for Datha to bring the main course.
“Clarence looks nice. I’m sure Edith is pleased.”
“Hmm,” Riley muttered, taking a sip of coffee.
Datha carried in a large platter of roast beef, boiled potatoes and carrots. Dishes of cooked cabbage, brown beans, plump ears of corn, festive red beets and thick brown gravy followed.
April’s distraught gaze swept the heavily laden table and she sighed. Datha cooked enough to feed an army of foot soldiers, but April had given up complaining. It didn’t matter what she said. Having learned at her grandmother’s side, Datha couldn’t seem to cook meals for fewer than twelve people.
Now the two of them just let her cook to her heart’s content, resigned to share leftovers with neighboring shutins.
Serving herself potatoes and meat, April smiled. “This looks delicious.”
“Thank you, April girl.” Smiling back, Datha returned to the kitchen.
The two of them ate in silence, until Riley suddenly cleared his throat and laid the butter knife aside.
April, knowing some kind of pronouncement was forthcoming, put down her fork.
“April Delane, I’ve mulled this over all afternoon.”
Her pulse jumped. Grandpa never used her middle name unless he was upset with her. By the thundercloud forming on his face, he was more than upset. He was furious….
Oh, no! He knew she was working with Lydia Pinkham. Someone—some blabbermouth doctor—had told him! Dr. Fuller had recognized her, after all!
Dabbing the corners of her mouth with her napkin, she steeled herself. Riley Ogden was a patient man, but when he was angry, he was just like Great-grandfather Owen. Impossible to reason with.
Managing to keep her tone light, she asked, “Is something wrong?”
“April.” Riley’s voice held a rare hint of authority as his faded blue eyes pinned her to the chair.
Swallowing, she feigned unusual interest in the bowl of potatoes. “Yes, Grandpa?”
“Young lady, you’re old enough to do what you want, but how can you think of selling that Pinkham woman’s poison?”
April’s knife clattered to her plate. “Who told you?”
“Never mind who told me!”
“I know who it was! That snoopy doctor told you, didn’t he! That interfering, sanctimonious—”
“Never mind who told me!” Riley thundered. “Doctoring’s best left to doctors! No silly brew concocted by that Pinkham woman is going to fix women’s ills. No vegetable compound is going to cure what ails them. People get sick and die, April. Living in a mortuary, you should know this. Mrs. Grimes died in childbirth. Mrs. Wazinski from influenza. Bertha Dickens from a burst appendix. Why, I’ve buried a half dozen women just this year—”
“Not from taking the compound!” April interrupted. “And if Ginny Grimes, Mary Wazinski and Bertha Dickens hadn’t listened to some overzealous doctor, but tried to find other ways to treat their problems, they just might be alive today!”
“Hogwash! Not one of those women died from a doctor’s neglect!” Riley’s face was as red as the bowl of beets he was holding. “Young lady, you are to resign from the Pinkham ‘circus’ first thing tomorrow morning! Do you hear me?”
“Grandpa—”
“Tomorrow morning, April Delane!” A vein in his temple throbbed.
She knew better than to argue with him; it would be like barking at a knothole. He was such a stubborn old man!
Shoving her chair back, she pitched her napkin on the table and stormed out of the room.
Riley got to his feet, his hand automatically going to the left side of his chest.
“April Delane Truitt! You come back here, young lady! I’m not through talking to you!”
Entering her bedroom, April threw herself across the bed. Flipping onto her back, she stared at the ceiling, cursing the Fates that had brought Gray Fuller to Dignity. It had been a nice, quiet town until he got here.
Lydia Pinkham was helping women, and instead of working hand in hand to find solutions to problems, Gray and other doctors like him were doing everything they could to hinder her progress.
Women needed Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. Why, Henry had told her that a Connecticut preacher was actually murdered by his wife after she’d suffered for sixteen years with female complaints. That could have been averted if the poor woman had only had the elixir!
Mrs. Pinkham wasn’t trying to lift Eve’s curse, she was only trying to ease a few miseries. April believed with all her heart that God wouldn’t object to those poor women getting help. He’d given the formula to Mrs. Pinkham, April was sure of it. And she, herself, had felt His calling. She wouldn’t be going behind Grandpa’s back if she didn’t believe that she was on a mission. Now, thanks to Gray Fuller, she had to choose between Grandpa or disobeying God. Life was so unfair.
It was a crime the way doctors routinely removed healthy ovaries, as they had done to her mother. Far too many women were dying from the process.
Rolling over, April buried her face in the pillow, recalling how her mother had died an untimely, unnecessary death.
Delane Truitt had been in the prime of her life when she was beset by female problems. A heavy menstrual flow put her to bed two out of four weeks a month. She’d gotten to the point where she couldn’t appear in public for fear an “accident” would leave her red-faced with shame. In desperation, she’d finally consented to let the doctor remove her ovaries and uterus. The procedure had taken her life.
April was glad her father had not been around to witness the tragedy. He had died three years before Delane’s death in a train derailment as he was returning from New York. “Dignity doesn’t have anything good enough for my wife and daughter,” he’d say, so off he’d go every December in search of the perfect gifts.
That December, he never came back.
April was obsessed by the thought that Mrs. Pinkham’s compound might, just might, have saved her mother’s life.
That hope was what fired her crusade.
If she could spare one woman her mother’s fate, then her cause was justified, no matter what Grandpa thought.
Lydia Pinkham, far from being the quack Dr. Fuller called her, was truly a pioneer. She hadn’t come by her trade easily. She’d been one of twelve children, her father a cordwainer and farmer. Twice married, he’d been a Quaker, but left the Friends because of a conflict over the slavery issue.
Lydia had graduated from Lynn Academy, then served as secretary of the Freeman’s Institute. She was a schoolteacher when she married Isaac Pinkham, who had a daughter by a previous marriage. Their union produced five more children—Charles, Dan, Will, Aroline, and a baby who died.
Lydia
