Tansy by Nancy Smith Harris

Every bone in her body warned Ellie Snyder to turn Bertha Miller away at the door; still, she took the haggard woman in and brewed the tea, fragrant as a Balsam fir in December. Clay Miller’d already saddled her with five kids, and one more might just put Bertha in her grave. Only problem with saving the wretch was Bertha’s need to make confession—it was religion that’d trip her up. The woman was a walking apology, a sinner perpetually pleading for redemption. Ellie hoped to hell she’d confess to somebody other than her damn husband.

“Two cups a day for ten days.” Ellie pressed a jar of dried tansy stems and shriveled blossoms into Bertha’s raw hands and watched her meander down the dusty street. Anybody with two eyes and half a brain would recognize all the ways man and God could conspire to wreck a perfectly fine female in the hopeless gait and bent figure of Bertha Miller.

***

Sure enough, within a week, Ellie was making her way home from the Lochiel Hotel when Clay bore down and snagged her in the dark, clamping her wrist in his sweaty grip and blowing whiskey breath into her face.

“She’s a good-looking little woman, that girl of yours,” he growled, “how old is Blanche now—thirteen? Fourteen?”

“Same as your oldest boy, Clay Miller, a child,” Ellie hissed, working her hand free, “a child.”

“Child?” He roared, “that girl’s grown, Ellie. Grown as you. Might find herself in trouble one of these days, need a cup of that tea you dole out.”

            ***

From then on, she held her breath every time Blanche left the house until the day the girl came home teary-eyed and flushed. At the end of her shift at the Lochiel that night, after all the glassware had been shined to a shimmer and lined up on the bar, Ellie hung back in the shadows outside until the bartender kicked Clay Miller out at closing time. When she leapt from the dark and shoved him against the wall, Clay, sloppy with whiskey, knocked his head and fell to the ground in a crumpled mess beneath the glow of gaslight.

“You keep away from Blanche,” she bellowed, booting the limp man in the buttocks until her foot went numb.

“Girlie, I can put you in jail for what goes on in that house of yours,” he slurred, rolling over, pulling himself up by a hitching post, “then who’ll look after that sweet young thing of yours?”    

***

The following morning, after she’d harvested the last of the season’s flowers with the plush yellow blossoms and reedy stems, they arrived, one after the other. It was her busiest day in months. First there was the unmarried librarian from the Steelton branch; next, a string of locals: the Presbyterian minister’s wife, Mary Ellen Schrier’s sixteen-year-old holding tight to her mother’s hand, the lady who ran the pancake house at the railroad station; finally, a woman in a buckboard all the way from Halifax who paid with a pot of jam and a basket weave quilt.

After they’d all gone, Ellie climbed down the steep cellar steps to hang the last stalks for drying. When she groped in the dark innards of a deep cupboard for more twine she brushed against a canvas cover that fell away from the old still, its dusty coil strung from the battered copper pot and feeding into a porcelain jug wrapped in cobwebs. It came to her then the way a problem that’s worked its way into a life until everything pleasant falls away—any fleeting moment of peace and quiet or thought-free interlude—eventually demands a clear solution.

***

Everybody knew the bartender at the Lochiel insisted that Clay Miller keep his own prepaid bottle of rye next to the cash register because the man was often out of work and strapped for the two bits needed to purchase his next drink. For two nights, Ellie kept an eye on the level of that wheat-colored liquor. On the third night, when the bartender left the bar to use the men’s, she emptied the vial of distilled tansy oil into the rye. Clay nearly choked on his next three shots, complaining that he’d been sold a lousy bottle.

“Maybe you’re losing your taste for the stuff, Clay,” the bartender joked, pouring a fourth shot before sending the man home for the night.

***

She was washing the sodden stems, leaves, and blossoms from the copper pot at the kitchen sink when Blanche came in.

“Mr. Miller’s sick,” she announced, eyeing her mother, “somebody said he’s been poisoned.”

Ellie continued swishing water in the pot, breathing in the resiny balsam scent of the matted vegetation in the sink,  thinking about the sights, and sounds of Christmas, which was four months away and yet right around the corner.

“Mama?”

***

It took Clay Miller four days to die, Bertha trembling over him day and night. The doctor said it looked suspicious, a big, strong man going like that with no sign of illness unless one counted a proclivity for drink in that category. There was talk of an inquest and autopsy and with that news, Ellie, reconsidering her livelihood, bargained a promotion from dishwasher to apprentice bartender at the Lochiel, citing the fact that the Eagle Hotel down the street had just hired a lady to serve patrons. Next, she set about uprooting the plants bordering her house.

Blanche found her mother on her knees, the stalks of dormant flowers piled high on a stretch of burlap.

“The tansy was getting out of control,” Ellie announced, gathering the burlap corners into a bulging sack and dumping it into the trash barrel, “…time to plant some echinacea. Supposed to be good for colds.”

Nancy Smith Harris

Image by Pfüderi from Pixabay