Butterfly Weed (3 page)

One other thing I realized: being a woman, Cassie Whitter out of verbal modesty was censoring a great deal of Doc’s story; she was obviously omitting or euphemizing the sexual parts of it, and if I wanted to learn those, I’d have to search them out from somebody else.

Nor did she reach, in her telling of the story, the crucial part, concerning his “affair” with a beautiful young girl. That most dramatic part of the story, which I would have to learn primarily from Doc himself, had just commenced when my illness became so severe that she was prompted to abandon the story and announce, “I had best see if I caint fetch Gram Dinsmore fer ye, or else you’re not long fer this world.” Then she disappeared, for the better part of the day, as I grew progressively sicker and felt hopeless that I was alone without anybody handy to help me. Late in the afternoon she finally returned with another woman, older even than she, who carried a bundle, an assortment of some things tied up in what looked like a gingham dish towel. Gram Dinsmore, I was told, was a “yarb doctor,” and she proceeded to prod and poke me while asking various questions about me and my condition. How old was I? On what day of what month at what hour of day was I born? Through which nostril had my nose bled, and at what hour of the day? “Have you got the flux?” she asked.

“Flux?” said I.

“Yessir, are yore bowels loose and runny?” she inquired. When I admitted that I did indeed have diarrhea, she asked several embarrassing questions about the composition and color of the excretion. Then she opened her bundle and took out a small sheaf of green leaves, which she gave to the Widder Whitter, asking her to brew it up into a tea. She explained to me that it was simply ragweed, and the ragweed tea would cure me of the flux, but the flux, she said, was just a symptom of something far more serious, and she wanted me to take a strong dose of some oozy concoction she kept in a quart Mason jar. When I refused to take it until I knew what it contained, she recited the few ingredients, primarily the boiled-down residue of the inner bark of the slippery elm tree,
Ulmus fulva.
She gave me a tablespoon full of it, and it was nippy but not unpleasant. She forbade me to eat any solid food, and told me to drink lots of the ragweed tea, then she asked me for a dime, but I protested I ought to pay her much more than that.

“Jist let me borry a dime iffen ye got one,” she said, and I gave her a dime and she inspected it closely and declared, “Hit aint shiny enough.” I searched my pocket for a shinier dime, but had none. She gave the dime to the Widder Whitter. “Could ye rench this in some vinegar and lye soap?” And when this was done, she took the now-shiny dime and inserted it between my upper lip and teeth, and declared, “Now thet thar will stop yore nose from a-bleedin.”

And sure enough it did. I wish I could report that her other prescriptions healed my afflictions as quickly as that dime cured me of nosebleed, but no. Gram Dinsmore accepted from me a half-dollar for her services, but left without telling me what her diagnosis had been, and my diarrhea and chills continued unabated despite my regular consumption of the slippery elm ooze and the ragweed tea. The Widder Whitter attempted to resume telling Doc Swain’s story, on the threshold of the appearance of the young heroine, but I could not listen attentively. Finally I interrupted her in desperation, “Just how fur away does this Doc Swain live?”

“He lives all the way over to Stay More,” she said. “That’s six mile at least.”

“Miz Whitter,” I said, “you’ve done gone and predicted I’ll most likely spend my old age in a home under the care of nurses, so that means I aint about to up and die of what’s ailin me right now. But if you can read the near future jist as good as the far future, can you tell me how long I’m gonna be sick and how I’m gonna get well? How long am I gonna have to stay here?”

“Yo’re welcome to stay here, long as you like,” she said. “And I can finish tellin ye Doc Swain’s story.”

“Well, yes, and I’m obliged,” I said, “but can you tell me how long before I get well enough to travel again? At least the six miles to Stay More so’s I could see Doc Swain myself?”

“Drink up yore ragweed tea,” she told me, and I drank it, and she took the cup and peered closely at the small bits of ragweed clinging to the sides. “Hhmmm,” she hummed, more than once, and I began to understand that perhaps she was as adept at reading tea leaves as reading coffee grounds. At length, she said, “How about that? It’s Doc Swain hisself who’s a-comin to fetch ye and take ye to Stay More and fix ye all up, and cure the ailments of yore soul while he’s at it!”

