Maybe I’m giving the impression that Doc didn’t have anything better to do, when he wasn’t killing time chatting with Latha Bourne on her store porch, than to sit around telling me tales and windies. My picture of him might run counter to the traditional idea of the overworked, underslept physician who had to see a hundred patients a day or night at all hours. In truth, Doc Swain was not the slave of his job…but he was the slave of his research, which he was keeping private. I knew that he spent a great number of hours each day in a back room of the house that he called his “laboratory.” He explained that of course he was his own pathologist, but that wasn’t all he was doing back there in that room. For all I knew, he was creating a monster, like Frankenstein. I can remember a few occasions when Rowena said to me, “Colvin caint see you this mornin”—she never called him “the doctor” or “Doc” or anything but his first name—“on account of he was up all last night hard at work in his laboratory.” Eventually I came right out and asked him what kind of research he was doing, but all he would say was, “Oh, I’ve jist been foolin around with some pathogenic microorganisms, tryin to see if I caint come up with an antibiotic.”
He had very few office calls. Whenever somebody was sick, Doc went to them, at their house. And usually that was only after they had exhausted every other possible means for a cure: home remedies, patent medicines, superstitions, visits from Gram Dinsmore or some other “granny woman.” Doc was just the expedient if nothing else worked.
“I am the last resort,” he declared to me one day, in a kind of self-deprecating way. But there was not only a poignant seriousness to the declaration, there was also a kind of symbolism in it.
And he scarcely made enough income to meet his expenses. He had practically not one cash-paying patient…except me, whenever my time came to settle the bill for my treatment. His patients paid him through a kind of barter. The storekeeper Willis Ingledew gave him free gasoline for his car. Other patients gave him produce from their gardens, or fruit from their orchards, or cordwood from their woodlots, or corn whiskey, or even livestock: pigs and calves and chickens, and a horse. Later, after I became ambulatory, Doc showed me his pantry, crowded with Mason jars of canned fruits and vegetables, blackberry preserves, jams, honey, and molasses, and he showed me the little smokehouse behind his home, where he had hanging a great collection of hams and side meat. “The pay in this line of work aint nothin to mention,” he declared, “but the eatin is sure dandy.”
He was a good doctor, too. My first and most vivid impression of his talent occurred early in my second week there, a morning after my Brand bath when I began feeling worse, after a steady improvement. I wondered if the Brand baths were taxing my system or giving me pneumonia, but they wouldn’t have given me the stomach distress I was feeling.
Doc was customarily easygoing, relaxed, slow moving, and deliberate in everything he did. But that morning he took a good look at me and became suddenly brisk. He popped his thermometer into my mouth and could hardly wait to read it, and when he did, he yelled, “Git the morphine, Rowener!” I began to get dizzy even before he administered the morphine; I was scarcely conscious of his busy movements and what he was doing, and I barely heard him say to Rowena, “He’s a-hemorrhaging.” He worked me over, then said to her, “Fetch me some thromboplastin.”
The last thing I remember of that episode was his telling Rowena to run up to Latha’s and see if she had any ice in her icebox that she could spare, and to fill an ice bag to keep on my stomach. That was, incidentally, my first awareness of Latha’s use of that modern convenience which you would note in your first book about her: that she ordered from Jasper, the county seat and depot for it, an occasional block of ice, manufactured in distant Harrison, the nearest large town. The mail truck brought the ice wrapped in canvas. Latha had the only icebox in Stay More; and a few years afterwards in her general store she would have the only soda-pop cooler in that part of Newton County.
I am not certain that I avoided the delirium that he had predicted might be a sequela of my disease. For a long time I thought it was just a dream, but it could have been a delirious dream. I am reluctant to reveal it, except that it casts some light on what we are going to learn, later on, about Doc Swain’s early career as a physician. Rowena was in the dream too, the player piano was in the dream, in fact there was so much from “life” included in the dream that I did not understand until I “woke” from it that it had all been a dream. It was, frankly, the most vivid, the most real dream I had ever had. I do not remember what Doc said to me, nor I to him. He was holding in his hand that ice bag that he had supposedly obtained from Latha, and he applied it to my stomach and successfully induced the clotting of my blood, so that a transfusion would not be necessary. He then manipulated my abdomen, lay his hands on my chest for a while, and finally put one hand on my head and pronounced me cured. I remember only one thing I said: “Just like that, huh?”
