Earth Angels (2 page)

“Good as new, Doc. Aches a little in the cold, but nothin’ to speak of.” Like a boxer, he made a fist and flexed his right arm. “Danged wagon slipped and fell on my last spring when I was fixin’ the axle, Emma. That was just afore you and your Daddy came to town. Doc here patched me right up.” He winked at her again. “Good thing, a fella needs two good arms if he’s courtin’ a lady.”

Emma rolled her eyes. Oscar was a tease.

“What do I owe you, Miss Walsh?” The doctor, looking ill at ease and disapproving, searched his pockets and finally located his money. He peeled off bills and tossed them on the counter.

Emma sorted them, handed him back the ones she didn’t need along with his change, noting that the doctor and Oscar were almost the same height, several inches over six feet. She barely came to their shoulders. She was partial to tall men; they made her feel fragile, which she wasn’t in the slightest. Hefting kegs and heavy boxes had put muscles in her arms, and she was sturdily built. But it was lovely to pretend she couldn’t lift a handkerchief if she dropped it.

Doctor Gillespie gathered his purchases and hurried out the door.

“Oh my, he’s forgotten his gloves again.” Emma grabbed them up and raced after him, gasping at the icy blast of cold air when she opened the door.

“Doctor Gillespie, wait. “ He turned just as she slipped on the ice.

He dropped his parcel, reached out both arms and grabbed her.

Emma recovered her balance, and instantly he let her go. My, he was strong. He’d almost lifted her right off her feet.

“Thank you, Doctor. I very nearly took a tumble. Lucky thing you don’t have eggs in that bag.”

She had to smile at the way he looked. His glasses had frosted over and slid to the end of his nose. He was peering at her over them like an owlish professor.

He must have guessed why she was smiling, because he snatched them off and tucked them into his pocket. His eyes, the color of sherry, were long lashed, intense. Their beauty almost made her forget why she’d run after him.

“You, ummm, you forgot your gloves, Doctor.” She held them out and shivered. “You’ll need them, it’s absolutely freezing out here.”

“Thank you, Emma.” Her name came awkwardly to his lips. “Hurry back inside now. You’ll catch the grippe from being out here.”

He picked up his bag, took her elbow in a firm grip, and guided her back to the store. He opened and held the door for her, gave a little bow, and then he smiled.

Emma could only stare. Without the glasses, with the smile, he was utterly transformed. He was handsome, vulnerable, and her heart lurched and then hammered against the tiny pleats on the front of her pink handkerchief-linen blouse.

She hurried back inside, shivering, but there was a warm glow in her stomach.

Gillespie Doctor was a challenge, and she enjoyed nothing more. She was going to make an enormous effort on his behalf.

She was going to get Joseph Gillespie to notice her, to take an interest in her.

In fact, she decided, she was going to do all in her power to make him fall in love with her.

CHAPTER TWO

The pot bellied stove inside the store was giving off waves of heat, and Oscar took Emma’s hand and led her over beside it.

“Poor little thing, you’re half frozen. I’ve put more wood on, come here and warm up.” He rubbed her hands between his huge paws, and Emma tried in vain to figure out why Oscar Macky adored her, without one iota of effort on her part, and Joseph Gillespie seemed impervious? There were no other customers, so she sank into one of the high backed chairs that circled the stove, holding her hands out to the welcome warmth.

She looked around, proud of the changes she’d made in the months she’d been proprietor. Woven reed baskets displayed bright yarn, a small oaken dresser with drawers ajar showed off buttons, lace and edgings. The General Store had gone from dull, uninviting and dusty to shining clean and welcoming.

And the chairs around the stove generally held young males of marriageable age. She very much enjoyed their attention. She liked to flirt a little, she loved to laugh, she liked feeling like a queen bee with dozens of drones buzzing around her.

If the prudish and sour elements in town were gossiping about her, then, as her daddy always said, they were leaving someone else alone.

Remembering the doctor’s mesmerizing sherry colored eyes, she decided to do a little gossiping herself.

“Oscar, has Doctor Gillespie lived here long?”

