Butterfly Weed

by Donald Harington

  Butterfly Weed

  By the Author

  The Cherry Pit (1965)

  Lightning Bug (1970)

  Some Other Place. The Right Place. (1972)

  The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks (1975)

  Let Us Build Us a City (1986)

  The Cockroaches of Stay More (1989)

  The Choiring of the Trees (1991)

  Ekaterina (1993)

  Butterfly Weed (1996)

  When Angels Rest (1998)

  Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling off the Mountain) (2002)

  With (2004)

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright ©1996 Donald Harington

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by AmazonEncore

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN: 978-1-61218-102-8

  For Larry Vonalt

  All lies and fantasy, but true as God’s gospel.

  —Vance Randolph on The Architecture of the

  Arkansas Ozarks, in his Ozark Folklore, Volume II

  To him the men of Stay More are still gods.

  —Martha Duffy on Lightning Bug in Time

  Give a cock to Asclepius.

  —Socrates, last words

  Contents

  Chapter one

  Chapter two

  Chapter three

  Chapter four

  Chapter five

  Chapter six

  Chapter seven

  Chapter eight

  Chapter nine

  Chapter ten

  Chapter eleven

  About the Author

  Chapter one

  Good of you to drop by again. Pull you up a chair, sit on your fist, and lean back on your thumb—but I see you’re already seated. Can you hear me? I may mispronounce a few words, and the way I pronounce others may strike you as mispronunciation. I’ve had all of my teeth taken out, not like the old codger who could boast, “I never had no trouble with my teeth. They just rotted out naturally.” What with my missing choppers and the stroke I had a while back, not to mention my chronic stammer, it’s a wonder I can still hear myself talk. Yes, I may misunderstand myself now and again. So don’t hesitate to ask me to try to repeat myself if you don’t catch it the first time. Now if you’ll be so kind as to reach down beneath my cot and feel around, you’ll find a near-full bottle of Chivas Regal, the last of a whole case of the stuff that Gershon Legman—you know the great bawdy bibliophile?—arranged to have sent to me last Christmas. Fetch it up here and we’ll have us a snort. I’m a badly backslid alcoholic, you know. But I can tell you, I don’t never consume more than a half a pint a day. I’m not one of these fellers who just can’t stop once he gets started. I was sorry I couldn’t offer you a shot or two when you came to visit me last, that winter I was in the VA hospital—when was it? two years ago?—but the VA people are really tight-assed and by the book, unlike these here rest homes where they look the other way or pretend the janitor’s broom didn’t mean to knock over your bottles a-cleaning under the bed. But that visit you paid me to the Veterans hospital, you must’ve already had a lot to drink, a whole bladderful: I haven’t forgot how you went outside on the hospital grounds and there in a snowbank took out your tool and urinated the letters V-A-N-C-E into the snow. I couldn’t see it, but a nurse told me about it; she told as how that hard January cold kept the snow on the ground for weeks more, and those letters stayed there, yellow on white! You know, there’s been some talk, probably just a joke, about the University is going to build me a monument and put up a statue in front of Old Main: a heap of white marble imitating a snowbank, with a bronze figure of me a-hunching over it with one hand aiming my tool. But back to that VA visit, before you went out and pissed my name in the snow, you told me your dad had just passed on, and you said to me, “Vance, I’ve just lost my actual father, so you’d better get yourself well, because if I was to lose my spiritual father too, it would just finish me off.” And you recall what I said to that? All I could think of at the time to say to that, choked up as I was? All I could say was, “Bless you, my boy, I aint about to cash in, just yet.”

  But I’ve thought a lot about that. Me, who never had a son, who never fathered a child, leastways not that I know of. There’s not much I can give you in return for those kind words. This here scotch won’t even repay you for that splendid review you wrote of Pissing in the Snow for the local underground paper. I won’t pretend that anything I could say, running on at the mouth the way I do, could scratch your back the way you’ve scratched mine. No. But I’ve thought a lot about it, and I’ve decided that one little thing I could do for you would be to confess to you that I’ve actually been to your Stay More myself, once, a long time ago, and I could tell you the story about it, if you’d care to hear it. Might be you could even make a novel out of it, for it concerns your Doc Swain, God rest his soul. I haven’t told anybody this, not even Herb Halpert, my diligent annotator, but Doc Swain is the model, or simply the source, for “Doc Holton,” who appears in so many of my folktale collections, particularly Sticks in the Knapsack and The Devil’s Pretty Daughter, to name just two. I reckon you know, though you hardly gave a clue in those novels of yours in which he briefly, all too briefly appears, that Doc Swain was quite the raconteur! He believed in the power of laughter to help the healing processes, and he rarely visited a patient—and I suppose you know, or ought to, that in those days he always went to the patients instead of having them come to him—he rarely visited a patient without telling a good joke or a real funny story, which helped many a nervous patient to relax and feel good enough to start getting well. Why, I myself was present once during a difficult childbirth, what they call a breech delivery I believe, when Doc Swain told the mother such a hilarious yarn that her shudders of laughter helped expel the baby! But I’m getting ahead of my story, which begins not with Doc Swain but with myself and how I happened to find myself in Stay More in the first place.

