The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana)

by Robert Lewis Taylor

  In February he had a long session of soberness, and some doctors at the City Hospital put him up for a steady job there, with the title of Assistant Physician. The salary would be twenty-five hundred dollars a year. Hearing about it, he was almost cheerful over something to do with medicine, for a change. It was an honor, and the salary being, as he said, princely, it would enable us to move into a house, buy a carriage and horses, send for Jennie and them, if they’d come, and then send for the folks at Louisville later on. He was all worked up about it, though it seemed to me only swapping an unhappy situation in Louisville for the same kettle of fish in San Francisco.

  In any case, it didn’t matter, for on the first ballot taken by the Board, five votes were cast for my father and three for a Dr. Hunter, and then, when they ran it off in other ballots, Dr. Hunter won out.

  This crushed my father down as bad as anything that had happened. He even began to neglect his occasional practice he’d built up, and took to spending his time serving on juries, making three or four dollars a day. I ran the stand, Reverend Ebersohl helped as usual, also helped with my father, and we floundered along.

  On one of the worst days, in late March, I was steering him across the Plaza (as he’d fallen into a ditch after coming out of the Courthouse) when I heard a familiar, “Dear me, dear me, I hope there’s nothing wrong,” and it was the spry little cricket, Mr. Peters, who’d insisted on knowing our address in San Francisco.

  My father straightened up with dignity, slapped some of the mud off of his trousers, brushed his hat, which was now a wreck, with the lid busted loose so that your hand would slide through, and said, “Wrong? wrong? Perhaps you’ll explain yourself, sir.”

  Mr. Peters was a hoppity little rabbit of a man, but he was not easily cowed. He stood surveying my father, one forefinger on his upper lip, then shook his head in distress. He was dressed in the same professional way, fussy, prim, neat, even more businesslike than before, if possible.

  “Oh, this won’t do, it really won’t—and seven months yet to go” (consulting his notebook) “till October twentieth, to be exact. Client would be most disturbed.”

  It’s hard to admit, but my father was far from sober. To put it plainly, he didn’t entirely make sense. But he drew himself up like the grandest kind of actor on a stage, jammed on his hat with a beautiful flourish, causing the lid to pop up on one side and stay there, then said, “I am not accostomed to being accusted in the public thoroughfare, like a common footpad. Kindly consult me at my office, sir. Make an appointment. Any afternoon will do; I generally sleep it off in the mornings.”

  “Oh, my!” said Mr. Peters. “This is serious, is it not? How fickle is fortune! I never dreamed—Surely you remember me, sir. Junius T. Peters, of the inquiry at the post office?”

  My father gave him a very keen look, then he said, “It won’t do you a particle of good to masquerade under an alias. I’m onto that dodge. Now suppose you sit yourself down there”—we had reached the stand—“and state your symptoms like a man.”

  “My dear sir, I am not ill! I really must protest—”

  My father had reached underneath the counter, removed his heart cone, and applied it to Mr. Peters’ chest. Listening gravely, still with his hat on, he said, “You should have come in sooner. I cannot stress too strongly the importance of a periodic check, especially at your age.” Then he straightened up with an air of decision. “Your case is simple, Mr. Streeter. You’ve either swallowed a cheap watch or you haven’t over a month to live. In any event, I’d like to call in another opinion before resorting to surgery.”

  I have no idea how much of this nonsense was done on purpose, from being in a gay mood, and how much was dumb, drunken talk. Once alcohol removed his cautions, he was sometimes given to carrying on very elaborate, silly jokes, to make up for all the seriousness he had to go through, and hated, about medicine. I’d seen him do it often before.

  Mr. Peters tried to struggle to his feet, but he was pushed back firmly and a wooden spatula inserted in his mouth.

  “Ah,” said my father. “Say ‘Ah.’ No, no, not ‘Ugh’—‘Ah.’ Better, that’s better. You’re coming along fine. We’ll lick this thing yet. The trick is to get them at their source. Great jumping Jehosophat!”–peering into his mouth—“this is shocking. Mr. Streeter, I hate to say so, but I’m afraid you’ve been drinking.”

