Butterfly Weed

by Donald Harington

  Being bounced on Kie’s knee, by the way, was all the holding and cuddling that little Colvin needed, that he might’ve got from a mother if he’d had one. He didn’t need more of it. But Kie would hold and cuddle him if he hurt himself or was afraid of something.

  Kie was a talented guitarist and a pretty good singer of old songs, and he sang for his foster son every ballad, ancient and modern, which concerned horses.

  Later when Colvin had outgrown the knee-horsie, or rather graduated to being able to ride Kie’s back as Kie got on all fours to become the horse, Kie taught him to recite such things as “Ride a cock horse to Banbury town,” and such old rhymes as:

  One white foot, buy a horse;

  Two white feet, try a horse;

  Three white feet, look well about him;

  Four white feet, do without him.

  …Or the Ozarkian variant on this last: “Four white feet an’ a white nose, / Take off his hide an’ throw him to the crows.” And later, such things as: “Dear to me is my bonny white steed; / Oft has he helped me at pinch of need.” And even these lines from Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis”:

  Round-hoof’d, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,

  Broad breast, full eye, small head and nostril wide,

  High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong,

  Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide:

  Look, what a horse should have he did not lack,

  Save a proud rider on so proud a back.

  And later still, Kie taught him Latin: Tum bene fortis equus reserato carcere currit, Cum quos prœtereat, quosque sequatur, habet, which is from Ovid’s Art of Love and means: “The valiant horse races best, at the barrier’s fall, when he has others to follow and o’erpass,” or, to translate it into the way folks would talk in those parts, “A good horse runs better if he’s got other horses to beat out.” But by that time, Colvin was too old to ride the playlike horse of Kie or even the various broomstick horses that he outgrew one by one. He was ready for his own real horse. When a Spunkwater mule skinner named Felix Amidon got blinded by his own daddy for fooling around with the daddy’s kept woman, Kie went to him and treated him with a combination of large doses of thiamine and the singing of a special magic song in countertenor, which restored his eyesight, and Felix Amidon paid Kie for this cure with a broomtail Indian pony, which Kie presented to Colvin, who named the pony Pegasus but called him Ole Peg. I doubt if Kie ever told him the old tale of how Pegasus sprang from Medusa’s neck when her head was cut off, but possibly he did tell him about how the nine Muses took care of Pegasus and maybe even how Bellerophon tamed him and rode him off to fight the Chimera.

  What the knife Prince had been to his daddy at that age and later, the pony Pegasus became for Colvin. He took to riding it all over creation, especially westward to Stay More, which somehow seemed more like a hometown to him than Spunkwater did. Even though he didn’t know it, Stay More was a-swarming with his own kinfolks. He had first cousins and last cousins all over the place. He liked to tie Pegasus at the porch of Isaac Ingledew’s gristmill and sit on the edge of the mill porch with all the other loafers of Stay More. Because his hair was black and his features favored the McKinstry side of his family, nobody suspected that he was another son of Alonzo Swain, who had his doctor’s office on Stay More’s Main Street and sometimes came to the mill to loaf around. Colvin had learned to call him “Uncle ’Lonzo,” because that is what Alonzo had requested that Kie tell the boy he was: not his father, but his uncle. If any of the Stay More boys his own age asked him who he was or where he was from, he would just say he was Colvin and he lived in a cave-house over toward Spunkwater with Doc Kie Raney. He never told anybody that he was Doc Raney’s son. We don’t even know if he believed that himself, but leastways he never gave out that he was Doc Raney’s son; he just said he lived with him, in a cave-house. The other boys were curious to know about that cave-house, what it looked like, how it was built (or rather how the boards and windows and door covered the mouth of the cave to form one wall of a dwelling whose other walls were the natural stone of the cave), and how it felt to live inside of it. When Colvin explained how cool it was in hottest summer and how warm it was in coldest winter, the boys went home to their parents and demanded to know why everybody didn’t live in caves. Most of the parents could only reply, “Beats me,” or, “I don’t have the first idee,” or, “You’ve got me there, boy.”

