Butterfly Weed

by Donald Harington

  “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.

  But in all truth, if anything did pass in the road, I couldn’t have seen it from where I lay. The world of Stay More surrounded me without my awareness of what, if anything, was going on out there. The one window of my small room afforded a view chiefly of the ruin of the stone bank building just to the north of Doc Swain’s house. Doc told me the story of how the bank was robbed in 1922, when the same Every Dill who…but you know that story and have told it so well yourself. Now the bank had lain empty for over a decade; and its wooden timbers, encased within the rustic stonemasonry, were beginning to decay. The wooden door at the side facing my window had rotted and fallen, but it was only after several days of glancing at the bank that I noticed I could see through the open door to the window on the other side of the interior, and through that window I could discern the front porch of Latha Bourne’s general store, where that woman, whom you have called the demigoddess of your world of Stay More, was often sitting.

  It is funny how we all have the habit of not noticing what is visible beyond the immediate vista, how, for
example, you can look through that window yonder and see nothing but a bunch of nondescript houses across the way from this nursing home, and you wouldn’t even notice, until I call it to your attention, that the towers of Old Main at the University are rising up in the distance. See? Had you noticed before? Well, I was a little embarrassed at myself, that there had been so many hours, so many days, when I just lay on that bed in that room with nothing to do but stare at the blank stone wall of that bank building without even noticing that I could see through the wall, or rather through that fallen door and the window on the other side, and catch a clear glimpse of people on the porch of Latha’s store over two hundred yards away, including Latha herself.

  Shall I describe her for you? You, of all people, who have, by your own declared intention, granted her eternal life? The Latha I first saw was the Latha who existed in the year before you were even born, and whom you never knew. The Latha you fell madly in love with at the age of five-going-on-six was perhaps beginning to discover a gray hair or two in her dark hair, and perhaps was even beginning to thicken at the middle, or to develop wrinkles here and there, or maybe even a skin spot or two, and of course if she already had any of this six years before, I couldn’t have detected it from a distance. All I could tell, from that distance, was that she was most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. And I was overwhelmed with desire for her, to the extent that she became my reason for wanting to recuperate and get out of that bed and go meet her.

  Did you know that Doc himself was in love with her? Alas, the story I’m going to keep on telling you as long as you come back to hear it does not really involve Latha Bourne. I wish I could tell you a story about how I finally got out of my bed and went over and met her and we became lovers and lived happily ever after, or at least spent a wild night together. Could you accept that? No, nor could you accept the story of how Doc finally persuaded her to become his lover. Because you are “saving” her for Every Dill. As perhaps she was unknowingly saving herself. So she is not going to be the heroine of this narrative. She is incidental to it, and indeed during the time of which I shall be mainly speaking, she did not live in Stay More at all, but was in a kind of exile, either at the state hospital for the insane in Little Rock or, after Every Dill kidnapped her from that awful place and she subsequently was parted from her rescuer, in Tennessee, trying to find her way home but not succeeding until…but that is another story which you must tell us yourself one of these days, perhaps when you have no other stories to tell or you cannot do a fair job of telling whatever story you’re trying to tell.

  Anyway, from my window I could not only see through that bank building and catch a glimpse of Latha in her rocker on the porch of her store but also, at least once a day, Doc Swain himself sitting beside her, talking with her. As I’ll probably have to show you, it was an unrequited love he had for her, or maybe even an unexpressed love.

  You’ll have to decide for yourself, when I’m all done telling my story, whether or not Doc Swain even understood what love is. And making that judgment of him, you may also have to make it of me, because I’m not sure, even yet, that I know. Mary Celestia yonder accuses me to my face of not knowing, don’t you, Mary? Yes. Could be that she, like some women, just suffers from the insufficiency of my speaking of it. I don’t tell Mary Celestia every blessed day that I love her. That would turn it into a routine, like eating or breathing or taking a shit. There’s nothing routine about love, and it’s not something we do all the time, or even most of the time. I don’t love Mary every day. Some days it hits me all of a sudden in a way I can’t express that I love her more than anything ever got loved in the history of mankind, but other days I don’t even think about it.

  You know, I tried to point out in my folk-speech book, Down in the Holler—sizable parts of which I collected in Stay More that summer—that among the euphemisms and prudish taboos of the Ozarker even the word “love” is considered more or less indecent, and the mountain people seldom use it in its ordinary sense, but nearly always with some degrading or jocular connotation. If a hillman does admit that he loved a woman, he means only that he caressed and embraced her.

  And as far as I know, or was ever able to find out, Doc Swain never caressed, nor embraced, nor even touched your Latha Bourne. There was a woman—and also a girl—that Doc Swain had caressed and loved, over ten years and more previously, and this is going to be a story about them.

