Butterfly Weed

by Donald Harington

  Except for a sizable wad of cash, I was traveling light. I had everything I needed in a canvas knapsack, including plenty of scraps of thin newsprint, on which I would jot down my recordings of stories and jokes and old sayings and odd words and their meanings, and superstitions and whatever else I needed to collect and record. I had one change of clothes in the knapsack, and the clothes on my back, which I had carefully selected to make me look as much like a hillman as possible: a well-worn chambray shirt, frayed and faded denim pants, scuffed brogues on my feet, and on my head a crushed, floppy, sweat-stained black felt fedora. I had debated with myself whether to wear a felt hat or a straw, and had decided the latter might make me look like a farmer, which I wasn’t.

  Even in such old clothes, I cut quite a figure in those days, if I say so myself. You wouldn’t guess it to look at me now, but I was a handsome man in my forties. I had a neat, nearly a dapper, mustache, not as full as I wear now nor as gray but dark, and in contrast to this shiny smooth dome, which looks like I’m a-clearing ground for a new face, I had a full head of dark hair, just beginning to thin. During my ephemeral stay in Hollywood, I had more than once been mistaken for a movie star.

  Much of my traveling was by shank’s mare—on foot, but I got plenty of rides too—by wagon, by occasional auto, sometimes by truck or other conveyance, and thus I gravitated toward the remotest part of the Ozarks, that selfsame Newton County which has been the private purlieu of your fictions. As soon as I crossed the county line, I began to lose track of time, which I suppose was my intention anyhow. I spent the nights in a variety of accommodations: in the crudest, dirtiest log cabin, sleeping with a whole family of twelve in one room; in the “guest room” of a rather prosperous valley farmer whose wife came perilously close to sharing my bed; in an abandoned house that must surely have been inhabited by ghosts, who kept me awake most of the night; in a barn, on the straw, not once but twice; in the shelter of a moonshine distillery, whose owner and I both passed out sampling the product and slept on the hard ground; and in a house of sorts in the mouth of a cave, three of its four sides the natural rock of the cave.

  Everywhere I went I was warmly received and invited to stay, and sometimes almost forcibly prevented from leaving. My business, to anyone who inquired, was simply that I was wandering the countryside, a vagabond in search of adventure and occasional work—and I had occasional work, being put to good service helping out around the farm or the house. Often I earned my keep. I was a good woodchopper. I was a good hay-mower. I could hoe a patch of corn with the best of them…although my hands, unaccustomed to manual labor, easily blistered and became quite raw, but I dared not ask for a pair of gloves, lest my hosts suspect that I was not the native hillman I was pretending to be.

  One of the finest storytellers I encountered not only had a repertoire of the very best old folktales as imaginatively reconstructed or retold by herself but also was a fantastic teller of “local history.” She was an old woman, a fortune-teller, name of Cassie Whitter, and she lived in a dogtrot cabin on a mountaintop in the most isolated spot I ever reached in all my travels. I sought her out on the advice of some of her distant neighbors, who assured me that the old lady could not only accurately predict my future, or tell me the location of anything I had lost, but could “keep ye up all night long with stories, ever one of ’em true.” I had heard several references to the “Widder Whitter,” an utterance which sounded like a birdcall, before I figured out that the first part was merely a title of honor: she had been widowed for many years. Climbing the steep and rugged trail to her place, hardly more than a pig’s path, I felt such a fatigue and malaise, which couldn’t be blamed on the arduous trek, that I wondered if I was coming down with something.