And then I found myself in exactly the same position, in relation to the other two people who had been in the “dream,” except that I understood that I was “awake,” and that whatever I had been experiencing must have been a dream or a delirium. I felt wonderful. I felt, at least, much better than I had in weeks. “I reckon that ice bag worked!” I observed.
“We couldn’t use it,” he said apologetically. “Latha was all out of ice.”
“But didn’t you just put an ice bag on my stomach?” I asked.
He and Rowena exchanged looks. “Nope, I’m sorry,” he said. “But somehow the blood clotted anyway, so I reckon we won’t have to give ye a transfusion after all. I could’ve given ye one from my own arm,” he declared, “since me’n you has got the same blood type, but I’d shore of had to charge ye a good bit extry for that!”
I was sitting up, I was ready to get out of bed, I was all well, but I was puzzled that Doc did not realize what he had done to me. “I must have been just dreaming,” I said, “but whatever it was, you healed me! You appeared to me in the dream and fixed me up just fine!”
He smiled his benevolent smile, and said, “Wal, it’s been a good long while since I did the dream cure on anybody, but if you think that’s what it was, and it worked, then we’re sure enough in good health again.”
“Dream cure?” I said, snared by the possible mythology of it. “Doc, you are just going to have to tell me about the dream cure.”
He let me get out of bed. He invited me into the adjacent room, his office, where there were a pair of comfortable chairs. He pulled out his pocket watch, looked at it, and declared, “Rowener’s taking off in a minute or two.” Then he opened a drawer of his desk and brought out a cigar box which contained, I was surprised and delighted to discover, a few cigars. He handed me one and began unwrapping one himself. Those weren’t nickel cigars, either. Hell, they weren’t even dime cigars, but two-for-a-quarter Antonio y Cleopatras. You know, I can’t hardly ever smoke anymore, mostly on account of consideration for Mary Celestia but also because this nursing home don’t allow smoking in bed and I aint allowed to get out of bed! But there was a time, many and many a year of my earlier days, when I truly appreciated a good cigar.
After Doc lit my cigar for me, and lit his own, and we commenced a-suckin and a-puffin and actin like a pair of pigs who’d got into the corncrib, pretty soon Doc got up again to fetch the demijohn and poured us both a good helping of the Chism’s Dew, saying, “Don’t worry, ole Rowener won’t be back ’til after suppertime.” Then Doc put on his storytelling face. I had learned to recognize it: the slight upturning of the corners of his mouth as if he was getting ready to be amused himself; the twinkle in his eye, the wrinkling of the crow’s-feet at the eye corners. But the gaze in his twinkling eyes was far, far away, and he said, “I aint quite ready to tell you my own story. Not jist yet. I reckon I could do it, by-and-by, but I’d better warm up first on somebody else’s story. I’m a-fixin to tell ye about the first physician of Stay More, who was my paw, and if you can swaller his story, you jist might be rea
dy for mine.”
Then he began. He wound himself up and went all the way back to when his father, Gilbert Alonzo Swain, first arrived in what had become Stay More at the age of two or three. You have already told the beginning of that in your Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks: how the first white settlers of Stay More after Jacob and Noah Ingledew was a family from North Carolina, the widow Lizzie Swain and her thirteen children, the “least’un” being Gilbert, who would later prefer being called by his middle name. You have told how tiny Gilbert played a crucial part in the matchmaking of his oldest sister, Sarah, with Jake Ingledew, thereby starting the Ingledew dynasty. Doc told me all of these stories which I recalled when I read your book, and I learned from him also of the annual visits of the legendary peddler from Connecticut, Eli Willard. I don’t want to bore you with what you already know, so I suppose I’ll begin, myself, with Gilbert’s acquisition of his knife from that peddler. The knife would later serve as his scalpel. Eli Willard sold to each of the Swain sisters a pair of scissors and to each of the Swain brothers a knife, which would fold up to be kept in one’s pocket.
