The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  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 lac
e, 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.”

  Their house never burnt down (Alonzo moved in with the Widow Kimber and left the house on Main Street to the newlyweds, although he kept his office next to Colvin’s in the front), and the sun just went on rising and setting the way it always had, but Colvin and Piney had some problems. You’d think they might have sort of complemented each other: since he knew everything there was to be known about medicine, she knew everything there was to be known about everything else. Whenever somebody died and they sang that funeral hymn “Farther along we’ll know all about it, farther along we’ll understand why,” it didn’t apply to Piney, because she already knew all about it; she already understood why everything was. Between them, Colvin and Piney were totally omniscient. But Colvin was too strong-willed and opinionated to allow some woman, even his beloved Piney, to get the upper hand. They argued. If Colvin tried to point out that the Republican Party had always been the traditional party of the people of Stay More, all the way back to the Civil War, and was therefore the right party, Piney (and in those days women weren’t even supposed to care about politics) would likely come back at him with the information that the Democratic Party was the only just and valid party, and that Woodrow Wilson was the only person who could keep us out of another war. Never mind that she might be proved wrong; never mind that Wilson didn’t keep us out of the next war; never mind, goddamn it, that the Republicans are right, or wrong, just as often as the Democrats are. If Piney said the Democrats were the party, then they were. There were no ifs, ands, or buts to Piney. She knew everything.

  The seventh daughter of a seventh daughter can tell you what beliefs are “true” and which are just superstitions, and not just about the Republican Party. Piney could tell you that it’s just an old notion that if you find a pin in the road and pick it up, it’ll bring you good luck, but she could prove that it’s true that if you find a pin in the road and don’t pick it up, it’ll bring you bad luck all day long. She’d also let you know that it isn’t true that singing at the table will bring misfortune on the whole family, but it’s certainly demonstrable that if you sing before breakfast, you’ll cry before supper. She was an expert on beliefs having to do with marital relations: she knew in her bones that it’s true that two persons using the same towel at the same time are sure to quarrel, but it’s only a superstition that you can “take the cuss off ’n it” by twisting the towel between the two of you. If Colvin was helping her do the dishes, as he often happily did, and they accidentally dried the dishes or their hands on the same towel, there was nothing for them to do but go ahead and wait until some bone of contention came along and then have a real bad quarrel over it and get it out of their system. And usually the quarrel was over something she knew she knew, and he had the temerity to challenge her belief.

  But as often as not, Colvin for the sake of harmony would let her have her way, or concede she was right. She was a real good cook, and if she insisted that fish had to be baked although he liked his fried, he didn’t raise any objection. If he liked his sweet potatoes mashed but she kept them in the skins, that wasn’t the end of the world, as far as he cared. Even when it came to okra, which he’d always had sliced and fried in cornmeal, he wasn’t going to raise a fuss if she served ’em whole and slimy. When Piney started in to redecorating his office, putting up curtains and moving things around, he never even protested that he couldn’t find anything anymore. When she ordered from Sears Roebuck a fancy dark gray cheviot suit of wool for him to wear, he protested that there wasn’t another man in Newton County who had long tails on his coat. Piney just smiled and said there wasn’t another man in Newton County like him, period. But when she tried to get him to wear this new felt hat she’d ordered with it, a kind of homburg to replace his old floppy fedora, and he couldn’t persuade her that he didn’t want to look that genteel and swellish, all he could do was try a bit of psychology: the dent in the crown of the hat, he pointed out to her, was like an advertisement (she would have understood “symbol” better) for the dent in the crown of his penis, and he even yanked out his tool to show her the exact same resemblance, saying, “Now damned if you want me to be Old Peckerhead, do ye?” Piney just replied, “As long as men are going to personate their peckers anyway, by having heads, what does it matter whether you personate it with the dent in your hat or the part in your hair?”

  And speaking of matters sexual, we may as well reveal that as often as not, Piney knew that the best place for the female in the process of coitus was woman-on-top. This was not because she wanted to dominate, or prove her obvious superiority, but because in her absolute certainty about everything, she knew that this position allowed both of them more control over the hiking to climax: she could let go, he could hold back. True? But it worried Colvin somewhat; man is, after all, a depositor, while woman is a receptacle. Man stashes; woman seals. He argued that gravity alone should be the determinant, and he tried to win the argument with his medical knowledge: “Sperm can swim upwards, but semen can only flow downwards.”

  “Do you want to have fun,” she asked, “or do you want to have a baby?” Dr. and Mrs. Swain had a lot of fun, and, knowing everything, she let him go on believing that all the ways they did it, every time they did it, they were just dead-level set on having the time of their lives, when in fact she had decided to have a baby. She never asked him if they could. She never discussed raising a family with him. They never talked about times of the month or taking precautions. As far as Colvin was concerned, there ceased to be any connection between what they were doing and the existence of sperm and ova. Piney not only continued to believe that a woman can regulate and control the steady rising to climax in both herself and her partner, but can also control her conception and her contraception, and when she was ready, she conceived. She knew the exact moment, the exact instant, that one of those upward-swimming spermies, an audacious little scamp she’d already given a name, met up with her ripe fat lucious egg and said, “Howdy sweetheart, let’s cuddle up and multiply!”

  She didn’t tell Colvin. She knew that the sex of the fetus was male, and she knew that the baby would be named after her father, McKay Coe, and the boy would be called Mackey Swain, and she knew that “Mac” means “son of” in Scotch-Irish, and that Mackey means virile or manly in Irish, and she knew that Mackey Swain would grow up to become a virile
doctor like his father, and she knew that Colonel McKay Swain would serve with great distinction as a surgeon in some future national war, and that great stories would be told about his heroism on the battlefield, where, however, he would be mortally wounded.

  “How come you’re a-weepin, darlin?” Colvin asked her one day, when she was thinking about Mackey’s tragic death, for indeed it was the first time Colvin had ever known her to cry. People who know everything do not cry. Crying is the result usually of not understanding something, of being unable to deal emotionally with a situation because it is not understood, and if you know everything you have no reason to cry. Piney was terribly embarrassed over her tears, which were not necessarily the result of a mother’s inability to grasp the reason why her beloved son will have been taken from her prematurely, because she fully knew that in order to serve his country and his fellow man as he will have had to do, Colonel Mackey Swain will have had to be willing to give up his own life, which he will have done, so it will not have been his death, nor the absolute foreknowledge of it, that made her cry, but rather the sudden fear, the overwhelming fear, that when the moment will have finally come that she will have been informed by telegram of her son’s death, she will lose control. And she had never lost control. In response to her husband’s question, she could only shake her head, wordlessly, and continue shaking it until he grew bored and left the room.

  But Colvin’s magical physician’s fingers detected, in only the second month of her pregnancy, that she was with child, and he was as happy as he was mystified that she had not told him nor asked for his knowing collaboration in the happy event. When he confronted her with his findings, she confessed that she had known the exact moment of the conception, and that she had already named the child McKay “Mackey” Swain, and that she had been secretly sewing the layette ever since. She knew that the boy would be a brunette, that he would have a slight left clubfoot, that he would speak his first word at the age of eight months and take his first step at the age of eleven months, and that he would be toilet trained before his second birthday. She knew he would marry a Dinsmore at the age of eighteen. She knew everything about him, and she was happy to have the chance, now that she had confessed his conception, to tell Colvin everything that she knew about Mackey’s entire life and heroic death.