So. We come at last to our hero, the main character of her story, and of mine. You’ve been patient to sit through this long preface. Okay, here he is: one afternoon during my second week at Cassie Whitter’s, the door opened, and in walks this man who is the everlovin
epitome
of the old-time country doctor! Black bag and all! Steel-rimmed spectacles and all! Christ A-mighty, he was so much right out of a Norman Rockwell cover that I
knew
I was having a delirious hallucination (although that wouldn’t come until a week later): that I had just invented him in my desperate need, out of my urgent fancy, that I was just
wishing
he was there.

“Why, howdy, Doc!” the Widder Whitter said to him in surprise, as if I was inventing also her confirmation of his reality. “I was jist a-talkin about ye. How’d ye know we’ve got a customer fer ye?”

“Gram Dinsmore tole me,” the man declared, setting down his bag and opening it and taking out his stethoscope. I suddenly realized that in her long story about him, Cassie Whitter had made no attempt to describe his appearance. Was that in order to universalize him, to let him represent
all
physicians? He was not tall, and inclined to stockiness, and I guessed he was about fifty, maybe midfifties, about right for a skilled, well-practiced physician. I don’t think Norman Rockwell could have given him a better face: as kind and benign as you could hope for, and even a little handsome. The only missing touch was that he was not wearing a doctor’s coat and vest: he was not even wearing a necktie: he was not even wearing a white shirt. I can’t honestly recall
what
he was wearing; I just remember that although it was not at all
professional,
he still somehow looked very proper and official.

The Widder Whitter was chuckling. “Now what’d she go and do thet fer? Aint you her rival?”

The man laughed. “Yeah, and we was both up at Elbert Sizemore’s place this mornin, a-tryin to cure him of a bad case of the hives, me with my magnesium sulfate and her with her maple-leaf tea. I had a little fun, askin her if her tea was made from rock maple or soft maple, and shore enough she’d used the soft, and I tole her that rock always beats soft when it comes to hives.” The doctor paused to pick from his eyes some tears of laughter. “That shore did frost her gizzard! But anyhow, when we got done a-fussin around with ole Elbert, Gram tole me about this here feller here, said he most likely was ailin with something that was ‘beyond her powers,’ is the way she put it, ‘beyond her powers.’ Never heared her admit that of ary a case before. She tole me what she thought it mought be, but I’ll jist have to see fer myself.” All the time that he was speaking these words, the doctor was doing things to me: running a thermometer into my mouth, placing his stethoscope on my chest and back, squeezing my stomach and my sides, and peering into my ears, my nose, my mouth. At length he pulled up my shirt, inspected my stomach carefully, then let my shirt fall and said, “I don’t reckon I’ve met ye afore. I’m Doc Swain,” and offered me his hand.

“I’m Doc Randolph,” I said, shaking his hand. In those days everybody around Pineville called me “Doc” just as a nickname, which had nothing to do with medicine nor with the Pee-Aitch-Dee that I’d never succeeded in finishing, but was just a common Ozark nickname for a gambler. So I added, “But it’s jist what they call me, it aint but a nickname.”

“Please to meet ye, Doc,” he said. “You don’t live here-abouts, do ye?”

“Nope, jist a-passin through.”

“Wal, you shore caint pass on through if we jist leave ye a-layin here. It’s too fur and a hard climb for a old man like me to come up here ever day and see you. And besides you couldn’t afford my rates of twenty-five cents a mile for the distance I’d have to travel. So I need to git you down whar I can give ye a blood test, and keep a eye on ye.”

“What seems to be wrong with me?” I asked.

“I caint be a hunerd percent certain, jist yet. I don’t believe it’s malaria, but it could be meningitis, or trichinosis, or abdominal Hodgkin’s disease, or several other things. Whatever it is, it’s serious. Gram Dinsmore thought it mought be typhoid, and that’s what she prescribed fer ye, although she gave ye one thing to loosen yore bowels and another’n to stop ’em up!” Doc Swain laughed. “The way I learnt it, if the slippery elm bark is peeled upwards, it’ll make ye puke, but if it’s peeled down’ards it’ll give ye the flux. She must’ve peeled it the wrong way!” He laughed again, then grew serious. “But do ye reckon ye could git up, and me and Cassie will help ye down the mountain to whar I had to leave my auto?”

