The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Driving on, Doc pointed out the towering gristmill behind the general store. “Been shut down fer some years.” He pointed to the opposite side of the road. “But that’s still runnin, sort of.” There was a small hotel, or rather actually a large house, two stories, three front doors, which had a little HOTEL sign over its entrance. We passed an abandoned house next to it before Doc turned the car into his own yard, before a modest cottage with a sign out front, C. U SWAIN, M.D. DOCTOR OF HUMAN MEDICINE. The house’s porch was practically right on the road, and what yard there was clung to both sides of the building and was littered with free-ranging chickens. As Doc got out of the car, he was greeted by a large, slobbering, black-spotted hound dog, and, ruffling the dog’s neck, he said to me, “This here’s Galen, not the one I was tellin ye about, not the original Galen, who, come to think of it, wasn’t the original Galen hisself. No, this here’s Galen Four or Galen Five, I forget which.” Then the doctor directed my attention to a house across the road, where another shingle was posted on a stake: J.M. PLOWRIGHT, M.D. FAMILY MEDICINE. “There’s my competition,” Doc said, “jist in case ye need a secont opinion. But I was you, I’d shore hope I don’t.” Then he pointed at two more buildings: next to his house was an abandoned shop, flat-roofed, constructed of stonemasonry. “That there used to be the money-bank,” he said. “Got robbed back in twenty-two. Remind me to tell ye the story.” Then he pointed again, one last time, at a building up the road, across another branch road from the bank, which was not abandoned but had wagons parked in front and a couple of horses tethered at its post. “Stay More ’pears to be still big enough to support two physicians, more or less, and it’s also big enough to support two general stores. That’un there is run by the nicest gal ye’d ever hope to meet, name of Latha Bourne.”

  Doc Swain helped me rise up out of the car and climb the porch and into the front room of his house. “This is what passes for my office,” he said, indicating the room, which indeed looked professional enough and equipped enough to be a rural doctor’s clinic. He supported me onward to an adjoining room containing a narrow bed, a bedside table, and a player piano. The walls and ceiling were covered with tongue-and-groove boards painted a not unpleasant shade of tan. “And this here is what will jist have to pass for my hoss-pittle,” he said. “Let’s jist plunk ourselfs down right here,” and he helped me down onto the bed, which had a mattress stuffed with goose down and was infinitely comfortable. In my condition, which seemed to be growing worse despite the prospect of medical attention, I was grateful for any little thing that eased my pain.

  “Now, Doc, I’d better go feed my livestock and milk the cow,” Doc Swain declared, “unless there’s anything else I can do fer ye right now.”

  “Doc, you don’t suppose,” I managed to request, “you could let me have a little drink of somethin?”

  “Water? Sody pop? How about milk? You’re gonna have to drink two quarts of milk ever day, but I’ll have to get some from Bess first.” I realized the female he referred to was his cow.

  “Somethin hard to ease my misery,” I suggested. “A drap of corn, maybe?”

  He smiled his kindly smile. “Wal, I’ll tell ye,” he said. “Gener’ly it wouldn’t make no difference nor do ye no harm, but I’m a-fixin to give ye somethin to he’p ye sleep, and they don’t mix. When ye wake up, I’ll see if I caint let ye have a drap or two of Chism’s Dew, best corn on airth.”

  Doc Swain filled a hypodermic syringe and injected me with something that indeed put me into a deep, deep sleep. But when I woke up, it was still daylight. I figured I must not have slept very long, because it had been getting on to suppertime when I’d arrived. I waited for a good while to see if the doctor would check in on me, and then I hollered, “Anybody home?”

  Instantly Doc appeared, and said, “Wal, you shore had a good sleep, now didn’t ye? How you feelin?”

  “It’s still day,” I observed.

