Butterfly Weed (2 page)

So just push that door to, if you will. I declare, the one big advantage, if it may be called that, of being confined to this godforsaken stinking pesthole is that it makes me appreciate that I may be sick and crippled, and I may be eighty-six years old, and I may be poor, but goddamn it I aint yet senile, nor about to be, and there’s lots of old folks much worse off than me. When I was just a young man, going off to graduate school, my
I.Q
. measured out at 180, by God, and I don’t honestly believe it has shrunk at all since then. And as I think you’re about to discover, I can still tell a story.

This here tale begins in the summer of that year, whatever year it was—I’ve got a bad head for dates—let’s say I was about the same age you are now, and you’re what?—forty-two or forty-three?—so figure it out if you want to take the trouble to add up from my birthdate in 1892. The year don’t matter. The national situation don’t even matter, because even though we were smack dab in the middle of what we’ve been told was the Depression, folks in the Ozarks was so poor to begin with that they scarcely noticed. No, that’s not right, because poverty’s so relative. A better way to put it is that folks in the Ozarks still had everything they needed to subsist and endure, and they didn’t want for nothing. So they didn’t even know that people elsewhere all over the country was suffering from want.

It was a summer I couldn’t make up my fool mind just what to do with myself, devoting my energies either to finishing up a novel that I’d been fooling around with, or else, if I made up my mind I couldn’t write fiction, to a book that I’d had in the back of my mind for years, which I aimed to call
Recreational Sex in the Plant Kingdom.
Did you ever know there was such a thing? Plants are like people—why shouldn’t they be?—they “get together” oftentimes not just for propagation but for the sheer pleasure of it. But even Haldeman-Julius, the publisher for whom I’d written so many popular Little Blue Books, a nickel apiece, wouldn’t touch a book on that subject. So finally I decided just to continue thenceforward the work in which I had been engaged for a dozen years: the sympathetic seeking out and collecting of folklore, trying to record it before it was all gone, as it seemed in constant danger of going. But I was not—I kept saying, and I’m still saying—I was not a
folklorist,
whatever the fuck that is, possibly an academically trained pedant with a Pee-Aitch-Dee and a patronizing attitude toward the backward bucolics of the hinterlands. I wasn’t getting paid much for the hard work I did, but I never earned a penny as a
folklorist.
These here modern-day folklorists don’t even study folklore anyhow; they call it “folkloristics” to make it sound even more academically respectable, and they fill up their fancy journals with words like “paradigm” and “parameter,” which I’ve got just a vague notion of the meaning of, and they talk about “etics” and “emics,” which I don’t know what the shit they’re saying. I have never had anything to do with the folklorists. All right, Mary. Miss Mary Celestia wishes to remind me, and inform you, that she herself was, until her retirement, the University’s only professor of folklore. So all right, I married a folklorist, and I’ve known a whole bunch of ’em, I’ve met the great ones, I’ve corresponded with and talked with the likes of Stith Thompson and Archer Taylor and Richard Dorson and George Corson, and I’ve even developed friendships with some of them: there’s a young Ph.D. of folklore over at the University, name of Robert Cochran, who replaced Mary, and who comes in to see us from time to time and tells me he’s working on my biography, and then of course there’s Rayna Green, a brave and sweet girl who annotated and introduced my
Pissing in the Snow.
No, there are several bona fide “folklorists” that I can not only tolerate but admire. But don’t never call me one! Call me a collector, or call me an antiquarian, or just call me a shiftless bum who never had nothing better to do than mingle with and observe the forgotten cordwood folks of the hollers and hills.

I knew that the gods of the mountains are not the gods of the towns. And I knew that the young people of the mountains, given half a chance, would choose to ape their city cousins and abandon the old ways of their heritage, including enchantment with stories and tales. Television was just a distant fantasy, but radio was coming in, and talking motion pictures were being shown in the country villages as competition, if not replacement, for the old storytelling tradition. Along with it, movies and radio were attempting to establish new standards of “correct” English that would soon leave the Ozark hillfolk trying to mouth a homogenized “acceptable” English as it was spoken elsewhere in the country, and they would start discarding the old Chaucerian and Shakespearean and Spencerian language that had been in their safekeeping for generations, and they would lose completely what traditional memory they still had of the actual stories told by Chaucer and Shakespeare and Spencer.

