This went on for another year before she finally had to admit to herself that she did not know everything, and therefore she was forced to ask Colvin a question. It was one of the few times that she ever asked him a question. “Why am I not getting pregnant?”
Gently he tried to tell her that while he wasn’t one hundred percent certain (he was the first to admit that in medicine there is never, ever anything like one-hundred-percent certainty), it was quite possible that the eclampsia had left some permanent damage to her interior organs of reproduction.
Secretly Piney had been planning the life and career of her second son, Potts Swain (named after her mother’s family, the Potts). Although she could not be certain that she knew this, she thought, or at least hoped that Potts, like his late lamented brother, Mackey, would follow in his father’s footsteps as a physician. Maybe Potts wouldn’t be a heroic army surgeon in some future war, but he’d be a good doctor, she knew. No, not knew, but thought, or hoped. Now she found it hard to believe, no, impossible to accept, that poor Potts couldn’t even get his medical diploma because the eclampsia had ruptured her reproductive system. Not sure any longer that she knew anything, she wondered if perhaps making Potts into a gynecologist, and a famous one, might make it possible for her to hope, if not to know, that her gynecological apparatus could be repaired so that Potts could be born.
Brooding on this puzzle, Piney isolated herself with her quilt making. She gave up sex entirely. Like the consumption of alcoholic beverages, quilt making is something that ought not be done in private; as long as drinking and quilt making are social activities indulged in the company of one’s friends and kindred, they are relatively harmless, but once you start drinking or quilting in private you are in a trouble. Colvin missed Piney. It was almost like finding himself without a mirror to look into and see his own image, because in so many ways Colvin and Piney were mirrors of each other. Not physically, although her hair was the same black as his and there were enough other similarities that they could have passed for twins. Not even emotionally, although being seventh son of a seventh son and seventh daughter of a seventh daughter gave them depths of temperamental kinship that transcended whatever “magic” powers they had acquired (and perhaps lost) from such a lineage. But probably mentally, because they remained each other’s best friend, and would always be, even when Piney withdrew so deeply into solitary quilt making and into her sadness over her infertility that she no longer talked to him or to anybody.
The years passed. Although America belatedly joined the world’s first great war, only two Stay Morons volunteered to become soldiers, as you have noted. Another great event of that time affected the town more than the war, and that was the outbreak of Spanish influenza, which presented Colvin with the first disease for which he could not prescribe a cure, because there was none. I myself as a young infantryman stationed at Camp Pike in North Little Rock had a bout with the flu, which later became an epidemic killing dozens of soldiers there. Nationwide, 548,000 victims of influenza died that year. Of those, only one was a patient of Doc Swain, but that was too much for Colvin, who had never lost a patient before. He ought to have been consoled by the survival of the 189 folks that he treated successfully for the flu, doing whatever was necessary to help them get over it. He’d given up his saddle horse in favor of a horse-drawn buggy, and his horse, Nessus, always knew the way home, so that after Colvin had been out all night tending the flu victims, he could go to sleep in the buggy and Nessus would take him home. Even Doc Plowright too was exhausted from treating, or trying to treat, the flu. It ought to have consoled Colvin that Jack lost six or seven of his patients, to Colvin’s one, but that one haunted his sleep and gave him bad dreams, in which he kept trying to resurrect the dead man. Never mind that the man was old Willis Dinsmore, who wasn’t so far off from dying of natural old age anyhow. Colvin began to have dreams in which he tried something different on Willis and saved him. Before long, he was “visiting” more flu victims in his dreams than he was in his buggy, and the funny thing was, the ones that he visited in his dreams got well! At least, more of ’em did than the ones he visited in his buggy.
There were two things Colvin couldn’t admit to Piney. One was that he had a touch of the flu himself. The other was that he was going around in his dreams curing people. The first was no problem: he just stayed away from Piney until his own contagion could no longer infect her. But the second was a big problem, because they had always shared their dreams, and Colvin couldn’t admit to her that he was going around curing all of these sick people in his dreams. Knowing everything, she knew he was up to something. She asked him where he’d been in his dreams, and he had to make up lies: he’d just taken a trip to Harrison, or he’d gone off fishing or whatever. Finally she accused him, “You’re seeing a girlfriend, aren’t you?”
