Butterfly Weed (11 page)

“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.

Colvin used money he had saved from trapping furs to buy for four dollars his own copy of a big medical dictionary, and when he had stored it in memory within two months, to order for one dollar a year’s subscription to
Medical Bulletin: A Monthly Journal of Medicine and Surgery,
and for three dollars a year’s subscription to
Journal of Laryngology, Rhinology, and Otology,
and his faithful perusal of each month’s issue of these magazines made him even more knowledgeable and au courant than Kie himself. It was through these magazines that Colvin discovered two rather astonishing facts about medicine: first, that in order to practice the profession legally, you have to have something called an M.D., and secondly, that the only way you can get an M.D. is by going off somewheres to something called “medical school.” Colvin was appalled. Ever since his brief attendance at the Stay More institution of lower learning, he had had a poor opinion of “school,” and he couldn’t quite understand why it was necessary to sit at a desk facing a teacher in order to learn medicine. His memory of the one afternoon at the Stay More school came back to him, and he tried to conceive of sitting at a desk and raising his hand to name the parts of the gastrointestinal system. If he left one out, would the teacher flog him?

But the more he thought about this business of medical school, the more it bothered him. Finally he asked Kie, “Did you ever go to medical school?”

Kie looked around, from left to right, as if there might be somebody else within earshot, and then he raised his index finger to his lips. “Colvin,” he said, “maybe they’s some fellers down to Little Rock has been to medical school, and maybe you’d even find a doctor or two in Harrison who might at least have walked down the hallways of a medical school, but most Arkansas doctors learnt their trade the same way I’m a-learnin you: they just apprenticed theirselfs to somebody who had already learnt it.”

Colvin tried to forget the matter, to bury it in the back of his too active mind, but over the years it would occasionally creep up on him again. On Colvin’s sixteenth birthday, Kie discovered that there was not one single question he could ask of Colvin, on any medical subject, which he could not answer, not even something like “How do you induce spontaneous remission of cancer?” or “How do you restart a heart which has stopped?” So Kie presented Colvin with that most delightful of all treatises, the fourteenth edition (carefully revised and greatly enlarged) of Dr. D.W. Cathell’s
Book on the Physician Himself and Things That Concern His Reputation and Success.
Kie declared that he had nothing whatever left to teach Colvin; that the Cathell book would instruct him in all the matters of behavior, conduct, ethics, and other subjects above and beyond the acquired science that he had already learned.

There were tears running down the wise, kind instructor’s face, the first time that Colvin had ever seen him weeping, and Kie wrung his hands, the first time that Colvin had ever seen him wringing. “Son,” Kie said, although he had never called him that before and really didn’t mean it in a paternal so much as a sociable way, “I’m a-gorn have to send ye out into the world, all on yore lonesome. You’ll jist have to set up yore own practice somewheres, anywheres so long as it aint in my territory. There’s jist a few things you’ve got to promise, and I want ye to recite these after me.”

And Kie had Colvin raise his right hand and put the other hand, lacking a Bible, on top of the Cathell book, and repeat after him:

I swear that

1. I’ll be a-thinkin on my ole teacher the exact same way I’d think on my own daddy, and I’ll be a-helpin him out if he ever needs it.
   
2. I’ll be using everthang I learnt to make folks well, but not never to hurt ’em or wrong ’em.
   
3. I’ll not never be giving no man nary drug that would harm him even if he baigs me fer it, nor will I never be giving no womarn a abortion even if she baigs me fer it.
   
4. I’ll not never be a-gorn inter nary a house except to go in thar and heal the sick. I’ll not never go inter nobody’s house to do nothing wrong or seduce some pore gal or feller neither one.
   
5. I’ll not never be a-blabbin nothing I hear or learn that aint nobody else’s business to them or nobody, so help me ye gods.
   

When Colvin had finished swearing this oath, Kie said, “Now you go on and git out of here. You are the seventh son of a seventh son, and any durn fool knows what that means: it means you are a doctor in spite of yourself, it means you couldn’t never
stop
being a doctor even if you tried. And it means you can cure any ailment under the sun; you can heal any complaint that ever was or ever will be.”

Colvin could not budge. He just stood there, with his mouth open, and his own eyes a-watering up like Kie’s, and finally he asked, “Whose seventh son am I the seventh son of?”

“Ole Lizzie Swain’s, rest her soul,” Kie said. And even though he had ordered Colvin off the premises of the cave-house, he relented long enough to tell Colvin the complicated story of how Elizabeth Hansell Swain had come from Cullowhee, North Carolina, with her thirteen children, arriving in Stay More not long after the brothers Jacob and Noah Ingledew had already founded it and named it, and the youngest of her children, her “least’un,” Gilbert, grew into rambunctious manhood impregnating females hither and yon all over the goddamn county, and later opting for his middle name, Alonzo (“I hope ye don’t never choose to be called by
yore
middle name, U, which sounds like an Englishman pronouncing ‘Hugh’”), under which Alonzo became a doctor after training with Kie—“So you’d best not never practice in
his
territory neither.”

“Uncle
’Lonzo
is my actual paw?!” Colvin asked, dumbfounded. “But how d’ye know I’m his seventh son?”

“Aw, hell, Colvin, he jist might’ve had seventeen sons, fer all I know. And maybe fer all he knows, either. But I’m jist a-tellin the story the way she ort to be told. Now go on and git out of here.” Kie turned his back so that he would not have to watch Colvin leave, because there is a wise and venerable belief, which has both a practical and a pretty reason, that you should never watch anybody go out of sight.

Colvin packed a few of his belongings—his Cathell book and back issues of his medical journals and his clothes, and his copperhead Drakon wrapped in a burlap sack—into the saddlebags of Pegasus, and headed west. His initial intention was to keep going west until he got to California. He had heard many marvelous things about California, what a great land of opportunity it was, and his medical journals had led him to know that it desperately needed some good doctors. Isolated in the cave-house as he had been, Colvin had never heard the legendary Curse of Jacob Ingledew, which doomed any Ozarker who dared venture into California, doomed him into a bad life of ill luck, sickness, poverty, even death.

It was just as well, because the closest Colvin ever got to California, on his journey westward, was the village of Stay More, where, the first evening into his journey, Pegasus came down with what veterinarian Colvin correctly diagnosed as encephalomyelitis. He could have prevented it by immunizing Ole Peg for one season with a chick-embryo vaccine, but he had not, and there was no cure once the virus had taken over. Pegasus died.

Afoot, Colvin was stuck in Stay More…not a bad place to be stuck, come to think of it, in fact the best place on earth to be stuck, but Colvin still remembered too vividly the beating at the schoolhouse and the injunction never to return. That was the third factor giving him pause, the other two being the presence on Main Street not only of the office and clinic of Uncle Alonzo, the man presumed to be his father, but also, directly across the street from it,
another
office and clinic, that of John Mabrey Plowright, a Stay More native who had done gone and apprenticed himself to an actual M.D. up at Harrison, and after a year’s apprenticeship and perhaps some mail-order lessons from a St. Louis diploma mill, had erected a stake in his front yard with a shingle hanging from it:
J.M. PLOWRIGHT, M.D. FAMILY MEDICINE
. Colvin stood on Main Street for a while, staring at this shingle, trying to determine how “family medicine” was any different from any other kind, unless possibly it meant as opposed to medicine of individuals who didn’t live in families, and also thinking about the circumstance whereby the population of Stay More had now grown to the point where it could support
two
physicians—not a bad idea, because it meant the two would keep each other in line, provide healthy competition, offer second opinions, and ideally assist each other in complicated operations, not to mention being “on call” when the other had gone fishing or something.