I wanted to find the most inaccessible parts of the Ozarks, cabins on ridges at the end of crude trails, and talk to the oldest of the old-timers among those lost and forgotten people, and I wanted to write down what they had to remember. I wanted to befriend old shut-ins, and interview granny women and yarb doctors and old horse traders. I wanted to shack up with berry pickers under the ledges, and sit on the porch of a gristmill while the corn was a-grinding, and around the fire of the still while the corn was a-making, and listen to the stories told around midnight campfires on the stream banks and high ridges while fishing or coon hunting. I wanted to kick up my heels at square dances and play parties and other backwoods frolics, and write down the words the caller spoke and the tunes the fiddlers played. I wanted to sit in brush arbors under the boiling sun and listen to the preachers exhort the sinners to their salvation. I wanted to loaf on the courthouse steps and the steps of crossroad country stores and listen, and listen, and listen!

I wanted, in short, to make my most concentrated investigation of the distinctions between mundane “reality” and magical if untrue story. Without planning it or knowing it in advance, I would also be collecting material for one of my major books,
We Always Lie to Strangers,
on the distinction between exaggerations meant to deceive and to entertain.

So I went. I ought to have told Marie what I was planning to do, but I didn’t. I just up and went. I left her a letter, apologizing for sneaking off before daybreak, and making it clear that my intentions were no different from that sort that had allowed her to say to her friends on several occasions, “Oh, Vance has just hit the road again, to see what he can see.” You recall that old folk tune, “The bear went over the mountain, to see what he could see”? In fact, I had spent most of the decade of the twenties, perhaps secretly driven by the coming of the Jazz Age, living hand-to-mouth in my rambles all over the Ozarks. This time I had a
little
money, and I was leaving Marie more than she needed for groceries and such. The year before I had been invited to put in a stint as a screenwriter in Hollywood—just like Fitzgerald and Faulkner and all the rest—and they had paid me a couple hundred dollars a week for nearly three months before they discovered that I couldn’t write movies. That was the best money, the most money, I had ever earned.

Except for a sizable wad of cash, I was traveling light. I had everything I needed in a canvas knapsack, including plenty of scraps of thin newsprint, on which I would jot down my recordings of stories and jokes and old sayings and odd words and their meanings, and superstitions and whatever else I needed to collect and record. I had one change of clothes in the knapsack, and the clothes on my back, which I had carefully selected to make me look as much like a hillman as possible: a well-worn chambray shirt, frayed and faded denim pants, scuffed brogues on my feet, and on my head a crushed, floppy, sweat-stained black felt fedora. I had debated with myself whether to wear a felt hat or a straw, and had decided the latter might make me look like a farmer, which I wasn’t.

Even in such old clothes, I cut quite a figure in those days, if I say so myself. You wouldn’t guess it to look at me now, but I was a handsome man in my forties. I had a neat, nearly a dapper, mustache, not as full as I wear now nor as gray but dark, and in contrast to this shiny smooth dome, which looks like I’m a-clearing ground for a new face, I had a full head of dark hair, just beginning to thin. During my ephemeral stay in Hollywood, I had more than once been mistaken for a movie star.

Much of my traveling was by shank’s mare—on foot, but I got plenty of rides too—by wagon, by occasional auto, sometimes by truck or other conveyance, and thus I gravitated toward the remotest part of the Ozarks, that selfsame Newton County which has been the private purlieu of your fictions. As soon as I crossed the county line, I began to lose track of time, which I suppose was my intention anyhow. I spent the nights in a variety of accommodations: in the crudest, dirtiest log cabin, sleeping with a whole family of twelve in one room; in the “guest room” of a rather prosperous valley farmer whose wife came perilously close to sharing my bed; in an abandoned house that must surely have been inhabited by ghosts, who kept me awake most of the night; in a barn, on the straw, not once but twice; in the shelter of a moonshine distillery, whose owner and I both passed out sampling the product and slept on the hard ground; and in a house of sorts in the mouth of a cave, three of its four sides the natural rock of the cave.