  So I lay there looking through that window, watching Latha’s store porch and watching her and whoever was on the porch talking to her, and whatever fantasies I could fix up in my idle mind involving myself and her or whoever. But that wasn’t all I did, of course. Rowena would bring me my breakfast of scrambled eggs or oatmeal, biscuits or toast, and make sure I drank a whole quart of fresh milk. Then she’d lather my jowls and shave me expertly with a straight razor that she kept keenly stropped, all the while keeping up a running palaver of chitchat. She even contributed to the story of Doc Swain by adding a few anecdotes and more interesting items that she had learned about him.

  Then she’d give me what the doctor prescribed as “a Brand bath.” Like my youthful misunderstanding of castor oil as a lubricant for furniture casters, I misunderstood this name to mean that it would permanently brand me, like cattle, but Doc eventually explained it was named after a German doctor named Brand who’d invented it as a therapy for typhoid. It was a lot harder to take than the “enemers” that Rowena also administered. It involved getting into a galvanized tub—I think it was just a sort of oval-shaped trough for watering livestock—and having Rowena dump buckets of fresh well-water over me, cold as a well-digger’s ass. Colder! Colder than a preacher’s balls! ’Scuse me, Mary. That water would make me scream, and then my teeth would start a-chattering, and my fingernails would turn blue. Doc called the Brand bath “a cardiovascular tonic,” but it near about gave me a heart attack. A wonder it didn’t give me pneumonia. But just when I’d got colder than I could stand, Rowena would commence a-rubbing me, like a massage only real hard, on my arms and legs and back and sides and all, until my blue skin had turned red as roses, and then, without drying, I’d get wrapped in an old linen sheet with a double blanket over that and put back to bed. All that rubbing Rowena done, especially around my lower stomach, would give my ole ying-yang a bone, and if I hadn’t been so sick I would’ve begged the gal for a little relief. Mary Celestia, it’s time for your nap, sweetheart, you don’t have to listen to this.

  But all of my “commerce” with sweet Rowena was limited mostly to friendly banter, sometimes off-color, and to her answers to occasional questions of mine, for example, Was Doc ever married? “Still is,” Rowena said, and when I tried to get her to elaborate she told me, as if I didn’t know, that there was no such of a thing as divorce in these here parts, and Doc had had a wife a number of years previously, whom he hadn’t seen in many a year, and another wife who died. “But you’ll jist have to git him to tell you his own self about all of that,” Rowena said.

  What with all that therapy and attention from Rowena—I don’t know if I was her only patient but she gave me the impression that I was—I was getting better day by day and reaching the point of wanting to get out of bed. “Doc,” I requested one morning, “how about lettin me sit in the rocker ’stead of layin in this bed all day and night?”

  “We aint out of the woods yit,” he declared.

  I sighed, “Tell me, Doc,” I said with a little exasperation, “how come you always say ‘we’ as if you’re the patient too? ‘Time for our breakfast,’ you’ll say even if you’ve done et. ‘Now let’s take our temperature,’ you’ll say, but you aint takin your own. Yesterday you said, ‘We wanter watch out we don’t git ourselfs a intestinal perforation,’ but there aint a bit of danger that you will ever git one!”

  Doc looked a little bit crestfallen. “Wal, don’t ye know, I reckon hit’s jist plain ole empathy,” he observed. “I aint never had a patient that I didn’t feel like everything happenin to them was happenin to m
e too. Ever baby I’ve delivered was birthed by me. Ever time anybody died I died too.”

  There was such a melancholy in his speaking of these words that I softened my annoyance. “Okay, I get the drift. But don’t ‘we’ get pretty goddamned itchy and on edge when ‘we’re’ confined to bed all the time?”

  “Yeah, I reckon we do. That’s how come me and Rowener tries to keep ye beguiled.”

  I was charmed by his use of that word, which can mean either to cheat, to deceive, or to amuse, to entertain, the latter meaning carrying the connotation of whiling away the hours and diverting one from one’s problems. It set me to pondering how the latter meaning could have grown out of the former, as if the ways we really entertain ourselves involve some kind of deception. A good story beguiles us: by deceiving us it entertains us. Maybe it’s even necessary to make some kind of corollary: a story is successfully delightful in proportion to its deception.

  But although Doc Swain had both beguiled and regaled me with quite a lot of anecdotes, jests, and tall tales that I had not heard before, he hadn’t yet got to the stage of telling me real stories, that is, extended narratives with plot development running through beginnings, middles, and endings. And despite my occasional promptings, he had not yet begun to tell me the most important story: his own. “Doc,” I would prompt, trying to get it out of him, “is it true that you were once a basketball coach?”

  “Basketball?” he would put me off. “I never knew nothing about basketball.” And, as I would eventually learn, that was quite true: he never knew nothing about basketball. But he had coached it.