  Mary Celestia hasn’t heard this story herself, have you, Mary? No, all these years she’s been obliged to hear me rambling on, sometimes just a-talking to myself, sometimes telling her stories, sometimes just arguing the damn fool things that show up on TV or in the papers. She just sits there sweetly on her own cot, or lays on it, and she doesn’t interrupt me except when I’ve got my facts badly wrong, as occasionally I do. She’s blind now, you know, so I have to describe to her what’s showing up on the TV or what the papers say, and I have to read her mail to her. Hers is not the blindness of Homer or Milton—though she could tell you some tales of her own—but of Tiresias, who accidentally gazed upon the naked beauty of wisdom and lost his eyes for it, but had the power of soothsaying in recompense. Oh yes, Mary Celestia could tell you everything that’s going to happen. She could even tell me, if I asked her, how much longer she and I will have to live in this miserable little room before we move on, or pass on, or whatever. Mary. Mary Celestia! Now listen, love, I’m a-fixin to tell a story to this clever novelist, and you aint never heard it afore yourself! It is a story about myself when I was about this gentleman’s age, about half of what I am now, long before you met me, but I’ve told you how I was one for drinking all the time in those days, and I wasn’t too happily married to Marie, my first wife, and used ever excuse I could think of to get away from her. This is the story of how I got away from her one summer and wandered around the Ozark Mountain
s of Arkansas, looking for the wildest parts of the country where progress was still unknown and I might find and collect some rare old folkways and stories and superstitions and sayings that I hadn’t never heard before. This is the story of how I come to find myself in a lost, lost place called Stay More, which happens to be the name of the village that this gentleman has written so much about. But this is mainly the story of a strange, remarkable backcountry physician named Colvin Swain, and how he come to hide his heart from the world, but finally revealed it to me. I ought to have written this into a book myself, but now it’s too late for that. So, Mary, listen in, if you’ve a mind to, but some of it aint pretty, at all, and some of it may make you think I’m just sawing off a bunch of whoppers to see if I still know how to lie convincingly, but I swear, if there’s any lies in this story, I didn’t make ’em up myself.

  Now son, maybe you should just shut that door. People are a-hollerin too goddamn loud out there. Don’t you hear ’em? No, I reckon you caint. Some old bat is screeching, as she constantly does, “MEDICINE! MEDICINE! MEDICINE!” It’s the only word she knows. And there’s this feller a-going, “It’s time! It’s time!” When me and Mary Celestia first moved in, I thought he was just trying to answer the old lady that it was time for their medicine, to quiet her down, but he doesn’t even know she’s there. Later I opined he was just complaining that his supper was late, or something, but I honestly don’t know what he thinks it’s time for. He makes such a racket, we can’t help but get to wishing it was time for him to pass away. And there’s this real old lady in her wheelchair, older’n me, and she’s always screaming, “Tell me another’n, Grampaw! Tell me another’n, Grampaw!” as if she was still six years old wanting a bedtime story. You’d think some of these people belong in the loony bin, not just a common old rest home. And there’s this real witch out there, I’m told she has Tourette’s syndrome, who’s uttering obscenities that would shame a sailor. I wish you could hear it. If you could hear it, you’d realize what I long ago did: the nastiest language loses all its power once it gets frequent. But the loudest mouth belongs to this old gent who keeps saying, again and again, “About that time, six white horses flew over.” Did you ever hear that expression? It’s what smart-alecky kids used to say if they didn’t believe something you’re saying. I met the old cuss once, when he wheeled his chair right into this room and looked me in the eye and said, “About that time, six white horses flew over,” and if I hadn’t already heard him hollering it a hundred times in the hall I would have thought he was making a personal accusation about my untruthfulness. I raised my cane over his head to get him to back off, and I said, “Yes, and all six of ’em bombed you with their turds.” He gave me a look like he’d actually been hit with a horse turd, and he got out.

  So just push that door to, if you will. I declare, the one big advantage, if it may be called that, of being confined to this godforsaken stinking pesthole is that it makes me appreciate that I may be sick and crippled, and I may be eighty-six years old, and I may be poor, but goddamn it I aint yet senile, nor about to be, and there’s lots of old folks much worse off than me. When I was just a young man, going off to graduate school, my I.Q. measured out at 180, by God, and I don’t honestly believe it has shrunk at all since then. And as I think you’re about to discover, I can still tell a story.

  This here tale begins in the summer of that year, whatever year it was—I’ve got a bad head for dates—let’s say I was about the same age you are now, and you’re what?—forty-two or forty-three?—so figure it out if you want to take the trouble to add up from my birthdate in 1892. The year don’t matter. The national situation don’t even matter, because even though we were smack dab in the middle of what we’ve been told was the Depression, folks in the Ozarks was so poor to begin with that they scarcely noticed. No, that’s not right, because poverty’s so relative. A better way to put it is that folks in the Ozarks still had everything they needed to subsist and endure, and they didn’t want for nothing. So they didn’t even know that people elsewhere all over the country was suffering from want.

