Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural)
Page 57
‘Then,’ resumed Doctor Pelletier, ‘I take it that all that material of his – I notice that there have been a lot of story-writers using his terms lately! – is sufficiently familiar to you so that you have some clear idea of the Haitian-African demigods, like Ogoun Badagris, Damballa, and the others, taking up their residence for a short time in some devotee?’
‘The idea is very well understood,’ said I. ‘Mr Seabrook mentions it among a number of other local phenomena. It was an old Negro who came up to him while he was eating, thrust his soiled hands into the dishes of food, surprised him considerably – then was surrounded by worshippers who took him to the nearest houmfort or vodu-house, let him sit on the altar, brought him food, hung all their jewelry on him, worshipped him for the time being; then, characteristically, quite utterly ignored the original old fellow after the “possession” on the part of the “deity” ceased and reduced him to an unimportant old pantaloon as he was before.’
‘That summarizes it exactly,’ agreed Doctor Pelletier. ‘That, Canevin, that kind of thing, I mean, is the real starting-place of this dreadful matter of Arthur Carswell.’
‘You mean – ?’ I barged out at Pelletier, vastly intrigued. I had had no idea that there was vodu mixed in with the case.
‘I mean that Arthur Carswell’s first intimation that there was anything pressingly wrong with him was just such a “possession” as the one you have recounted.’
‘But – but,’ I protested, ‘I had supposed – I had every reason to believe, that it was a surgical matter! Why, you just objected to telling about it on the ground that – ’
‘Precisely,’ said Doctor Pelletier, calmly. ‘It was such a surgical case, but, as I say, it began in much the same way as the “occupation” of that old Negro’s body by Ogoun Badagris or whichever one of their devilish deities that happened to be, just as, you say, is well known to fellows like yourself who go in for such things, and just as Seabrook recorded it.’
‘Well,’ said I, ‘you go ahead in your own way, Pelletier. I’ll do my best to listen. Do you mind an occasional question?’
‘Not in the least,’ said Doctor Pelletier considerately, shifted himself to a still more pronouncedly recumbent position in my Chinese rattan lounge-chair, lit a fresh cigarette, and proceeded: ‘Carswell had worked up a considerable intimacy with the snake-worship of interior Haiti, all the sort of thing familiar to you; the sort of thing set out, probably for the first time, in English at least, in Seabrook’s book; at the gatherings, and the “baptism”, and the sacrifices of the fowls and the bull, and the goats; the orgies of the worshippers, the boom and thrill of the rata drums – all that strange, incomprehensible, rather silly-surfaced, deadly-underneathed worship of “the Snake” which the Dahomeyans brought with them to old Hispaniola, now Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
‘He had been there, as you may have heard, for a number of years; went there in the first place because everybody thought he was a kind of failure at home; made a good living, too; in a way nobody but an original-minded fellow like him would have thought of – shot ducks on the Léogane marshes, dried them, and exported them to New York and San Francisco to the United States’s two largest Chinatowns!
‘For a “failure”, too, Carswell was a particularly smart-looking chap, in the English sense of that word. He was one of those fellows who was always shaved, clean, freshly groomed, even under the rather adverse conditions of his living, there in Léogane by the salt marshes; and of his trade, which was to kill and dry ducks. A fellow can get pretty careless and let himself go at that sort of thing, away from “home”; away, too, from such niceties as there are in a place like Port au Prince.
‘He looked, in fact, like a fellow just off somebody’s yacht the first time I saw him, there in the hospital in Port au Prince, and that, too, was right after a rather singular experience which would have unnerved or unsettled pretty nearly anybody.
‘But not so old Carswell. No, indeed. I speak of him as “Old Carswell”, Canevin. That, though, is a kind of affectionate term. He was somewhere about forty-five then; it was two years ago, you see, and, in addition to his being very spick and span, well groomed, you know, he looked surprisingly young, somehow. One of those faces which showed experience, but, along with the experience, a philosophy. The lines in his face were good lines, if you get what I mean – lines of humor and courage; no dissipation, no let down kind of lines, nothing of slackness such as you would see in the face of even a comparatively young beach-comber. No, as he strode into my office, almost jauntily, there in the hospital, there was nothing, nothing whatever, about him, to suggest anything else but a prosperous fellow American, a professional chap, for choice, who might, as I say, have just come ashore from somebody’s yacht.
