Butterfly Weed Page 3

  “Myself, I’ve never permitted her to mess around with my fortune,” he declared. “She seems to know such fantastic tales about my past, I don’t want to know my future. Tell ye the honest truth, if half of what she told ye about me was true, my past has done already had enough problems to last me plumb through the rest of my future!” I managed to join in his laughter over this. He went on, “So I couldn’t tell ye if she knows my future, but she’s either an awful good guesser or got some special knowledge of Fate, because she’s never been known to be wrong in one of her readings. And I know fer a fack that she’s ’specially good at tellin whar lost things is at—she can locate strayed animals and anything else that’s been misplaced.” Then, as the car—a Model A Touring Sedan considerably dented and dusted—bucked and jerked down the terrible road off the mountain, the doctor, speaking loudly over the noise of the car’s rattling and bumping, told me the story of how the Widder Whitter had once located a dog the doctor had lost, or rather had had stolen. “I had me this great big ole hound, named Galen—after the olden-time Greek physician, you know?”—he cast me a glance to see if I did indeed know, and there must have been something in my smile which told him that I did—“and one day ole Galen turned up missin, and was gone more’n a week before somebody suggested it wouldn’t do no harm for me to ask the Widder Whitter to tell me if he was lost for good, or dead some’ers, or what, so I hiked up to her place and tole Cassie what I come fer, and she started in a-conjurin around with some little sticks and buttons and what-all, and talked a lot of damn foolishment, but finally she says my dawg is tied up in a corncrib over to Spunkwater, some miles due east of my place in Stay More, and she even described the feller who stole ’im, and I knew right off it was ole Bib Ledbetter, who’d been bearin a grudge again me ever since I’d treated him fer syphilis and he’d wanted me to tell his old lady it was jist measles, but I’d had to warn her not to lay with him, and she’d done guessed that he’d been cheatin on her. Wal sir, I drove on over to Bib’s place, and shore enough thar was my dawg Galen, big as life and twice as natural! Ole Ledbetter claimed he’d jist seen a stray dawg around the last couple of days, and didn’t pay it no mind. He says some of the childern must of shut him up in the corncrib, maybe. So I couldn’t prove nothing, and didn’t try to argue with Bib—I jist took my dawg and drove him home. But there aint no doubt in my mind that I’d of never got Galen back if it hadn’t been fer Cassie Whitter. So maybe we’d best not dismiss anything the widder says.”

  I managed a smile at his story, but I couldn’t make any comment. Eventually he coughed again, and cast me a sharp look, and asked, “Did she tell you about that time she predicted the future for a gal named Tenny?”

  I tried to remember. “I think she was just getting around to that part of your story. Wasn’t Tenny your wife?”

  “Maybe not legally,” he said, and did not elaborate, so I left it at that. The bouncing of the car was hell on my stomach, and after another mile of the rugged highway I searched for something to say just to keep my mind off my miseries. “Have you ever heared tell of a ‘nursin home’?” I asked him. And when he pondered a moment before shaking his head, I told him that Cassie Whitter had predicted I’d spend my last days in a nursing home.

  He meditated on that prophecy for a while longer before declaring, “Wal, it sounds to me like yore last days won’t befall ye fer a many and a many a year to come. Forty year from now, maybe they’ll conjure up some kind of house whar ole folks jist go to be took keer of in their feebleness and senility. A house filled with nurses.”

  Once we hit a rut so deep that my stomach got the better of me, and I frantically signaled for him to stop so I could open the door and puke into the road. He watched me with interest and sympathy and expressed regret that he couldn’t give me anything on the spot to help. “We’ll be home directly,” he said.

  My condition was such that I could not appreciate how close we might have been to our destination, nor could I even absorb the gorgeous scenery en route. To this day I have hardly any memory of how we got into Stay More. Sometimes in my dreams I seem to have relived that route, and caught glimpses of strange turnings in the road, streams forded, mountains rising up to enclose me or hug me, but I couldn’t have mapped the route to save my soul, and much later I would realize that there was no way I could escape from Stay More, because I had no idea how I’d got there.

  Haven’t you remarked on this phenomenon in your novels? You’ve made it clear that Stay More is not simply remote and hard to get to, if not inaccessible, but that it’s even harder to escape than it is to find.

