Butterfly Weed Read Free Page B

It is the story that I heard again in part from various people I interviewed in Stay More itself. It is the story that, finally, Doc Swain himself was going to confirm to my satisfaction before I was done with him. Probably no one told me the story better than Cassie Whitter, but I could not appreciate it, nor even listen closely, those days and nights of desperate illness while she seemed to drone on and on. In fact, it was horribly tantalizing, listening to the exploits and the cures of this fantastic country doctor when I needed him so frantically myself. But I had the presence of mind to realize that the story she was telling me was so important, so fabulous, that I had better make some notes to jog my memory of it, and while I was so sick I could scarcely hold a pencil, I managed to write down a kind of outline of the story as Cassie was telling it to me. So I was sacrificing half of my newsprint as wipes for my diarrhea, and the other half was going to summarize Doc Swain’s story, and sometimes I couldn’t tell the difference!
    One other thing I realized: being a woman, Cassie Whitter out of verbal modesty was censoring a great deal of Doc’s story; she was obviously omitting or euphemizing the sexual parts of it, and if I wanted to learn those, I’d have to search them out from somebody else.
    Nor did she reach, in her telling of the story, the crucial part, concerning his “affair” with a beautiful young girl. That most dramatic part of the story, which I would have to learn primarily from Doc himself, had just commenced when my illness became so severe that she was prompted to abandon the story and announce, “I had best see if I caint fetch Gram Dinsmore fer ye, or else you’re not long fer this world.” Then she disappeared, for the better part of the day, as I grew progressively sicker and felt hopeless that I was alone without anybody handy to help me. Late in the afternoon she finally returned with another woman, older even than she, who carried a bundle, an assortment of some things tied up in what looked like a gingham dish towel. Gram Dinsmore, I was told, was a “yarb doctor,” and she proceeded to prod and poke me while asking various questions about me and my condition. How old was I? On what day of what month at what hour of day was I born? Through which nostril had my nose bled, and at what hour of the day? “Have you got the flux?” she asked.
    “Flux?” said I.
    “Yessir, are yore bowels loose and runny?” she inquired. When I admitted that I did indeed have diarrhea, she asked several embarrassing questions about the composition and color of the excretion. Then she opened her bundle and took out a small sheaf of green leaves, which she gave to the Widder Whitter, asking her to brew it up into a tea. She explained to me that it was simply ragweed, and the ragweed tea would cure me of the flux, but the flux, she said, was just a symptom of something far more serious, and she wanted me to take a strong dose of some oozy concoction she kept in a quart Mason jar. When I refused to take it until I knew what it contained, she recited the few ingredients, primarily the boiled-down residue of the inner bark of the slippery elm tree, Ulmus fulva. She gave me a tablespoon full of it, and it was nippy but not unpleasant. She forbade me to eat any solid food, and told me to drink lots of the ragweed tea, then she asked me for a dime, but I protested I ought to pay her much more than that.
    “Jist let me borry a dime iffen ye got one,” she said, and I gave her a dime and she inspected it closely and declared, “Hit aint shiny enough.” I searched my pocket for a shinier dime, but had none. She gave the dime to the Widder Whitter. “Could ye rench this in some vinegar and lye soap?” And when this was done, she took the now-shiny dime and inserted it between my upper lip and teeth, and declared, “Now thet thar will stop yore nose from a-bleedin.”
    And sure enough it did. I wish I could