‘And yet – good God, Canevin, the story that came out – ’
Naval surgeon though he was, with service in Haiti, at sea, in Nicaragua, the China Station to his credit, Doctor Pelletier rose at this point, and, almost agitatedly, walked up and down my gallery. Then he sat down and lit a fresh cigarette.
‘There is,’ he said, reflectively, and as though weighing his words carefully, ‘there is, Canevin, among various others, a somewhat “wild” theory that somebody put forward several years ago, about the origin of malignant tumors. It never gained very much approval among the medical profession, but it has, at least, the merit of originality, and – it was new. Because of those facts, it had a certain amount of currency, and there are those, in and out of medicine, who still believe in it. It is that there are certain nuclei, certain masses, so to speak, of the bodily material which have persisted – not generally, you understand, but in certain cases – among certain persons, the kind who are “susceptible” to this horrible disease, which, in the prenatal state, did not develop fully or normally – little places in the bodily structure, that is – if I make myself clear – which remain undeveloped.
‘Something, according to this hypothesis, something like a sudden jar, or a bruise, a kick, a blow with the fist, the result of a fall, or what not, causes traumatism – physical injury, that is, you know – to one of the focus-places, and the undeveloped little mass of material starts in to grow, and so displaces the normal tissue which surrounds it.
‘One objection to the theory is that there are at least two varieties, well-known and recognized scientifically; the carcinoma, which is itself subdivided into two kinds, the hard and the soft carcinomae, and the sarcoma, which is a soft thing, like what is popularly understood by a “tumor”. Of course they are all “tumors”, particular kinds of tumors, malignant tumors. What lends a certain credibility to the theory I have just mentioned is the malignancy, the growing element. For, whatever the underlying reason, they grow, Canevin, as is well recognized, and this explanation I have been talking about gives a reason for the growth. The “malignancy” is, really, that one of the things seems to have, as it were, its own life. All this, probably, you know?’
I nodded. I did not wish to interrupt. I could see that this side-issue on a scientific by-path must have something to do with the story of Carswell.
‘Now,’ resumed Pelletier, ‘notice this fact, Canevin. Let me put it in the form of a question, like this: To what kind, or type, of vodu worshipper, does the “possession” by one of their deities occur – from your own knowledge of such things, what would you say?’
‘To the incomplete; the abnormal, to an old man, or woman,’ said I, slowly, reflecting, ‘or – to a child, or, perhaps, to an idiot. Idiots, ancient crones, backward children, “town-fools” and the like, all over Europe, are supposed to be in some mysterious way en rapport with deity – or with Satan! It is an established peasant belief. Even among the Mahometans, the moron or idiot is “the afflicted of God”. There is no other better-established belief along such lines of thought.’
‘Precisely!’ exclaimed Pelletier. ‘And Canevin, go back once more to Seabrook’s instance that we spoke about. What type of person was “possessed”?’
‘Right once more! Note now, two things. First, I will admit to you, Canevin, that that theory I have just been expounding never made much of a hit with me. It might be true, but – very few first-rate men in our profession thought much of it, and I followed that negative lead and didn’t think much of it, or, indeed, much about it. I put it down to the vaporings of the theorist who first thought it out and published it, and let it go at that. Now, Canevin, I am convinced that it is true! The second thing, then: When Carswell came into my office in the hospital over there in Port au Prince, the first thing I noticed about him – I had never seen him before, you see – was a peculiar, almost an indescribable, discrepancy. It was between his general appearance of weather-worn cleanliness, general fitness, his “smart” appearance in his clothes – all that, which fitted together about the clean-cut, open character of the fellow; and what I can only describe as a pursiness. He seemed in good condition, I mean to say, and yet – there was something, somehow, flabby somewhere in his makeup. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but – it was there, a suggestion of something that detracted from the impression he gave as being an upstanding fellow, a good-fellow-to-have-beside-you-in-a-pinch – that kind of person.