  “It’s still day all right,” he agreed. “But it’s midday of the day after I put ye under.” He reached beneath my bed and drew out a thunder mug, or chamber pot. “Use this if ye need it, and I’ll give ye a snort of Chism’s Dew, lessen ye’d keer fer some breakfast first.” He went away while I used the chamber pot, into which I was able only to urinate. He noticed this on his return, and said, “Wal, Gram Dinsmore’s ellum juice seems to be a-wearin off. You aint got the trots no more.” He took my temperature, my blood pressure, and ran me through the routine of assorted palpations and reflex-checking taps with his little silver hammer. “You know, Gram Dinsmore did the right thing, I reckon,” he said. “And even her diagnosis was correct. Blame if ye aint got the typhoid fever. I took some of your blood while you was asleep and ran a test on it. Wal, Gram Dinsmore aint such a bad ole yarb doctor, such as they come. ‘Many an old wife or country woman doth often more good with a few known and common garden herbs than our bombast Physicians with all their prodigious, sumptuous, far-fetched, rare, conjectural medicines.’ That’s what ole Burton writ, in his ’Natomy of Melancholy.” The doctor paused, then fixed me with a keen look. “You know ole Burton, don’t ye?”

  Certainly I knew Robert Burton, although, as I was eventually to confess to Doc Swain, I had never managed to read the entire thousand-odd pages of The Anatomy of Melancholy, into which I had first dipped when I was working on my master’s in psychology at Clark University. But at the moment I was rattled: not because it surprised me to discover his familiarity with that seventeenth-century forerunner of Freud, but because he seemed to be casting suspicion upon my disguise as a mere backwoods durgen. It was a disguise of which I was proud, and which I wasn’t ready to drop, and I pretended innocence. “Burton who?” I said.

  “Oh, let’s not fool ourselfs, Doc,” he said. And when I continued attempting to maintain my look of ignorance—not very successfully, I suppose—he took one of my hands and turned it over, palm up, and called my attention to the blisters and abrasions on it. “Yore raw paws was the first thing I noticed about ye,” he said. “You aint no simple farmer nor woodsman, now air ye?”

  He had me there, but I stubbornly clung to my imposture, and even said some fool thing like “Now what on airth gives ye sech a notion as thet?”

  “Wal, Doc, I hate to tell ye,” he said, “but last night while ye was deep asleep, I took the liberty of lookin through yore tote sack, and I seen all them scribblins on all that paper in thar, with my own name mentioned frequent. Main reason I done it was I suspicioned ye might be a revenuer in disguise, and we’ve had some problems lately with them bastards. You shore aint no revenuer, neither, air ye? You wouldn’t be writin down my name, because I aint never distilled any corn myself, nor had any dealins in it. So do ye mind tellin me jist what it is yo’re after, writin my name all over those sheets?”

  I decided to cease trying to deceive him. “Okay, Doc, you’ve got me, I reckon,” I said. “I’ve just been a-wanderin around the country, tryin to pick up a good story hither and yon. Those sheets you seen was jist some notes I made on what Cassie Whitter told me about you.”

  He studied me quizzically, then smiled. “Kin ye earn a livin jist a-gatherin up folks’ stories like thet?”

  I laughed. “Jist barely.”

  “How? You aint one of these here novelists, air ye?” He pronounced the word with disparagement, as if he might have had an encounter or two with the products of a novelist.

  “Nope,” I said. “I aint published no novels.”

  “Do ye write it up fer the newspapers and get paid fer it?”

  “I’ve written some books that weren’t fiction,” I declared, “Although I haven’t been paid much for them. Most recently, I wrote a pair of books called The Ozarks: An American Survival of Primitive Society and Ozark Mountain Folks,” I felt pretty strange, telling him my titles, as if I were Roger Tory Peterson trying to tell a bird that I’d written a field guide in which the bird was included. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard of ’em?”

  Doc shook his head. “‘Surv
ival of primitive society,’ d’ye say?” he repeated. “I never thought of it thataway, but I ’low as maybe yo’re right. I reckon we’re pretty primitive compared with the rest of the world. I reckon we’re still a-livin the way our forefathers had to live ’cause they didn’t have any better, nor know any better.” Doc Swain produced a demijohn and a pair of glass tumblers, into which he poured a liquid that was not clear and white like conventional moonshine but yellowed as if aged in a cask. He handed me one, and clanked his against mine: “Here’s lookin at ye. See if ye think this here whiskey aint a survival of primitive society.”

