Christy

by Catherine Marshall

  “Oh, yes! They look just my size!” With difficulty I restrained my curiosity.

  “Better slip out of those wet shoes too. Here’s a pair of my carpet slippers.”

  I followed him to the room he indicated and he left me there, shutting the door after me. It was his bedroom. There was a pine four-poster bed with an unbleached homespun spread hastily pulled up over the voluminous featherbed, and a cherry chest of drawers. An open cupboard with medical books piled in it, a small wooden chest, and one hooked rug completed the furnishings of the room.

  I spread the garments on the bed. The dainty underclothes were handmade with lace and narrow ribbon. When I stepped out of the wet riding skirt into the bloomers (though slightly old-fashioned) they fit as though they had been made for me. As I picked up the dress, a fragrance—woodruff, I thought it was—came from its folds. I had caught a whiff of that somewhere else recently, but I couldn’t place it. The dress was of barred muslin, a summer costume, but I could stay close to the fire.

  My return to the living room interrupted the flow of masculine voices. Both men looked up inquiringly. “These are perfect!” I was holding my wet clothes at arm’s length. “Could I dry these by the fire?”

  “Sure.” Dr. MacNeill took the garments. “David tells me that you have to be at Lufty Branch crossroads by three.” The doctor looked at the clock on the mantle. “It’s two-thirty now.”

  David sat there considering, then made a decision. “That heavy wool won’t dry in fifteen minutes, Christy. And you can’t go out in this weather in a cotton dress. You stay here and I’ll go and make excuses for you. They’ll understand. By the time I get back, your skirt will be dry.”

  I agreed reluctantly. “Sorry I messed things up, David.”

  “Never mind. Doesn’t really matter. Thanks, Doc, for your help.” And David turned to go.

  Alone with Dr. MacNeill, I felt immediately ill at ease. Until I had seen David’s broad back disappearing out the door, I had not realized what a difference his presence made or how much I had been relying on him to shield me from the strangeness of the doctor and his cabin.

  For there were contradictions in this man and his surroundings. All kinds of questions forced themselves to the surface. Why the locked door in a community where most of the people scarcely bothered to shut their front doors, much less lock them? To whom had these clothes belonged? From where were these evidences of education and refinement—like the pieces of fine old furniture, the framed inscribed photographs, and the pipe lying on the table with the wide engraved silver band on its stem?

  Dr. MacNeill seemed of the mountains, yet strangely not of them. He would have had to get his medical education somewhere else. But then, once he had seen and known the world outside the Cove, why had he come back to practice medicine here and then let things go on as before—like that liver-­grown superstition that had killed the McHone baby?

  “You’re a silent one, especially for a female.” The deep voice broke into my thoughts. “I’m going to fix you a hot grog.”

  “Please don’t bother. I’m thawed now.”

  “Not afraid of a little mountain dew, are you?”

  My answer must have sounded defensive. “Not afraid. I just don’t like the taste.”

  “Then call it medicine, insurance against any side effects of your swim in the creek.”

  It was useless to protest; Dr. MacNeill had a dominating way about him. As he took an old pewter jug from the shelf, wiped it, went about mixing the grog and placing it close to the fire, I studied his face.

  In profile it was a rugged face, as if the features had been chiseled out of rough stone and the final smoothing and polishing never quite completed. Yet that was not quite right either, for when finally he turned to look at me, I saw that the hazel eyes were intuitive, perceptive; their corners were crisscrossed with smile lines. And he had a sensitive mouth, as if the sculptor had given special attention to that. All in all, it was a strong, unmistakably masculine face. Yet his curly, sandy-reddish hair—apparently always too long and unruly—gave him a boyish look. The hair curled a bit at the back of his head and over the tips of his ears. And that restless habit I had noticed the day of the operation, of running his fingers through the back ends, squeezing them—he could not keep his fingers still.

  “Drink that.” There was a peremptory note in his voice. He thrust the pewter mug at me.