‘The second thing I noticed, it was just after he had taken a chair beside my desk, was his fingers, and thumbs. They were swollen, Canevin, looked sore, as though they had been wound with string. That was the first thing I thought of, being wound with string. He saw me looking at them, held them out to me abruptly, laid them side by side, his hands I mean, on my desk, and smiled at me.
‘ “I see you have noticed them, Doctor,” he remarked, almost jovially. “That makes it a little easier for me to tell you what I’m here for. It’s – well, you might put it down as a ‘Symptom’.”
‘I looked at his fingers and thumbs; every one of them was affected in the same way; and ended up with putting a magnifying glass over them.
‘They were all bruised and reddened, and here and there on several of them, the skin was abraded, broken, circularly – it was a most curious-looking set of digits. My new patient was addressing me again.
‘ “I’m not here to ask you riddles, Doctor,” he said, gravely, this time, “but – would you care to make a guess at what did that to those fingers and thumbs of mine?”
‘ “Well,” I came back at him, “without knowing what’s happened, it looks as if you’d been trying to wear about a hundred rings, all at one time, and most of them didn’t fit!”
‘Carswell nodded his head at me. “Score one for the medico,” said he, and laughed. “Even numerically you’re almost on the dot, sir. The precise number was one hundred and six!”
‘I confess, I stared at him then. But he wasn’t fooling. It was a cold, sober, serious fact that he was stating; only, he saw that it had a humorous side, and that intrigued him, as anything humorous always did, I found out after I got to know Carswell a lot better than I did then.’
‘You said you wouldn’t mind a few questions, Pelletier,’ I interjected.
‘Fire away,’ said Pelletier. ‘Do you see any light, so far?’
‘I was naturally figuring along with you, as you told about it all,’ said I. ‘Do I infer correctly that Carswell, having lived there – how long, four or five years or so – ?’
‘Seven, to be exact,’ put in Pelletier.
‘ – that Carswell, being pretty familiar with the native doings, had mixed into things, got the confidence of his Black neighbors in and around Léogane, become somewhat “adept”, had the run of the houmforts, so to speak – “votre bougie, M’sieu” – the fortune-telling at the festivals, and so forth, and – had been “visited” by one of the Black deities? That, apparently, if I’m any judge of tendencies, is what your account seems to be leading up to. Those bruised fingers – the one hundred and six rings – good heavens, man, is it really possible?’
‘Carswell told me all about that end of it, a little later – yes, that was, precisely, what happened – but that, surprising, incredible as it seems, is only the small end of it all. You just wait – ’
‘Go ahead,’ said I, ‘I am all ears, I assure you!’
‘Well, Carswell took his hands off the desk after I had looked at them through my magnifying glass, and then waved one of them at me in a kind of deprecating gesture.
‘ “I’ll go into all that, if you’re interested to hear about it, Doctor,” he assured me, “but that isn’t what I’m here about.” His face grew suddenly very grave. “Have you plenty of time?” he asked. “I don’t want to let my case interfere with anything.”
‘ “Fire ahead,” says I, and he leaned forward in his chair.
‘ “Doctor,” says he, “I don’t know whether or not you ever heard of me before. My name’s Carswell, and I live over Léogane way. I’m an American, like yourself, as you can probably see, and, even after seven years of it, out there, duck-hunting, mostly, with virtually no White-man’s doings for a pretty long time, I haven’t ‘gone native’ or anything of the sort. I wouldn’t want you to think I’m one of those wasters.” He looked up at me inquiringly for my estimate of him. He had been by himself a good deal; perhaps too much. I nodded at him. He looked me in the eye, squarely, and nodded back. “I guess we understand each other,” he said. Then he went on.
‘ “Seven years ago, it was, I came down here. I’ve lived over there even since. What few people know about me regard me as a kind of failure, I dare say. But – Doctor, there was a reason for that, a pretty definite reason. I won’t go into it beyond your end of it – the medical end, I mean. I came down because of this.”
‘He stood up then, and I saw what made that “discrepancy” I spoke about, that “flabbiness” which went so ill with the general cut of the man. He turned up the lower ends of his white drill jacket and put his hand a little to the left of the middle of his stomach. “Just notice this,” he said, and stepped toward me.