Gilbert did not have a pocket but he became inseparable from his knife, carrying it closed in his hand at all times except when he slept and placed it under his pillow. He noticed there were letters on the knife, and he asked his mother what they meant, and she said they said, “Prince,” so he decided that would be his knife’s name, and sometimes he would even talk to it, saying, “Prince, I have got to find me some way to raise four cents’ cash money to pay for you.”
His brother Murray showed him how to rub Prince on a piece of Arkansas whetstone, which is the best there is, and he always kept Prince sharp enough to slice a hair in two. His brother Virgil tried to show him how to use Prince to play a dumb game called mumble the peg, but he did not like sticking Prince into the earth, which was dirty. He did not mind sticking Prince into things which bled, because blood is not dirty. With Prince he carved up birds and frogs and squirrels, and he got into bad trouble with his mother when he carved up a cat that she cherished. His mother took Prince away from him for two months.
When she finally let him have Prince back, he took Prince and stuck him into the largest snake he could find. The snake writhed and twisted and flopped for a good long spell before it finally died. Gilbert wanted to hang it on the wall of the house, but his mother would not let him, so he took it back to the spot where he killed it and told it, “You can jist lay there and rot, for all I care.” Then he had to scrub his hands with lye soap to get rid of the snake’s blood and stains. Gilbert’s childhood ended not when he learned that death is an escape nor even when he learned that we must confront the meaning of death but when his well-meaning sister Bert tried to teach him what death is like. Elberta did not try to kill him, and what she did was not even meant to hurt him. She did not even understand perhaps that a six-year-old boy was not old enough to feel the kind of death she was contemplating. Many years afterwards he was to ask her, “How come ye didn’t pick Boyd or Frank or Virgil or one of yore other brothers?” and she was to answer only, “They was too big and besides they wasn’t handy.” He assumed she meant that they weren’t sleeping with her, as he was.
Being the “least one,” Gilbert Alonzo had always been required to sleep in the bed that contained all the females of the family, where every night there was usually a right smart of constant whispering and giggling amongst his sisters, which kept him awake and went on until Gilbert’s mother told them to shut up and skedaddle for the Land of Nod. Sometimes Gilbert listened to the sounds of the dark: the snickers and titters and tee-hees, and sometimes he heard a fragment of their whisperings, which had to do with girly stuff that either didn’t interest him or, more than likely, was too tough for him to figure.
Although they had customary places in the bed—Gilbert usually sleeping between his mother and Esther, the youngest girl, who was less than a year older than Gilbert and, being so small, not as encumbered with protruberances as the older girls—the place a body went to sleep in was not necessarily the place a body would wake up in, and sometimes before morning Gilbert would find himself at the opposite side of the bed from his mother, and not be able to remember how he had managed to climb over or roll over or be shoved or lifted over all the sisters.
The night his childhood ended, the night he decided henceforth to “go by” his middle name, Gilbert Alonzo woke perhaps an hour after going to bed to find himself face-to-face with Bert, who was the fleshiest of the sisters, and being so soft, not so troublesome to be face-to-face with, although you usually didn’t get face-to-face until you were in deepest slumber. Bert was awake too, and she commenced whispering into Gilbert’s ear. All he could make out in his grogginess was the question “Does that feel good?” which she would repeat in several variations during the course of the next hour or so. She was doing something that not even his mother had ever done, as far as he could recall. She was holding him by his handle, which had swole. He had never touched his jemmison himself except when he had to go to the bushes with it, and he had been taught that one goes to the bushes for a good reason: because the bushes are private, shielding. Sometimes one of his sisters had to go to the bushes in the middle of the night, but she didn’t actually go outside where the real bushes were, she just squatted down over the slop jar that was kept beneath the bed, and apparently didn’t even have to aim her jemmison, an accomplishment which led Gilbert to the eventual realization that girls don’t even possess jemmisons, and now Bert was taking his hand and making him touch her to confirm that she did not possess a jemmison and asking him, “Does that feel good?” He didn’t know for sure if it felt good or not but it sure felt funny, just a damp crease where a jemmison ought to be. And next thing he knew she was saying, “Let’s us mash our things together and see how that feels,” and they did, and when she asked the next time, “Does that feel good?” he was compelled to speak the only word that he uttered that night: “Some.”
