Butterfly Weed (14 page)

I commenced a-weeping, and it was hard to keep from blinking with tears in my eyes but I kept my eyes open long enough to tell her that I was awfully sorry she couldn’t be the heroine, because that was just the way things was, I was only telling what had been told to me, I didn’t have the power to let her and Doc Colvin U Swain live happily ever after. She got real sad herself then, and I knew I was going to have to blink my eyes or wipe ’em or both, and I had just enough time to say, “But Piney, child, I promise I’ll try to keep ye as long as I can.” Then I had to blink, and she smiled again one last time as if to leave me with the memory forever of that special smile, and she disappeared, and there was Mary again, just Mary.

So. Piney is keeping the home fires burning while Colvin gallivants off to St. Louis to see what he can see. When he went to St. Louis, that time, he might have stayed there. As I’m about to show you, he was
urged
to stay there. He could’ve become a prosperous St. Louis physician, or had a big-city practice elsewhere. But then of course we wouldn’t have any story, would we?

The Ingledews prepared Colvin for St. Louis. Actually he knew roughly where it was located, up in eastern Missoury, and for several years now he’d been listening to people sing, “Meet me in St. Louis, Louie, meet me at the fair…” Most all of the Ingledews had gone to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, or the St. Louis World’s Fair as it was known, back in 1904, and they still remembered how many thousands upon thousands of people they’d seen, and they warned Colvin that the roads in St. Louis were filled with horse shit from all those strange conveyances called trolleys that carry all those thousands of people constantly to wherever they seemed to want to be going. Colvin discovered the Ingledews were wrong about the horse shit, or, rather, the horses had been replaced by electricity, which now powered the trolley cars. Colvin had never seen electricity before, and, of course, he didn’t actually “see” it now, but he saw all of the things that were being operated on it, like streetcars and street lamps. In fact, Colvin had never seen a street before, which is a kind of tamed road, held hostage by cement sidewalks, a road which doesn’t go anywhere but endlessly crisscrosses other streets at right angles. Beneath the street lamps of St. Louis were streetwalkers, one of whom offered herself to him for three dollars. He discovered more interesting and attractive specimens of life in the St. Louis Zoo, where a whole house was devoted to snakes, which both fascinated him and made him homesick for Drakon.

There were big buildings all over town called “hospitals,” all of them named, like the city itself, after saints: St. Luke’s, St. John’s, St. Mary’s. Of course Colvin knew what a hospital was, from reading his medical journals, but he could not imagine what one was like. Curious, he entered St. Matthew’s and spent an hour wandering around, astonished to discover that all of the doctors were female and they were all dressed identically in striped dresses and little hats. And these lady doctors didn’t seem to be curing anybody; they were just feeding ’em and changing their bedpans and their sheets, and trying to keep ’em comfy. All the patients looked sick. Colvin could tell just by looking at ’em what was wrong with most of ’em, but he didn’t think it was his place to go around telling those lady doctors what ought to be done.

He assumed that the St. Louis Royal Academy of Physicians and Surgeons would be connected to one of these hospitals, if not right next door to it. But the address given him wasn’t a big building at all. It was just a little shop on a side street, not much bigger than you’d find in Jasper, and the sign over the door said
AJAX JOB PRINTING
. Colvin figured he had the wrong address, but he went in anyway and told the feller, “I’m tryin to find the Royal Academy of Physicians and Surgeons.” The feller gave Colvin a kind of shifty, beady look and asked him why he was trying to find it. Colvin said, “Wal, I ordered me a diploma but it never come.” What was that name? the feller asked, and took his name, and wanted him to spell out what the “U” stood for, and Colvin had to explain it didn’t stand for nothing, so then the feller went over to one of his tables and commenced collecting bits of type which he stuck into this printing press, cranked it up, and let her fly, and then he handed Colvin his diploma.

Despite whatever pride he felt in seeing his name in fancy lettering on a lavish piece of paper which awarded him the degree of
Medicinae Doctor,
Colvin was just a little disappointed. “Is this all I git for my fifty dollars? Seems like the least ye might do is ask me some questions to see if I know beans about medicine.” Take it or leave it, the man said. So Colvin took it, hoping that it might satisfy the state of Arkansas as far as getting a license went.

