Butterfly Weed Read Free Page A

my keep. I was a good woodchopper. I was a good hay-mower. I could hoe a patch of corn with the best of them…although my hands, unaccustomed to manual labor, easily blistered and became quite raw, but I dared not ask for a pair of gloves, lest my hosts suspect that I was not the native hillman I was pretending to be.
    One of the finest storytellers I encountered not only had a repertoire of the very best old folktales as imaginatively reconstructed or retold by herself but also was a fantastic teller of “local history.” She was an old woman, a fortune-teller, name of Cassie Whitter, and she lived in a dogtrot cabin on a mountaintop in the most isolated spot I ever reached in all my travels. I sought her out on the advice of some of her distant neighbors, who assured me that the old lady could not only accurately predict my future, or tell me the location of anything I had lost, but could “keep ye up all night long with stories, ever one of ’em true.” I had heard several references to the “Widder Whitter,” an utterance which sounded like a birdcall, before I figured out that the first part was merely a title of honor: she had been widowed for many years. Climbing the steep and rugged trail to her place, hardly more than a pig’s path, I felt such a fatigue and malaise, which couldn’t be blamed on the arduous trek, that I wondered if I was coming down with something.
    She received me hospitably, and sensed that I was not well, and, as was the custom everywhere I went, insisted, no, demanded that I spend the night. After I drank the coffee she gave me, she took my empty cup and studied the coffee grounds clinging to its sides, and “read” my fortune from those dregs, in the manner of other fortune-tellers reading tea leaves. The things she predicted would happen to me actually did happen to me eventually—in fact so many of her predictions did come true that I was convinced that all the stories she told me as “truth” must also have been true. Among her predictions, for example, was that I would spend all my later years in a nursing home, a concept of an institution that was unknown to me at that time and could not possibly have been known to her, and I thought her notion of it was a form of madness. I truly suspected that she was a little loony, and possibly even dangerous, and that is why, when I began to get honestly sick during the night, my first thought was that she might have poisoned me. She had fed me a dish I recognized because I’d had it elsewhere among those people—stewed squirrel with new potatoes and poke greens—it was very tasty, but after she had put me up for the night in “t’other house,” that is, the opposite wing of the two-pen dogtrot cabin in which she lived, I grew desperately ill, and despite the warm June night, I had severe chills that shook me so violently I needed extra quilts, but the shaking served to distract me from a very severe headache and an even more severe backache. Several times during the night I had to get up and go out to “the brush.” I had diarrhea, and used up several precious sheets of the newsprint I packed for keeping notes. At dawn of that sleepless night my nose began to bleed, and I lost more newsprint trying to stanch it.
    When the Widder Whitter discovered my condition, she offered to bring me my breakfast in bed, but I had no appetite whatsoever. She put her hand on my brow for a moment and declared, “Wal, I may be able to read yore future, but I caint tell what ails ye in the present. We need Doc Swain, if he didn’t live so blamed fur away. Too fur for me to fetch ’im. Why, he could fix ye up in nothing flat. Doc Swain could jist take one look at ye, and tell what ye needed to do to git well. He could…”
    Sick as I was, and enfeebled, I did not realize that Cassie Whitter had begun to tell me the long, long story of Doc Colvin Swain of Stay More. It is the story that I am going to be telling to you, for as long as it takes me.