Horse of a Different Color: Reminiscences of a Kansas Drover

by Ralph Moody

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Your specimen showed little more than a trace of sugar then, and remained about the same until last December, then the content doubled. Wasn’t that when the livestock market broke, and from then till after the time you saw me in June weren’t you worrying yourself about half sick?”

  “I had plenty to worry about,” I told him.

  “Now, when did you quit worrying,” he asked, “before or after you quit your diet?”

  “At about the same time,” I said.

  “Thought so! I’m not saying there’s any connection, but there just might be. And there’s another ‘might be.’ When I was a boy the old-time country doctors used to say a carbuncle was worth ten dollars to a man—boiled the poison out of his system and purified his blood. I never found scientific proof of it, but those oldtimers got results with lots of remedies that have never been approved by modern science. If there’s anything to the theory, your blood sure got a purging at about the time of the flood. I’m not saying that had anything to do with your improvement, but I’m not ruling it out either.

  “Then there’s a third possibility, and that’s the one I’m inclined towards. Though I’ve never run into a case, there is such a thing as incipient diabetes. As I recall, it has all the symptoms of true diabetes, but is more a malfunction than a disease. In true diabetes the pancreas fails to secrete insulin, the substance that enables the human body to absorb and make use of fats and sugars. In incipient diabetes the insulin is secreted, the body absorbs and utilizes fats in the normal manner, but just as the valve in your heart malfunctions to let a little blood past, the kidneys . . . ”

  Dr. DeMay broke off in mid-sentence, clasped both hands behind his head, and sat gazing at the ceiling for two or three minutes. Then, as though a spring had suddenly been released, he sprang to his feet and demanded, “Were you in the war?”

  “No, sir, I was rejected because of a leaky heart,” I said.

  “What were you doing when your health failed?” he snapped.

  “I was a carpenter at a munitions plant when I began losing weight,” I told him, “but I wasn’t really sick.”

  “How much did you lose?”

  “About sixty pounds.”

  “In how short a time?”

  “About four months.”

  The old doctor clasped his hands across his rotund belly and paced back and forth across the little office. “Did you eat three good square meals a day?” he asked.

  “Not always. The summer of 1918 was hot in Delaware, and I wasn’t always hungry at mealtime.”

  “Get in much overtime?”

  “Quite a bit,” I told him. “I wanted to save as much money as I could while the big pay lasted.”

  Dr. DeMay stopped pacing, whirled, and demanded sharply, “How many days a week were you working?”

  “Seven.”

  “How many hours a week?”

  “Sometimes as few as seventy, and occasionally ninety. Usually about eighty-four.”

  “Now, we’re getting somewhere!” he sang out. “Exhaustion! Exhaustion and malnutrition! There’s our answer!”

  Dr. DeMay sat down again, leaned forward, and told me, “Somewhere in the back of my head I had a recollection that incipient diabetes was the result of exhaustion and malnutrition, but was stumped for any authority until I remembered a lecture I attended during my internship. This lecturer—and I can’t tell you who he was now—argued that when the system is debilitated, as by exhaustion or malnutrition, the tissues of the kidneys in some individuals have a tendency to become flaccid, permitting sugar to seep past. I don’t know that his theory was ever proved, but it sounds reasonable, and if there’s anything to it, it might explain your case.

  “A boy nineteen years of age working eighty to ninety hours a week at carpentry would be constantly on the verge of exhaustion, particularly if he was starving himself so as to save every dollar he could lay his hands on. My guess is that you never had true diabetes, but abused your kidneys until the tissues became flabby enough to leak sugar by the gram, producing symptoms of the true disease at a dangerously advanced stage. Your loss of weight could have been as attributable to malnutrition as to loss of sugar, probably more so.”

  “I hope you’re right,” I told him, “but I haven’t been overworking or starving myself since I came to Kansas, and I’m still passing sugar. Why would that be?”

