The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Piney made such a project out of Mackey that Colvin was forced to get himself a dog. This was Galen the First, although of course Colvin didn’t call him that, because he didn’t realize that the dog would be only the first of many, many dogs to whom he would give that name. He just called him Galen, after the ancient Greek physician, whom Colvin admired because he’d founded experimental physiology, and Colvin owned and read with pleasure his Corpus Medicorum Graecorum, and considered himself in many ways a Galenist. Galen was just an ordinary bluetick hound dog, scrawny and gangling and smelly, but he was devoted to Colvin in ways that Piney was not (although it is hard to imagine anything deeper than her devotion to him), and Galen went everywhere with Colvin, on every house call he made. I would like to discount as mythical the stories I heard that Galen sometimes licked the wounds of injured persons and thereby effected the healing. Surely that is stretching the blanket! If one is a collector of folk narratives, or “oral history” as they’re calling it these days, one learns to distinguish between the colorful, extravagant, but factual retellings of remembered events, and the embellished reshapings or reimaginings of “reality” which sacrifice truth for the sake of charm. Lord knows, Colvin’s entire story is shot full of the latter, but I think I’m doing a good job of not foisting upon you anything incredible or inconceivable, and that is because I’m editing the story as it came to me, and I must exercise the editor’s prerogative to stand up and say, No! it is not likely that Colvin permitted Galen to lick anybody’s wounds! Why, there’s not any more truth to that than there is to the story of Sukie Ledbetter, who claimed that Colvin cured her of her “barrenness” by permitting her to have intercourse with Drakon!

  Where was I? Yes: Piney was so absorbed with that little Mackey in her womb that Colvin needed a dog to keep him company. Piney might have known everything, but she didn’t perhaps know that the reason Colvin and his dog were gone from the house so much was to escape from her constant recital of the life story of Mackey Swain. This was the period when Colvin became involved in the story of Nail Chism, the Stay More shepherd who was convicted of raping young Dorinda Whitter and sentenced to the electric chair in Little Rock…which is a story you’d admire to put into a novel at some future time, before or after this one. Remind me to tell you how Colvin helped hide Nail when he escaped from the prison, and how Nail used to could hear the trees singing, and all.

  Well, I wish I could also suggest for one of your future novels the World War II story of the heroism of Colonel McKay Swain, but the sad truth is that Mackey Swain was stillborn. Piney may have known everything, but she was wrong about that. When she started gaining a lot of weight, she knew that pregnant women were supposed to do that, and not even Colvin realized that she was gaining a lot more weight than pregnant women usually do, and when she had some terrible headaches she knew that pregnant women are supposed to get headaches. But one day she discovered that everything was growing dim to her sight, and there were spots before her eyes, and she began violently throwing up, and she knew that these things weren’t supposed to be happening. Colvin wasn’t home or in his office. Just the week before, old Alonzo Swain, seventy-eight, had taken down his shingle, turned the office over to his son, and retired, for good, and was spending his days in the Widow Kimber’s bed, so he was not available in this emergency. Piney waited for as long as she could stand it, hoping Colvin would return to the office. Waiting, she began taking her own pulse, which was very rapid, and she was growing drowsy and dizzy and blind. Finally, she decided that she’d just better try to get across the road to Doc Plowright’s. She could hardly stand up and felt she would faint, and she was so dizzy she had to get down on all fours and crawl, out onto the porch, down the steps, across the dirt road into Doc Plowright’s yard, and up his steps. Piney, knowing everything, knew that there isn’t any such thing as “God,” but she prayed, anyway, prayed that Doc Plowright would be home. From what we know of Jack Plowright, she ought to have had the sense to have prayed that he would not be home. He was home, though, and he helped her onto his examining table and asked her a bunch of questions in an effort to find out where she hurt and what was a-troubling her. But there was nothing he could do because he had no idea what diagnosis to make.

