The Trial of Dr. Kate (14 page)

“Who you calling, honey?”

“Buford Frampton.”

“Just tell the operator who you want.”

On the third ring, a woman answered. “You’ve got the senator’s. What you want?” she asked in a raspy voice.

“My name’s Shenandoah Coleman. I’m a reporter with the
Memphis Express
. I was wondering if I might come out and talk to the senator.”

“He ain’t here now. Should be home in about an hour. I reckon you could come on out then.”

A
n hour to kill. Better not waste it.
Shenandoah pursed her lips as she stepped into her car. She drove to Army’s garage and parked in front. Once inside, she saw Bobby working at a bench in the back. For once, the radio wasn’t playing. He was preoccupied and didn’t see or hear her walk up.

“Bobby,” she said, “I need some help.”

Startled, Bobby turned. “Change your mind?” he asked when he saw her.

“About supper? No. I want to hire you to teach me something.”

He leaned against the bench and continued to rub grease from his hands. “Now what might that be?”

“I want to learn how to do one of those funny turns.”

“A bootleg turn?”

“Yeah. Can you teach me?”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

He looked around the garage as if he expected Army any minute. “I reckon I can do that. No need to pay me, though.”

“I’d feel better if I did.”

“Well, come on, then. I guess you want to learn in your car.”

“Yes. Will my car do that?”

“Sure. It isn’t the car; it’s the driver. You’ve got a stick shift, don’t you?”

“Yes. Is that important?”

“It helps. Come on. I can’t be away from the garage too long.”

Shenandoah followed Bobby out through the big door. He lowered it and locked both it and the small door beside it. Then he walked to the driver’s side of the Chevy. Bobby slid behind the wheel, and Shenandoah handed him her key ring.

Bobby started the car, and soon they were on the road to Static.

“Why do you want to learn how to do this?” Bobby asked.

“Somebody ran me off the road the other day. I may need to get away from that idiot in that Dodge pickup.”

“Why you reckon that fellow is after you?”

“I don’t know. Could be a damn woman for all I know.”

“Okay,” Bobby said. “You ready?”

“Yeah.”

At that moment, Bobby was doing about sixty miles per hour. All of a sudden, he stepped on the emergency brake and spun the steering wheel to the left. The car fishtailed and came to a stop headed in the opposite direction. He slipped the transmission into low gear and roared off. Shenandoah screamed with delight.

“Stop and let me try,” she said with a big grin on her face.

They changed places, and Shenandoah gunned the Chevy down the straightaway. She was doing about forty when she stepped on the emergency brake and spun the wheel. The car spun around, but stopped crossways in the highway instead of completing the turn. She hit her head on the driver’s side window. Stunned, she looked at Bobby. “What did I do wrong?”

“It’s timing, girl. You’ve got to get the timing right. Let’s do it again.”

Shenandoah shook her head and gunned the Chevy. She slipped the transmission into low and pressed the accelerator to the floor-board. The new tires on the rear wheels left a long line of rubber on the asphalt as the car fishtailed down the straightaway. At forty miles an hour, she repeated the maneuver, and the car did a perfect one-eighty degree turn and stopped. She slipped the transmission into low gear and roared off in the opposite direction.

“I did it. Jesus, Bobby, I did it. Thank you so much.”

“That’s okay, girl. You ever want to run booze, you’ve got a job.”

* * *

Shenandoah pulled up in front of the senator’s house a little after one and rang the doorbell. As she stood on the wide porch looking out across the expanse of green lawn with its lush grass, the disparity between the senator’s wealth and the rest of the population of Parsons County seemed vast.

The door opened, and a woman came onto the porch. She wore a white apron with big pockets filled with small cucumbers, and she held a large butcher knife in her hand. “Come in, young lady,” said the woman, whom Shenandoah took to be Mrs. Frampton. “I ain’t got a minute to spare.”

Mrs. Frampton—or Edwina, as she asked Shenandoah to call her—had unruly gray hair, a plump face, and dark brown eyes. Shenandoah followed her down a long hallway that ended in a spacious country kitchen. Several pots were boiling on an oversized stove, and canning jars stood on the countertop like a high school band on parade. Large gallon jars of vinegar sat on a table next to the sink.

“Have a seat over there at the dinette, honey. Buford ought to be home any minute now. Your mother a canner?” Edwina asked as she emptied the cucumbers into a bowl.