Like all healthy, normal, even happily married men, he sometimes dreamt of women he wasn’t married to, but he wouldn’t admit this to Piney. As a matter of fact, he was visiting a patient in his dreams who was both a friend and a girl, a second cousin of his named Lorraine Swain, who was a dizzying redhead. In his dreams she came down with an awful case of the flu, and he was trying everything he knew to help her.
One day he happened across the girl’s mother, who was his own cousin, and just out of curiosity he asked her how Lorraine was, and the mother replied that Lorraine had had a real bad case of the flu but seemed to be completely over it now.
Weeks passed, and Lorraine came to him one day, saying, “Doc, you shore fixed me up jist fine when ye came in my dreams. But now I’ve got something else, and ever time I try to see ye in my dreams you’re out on a call.”
Apparently as a consequence of the flu, or even a slight pneumonia accompanying it, Lorraine had developed empyema, which is where an accumulation of pus builds up in the pleura, the lung coverings. Abscess is what it is, and Colvin had to spend a lot of time with her, treating her with various measures to avoid having to operate, which is often necessary to drain the cavity.
Colvin found that his daytime, “real,” unasleep treatment of Lorraine was not as effective as his nighttime, dreaming treatment of her, so he continued the latter to the point where, one night, Piney woke him up and accused him of being with another woman, and he simply tried to explain that he was treating a patient, Lorraine Swain. He was abashed because he’d actually had normal, healthy fantasies of getting into bed with Lorraine, but he had refrained from doing it, even in his dream. “For Godsakes, Piney,” he complained, “I’m jist a-doing my duty as her doctor!” Haven’t you been holding her hand? Piney asked, feeling the return of her old omniscience. Colvin blushed and had to admit that he had been holding Lorraine’s hand in the dream, not just for her comfort but to check her circulation and nerves. Haven’t you been feeling of her breasts? Piney asked, surprised and pleased to discover that now she knew what he had been doing, Colvin did an inadequate job of explaining that it was necessary to palpate her bosom in order to examine the state of her thorax. Haven’t you kissed her a time? Piney wanted to know, knowing as well as if she could see them doing it. Poor Colvin was really clumsy in his attempt to explain that he was trying to determine if the pus was odorless or infected and had put his nostrils right up against her nostrils in order to smell her breathing.
“You had better just keep that girl out of your dreams, you hear me?” Piney told him. And just to be sure that he had stopped seeing Lorraine in his dreams, each morning she would ask him if he’d dreamt of her. Now you may wonder if it was unethical for a doctor to be so henpecked by his wife that he’d neglect one of his patients even in his dreams, and the truth was that Colvin had discovered he was doing something he’d never have suspected himself of doing: lying to Piney. He was still seeing Lorraine every night in his dreams, but only to treat her condition.
Before he knew it, Lorraine was up and around and just as good as she ever was. One day, he was riding his horse up the road to see another patient when he came across Lorrain
e picking blackberries along the road, and he figured it wouldn’t be violating any of Piney’s restrictions if he just stopped and passed the time of day with her for a minute or two. In the course of their talk, Colvin learned that not only had he visited her every time she’d gone to sleep and dreamt, for a week or more, but in her dreams he’d told her what to take, and—get this—he’d even “opened her up” in her dream and removed a portion of her rib in order to drain the pus from the cavity and had injected some medicine into the cavity as well as into her chest muscle.
“Hold on, gal!” Colvin exclaimed, astonished because the treatment she was describing was exactly what he dreamt he had done. But how do you operate in a dream? “Show me where ye claim I cut ye open.” And right there in the road Lorraine unbuttoned her shirt to show him the incision. Bertha Kimber happened to be coming down the road at that moment, and word got back to Piney that Lorraine Swain had popped one of her boobs into Colvin’s face right in the road in broad daylight, and there was hell to pay when Piney got onto Colvin about that.