  One day Colvin noticed that the Stay More boys were missing. He waited around the mill porch for them to show up, but they never did. He went over to the Ingledew Store to see if they might be there, but they weren’t. So he went back to the mill and waited some more, until somebody asked him, “How come ye aint in school?” Now the only school he’d ever heard tell of was once when Kie Raney had showed him a school of fish in the creek. So he figured that the other boys were all off a-fishing somewheres. He got back on Ole Peg and rode up and down Banty Creek a ways without finding any boys fishing, so then he rode up and down Swains Creek a ways, and it just so happened that when he come to the Stay More schoolhouse, the boys was all outdoors for recess, and there was a bunch of girls too! Colvin had hardly ever seen a girl. Riding Pegasus all over the countryside, he had sometimes spied a girl standing on the porch of a house or maybe even working in the garden, but he’d never seen one up close. He wanted to talk to one of them, to see if they sounded like human beings.

  Colvin got down from his pony and stood there admiring the girls, and admiring the schoolhouse, a handsome structure with a little bell-tower cupola on top of it, and big glass windows, and a couple of twin doors—“bigeminal,” as you say. Colvin went up to one of the boys and asked, “What are y’all up to?” The boy replied, “We’re a-playing Dare Base.” Colvin watched them run around for a while, and then the bell up on the roof went BOMB-DOOM one time, and all the kids quit running around and went into the building, the girls through one door, the boys through the other, with Colvin joining the latter. He found a seat at a desk in the back and sat there watching as a old feller got up and took a piece of white chalk and used it to make some letters on the wall, which was painted black. The letters said GEOGRAPHY, LESSON 6, and STATE CAPITALS, and then the feller turned around and said, “All righty, what’s the state capital of Arkansas?” and some girl held up her hand and the feller said, “You, Sarey,” and the girl said, “Little Rock, Teacher!” And the man said, “Keerect. Missoury?” and somebody said “Jeff City, Teacher.” This went on for some time, with the feller naming all the neighboring states, but then he began to name far-off places, and when he named Virginia nobody knew its capital, except Colvin, who did as he had observed the others doing and held up his hand.

  “You thar,” the teacher-feller pointed at him. “I don’t believe I recollect yore name.”

  “Colvin, Teacher” he said. “Richmond.”

  “Colvin Richmond, huh? I don’t know any Richmonds hereabouts. Are you new to this country?”

  “Nossir, I meant Richmond is the capital of Virginia.”

  “Is that a fack?” the man said, and consulted his book, and said, “Why, yes indeed, Richmond is the capital of Virginia. What is the capital of North Carolina?”

  Nobody else held up their hands, so Colvin said, “Raleigh, Teacher.” His ability to answer apparently amused some of the boys, who began giggling and making remarks among themselves, which appeared to anger the teacher, who took one of the boys, Oren Duckworth, to the front of the room and used a hickory switch to flog him unmercifully. Colvin had never seen anybody flogged before, nor considered that one human might do this thing to another human, so despite his sympathy for Oren he considered this experience more educational than learning the state capitals, which he already knew anyway. And since nobody except Colvin knew that Pierre is the capital of South Dakota and Montpelier is the capital of Vermont, the teacher gave up on Geography and went on to Reading, where it turned out that Colvin was the only one who could read a page of
the McGuffey Reader without using his finger as a pointer or screwing up his face and reciting the words in a singsong; to ’Riting, where it appeared that Colvin alone could use script instead of block letters; and to ’Rithmetic, where Colvin was able to do higher sums without counting on his toes.

  Then school let out for the day. Colvin had been looking for a chance to talk to some of the girls, especially since he’d already learned from the classroom that they sounded pretty much like any other human being. But before he could approach any of the girls, he was surrounded by a group of the boys, and Oren Duckworth said, “Aint you a big sprout?” Colvin was not sure which of the various buds or shoots of young plants he was referring to, and before he could answer, Oren put both hands on his chest and shoved, throwing Colvin off balance so that he landed on his buttocks, and before he could get up the other boys began kicking him, in his ribs and stomach and even in his face. It was very painful. He tried to cover himself with his arms. “Git on back to yore cave, Smartypants!” Oren said. “Jist crawl on home to yore hole and don’t show yore face around here again!” They allowed him to get up, and he made a dash for Pegasus, leapt atop the pony and took off, but the boys pursued him, throwing rocks, some of which hit both him and his pony, before they could make their getaway. Riding home, he meditated on the irony that in a place called invitingly “Stay More,” he was told imperatively, “Git Out.”

