Butterfly Weed (9 page)

So Corinna and Ism got the
JP
to marry them, just in the nick of time, because she was already swollen out more than Ism could have been held accountable for. When Alonzo found out that Corinna had went and got herself married, he nearly went crazy. He thought of her as
his
woman, even if he would never have married her himself. He still wanted her, and he hoped that she would go on making herself available to him, because after all he was still the best-looking feller in the country and nobody knew how to titillate her bubbies the way he did. But once she was married, Corinna told her Lonzie that she was a respectable woman and did not intend to sneak around and cheat on her husband, so Lonzie had just better go and find himself another bed partner.

Now Alonzo did not know, and he never knew, that Ism was his own flesh and blood. He never even got a good look at him, or he might have recognized himself in the young man. He just knew that Corinna’s husband, whoever he was, was the lowdown misbegotten suck-egg dog who had stolen away all that good first-rate nookie. Alonzo couldn’t stand this. The more he brooded about it, the more it drove him balmy and boiling. It makes you understand why a simple word like “mad,” which in the old days always meant insane, or deranged by violent emotions, came to mean angry or resentful. Alonzo was foaming at the mouth and pissing puppies.

Ism took to married life like a duck to water, and just as he had planned, he gave up the pursuit of women and settled down to being a good husband. He built a sturdy little cottage for him and Corinna to live in, and to raise the baby in, when it came, and then he took to clerking in a store all the way up to Jasper, to make ends meet and be a good provider. Of course, Ism being gone all day presented an opportunity for Doc Alonzo Swain to drop by that new cottage to visit with Corinna. He leered and told her he was going to be her obstetrician as well as the baby’s pediatrician, and he wanted to make sure everything was okay with the baby in her womb, but even that excuse wouldn’t get him permission to lift her dress and have access to her twitchet, and pretty soon he had a full-blown case of frustration to go along with his madness.

And then it was too late, too far along in the advancing of the pregnancy, for him to lay with her even if he could talk her into it.

Nobody knows just how the fire started that burned down that new cottage. It happened in the middle of the night, the dark of the moon, and there wasn’t any thunderstorm that would allow lightning to be the cause. It could’ve been a coal-oil lamp knocked over, or maybe Ism had got careless with the pipe he smoked, or who knows? maybe it was some kind of spontaneous combustion in the corn-shuck mattress stuffing. But whatever it was, it happened so fast that Ism and Corinna must have both been deep asleep, and a good many folks were said to speculate on that and ask how could a fire have burned the house down before they even noticed it and got away? The sheriff reckoned maybe they were both dead before the fire started, but both bodies was burnt to a crisp and there was no way of finding out if they’d been killed by some means other than the fire. There wasn’t anything at all left of the house or of the newlyweds except a pile of ashes and a few pieces of charred bones.

What must’ve happened, at least according to one or two of the folks who tell this story, and who weren’t even living at that time, was that Alonzo, regardless of whether he started the fire himself or maybe even killed both of them before he started the fire (and nobody ever accused him of it), somehow got into the cottage while it was still a-burning, and found Corinna, whether she was dead yet or not, and took his trusty knife Prince and performed a Caesarian section on her right then and there amidst the flames, and grabbed the baby out of her, and took off. That’s what must’ve happened.

Then, directly or soon after, Alonzo must’ve taken the baby up to that cave-house where Doc Raney had his home and his office, and gave the baby to him, saying, “Here, Hoss, here’s that little misfortune I promised ye.”

I notice you have glanced at your watch, and more than once. I trust you’re just curious about what time of the afternoon it’s getting to be, or perhaps you’ve got an appointment somewhere, or maybe even you’re timing my story to see if I’m pacing it properly, the way a runner gets paced by somebody on the sidelines with a stopwatch. I do hope I’m not boring you, but I’m going to have to call it quits for the day pretty soon anyhow. Dr. Gilbert Alonzo Swain’s story has taken a lot out of me, and I don’t mean it’s taken a lot of effort for me to make it up, because I’ve been telling it to you more or less the way I heard it from various folks, primarily Colvin Swain himself, but also from Cassie Whitter and, in variations, assorted Stay Morons lounging on the store porches of Willis Ingledew and Latha Bourne.

