Page 23 of The Botanist's Assistant
Margaret rears back as if the stalk were a rattlesnake coiled to strike.
It’s one thing to know the toxic qualities of a certain plant: blurred vision, severe pain, tingling of extremities, nausea, heart arrhythmia and eventually death. It’s another thing to find it next to the door where you’d just been working.
A chill ripples down Margaret’s spine. Ancient hunters once dipped their arrows in wolfsbane to kill creatures they believed were powerful and strong. Was this stem a warning that independent-minded women can be felled as easily as mighty beasts? Or was this a last display of hatred for Dr. Deaver?
Margaret stares at the plant and some primal instinct kicks in. Before she knows it, she is hurrying down the hall with the aconite stem in her hand. She pushes through the door to the basement and clambers down the stairs into a cavernous room filled with a jumble of discarded desks, chairs and file cabinets; a huge dumpster; an ancient incinerator and an autoclave where hazardous waste is sterilized with steam, then thrown away or burned. She stuffs the stem into a biohazard bag, throws it into the machine and sets it running.
Her commute home is a blur.
Margaret is too rattled to cook anything substantial and, instead, heats a can of chicken noodle soup (62¢ per can). Sheeats the entire bowl without tasting a drop of it. She tries to read but can’t concentrate. She goes into her garden.
A wet and unseasonable fog has drifted in from the ocean, turning the world gray and spongy. She carries the rocking chair from the porch and sets it on a flat spot next to the roses and lavender. She pushes off with her toes and lets herself rock. An owl calls a foghorn-like hoot. She’s glad she put on her sweater.
She pictures the stem of wolfsbane and how she’d shoved it into the autoclave as if simply touching it was enough to summon death. She knows better. Why had she panicked? Why had she left the specimen to be destroyed? She hadn’t even taken a photo to prove the stem’s existence.
What a fool, she concludes for the second time that day.
She continues to rock until the dripping fog drives her inside.
15
When You Hear Hoofbeats
By the time she arrivesat the lab the next day, Margaret has almost convinced herself that the wolfsbane was not a threat but a mistake. Aconite isn’t common, but it certainly grew in the area. Perhaps one of Dr. Deaver’s admiring students—he taught a popular class titled The Superpowers of Plants—had spotted it in the marshy area near campus, admired its blooms and hadn’t recognized what it was. What was that saying? When you hear hoofbeats, don’t look for zebras? She’d run from the plant as if it were a charging herd of them.
Margaret turns to the day’s emails. She doesn’t care for email. First, it piles up so quickly and easily that no matter how many you delete one day, the same number seems to appear the next, and, secondly, many of the emails she receives are riddled with spelling and grammar errors. Some people blame the mistake on autocorrect, but to Margaret’s way of thinking the sheer number of misspelled words and grammargarbles undercut that excuse. Why can’t people just talk to each other?
Today, there are two missives that unsettle her, besidesone that claims her nephew has been kidnapped in Guatemala and can be ransomed for the sum of US$7,534. (She has no nephew and why the strange ransom amount?)
The first is from Dean McDonald, who says that he wants the draft paper submitted to Dr. Blackstone in two weeks and that the grant application should be sent by Friday. He also reminds her that while the application should acknowledge Dr. Deaver’s death it should only include Blackstone’s CV, “since there was an apparent collaboration between the two of them and we must emphasize that connection.”
Margaret feels herself grow hot.
How dare Blackstone claim a collaboration with Dr. Deaver, and didn’t the dean understand that Levi Blackstone’s unimpressive CV could doom the application even before it got to the full committee for consideration? A big grant did not go to a mouse of science.
A rat of science, Margaret amends.
The truth is that even she, a mere research assistant, has more impressive credentials than Blackstone. Unlike others in the world of science (mostly male), Dr. Deaver has included her name as an author on the last nine years of his papers.
Then there is also the fact that Dr. Deaver has left a detailed list of what needs to be done to further his research, and she is capable of most of it.
Could she put her name as the grant applicant?
She dismisses the idea even as it forms. The Cameron Foundation would no more award the money to afifty-four-year-old research assistant II with a master’s degree from a state college than it would give it to Joe the custodian, although he’s probably more capable than Blackstone.
What brought Joe to Roosevelt University anyway?
Margaret knows she can’t let Blackstone get away with his scheme, nor can she endanger the possibility of a new cancer treatment. She thinks of her mother’s ravaged body and the chemotherapy that had only delayed cancer’s long and terrible march toward death.
Margaret puts her fingers to the keyboard.
Dear Dean McDonald,
The deadlines you’ve stated are acceptable; however, there was no collaboration between Drs. Deaver and Blackstone as Professor Blackstone might claim; therefore, I cannot report what is not true. As an alternative, perhaps you might serve as the applicant so that Calvin Hollowell and I might continue the work. Dr. Deaver left extensive notes and I am confident that with the addition of another postdoc and perhaps a bioengineer or medical chemist, or a collaboration with one afforded by the Cameron Foundation grant, we might complete the work and thus put Roosevelt University on the map with Stanford and UCLA as you stated.
Best,
Margaret Finch, Research Assistant II.