  It was indeed the best whiskey I’d had in a long, long time, and I told him so. In return, he told me a little about its origin: a family named Chism, living up in the mountains east of Stay More (he had pointed out their house on the trip from Cassie’s), had for generations been producing a superior moonshine which…but what am I doing?—trying to explain “Chism’s Dew” to you, who practically invented the name for it. You’ll just have to stop me whenever I get to telling this story in such a way I forget who I’m talking to. Sometimes I’m inclined to think I’m just talking to gentlepeople in general.

  Anyhow, Doc and me had more than one glass apiece, and I told him a little of my background: born in Pittsburg, Kansas; first visited the Ozarks at the age of seven; taught biology at Pittsburg High School after getting my M.A. in psychology at Clark University in Massachusetts; served as a private in the infantry during the World War but got medically discharged without seeing any action; moved after the war to the Ozark village of Pineville up in Missouri and started my first experiments in collecting backwoods lore; interrupted by an attempt to get a legitimate Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Kansas, gave it up, and moved back to Pineville and lived there ever since, except for those months I lived in Hollywood the previous year. I concluded this capsule autobiography by declaring, “Now my throat’s getting sore. Am I talkin too much, or do ye suppose the liquor is causing it?”

  “That’s jist part of yore disease,” he said. “But the liquor ought to be he’pin yore appetite. Are you hungry yit?”

  Sure enough, my appetite was returning, for the first time in several days. When I acknowledged this, Doc cupped his mouth and called, “Ro-weener!” A woman came into the room, a fortyish woman in a simple flower-print dress tight on her sturdy but shapely frame. She was not a homely woman but she wasn’t exactly pretty. I assumed she was the doctor’s wife, but he introduced us, saying, “This here’s all I’ve got in the way of a nurse, and I can only keep her part-time, but she’s the best there is. She’ll be takin keer of ye most of the time. The thing about typhoid is, recoverin from it depends more on good nursin than on doctorin. Rowener can hep ye a good sight more’n I could do.”

  “Right proud to meet ye, Doctor Randolph,” Rowena said, and sized me up, or, since I was still reclining, sized me sideways.

  “He aint a doctor doctor,” Doc Swain said to his nurse. “They jist call ’im Doc as a nickname, maybe on account of he’s sort of a perfesser.”

  Rowena sniffed. “Have you boys been drinkin?”

  Doc Swain coughed. “Wal, uh, I figgered it mought hep his appetite, ye know, and shore enough, he feels like eatin, first time in days. Do ye reckon ye could skeer him up some grub?”

  “What about yore appetite?” she said to him, but disappeared and began banging things around in some distant kitchen.

  “I’m fixin to mosey over to the store to get my mail,” Doc said. “Wouldje like fer me to send a postcard to yore wife or sweetheart or anybody out thar in the world of society?”

  “How long am I gonna be laid up in this bed?” I asked.

  “Hard to say,” he said. “Yore spleen is enlarged, and we’ll have to see if it shrinks back to normal. Any day now, you may jist have a touch of delirium or stupor that could last awhile. But iffen ye don’t git complications, like a hemorrhage or perforation, you mought jist be up and about in a week or two.”

  I sighed. I debated with myself whether to send a note to Marie, but decided against it. I hadn’t sent her anything since leaving home, and I doubted that she was expecting anything.

  I took advantage of my doctor’s absence to examine the contents of his little “hoss-pittle” room, which would be my home for the next week, or more: the few pictures on the wall, a moonlit landscape painted on glass with some kind of garish pigment, a chromolithographed still life of wildflowers, and a glass-enclosed framing of pinned butterflies of various shapes and colors, none of them rare, just chosen and captured for their variety of color. There were stray pieces of furniture: a cedar chest, a rocker with splint-woven seat and back, and a birch washstand with stoneware pitcher and basin. But the dominant piece of furniture was a player piano. Its lid was closed, and dust covered, and the dozen or so rolls that were needed to make it play were stacked atop the piano and also collecting dust. The floor of the room was covered with a cheap Axminster carpet in a floral design, and my bedframe had cast-iron foot-and headboards.

  Rowena brought me a tray with a plate of scrambled eggs and toast, and a large glass of milk. She removed my unfinished tumbler of Chism’s Dew. “When ye git done eatin that,” she declared, “I aim to give ye a shave.”