  She received me hospitably, and sensed that I was not well, and, as was the custom everywhere I went, insisted, no, demanded that I spend the night. After I drank the coffee she gave me, she took my empty cup and studied the coffee grounds clinging to its sides, and “read” my fortune from those dregs, in the manner of other fortune-tellers reading tea leaves. The things she predicted would happen to me actually did happen to me eventually—in fact so many of her predictions did come true that I was convinced that all the stories she told me as “truth” must also have been true. Among her predictions, for example, was that I would spend all my later years in a nursing home, a concept of an institution that was unknown to me at that time and could not possibly have been known to her, and I thought her notion of it was a form of madness. I truly suspected that she was a little loony, and possibly even dangerous, and that is why, when I began to get honestly sick during the night, my first thought was that she might have poisoned me. She had fed me a dish I recognized because I’d had it elsewhere among those people—stewed squirrel with new potatoes and poke greens—it was very tasty, but after she had put me up for the night in “t’other house,” that is, the opposite wing of the two-pen dogtrot cabin in which she lived, I grew desperately ill, and despite the warm June night, I had severe chills that shook me so violently I needed extra quilts, but the shaking served to distract me from a very severe headache and an even more severe backache. Several times during the night I had to get up and go out to “the brush.” I had diarrhea, and used up several precious sheets of the newsprint I packed for keeping notes. At dawn of that sleepless night my nose began to bleed, and I lost more newsprint trying to stanch it.

  When the Widder Whitter discovered my condition, she offered to bring me my breakfast in bed, but I had no appetite whatsoever. She put her hand on my brow for a moment and declared, “Wal, I may be able to read yore future, but I caint tell what ails ye in the present. We need Doc Swain, if he didn’t live so blamed fur away. Too fur for me to fetch ’im. Why, he could fix ye up in nothing flat. Doc Swain could jist take one look at ye, and tell what ye needed to do to git well. He could…”

  Sick as I was, and enfeebled, I did not realize that Cassie Whitter had begun to tell me the long, long story of Doc Colvin Swain of Stay More. It is the story that I am going to be telling to you, for as long as it takes me. It is the story that I heard again in part from various people I interviewed in Stay More itself. It is the story that, finally, Doc Swain himself was going to confirm to my satisfaction before I was done with him. Probably no one told me the story better than Cassie Whitter, but I could not appreciate it, nor even listen closely, those days and nights of desperate illness while she seemed to drone on and on. In fact, it was horribly tantalizing, listening to the exploits and the cures of this fantastic country doctor when I needed him so frantically myself. But I had the presence of mind to realize that the story she was telling me was so important, so fabulous, that I had better make some notes to jog my memory of it, and while I was so sick I could scarcely hold a pencil, I managed to write down a kind of outline of the story as Cassie was telling it to me. So I was sacrificing half of my newsprint as wipes for my diarrhea, and the other half was going to summarize Doc Swain’s story, and sometimes I couldn’t tell the difference!

  One other thing I realized: being a woman, Cassie Whitter out of verbal modesty was censoring a great deal of Doc’s story; she was obviously omitting or euphemizing the sexual parts of it, and if I wanted to learn those, I’d have to search them out from somebody else.

  Nor did she reach, in her telling of the story, the crucial part, concerning his “affair” with a beautiful young girl. That most dramatic part of the story, which I would have to learn primarily from Doc himself, had just commenced when my illness became so severe that she was prompted to abandon the story and announce, “I had best see if I caint fetch Gram Dinsmore fer ye, or else you’re not long fer this world.” Then she disappeared, for the better part of the day, as I grew progressively sicker and felt hopeless that I was alone without anybody handy to help me. Late in the afternoon she finally returned with another woman, older even than she, who carried a bundle, an assortment of some things tied up in what looked like a gingham dish towel. Gram Dinsmore, I was told,
was a “yarb doctor,” and she proceeded to prod and poke me while asking various questions about me and my condition. How old was I? On what day of what month at what hour of day was I born? Through which nostril had my nose bled, and at what hour of the day? “Have you got the flux?” she asked.

  “Flux?” said I.

  “Yessir, are yore bowels loose and runny?” she inquired. When I admitted that I did indeed have diarrhea, she asked several embarrassing questions about the composition and color of the excretion. Then she opened her bundle and took out a small sheaf of green leaves, which she gave to the Widder Whitter, asking her to brew it up into a tea. She explained to me that it was simply ragweed, and the ragweed tea would cure me of the flux, but the flux, she said, was just a symptom of something far more serious, and she wanted me to take a strong dose of some oozy concoction she kept in a quart Mason jar. When I refused to take it until I knew what it contained, she recited the few ingredients, primarily the boiled-down residue of the inner bark of the slippery elm tree, Ulmus fulva. She gave me a tablespoon full of it, and it was nippy but not unpleasant. She forbade me to eat any solid food, and told me to drink lots of the ragweed tea, then she asked me for a dime, but I protested I ought to pay her much more than that.

