Butterfly Weed (17 page)

“Hold on, gal!” Colvin exclaimed, astonished because the treatment she was describing was exactly what he dreamt he had done. But how do you operate in a dream? “Show me where ye claim I cut ye open.” And right there in the road Lorraine unbuttoned her shirt to show him the incision. Bertha Kimber happened to be coming down the road at that moment, and word got back to Piney that Lorraine Swain had popped one of her boobs into Colvin’s face right in the road in broad daylight, and there was hell to pay when Piney got onto Colvin about
that.

But the worst thing was, Lorraine Swain had told her best friend, Ella Jean Plowright, about how she had been cured in her sleep by dreams of Colvin Swain, and Ella Jean, who had been visiting her uncle, Doc Jack Plowright, for treatment of her nausea and vomiting, decided to give it a try herself, and sure enough, she went to sleep and had a dream where Colvin Swain appeared and assured her that her nausea was not morning sickness, as Doc Plowright had diagnosed it (a faulty diagnosis in view of the fact that Ella Jean was still a virgin) but was actually uremia, not nephritic but treatable by an injection which he gave her; the pain of the injection woke her from her dream, but within a few hours the vomiting had stopped, her appetite returned, and she was well enough to visit Lorraine and compare notes on how nice Doctor Swain had treated them in their sleep. Naturally, they couldn’t keep it to themselves, either, and before long everybody in Stay More knew about it, and ailing folks were going to sleep right and left in order to have dreams of Doc Swain.

Yesterday I asked your friend and mine, Bob Besom, who works over in the Special Collections department at the University Library, to look into the Swain papers and check on this matter for me. You know that they’ve got over there nine ledgers that Doc Swain kept during his years of practice, including several “calendar diaries.” According to Besom, there’s nothing of particular interest in this material, mostly just accounts of charges made and collected, accounts receivable but never received, et cetera, but Colvin did have the habit of jotting down all of his visits to patients with a notation of what he used to treat them, and the record is fairly complete. There’s even the record of how he treated me for typhoid that summer I was confined in Stay More for a few weeks. No commentary. He doesn’t say whether he liked me or not, or how we became friends. Just what medicines he used and that the treatment was successful and I got well…and, under “Amount due”:
N.C.

But that was in Ledger #6, years later, and we’re concerned right now with Ledger #2, and Bob Besom was good enough to make photocopies of a few pages in that ledger for me, if you’ll hand me my reading spectacles from the table there.

June 3
Lorraine Swain Empyema following influenza. Clear yellow serous fluid. Tea of butterfly weed t.i.d. Dover’s powder for pain.

June 9
Lorraine Swain Fluid thickening. Irrigated cavity with hypochlorite. May try injection of gentian violet.

June 17
Lorraine Swain Ambulatory, robust, and claims I treated her in dreams (!) including surgery for drainage (!!) but section of 6th rib actually missing (!!!). ???

According to Besom, there are no further entries in the ledger on Lorraine Swain’s condition, but there is this:

June 30
Ella Jean Plowright, not my patient. Hardly know her, but had dream last night of treating her for uremia with injection, etc. Lorraine Swain confirms this is true.

July 3
Complaint from Dr. Plowright that I had “stolen” his patient and niece, Ella Jean. Swore to Jack I never touched her, nor spoke to her. “Don’t matter,” he said. “You cured her of uremia.”

Besom says there’s only one more entry, three months later, that is relevant to the matter:

October 4
Haven’t had an awake patient in over a month.

By “awake,” we may suppose that Colvin Swain meant exactly that: all of his patients were now visiting him in their dreams. All over Stay More, and even in Stay More’s “suburbs,” sick people were attempting to see if they couldn’t follow the examples of Lorraine and Ella Jean, and they were finding that it was easy, and they were rapidly converting skeptics by showing their evidence: a man proudly exhibited an enormous tapeworm which he claimed Doc Swain had extracted from him during his dreams; a woman showed a set of false teeth which she had swallowed and Doc Swain had extracted from her stomach in a painless dream surgery; several proud mothers displayed babies which Doc Swain had delivered while they were asleep and dreaming. There was even a case of a “vicarious incubation”: a girl who was too embarrassed over her “female trouble” to permit Doc Swain to visit her in her dreams was persuaded by her mother to allow the mother to have the dream for her, and the mother dreamt that Doc Swain had come and corrected the girl’s prolapsed uterus, and indeed the girl, who had been unable to walk because the womb had been protruding from her vagina, was now blissfully hopping, skipping, and jumping.