  Fortunately, Colvin came home, having been out on a call setting a broken leg, and after noticing that his wife wasn’t anywhere around the premises, and that Galen was acting kind of peculiar, he asked Galen, “Whar’s Piney?” and Galen did two or three complete turns and then headed across the road to Doc Plowright’s, and Colvin had the sense to follow him.

  “I jist don’t rightly know what the trouble is,” Doc Plowright confessed to his colleague. “Aint it too early for her to be a-birthing?” By this time, Piney had begun to flail. That is, she was thrashing her arms and her legs wildly, and it took both men to hold her down to keep her from breaking a bone, and Colvin had to put a spoon wrapped in cloth into her mouth to keep her from biting her tongue. Colvin took her blood pressure, which was way up, and he tested her urine for albumin, which was present. He shook his head sadly and told his colleague that his wife was having eclampsia. “Ee-which?” Doc Plowright asked. Colvin explained “eclampsia” was from a Greek word meaning “I explode.”

  Piney was exploding. Her convulsions kept both doctors busy for the next several hours, and Colvin was mighty glad to have the help of Doc Plowright, even if the man didn’t know the difference between eclampsia and eczema. Colvin injected Piney with magnesium sulfate to control the fits and gave her both morphine and chloral as sedatives, and he kept a close watch to see if the seizures would induce premature labor. Piney went rigid and lost consciousness. She twitched in her face and limbs in such a way as to make Doc Plowright ask, “She aint a-dying, is she?” Not yet, Colvin said.

  All night they stayed with her. When Colvin could no longer detect the fetal heartbeat, he decided to induce labor. He saved the mother, but lost the child. Outside, Galen began to howl like a wolf. Across the road, Drakon escaped from his cage and tried to slither his way to the Plowright place, but was run over by an automobile, a Phantom Phaeton, and died, age twenty-one. Colvin discovered his corpse when he was carrying Piney home in his arms. He kept Piney in a darkened room of their house for several days. He buried the stillborn infant and the squashed snake in the Stay More cemetery and attempted to conduct a simple ceremony for each. He decided not to say anything to Piney about the loss unless Piney asked. He did not understand that Piney did not need to ask, because she knew. He was puzzled that she never even wanted to know if the baby had been a boy (it had), or that she never asked what the matter had been, so that he could have explained eclampsia to her. He began to have problems communicating with her; for example, if he asked her what she wanted for breakfast, she would likely respond, “I just don’t know.” If he inquired how she was feeling, she might answer, “Land knows,” without explaining who or what Land was. If he became specific with something like, Does your stomach hurt? she would more than likely reply, “It beats me,” leaving him to puzzle out whether she was trying to explain that her stomach was beating her. Once he asked her, Where do you ache? but she only told him, “Search me,” and he searched her pretty thoroughly without being able to determine if anything was dysfunctional that would cause her any pain.

  He began to notice that she no longer was so all-fired stubborn in her opinions about everything, and he gently inquired, “Do ye reckon maybe you don’t know as much as you thought you knew?”

  To which she could only reply, “You’ve got me.” Yes, he had her, and she was all he needed to have (there had been moments during her coma when he feared he’d lost her forever), but what was he going to do with her?

  In the fullness of time, when she seemed to be pretty much back to normal, he noticed subtle changes. She began to fry fish instead of bake them, skin the sweet potatoes and mash them up, and even to fry the okra in cornmeal. And the very first time after her confinement that they were permitted to have interco
urse again, she lay back down beneath him instead of clambering atop him, and the novelty alone of the position made him shoot off too soon, but she didn’t seem to mind. She just waited an hour and wanted to do it again. And then again after another couple of hours. And yet twice more in the wee hours. At dawn, when he was called out to tend a patient, he could hardly walk. But as soon as they’d had supper the next night, she yanked him off to bed again. In no time at all, after several nights of this, he had nothing left to deposit, he was plumb dry, but she kept on coming, sometimes before they got out of bed in the morning, sometimes during his noon dinner hour, and oftentimes on the table in his office whenever she could catch him without a patient. He developed blisters on his penis, and eventually a bend in it. Finally he decided to try satisfying her with other devices: his fingers, or even his mouth, but when he attempted this, she protested, “I want your thing in me! I want you to fill me up with your seedjuice!” He tried to explain that he was totally drained of seedjuice, that there was no way his system could manufacture enough of the stuff to keep up with her desires. She thought about that, and, although she no longer seemed to know everything, she understood that in order to be filled up with seedjuice she would just have to abstain from sex for a while, particularly during the days preceding her ovulation. Having made a habit of coitus a dozen times a day, it was difficult for her to taper off the habit, but she took up quilt making as a substitute and managed to go for days at a time without even thinking about seedjuice.