So with no small expenditure of effort and finesse, the doctor and the Widder Whitter supported me between them as we made our way slowly and carefully down the steep trail from the widow’s cabin. The doctor had to carry his bag in one hand and the Widder Whitter had to carry my cumbersome knapsack in one of hers, and the three of us had to stop whenever we came to a fallen log and sit on it for a moment to rest. Going downhill in my condition in that manner was a worse ordeal for me than any uphill hike I’d ever made. It seemed it took hours to reach the place where the trail met a graveled road, and the doctor’s car was parked. Through the mental fog that was settling down on me, I tried to thank the widow for her hospitality and tolerance of my infirmity and her help and her food and her…but she put her fingers on my lips to hush me. “Come back and see me again when you git to feelin better,” she said. “I never did finish tellin ye that amazin story. But maybe ye can git the ole hoss to tell you the rest of it hisself!”

As we drove off, the doctor glanced at me and asked, as if he knew the answer, “What ole hoss? What amazin story?”

“It seems that there womarn knows yore entire life,” I observed. “And she’s been a-tellin me most of it.”

Doc coughed. “Wal, heck, Doc, I aint so sure she knows the past as well as she knows the future. Didje git yore fortune tole?”

“Yeah, I reckon I did, Doc,” I allowed. “But it was kind of strange.” I didn’t feel much like talking, but maybe I could just let him do all of it. So I asked, “Does she really know the future?”

“Myself, I’ve never permitted her to mess around with my fortune,” he declared. “She seems to know such fantastic tales about my past, I don’t
want
to know my future. Tell ye the honest truth, if half of what she told ye about me was true, my past has done already had enough problems to last me plumb through the rest of my future!” I managed to join in his laughter over this. He went on, “So I couldn’t tell ye if she knows
my
future, but she’s either an awful good guesser or got some special knowledge of Fate, because she’s never been known to be wrong in one of her readings. And I know fer a fack that she’s ’specially good at tellin whar lost things is at—she can locate strayed animals and anything else that’s been misplaced.” Then, as the car—a Model A Touring Sedan considerably dented and dusted—bucked and jerked down the terrible road off the mountain, the doctor, speaking loudly over the noise of the car’s rattling and bumping, told me the story of how the Widder Whitter had once located a dog the doctor had lost, or rather had had stolen. “I had me this great big ole hound, named Galen—after the olden-time Greek physician, you know?”—he cast me a glance to see if I did indeed know, and there must have been something in my smile which told him that I did—“and one day ole Galen turned up missin, and was gone more’n a week before somebody suggested it wouldn’t do no harm for me to ask the Widder Whitter to tell me if he was lost for good, or dead some’ers, or what, so I hiked up to her place and tole Cassie what I come fer, and she started in a-conjurin around with some little sticks and buttons and what-all, and talked a lot of damn foolishment, but finally she says my dawg is tied up in a corncrib over to Spunkwater, some miles due east of my place in Stay More, and she even described the feller who stole ’im, and I knew right off it was ole Bib Ledbetter, who’d been bearin a grudge again me ever since I’d treated him fer syphilis and he’d wanted me to tell his old lady it was jist measles, but I’d had to warn her not to lay with him, and she’d done guessed that he’d been cheatin on her. Wal sir, I drove on over to Bib’s place, and shore enough thar was my dawg Galen, big as life and twice as natural! Ole Ledbetter claimed he’d jist seen a stray dawg around the last couple of days, and didn’t pay it no mind. He says some of the childern must of shut him up in the corncrib, maybe. So I couldn’t prove nothing, and didn’t try to argue with Bib—I jist took my dawg and drove him home. But there aint no doubt in my mind that I’d of never got Galen back if it hadn’t been fer Cassie Whitter. So maybe we’d best not dismiss anything the widder says.”

I managed a smile at his story, but I couldn’t make any comment. Eventually he coughed again, and cast me a sharp look, and asked, “Did she tell you about that time she predicted the future for a gal named Tenny?”

I tried to remember. “I think she was just getting around to that part of your story. Wasn’t Tenny your wife?”

“Maybe not legally,” he said, and did not elaborate, so I left it at that. The bouncing of the car was hell on my stomach, and after another mile of the rugged highway I searched for something to say just to keep my mind off my miseries. “Have you ever heared tell of a ‘nursin home’?” I asked him. And when he pondered a moment before shaking his head, I told him that Cassie Whitter had predicted I’d spend my last days in a nursing home.

He meditated on that prophecy for a while longer before declaring, “Wal, it sounds to me like yore last days won’t befall ye fer a many and a many a year to come. Forty year from now, maybe they’ll conjure up some kind of house whar ole folks jist go to be took keer of in their feebleness and senility. A house filled with nurses.”