Butterfly Weed (6 page)

Then she’d give me what the doctor prescribed as “a Brand bath.” Like my youthful misunderstanding of castor oil as a lubricant for furniture casters, I misunderstood this name to mean that it would permanently brand me, like cattle, but Doc eventually explained it was named after a German doctor named Brand who’d invented it as a therapy for typhoid. It was a lot harder to take than the “enemers” that Rowena also administered. It involved getting into a galvanized tub—I think it was just a sort of oval-shaped trough for watering livestock—and having Rowena dump buckets of fresh well-water over me, cold as a well-digger’s ass. Colder! Colder than a preacher’s balls! ’Scuse me, Mary. That water would make me scream, and then my teeth would start a-chattering, and my fingernails would turn blue. Doc called the Brand bath “a cardiovascular tonic,” but it near about gave me a heart attack. A wonder it didn’t give me pneumonia. But just when I’d got colder than I could stand, Rowena would commence a-rubbing me, like a massage only real hard, on my arms and legs and back and sides and all, until my blue skin had turned red as roses, and then, without drying, I’d get wrapped in an old linen sheet with a double blanket over that and put back to bed. All that rubbing Rowena done, especially around my lower stomach, would give my ole ying-yang a bone, and if I hadn’t been so sick I would’ve begged the gal for a little relief. Mary Celestia, it’s time for your nap, sweetheart, you don’t have to listen to this.

But all of my “commerce” with sweet Rowena was limited mostly to friendly banter, sometimes off-color, and to her answers to occasional questions of mine, for example, Was Doc ever married? “Still is,” Rowena said, and when I tried to get her to elaborate she told me, as if I didn’t know, that there was no such of a thing as divorce in these here parts, and Doc had had a wife a number of years previously, whom he hadn’t seen in many a year, and
another
wife who died. “But you’ll jist have to git him to tell you his own self about all of that,” Rowena said.

What with all that therapy and attention from Rowena—I don’t know if I was her only patient but she gave me the impression that I was—I was getting better day by day and reaching the point of wanting to get out of bed. “Doc,” I requested one morning, “how about lettin me sit in the rocker ’stead of layin in this bed all day and night?”

“We aint out of the woods yit,” he declared.

I sighed, “Tell me, Doc,” I said with a little exasperation, “how come you always say ‘we’ as if you’re the patient too? ‘Time for our breakfast,’ you’ll say even if you’ve done et. ‘Now let’s take our temperature,’ you’ll say, but you aint takin your own. Yesterday you said, ‘We wanter watch out we don’t git ourselfs a intestinal perforation,’ but there aint a bit of danger that
you
will ever git one!”

Doc looked a little bit crestfallen. “Wal, don’t ye know, I reckon hit’s jist plain ole
empathy,
” he observed. “I aint never had a patient that I didn’t feel like everything happenin to them was happenin to me too. Ever baby I’ve delivered was birthed by me. Ever time anybody died I died too.”

There was such a melancholy in his speaking of these words that I softened my annoyance. “Okay, I get the drift. But don’t ‘we’ get pretty goddamned itchy and on edge when ‘we’re’ confined to bed all the time?”

“Yeah, I reckon we do. That’s how come me and Rowener tries to keep ye beguiled.”

I was charmed by his use of that word, which can mean either to cheat, to deceive, or to amuse, to entertain, the latter meaning carrying the connotation of whiling away the hours and diverting one from one’s problems. It set me to pondering how the latter meaning could have grown out of the former, as if the ways we really entertain ourselves involve some kind of deception. A good story
beguiles
us: by deceiving us it entertains us. Maybe it’s even necessary to make some kind of corollary: a story is successfully delightful in proportion to its deception.

But although Doc Swain had both beguiled and regaled me with quite a lot of anecdotes, jests, and tall tales that I had not heard before, he hadn’t yet got to the stage of telling me real stories, that is, extended narratives with plot development running through beginnings, middles, and endings. And despite my occasional promptings, he had not yet begun to tell me the most important story: his own. “Doc,” I would prompt, trying to get it out of him, “is it true that you were once a basketball coach?”

“
Basketball?
” he would put me off. “I never knew nothing about basketball.” And, as I would eventually learn, that was quite true: he never knew nothing about basketball. But he had coached it.

