Butterfly Weed (13 page)

Colvin was able to clear up Della’s disease in just two weeks with sitz baths and a vaginal application of gentian violet and vinegar. But Rosa’s problem required six weeks of treatment, and he nearly lost her to a pulmonary embolism, since he lacked anticoagulants…but he never lost a case, and he stuck with it, although she had postphlebitic symptoms for quite some time thereafter, and didn’t feel like joining her sister when the time finally came for them to pick up where they’d left off, or been interrupted, in that bed. Della tried to go it alone, but discovered that she somehow was not able to induce that “whopping sockdolager” that had equipped Colvin earlier on. She played with it and even put it in her mouth, but the only excuse Colvin could offer for its refusal to stand up and become useful was that he was possibly working too hard, although he privately surmised that he’d developed some kind of aversion to sticking it into a postvulvovaginitic orifice.

Alonzo Swain, learning of his son’s continuing virginity, told Colvin that he ought to grow some upper lip hair in order to make himself more desirable to women. At twenty, Colvin still looked like a teenager. He was handsome. He was tall and dark. But he looked like a kid. All of the other men of Stay More, without exception, had full mustaches. It was the vogue of the day, perhaps inspired by the nation’s current president, Teddy Roosevelt. Alonzo’s own mustache covered his entire mouth and often got chewed up at mealtimes. And women could not resist him.

So Colvin obeyed his father, and gave up shaying. He tried to be a dutiful son. The two Swain doctors lived together in the house on Main Street, and they had to accommodate each other, as bachelors must. (Since Alonzo did not like Colvin’s snake, Drakon, Colvin did not let Drakon have free run, or free slither, of the house, but kept him confined when Alonzo was around, and only took him out for walks, or slithers, at night. In return, Alonzo agreed to stop using the unsterilized Prince as a scalpel, toenail cleaner, and stirrer of medicine.) Both Swain doctors belonged to the Ingledewville Lodge, No. 642, of the Free and Accepted Masonic Order, and they attended meetings together in a back room of the Ingledew store, and they studied their Masonic texts together, making of Masonry a religion in substitute for any other beliefs they lacked. Like so many physicians, they found it difficult to subscribe to the notion of a Supreme Being, although, as I’ll have to tell you later on, Colvin did finally come to believe in God, in a way. At the age of twenty, however, all he believed in was the gods of medicine. And he believed in the goddesses of the Fair Sex, and kept on hoping to find one that he could do it with.

Alone of the Masons, alone of the men of Stay More, Colvin grew not just a mustache but a full beard, a thick, black, luxuriant, and somewhat curly beard, which indeed made him look like an older man, and a physician, and even a classical physician, or at least a classical American horse-and-buggy (though he did not yet have a buggy) doctor. And he became suddenly exciting to women.

It was Dulcie Duckworth herself, who had given him so much trouble in his efforts to tear off just a little piece, who seemed to be the first to notice his newly acquired virility, although she wasn’t able to determine whether it emanated from his beard or from the snake she observed him playing with, one evening on the porch of the Swain clinic. “Oh, my,” she said. “I shore have missed you, Col hon boy sugar. Oh my oh my. You better jist put down that there sarpint and take a little walk with me.”

By coincidence that was the twenty-first anniversary of the night Alonzo had ripped him from his mother’s womb in that fire. So Colvin lost his minority and his virginity at the same time. Neither is recoverable.

It never rains but it pours, as they say. Feast or famine. Almost as if to make up for all those years he’d done without, he now found himself with more women than he could handle. But just as a drought is often ended by an uncontrollable flood, Colvin’s sexual drought was followed by an uncontrollable flood of his jism. Try as he might, he could not regulate it. It came fast and furiously without warning, as if it were happening to somebody else, not to him. From his lodge brethren in the Masonic Order, he received plenty of advice on the sundry ways to postpone the outpouring of the jism: you can review your financial accounts in your head, you can imagine trying to catch a fly ball during a game of baseball, you can pretend the woman beneath you is actually a revolting witch, you can try to make your mind a total blank, you can drink enough Chism’s Dew to get yourself into a stupor, you can play with yourself beforehand until you shoot off, or you can try smearing any of a number of natural desensitizing substances on your pecker. Colvin tried all of these things, to no avail, and finally decided to ask the one lodge brother who was actually his father, but he chose to do it in a clinical manner. “Doctor, from your considerable experience, what method is best, during the act of coitus, for prolonging excitation in order to intermit the ejaculation?” Alonzo gave him a look as if he had asked what’s the best way to fly to the moon, and then he said, “What in tarnation do ye need to do
thet
for?” To make the woman happy? Colvin suggested. Alonzo snorted. “Boy, if it takes a gal one minute to chew and swaller a nice big slice of apple pie, she aint gonna feel no better if it takes her fifteen minutes to do it.”