‘There, just over the left center of that area and extending up toward the spleen, on the left side, you know, there was a protuberance. Seen closely it was apparent that here was some sort of internal growth. It was that which had made him look flabby, stomachish.
‘ “This was diagnosed for me in New York,” Carswell explained, “a little more than seven years ago. They told me it was inoperable then. After seven years, probably, I dare say it’s worse, if anything. To put the thing in a nutshell, Doctor, I had to ‘let go’ then. I got out of a promising business, broke off my engagement, came here. I won’t expatiate on it all, but – it was pretty tough, Doctor, pretty tough. I’ve lasted all right, so far. It hasn’t troubled me – until just lately. That’s why I drove in this afternoon, to see you, to see if anything could be done.”
‘ “Has it been kicking up lately?” I asked him.
‘ “Yes,” said Carswell, simply. “They said it would kill me, probably within a year or so, as it grew. It hasn’t grown – much. I’ve lasted a little more than seven years, so far.”
‘ “Come into the operating-room,” I invited him, “and take your clothes off, and let’s get a good look at it.”
‘ “Anything you say,” returned Carswell, and followed me back into the operating-room then and there.
‘I had a good look at Carswell, first, superficially. That preliminary examination revealed a growth quite typical, the self-contained, not the “fibrous” type, in the location I’ve already described, and about the size of an average man’s head. It lay imbedded, fairly deep. It was what we call “encapsulated”. That, of course, is what had kept Carswell alive.
‘Then we put the X-rays on it, fore-and-aft, and sidewise. One of those things doesn’t always respond very well to skiagraphic examination, to the X-ray, that is, but this one showed clearly enough. Inside it appeared a kind of dark, triangular mass, with the small end at the top. When Doctor Smithson and I had looked him over thoroughly, I asked Carswell w
hether or not he wanted to stay with us, to come into the hospital as a patient, for treatment.
‘ “I’m quite in your hands, Doctor,” he told me. “I’ll stay, or do whatever you want me to. But, first,” and for the first time he looked a trifle embarrassed, “I think I’d better tell you the story that goes with my coming here! However, speaking plainly, do you think I have a chance?”
‘ “Well,” said I, “speaking plainly, yes, there is a chance, maybe a ‘fifty-fifty’ chance, maybe a little less. On the one hand, this thing has been let alone for seven years since original diagnosis. It’s probably less operable than it was when you were in New York. On the other hand, we know a lot more, not about these things, Mr Carswell, but about surgical technique, than they did seven years ago. On the whole, I’d advise you to stay and get ready for an operation, and, say about ‘forty-sixty’ you’ll go back to Léogane, or back to New York if you feel like it, several pounds lighter in weight and a new man. If it takes you, on the table, well, you’ve had a lot more time out there gunning for ducks in Léogane than those New York fellows allowed you.”
‘ “I’m with you,” said Carswell, and we assigned him a room, took his “history”, and began to get him ready for his operation.
‘We did the operation two days later, at ten-thirty in the morning, and in the meantime Carswell told me his “story” about it.
‘It seems that he had made quite a place for himself, there in Léogane, among the Negroes and the ducks. In seven years a man like Carswell, with his mental and dispositional equipment, can go quite a long way, anywhere. He had managed to make quite a good thing out of his duck-drying industry, employed five or six “hands” in his little wooden “factory”, rebuilt a rather good house he had secured there for a song right after he had arrived, collected local antiques to add to the equipment he had brought along with him, made himself a real home of a peculiar, bachelor kind, and, above all, got in solid with the Black People all around him. Almost incidentally I gathered from him – he had no gift of narrative, and I had to question him a great deal – he had got onto, and into, the know in the vodu thing. There wasn’t, as far as I could get it, any aspect of it all that he hadn’t been in on, except, that is, “la chèvre sans cornes” – the goat without horns, you know – the human sacrifice on great occasions. In fact, he strenuously denied that the voduists resorted to that; said it was a canard against them; that they never, really, did such things, never had, unless back in prehistoric times, in Guinea – Africa.