  He did not tell Kie Raney about being banished from Stay More, but he told him about the school. “You never told me there was such a place as a school,” he mildly complained, because Kie had tried to tell him about everything under the sun.

  “Yeah, I used to run a school myself,” Kie said, and he told about his years as schoolmaster at the Spunkwater school, and how he’d been the preceptor of some kids who grew up to be some of the finest people in this part of the country because he’d tried to make them interested in some subjects that would otherwise have been boring. “Did ye git bored at the Stay More school?” Kie asked him.

  Colvin allowed as how he hadn’t particularly enjoyed it, nor learned anything worth knowing, except his two lessons, one as an observer and one as a participant, in the way the human species gets pleasure from inflicting pain on one another. “But I don’t see the point,” he declared, “in a teacher standing in front of a bunch of kids who all face the same way and sit at the same kind of desk and have to learn the same kind of stuff…unless maybe that was my third lesson, if a teacher has fun making learning painful.”

  Kie laughed and said he suspected that there was a streak of cruelty in many teachers that was not expressed only in the corporal punishment of the hickory switch but in the pleasure of exposing ignorance and provoking feelings of stupidity and worthlessness. “Don’t ye fret, Colvin,” Kie said, “I won’t let anybody make ye go to school if ye don’t wanter.”

  “Suits me,” Colvin said, but then he thought of something, and added, “I reckon all I’d miss would be the chance to git a good look at some of them gals. I don’t never see ary gal hereabouts, and maybe I’ll git to missin ’em.” He pondered this prospect, and then, having been encouraged all his young life to ask any question that he wished to ask of his sage and kind mentor, he asked, “How come gals has got long hair and dresses?”

  “There’s always two reasons for everything,” Kie reminded him, “a practical reason and a purty reason. The purty reason is the same as the reason gals gener’ly look sweeter in the face than boys do, and the reason the grown-up gal is the only female in all creation who has swollen bubbies all the time. A gal gits a feller to notice her by all these things: the long hair and the nice dress and sweet face and the shapely bubbies let on that she’s a she, jist in case his weak nose and his weak ears didn’t let him know. That’s the purty reason, and ye know, of course, why it’s necessary for fellers to want gals, to propagate the species like all other critters and livin things. Now the practical reason is this: the long hair keeps the gal’s head temperature more even and reg’lar and helps her think better, and she shore needs to use her wits and her brains to git along in this world; the sweet face makes fellers want to protect it and help her git along in this world; the dress makes it more handy for them to lift it up so’s they can propagate the species, you know? And the swollen bubbies make a nice soft piller fer babies and menfolk alike.”

  “Pillow or pillar?” Colvin sought to clarify the pronunciation.

  “Both, like I say,” Kie said.

  Doc Kie Raney was all the teacher that Colvin ever needed, and there were so many things to teach him that perhaps it was just as well that he wasn’t distracted by long hair, dresses, sweet faces, and bubbies. If Colvin inherited any of Alonzo’s legendary appetite for the pleasures of the flesh, he would not really have an opportunity to express it for years to come.

  Man’s first sublimation of the sexual urge was hunting, a necessity, and that is what all sublimations are, if I may use Kie’s theory: there is both a practical reason and an aesthetic reason for everything, and the sexual urge is sublimated, on one hand, the practical hand, to make man hunt, to feed himself, to destroy life in order to nurture life, and on the other hand, the aesthetic one, to make man create: to build, to paint, to compose, to tell stories.