  “Hmmf! Hmmf!” he snorted irritably. “From the day you first came to me, I’ve never seen you when you weren’t tearing into something or other as if you were fighting fire, and that diet you were on kept you undernourished all the while. No wonder you couldn’t gain a pound on it. Furthermore, you can’t expect vital organs to function perfectly after they’ve been badly abused. I’ll be surprised if you don’t pass a little sugar for the rest of your days. Now here’s what I want you to do for me: get out of here and run. I don’t care where or how fast, but don’t come back until you’re plumb tuckered out.”

  Dr. DeMay was waiting for me when I came back two hours later, and seemed delighted that I was so fagged I could hardly keep my balance. He took my blood pressure and listened to my heart and lungs with a stethoscope, then told me, “Well, that didn’t do you any harm. Can’t see for the life of me why the Army turned you down for a leaky heart. There’s a slight regurgitation there, but there isn’t one man in forty that has a heart muscle with the strength of that one. And if you don’t abuse those lungs they’ll carry you a long, long ways. Now go in the back room there and leave me a specimen. I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t have a tale to tell.”

  I’d done as he told me, and had been waiting beside his desk five or six minutes when I heard him chuckling in the back room. After another minute or two he came out, still chuckling, sat down, and slapped me on the knee. “Just as I expected,” he told me. “Highest sugar content since I’ve been treating you.”

  He leaned forward, looked me full in the eyes, and said, “I’d like to tell you right now that—in my opinion, you understand—you’re no more likely to die of diabetes than I am, but before I do it I want to make one more experiment. This next week I want you to work just as hard as you worked last week. For the first three days you’re to stick rigidly to the diet the Boston specialists put you on. For the last three you’re to eat as you have been for the past three months. I’m going to give you half a dozen large sample bottles in mailing tubes, and I want you to mail me your entire first specimen every morning. Then, today a week, I want you back here after so completely exhausting yourself that you can barely make it up the stairs. Now run along and let me get to work. I’ve got forty calls to make before bedtime.”

  One of the most difficult things I ever had to do was to get out of McCook without first sending telegrams off to Edna and the folks back home, telling them it had all been a mistake, that I’d never really had diabetes, and that my chances of living to old age were fully as good as the average man’s. But it would have been senseless to do anything of the kind before Dr. DeMay was thoroughly satisfied that his diagnosis was correct. To avoid temptation I stayed in McCook only long enough to buy a dozen cans of salmon, a gallon of sauerkraut, and five pounds of gluten flour. Then I headed for Cedar Bluffs as fast as I could drive.

  I didn’t even tell Effie or the Miners what Dr. DeMay believed he had discovered, but pitched into the work as hard as I could go. The last heifer Nick had butchered was one of the first I’d bought. She’d been on a corn and alfalfa diet only ten weeks but had gained nearly two hundred pounds. The beef from any animal fattened that rapidly is bound to be as tender and juicy as squab. When I started cutting the forequarters that afternoon I noticed that the fat was white as Carrara marble, and the lean looked as though it were flecked with snowflakes, a sure sign of tenderness and delicious flavor.

  Probably because I couldn’t keep the folks at home out of my mind, I got the idea of sending them one of the loins from that heifer. The weather was cool, perishable expr
ess should reach Boston in three days, and there was little risk that a large piece of prechilled meat would spoil in that length of time. I wrapped the thirty-pound loin in clean, loosely woven burlap, tagged it with my mother’s name and address, raced back to McCook, and got it aboard the eastbound express train.

  That evening I wrote to Edna but found it hard to hold back the news I wanted most to tell her. To keep from it I wrote nearly two pages about George Miner and Effie Simons, saying that George had been a second father to me and that Effie, old enough to be my mother, had taken me under her wing as if I were an orphan chick. Then I told her about my having been in the cattle and hog feeding business, and that I’d gone somewhat in debt when the livestock market broke, but that with advice and help from George and Effie I was getting myself pulled out of the hole. To fill out the page I wrote that I’d expressed home the beef loin, and asked if she’d drop by and tell my mother that the outside of the piece might become slimy and ill-smelling in shipment, but to trim away an inch all around and the rest would be as sweet and tender as a ripe pear. To avoid mentioning love, I closed my letter, “Ever and ever, Ralph.”