But Colvin Swain, as I hope we have seen, was nobody’s fool, and his good conscience bothered him. As long as he had gone to all that trouble to make a journey to St. Louis, he thought he would look into this whole matter of “medical education.” So he went to the trouble to locate and to visit the city’s actual institutions of medical training, the St. Louis University School of Medicine and the Missouri Medical College. Since the former was Catholic and the latter Protestant, he decided to enroll at the latter, not that he was Protestant, but he certainly wasn’t Catholic, and besides, “college” was probably a better place than “school.” But at the Missouri Medical College, the admissions officer was confused in his attempts to determine how and where to obtain Colvin’s high school transcript, so Colvin was passed along to an assistant dean, who spent an hour trying to determine how Colvin expected to be admitted if he’d never been to school, and then passed him along to an associate dean, who received from Colvin a rather frank, extensive biographical sketch of his preceptor, Dr. Kie Raney, which he found most interesting but conceivably irrelevant. At the end of the day, Colvin found himself in the office of the dean, a very wise, kind, and learned gentleman, an M.D. himself, who did not snicker at Colvin, as his assistant and associate had done, but examined Colvin’s diploma and took down the address of the Ajax Job Printing Company, declaring that he would love to see to it that the place was shut down. Then he asked, not with sarcasm as his assistant and associate had done but with genuine politeness and curiosity, “What do you know about medicine?”

“Ask me something,” Colvin suggested.

The dean smiled benignly and started off with a few simple questions, like naming the bones of the chondrocranium of a human embryo and describing the functions of the lymphatics of the thorax, but he discovered these were child’s play to Colvin, so he graduated to more complicated questions, such as microscopic identification of slides of
Coccidioides
and
Neisseria intracellularis,
but these too Colvin answered so quickly and effortlessly that the dean began asking him what he would prescribe for prolapsed rectum, hepatitis, and pancreatitis.

The dean began to hand instruments to him and to ask him what they were, and Colvin successfully identified various retractors, curettes, clamps, and forceps, as well as a vaginal speculum, an anal dilator, and a tonsil snare. Then the dean picked up an instrument which Colvin could not recognize, and his heart sank. It looked kind of like an anal dilator but was much too large for that purpose. Instead of handing the instrument to Colvin, however, the dean held it to his own mouth and said, “Henry, could you and Clarence drop whatever you’re doing and come down? I have someone I’d like you to meet.” Soon they were joined by two other fellers, whom the dean introduced to him as the professor of physiology and the professor of pharmacology. “Gentlemen, I’ve ordered supper sent up,” the dean said. “This may take awhile.”

It was nigh on to bedtime before the dean finally dismissed those other fellers. They were all worn out from thinking up questions, and Colvin was getting kind of tired of answering them. “There is one more ordeal I should like to submit you to,” the dean said, “if you could return early in the morning and meet me at the hospital. And may I suggest that you trim your beard?” So Colvin came back the next morning after spending the better part of an hour snipping around at his beard and mustache. They gave him a white smock to wear and a brand new stethoscope. Two dozen other fellers in white smocks and stethoscopes joined them, and not a one of them was a lady doctor like he’d seen in that other hospital. This hospital did contain a lot of those women in their neat uniforms, but Colvin heard a doctor order one of them in a bossy way, “Nurse.” Before long, Colvin had figured out that these women weren’t really doctors but some kind of white slave. Although they were constantly commanded, “Nurse,” not one of them was actually giving suck to the newborn.

The dean-doctor and the other couple dozen doctors took Colvin around to all of the beds on six different floors, and at each one of the beds the dean-doctor would look at him and say, “Well, Doctor?” and wait for Colvin to examine the sick person and say what ought to be done, and maybe even do it. In the course of a long day, Colvin U Swain drew out poisons, killed microbes, corrected deformities, made the lame walk, the blind see, the deaf hear. He come mighty nigh to resurrecting the dead, but the patient, who had an advanced brain tumor, was already clinically dead when Colvin got to him, and although Colvin restored heartbeat, breathing, and other lapsed functions, the patient remained alive only long enough to say, “No, thanks, Doc,” before resuming final demise. Colvin was upset and apologetic, because he had never lost a patient before, but the dean-doctor explained that the patient had actually been dead for three days and they were simply curious to see if Colvin would concur in that diagnosis.