  Kie and Colvin spent a lot of time hunting. Although Doc Raney’s patients paid him off with produce and livestock, and Kie never lacked for a larder, he and Colvin had a taste for game, and they’d rather eat a rabbit than a chicken, a deer than a beef, a wild turkey than a tame one, and they were crazy about bear meat. Kie taught Colvin marksmanship not only with a variety of firearms, side arms, and shoulder arms alike, but also with bow and arrow, crossbow, and even, in emulation of the Bluff Dwellers who had lived in their cave before them, the atlatl. Kie spent a great deal of time teaching Colvin about knives: not just the common jackknife like his daddy’s old Prince, but real hunting knives, Bowie knives, carving knives, daggers, frog stickers, and, of course, scalpels, with which Kie taught him the anatomy of everything in creation, animal and plant alike. Once, an indigent, homeless patient of Kie’s died, and Kie brought the cadaver home and used it for months to teach Colvin the anatomy of the human body. Colvin’s keen mind was too fascinated to be frightened or disgusted by the cadaver.

  Living in the near-wilderness gave Colvin a better understanding of nature than most physicians could ever learn. Just as Kie and Colvin preferred the wild meat of the forest to the tame meat that Doc Raney’s patients offered in payment, they preferred the wild plants to the produce from the vegetable garden. They foraged not just for the delicious things like muscadines, dewberries, wild blackberries, and walnuts but also poke sallet, lamb’s quarters, dock, and sorrel. As long as Kie had him in the forest teaching him how to tell a possum from a coon or an edible boletus from a deadly amanita, the wise and good doctor thought it was time to begin Colvin’s education in the finding and preparation of medicinal herbs, and even their naming by Latin botanical name, for example Hydrastis canadensis for goldenseal, Digitalis purpurea for foxglove, and Podophyllum peltatum for mandrake. He took especial pains to show Colvin how to find, dig up, and make a tea from the stout taproot of Asclepias tuberosa, called variously silkweed, white root, orange milkweed, wind root, chigger weed, pleurisy root, Indian paintbrush, and, most commonly, butterfly weed. It is tops for curing any of the various diseases that are generally called “lung trouble.” Even when it fails, butterfly weed is still the most powerful placebo known to man. Kie taught Colvin all of the magical incantations that are meant to accompany the administering of each herb, but he pointed out that butterfly weed is the only remedy which doesn’t need a verbal incantation to go with it.

  Incantations, Kie had to point out, did not work in veterinary medicine, because animals could not understand our language. Kie made Colvin into an expert veterinarian before allowing him a chance to treat a human being, even including himself. Kie taught him never to kill a snake, especially not a poisonous snake, and most particularly not a
particular poisonous snake who has bitten someone, because an essential part of the cure for snakebite, the exact details of which I was never able to pry out of any of my informants, was to find the actual snake who had bitten the victim, do something or the other with it, but release it unharmed afterwards. Colvin himself was bitten once by a deadly copperhead, cured of the bite by Kie with the help of the reptile itself, who, instead of being released, became Colvin’s pet. Colvin called him Drakon and fed him and talked to him, and, for some years, even slept with him. Drakon and Pegasus did not like each other, however, and Colvin had to learn to enjoy the company of one without the other.

  When Colvin turned fourteen, and demonstrated to his master’s satisfaction his ability to cure rinderpest in cows, glanders and staggers in horses, bluetongue in sheep, and swine fever in pigs, Kie got out a big book and blew the dust off it, Home-Study Guide to Materia Medica, Pharmacy, Therapeutics, and Surgical Procedures, the same book Kie had used to teach Colvin’s daddy the rudiments of human medicine. Alonzo had required six months to master the book with the help of daily quizzes from Kie; Colvin was able to commit the book to memory in one month. Then, because Kie fortunately had a little cash on hand, from tending a rheumatic widow who couldn’t pay him in produce or livestock and had to use real money, he was able to send off and order such additional books as Boenning’s A Textbook on Practical Anatomy, Buret’s Syphilis in Modern Times, Eisenberg’s Bacteriological Diagnosis, Edinger’s Twelve Lectures on the Structure of the Central Nervous System, and Hare’s Fever: Its Pathology and Treatment. Since these new books contained all kinds of stuff that even Kie himself didn’t know, he and Colvin read them together and quizzed each other on them, and by the time he was fifteen, Colvin was accompanying Kie on his rounds and assisting in surgery and obstetrics. Eager to please, Colvin offered to take over the management of the disorderly office accounts, and began riding Pegasus around to collect the livestock and produce that patients owed. All of this activity brought him occasionally into contact with, or at least in sight of, a female, and he enjoyed this.