Who named our hero? Well, one story about that is this: Alonzo and Kie sort of did it together. They sat around and studied the problem and studied the baby, who was yelling bloody murder—excuse the expression—the infant was of course very desirous of a lactating teat, which neither of the men could provide. Pretty soon Kie Raney would summon a granny woman accomplice of his, who happened to know a young lady from Spunkwater—her name doesn’t even matter, though it is known—who could wet-nurse the baby for a while until Kie could get ahold of one of them nursing bottles, one of them flasks with a long rubber tube and a rubber nipple on the end of it.

Kie was a learned feller and he wanted to name the baby something with “vin” in it, not for wine but from the Latin
vincere
for conquer, because Kie hoped that the boy would grow up and become a doctor who could conquer all the ills that the flesh is heir to, maybe even cancer and consumption and the common cold. So Kie wanted to name him Vincent, but Alonzo thought that was too Frenchified and he suggested instead they name him Irvin, but Kie thought that sounded Jewish so he proposed Melvin, but Alonzo thought that was rather unmanly and timid, so he opined they might try out Alvin, but Kie said, “Aw hell, ’Lonzo, that’s even less manly than Melvin.” So they considered Marvin and Kelvin and Gavin and a bunch of others, and finally Alonzo said, “Wal, Hoss, let’s us jist name the boy Steven,” and Kie agreed that was a right manly name, and he dipped his goose feather into ink and wrote it out on the birth certificate, and they studied it and admired it for a while and even called the baby that name a few times, but it suddenly dawned on Kie Raney that the name didn’t really have a “vin” in it unless they had misspelled it, and somehow changing it to “Stevin” didn’t look right. “Shit,” Alonzo said, “we may as well change it to Spavin.” But Hoss Raney knew that “spavin” was a hock-joint disease in horses, and he wasn’t about to afflict the boy with a horse ailment for a name.

They got to babbling, and tried Tomvin and Dickvin and Harvin and Carvin, and Halvin and Gilvin and Colvin, and Alonzo snapped his fingers and said, “That’un’ll do her!
Colvin.
” Little did either of them know that Colvin is a perfectly good Teutonic name, meaning “black-haired friend,” appropriate since the baby had inherited not his father’s golden hair but his mother’s raven hair.

I like to think that Alonzo instinctively selected Colvin because it had a certain Ozarkian ring to it, a country sound; it seemed appropriate for a black-haired country doctor who would be a friend to everyone and would conquer, if not the common cold and cancer, at least consumption.

They never gave him a real middle name, only an initial, “U.” That wasn’t too uncommon in those days, that a feller would have a middle initial that didn’t mean anything, it was just for looks. Harry S Truman for one. Another example is…

Hark! You can’t hear him, but that old fool out in the hall is yelling, “About that time, six white horses flew over.” He’s been at it for the past hour, and it’s a wonder he hasn’t wakened poor Mary Celestia from her nap. Surely you can hear the sound of his voice even if you can’t hear the words? Well sir, it’s been hard enough for me to remember Alonzo Swain’s story and get it straight and try to rehearse it to you, without listening to
him
and that blather insinuating that I might as well have flying horses in my story! Have I told you a single blessed thing yet that was impossible, like flying horses? There may be some aspects of Alonzo Swain’s story that really stretch the blanket, but there isn’t anything inconceivable about it, now is there?

Maybe I need Herb or Ernie around to annotate for me. You know how Herbert Halpert, the great academic folklorist and my dear friend, took the trouble to write commentaries on each of the tales and stories in my collections, all of ’em except
Sticks in the Knapsack,
for which Ernest Baughman supplied the notes, and
Hot Springs and Hell,
which I annotated myself, because it aint nothing but a joke book, and
Pissing in the Snow,
which Frank Hoffman annotated because he’s a specialist in dirty tales. But the main purpose of all those notes is to show that likely the story I’m relating, even though I’m telling it exactly as I heard it in the back brush, is just a rehash of some ancient tale that goes all the way back to Chaucer or Boccaccio or even the Bible. Hell, them academic annotators has even got a thing called the
Motif Index
and another thing called the
Aarne-Thompson Index,
and they can probably take any story you tell ’em, even if you think you’re a-making it up, and scribble all over it their numbers, like Motif
D
420.1.6.7., and Incident
VIII
in Type 1542, which shows that there aint no such thing as an original story.