Bert squirmed and shifted her legs and tried to arch her back without knocking the next sleeper out of the bed, and she grabbed him and pulled him and tugged him, and pretty soon he knew that his swole jemmison had been tucked into her. “Don’t that feel good!” she said, but it was not a question. He studied the feeling. It was not quite like sticking Prince inside of something. Prince would slice or tear to get inside. But still it was a kind of insideness. A disappearance. He was only mildly troubled to discover that Bert, and by implication all other girls, had all of that slick tight warm interior space, which his jemmison could not quite fill.
The movements that Bert began making seemed intended to make him fill her better or fill her repeatedly or fill her deeper or fill her faster. Bert was getting so busy that the mattress, which was stuffed with corn shucks, began to utter and grumble. Whoever was sleeping on the other side of Bert was jostled awake and said “Huh?” and then “Who?” and then “Hee,” and then rolled the other way and dropped back into sleep. Bert was making the whole bed shake. It was a wonder she didn’t wake everybody. But then she asked, “Don’t ye feel good enough to die?” and she declared, “I’m a-fixin to die!” and then she gasped and hollered, “I’m a-dyin!” and Alonzo tried to break loose from her but she grabbed his bottom and mashed him even harder against her, and she went on dying for a while and then, to his relief, she quit dying and came alive again, and let him go. He got his jemmison out and backed off from her as far as he could, up against whichever sister was behind him. Bert said, “Wal, I reckon ye aint old enough to die yet.” And she went to sleep.
Five more years went by before Alonzo was able to die himself, and discover why dying was so important to Bert and also to his sisters Octavia and Zenobia, who, once they discovered what Bert had done with Alonzo, had to try it themselves. ’Tavy and Nobe were both older than Bert. Two of the sisters younger than Bert, Nettie and Esther, also wanted to give it a try, but although they managed to do everything with Alonzo that they were supposed to do, with some diffi
culty because of their virginity, they were not able to die yet. For four years Alonzo was passed around from one sister to another, usually in bed in the dark, but sometimes elsewhere around the place in daylight too. He greatly enjoyed “the funny feeling,” as he called it, the mild sting or buzz or whatever it was that was almost but not quite dying.
Then when he finally did die for the first time, it wasn’t with a sister but a pretty little girl who lived up the creek a ways, name of Mellie Chism. But while this death was the best feeling that he’d ever had, two things troubled him about it: the very fact that Mellie wasn’t any sister of his, and the fact that Mellie herself didn’t die as his sisters so readily did. Studying this problem, he decided that you aren’t supposed to do it with your sister if you want to die, but if you’re a sister you have to do it with your brother if you want to die. Since he wasn’t a sister, it didn’t matter to him whether Mellie died or not, and he went on doing it with her whenever they could sneak off somewheres private together.
For a year all of his deaths were dry deaths. Mellie got right damp and creamy but he never did. A few times at her suggestion because she wanted to see if it might make her die, he had taken a piss while he was inside her. It had felt funny to him and given her a thrill but it didn’t kill either one of them. The time when finally he had his first true wet death he thought at first that he was only pissing again, but it wasn’t. Whatever it was, it stayed inside her.
Alonzo Swain was fourteen years old before he ever saw what his own jism looked like. It happened one time when Mellie took a notion to remove her dress. Alonzo had never seen a girl naked. All his sisters slept in nightdresses that came down to their ankles and besides it was dark, usually, and the few hundred times that he had lain with a sister in the daylight she had kept her day dress on, just raising it to her waist. But one time Mellie and Alonzo were way off in the woods and it was hot July and she suddenly took her dress plumb up off over her head. He already had a very stiff jemmison in anticipation of what they would sooner or later do and because they hadn’t done it in over two months, and now the sight of Mellie without a stitch just caused his mind to run away with him and then his glands ran away with him and before he knew what had happened he was squirting jism all over creation, even hitting Mellie in the face, which for some reason she thought was the funniest thing that had ever happened to her. The stuff had no resemblance to piss. It was much thicker, and white, and runny. Using his hand to wipe it off her face, he asked, “Is this yere what I’ve been a-fillin ye up with all along?”
Butterfly Weed Page 5