  “Jist let me borry a dime iffen ye got one,” she said, and I gave her a dime and she inspected it closely and declared, “Hit aint shiny enough.” I searched my pocket for a shinier dime, but had none. She gave the dime to the Widder Whitter. “Could ye rench this in some vinegar and lye soap?” And when this was done, she took the now-shiny dime and inserted it between my upper lip and teeth, and declared, “Now thet thar will stop yore nose from a-bleedin.”

  And sure enough it did. I wish I could report that her other prescriptions healed my afflictions as quickly as that dime cured me of nosebleed, but no. Gram Dinsmore accepted from me a half-dollar for her services, but left without telling me what her diagnosis had been, and my diarrhea and chills continued unabated despite my regular consumption of the slippery elm ooze and the ragweed tea. The Widder Whitter attempted to resume telling Doc Swain’s story, on the threshold of the appearance of the young heroine, but I could not listen attentively. Finally I interrupted her in desperation, “Just how fur away does this Doc Swain live?”

  “He lives all the way over to Stay More,” she said. “That’s six mile at least.”

  “Miz Whitter,” I said, “you’ve done gone and predicted I’ll most likely spend my old age in a home under the care of nurses, so that means I aint about to up and die of what’s ailin me right now. But if you can read the near future jist as good as the far future, can you tell me how long I’m gonna be sick and how I’m gonna get well? How long am I gonna have to stay here?”

  “Yo’re welcome to stay here, long as you like,” she said. “And I can finish tellin ye Doc Swain’s story.”

  “Well, yes, and I’m obliged,” I said, “but can you tell me how long before I get well enough to travel again? At least the six miles to Stay More so’s I could see Doc Swain myself?”

  “Drink up yore ragweed tea,” she told me, and I drank it, and she took the cup and peered closely at the small bits of ragweed clinging to the sides. “Hhmmm,” she hummed, more than once, and I began to understand that perhaps she was as adept at reading tea leaves as reading coffee grounds. At length, she said, “How about that? It’s Doc Swain hisself who’s a-comin to fetch ye and take ye to Stay More and fix ye all up, and cure the ailments of yore soul while he’s at it!”

  So. We come at last to our hero, the main character of her story, and of mine. You’ve been patient to sit through this long preface. Okay, here he is: one afternoon during my second week at Cassie Whitter’s, the door opened, and in walks this man who is the everlovin epitome of the old-time country doctor! Black bag and all! Steel-rimmed spectacles and all! Christ A-mighty, he was so much right out of a Norman Rockwell cover that I knew I was having a delirious hallucination (although that wouldn’t come until a week later): that I had just invented him in my desperate need, out of my urgent fancy, that I was just wishing he was there.

  “Why, howdy, Doc!” the Widder Whitter said to him in surprise, as if I was inventing also her confirmation of his reality. “I was jist a-talkin about ye. How’d ye know we’ve got a customer fer ye?”

  “Gram Dinsmore tole me,” the man declared, setting down his bag and opening it and taking out his stethoscope. I suddenly realized that in her long story about him, Cassie Whitter had made no attempt to describe his appearance. Was that in order to universalize him, to let him represent all physicians? He was not tall, and inclined to stockiness, and I guessed he was about fifty, maybe midfifties, about right for a skilled, well-practiced physician. I don’t think Norman Rockwell could have given him a better face: as kind and benign as you could hope for, and even a little handsome. The only missing touch was that he was not wearing a doctor’s coat and vest: he was not even wearing a necktie: he was not even wearing a white shirt. I can’t honestly recall what he was wearing; I just remember that although it was not at all professional, he still somehow looked very proper and official.

  The Widder Whitter was chuckling. “Now what’d she go and do thet fer? Aint you her rival?”