But the worst thing was, Lorraine Swain had told her best friend, Ella Jean Plowright, about how she had been cured in her sleep by dreams of Colvin Swain, and Ella Jean, who had been visiting her uncle, Doc Jack Plowright, for treatment of her nausea and vomiting, decided to give it a try herself, and sure enough, she went to sleep and had a dream where Colvin Swain appeared and assured her that her nausea was not morning sickness, as Doc Plowright had diagnosed it (a faulty diagnosis in view of the fact that Ella Jean was still a virgin) but was actually uremia, not nephritic but treatable by an injection which he gave her; the pain of the injection woke her from her dream, but within a few hours the vomiting had stopped, her appetite returned, and she was well enough to visit Lorraine and compare notes on how nice Doctor Swain had treated them in their sleep. Naturally, they couldn’t keep it to themselves, either, and before long everybody in Stay More knew about it, and ailing folks were going to sleep right and left in order to have dreams of Doc Swain.
Yesterday I asked your friend and mine, Bob Besom, who works over in the Special Collections department at the University Library, to look into the Swain papers and check on this matter for me. You know that they’ve got over there nine ledgers that Doc Swain kept during his years of practice, including several “calendar diaries.” According to Besom, there’s nothing of particular interest in this material, mostly just accounts of charges made and collected, accounts receivable but never received, et cetera, but Colvin did have the habit of jotting down all of his visits to patients with a notation of what he used to treat them, and the record is fairly complete. There’s even the record of how he treated me for typhoid that summer I was confined in Stay More for a few weeks. No commentary. He doesn’t say whether he liked me or not, or how we became friends. Just what medicines he used and that the treatment was successful and I got well…and, under “Amount due”: N.C.
But that was in Ledger #6, years later, and we’re concerned right now with Ledger #2, and Bob Besom was good enough to make photocopies of a few pages in that ledger for me, if you’ll hand me my reading spectacles from the table there.
June 3 Lorraine Swain Empyema following influenza. Clear yellow serous fluid. Tea of butterfly weed t.i.d. Dover’s powder for pain.
June 9 Lorraine Swain Fluid thickening. Irrigated cavity with hypochlorite. May try injection of gentian violet.
June 17 Lorraine Swain Ambulatory, robust, and claims I treated her in dreams (!) including surgery for drainage (!!) but section of 6th rib actually missing (!!!). ???
According to Besom, there are no further entries in the ledger on Lorraine Swain’s condition, but there is this:
June 30 Ella Jean Plowright, not my patient. Hardly know her, but had dream last night of treating her for uremia with injection, etc. Lorraine Swain confirms this is true.
July 3 Complaint from Dr. Plowright that I had “stolen” his patient and niece, Ella Jean. Swore to Jack I never touched her, nor spoke to her. “Don’t matter,” he said. “You cured her of uremia.”
Besom says there’s only one more entry, three months later, that is relevant to the matter:
October 4 Haven’t had an awake patient in over a month.
By “awake,” we may suppose that Colvin Swain meant exactly that: all of his patients were now visiting him in their dreams. All over Stay More, and even in Stay More’s “suburbs,” sick people were attempting to see if they couldn’t follow the examples of Lorraine and Ella Jean, and they were finding that it was easy, and they were rapidly converting skeptics by showing their evidence: a man proudly exhibited an enormous tapeworm which he claimed Doc Swain had extracted from him during his dreams; a woman showed a set of false teeth which she had swallowed and Doc Swain had extracted from her stomach in a painless dream surgery; several proud mothers displayed babies which Doc Swain had delivered while they were asleep and dreaming. There was even a case of a “vicarious incubation”: a girl who was too embarrassed over her “female trouble” to permit Doc Swain to visit her in her dreams was persuaded by her mother to allow the mother to have the dream for her, and the mother dreamt that Doc Swain had come and corrected the girl’s prolapsed uterus, and indeed the girl, who had been unable to walk because the womb had been protruding from her vagina, was now blissfully hopping, skipping, and jumping.
She was the most conspicuous advertisement for the Swain Dream Clinic, which nearly everyone was now patronizing. You didn’t need an appointment. You didn’t need to send somebody out in the middle of the night to fetch the doctor to your house. The Doctor Swain they met in dreams was if anything even nicer, gentler, more polite and easygoing than the “real” Doc Swain. And if the “real” Doc Swain could never be “a hunerd-percent certain” about anything, the Doc Swain who came in dreams was infallible and omnipotent.