She was the most conspicuous advertisement for the Swain Dream Clinic, which nearly everyone was now patronizing. You didn’t need an appointment. You didn’t need to send somebody out in the middle of the night to fetch the doctor to your house. The Doctor Swain they met in dreams was if anything even nicer, gentler, more polite and easygoing than the “real” Doc Swain. And if the “real” Doc Swain could never be “a hunerd-percent certain” about anything, the Doc Swain who came in dreams was infallible and omnipotent.

Best of all, you didn’t have to pay! Not even in the barter of produce or livestock. But while that was considered a tremendous advantage from the patient’s point of view, it was not putting any food on Doc’s table. In fact, he was nearly broke. He had some savings, which he had deposited in a savings account in the Swains Creek Bank and Trust Company, the small financial institution that John Ingledew had erected on Main Street, and he hated to dip into his savings, but unless he could find some wakeful patients to treat, he was going to have to make a withdrawal. Poor Jack Plowright had already gone out of business and been forced to retire prematurely, after losing a court case in which he had unsuccessfully attempted to have his attorney, Jim Tom Duckworth, sue Dr. Swain for monopolizing the medical practice of Stay More. Colvin had had to go to Jasper for the trial and had testified that there wasn’t any way he could be monopolizing the medical practice, because he hadn’t had any patients himself lately, and he could prove it.

Then, as you well know, and have already told about in your
Lightning Bug
and elsewhere, the bank was robbed. A young Stay More man, son of Billy Dill the wagon maker, lover of Latha Bourne if not loved by her, came and raped her and robbed that bank and started one of the best stories that ever came out of the town, leaving Latha pregnant. There is no doubt in anybody’s mind that Doc Swain would have gladly visited her in her dreams and performed an abortion, because even though the “real” Doc Swain had taken an oath never to perform an abortion, the Doc Swain of dreams wouldn’t have let himself be stopped by such scruples or oaths. But she wouldn’t visit the Swain Dream Clinic; for whatever reasons of her own, she went off to Little Rock to live with her sister and have the baby. Never mind about that, for now. Her rapist robbed the bank, and Doc Swain was penniless.

So we have here two good reasons why Colvin was forced to accept the job that he took, which brings us to the real heart of our story. Come back tomorrow and I’ll take you on a tour of the “college” in Parthenon where Colvin Swain became medical consultant.

Chapter five

H
ow long have you been a-sitting there? How long have my eyes been closed? I closed my eyes to get a glimpse of Tenny, the gal who’s the real heroine of this story, although we haven’t laid eyes on her yet. How many times have you been here so far? I’m not keeping count, but I’m a little dismayed to realize that I’ve talked so much, and told you all that I have, but I still haven’t really done nothing but a kind of prologue. Today we’ll meet Tenny, if all goes well. We’ve waited so long. But so far, so good? How’m I doing?

I see you’ve got there a fresh bottle of Chivas Regal to lubricate my larnyx. That’s real thoughtful of ye. We’ve run out of Gershon Legman’s contribution. I’ve been meaning to ask why you only come in the afternoons or the evenings, never in the mornings, but I reckon it’s because you’re up late of a night, drinking and thinking, and you tend to sleep late of a morning.

