss Landway’s voice as he turned a corner toward the front of the compound.

“It’s just shapes?” a child’s voice, full of wonder, came in reply. Daniel slowed his steps, not wanting to intrude but still curious. He peered to his left to see Miss Landway seated on the stone bench by the front gate. She had a pair of girls on each side of her, more at her feet and a large pad of paper perched upright on her lap.

“Shapes and color. That’s how an artist sees the world.” She moved her hand over the paper, and Daniel shifted closer to improve his view. “Look at the gate and tell me what shape it is.”

“A rectungle,” one girl said. Miss Landway’s laugh chimed across the courtyard in reply.

“A rec tangle , yes. Very good.” He watched her sketch out the shape in the center of her page. “But not just any old rectangle. What’s special about this one?”

“It’s got a moon on top,” Gwendolyn Martin, on the bench right next to Miss Landway, piped up as she pointed to the gate’s rounded arch.

The nurse’s smile was warm and bright as she nodded toward her seatmate. “Right you are, Gitch. The moon is also a shape, called an arch or a crescent, and if you plop that big old moon sideways on top of our rectangle—” she added the curve to the top of the drawing “—you get our gate.” Miss Landway spun the drawing around so that the girls at her feet could see, and a chorus of wide-eyed oooh s met her display. The part of him that worried how long the Parker Home could retain a nurse was happy to note she used the word our when she referred to the gate. Lord, You know I was looking for someone entirely different, but I’d still be grateful if this one actually stays. He could try to learn to see the world in colors and shapes if it meant she stayed here where she was most definitely needed.

As if she’d heard his thoughts, Miss Landway opened a tray of watercolors on her lap with a flourish and announced, “Now we’ve got to add the colors. Call out the ones you see.”

“The gate is black,” young Miss Martin offered.

“Only it’s got red and orange around the hinges and in spots on the side,” added another girl.

“The dirt is brown but the leaves are green,” another girl spoke up, pointing to the objects she named.

“But not the same color as those leaves over there,” came another comment. “Those are a different green.”

The children called out half a dozen colors and a few more shapes as they peered hard at the landscape before them. Miss Landway held up her pigments and had each girl match the color she saw with a color from the tray. For a woman who continually bemoaned the lack of color at the Home, she was wasting no time in digging up a palette right here. He stood and watched, fascinated, as she used each color to create a painting of the gate and the plants around it. Miss Landway had skill; the image was pleasant enough to hang in the staff dining room.

If only she had stopped there.

“The best thing about art,” she said once she’d finished with each child’s color, “is that we don’t just have to leave the world the way we found it. We can have more fun than that.”

Daniel felt his jaw go slack as Miss Landway dove into her palette and created a riot of hues around the gate. Under her enthusiastic brush, a full and wild garden sprung up around the gate on her paper. In a matter of minutes, two outrageously colored birds perched on the wall under a blinding yellow sun. A bright red house rose up beyond the gate whereas in real life only a dull gray shed stood on the other side of the street. Before she was finished, every inch of the paper was filled with motion and color until the canvas looked more like a tropical circus than the scene Daniel saw before her. When Miss Landway flipped the painting around to show the children, giggles and applause echoed across the courtyard along with her loud and musical laugh.