Everywhere I went I was warmly received and invited to stay, and sometimes almost forcibly prevented from leaving. My business, to anyone who inquired, was simply that I was wandering the countryside, a vagabond in search of adventure and occasional work—and I had occasional work, being put to good service helping out around the farm or the house. Often I earned my keep. I was a good woodchopper. I was a good hay-mower. I could hoe a patch of corn with the best of them…although my hands, unaccustomed to manual labor, easily blistered and became quite raw, but I dared not ask for a pair of gloves, lest my hosts suspect that I was not the native hillman I was pretending to be.

One of the finest storytellers I encountered not only had a repertoire of the very best old folktales as imaginatively reconstructed or retold by herself but also was a fantastic teller of “local history.” She was an old woman, a fortune-teller, name of Cassie Whitter, and she lived in a dogtrot cabin on a mountaintop in the most isolated spot I ever reached in all my travels. I sought her out on the advice of some of her distant neighbors, who assured me that the old lady could not only accurately predict my future, or tell me the location of anything I had lost, but could “keep ye up all night long with stories, ever one of ’em true.” I had heard several references to the “Widder Whitter,” an utterance which sounded like a birdcall, before I figured out that the first part was merely a title of honor: she had been widowed for many years. Climbing the steep and rugged trail to her place, hardly more than a pig’s path, I felt such a fatigue and malaise, which couldn’t be blamed on the arduous trek, that I wondered if I was coming down with something.

She received me hospitably, and sensed that I was not well, and, as was the custom everywhere I went, insisted, no,
demanded
that I spend the night. After I drank the coffee she gave me, she took my empty cup and studied the coffee grounds clinging to its sides, and “read” my fortune from those dregs, in the manner of other fortune-tellers reading tea leaves. The things she predicted would happen to me actually did happen to me eventually—in fact so many of her predictions did come true that I was convinced that all the stories she told me as “truth” must also have been true. Among her predictions, for example, was that I would spend all my later years in a nursing home, a concept of an institution that was unknown to me at that time and could not possibly have been known to her, and I thought her notion of it was a form of madness. I truly suspected that she was a little loony, and possibly even dangerous, and that is why, when I began to get honestly sick during the night, my first thought was that she might have poisoned me. She had fed me a dish I recognized because I’d had it elsewhere among those people—stewed squirrel with new potatoes and poke greens—it was very tasty, but after she had put me up for the night in “t’other house,” that is, the opposite wing of the two-pen dogtrot cabin in which she lived, I grew desperately ill, and despite the warm June night, I had severe chills that shook me so violently I needed extra quilts, but the shaking served to distract me from a very severe headache and an even more severe backache. Several times during the night I had to get up and go out to “the brush.” I had diarrhea, and used up several precious sheets of the newsprint I packed for keeping notes. At dawn of that sleepless night my nose began to bleed, and I lost more newsprint trying to stanch it.

When the Widder Whitter discovered my condition, she offered to bring me my breakfast in bed, but I had no appetite whatsoever. She put her hand on my brow for a moment and declared, “Wal, I may be able to read yore future, but I caint tell what ails ye in the present. We need Doc Swain, if he didn’t live so blamed fur away. Too fur for me to fetch ’im. Why, he could fix ye up in nothing flat. Doc Swain could jist take one look at ye, and tell what ye needed to do to git well. He could…”

Sick as I was, and enfeebled, I did not realize that Cassie Whitter had begun to tell me the long, long story of Doc Colvin Swain of Stay More. It is the story that I am going to be telling to you, for as long as it takes me. It is the story that I heard again in part from various people I interviewed in Stay More itself. It is the story that, finally, Doc Swain himself was going to confirm to my satisfaction before I was done with him. Probably no one told me the story better than Cassie Whitter, but I could not appreciate it, nor even listen closely, those days and nights of desperate illness while she seemed to drone on and on. In fact, it was horribly tantalizing, listening to the exploits and the cures of this fantastic country doctor when I needed him so frantically myself. But I had the presence of mind to realize that the story she was telling me was so important, so fabulous, that I had better make some notes to jog my memory of it, and while I was so sick I could scarcely hold a pencil, I managed to write down a kind of outline of the story as Cassie was telling it to me. So I was sacrificing half of my newsprint as wipes for my diarrhea, and the other half was going to summarize Doc Swain’s story, and sometimes I couldn’t tell the difference!