  Late in the afternoon we came to a clearing at the top of a hill affording a broad view of the valley below, and the doctor pointed at the small village there, a sleepy, decaying, almost storybook hamlet, and said, “Yonder’s Stay More.”

  Are those tears in your eyes? From nostalgia, I trust, not from boredom. What can I tell you about Stay More that you don’t already know?—except perhaps to assure you that although you must have allowed yourself occasionally to doubt its existence except in your novelist’s fantasy, it does indeed exist! Or rather, it did; it doesn’t anymore. You told me in a letter once that you took the name for your “mythical” village right out of the chapter “An Ozark Word List,” in the back of the book I wrote with George Wilson, Down in the Holler: A Gallery of Ozark Folk Speech, wherein I had reprinted an item I’d originally published in a 1926 issue of the journal Dialect Notes:

  stay more: v.i. To remain longer. This is a polite expression, used when a guest is preparing to depart. “Don’t be drug off, Jim! Stay more!”

  But the simple, wonderful truth, Donald, is that it may be only a common polite expression in the Ozarks, but it is also the name given in the first half of the nineteenth century to a burgeoning community of hillfolk in Newton County, and while it may no longer exist, it most certainly did exist that summer of which I am telling you! My own name for my own mythical village, whenever I had recourse to mention it in my various collections, or in my book of stories, From an Ozark Holler, was “Durgenville,” which I fabricated from the word for an awkward, uncouth hillman, “durgen.” That’s a hard “g.” I can assure you that nobody ever named any actual Ozark village Durgenville. But I can also assure you that somebody, even if it was, as rumored, an Indian, did indeed name the village of which we are speaking Stay More.

  Although the village had begun to decay, its essential architecture was still intact: there was a schoolhouse, a pair of doctor’s offices, a sawmill and a wagon-bow factory, an inoperative but still impressive gristmill, and a couple of general stores. Doc Swain pulled up at the lone gasoline pump beside one of the stores, a large, three-story mercantile with a faded sign over it, INGLEDEW’S GEN. STORE, and in one of its grimy plate-glass windows a pasteboard sign, POST OFFICE, STAY MORE, ARK. The store appeared to be in operation but had no customers at the moment. The gasoline pump was one of those old tall, slender types where you pump the gas up into a glass cylinder before gravity lets it down into your tank. Doc said, “’Scuse me, but I’d best fill up now, or it’ll slip my mind, and I’ll find myself called out in the middle a the night without any gas.” While he was filling his tank, the storekeeper came out onto the porch, a white-haired but still-handsome old gent, and they exchanged greetings, “Howdy, Doc,” and “Howdy, Willis.” Doc Swain tried to pay for the gas, but Willis waved the money away, saying, “I still owe you, Doc, and probably forever will.”

  Driving on, Doc pointed out the towering gristmill behind the general store. “Been shut down fer some years.” He pointed to the opposite side of the road. “But that’s still runnin, sort of.” There was a small hotel, or rather actually a large house, two stories, three front doors, which had a little HOTEL sign over its entrance. We passed an abandoned house next to it before Doc turned the car into his own yard, before a modest cottage with a sign out front, C. U SWAIN, M.D. DOCTOR OF HUMAN MEDICINE. The house’s porch was practically right on the road, and
what yard there was clung to both sides of the building and was littered with free-ranging chickens. As Doc got out of the car, he was greeted by a large, slobbering, black-spotted hound dog, and, ruffling the dog’s neck, he said to me, “This here’s Galen, not the one I was tellin ye about, not the original Galen, who, come to think of it, wasn’t the original Galen hisself. No, this here’s Galen Four or Galen Five, I forget which.” Then the doctor directed my attention to a house across the road, where another shingle was posted on a stake: J.M. PLOWRIGHT, M.D. FAMILY MEDICINE. “There’s my competition,” Doc said, “jist in case ye need a secont opinion. But I was you, I’d shore hope I don’t.” Then he pointed at two more buildings: next to his house was an abandoned shop, flat-roofed, constructed of stonemasonry. “That there used to be the money-bank,” he said. “Got robbed back in twenty-two. Remind me to tell ye the story.” Then he pointed again, one last time, at a building up the road, across another branch road from the bank, which was not abandoned but had wagons parked in front and a couple of horses tethered at its post. “Stay More ’pears to be still big enough to support two physicians, more or less, and it’s also big enough to support two general stores. That’un there is run by the nicest gal ye’d ever hope to meet, name of Latha Bourne.”