Oscar was sitting in the chair next to hers, one long leg propped on the other knee.

“Yup, born and raised here same as me. Joseph’s about four years older than me, must be thirty-two, thirty-three now. We was in grade school together, he was real smart, went through faster’n I did. Always had a book, liked readin’ a lot.”

“Did he come from a wealthy family?”

Oscar shook his head. “Hell, no.” His neck turned red. “Sorry, Miss Emma. Heck, they was farming folk, like mine. Older, quiet, hard workin’, hardly two cents to rub together. He was their only one, stayed on the farm after he finished grade school, folks needed him. But they up and died within a single week, it was the typhoid, rampaged through Demersville that year. He’d a been twenty-one, twenty-two mebbe.”

Emma thought about that, forming a mental picture of an intelligent, studious boy, tied to a farming life he probably loathed, but loyal to his aging parents. It wasn’t unusual in small towns like this.

The bell announced another customer, and Emma got up with reluctance, smoothing her gray worsted skirt over her hips. She knew Oscar was admiring her figure while he pretended to check the stove for wood.

“How did Joseph become a doctor, then?” She shot a reproving look at Oscar, who was studying her bosom.

He turned fiery red and looked appropriately shamefaced. “Joseph? He sold the farm to old man Perkolik and lit out right after the sale. Got hisself into some fancy school back East, Harvest or somethin’ like that.”

“Harvard.” Joseph was beyond smart, to qualify for a spot at Harvard. She hurried to the front of the store, welcoming smile in place, her mind still on the doctor.

Truth was, he annoyed her mightily. He was the only single man in town of marriageable status who never seemed to notice her figure.

Miss Emma Walsh was definitely a flirtatious young woman, Joseph concluded as he hurried down the icy street toward home. He replied absently to greetings from the few townspeople out on this cold January morning as he mused that Emma certainly had Oscar Macky twined around her little finger, and no wonder, batting those long eyelashes the way she did. And there was that sultry husky voice of hers.

His mind conjured up the intriguing curves under her blouse as he made polite responses to passersby. She really was much too forward, was Miss Emma Walsh.

Her scent lingered in his nostrils, lavender. It always made him want to lean in closer to her. Undoubtedly it had the same effect on other men, which really could prove to be dangerous. Was she at all aware of men’s baser instincts?

“G’day, Doc. Filthy weather, ain’t it?” The town drunk, Lazarus Weatherby, was undoubtedly on his way to the tavern to get started on his daily drinking ritual. Joseph despaired for Lazarus’s liver, but there was nothing to be done. He’d already tried everything short of locking the man up. Drunkenness was a malady for which he could devise no cure, and it saddened him.

Was flirting just as irreversible?

“Morning, Doctor. It’s icy, watch your step.” Henry Goodman, the town barber, was out with his shovel, ineffectually clearing the patch of wooden sidewalk in front of his shop. Henry had asthma, but Joseph had it under control. He’d concocted a remedy of elecampane, angelica and comfrey steeped in honey, and Henry hadn’t had an attack in months.

Outside the barber shop, on a bench, sat the four old codgers Joseph privately called the barbershop quartet. Lewis, Martin, Olaph and Quincey were the self styled eyes, ears and conscience of the town. They judged, criticized, watched and castigated everyone and everything that happened in Demersville. They’d sat in front of the General Store for years, taking the seats around the stove when the weather was cold. But when the previous owner died and Miss Walsh took over and made changes, they moved to Henry’s barbershop. They criticized and condemned every change Emma had made, grumbling loudly about women who thought they were men, upstarts, highfalutin notions, predictions of bankruptcy and ruin. But Emma had proven them all wrong. Flirtatious or not, she was a clever businesswoman.

“Mornin’, Doc,” they each mumbled, one after the other.

“Gentlemen,” Joseph murmured, although he believed them to be anything but.

“Oh, Doctor, how fortunate, I was just on my way to your surgery.” The peevish, breathless female voice sounded from behind him and Joseph’s heart sank. “I’ll just walk the rest of the way with you, shall I?”