  But each month, regular as the calendar, for the whole length of the calendar’s year, and more, she let Colvin go without any sex for an entire week in the middle of the month, and then, when she knew, as she sometimes still knew some things, that she was ovulating, and that Colvin’s system had replenished its store of seedjuice, she’d drain him dry with a succession of acts at all times of day and night.

  This went on for another year before she finally had to admit to herself that she did not know everything, and therefore she was forced to ask Colvin a question. It was one of the few times that she ever asked him a question. “Why am I not getting pregnant?”

  Gently he tried to tell her that while he wasn’t one hundred percent certain (he was the first to admit that in medicine there is never, ever anything like one-hundred-percent certainty), it was quite possible that the eclampsia had left some permanent damage to her interior organs of reproduction.

  Secretly Piney had been planning the life and career of her second son, Potts Swain (named after her mother’s family, the Potts). Although she could not be certain that she knew this, she thought, or at least hoped that Potts, like his late lamented brother, Mackey, would follow in his father’s footsteps as a physician. Maybe Potts wouldn’t be a heroic army surgeon in some future war, but he’d be a good doctor, she knew. No, not knew, but thought, or hoped. Now she found it hard to believe, no, impossible to accept, that poor Potts couldn’t even get his medical diploma because the eclampsia had ruptured her reproductive system. Not sure any longer that she knew anything, she wondered if perhaps making Potts into a gynecologist, and a famous one, might make it possible for her to hope, if not to know, that her gynecological apparatus could be repaired so that Potts could be born.

  Brooding on this puzzle, Piney isolated herself with her quilt making. She gave up sex entirely. Like the consumption of alcoholic beverages, quilt making is something that ought not be done in private; as long as drinking and quilt making are social activities indulged in the company of one’s friends and kindred, they are relatively harmless, but once you start drinking or quilting in private you are in a trouble. Colvin missed Piney. It was almost like finding himself without a mirror to look into and see his own image, because in so many ways Colvin and Piney were mirrors of each other. Not physically, although her hair was the same black as his and there were enough other similarities that they could have passed for twins. Not even emotionally, although being seventh son of a seventh son and seventh daughter of a seventh daughter gave them depths of temperamental kinship that transcended whatever “magic” powers they had acquired (and perhaps lost) from such a lineage. But probably mentally, because they remained each other’s best friend, and would always be, even when Piney withdrew so deeply into solitary quilt making and into her sadness over her infertility that she no longer talked to him or to anybody.

  The years passed. Although America belatedly joined the world’s first great war, only two Stay Morons volunteered to become soldiers, as you have noted. Another great event of that time affected the town more than the war, and that was the outbreak of Spanish influenza, which presented Colvin with the first disease for which he could not prescribe a cure, because there was none. I myself as a young infantryman stationed at Camp Pike in North Little Rock had a bout with the flu, which later became an epidemic killing dozens of soldiers there. Nationwide, 548,000 victims of influenza died that year. Of those, only one was a patient of Doc Swain, but that was too much for Colvin, who had never lost a patient before. He ought to have been consoled by the survival of the 189 folks that he treated successfully for the flu, doing whatever was necessary to help them get over it. He’d given up his saddle horse in favor of a horse-drawn buggy, and his horse, Nessus, always knew the way home, so that after Colvin had been out all night tending the flu victims, he could go to sleep in the buggy and Nessus would take him home. Even Doc Plowright too was exhausted from treating, or trying to treat, the flu. It ought to have consoled Colvin that Jack lost six or seven of his patients, to Colvin’s one, but that one haunted his sleep and gave him bad dreams, in which he kept trying to resurrect the dead man. Never mind that the man was old Willis Dinsmore, who wasn’t so far off from dying of natural old age anyhow. Colvin began to have dreams in which he tried something different on Willis and saved him. Before long, he was “visiting” more flu victims in his dreams than he was in his buggy, and the funny thing was, the ones that he visited in his dreams got well! At least, more of ’em did than the ones he visited in his buggy.