“You were wrong,” the dean-doctor said, “but it’s the only time you’ve been wrong so far.” Then he took Colvin back to his office and gave him a cigar and some honest-to-God sippin whiskey and said, “Well, Dr. Swain, I am prepared to offer you a position on our faculty. Would you like to locate in St. Louis?” When Colvin hesitated, because he had never even given a thought to locating anywhere except maybe California in that long-ago idle fantasy, the dean said, “Of course, you could maintain your own practice in association with our hospital, and your teaching duties would not greatly distract you from your patients.”

“But I don’t even have a bony fide diploma,” Colvin pointed out.

The dean laughed, but nervously. Then he coughed and said, “Let me see if I can’t do something about that. Come back tomorrow.” And when Colvin returned the next day, the good Dean presented him with an actual Missouri Medical College diploma made out of lamb hide, with
Medicinae Doctor
in gold letters, and a fancy red leather cover and all. It didn’t even matter that they’d misspelled it “Calvin” and put a period wrongly after “U.”

“Much obliged,” the newly legitimate Doctor Swain said, “but last night I took me a walk down by your creek—what do you call it, the Miss’ippi?—I went down there and thought for a long time about your offer. That creek is too damn big and deep, just like this city. These here hospitals are too big and have too many people in ’em, and it’s a sin to Moses the way you work them pore women that have to run the hospitals. But the roads—them streets out yonder—are filled with people walkin around who ought to be in the hospitals. I reckon I’d be a whole lot happier if I jist stayed put, in Stay More.”

“This ‘Stay More,’” the dean said wistfully, “it must certainly be a special place.”

“It shorely is,” Colvin said. “Come see us sometime.”

When he got back home, Piney asked him, “How was St. Louis?”

“Porely,” he said. And then he said, “Piney, darlin, what do you say me and you git hitched?”

“I say I’m game if you are,” she laughed gaily. “Did you obtain your diploma?”

He showed her his diploma, and then he took it and made for it a frame out of spare boards from the corncrib and a windowpane from a back window where nobody would notice it missing, and he hung his diploma in his office and even invited Jack Plowright over to see it. “Mine aint printed on a animal skin, is the only difference I can see,” Doc Plowright observed.

Alonzo Swain, who had been elected justice of the peace of Swains Creek Township for several years running now, officiated at the nuptials of his son and Piney Coe. The wedding was held under the shade of Stay More’s lone pine tree, which towered over the intersection of Main Street and the Banty Creek Road, and it was attended by fifty-six Swains and forty-three Coes, plus an assortment of Duckworths, Whitters, Plowrights, Dinsmores, and even a bunch of Ingledews, including old Isaac, who played on his fiddle, accompanied by Doc Kie Raney on guitar, such things as “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” and the wedding part of “Lohengrin.” Drakon was permitted to attend, kept in his cage. The bride was radiant and beautiful all in a white dress and an armful of white flowers: Queen Anne’s lace, common yarrow, fleabane, and hedge parsley. The groom stood up straight and tall and looked like he was mighty glad to be home, or mighty glad to be getting married, one, or maybe both.

Even if Colvin and Piney were not destined to live happily ever after together, they sure started off living happily enough to beat the band. And if I was you, if I had a smidgin of your talent for writing novel-books, I’d sure do one in which Piney is the
only
female, a heroine like she asked me to make her. I’d start off by reminding my readers that she was the seventh daughter in the family, just as her mother, Minnie Potts Coe, had been a seventh daughter. Now it’s well known everywhere that the seventh son of a seventh son is fore-ordained to be a physician, even in spite of himself, and there was no way on earth that Colvin U Swain could have
not
been a doctor. But did you ever know what the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter is fated to be? Of course, like any other woman in that day and age she was fated to be a housewife, or a spinster, one or the other. She wouldn’t have a career, like doctoring.

And I aint even going to say that the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter is ordained to be a doctor’s wife. No, that’s not it. What it is, is this. She is fated, or doomed, however you look at it, never to be told anything. I mean, you can’t tell ’em
nothing!
They already know it all. Before, we’ve had a notion of Piney’s fate through the way she talked, as if she knew exactly the way the language ought to be spoken, and wouldn’t hear of any other way. Now a woman like that, if Colvin told her the house was a-burning down and it actually was, she’d say, “You are mistaken.” Or if he tried to point out that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, she’d say, “That is not the case at all.”