Best of all, you didn’t have to pay! Not even in the barter of produce or livestock. But while that was considered a tremendous advantage from the patient’s point of view, it was not putting any food on Doc’s table. In fact, he was nearly broke. He had some savings, which he had deposited in a savings account in the Swains Creek Bank and Trust Company, the small financial institution that John Ingledew had erected on Main Street, and he hated to dip into his savings, but unless he could find some wakeful patients to treat, he was going to have to make a withdrawal. Poor Jack Plowright had already gone out of business and been forced to retire prematurely, after losing a court case in which he had unsuccessfully attempted to have his attorney, Jim Tom Duckworth, sue Dr. Swain for monopolizing the medical practice of Stay More. Colvin had had to go to Jasper for the trial and had testified that there wasn’t any way he could be monopolizing the medical practice, because he hadn’t had any patients himself lately, and he could prove it.
Then, as you well know, and have already told about in your Lightning Bug and elsewhere, the bank was robbed. A young Stay More man, son of Billy Dill the wagon maker, lover of Latha Bourne if not loved by her, came and raped her and robbed that bank and started one of the best stories that ever came out of the town, leaving Latha pregnant. There is no doubt in anybody’s mind that Doc Swain would have gladly visited her in her dreams and performed an abortion, because even though the “real” Doc Swain had taken an oath never to perform an abortion, the Doc Swain of dreams wouldn’t have let himself be stopped by such scruples or oaths. But she wouldn’t visit the Swain Dream Clinic; for whatever reasons of her own, she went off to Little Rock to live with her sister and have the baby. Never mind about that, for now. Her rapist robbed the bank, and Doc Swain was penniless.
So we have here two good reasons why Colvin was forced to accept the job that he took, which brings us to the real heart of our story. Come back tomorrow and I’ll take you on a tour of the “college” in Parthenon where Colvin Swain became medical consultant.
Chapter five
How long have you been a-sitting there? How long have my eyes been closed? I closed my eyes to get a glimpse
of Tenny, the gal who’s the real heroine of this story, although we haven’t laid eyes on her yet. How many times have you been here so far? I’m not keeping count, but I’m a little dismayed to realize that I’ve talked so much, and told you all that I have, but I still haven’t really done nothing but a kind of prologue. Today we’ll meet Tenny, if all goes well. We’ve waited so long. But so far, so good? How’m I doing?
I see you’ve got there a fresh bottle of Chivas Regal to lubricate my larnyx. That’s real thoughtful of ye. We’ve run out of Gershon Legman’s contribution. I’ve been meaning to ask why you only come in the afternoons or the evenings, never in the mornings, but I reckon it’s because you’re up late of a night, drinking and thinking, and you tend to sleep late of a morning.
That’s what I was doing at Stay More, and Doc Swain was going to try to cure me of it, as we’ll see. Anyhow, if you’d been here this morning, you wouldn’t have missed the little excitement we had. There’s precious little to keep us from getting bored to death, but this morning one of our fellow residents got raped. You know how you read in the papers sometimes there’s a certain kind of punk kid who only lusts after old ladies? Well, there was a young feller working here, one of the orderlies, who fit in that category, and I could tell because of the way he was always buttering up to poor Mary C. You know that old woman I was telling you about, lived a few doors down the hall, who was always yelling, “Tell me another’n, Grampaw”? Maybe you never heard her, but she was always out there with her little-bitty voice like a child begging for another bedtime story…or, come to think of it, maybe that wasn’t what she was doing. Maybe there was a kind of edge to her voice, maybe a touch of sarcasm, as if she was accusing her invisible grandfather of having lied to her. It troubles me, come to think of it. I don’t take nothing personal from it, hell, she didn’t even know I was here. But anyway that punk orderly crope under the covers with her early this morning, and it turned out she knows other words besides “Tell me another’n, Grampaw,” She knows “help” and she knows “rape,” and she knows “Will somebody please come and git this thing offen me?” It woke me up. I recognized the voice and wondered why the voice was not begging to be told another one. I nearly tried to get myself into my wheelchair so I could go out there and see what was happening. But I guess the nurse on duty had got to them, and she stopped it and called the police, and they come and got the feller, and then Dr. Bittner came and examined the old lady and sent her off to the hospital. The reason Mary C. is just a-sitting there looking stunned is probably because she’s thinking it could’ve happened to her. And it could’ve.
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