  There were two things Colvin couldn’t admit to Piney. One was that he had a touch of the flu himself. The other was that he was going around in his dreams curing people. The first was no problem: he just stayed away from Piney until his own contagion could no longer infect her. But the second was a big problem, because they had always shared their dreams, and Colvin couldn’t admit to her that he was going around curing all of these sick people in his dreams. Knowing everything, she knew he was up to something. She asked him where he’d been in his dreams, and he had to make up lies: he’d just taken a trip to Harrison, or he’d gone off fishing or whatever. Finally she accused him, “You’re seeing a girlfriend, aren’t you?”

  Like all healthy, normal, even happily married men, he sometimes dreamt of women he wasn’t married to, but he wouldn’t admit this to Piney. As a matter of fact, he was visiting a patient in his dreams who was both a friend and a girl, a second cousin of his named Lorraine Swain, who was a dizzying redhead. In his dreams she came down with an awful case of the flu, and he was trying everything he knew to help her.

  One day he happened across the girl’s mother, who was his own cousin, and just out of curiosity he asked her how Lorraine was, and the mother replied that Lorraine had had a real bad case of the flu but seemed to be completely over it now.

  Weeks passed, and Lorraine came to him one day, saying, “Doc, you shore fixed me up jist fine when ye came in my dreams. But now I’ve got something else, and ever time I try to see ye in my dreams you’re out on a call.”

  Apparently as a consequence of the flu, or even a slight pneumonia accompanying it, Lorraine had developed empyema, which is where an accumulation of pus builds up in the pleura, the lung coverings. Abscess is what it is, and Colvin had to spend a lot of time with her, treating her with various measures to avoid having to operate, which is often necessary to drain the cavity.

  Colvin found that his daytime, “real,” unasleep treatment of Lorraine was not as effective as his
nighttime, dreaming treatment of her, so he continued the latter to the point where, one night, Piney woke him up and accused him of being with another woman, and he simply tried to explain that he was treating a patient, Lorraine Swain. He was abashed because he’d actually had normal, healthy fantasies of getting into bed with Lorraine, but he had refrained from doing it, even in his dream. “For Godsakes, Piney,” he complained, “I’m jist a-doing my duty as her doctor!” Haven’t you been holding her hand? Piney asked, feeling the return of her old omniscience. Colvin blushed and had to admit that he had been holding Lorraine’s hand in the dream, not just for her comfort but to check her circulation and nerves. Haven’t you been feeling of her breasts? Piney asked, surprised and pleased to discover that now she knew what he had been doing, Colvin did an inadequate job of explaining that it was necessary to palpate her bosom in order to examine the state of her thorax. Haven’t you kissed her a time? Piney wanted to know, knowing as well as if she could see them doing it. Poor Colvin was really clumsy in his attempt to explain that he was trying to determine if the pus was odorless or infected and had put his nostrils right up against her nostrils in order to smell her breathing.

  “You had better just keep that girl out of your dreams, you hear me?” Piney told him. And just to be sure that he had stopped seeing Lorraine in his dreams, each morning she would ask him if he’d dreamt of her. Now you may wonder if it was unethical for a doctor to be so henpecked by his wife that he’d neglect one of his patients even in his dreams, and the truth was that Colvin had discovered he was doing something he’d never have suspected himself of doing: lying to Piney. He was still seeing Lorraine every night in his dreams, but only to treat her condition.