The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (33 page)

When we arrived at one of those soda ponds, being a little backwash slough with a white deposit over the top, I collected a pocketful of dust that goes by the western name of “saleratus,” which is
practically the identical same thing as baking soda, and really first-rate for undigestion.

In about an hour, she had enough to suit her, and said we could make a very tolerable brew that would likely ease him when he came home. I had enough, too—my pockets were near about filled—so we went on back.

By now I was wrapped up in the work, and felt happy for my father. He was in luck; not many people backsliding like that have an unselfish bunch out moving heaven and earth to help him. I stirred up the fire and put on a kettle and she spent a long time mixing and testing. And when she turned around to throw out a beetle that had got in by mistake, and regretted it, by the look of him, I added
my
stuff. So we really had an uncommonly powerful remedy going; I was proud of it. It was maybe the first one like it ever brewed. And if you can judge anything by the smell, there was enough strength in that pot to clear up an epidemic of the bubonic plague. I never smelled anything like it, before or since.

“We’ve done a good job,” I said when we finished. “I think that ought to hold him. I’m well satisfied with it. I doubt if he ever drinks anything again, even water.”

The girl said the odor wasn’t exactly what she had in mind—it seemed heartier than most medicines she’d fixed—but I didn’t bother to mention my additions. There wasn’t any reason for it. It would only produce argument, and if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s wrangling with females. Even my father had lately commented on the uppity ways of women, after Jennie made some kind of statement about “equality.” He said in a few years about the only field closed off to women would be fatherhood, and he imagined they’d find a way to get around that, too, before they were done. Jennie only said, “Stuff!” and “Vulgar,” but I figured he was probably right: you couldn’t fool him on scientific things.

We waited up another hour or more and then went to bed—it was beginning to look like a tiresome long haul. But it didn’t seem I was asleep over a minute before I heard somebody singing, “Angus McGregor, Helpless in the Heather,” which struck me as a very
good choice, and then I heard a heavy sound like a thud, and then a moan, and a man’s voice in a tent saying, “What in the name of Jupiter’s going on out there?” So I got Po-Povi, who was already awake and dressed, and we ran over and picked him up. He had tripped on a guy rope, you understand, and taken a header into one of those slit trenches they dig to keep the water out.

He seemed to be enjoying himself, though when we got him on his feet, saying, “Shhh!” so as not to wake everybody, he appeared to drag his left leg, and said it was paralyzed. But in a minute he forgot about that and asked where’s his hat, somebody had stole his hat. “There’s nothing lower on earth than a hat thief,” he said, then he started to sing about Angus McGregor again, so we hustled him right along to the tent. But he was sick before we got him laid down, and we had to wheel him outside and empty him. When we got back I said, “Conditions are perfect for the medicine. It’s a good thing you thought of it; I want you to know I appreciate it.”

She didn’t waste time on polite gabble but helped me get to work. We had him down on his buffalo robe, partly moaning and partly trying to sing the second verse of the song, which wasn’t really fit for a young girl’s ears, so whenever it began to come out, I sort of stopped him up for a second with a sock, taking care to let him breathe on schedule. But now we had the problem of trying to get the medicine down, and it was a puzzler. Whenever the girl tried to pour in some out of a cup, he thrashed around and spilled it. We were about strapped for a way out, when I said, “There’s only one solution—we’ll have to use the coal-oil funnel. It’s just the ticket.” She looked doubtful, but there wasn’t time to complain. I got the funnel and shook it out carefully, because of course we didn’t want coal oil in the remedy, and put the end in his mouth, and after that we waltzed along. He spit the first dose straight up in the air, like a geyser, but after that it appeared to go much easier. There wasn’t any doubts about it; that medicine took the fight out of him in a hurry.

I don’t much like to tell the next part, but I’ve got to own up and face it. Along toward 3
A.M
., with me asleep on my robe and Po-Povi
gone to her tent, my father began to make some very peculiar noises, like a volcano that’s about to give notice. Then he raised up and said he was dying. He looked so white and sober I believed it, too. So I got the girl and we talked it over pretty fast. She knelt over him, and looked confused. “Don’t worry,” I said. “It isn’t your fault. The medicine’s taken him wrong—it does that sometimes. I’d better go for Doctor Merton.” I was back in ten minutes, but I must say that this Dr. Merton appeared to be in a poor humor, and said he hoped it wasn’t any kind of joke; he’d be obliged “to make representations in the proper quarter.”