  The man laughed. “Yeah, and we was both up at Elbert Sizemore’s place this mornin, a-tryin to cure him of a bad case of the hives, me with my magnesium sulfate and her with her maple-leaf tea. I had a little fun, askin her if her tea was made from rock maple or soft maple, and shore enough she’d used the soft, and I tole her that rock always beats soft when it comes to hives.” The doctor paused to pick from his eyes some tears of laughter. “That shore did frost her gizzard! But anyhow, when we got done a-fussin around with ole Elbert, Gram tole me about this here feller here, said he most likely was ailin with something that was ‘beyond her powers,’ is the way she put it, ‘beyond her powers.’ Never heared her admit that of ary a case before. She tole me what she thought it mought be, but I’ll jist have to see fer myself.” All the time that he was speaking these words, the doctor was doing things to me: running a thermometer into my mouth, placing his stethoscope on my chest and back, squeezing my stomach and my sides, and peering into my ears, my nose, my mouth. At length he pulled up my shirt, inspected my stomach carefully, then let my shirt fall and said, “I don’t reckon I’ve met ye afore. I’m Doc Swain,” and offered me his hand.

  “I’m Doc Randolph,” I said, shaking his hand. In those days everybody around Pineville called me “Doc” just as a nickname, which had nothing to do with medicine nor with the Pee-Aitch-Dee that I’d never succeeded in finishing, but was just a common Ozark nickname for a gambler. So I added, “But it’s jist what they call me, it aint but a nickname.”

  “Please to meet ye, Doc,” he said. “You don’t live here-abouts, do ye?”

  “Nope, jist a-passin through.”

  “Wal, you shore caint pass on through if we jist leave ye a-layin here. It’s too fur and a hard climb for a old man like me to come up here ever day and see you. And besides you couldn’t afford my rates of twenty-five cents a mile for the distance I’d have to travel. So I need to git you down whar I can give ye a blood test, and keep a eye on ye.”

  “What seems to be wrong with me?” I asked.

  “I caint be a hunerd percent certain, jist yet. I don’t believe it’s malaria, but it could be meningitis, or trichinosis, or abdominal Hodgkin’s disease, or several other things. Whatever it is, it’s serious. Gram Dinsmore thought it mought be typhoid, and that’s what she prescribed fer ye, although she gave ye one thing to loosen yore bowels and another’n to stop ’em up!” Doc Swain laughed. “The way I learnt it, if the slippery elm bark is peeled upwards, it’ll make ye puke, but if it’s peeled down’ards it’ll give ye the flux. She must’ve peeled it the wrong way!” He laughed again, then grew serious. “But do ye reckon ye could git up, and me and Cassie will help ye down the mountain to whar I had to leave my auto?”

  So with no small expendit
ure of effort and finesse, the doctor and the Widder Whitter supported me between them as we made our way slowly and carefully down the steep trail from the widow’s cabin. The doctor had to carry his bag in one hand and the Widder Whitter had to carry my cumbersome knapsack in one of hers, and the three of us had to stop whenever we came to a fallen log and sit on it for a moment to rest. Going downhill in my condition in that manner was a worse ordeal for me than any uphill hike I’d ever made. It seemed it took hours to reach the place where the trail met a graveled road, and the doctor’s car was parked. Through the mental fog that was settling down on me, I tried to thank the widow for her hospitality and tolerance of my infirmity and her help and her food and her…but she put her fingers on my lips to hush me. “Come back and see me again when you git to feelin better,” she said. “I never did finish tellin ye that amazin story. But maybe ye can git the ole hoss to tell you the rest of it hisself!”

  As we drove off, the doctor glanced at me and asked, as if he knew the answer, “What ole hoss? What amazin story?”

  “It seems that there womarn knows yore entire life,” I observed. “And she’s been a-tellin me most of it.”

  Doc coughed. “Wal, heck, Doc, I aint so sure she knows the past as well as she knows the future. Didje git yore fortune tole?”

  “Yeah, I reckon I did, Doc,” I allowed. “But it was kind of strange.” I didn’t feel much like talking, but maybe I could just let him do all of it. So I asked, “Does she really know the future?”