Afoot, Colvin was stuck in Stay More…not a bad place to be stuck, come to think of it, in fact the best place on earth to be stuck, but Colvin still remembered too vividly the beating at the schoolhouse and the injunction never to return. That was the third factor giving him pause, the other two being the presence on Main Street not only of the office and clinic of Uncle Alonzo, the man presumed to be his father, but also, directly across the street from it, another office and clinic, that of John Mabrey Plowright, a Stay More native who had done gone and apprenticed himself to an actual M.D. up at Harrison, and after a year’s apprenticeship and perhaps some mail-order lessons from a St. Louis diploma mill, had erected a stake in his front yard with a shingle hanging from it: J.M. PLOWRIGHT, M.D. FAMILY MEDICINE. Colvin stood on Main Street for a while, staring at this shingle, trying to determine how “family medicine” was any different from any other kind, unless possibly it meant as opposed to medicine of individuals who didn’t live in families, and also thinking about the circumstance whereby the population of Stay More had now grown to the point where it could support two physicians—not a bad idea, because it meant the two would keep each other in line, provide healthy competition, offer second opinions, and ideally assist each other in complicated operations, not to mention being “on call” when the other had gone fishing or something.
Then Colvin turned, climbed the steps of the other doctor, knocked, and when the man appeared, said, smiling sweetly, “Howdy, Paw.”
Alonzo said, “Why, howdy there, Col boy,” and then he coughed and inquired, “What didje call me?”
“‘Paw,’ Paw,” Colvin said, like naming the Asimina triloba tree, which was overabundant in the woods and fields of Stay More. “Kie threw me out, Paw. I reckon he’s done already taught me all there is to know about doctoring.”
“Is that a fack, now?” Alonzo said. “You don’t mean to tell me.” He coughed again, and Colvin, detecting that the breath was also bad, realized it wasn’t merely from nervousness or discomfort; his father likely had a bronchiectasis, but damned if Colvin was going to write prescriptions for lipiodol and iodide of potash for a man capable of writing his own. “So where are you off to?” Alonzo asked.
“I was thinkin about Californy,” Colvin admitted. “But my horse broke down. You could either give me another horse, or you could move over and make room for a third doctor in this town.”
“Hellfire, boy, didn’t Kie warn ye to stay out of my territory? He tole me to stay out of his’n, and I don’t aim to let ye practice in mine. I’ve already got all the rivalry I can handle from Jack Plowright across the road yonder.”
“Tum bene fortis equus reserato carcere currit,” Colvin began to recite, because doesn’t any kid want to impress his daddy? “Cum quos prætereat, quosque sequatur, habet.” And when Alonzo failed to look impressed, only annoyed, Colvin offered the translation, “A good horse runs better if he’s got other horses to beat out.”
“I caint afford to give ye a new horse,” Alonzo said. “You’ll jist have to find some other way to git to Californy.”
“That aint what I’m talkin about,” Colvin said. “I’m talkin about maybe you and Jack Plowright both would be better doctors if you had a real thoroughbred to have to run against.”
“Shit on a stick!” Alonzo grew red with anger. “Sonny boy, you aint but a little spadger still wet behind the ears! You caint be more’n what? Fifteen? Sixteen year old? You think anybody would trust their life to you? Hell, you couldn’t even—” Alonzo coughed, gagged, spit up some blood into his handkerchief, and then had another paroxysm of coughing. Colvin was sure it was generalized bronchiectasis, but he wanted to be able to discount emphysema in association with it.
“Dad, what are you a-takin for that there cough?” he asked.
“Jist horehound, and a bit of tea from butterfly weed root,” Alonzo said.
“Could I see yore hand.” Colvin took his father’s hand and checked it for clubbed fingers and hypertrophic osteoarthropathy, apparently negative. “Doctor,” Colvin said respectfully, “if ye don’t mind, I’d like to do a bronchoscopy.”
“Say what?” Alonzo said.
“Doctor, we need to rule out any furrin bodies in yore trachea and bronchi,” Colvin suggested, “if ye could lend me the borry of yore bronchoscope.”
“Aint got ary of them newfangled gadgets,” Alonzo admitted.
“Do ye reckon Jack Plowright might have one?”
“Maybe, but I aint about to ask ’im fer it.”