  Doc returned from the post office, leafing through his only mail, the local county weekly newspaper and the latest issue of the American Medical Association Bulletin. Then he began opening a large bottle of castor oil and poured into a tumbler a larger amount of it than he had of the Chism’s Dew. “There aint no medicine specific fer typhoid,” he said. “The most I can hope to do is clean out yore system and keep ye comfy ’til yore strength comes back.”

  “I’d druther drink coal awl than castor awl,” I declared, truthfully. And then, as if to get under his skin, I said, “Gram Dinsmore’s slippery elm juice would do me a sight more good and be easier to drink.”

  “Iffen it was peeled the right way!” he said. “Here, let’s take a big swaller of this.” He held the glass to my lips.

  I took a small sip of the thick liquid and tried to swallow, but it was truly awful, and brought back some of the most unpleasant memories of my childhood, when my mother would regularly make me take the stuff, and I had thought that it was some kind of vicious, viscid machine oil for the purpose of lubricating casters, those little wheels under furniture. “What do they make this stuff out of, anyhow?” I said, more rhetorically than because I wanted to know.

  “The seeds of a plant called Palma Christi,” he said. “Hit aint but a harmless purge. Hit’s the best thing fer loosenin up yore bowels without aggervatin ’em. Here, let’s have another big swaller,” and he held the glass to my mouth again.

  After I got another swallow down, I asked, out of curiosity about his knowledge, “How does the stuff work? What does it do to you?”

  “Hit’s got a toxic sustance called ricin in it,” he said, trying not to sound pedantic. “The ricinoleic acid will give yore intestines a fierce peristalsis. I reckon ye know what peristalsis is.” When I nodded, not so much because I really did know as in a kind of surprise at his use of the word, he continued, “Wal, that will liquefy and soften yore stools.”

  “But I’ve already got diarrhea!” I protested.

  He smiled, and shook his head. “You did have,” he said. “But you don’t, no more. And anyhow, the good thing about castor oil is, it’s also a cure for diarrhea!” He held the glass to my mouth. “Come on here now, my friend. Let’s drink up the rest of this.”

  “Couldn’t we mix it with some Chism’s Dew?” I suggested.

  “And spoil good whiskey?” he demanded.

  So I had to finish off the glass of the stuff and I surprised myself by not vomiting. And I actually got to feeling some better. That, as I recall, was the time that Doc Swain told me the little anecdote, which I would later borrow for my 1965 collection of jests, Hot Springs and Hell, and which you borrowed five years later in your novel Lightning Bug, having your hero Every Dill tell it to
your heroine Latha Bourne. I forget just how Every told it, but this was the way I told it: Doc Swain gave an old woman some medicine and he told her, “Keep a close watch, and see what passes.” Next day he came back, and she was feeling a little better. “Did anything out of the ordinary pass?” asked the doctor. “No,” says the old woman, “just a ox team, a load of hay, and two foreigners on horseback.” The doctor just looked at her. “Well,” says he, “it aint no wonder you’re a-feelin better.”

  I guffawed despite my bodily aches, and I thought that tale, which I believe actually happened, was one of the most hilarious anecdotes I’d ever heard, and I asked on the spot for my writing materials, so I could copy it down. And afterwards there developed a kind of routine between Doc Swain and me, in which each morning he would ask me, “Did anything out of the ordinary pass?” and I would come back with something like “a mule team hauling logs,” or “a girl rolling a hoop,” or “a shepherd and eighteen sheep.” And he would always wink and say, “Well, it aint no wonder you’re a-feelin better.” And I actually was feeling much better, day by day.

  But right now, I’m commencing to feel a mite weary, and too hoarse to talk more, and the nurse is gonna bring our supper in just a little while. Maybe I’d best wait and tell you some more of this tale tomorrow. You will come again tomorrow, won’t you? I haven’t bored you yet, have I?

  Chapter two

  I thought you’d come back. Tell me if I’m wrong, but you came back not just out of friendship, or politeness, or even a desire to hear what I have to say about your patented exclusive real estate, the world of Stay More, but because I still know, after all these years, how to tell a story, and to tell it in such a way that you can believe it.