“No, ma’am; I’ve never seen anyone can. What’re you making?”

“Sweet pickles now, bread-and-butter pickles later. Been canning for two days, and in this heat, if you can believe it.” She kept talking to Shenandoah over her shoulder as she worked. “Look out there on the back porch and bring me that bag of sugar, honey. Things are critical here. I got to work fast.”

Shenandoah suspected that Edwina had hoodwinked her into becoming her canning assistant. She wondered what one called such an individual. A cannee, perhaps.

Shenandoah stepped out onto the back porch where a big yellow bobtail cat lay asleep on the sack of sugar. When she reached for the sack, the cat yowled and took a swipe at Shenandoah with her claws extended. Seeing a broom, Shenandoah picked it up and pushed the animal off the sugar sack. The cat arched its back, fur bristling, and for a second it looked as if it might attack her. She snatched the sack as quickly as possible and retreated through the screen door.

As she stepped back into the kitchen, Edwina asked, “What took you so long? You tangle with Hercules?”

“The yellow cat?”

“That’s him.”

“What kind is he?”

“Yellow Manx. Damn good mouser. Got a foul temper, though.”

“While I’m waiting for the senator, could you share some thoughts on Dr. Kate Marlow? I’m sure you know who that is.”

“Everyone knows Dr. Kate. What you want to know?”

“Just something about her. An experience you’ve had with her. How you feel about her.”

“Hold on, honey, hold on. I’ve got a thirty-minute break coming. You’ll have plenty of time for me to tell you an earful about Dr. Kate. Just hold your horses.”

True to her word, a few minutes later Edwina took a large timer off the shelf and set it to ring in thirty minutes. After checking one of the pots, she removed her apron and hung it on a hook. “Come on, young lady, we’ll go to the living room. Should be a mite cooler in there.”

Shenandoah followed her down the hallway and entered a spacious room filled with beautiful English antiques. Edwina flopped down in a wing chair and motioned for Shenandoah to sit across from her. “Have a seat, honey, and we’ll talk a spell. What’d you say your name was?”

“Shenandoah Coleman.”

“From Beulah Land?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How’d you end up in Memphis?”

“After the war I went to college and got a degree in English. I’m a reporter.”

“I can’t remember a single Coleman who got herself a college education. Good for you. You go by Shenandoah?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You want to ask me questions, or should I just tell you about Dr. Kate?”

“I believe it would work best if you’d tell me about your experiences with her.”

Edwina pulled a small ottoman around to the front of her chair, took off her shoes, and placed her bare feet on top. Edwina’s feet, crippled by arthritis, had huge bunions at the base of both big toes. Her ankles were swollen and bluish. Though Shenandoah tried not to stare, Edwina caught her glance. “Sorry, Shenandoah, they ain’t pretty, and they hurt worse than they look. Dr. Kate tells me to keep them up as much as I can.

“I know Dr. Kate is who you’re interested in, but to tell you my story about her, I’ve got to tell you a little about the senator. You ain’t met Buford, have you?”

“No, ma’am. I saw him at the political rally today, but I’ve not met him.”

“Buford’s eighty-five and a damned good politician. We’ve been married sixty years. I was nineteen and him twenty-five when we got hitched. So, I ain’t no spring chicken myself. Buford is a big man in Tennessee politics, Crump’s man in the eastern part of the state. You don’t have to be no genius to see that this farm is a showplace, that there’s money here.

“Buford’s been a state senator for forty years and a darn good one. I’m proud of all he’s done for Tennessee. He’s smart—savvy, so to speak, to the ways of politics—and he’s a country lawyer, so he had a better education than me. High school was my limit. And our schools weren’t that good when I was a youngster. I know I kill the King’s English, but I ain’t alone. Most older folks up here don’t talk as good as we ought to, and we don’t know much about the outside world. Might say we’re backward that way.

“I stay home and run the farm, and he goes off to Nashville each session. He comes home on weekends, but otherwise he lives there and I live here when the legislature’s meeting.”

Edwina shifted her weight in the chair and pulled the hem of her dress down. She took a small handkerchief out of her blouse pocket and wiped the perspiration from her forehead. “Shenandoah, switch on that old fan over there and see if we can’t cool it down a bit.”