Maybe I’m giving the impression that Doc didn’t have anything better to do, when he wasn’t killing time chatting with Latha Bourne on her store porch, than to sit around telling me tales and windies. My picture of him might run counter to the traditional idea of the overworked, underslept physician who had to see a hundred patients a day or night at all hours. In truth, Doc Swain was not the slave of his job…but he was the slave of his research, which he was keeping private. I knew that he spent a great number of hours each day in a back room of the house that he called his “laboratory.” He explained that of course he was his own pathologist, but that wasn’t all he was doing back there in that room. For all I knew, he was creating a monster, like Frankenstein. I can remember a few occasions when Rowena said to me, “Colvin caint see you this mornin”—she never called him “the doctor” or “Doc” or anything but his first name—“on account of he was up all last night hard at work in his laboratory.” Eventually I came right out and asked him what kind of research he was doing, but all he would say was, “Oh, I’ve jist been foolin around with some pathogenic microorganisms, tryin to see if I caint come up with an antibiotic.”

He had very few office calls. Whenever somebody was sick, Doc went to them, at their house. And usually that was only after they had exhausted every other possible means for a cure: home remedies, patent medicines, superstitions, visits from Gram Dinsmore or some other “granny woman.” Doc was just the expedient if nothing else worked.

“I am the last resort,” he declared to me one day, in a kind of self-deprecating way. But there was not only a poignant seriousness to the declaration, there was also a kind of symbolism in it.

And he scarcely made enough income to meet his expenses. He had practically not one cash-paying patient…except me, whenever my time came to settle the bill for my treatment. His patients paid him through a kind of barter. The storekeeper Willis Ingledew gave him free gasoline for his car. Other patients gave him produce from their gardens, or fruit from their orchards, or cordwood from their woodlots, or corn whiskey, or even livestock: pigs and calves and chickens, and a horse. Later, after I became ambulatory, Doc showed me his pantry, crowded with Mason jars of canned fruits and vegetables, blackberry preserves, jams, honey, and molasses, and he showed me the little smokehouse behind his home, where he had hanging a great collection of hams and side meat. “The pay in this line of work aint nothin to mention,” he declared, “but the eatin is sure dandy.”

He was a good doctor, too. My first and most vivid impression of his talent occurred early in my second week there, a morning after my Brand bath when I began feeling worse, after a steady improvement. I wondered if the Brand baths were taxing my system or giving me pneumonia, but they wouldn’t have given me the stomach distress I was feeling.

Doc was customarily easygoing, relaxed, slow moving, and deliberate in everything he did. But that morning he took a good look at me and became suddenly brisk. He popped his thermometer into my mouth and could hardly wait to read it, and when he did, he yelled, “Git the morphine, Rowener!” I began to get dizzy even before he administered the morphine; I was scarcely conscious of his busy movements and what he was doing, and I barely heard him say to Rowena, “He’s a-hemorrhaging.” He worked me over, then said to her, “Fetch me some thromboplastin.”

The last thing I remember of that episode was his telling Rowena to run up to Latha’s and see if she had any ice in her icebox that she could spare, and to fill an ice bag to keep on my stomach. That was, incidentally, my first awareness of Latha’s use of that modern convenience which you would note in your first book about her: that she ordered from Jasper, the county seat and depot for it, an occasional block of ice, manufactured in distant Harrison, the nearest large town. The mail truck brought the ice wrapped in canvas. Latha had the only icebox in Stay More; and a few years afterwards in her general store she would have the only soda-pop cooler in that part of Newton County.

I am not certain that I avoided the delirium that he had predicted might be a sequela of my disease. For a long time I thought it was just a dream, but it could have been a delirious dream. I am reluctant to reveal it, except that it casts some light on what we are going to learn, later on, about Doc Swain’s early career as a physician. Rowena was in the dream too, the player piano was in the dream, in fact there was so much from “life” included in the dream that I did not understand until I “woke” from it that it had all been a dream. It was, frankly, the most vivid, the most real dream I had ever had. I do not remember what Doc said to me, nor I to him. He was holding in his hand that ice bag that he had supposedly obtained from Latha, and he applied it to my stomach and successfully induced the clotting of my blood, so that a transfusion would not be necessary. He then manipulated my abdomen, lay his hands on my chest for a while, and finally put one hand on my head and pronounced me cured. I remember only one thing I said: “Just like that, huh?”