  The morning I went back to Dr. DeMay I exhausted myself so completely by running that I was staggering when I reached his office. He tested and retested a sample of my urine, then slouched down into his big leather swivel-chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and rocked contentedly.

  “Son,” he told me, “I’ve seen many a time when there was a blizzard blowing and I had to make a dozen calls way out on the divides to treat nothing more serious than bellyaches, and knew I’d be lucky to collect two dollars for the day’s work. Those times a country doctor feels like cussing himself for having gone into the medical profession, but it takes only one case like yours to make up for all the rest of it, over and over again. I’m only a general practitioner, and from a school those Boston specialists would probably look down their noses at, but I’d stake my life that they were as wrong in their diagnosis as in their prognosis that you could live no more than six months.

  “You have incipient diabetes, and probably always will have, but I predict that you’ll live to dandle many a grand-baby on your knee. Go on home and live a normal life like any other man, but don’t ever forget this: the good God that gave you that body gave you the responsibility of caring for it. No reasonable amount of work will hurt you so long as you balance it with proper nourishment and rest, but another abusing such as you gave yourself during the war could be fatal. You’ll have to avoid exhaustion, and for the rest of your life you should never go more than three months without a thorough physical examination. Now run along and take care of yourself. Or better still, get a good wife to take care of you. You’re at the stage in life where you ought to have a home and family.”

  “That’s just what I intend to do,” I told him, thanked him for all he’d done for me, and ran down the stairs two at a time. I kept right on running to the depot, intending to send telegrams to Edna and my mother. I had the one to Edna half written when I changed my mind. Her letters had never been more than friendly, and our engagement had been broken because I got hot-headed and threw the ring away, not because my health had failed. I’d been away nearly three years, and the chances were ten to one that she was in love with someone else if not already engaged to him. Before I made a complete jackass of myself, I’d better write my sister Grace and find out how matters stood.

  When I got home there were two letters in the mailbox: a thick one from my mother and a thin one from Edna. I ripped the envelope off the thin one and found the letter almost formal, the way people sometimes talk when they’re self-conscious.

  Edna started her letter by telling me she’d been up to my mother’s house, that everyone was well, and that the loin of beef had arrived safely. As I had anticipated, it required only a little trimming to remove the shipping damage. My mother had insisted that she take home a big steak, and her parents agreed with her that I was to be congratulated for producing such fine beef. I was most fortunate to have such loyal friends as Mr. Miner and Mrs. Simons. She was glad I’d found a second father in Mr. Miner, and knew how gratified I must be at having recovered from my financial reverses. After another paragraph or two about happenings at the church she closed her letter, as always, “Sincerely, Edna.”

  I was so disappointed that I stuffed both letters into my pocket, and for the rest of the day I kept too busy to think about anything but the work I was doing. Nick had gone to the slaughterhouse and I’d finished washing the supper dishes before I thought of my mother’s letter again, sat down on the back steps, and opened it. “Dear Son,” she wrote:

  I have a shameful confession to make. This afternoon the expressman rapped at my back door, saying he had a shipment of meat addressed to me from Kansas, but that it had spoiled in transit. From where I stood I could see that the burlap was slimy, and the stench was appalling. I marched straight out to the garbage can, took the cover off, and said, “You may deliver it right in there if you will.”

  He hadn’t been gone twenty minutes when Edna came—the first time she’s been to our house since she graduated from high school. She said you’d written her that you had sent home a loin of beef, and that the outside might become slightly tainted in shipment, making a little trimming necessary. I told her the meat had arrived, but in a hopelessly putrid condition, and where I’d had the expressman deliver it.