  Dutifully I raised the mug to my lips but did not drink the bitter stuff. “Dr. MacNeill, I’m confused about something.”

  He stopped and turned around to look at me, smile lines pulling at his mouth. “What do you mean?”

  Now that I had taken the plunge, I was embarrassed. “Oh, lots of things.” I wondered in what order to ask my questions. But then I blurted out, “Like babies dying.”

  “Are you referring to the McHone infant?”

  I nodded. “I helped prepare the baby.”

  “I know you did. And you think I was remiss in my duty? Not a real doctor to my people. Is that it?”

  I looked him full in the face. “Yes, I admit it. I did have that thought.”

  Suddenly the doctor became preoccupied with filling his pipe. Carefully he tamped in the tobacco. His hands looked just as they had that afternoon of the operation—stained and roughened by work. His deliberation was maddening.

  “You’ve got a lot to learn about the mountain people,” he said finally. “I’ve known Opal McHone all my life. She had a granny who came from Aberdeenshire originally, then lived in Ulster awhile—true Scotch-Irish. The old lady was revered in the Cove as an herbalist. Some of her knowledge was sound enough, some of it nonsense—like the liver-grown ailment. But granny’s word is still gospel. The Scotch-Irish are stubborn, you know.”

  “You mean Mrs. McHone won’t listen to you?”

  “Not when my word crosses granny’s.” He paused, then went on tersely. “I can guess your next question. You’re curious about the dress.” There was an almost imperceptible change in the expression on his face, a softening of the lines. “It belonged to my wife. She died three years ago in childbirth. Typhoid complications.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” I found myself wanting to ask about the locked door and whether or not that had been her room. But the doctor’s manner told me that the subject was closed for now.

  “As for me,” he went on, “I was born in this cabin. So were my parents and my grandparents. So you see—I’m a hillbilly.”

  “You don’t talk like one.”

  He puffed on his pipe, again took his time before answering. “I lapse into mountain talk easily enough when I’m with the natives, like an Irishman whose brogue gets thicker by the minute when he’s with another Irishman. However, I’ve had some schooling outside—college, then medical school.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking—where?”

  He did not answer immediately. He put two more logs on the fire, felt my skirt and turned it over. Then he said slowly, as if reining in his impatience with my questions, “When I was sixteen, a group of New York physicians and surgeons hired a special train and came down to the Smokies on a vacation hunting trip. They used an uncle of mine as a guide. I went along to help carry their camping gear. For some reason they took a liking to me, found out that I had ambitions to be a doctor. So—they made college and medical school possible for me. I went to Jefferson Medical College, then got my bedside training at Jefferson Hospital and the Will’s Eye Hospital.”

  “Are those the pictures of some of the doctors?”

  “Yes, great men, long-time friends. I owe them everything.”

  I rose to have a closer look at the pictures. The doctor came and stood just behind me.

  “That’s James Healy, orthopedic surgery . . . McDougall, abdominal surgery . . . Kinnigan, a great professor of ophthalmology . . . William S. Paget . . .” I felt his breath on my neck. Abruptly, I walked over to the pictures on the other wall. “And these?”

  “That’s Starr Gatlin—dead now. He
was the brain surgeon who did the only trephine I ever witnessed.”

  “Trephine?”

  “You know, the same surgery I performed on Bob Allen. Tricky operation. Matter of fact, that particular surgical procedure hasn’t often been tried in our time.”

  “In our time?”

  “Yes. What I mean is old-timers say the trephine burr-hole was used fairly often by pioneer doctors for those who survived Indian scalpings.”

  “I didn’t know anybody survived Indian scalpings.”

  “Oh, a few. Naturally not when the whole top of the skull was hacked off.”

  I winced. “But I still don’t see how the operation would help.”

  “For anybody who lived through the scalping, the problem was how to get the skull covered again. So the frontier doctors used to bore a series of holes into the dura mater with a straight awl until they drew blood to the surface. That caused the scalp to grow again—in time.”