And then I found myself in exactly the same position, in relation to the other two people who had been in the “dream,” except that I understood that I was “awake,” and that whatever I had been experiencing must have been a dream or a delirium. I felt wonderful. I felt, at least, much better than I had in weeks. “I reckon that ice bag worked!” I observed.

“We couldn’t use it,” he said apologetically. “Latha was all out of ice.”

“But didn’t you just put an ice bag on my stomach?” I asked.

He and Rowena exchanged looks. “Nope, I’m sorry,” he said. “But somehow the blood clotted anyway, so I reckon we won’t have to give ye a transfusion after all. I could’ve given ye one from my own arm,” he declared, “since me’n you has got the same blood type, but I’d shore of had to charge ye a good bit extry for
that!
”

I was sitting up, I was ready to get out of bed, I was all well, but I was puzzled that Doc did not realize what he had done to me. “I must have been just dreaming,” I said, “but whatever it was, you healed me! You appeared to me in the dream and fixed me up just fine!”

He smiled his benevolent smile, and said, “Wal, it’s been a good long while since I did the dream cure on anybody, but if you think that’s what it was, and it worked, then we’re sure enough in good health again.”

“Dream cure?” I said, snared by the possible mythology of it. “Doc, you are just going to have to tell me about the dream cure.”

He let me get out of bed. He invited me into the adjacent room, his office, where there were a pair of comfortable chairs. He pulled out his pocket watch, looked at it, and declared, “Rowener’s taking off in a minute or two.” Then he opened a drawer of his desk and brought out a cigar box which contained, I was surprised and delighted to discover, a few cigars. He handed me one and began unwrapping one himself. Those weren’t nickel cigars, either. Hell, they weren’t even dime cigars, but two-for-a-quarter Antonio y Cleopatras. You know, I can’t hardly ever smoke anymore, mostly on account of consideration for Mary Celestia but also because this nursing home don’t allow smoking in bed and I aint allowed to get out of bed! But there was a time, many and many a year of my earlier days, when I truly appreciated a good cigar.

After Doc lit my cigar for me, and lit his own, and we commenced a-suckin and a-puffin and actin like a pair of pigs who’d got into the corncrib, pretty soon Doc got up again to fetch the demijohn and poured us both a good helping of the Chism’s Dew, saying, “Don’t worry, ole Rowener won’t be back ’til after suppertime.” Then Doc put on his storytelling face. I had learned to recognize it: the slight upturning of the corners of his mouth as if he was getting ready to be amused himself; the twinkle in his eye, the wrinkling of the crow’s-feet at the eye corners. But the gaze in his twinkling eyes was far, far away, and he said, “I aint quite ready to tell you my own story. Not jist yet. I reckon I could do it, by-and-by, but I’d better warm up first on somebody else’s story. I’m a-fixin to tell ye about the first physician of Stay More, who was my paw, and if you can swaller his story, you jist might be ready for mine.”

Then he began. He wound himself up and went all the way back to when his father, Gilbert Alonzo Swain, first arrived in what had become Stay More at the age of two or three. You have already told the beginning of that in your
Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks:
how the first white settlers of Stay More after Jacob and Noah Ingledew was a family from North Carolina, the widow Lizzie Swain and her thirteen children, the “least’un” being Gilbert, who would later prefer being called by his middle name. You have told how tiny Gilbert played a crucial part in the matchmaking of his oldest sister, Sarah, with Jake Ingledew, thereby starting the Ingledew dynasty. Doc told me all of these stories which I recalled when I read your book, and I learned from him also of the annual visits of the legendary peddler from Connecticut, Eli Willard. I don’t want to bore you with what you already know, so I suppose I’ll begin, myself, with Gilbert’s acquisition of his knife from that peddler. The knife would later serve as his scalpel. Eli Willard sold to each of the Swain sisters a pair of scissors and to each of the Swain brothers a knife, which would fold up to be kept in one’s pocket.

Gilbert did not have a pocket but he became inseparable from his knife, carrying it closed in his hand at all times except when he slept and placed it under his pillow. He noticed there were letters on the knife, and he asked his mother what they meant, and she said they said, “Prince,” so he decided that would be his knife’s name, and sometimes he would even talk to it, saying, “Prince, I have got to find me some way to raise four cents’ cash money to pay for you.”