  Son, I have never seen such unquestioning confidence and loyalty in my life. She told me firmly, but without a trace of rudeness, “I can’t believe he’d have sent it, or written as he did, unless he’d been sure it would come through all right. Do you mind if I look at it, and would you lend me a butcher knife?”

  Of course, I wouldn’t let her do such a thing alone, so when I couldn’t persuade her against it we hauled the ill-smelling bundle out of the garbage can, unwrapped it, and found—just as you expected—that only the surface was the least bit spoiled.

  In the next two or three paragraphs Mother told how good the meat was, which of the neighbors she’d given steaks from it, and that she’d insisted upon Edna’s taking home a big sirloin. Then she wrote, “I’m sure that her affection for you has never wavered since you were childhood sweethearts, and Gracie tells me that she has never had another steady beau. I pray God for the day when your health has improved enough that you can again ask her to be your wife.”

  I don’t remember just what I said to Edna in the letter I wrote her that evening—and we’ve lost it somewhere during the forty-odd years we’ve been married—but it did the job I wanted it to do. Her only objection was that she didn’t want to bring up our children in Beaver Valley, but in a city with fine schools and other cultural advantages.

  I wanted her so much that I’d have gone anywhere or done anything to make her happy, but the West and horses and cattle had been in my blood from boyhood, and I didn’t want the city to be Boston. I tried to write it to her, but couldn’t find a way to put it on paper without seeming to be bossy, so drove to McCook and called her on long distance telephone. She understood perfectly, and we compromised on Kansas City, the gateway between East and West, and settled on January 25, 1922, as our wedding day.

  25

  The End of My Run

  WITH the date set, I began drawing the reins tighter into my hands, as any horseman does when nearing the end of his run. I started by putting a little pressure on the slowest of my meat customers, asking them to turn in whatever livestock was necessary to square their accounts. Then, by shipping out a carload of fat heifers, one of mixed cattle, and two of bacon hogs, I cut my pasture stock down to what I’d need for butchering until the end of the railroad contract. The check for the shipment came in on the fifteenth of November and, using all but two hundred dollars of my trading account, I paid off the last dime of my debt.

  I’d known since late October that I had enough accounts on my books and livestock in my pasture to get me entirely out of the hole, and planned to have a celebration dinn
er for the Miners and Simonses on the day I paid off my debt. Then, when Dr. DeMay made his discovery and Edna wrote that she’d marry me, I thought it would be best to celebrate all my good fortune at one time, so I kept quiet although I wanted to shout the news to everyone.

  As soon as I’d made my final payment to the receiver of the Cedar Bluffs bank I crossed the street to the telephone office, and found Effie in a decidedly testy mood. “Do you think you could find somebody to tend the switchboard this evening so you could get away early?” I asked.

  She looked perplexed, frowned, and told me, “Reckon I prob’ly could, but I sure don’t aim to. What’s goin’ on anyways, a shivaree? Whatever it is, it can’t amount to a tinker or I’d of heard somethin’ about it over the wires.”

  “You couldn’t have heard about this,” I said, “because I’m the only one who knows about it.”

  “Hmmfff!” she sniffed, “then I don’t reckon it amounts to enough to lose sleep over. What is it?”

  “Nothing much,” I said. “I was planning to have a little dinner party over at the Keystone Hotel for a half a dozen of my best friends, and hoped you and Guy could be there.”

  Effie got over her belligerency in a hurry, but asked, “Why don’t you wait till Sunday night when I’ll be closin’ the switchboard early anyways, and when everybody won’t be wore out with a day’s work? Why in the name of common sense do you want to have a party in the middle of a week?”

  “Because I thought this would be a good day for celebrating,” I said. “Ten minutes ago I paid off the last dime of my . . . ”

  Before I could finish the sentence Effie came off her chair like a charging grizzly, both arms spread wide, and wailing, “God love you, boy!”

  After she’d nearly smothered me, she held me at arm’s length with one hand, wiped tears off her cheeks with the back of the other, and told me, “I knew all the time you could do it, but I never in this wide world guessed you could do it this soon.”