  Doc Swain helped me rise up out of the car and climb the porch and into the front room of his house. “This is what passes for my office,” he said, indicating the room, which indeed looked professional enough and equipped enough to be a rural doctor’s clinic. He supported me onward to an adjoining room containing a narrow bed, a bedside table, and a player piano. The walls and ceiling were covered with tongue-and-groove boards painted a not unpleasant shade of tan. “And this here is what will jist have to pass for my hoss-pittle,” he said. “Let’s jist plunk ourselfs down right here,” and he helped me down onto the bed, which had a mattress stuffed with goose down and was infinitely comfortable. In my condition, which seemed to be growing worse despite the prospect of medical attention, I was grateful for any little thing that eased my pain.

  “Now, Doc, I’d better go feed my livestock and milk the cow,” Doc Swain declared, “unless there’s anything else I can do fer ye right now.”

  “Doc, you don’t suppose,” I managed to request, “you could let me have a little drink of somethin?”

  “Water? Sody pop? How about milk? You’re gonna have to drink two quarts of milk ever day, but I’ll have to get some from Bess first.” I realized the female he referred to was his cow.

  “Somethin hard to ease my misery,” I suggested. “A drap of corn, maybe?”

  He smiled his kindly smile. “Wal, I’ll tell ye,” he said. “Gener’ly it wouldn’t make no difference nor do ye no harm, but I’m a-fixin to give ye somethin to he’p ye sleep, and they don’t mix. When ye wake up, I’ll see if I caint let ye have a drap or two of Chism’s Dew, best corn on airth.”

  Doc Swain filled a hypodermic syringe and injected me with something that indeed put me into a deep, deep sleep. But when I woke up, it was still daylight. I figured I must not have slept very long, because it had been getting on to suppertime when I’d arrived. I waited for a good while to see if the doctor would check in on me, and then I hollered, “Anybody home?”

  Instantly Doc appeared, and said, “Wal, you shore had a good sleep, now didn’t ye? How you feelin?”

  “It’s still day,” I observed.

  “It’s still day all right,” he agreed. “But it’s midday of the day after I put ye under.” He reached beneath my bed and drew out a thunder mug, or chamber pot. “Use this if ye need it, and I’ll give ye a snort of Chism’s Dew, lessen ye’d keer fer some breakfast first.” He went away while I used the chamber pot, into which I was able only to urinate. He noticed this on his return, and said, “Wal, Gram Dinsmore’s ellum juice seems to be a-wearin off. You aint got the trots no more.” He took my temperature, my blood pressure, and ran me through the routine of assorted palpations and reflex-checking taps with his little silver hammer. “You know, Gram Dinsmore did the right thing, I reckon,” he said. “And even her diagnosis was correct. Blame if ye aint got the typhoid fever. I took some of your blood while you was asleep and ran a test on it. Wal, Gram Dinsmore aint such a bad ole yarb doctor, such as they come. ‘Many an old wife or country woman doth often more good with a few known and common garden herbs than our bombast Physicians with all their prodigious, sumptuous, far-fetched, rare, conjectural medicines.’ That’s what ole Burton writ, in his ’Natomy of Melancholy.” The doctor paused, then fixed me with a keen look. “You know ole Burton, don’t ye?”

  Certainly I knew Robert Burton, although, as I was eventually to confess to Doc Swain, I had never managed to read the entire thousand-odd pages of The Anatomy of Melancholy, into which I had first dipped when I was working on my master’s in psychology at Clark University. But at the moment I was rattled: not because it surprised me to discover his familiarity with that seventeenth-century forerunner of Freud, but because he seemed to be casting suspicion upon my disguise as a mere backwoods durgen. It was a disguise of which I was proud, and which I wasn’t ready to drop, and I pretended innocence. “Burton who?” I said.

  “Oh, let’s not fool ourselfs, Doc,” he said. And when I continued attempting to maintain my look of ignorance—not very successfully, I suppose—he took one of my hands and turned it over, palm up, and called my attention to the blisters and abrasions on it. “Yore raw paws was the first thing I noticed about ye,” he said. “You aint no simple farmer nor woodsman, now air ye?”