Colvin was twenty-three before he learned how to take fifteen minutes instead of one. And that was with the help of an exceptionally intelligent girl named Piney Coe. It was not a nickname and had no allusion to pining or yearning; she was the youngest of seven sisters all named after trees; anyone pitying her name should have had more compassion for Hickory, Dogwoody, Redbuddy, Persimmony, Chinquapinny, and Sycamoria. They belonged to a very poor family living in hard circumstances on the far side of Ingledew Mountain, and all of them were victims of pellegra, hookworm, impetigo, and scrofula. All of them stank of the asafedtida the mother made them wear around their necks in futile treatment of their various afflictions. Piney was required to consult Doc Plowright (not being able to afford the doctors Swain) for shortness of breath and heart palpitations. Jack Plowright diagnosed an aneurysm, specifically a syphilitic aneurysm, although Piney did not have any of the other symptoms of syphilis nor did she have difficulty swallowing; on the contrary, she was ravenously hungry all the time and would eat anything. He told her that if the heart medicine he gave her didn’t do any good, he might have to cut into her artery. This prospect scared her into crossing the road to seek a second opinion at the Swain clinic, where she critically examined the walls, noting the calendar from a Harrison feed store, the chromolithograph of
September Morn,
and an embroidery of the words “Patience is the best medicine.” She asked of Colvin Swain, “Why do you charge twice as much as Doc Plowright if you don’t have one of those certificates on the wall?” Colvin pleasantly and politely asked her what sort of certificate she meant. Piney described it: an impressively framed (behind glass) piece of paper which proclaimed that the St. Louis Royal Academy of Physicians and Surgeons had awarded to John Mabrey Plowright the degree of
Medicinae Doctor
and all rights and privileges pertaining thereto.

“Wal, I don’t know about that piece of paper,” Colvin said, “but I’ll show ye why we charge twice’t as much. Let me see the bottoms of yore feet.” That was no problem because she, like all her family, wore no shoes. And he looked at her feet (whose soles were pimply) and then asked her about her appetite (ravenous) and her stools (black), and he said, “Doc Plowright ort to leastways have given ye some peach-leaf tea ’stead of that heart medicine, because the only thing wrong with yore heart is that its blood is gittin stolen away from it by a bunch of worms in yore duodenum. And if I caint cure ye, you don’t owe me nothin.” He gave her half an ounce of magnesium sulfate, a saline purge, and told her to come back at sunrise the next day without eating breakfast.

Then he crossed the road and told Jack Plowright he was a fool for scaring the daylights out of the poor girl and misdiagnosing her besides. “Did ye plan to cut open her chest to get at her aorta?” he demanded. “If you’d cut her open a foot lower down, you’d find a washpan full of hookworms.” Colvin took the opportunity to examine the diploma on Plowright’s wall. It was impressive, but Colvin had never heard of the St. Louis Royal Academy of Physicians and Surgeons, and he knew that “royal” was supposed to be reserved for things British. “Where’d you get this?” he wanted to know. Jack Plowright said he’d sent off to St. Louis twenty-five dollars in good cash money for it.

Piney Coe came again the next day just as the sun was rising over the top of Dinsmore Mountain, and it was a beautiful day, a lovely day, a most pleasant and fragrant day, and Colvin noticed she wasn’t so bad-looking herself, in fact right admirable, hair as black as his own and a smile as if she knew and understood most of what was wrong with the world. “Tell me exactly what you’re going to do,” she requested, and he described the treatments as he administered them: two 15-grain capsules of thymol, which he had compounded himself from thyme growing in his herb garden, and he would repeat the dose in two hours, followed two hours after that with another dose of magnesium sulfate. Did she want something to read while she waited, or what? “Could we just talk?” she asked, “Or do you have a lot of other patients to see you?”

Colvin and Piney discovered that they got along just fine. In contrast to Dulcie and some other girls he could mention, she never ran out of things to talk with him about. In the course of the weeks it took him to eradicate every last worm and worm’s egg from her duodenum, they became practically best friends, a marvelous circumstance because Colvin had never had a friend before, if you didn’t count Drakon, who couldn’t talk. It even got to the point where, one day when Piney asked, “Don’t doctors themselves ever have any problems?” he broke down and confessed that indeed doctors are human beings like anybody else and they get sick and they have disorders and malfunctions and demons. “Tell me about
all
of yours,” she requested, so he told her eventually about the evanescent aches or stiffness he felt in some of his ringer joints upon awakening, a possible arthritis—which made her want to hold his hand; his labial frenulum was missing, the tiny band of skin that holds the upper lip to the gum, which made his upper lip rather too full—when he showed her, it made her want to kiss it, so she did, their first; and finally he told her blushingly about his difficulty in the act of sex, explaining that it was not technically
ejaculatio praecox,
which implies emission before penetration, but rather it had no precise medical term for it, the inability to hold back the ejaculation more than a couple of minutes after penetration. “Aren’t you going to show me?” she requested.