  Mr. Peters opened his mouth to protest again, having got rid of the spatula, but my father sat down beside him and said, in a sympathetic tone—he did have a fine bedside manner; everybody noticed it, “To understand this case more fully, I’ll have to ask a few routine questions, to get your history, that is. Now, first of all, has there been any serious insanity in your family? On either side.”

  Right here I want to pay tribute to one of the most admirable men, large or small, it’s ever been my good fortune to know. In these years, while I’ve been writing down our adventures, I never go to San Francisco without calling at his home, and he, in turn, often comes to see us.

  Instead of blowing up, as he was wholly entitled to do, from this outrage, Mr. Peters said, “Both my mother and my father, sir, were certifiable idiots.”

  I could see my father’s face working, and realized that the answer had gone pretty far toward getting him back to normal. Suddenly he took a bottle out of his pocket, fetched two small tumblers from under the stand, poured them half full, then broke the bottle on the end boards.

  “Mr. Peters, I’m going to prescribe a remedy that should do you a world of good. It’s the only known specific for patience during a medical consultation of this kind. Your health, sir.”

  Mr. Peters inclined his head slightly, then tossed off that raw whiskey without so much as a twitch.

  “Thank you, sir. One good turn deserves another, so if I may, I’ll just suggest a prescription for you.” He picked up a tin lying in view on the stand. “Known pharmacologically as Tea.”

  My father sat down and had a look at himself, his torn and muddied trousers, his threadbare coat, his hat (removing it to work the lid up and down with his hand) and at last, the stand itself, together, it seemed, with our miserable circumstance in general.

  “A shabby old man in defeat. Not pretty, Mr. Peters.”

  “Oh, come, sir,” cried Mr. Peters with great good cheer, “it isn’t all that bad. We must take steps, we must dedicate ourselves toward, as it were, reconstruction. It’s a matter of business. First, as stated, the Tea.” (I’d got our spirit-pot going and now began to pour out three cups.) “Then the question of attire. I dislike to sound picayune, but there are certain features of your present costume which fall below the level of strictly good usage. I suggest—”

  “You’ve struck a snag there.” My father produced a handful of silver. “I have exactly $2.40, the bulk of it supplied by an inebriated miner for whom I splinted up a leg, quite possibly the wrong one.”

  “Then there appears only one thing to do. We must visit my personal tailor. And we must visit him at once.”

  “Do you mean to say you wish to outfit me from your own purse? Why?”

  “I assure you, sir, it’s business. Purely business. We must remember that I have a certain responsibility to Client.” He acted a trifle embarrassed, as if, indeed, his actions were not good business. But he’d made up his mind, so after an exchange in which my father unsuccessfully tried to learn the name of Mr, Peters’ client, then gave some of his usual hogwash about how he insisted on making a “note of hand” for the debt, we struck out down the street. They’d laid plank sidewalks along here the month before, and Mr. Peters, for some reason, seemed dead-set against stepping on the cracks. They weren’t easy to miss. He skipped, teetering this way and that, balanced, hopped, fell back, and danced the tightrope, and altogether, before we arrived, I was as nervous as a cat. Tired, too. I’d have been happy to see him go back to the former oddity of trying to keep everybody in step. That one was comparatively easy to handle.

  At the tailor’s, some measurem
ents were taken on my father for a new coat and trousers, by a very sissified man that acted as if he didn’t relish the job. Then Mr. Peters left us, to disappear into wherever he came from. Before he did, standing there on the sidewalk, looking first at me and then at my father, switching his expression back and forth from the perfectly tight line of his mouth to his business smile, he finally sighed, and let his face go slack. Despite his manner, I had the idea that he wasn’t a natural-born businessman at all, but had to work at it pretty hard.

  “Doctor,” he said in a different voice. “This procedure of living in a tent on the public square. Is it good? Is it wise? And what about the boy?”