“Then I’d best do it fer ye, Paw,” Colvin said. “I’ll be right back.” And before his father could stop him, he had gone out and crossed the road and knocked on the other doctor’s door, and when the man answered, the man who would become his lifelong competition and his nemesis, Colvin squared his shoulders and said, “Doctor Plowright, sir, I’m Doctor Colvin Swain, nephew of the good gentleman across the street, who, I’m a-feared, may have contracted dilatation of the bronchi with secondary infection, most likely unilateral bronchiectasis of the lower lobes.”
“Serves that bastard right!” Jack Plowright exclaimed. “Jist what he needs!”
“My bag is missin its Hampton bronchoscope,” Colvin declared. “Could ye see yore way to lendin me the borry of your’n, fer jist a secont?”
“Wal, I don’t rightly know as I’ve got ary,” Doc Plowright said. “What do they look lak?”
Colvin described the instrument and offered to help Doc Plowright search among his apparatus for it, and sure enough, there it was, although it wasn’t the Hampton but the Crowell model, which would do. “I don’t reckon it’s been sterilized, if ye aint never used it?” Colvin asked, and then he said, “Thanks a load. I’ll be back with it lickety-split, afore ye even notice it missin,” and he took the instrument to his father’s and sterilized it, and said, “Doctor, if you’ll be so good as to open wide, and hold real still…” and he performed the bronchoscopy, ruling out foreign obstructions. He borrowed his father’s microscope to examine the sputum and determine which organisms were involved in the infectious process. Then he mixed up a dose of wild cherry syrup with potassium iodide in it, administered a teaspoon to his father, and told him, “Now, Doctor, I’m a-gorn to have to put ye into a position for postural drainage.”
And he showed his father how to hang over the side of the bed with his head on the floor, so that gravity would drain the pus from the dilated bronchi. “How long’ve I gotta stay this way?” Alonzo asked.
“Months, even years maybe,” the young doctor prognosed, and although he did not mean that his father had to stay constantly in that awkward upside-down position, he did honestly mean that his father might have to carry out the procedure every morning and evening for a very long time.
While his father was hanging upside down over the edge of the bed, Colvin took over his routines, borrowed his black bag and his horse, and successfully treated a variety of Stay Morons for a variety of ailments: sigmoid diverticulitis, tetany, mercury poisoning, gout, scurvy, hookworm, whooping cough, asthma, diphtheria, and rabies. Although there was much skepticism among the citizenry over Colvin’s qualifications and credentials, owing largely to his extreme youth, a singular fact of his practice was soon noticed and widely voiced: he never lost a case. Not one of his patients ever failed to be cured, not even those suffering with renal failure, anthrax, snakebite, general paresis, and gunshot wound.
So famous and popular did Colvin become that the only way Doc Jack Plowright could hope to compete with him was by attempting to beat him to the patient. This became literally a horse race in which Doc Plowright would jump atop his nag, Lucifer, and try to reach the patient’s house before Doc Colvin Swain, riding his dad’s sorrel mare, Sadie, could get there. Stay Morons took to pari-mutuel betting on which of the two would win. Lucifer actually was the better animal, and often Doc Plowright arrived first, but just as often he made the wrong diagnosis or prescribed the wrong treatment, so people who sent to the village for a doctor learned to
instruct the messenger to be sure and give Doc Swain’s mare Sadie a good drink of coffee mixed with corn whiskey in order to speed her up. Doc Plowright began to hate the younger Doc Swain as much as, or more than, he had ever hated the older Doc Swain, and he would spend the rest of his life dividing his time between his patients and his attempt to sabotage his competition. Indeed, the only way he managed to keep any patients was by charging only half as much as the Swains did, whatever they charged, even if it was produce or livestock. If you had to give one of the Doc Swains a whole hog to get your appendix removed, Doc Plowright would do it for you for only a piglet.
Over the years, Doc Plowright became known as the poor folks’ physician, and the Doc Swains were viewed as limiting their practice to “quality.”