So I’d hate to see what the academic annotators would do with Alonzo Swain’s story. They’d probably all shake their heads and say, “About that time, six white horses flew over,” and then they’d say, “This comes out of Hesiod. Or Pindar. Or Homer hisself.”

I’m tired, and I’m gonna let you go.

Chapter three

O
h, I just switched you on. It’s good to see a welcome face again. I’ve discovered a new power lately, although it could just be a sign I’m dying. You know the excruciatingly commonplace observation that when you die your whole life story flashes before your eyes? Well, I don’t know about that, leastways nothing like that has ever happened to me. But here’s what really is happening to me: whenever I don’t like who I’m looking at, I just close my eyes and then reopen them, and it’s like flicking a switch—I get rid of whoever was here. Works, like a charm. Just now I switched you on, after switching off the most obnoxious preacher I hope I ever have to meet. Mary Celestia and I are visited, biweekly on the average, by one or another of the local ministers, Pentecostal Holiness and Assembly of God and Jehovah’s Testicles and Whoever, all shapes and sizes. I don’t suppose anybody at the desk gives them any information about us, letting them know that Mary is a retired full professor of English and Folklore at the University, and I aint so dumb myself even if I look like a bald-headed old citereen in the last throes of Alzheimer’s. A few of these preachers are friendly and almost respectful, but most of ’em patronize us and talk down to us like we were helpless babies. “Have y’all finished your lunchie?” this feller who was just in here asks us.
Lunchie,
for God’s own sweet sakes! Nearly as bad as the nurse who brings us our
brekkie.
Or the goddamn attendant who has to come in and change my
di-dee
because the other attendant who was supposed to bring my bedpan didn’t get here in time and I had to take a shit. Anyhow, this preacher was one of the worst. He sways back and forth in front of Mary and waves his arms in her face because she’s blind, and he hollers at me because I’m a little hard of hearing. “Did y’all have somebodee read the Bible to y’all this weekie? Did y’all get a nice big bitey of the Holy Wordie?” Ooh, lawsy mercy ’pon my soul!

But as I say, I’ve discovered that I can just shut my eyes and make ’em go away. The trouble is, I can’t have any more control over who I’ll see when I reopen my eyes than I could control my bladder or my bowels. Just now I reopened my eyes and there
you
were, and I’m mighty glad to see you, but this morning I shut my eyes to get rid of Dr. Bittner—remind me sometime to tell you about him, he works over at City Hospital and comes around once a month to check up on us—I closed him out of my consciousness and when I reopened my eyes, flicked that switch, it wasn’t him I was looking at, nor you, but Colvin Swain! I swear. “Lord love a duck, Col!” I exclaimed. “I heared tell you had up and died back around the late fifties, wasn’t it? Some old boy told me you’d got hit by lightnin.”

He smiled his benevolent reassuring smile that was always so good for making his patients feel like they didn’t have any cause at all for feeling bad, and he said, “Wal, Vance, I reckon that’s true enough, as far as it goes. But jist recollect what I told you about how I learnt to cure folks in their dreams. And ask yoreself if you’re not jist dreaming.”

But I knew I was wide awake, and he was just a-sitting there right where you are, plain as you are…unless I’m only dreaming
you
too, and only you can decide that for yourself. But if you
know
that you are really there beside my bed and I’m really here, then you’ll just have to believe that he was there too. “Mary Celestia, sweetheart!” I called to her. “Don’t you see this doctor feller here?” And then I remembered that she is blind.

What’s that, Mary? Oh, yes. But this isn’t the doctor, and I wasn’t calling to you again, I was just quoting to him the way I called you this morning. This is my good friend the novelist.

Mary just said she wanted to remind me what she answered this morning, that of course she couldn’t see the man, but she could hear him, and he sure did sound like Doc Swain!

So maybe both of us are in our second childhoods and we deserve to be spoken to like babies.

Babies. How does one properly speak to a baby? Which brings us right back to our story, next installment of it, because I have to ask you now to picture a cave-house on a mountainside near Spunkwater, Arkansas, oh about 1886 or so, and a middle-aged bachelor ex-school-teacher turned self-styled physician and medical preceptor, name of Kie Raney, trying to talk to this baby named Colvin Swain.