Shenandoah did so, and Edwina continued. “You might think all this ain’t got nothing to do with Dr. Kate, but it does. You got to understand Buford to appreciate this story. Buford in my mind has always been a good man, a Christian, but he’s prideful as well, and that can be a sin. We had three boys, all about two year apart. We named them Buford Junior, Winfred for my daddy, and Lester for Buford’s. Junior and Winfred grew up to be fine men in their own right. Buford Junior’s a lawyer in Nashville, and Winfred’s a CPA down in your city.

“When Lester came, it was obvious straight off that he weren’t right. For one thing, his head was too big. Then he didn’t walk when he should have, and he was slow to learn words. Dr. Walt, Kate’s daddy, told us that Lester was retarded, that he’d never be able to take care of himself other than the basics like dressing and eating.”

Shenandoah saw Edwina’s eyes begin to mist. She lowered her head to the spiral notebook and jotted some entries. Shenandoah couldn’t remember anything in all the articles she had read about Buford Frampton having a retarded son. Learning this fact alone was worth her trip to the senator’s.

Edwina cleared her throat. “I was young then, and I depended on Buford to make all the decisions. What Dr. Walt told us crushed Buford. He took Lester and me to Nashville, Memphis, Louisville, Birmingham, and Atlanta for other opinions. They were all the same. Lester wouldn’t even be able to go to school. We’d have to look after him all his natural life.

“Buford went into this long period of melancholy, didn’t talk to me for days on end. Wouldn’t pick up little Lester or play with him. As the years passed by, Buford came out of his sadness, but he never paid any attention to the child. He spent all his time with Buford Junior and Winfred, leaving Lester to me. Buford wouldn’t let me take the poor child to town even—didn’t want folks to know we had a retarded son. His pride just wouldn’t let him.

“Even when Lester got grown and didn’t cause neither of us a day’s worry, Buford still wouldn’t have a thing to do with him. Then Dr. Walt died and Kate became our doctor. That’s when all hell broke loose.”

Edwina started to get up. “I got to get me some ice water, honey. I’m too hot to sit here without some.”

“Keep your seat, Edwina. I’ll get it for you.”

When Shenandoah returned, Edwina took the glass and swallowed the water in one gulp. “Thanks, honey, I needed that. Now where was I?”

“Dr. Kate became your doctor and all hell broke loose.”

* * *

Edwina Frampton awoke to the sound of a crash coming from her son’s room. She got out of bed, threw on a robe, and ran down the hallway to check on him. When she found him, Lester had his bed covers wrapped around him, his face was red, and he was shaking all over. She felt his forehead, and it was hot as a firecracker. The convulsion stopped just as she pulled the blanket and sheet off him. She shook his shoulder, but he didn’t wake up.

She ran to the phone and asked the operator to get Dr. Kate on the line. When the doctor answered, Edwina said, “Come to the house as quick as you can, Dr. Kate. Lester’s had a convulsion fit.”

“Is his temperature elevated?”

“He feels awfully hot to the touch. Please hurry.”

“Fill the tub with cold water, throw in all the ice cubes you can find, and put Lester in. I’ll be there in a few minutes,” Dr. Kate said.

Fifteen minutes later, Dr. Kate knocked on the front door. Swinging it open, Edwina said, “Thank God, you’re here, Dr. Kate. I’m worried sick.”

“Take me to Lester.”

The two women rushed down the hallway to the bathroom where Dr. Kate found Lester unconscious in a tub filled with floating ice cubes. She opened her doctor’s bag and removed her stethoscope. “Let some of the water out so I can listen to Lester’s chest,” she instructed. Then she placed the instrument on the man’s ribcage and listened carefully while Edwina pulled the rubber plug out of the bathtub drain.

Pulling the stethoscope from her ears, Dr. Kate turned to Edwina. “Lester’s lungs are full of fluid,” she said. “He has a severe case of pneumonia. I’m going to give him a penicillin shot and call an ambulance. He has to get to the hospital in Livingston tonight.”

Edwina frowned and looked at the floor.

“What?”

“Buford won’t let me do it.”

Dr. Kate sat on the bathroom floor and stared at the older woman. “What’s going on, Edwina?”

“Nobody knows about Lester. That’s the way it’s always been. Buford wants it that way. He helped me get Lester into the tub, but he won’t let me send Lester to the hospital.”

“Help me get Lester out of the tub,” Dr. Kate said.