That’s what I was doing at Stay More, and Doc Swain was going to try to cure me of it, as we’ll see. Anyhow, if you’d been here this morning, you wouldn’t have missed the little excitement we had. There’s precious little to keep us from getting bored to death, but this morning one of our fellow residents got raped. You know how you read in the papers sometimes there’s a certain kind of punk kid who only lusts after old ladies? Well, there was a young feller working here, one of the orderlies, who fit in that category, and I could tell because of the way he was always buttering up to poor Mary C. You know that old woman I was telling you about, lived a few doors down the hall, who was always yelling, “Tell me another’n, Grampaw”? Maybe you never heard her, but she was always out there with her little-bitty voice like a child begging for another bedtime story…or, come to think of it, maybe that wasn’t what she was doing. Maybe there was a kind of edge to her voice, maybe a touch of sarcasm, as if she was accusing her invisible grandfather of having lied to her. It troubles me, come to think of it. I don’t take nothing personal from it, hell, she didn’t even know I was here. But anyway that punk orderly crope under the covers with her early this morning, and it turned out she knows other words besides “Tell me another’n, Grampaw,” She knows “help” and she knows “rape,” and she knows “Will somebody please come and git this thing offen me?” It woke me up. I recognized the voice and wondered why the voice was not begging to be told another one. I nearly tried to get myself into my wheelchair so I could go out there and see what was happening. But I guess the nurse on duty had got to them, and she stopped it and called the police, and they come and got the feller, and then Dr. Bittner came and examined the old lady and sent her off to the hospital. The reason Mary C. is just a-sitting there looking stunned is probably because she’s thinking it could’ve happened to her. And it could’ve.

So there will be one less voice in the chorus of those dotards out there. Maybe it will even inspire me, as we approach the real thickening of the watery plot of our story. Son, this is where it commences to get exciting.

It may have been toward the end of my second week in Stay More—I wasn’t paying a bit of attention to the calendar—when one morning Colvin came into my room and took my temperature and blood pressure and then asked, as he customarily did, “Well, Doc, did anything out of the ordinary pass?” and I replied with something like, “No, Doc, just six white horses a-flying over,” and after he’d winked and said, “Then it aint no wonder you’re a-feelin better,” and we had our laugh, he asked, “Doc, do ye reckon you feel up to hoppin in my car for a little spin?”

Rowena shaved me and I dressed and had a big breakfast, and Rowena had packed a hamper with a fine lunch of fried chicken and potato salad and I don’t know what-all. It just looked like we were going to be gone for the better part of the day. And we were. Doc explained he wanted to take me to Parthenon.

You’ve mentioned that village in each of your novels, but I don’t think you have bothered to speculate upon the circumstance whereby some old settler, more literate and imaginative than usual, had chosen to name his town after a temple dedicated by the Greeks to their favorite goddess, Athene Parthenos, meaning Athena the Virgin, because she was practically the only one of those immortal Greek women never to lose her cherry. All over America people were naming their new towns after Greek towns, and this Newton County feller thought he was doing the same, but he was mistaken. The name of the town was Athens. There was a hill in Athens called the Acropolis, meaning “high town,” and he might have used that name, as I believe you did in disguising Parthenon’s name in your novel
Some Other Place. The Right Place.
But this feller didn’t use “Athens” or “Acropolis.” He used the name of the temple on top of that hill. For all he knew, he might as well have called the town “Innocence” or “Chastity” or “Maidentown” or “Virginville.” But in his confusion over classical matters, he called it originally “Mount Parthenon,” which could only be translated as suggesting that we get ourselves up atop a virgin. Hell, it took eighty years for the natives themselves to learn how to pronounce the place. They used to call it “Par-THEE-nun,” and even corrupted that to “Par-THEE-ny.”

But Colvin pronounced it correctly when he told me where we were going, so I asked him, “Are you taking me to a big stone building on a high hill?”

He smiled. “Yep, Doc, we’re going up a hill to see a mighty fine big stone building, all right, the biggest stone building in Newton County, but that aint the Parthenon. I reckon strangers might think the town was named after that building, but the town has been there since 1840 and the building wasn’t done much more’n a dozen years ago.”

We drove northeastwards from Stay More a number of miles, the road mostly following along the east bank of the Little Buffalo River, and it was one of those gorgeous summer days with cottony tufts of clouds stuck hither and yon over the azure. I enjoyed that ride, especially in comparison to the last time I’d been in Doc Swain’s car, when he was transporting me down the mountain from the Widder Whitter’s. I paid close attention to the turnings and forks in the road, in case I needed to remember how to get out of Stay More, because as we’ve said before it’s even harder to escape than it is to find. But I could also sit back and enjoy the scenery and the fine cigar Doc had given me. “Beautiful country” was all I could say.