  Sometimes I wished that my imagination was not so vivid. “They did all that with no ether?”

  “Wasn’t any ether. Anyone who lived through an Indian raid and being scalped was strong enough to stand a little more.”

  I had had enough of scalping. “Going back to the day of the operation, there were two things I never understood. Somebody said Mr. Allen was hit by a girdled tree . . .”

  “Oh, that—a tree hacked with a deep series of gashes all round the trunk. The tree eventually rotted and died. In the process of rotting, those trees are always dangerous because they’re so easily wind-thrown. Girdling was the lazy frontier way of clearing land. Terrible waste of good lumber. But then the early settlers thought the timber supply limitless.” He paused. “But you said two questions?”

  “Yes, Mary Allen—when she hove that axe into the floor, what was that about?”

  He smiled. “Mountain superstition. Axe is supposed to keep a person from hemorrhaging. Maybe you don’t remember, but Mary tied a string around Bob’s wrist too. That’s to keep disease away.”

  The doctor was tapping the tobacco out of his pipe on the edge of the fireplace. Then he picked up a reed from the luster jug, ran it through his pipe stem and blew on it. “But let’s get back to the medical situation here in the Cove,” he said. “Or—am I boring you?”

  “No. I want to hear about it.”

  “Well then, as for the question in your mind about why I’m not reforming things around here, if I didn’t care about these people, I’d sure be practicing medicine somewhere else.”

  “You mean it’s a hard place to practice?”

  He looked at me tolerantly. “I could soliloquize on that one for so long you’d be yawning. I’ll limit myself to one fact: Last year I was out on calls one hundred and seventy-four different nights.”

  I found it hard to believe. “You mean you keep records about every night call?”

  He shrugged, turned in his usual unhurried way to put another log on the fire. Then he stood on the hearth, a faraway look in his hazel eyes, absently squeezing his hair in his fingertips. I wondered why he didn’t get his hair cut more often. Obviously he didn’t care about his personal appearance. “I’m practicing here in Cutter Gap,” he resumed, “because of a particular afternoon I spent with Starr Gatlin. It was a rainy May afternoon. How could I ever forget? At that time I had three offers to consider for a beginning practice. Two were flattering offers. I was confused, torn about where my duty lay, how to make such an important decision. So—I went to see Dr. Gatlin. He was a wise old man. Just sat there smoking, let me do the talking.

  “By the time dusk was falling, I had talked myself out. And I knew what I had to do. The call of the mountains and my own people was too strong to deny. I knew how desperately they needed a doctor back in these hills and coves. Personal ambition didn’t matter really. I’ve never regretted that decision, simply because I wouldn’t have been happy anywhere else. One of these days some of the men I interned with will probably be as famous as Gatlin, McDougall, and the rest. I follow their careers with a lot of interest, rejoice in their successes, keep closely in touch with them.” With a sweep of his eyes he indicated the pictures. “As a matter of fact, they’re the ones whose gifts of money and drugs make it possible for me to practice in the Cove.”

  “It’s a sacrifice you’ve made, though,” I said softly. “But since you did come back here, I don’t quite see—I mean—”

  “You don’t see that I’ve accomplished much. You’ve been at the mission how long, Miss Huddleston?”

  “A little over two months.”

  “You’re young. Impulsive too. When you feel something, you feel strongly, don’t you? I can tell. And you’ve made some sweeping judgments in those two months, haven’t you?”

  I could feel my cheeks getting hot. Why did he have to put it like that? “I suppose I have made some judgments. But some things are obvious enough,” I added stubbornly. “Like cabins and yards so dirty and so smelly that I lost my supper after one visit.”

  Suddenly the doctor threw back his head and laughed. It was a deep rumbling laugh that rippled over his entire body. At the moment my sense of humor was missing. “Dr. MacNeill, a queasy stomach may seem funny to you. You’ve been trained to stand anything. But the sights and sounds that made me lose my supper aren’t funny. They really aren’t.”