  “Business?” inquired my father, wrinkling up the corners of his eyes.

  “Sir, from the cradle to the grave, everything is business, in one sense or another. My father, a banker of prominence, drilled that point home to me each year of my childhood, and he was correct, absolutely correct. My inquiry is based on business.”

  “Mr. Peters,” said my father, “you’re a humbug. I don’t think you care any more about business than I do. It’s only a triumph of will over instinct. I’ve never understood your interest in us, but we feel that it is, in some way, benign. So I’ll answer what would appear, in another, to be impertinence. We are going back to our tent, Jaimie and I, put our house, or tent, in order, resume the practice of medicine, wearing your clothes, attending to duty, forswearing all games of chance and intoxicants, and find proper lodgings as soon as prosperity permits. Does that suit you?”

  Mr. Peters sighed. “I wish I could make available my address, in case the need arose. But it would be in direct violation of my injunction by Client. That would never do.”

  “Unbusinesslike,” said my father.

  “I’ll bid you good day,” said Mr. Peters, stiffly. We had the impression that he was professionally, but not personally, offended.

  We walked down the street toward our tent, my father and I, in the warm but blustery March weather, and neither of us could find much to say. I felt a little down, and wished we were back at Vernon. Besides, I wasn’t exactly proud of my father. So I just walked along.

  At the stand, he said, “Sit down a minute, laddie. Let’s have a talk.”

  I wasn’t in the humor, but I perched on the edge of the bench and sat staring off across the Plaza. For some reason, I couldn’t get up the interest to look at him.

  “Son,” he said, “how would you like to go back home?”

  “To the diggings?”

  “To Louisville.”

  Then I did look at him, because this was about the last thing I expected. It made me kind of sore, and I spoke up in a way I’d never done before.

  “You falling down on that, too?”

  It shook him; he turned a couple of shades paler, which wasn’t easy to tell because of the stubble, sprinkled through with gray now, that covered his chin.

  “I don’t mind your saying that. I hate to hear you say it, but you’ve got the right. I suppose there isn’t a single thing I haven’t botched from start to finish.”

  “Up to lately, you’ve done fine. Nobody could have worked harder.”

  “Well, you’ve heard the old saying about throwing good money after bad. Maybe the simplest thing to do is face reality, admit defeat, grow up—me, I mean—troop back to Louisville, and dig in, whatever the pain. It’s quite possible I’ve been running long enough. In all truth, your mother was right, she always has been. Here’s what we can do, boy. We can take the Santa Fe Trail, the southerly route, new country, new adventures, maybe a little hike over to Mexico—always wanted to see it—and who knows how we’ll wind up? Why”—his face began to take on a very familiar look—“we’re apt to stumble across a fortune! Opp—”

  I got up abruptly and opened the stand.

  I said, “I worked a wheelbarrow for some Mexicans up near Vernon, three dollars for ten hours. Down where they lived—in Mexico, that is—they’d heard about the opportunities in California. I’ll be right here, in San Francisco. I don’t mind saying I’d like to see my mother and Hannah and Mary and Aunt Kitty, but we said we’d give it a year, and that’s what I’m giving it. Now you do just what you please.”

  There was a silence, then he said, “Son, what have you done these last weeks? I can’t seem to pick any one day out of the rest.”

  “Run the stand, hid what money I could so as to eat, talked, and worked, with Reverend Ebersohl, and slept in a tent. Is there something better?”

  I’m not proud of those words, for he looked terrible. He arose and said, “Put on some hot water; I need a shave.” And in a minute, while scraping away with his razor, he said, “There’s no use in saying I’m ashamed. It won’t solve anything. Deeds speak louder than words. John Barleycorn is buried as of today. We will stick out our year. I’ll work up a practice you’ll be proud of. And we’ll have the family here by Christmas. Son, reach in my medical bag and hand me that bottle of whiskey. Right there, that’s it, the one that says Back Liniment on the label.”