  It was a summer I couldn’t make up my fool mind just what to do with myself, devoting my energies either to finishing up a novel that I’d been fooling around with, or else, if I made up my mind I couldn’t write fiction, to a book that I’d had in the back of my mind for years, which I aimed to call Recreational Sex in the Plant Kingdom. Did you ever know there was such a thing? Plants are like people—why shouldn’t they be?—they “get together” oftentimes not just for propagation but for the sheer pleasure of it. But even Haldeman-Julius, the publisher for whom I’d written so many popular Little Blue Books, a nickel apiece, wouldn’t touch a book on that subject. So finally I decided just to continue thenceforward the work in which I had been engaged for a dozen years: the sympathetic seeking out and collecting of folklore, trying to record it before it was all gone, as it seemed in constant danger of going. But I was not—I kept saying, and I’m still saying—I was not a folklorist, whatever the fuck that is, possibly an academically trained pedant with a Pee-Aitch-Dee and a patronizing attitude toward the backward bucolics of the hinterlands. I wasn’t getting paid much for the hard work I did, but I never earned a penny as a folklorist. These here modern-day folklorists don’t even study folklore anyhow; they call it “folkloristics” to make it sound even more academically respectable, and they fill up their fancy journals with words like “paradigm” and “parameter,” which I’ve got just a vague notion of the meaning of, and they talk about “etics” and “emics,” which I don’t know what the shit they’re saying. I have never had anything to do with the folklorists. All right, Mary. Miss Mary Celestia wishes to remind me, and inform you, that she herself was, until her retirement, the University’s only professor of folklore. So all right, I married a folklorist, and I’ve known a whole bunch of ’em, I’ve met the great ones, I’ve corresponded with and talked with the likes of Stith Thompson and Archer Taylor and Richard Dorson and George Corson, and I’ve even developed friendships with some of them: there’s a young Ph.D. of folklore over at the University, name of Robert Cochran, who replaced Mary, and who comes in to see us from time to time and tells me he’s working on my biography, and then of course there’s Rayna Green, a brave and sweet girl who annotated and introduced my Pissing in the Snow. No, there are several bona fide “folklorists” that I can not only tolerate but admire. But don’t never call me one! Call me a collector, or call me an antiquarian, or just call me a shiftless bum who never had nothing better to do than mingle with and observe the forgotten cordwood folks of the hollers and hills.

  I knew that the gods of the mountains are not the gods of the towns. And I knew that the young people of the mountains, given half a chance, would choose to ape their city cousins and abandon the old ways of their heritage, including enchantment with stories and tales. Television was just a distant fantasy, but radio was coming in, and talking motion pictures were being shown in the country villages as competition, if not replacement, for the old storytelling tradition. Along with it, movies and radio were attempting to establish new standards of “correct” English that would soon leave the Ozark hillfolk trying to mouth a homogenized “acceptable” English as it was spoken elsewhere in the country, and they would start discarding the old Chaucerian and Shakespearean and Spencerian language that had been in their safekeeping for generations, and they would lose completely what traditional memory they still had of the actual stories told by Chaucer and Shakespeare and Spencer.

  I wanted to find the most inaccessible parts of the Ozarks, cabins on ridges at the end of crude trails, and talk to the oldest of the old-timers among those lost and forgotten people, and I wanted to write down what they had to remember. I wanted to befriend old shut-ins, and interview granny women and yarb doctors and old horse traders. I wanted to shack up with berry pickers under the ledges, and sit on the porch of a gristmill while the corn was a-grinding, and around the fire of the still while the corn was a-making, and
listen to the stories told around midnight campfires on the stream banks and high ridges while fishing or coon hunting. I wanted to kick up my heels at square dances and play parties and other backwoods frolics, and write down the words the caller spoke and the tunes the fiddlers played. I wanted to sit in brush arbors under the boiling sun and listen to the preachers exhort the sinners to their salvation. I wanted to loaf on the courthouse steps and the steps of crossroad country stores and listen, and listen, and listen!

  I wanted, in short, to make my most concentrated investigation of the distinctions between mundane “reality” and magical if untrue story. Without planning it or knowing it in advance, I would also be collecting material for one of my major books, We Always Lie to Strangers, on the distinction between exaggerations meant to deceive and to entertain.

  So I went. I ought to have told Marie what I was planning to do, but I didn’t. I just up and went. I left her a letter, apologizing for sneaking off before daybreak, and making it clear that my intentions were no different from that sort that had allowed her to say to her friends on several occasions, “Oh, Vance has just hit the road again, to see what he can see.” You recall that old folk tune, “The bear went over the mountain, to see what he could see”? In fact, I had spent most of the decade of the twenties, perhaps secretly driven by the coming of the Jazz Age, living hand-to-mouth in my rambles all over the Ozarks. This time I had a little money, and I was leaving Marie more than she needed for groceries and such. The year before I had been invited to put in a stint as a screenwriter in Hollywood—just like Fitzgerald and Faulkner and all the rest—and they had paid me a couple hundred dollars a week for nearly three months before they discovered that I couldn’t write movies. That was the best money, the most money, I had ever earned.