  “Forgive me. But if you could have seen your own face! When your nose wrinkled up, I could just see some of the sights you were remembering.” He was still chuckling. “I know it’s bad—but these people can’t be changed all at once. They have their own timing. The pace is slower back in these hills than outside. Let me tell you something Uncle Bogg said only last week. He was talking to me about the Great Northern Lumber Company trying to buy up land—a man was up here last fall looking around. ‘All the trouble them outlanders are makin’ for us tryin’ to git our land, that ain’t so bad by itself,’ Uncle Bogg said. ‘But hits comin’ right on top of the War Between the States that seems more’n we can stand.’ ”

  In spite of my annoyance, I couldn’t help laughing, and the tension between us relaxed.

  Yet, I was thinking, how odd that for the highlanders time moves that slowly. Ever since I’ve been in the Cove, for me it has been just the opposite. Is it because this seems such a new world and I’m having so many new experiences so fast? Like the way time telescoped for me when father took our family on that four-day holiday to New York City. We made every minute count and packed so much living into a brief time that when it was over, I could scarcely believe we had been in New York only four days.

  Again, the doctor pulled me away from my thoughts by a change of mood. “Resistance to change isn’t all. We’ve worse problems than dirt and smells back here. How much do you know about the murders back in these mountains?”

  “Not much. Several people have hinted at it, that’s all.”

  “You don’t know the Taylor-Allen story?”

  I shook my head.

  “In my father’s time, the spring of ’79 it was, Otis Allen was murdered by MacKinley Taylor. It was a land boundary dispute. Involved Coldsprings, one of the best springs in these mountains. I won’t go into details, they’re too involved. But since then nine men have been killed, three since I’ve been practicing. Oh, we’ve got things patched up enough—mostly Miss Henderson’s doing—so that Allen and Taylor children are both going to your school. You have no idea what an achievement that is. Just for example, there’s a couple other side Raven Mountain who haven’t spoken to one another in twenty-six years.”

  “You mean, they’re divorced?”

  “No! That’s my point. They’ve lived together in the same cabin all that time. Lived together as man and wife and have had seven children. The mother will say to one of the children, ‘Liz, tell yer Paw for me . . .’ Then the father will send his reply back by Liz. They think it’s a virtue, a mark of strong character, to carry a grudge to the grave.” He looked at me and laughed. “Your eyes are very expressive, Miss Huddleston. T
hey tell me you don’t believe me.”

  “Well, I—”

  “It’s true though. And that’s why rooting out the grudges and the hates that lead to killings is even more pressing than sanitation.”

  “Are these what you’d call feuds?”

  “In a way. But this area isn’t a feuding district like some other sections.”

  “But still, Dr. MacNeill, you’re a doctor. Stopping killings isn’t your job. That’s the law’s job.”

  “Sure. But out of nine murders and several woundings, nobody’s been convicted.”

  “How did they get off?”

  “Lots of angles to it. In these mountains, family loyalty comes before everything else—including the law. It’s Jacobite Scotland and Tudor England all over again. In the eyes of the mountaineers, the courts are always unfair, slanted toward one side or the other. So when the state can’t insure real justice, they think that private war, ambush, assassination, murder—are justified.”

  “But that’s ridiculous about the courts being unfair. This is twentieth-­century America, not Tudor England.”

  “It isn’t as silly as you think, not when families plot for years to get one of their clan elected a judge, sheriff or county squire. If the case comes before a jury, the jurors put family loyalty ahead of everything else too. So do all the witnesses.”

  I sat there trying to take in a lot of new ideas at once.

  “But then there’s another reason why murderers get off around here,” the doctor went on. “The El Pano district, the Old Twelfth, has a county squire who’s ruled this county for eighteen years and there hasn’t been a sentence for murder in all that time. There are ways and ways of seeing that nobody ever gets convicted.”

  “Who’s the squire?”

  “Uncle Bogg McHone.”

  “You can’t be serious!” I was shocked and made no effort to hide it. “He seems like a harmless, likable old man.”