  “What a wonderful start—”

  “—as a lotion after shaving,” he went on, turning the bottle up in his hand and slapping the liquid over his face, “it can’t be beat. Ah, yes, very efficacious; the only disagreeable feature is the smell. Dear me, I’m afraid it’s too acute; I’ll never get used to it.” He poured the rest on the ground, then, stepping over a few yards beside a bush, scooped up a mound of dirt and stuck the bottle upside down at the head. “Behold—John Barleycorn’s grave. We’ll decorate it daily.”

  He’d got going now, and to give him credit, he spruced himself up handsome. He repaired the hat, cleaned his shoes, cleaned off his clothes and had them pressed by a Chinaman, and washed out what laundry the Reverend Ebersohl hadn’t already done. Then he straightened up the tent from stem to stern and came out with pride in his eyes. I’d never seen him look quite so officious. It was as clear as daylight he’d come to some kind of decision. But I wasn’t entirely convinced; I’d been here before.

  We had to stop and serve figs and molasses and sassafras tea to four English sailors off a ship in the harbor. They said both their food and water had turned weevily, and their teeth were loose in their heads from scurvy. It was close on to six o’clock.

  “Shut her up for the day, my boy,” cried my father when they left. “We have an errand to do.”

  Call me crazy, but he said we were going up to the Powell Street Methodist Church and sign the pledge.

  “I’m not signing a pledge,” I said. “I haven’t any reason to, and never will, if I can help it.”

  “I’ve never believed in that cant myself, but there is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune, especially in San Francisco. I mean to strike while the iron’s hot.”

  As we turned to go, a man with a wooden leg that my father had become acquainted with, from the Sandwich Islands, a Mr. Hobson, perfectly white, came thump-thumping up and cried, “Come on, doc, they’re empaneling veniremen to try Bill McGurn. He’s guilty as hell. Being as I saw the whole thing, I’m unprejudiced by idle talk, so we can sleep right through.”

  “Friend Hobson,” said my father, “I am no longer a career juror. That belonged to my Barleycorn period. I am now a physician only.”

  “Why, doc, you’ll drink up all your painkiller.”

  “If you’ll excuse us, we have an appointment to keep. Call in at my office any time.”

  “Best of luck, doc,” Mr. Hobson called out cheerfully. He was a good enough fellow, and you could excuse him for drinking. He’d been on a trading trip through the southerly islands and been captured by some cannibals that cut off his leg, boiled it and ate it right in front of him, while he was conscious and watched them serve it out in pieces. Before they were finished, another bunch of outriggers pulled up, full of friendlies, and he was rescued. So now he was alive, though drunk, but he had a wooden leg. It was all written up in the Alta Californian, under the heading of “A Grisly Ordeal.” H
e carried the clipping around with him, and showed it to anybody that would look, after which he commonly mooched the price of a drink. People were very glad to pay it, in order to get away and think about something else.

  When we reached the church, Reverend Ebersohl was preparing to leave for his evening street preaching. And when he heard why we’d come, he didn’t seem happy. Anybody else, he’d a signed them up in a hurry, but with my father, he hated to see him demean himself in that way.

  “If I know the Lord, and I think I do, He’ll be glad to take the will for the deed.”

  “Reverend,” said my father, “kindly produce your paper. I’ve turned over a new leaf, and I’d like it authenticated in writing. Who knows? The document may eventually assume historical importance.”

  Chapter XLVI

  For a number of weeks my father pitched into his practice like a man reformed forever. We had letters from home, several from Vernon, and wrote some back, including one to Louisville which hinted that we practically owned San Francisco by now, and suggesting that my mother be “alerted” to join us when he gave the signal. I could see her face when she read it.

  Medically, he picked up a very fair number of cases, because people recognized that he was skilled at his job when sober, no matter how much he disliked it. I won’t come out and say he was happy—being a doctor was a strain on him—but he kept plugging away, and in this period, after a lapse of time, he began to write in his Journals again. He wrote up many of his cases, and I’ll tell some, to show how good and careful he was at doctoring when he really buckled down.