But it wasn’t. He took one look at my father, counted his pulse, tested his temperature, listened to his heart with a heart cone, and told me to rouse Mr. Kissel at once. We sat outside the tent, Po-Povi and I, and waited. I’ll have to admit I was a little worried. It’s entirely possible that nobody but a doctor should make medicine; I realize that now. But to give her credit, I believe the Indian girl was on the right track. Somewhere along the line, I’d thrown the remedy out of balance. I don’t know where I went off but I guess I learned a lesson.

It was nearly dawn when Dr. Merton came out, rolling down his sleeves. “It’s all right,” he said. “He’ll live. But I don’t mind telling you it was a very narrow squeak. You woke me just in time; another half hour and it might have been a different story.”

He said my father appeared to have swallowed a very powerful alkali, “on the order of lime or lye,” and that there was evidence of further poisons that he hadn’t come in contact with during his professional career. “Altogether,” he said, “it’s been a very singular case, though there are aspects of it I hope to illuminate more fully later on.”

I didn’t hope so. I said my father had drunk some whiskey up at the drovers’, and had likely got hold of a piece of tainted meat. “Mr. Coe also gave him some sherry,” I said, “and it looked old to me. All the printing had faded off the label. I’ll make any bet that bottle had gone bad.”

“Interesting explanation,” said Dr. Merton, and left. I didn’t say anything else; I wasn’t feeling very brash.

Well, they had the wedding at noon, and I took good care not to get out of line. They had three little flower girls, and me, but I said I wouldn’t put on a dress to see the Queen of England get married to King Solomon, so they let me wash up and join in anyhow. A man whose name I’ve forgotten with a wooden leg played the fiddle, and played it very well, too, and some of the women had baked a real winner of a cake, with what they called “matrimonial devices” on top. They handed it around; each person got a piece, even the children.

Some way or other, this wedding had a different effect on me than what I’d imagined. It was pretty. Jennie looked as handsome and blushing and smiling as a bud that’s just opened up, and softer, you would say, than usual. They had wax candles, just like a regular wedding, back home, and with that awesome high Chimney Rock in the background, it was kind of solemn. The officiating was done by a Reverend Mr. Campbell, a tall, baldish man with hair in his ears and a voice on the order of a soothery foghorn, mellow and churchy, and an interesting way of coming out strong on the last letter of a word, making it more important, such as “folks-ah,” whilst rocking up on his toes at the same time, and he read a beautiful service. Weddings
can
get at you; there’s no doubt about it. I hate to say so, but for removing all the frivolity out of a person, they’ve got it over funerals.

The only things that went wrong, from Jennie’s side, were that my father, who meant to give the bride away, was flat on his back in bed, and that Mr. Kissel, the best man, was also laid up, with a severe cold and fever of over a hundred. It was rotten bad luck, but my father called her in and said he’d fixed everything so nobody would suffer; the festivities wouldn’t be hampered any. He said he’d appointed Mr. Coulter to act in his place and that Mr. Coe would be best man. “The two most distinguished personages of the train. And God bless you, child. I’ll be thinking of you as I lie here in my pain.”

Well,
wasn’t
she mad? For a man as intellectural about some things, my father could be an awful fool when he tried. If he’d gone to work and picked Benedict Arnold to give the bride away he couldn’t have made a worse choice than Coulter. Her eyes just blazed, and her color was so high I thought she’d explode. But it was too late to do anything now—there weren’t only a few hours left—so she flounced out and went about trying on the elegant dress Mrs. Kissel had made with her own hands, the good, kind soul, with all the other things she had to do, too.