Socially, no such distinctions existed. Socially, Colvin Swain saved the life of Oren Duckworth and thereby earned his right to free mingling with those who had originally driven him away from the Stay More school yard. Oren lost the ability to breathe, and while Doc Plowright treated him for pulmonary disorders and the older Doc Swain attempted to treat him for hemolytic anemia, Colvin’s stethoscope told him that it was congestive heart failure, specifically left ventricular, and taking the patient’s history, deduced that it was associated with syphilitic disease of the aortic valve. Colvin sedated Oren with chloral hydrate, and then he addressed the assembled family: “Do any of y’uns know what foxglove looks lak?” Oren’s sister Dulcie was sent out to gather a quantity of the leaves of the foxglove flower, from which Colvin extracted the glucoside digitalin, and administered it to Oren along with one of Kie’s favorite incantations, with pronounced beneficial results. Oren, recovering, said, “Doc, I shore am sorry fer that time I whupped ye at the schoolhouse.” And Oren’s pretty sister Dulcie walked him to his horse and told him, “If ever you’d like to have a sweetie, I reckon I could step out a time or two.”
But “stepping out,” in Dulcie’s view as well as that of the typical Stay More girl, did not necessarily mean leaving the house. For all of the still-told stories of how the older Doc Swain had cajoled hordes of females into the back brush and the hayloft and even the creek bed, the younger Doc Swain was to discover, when he finally had a spare moment to experiment with courtship, that the best he could hope for was a usually chaperoned situation in which some member of Dulcie’s family was nearby, possibly in the same room, while Colvin and Dulcie attempted to make conversation. They had little to talk about. After discussing the weather and the chances of rain or continued drought, they would attempt to tell the latest joke that they had picked up, but most of Dulcie’s jokes were silly or simple, and most of Colvin’s were somewhat risky, and neither of them laughed at the other’s jokes. Dulcie, having observed that her mother and her mother’s friends loved to discuss their illnesses and physical problems, tried to get Colvin to talk about his patients, but he never forgot Kie’s fifth precept, namely, that the good physician never discloses any information about his patients, so Colvin would not even tell Dulcie who he had been treating, let alone for what. Usually, Colvin and Dulcie sat in silence until it was time for him to go.
“Paw,” Colvin asked Alonzo bluntly one day, “how did ye ever sprunch a gal in the old days?”
“The old days?” Alonzo said indignantly. “Why, I’ll have ye to know that jist last night I shagged Bessie Mae Murrison two times!”
“How d’ye do it? How d’ye talk ’em into it?”
“Aw, I don’t rightly do a whole lot of talkin. There aint that much to talk about. I jist sort of gentle ’em down into a laying position.”
But when Colvin attempted to gentle Dulcie into a horizontal, or even a reclining position, it seemed to ruffle her dignity, and she snapped upright like his very manhood had been snapped upright by the thought of what he was hoping to do.
After many months of an unexciting and uneventful romance, Colvin finally gave himself a strong dose of veronal, a barbituate good for relaxing the inhibitions, and he said, speaking in that same calm, soothing way he addressed all his patients, “Dulcie, honey-bunch sweetums, I sure would like to interduce my membrum virile betwixt yore nymphae.”
“Where is my nimfy?” she inquired, but he had not taken enough veronal to give him the courage to say, let alone to point out.
Dr. Colvin Swain spent a few years palpating the breasts and manipulating the vaginas of many females, but always only in a professional manner that may or may not have gratified the patient but did nothing for his own biological urges. He was ever mindful of Kie’s fourth precept, namely, never to seduce a patient, but Stay More, not to mention adjacent areas of Newton County, was teeming with females who weren’t his patients. He was nineteen years old, and still a virgin, when he blurted to his father one day, “Dad, did you ever commit rape?”
Alonzo tried to recall. “Wal, I reckon it ’pends on how ye’d look at it. Who did you have in mind to do it with?”
“Anybody!” Colvin said. “It’s either got to be a she-person or a sheep!”
“Son, you don’t mean to tell me it’s been that long since you done it last?”
“I aint never done it!”
When he had recovered from his shock, Alonzo Swain began to feel great pity for his son, and to realize it had been a mistake to have raised Colvin in the household of an old bachelor like Kie Raney who never had any women around the place. Forthwith, he arranged for Colvin to meet up with Della Sue Kimber, who lived with her sister Rosa up toward Parthenon. Both sisters had reputations, but it was Della who had not only put out for Alonzo on occasion but had done so in such a way that he knew poor Colvin wouldn’t have to do the talking, or the gentling, or any kind of work whatsoever. “Just don’t tell her you’re my boy,” Alonzo requested. “And I guarantee ye, you shore won’t even need to think about raping her.”