Mrs. Lepage was a bossy, idle woman, and she tried Joseph’s patience. She dreamed up one symptom after the next, never seeming to quite recover but never becoming seriously ill either. And she seemed to blame him for both conditions. In his opinion, a large part of her problem was her weight. He’d diplomatically—and not so diplomatically—suggested she reduce, to no avail.

“You’ll have to slow down, Doctor, I can’t walk quickly,” she whined. “It’s my veins, my legs are acting up again. And my back, I have such pain in my lower back—“

They progressed at a snail’s pace, along the main street. Joseph was nearly ready to throttle her by the time they turned into the front yard of his white clapboard house.

The surgery door was always unlocked. A Gothic-scripted sign read,
“Dr. Joseph Gillespie, Family Physician.”

Underneath, another sign said, “The Doctor is OUT.”

Joseph turned it over so the opposite message was displayed.

“Go in and make yourself comfortable, Mrs. Lepage. I’ll just take my purchases to the kitchen, I’ll be with you in a moment.”

In a thoroughly bad mood, he stalked through the waiting room and headed to the kitchen in the rear of the house. He upended the canvas sack on the kitchen table and remembered, too late, about the flannel sheets and the seamstresses. Now he’d have to go out again to see the Misses Templeton. He’d been sure there wouldn’t be many patients on a day like this, so he’d planned to spend a quiet day reading the latest medical journals.

With a beleaguered sigh, he went through the connecting door and into his office where Mrs. Lepage waited, eager to regale him with a list of her latest symptoms.

He was wrong, however, about the number of patients who ended up in his office that day. After Mrs. Lepage, a steady stream of people appeared with assorted ailments peculiar to the season, sore throats, ague, catarrh, severe chapping, chilblains. As always, he devoted himself fully and eagerly to his work, doing his best to alleviate his patient’s pain and discomfort.

At last, the waiting room was empty. He glanced out the window, amazed to find that darkness had fallen while he was busy. His growling stomach reminded him he’d forgotten lunch. Although the fire in the small round stove in his office blazed, his kitchen cook stove was out. Patients were very cooperative about stoking the stove in the office. They’d learned he forgot, more often than not.

In the kitchen, he used shavings to light the stove, trying to figure out what was in his larder for a quick supper. Bacon, and there were always eggs because many of his patients paid him with eggs, or milk, or home baked bread.

He was placing slices of bacon in the skillet when a child’s frantic screaming startled him. He hurried down the hallway, and the office door burst open. Emil Schroeder, a farmer Joseph knew well, raced in holding his small son in his arms. The boy was shrieking in agony. The gray woolen blanket around him had fallen away and his right arm lay across his chest, bent at a grotesque angle. Blood had seeped into his blue flannel shirt and stained the blanket.

“Zeke fell out of the loft. He was pitchin’ hay down to the cattle,” Emil hollered above his son’s agonized cries. “Bust his arm real bad.” Emil’s usually ruddy complexion was bleached and waxy, his eyes glassy with shock and terror.

“Bring him into the surgery.” Joseph led the way, pointed to the examining table. “Lay him down here.”

Joseph quickly assessed the break, trying to calm and reassure the little boy. “I know it hurts bad, Zeke, but we’ll get it fixed up in a jiffy, I promise.”

The break was compound, the bone protruding from the flesh just above the elbow. The boy’s screams continued unabated.

It was a serious injury, the kind that all too often resulted in loss of the limb or even death, not from the break but from sepsis. Shock, too, was dangerous.

“Emil,” Joseph said, “I’m better dealing with this alone. You go out to the kitchen and fix a pot of coffee. Stove needs wood, there’s a stack out back. Heat a big pot of water in case I need it.” Giving Emil something to do would help distract him, but Joseph needed privacy for another reason.

As soon as Emil left the room, Joseph closed the door and said in a quiet, urgent tone, “Nathaniel, I need your help. Please.”

As always the moment the words were spoken, Joseph felt a presence infiltrate the room, warm, infinitely loving. He knew from experience that Zeke, whose cries had now dulled to a nerve rending, agonized moaning, would be unable to see the being who’d materialized at the head of the table.