When the Honorable Coe heard about his last-minute substitution, he was as pleased as punch. He was a very fine-mannered man; everybody said so. And from that point forward, he practically took over the wedding. He declared that everything must be in order according to the rules. He had a book on ettiket, as they said, and he brushed up on his duties as best man; he told them he’d done it twice before but had become rusty. Digging into it deeper, he saw there were some problems to get over, if you went by the book. For example, he was supposed to either get the railroad tickets for the groom or hire a carriage for him if they stayed in town. It was awkward. There weren’t any railroads around for miles, and the only carriages in sight were these big old lumbering wagons, and they were full of things like pots and pans and rocking chairs and children and garden scythes and such like. So he had to give that part of it up. Then he read, aloud, that the main duties of a best man were to be “ ‘valet, expressman, and companion-in-ordinary,’ ” but since Brice wasn’t going anywhere to speak of, there wasn’t any packing to do, so Coe just concentrated on being a valet.

And he did a bang-up job of it. I saw so many people Congratulating him after the ceremony you’d have thought it was him that got married instead of Brice. He had on striped pants and a frock coat and a flowing pearl-gray tie, and he dressed Brice up just as gaudy, out of his own wardrobe.

I don’t want to make Coe sound silly, because he worked like a dog at this wedding. His heart was in it; he gave it class. Jennie told me the other day—I mean a long time after this—that what Mr. Coe
did in his officious, pompousy way provided her with something nice to have always about this wedding.

Those words make me realize what I should have known years before, that Jennie really cared for that poor, bewildered Brice. She looked upon him as something that needed mothering, and cherishing, and if she mistook it for love, a lot of others have done the same thing, just as my father said. They
both
needed somebody, so it was all right.

At the last minute, she decided to have a maid of honor and she dressed little Po-Povi up in a real linen dress that set off her dusky skin and made her nearly as respectable as a white person. She was proud-looking; her eyes practically sparkled for a change, and instead of being somber, her mouth was curved in a half-smile.

When the wooden-legged man, who I think they called him Jim Hardesty—he’d once had an argument with a buzz saw, and lost-struck up the wedding march, everybody got downright teary. I could feel the goose-pimples coming out on my arms. Coe, with his long blond mane and moustaches carefully brushed, and Brice at his side, marched up the little aisle they formed, stately and grand, and then Jennie came forward, with her hand resting very lightly on Coulter’s arm. For once, there wasn’t any frippery about this roughneck. He didn’t only seem deadly serious, he looked almost angry, and his face had turned a funny kind of pale under his tan. I couldn’t understand it. But Jennie
was
beautiful—only a fool could deny it—and I had some guilty thoughts about the ways I’d plagued her. All at once it came to me that she meant as well as could be expected. She was bossy and peckish, but she’d gone through a lot of troubles, and lost her entire family. Looking at her shining, strong-featured face, and thinking what a good shotgun shot she was, I almost loved her.

The Reverend Mr. Campbell read the service and pronounced them man and wife. Coulter started to turn away, but after Brice had kissed the bride, he took Jennie by the shoulders roughly and gave her a kiss that made everybody gasp. It really shook her. And when he let loose, she slapped his face. In a second, everybody had
passed it off as a joke, and Coulter disappeared. Then they tackled a fine wedding luncheon, or as good as you can manage with the sort of fodder we had, and Jim Hardesty fiddled for dancing all afternoon long. It was the pleasantest time these people had seen in weeks. Nobody got drunk, if you except my father’s indisposition in the tent; nobody got in a fight; nothing broke down anywhere. It was as peaceful a wedding as the frontier had ever seen; I heard one of the drovers say so, but he didn’t sound happy about it.

That night, all worn out, I crawled into our tent, and lay there, suffering a little but not knowing why. I felt blue, now that it was over.

“Is that you, son?”

I said, “Yes, father.”

“Wedding went off like clockwork, didn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Bride got a lot of fine presents?”

“Yes, father.”

He himself had given them a handsome silver carving set he’d picked up somewhere along the trail and carefully saved away for just such an occasion.

“You still there, son?” It was such a stupid question that it sort of broke the camel’s back, so to speak. I began to whimper; I couldn’t help it.

“You come over here,” he said, and I did so, and hung on. Maybe you think it’s sissified, but all of a sudden I missed my mother.

“Now, Jaimie, boy, I know you’re ashamed of me, and I don’t blame you, but I want you to believe it won’t happen again. You’ll be grown soon—you’re shooting up fast—and you’ll understand that adults, in their way, are fuller of flaws than children. We’ll make this trip, and we
will
get the gold, and we’ll go back to Louisville in a hurry. You’d like to see your mother, wouldn’t you?”