  He had me there, but I stubbornly clung to my imposture, and even said some fool thing like “Now what on airth gives ye sech a notion as thet?”

  “Wal, Doc, I hate to tell ye,” he said, “but last night while ye was deep asleep, I took the liberty of lookin through yore tote sack, and I seen all them scribblins on all that paper in thar, with my own name mentioned frequent. Main reason I done it was I suspicioned ye might be a revenuer in disguise, and we’ve had some problems lately with them bastards. You shore aint no revenuer, neither, air ye? You wouldn’t be writin down my name, because I aint never distilled any corn myself, nor had any dealins in it. So do ye mind tellin me jist what it is yo’re after, writin my name all over those sheets?”

  I decided to cease trying to deceive him. “Okay, Doc, you’ve got me, I reckon,” I said. “I’ve just been a-wanderin around the country, tryin to pick up a good story hither and yon. Those sheets you seen was jist some notes I made on what Cassie Whitter told me about you.”

  He studied me quizzically, then smiled. “Kin ye earn a livin jist a-gatherin up folks’ stories like thet?”

  I laughed. “Jist barely.”

  “How? You aint one of these here novelists, air ye?” He pronounced the word with disparagement, as if he might have had an encounter or two with the products of a novelist.

  “Nope,” I said. “I aint published no novels.”

  “Do ye write it up fer the newspapers and get paid fer it?”

  “I’ve written some books that weren’t fiction,” I declared, “Although I haven’t been paid much for them. Most recently, I wrote a pair of books called The Ozarks: An American Survival of Primitive Society and Ozark Mountain Folks,” I felt pretty strange, telling him my titles, as if I were Roger Tory Peterson trying to tell a bird that I’d written a field guide in which the bird was included. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard of ’em?”

  Doc shook his head. “‘Survival of primitive society,’ d’ye say?” he repeated. “I never thought of it thataway, but I ’low as maybe yo’re right. I reckon we’re pretty primitive compared with the rest of the world. I reckon we’re still a-livin the way our forefathers had to live ’cause they didn’t have any better, nor know any better.” Doc Swain produced a demijohn and a pair of glass tumblers, into which he poured a liquid that was not clear and white like conventional moonshine but yellowed as if aged in a cask. He handed me one, and clanked his against mine: “Here’s lookin at ye. See if
ye think this here whiskey aint a survival of primitive society.”

  It was indeed the best whiskey I’d had in a long, long time, and I told him so. In return, he told me a little about its origin: a family named Chism, living up in the mountains east of Stay More (he had pointed out their house on the trip from Cassie’s), had for generations been producing a superior moonshine which…but what am I doing?—trying to explain “Chism’s Dew” to you, who practically invented the name for it. You’ll just have to stop me whenever I get to telling this story in such a way I forget who I’m talking to. Sometimes I’m inclined to think I’m just talking to gentlepeople in general.

  Anyhow, Doc and me had more than one glass apiece, and I told him a little of my background: born in Pittsburg, Kansas; first visited the Ozarks at the age of seven; taught biology at Pittsburg High School after getting my M.A. in psychology at Clark University in Massachusetts; served as a private in the infantry during the World War but got medically discharged without seeing any action; moved after the war to the Ozark village of Pineville up in Missouri and started my first experiments in collecting backwoods lore; interrupted by an attempt to get a legitimate Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Kansas, gave it up, and moved back to Pineville and lived there ever since, except for those months I lived in Hollywood the previous year. I concluded this capsule autobiography by declaring, “Now my throat’s getting sore. Am I talkin too much, or do ye suppose the liquor is causing it?”

  “That’s jist part of yore disease,” he said. “But the liquor ought to be he’pin yore appetite. Are you hungry yit?”

  Sure enough, my appetite was returning, for the first time in several days. When I acknowledged this, Doc cupped his mouth and called, “Ro-weener!” A woman came into the room, a fortyish woman in a simple flower-print dress tight on her sturdy but shapely frame. She was not a homely woman but she wasn’t exactly pretty. I assumed she was the doctor’s wife, but he introduced us, saying, “This here’s all I’ve got in the way of a nurse, and I can only keep her part-time, but she’s the best there is. She’ll be takin keer of ye most of the time. The thing about typhoid is, recoverin from it depends more on good nursin than on doctorin. Rowener can hep ye a good sight more’n I could do.”