So Colvin went to see Della, who was maybe nine or ten years older than he was, but still right sightly and shapely for a woman of her years and experience. “You git yourself right in here and give me a big kiss!” she hollered, like he was her long-lost boyfriend, and she took him in and held him real tight and gave him such a kiss as would even revivify the jemmison of an old invalid like me, and for a young feller like him he had one on him that could’ve serviced a giraffe. It didn’t need any excitation, but she put her hand right on it and commenced squeezing and rubbing, and said, “My, my, my, let’s us have a little peek at thet thar whopping sockdolager!” and next thing he knew she was unbuckling his belt and taking down his pants, and hollering over her shoulder, “Rosa, there’s enough for both of us!” In nothing flat all three of ’em was naked as jaybirds and they had Colvin spread out on the bed. “You kin go first. You’re oldest,” Della said to Rosa, but Della couldn’t wait herself, and while Rosa commenced climbing atop that flagpole, Della went on kissing him and putting one of his hands onto her twitchet.
Colvin was admiring how white Rosa’s legs were, but then just as she was about to lower herself atop his jemmison, it occurred to him that the whiteness of the legs might be caused by a clot in the outer veins of the thigh, or thrombophlebitis. He ought to get Rosa’s legs elevated onto some pillows, paint them with some ichthyol, put a hot-water bottle over them, maybe even give her a shot of whiskey. “Pardon me, ma’am,” he said in that maddeningly polite physician’s voice of his, just at the instant he was about to lose his virginity, “but I’m afraid you might have phlebitis.” Withdrawing his hand from Della’s groin, he took a sniff of it and then a sharp glance at Della’s twitchet, and declared, “And you, ma’am, it appears you may have caught yourself a case of trichomoniasis. Do you have any itching down there? Or a kind of greenish yeller discharge? It aint nothing too serious, like some of the poxes. Nothing to worry about, but it is catching, you know.”
Colvin was able to clear up Della’s disease in just two weeks with sitz baths and a vaginal application of gentian violet and vinegar. But Rosa’s problem required six weeks of treatment, and he nearly lost her to a pulmonary embo
lism, since he lacked anticoagulants…but he never lost a case, and he stuck with it, although she had postphlebitic symptoms for quite some time thereafter, and didn’t feel like joining her sister when the time finally came for them to pick up where they’d left off, or been interrupted, in that bed. Della tried to go it alone, but discovered that she somehow was not able to induce that “whopping sockdolager” that had equipped Colvin earlier on. She played with it and even put it in her mouth, but the only excuse Colvin could offer for its refusal to stand up and become useful was that he was possibly working too hard, although he privately surmised that he’d developed some kind of aversion to sticking it into a postvulvovaginitic orifice.
Alonzo Swain, learning of his son’s continuing virginity, told Colvin that he ought to grow some upper lip hair in order to make himself more desirable to women. At twenty, Colvin still looked like a teenager. He was handsome. He was tall and dark. But he looked like a kid. All of the other men of Stay More, without exception, had full mustaches. It was the vogue of the day, perhaps inspired by the nation’s current president, Teddy Roosevelt. Alonzo’s own mustache covered his entire mouth and often got chewed up at mealtimes. And women could not resist him.
So Colvin obeyed his father, and gave up shaying. He tried to be a dutiful son. The two Swain doctors lived together in the house on Main Street, and they had to accommodate each other, as bachelors must. (Since Alonzo did not like Colvin’s snake, Drakon, Colvin did not let Drakon have free run, or free slither, of the house, but kept him confined when Alonzo was around, and only took him out for walks, or slithers, at night. In return, Alonzo agreed to stop using the unsterilized Prince as a scalpel, toenail cleaner, and stirrer of medicine.) Both Swain doctors belonged to the Ingledewville Lodge, No. 642, of the Free and Accepted Masonic Order, and they attended meetings together in a back room of the Ingledew store, and they studied their Masonic texts together, making of Masonry a religion in substitute for any other beliefs they lacked. Like so many physicians, they found it difficult to subscribe to the notion of a Supreme Being, although, as I’ll have to tell you later on, Colvin did finally come to believe in God, in a way. At the age of twenty, however, all he believed in was the gods of medicine. And he believed in the goddesses of the Fair Sex, and kept on hoping to find one that he could do it with.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 50
