Free Skip Rock Shallows by Jan Watson

and removed some shells. Lilly wondered if he was drunk.
    With a generous wave, the lady motioned Lilly inside. There were two straight-backed chairs at the kitchen table, which was laid for dinner with the scrubbed-clean lids of lard buckets, rims up, and a few assorted utensils. Brilliant, Lilly thought of the lard can plates. I never would have thought of that. A dough board packed full of reddish grape-size fruit decorated the center of the table. A packing crate pushed up against the wall held the water bucket and a wash pan. The only other furnishings in the room were a mirrored wardrobe, a coal cookstove, and a corn-shuck mattress on the packed dirt floor. The flue pipe that accessed the chimney to the cookstove lay in pieces atop the stove. A can of blacking, a long-handled brush, and a soiled rag made Lilly think she’d interrupted the lady cleaning the segmented pipe. She remembered how her mother would chase all the kids outside when she took on the same chore every spring. The black suet made a terrible mess. It had to be done yearly, however, or the pipe could catch on fire.
    Hiram ceremoniously pulled out a chair for Lilly before he plopped down in the other. “Air ye a doctor for real?” he asked.
    “For real,” she said.
    “Then mayhap ye can doctor me,” he said.
    “What seems to be the problem?”
    Lilly observed the boy while his father prattled on about bouts of dizziness and ringing in his ears. “Tobacco juice ain’t helping,” he said.
    “Pardon me?” she asked.
    “Lynn biled some tobacco and a big sweet onion for a poultice, but it don’t cut the pain no more.” He covered his right ear, which was stained dark brown, with his hand. “Used to work good,” he said with a puzzled look.
    The baby cried and rubbed her tiny red nose against her mother’s shoulder. The whole family needed doctoring from what Lilly could tell.
    “This quare woman was a-drinking from the spring,” Cleve chimed in.
    “Well, we all forgot our manners,” Lynn said. “Hiram, take this girl child while I fix the doctor a drink.”
    Lilly reached for the baby instead. “May I take a look at the little one?” she asked.
    The boy leaned against her arm while she searched in her kit for the otoscope. The baby shrieked in terror as Lilly attempted to look inside her ear with the tip of the pointed instrument.
    “Do mine first.” Hiram scooted his chair closer to Lilly’s. “She won’t be so scared if she sees me have it done.”
    The mother set an assortment of cracked cups and mugs on the table, stuck her finger in one, and popped it in the little girl’s mouth. “Don’t study everything so hard, Hiram.”
    Distracted, the toddler let Lilly probe her ears. “She has an ear infection. I suspect you do too,” she said to Hiram before she examined him. His ears looked worse than the baby’s. No wonder he was dizzy. “How about you, Cleve? Do your ears ache?”
    “Nah,” he said, “but I’d like to look through that there thing.”
    Hiram held his head to one side while Cleve took a look-see. Lilly was struck by the father’s tenderness in the midst of such poverty—even if he didn’t offer his wife a chair. Lynn slid a cup of pinkish liquid in front of Lilly.
    “Umm,” Lilly said, stalling for time, “this looks tasty.”
    “Sumac-ade.” The boy swallowed a large draught. “It’s good.”
    “My word, I thought sumac was poison.”
    The man picked a bunch of fruit from the dough board. “Red is safe; see how the fruit grows on the twig tips? Unless you strive to be as big a fool as Adam in the Garden, don’t dare to taste the white sumac. You’ll know it even if it’s not ripe, for it’ll dangle loosely and not from the tips.” He pulled a tiny winged projection from the stem and held it up for all to see. “The poison sumac don’t have wings either.”
    If she hadn’t been holding the toddler, Lilly would have smacked her own forehead. The boy had decorated his body with sumac