One day, while he was showing her for a second or a third time, she stopped him during the process and said, “Let’s just hold still for a little while,” and she waited until he’d calmed down and stopped breathing so hard before starting up again, and then after a while more she said again, “Let’s just hold still for another minute,” and this went on, several times, until she said, “All right, just keep on going as long as you want,” and he discovered that minute after minute flew by as he kept on a-going, all he wanted, for a right smart little spell, maybe twenty minutes all told, before he finally detonated like a keg of gunpowder.

By-and-by it got to where they were spending just about all their spare time together, and doctors don’t have a whole lot of free time, or they oughtn’t to, if they do. Colvin was beginning to have thoughts about having Piney around the house
all
the time, and that would sure have suited her.

Then the state of Arkansas passed something called the Turner Law, which said that you had to have a license to practice medicine and the only way you could get a license was to have a diploma. There was a “grandfather clause” in it, which said that if you’d already been practicing for twenty years or more, you were exempt from the new regulations, so Alonzo Swain wasn’t affected by it.

But Colvin had to have a diploma. He asked Jack Plowright for the address of that St. Louis Royal Academy of Physicians and Surgeons, and he sent them his twenty-five dollars, which was a lot of money in those days. They wrote back to say that the rising costs of medical education had necessitated the elevation of the fee to fifty dollars. So he sent them another twenty-five of his hard-earned dollars, but they never answered.

He waited as long as he could stand it, getting madder and madder, and then he decided he’d better just run up there to St. Louis, wherever it was, and get his diploma or his money back, one.

Piney offered to feed Drakon while he was gone.

You can be sure this will be continued.

Chapter four

A
fter you left yesterday, Mary Celestia fussed at me a little bit for the way I’m telling this story. Oh, yes, you can bet she’s listening in. Even when she appears to be nodding off. You’d think she’d be embarrassed by the bawdy elements of my story, but those are her favorite parts! Sometimes when I get into the short rows, as they used to say—that was an old Ozark allusion to the brief interval just preceding the orgasm, derived from plowing in odd-shaped fields, where the last few rows to be plowed are the shortest—in other words, the exact time when Piney knew to make Colvin stop and take a little rest—sometimes when I’m getting into the short rows of telling a story, I’ll glance over at Mary and the woman is practically drooling! Unless it’s just geriatric slobber, or whatever Colvin would have called it.

She tore into me, some, after you left, because of a couple of things. One was, she wouldn’t “buy” that Piney Coe was all that smart. Growing up in a dirt-poor ridge-runner’s shack, Piney would’ve talked the same way as everybody else. Even Colvin, smart as he was, too smart sometimes for his own good, used incorrect grammar and tautological sentences and mangled syntax like any other Ozarker who’s comfortable with that easy, folksy dialect. Hell, I aint always so proper myself. But Mary, she says there’s no way on earth that Piney could’ve talked as much as she did without ever committing a single little mistake in the speaking—or misspeaking—of the King’s English. “Vance,” she says, “you can make her special without making her so all-fired perfect.” All I could do was try to remind her that I’m just showing Piney Coe the exact same way that she was shown to me…and let me tell you, when I’d had enough of Mary’s criticism, I closed my eyes to get shut of her and when I reopened them—did I tell you last time about this talent I’ve discovered I’ve got, or this magic, or this transcendence of mundane reality?—when I reopened my eyes, Mary was gone, and there on that bed sat Piney Coe, real as life and twice as natural! I kid you not, son. Even though I’d not ever seen her before myself, even though she’s been dead for half a century, even though nobody ever showed me a photograph of her or anything, I knew it was her! That sable hair and those bottomless eyes and that cute little mouth that so often began a-beaming at some private knowledge of how funny and wondrous life is showing itself to be, and she was looking at me not as if I was this shrunken, wizened, bedridden old duffer but as if I still was the charming, presentable smoothie that I used to be. You have to believe it was the first time I’d ever seen her. And you have to believe it was love at first sight! But I knew that I could keep her there only as long as I could go without blinking my eyes, so I had to keep ’em open long enough to hear whatever she had to say. Which was, in that sweet and proper voice that Mary’d just been criticizing me for giving her but which she honestly had, to ask me, practically to beg me, to let her become my heroine.