Old Doctor Mercer didn’t mind their dangerous ways or their foolishness. “Boys will be boys,” he said, although several of these were rapidly lengthening into manhood, and should have devoted themselves to soberer ambitions. And Doc wasn’t annoyed when Letcher Billins started tying his claybank in front of the Mercer house, and coming in to amuse Adela with sprightly talk and circus tricks.
Miss Eulalie was in no way annoyed either: Abraham Billins was believed to be worth eight thousand in cold cash, and the saws in his mill hummed hourly as more and more people moved into the vicinity and felt the need of lumber. Zeke Billins was a sickly young man, and who knew how long he might last if a fever got hold of him? Letcher Billins was next-to-the-eldest, and doubtless he would settle into some kind of decency if he inherited the family fortunes.
Miss Eulalie had an eye to future comfort; she had an ear that could catch the ring of a thin dime clear across the neighborhood. So she smiled when she saw that pale horse gnawing the fence palings, and she reckoned Letcher wasn’t half so untamed as a certain thin person in buckskins who came creeping through the thickets to drop his wild-flowers at the doorstep, and vanish away again without ever a soul laying eyes on him.
The gentian roots grew and the wild turkeys gobbled; fish still flicked themselves in the waters where Doc Mercer commonly sought them.
As for Thin Jimmy Blackshears, he spent his time in bottling hen’s oil for Granny, and stewing up tobacco and mutton tallow as she needed them; and he was stripping out the inner bark of butternut trees and tincturing the blood-root, and counting crows upon the wing for weather prophecy, just as he always did.
And as for Adela Mercer, she had grown pretty and mildly plump; there was pink within her skin, and her eyes laughed when they looked at you. I don’t know whether they laughed when she looked at Letcher Billins or not, but he was around there most of the time for her to look at. People said that Letcher was an eligible young man despite his crazy activities and his ornery ways with the Bobcats. What he needed in his life was a settling influence, and likely Adela Mercer would award it to him.
Bitter trials do not come singly as a rule, and now Doctor Hardaway Mercer had the first tribulation which had visited him since his wife died many years before. It came in the shape of a runaway back in Kentucky, where his only brother was mortally hurt, and the family wrote a letter to Doctor Mercer while the brother lay a-dying.
Mercer had to pack and go; it was a long journey; he had to tend his brother devotedly when he got there, and when the man died there were the children to see after, and a million business disturbances to straighten out for the widow.
And through all those weeks of worry, there was unhappiness occurring within Hardaway Mercer’s own home, nigh to the town of Delight. His child Adela was stricken with a misery. She thinned down unreasonably, and she complained of anguish in her side and under her shoulder. Her skin no longer looked as if rose petals lay upon it.
There were some people inclined towards sentimentality who said that she needed her father’s return, as a sole and certain cure: motherless daughters were apt to hold their fathers close to their hearts, and perhaps Adela was pining for the doctor. There were others, more literal-minded, who declared that Miss Eulalie Kershaw’s cooking was the cause of it all.
Well, Adela was sick enough; she wouldn’t eat, and she experienced pain and fever. The only other doctor in the neighborhood lived at Billingsgate, and he was a harsh man who had quarreled with Hardaway Mercer on some matter of profession. Miss Eulalie Kershaw said she’d be blowed up with gunpowder before she’d summon the Billingsgate man, and that she knew enough to cure any two girls the size of Adela.
She brought bottles from the doctor’s shelves, and I reckon she used them all. She poured everything from Indian Cathartic Syrup to Colby’s Cholera Tincture down that poor girl’s throat. She gave her Wahoo Tonic and Wilson’s English Worm Cakes, and she rubbed her back with Kittredge’s Salve. She gave her Alcoholic Extract of Ignatia Amara, too.
But the prime cure she offered was Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup; Aunt Eulalie said if that didn’t fetch Adela into bounding health, nothing else would. And the hollows under Adela Mercer’s eyes grew deeper, and she lay listless upon her pillows.
No one of the neighbors dared to summon Granny Blackshears. Miss Eulalie Kershaw, with her specs and her big teeth and her loud voice, was now Adela’s guardian, and Miss Eulalie held no brief for grannyizing.
“Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup has cured folks afore this,” said Miss Eulalie. “Take it, child! It’s good enough for what ails you.”
The neighbors grew alarmed. Mrs. Drummond it was who wrote to Doctor Mercer that he’d best hasten home from Kentucky and see to things, or else he’d have to stand beside a grave when he did come. It was miserable to observe the Mercer house, from whence good cheer and kindness and laughter had always come forth, now turned grim and silent—with the blinds pulled down and the daughter fever-ridden.
I reckon Letcher Billins was reasonably upset. He’d bounce in every day to see how Adela was faring, and once he brought her a bottle of scent, and another time a box of chocolate drops that he had rode all the way to Billingsgate to purchase for her. But it was whispered that other eyes than his watched the house on frequent occasions, and that a tall shape was heard to go rustling away through the leaves, close before dawn or after the dusk had fallen.
Sure enough, Jimmy Blackshears must have heard of Adela Mercer’s ailment; and so had everybody else in the Rosy Ridge country. But Thin Jim was so withdrawn into his solitary pursuits that he dared not pull the Mercer latch-strings unbidden.
There came a night when Adela didn’t know the neighbor women who waited nigh her bed, nor recognize her Aunt Eulalie. Her eyes stared through them as if they had been window-glass, and she quoted strange words aloud in her restlessness and in all the pain of her sickness.
She spoke up through layers of fever, and she said that shoemakers’ children never had shoes; she said that she was a doctor’s daughter—the child of a man who had cured many—but now there was no one to cure her.
Then Mrs. Andrew Drummond went a-flying home, to tell old Andrew of the weakness and danger that beset Adela, and how nigh she seemed coming to her end.
Andrew Drummond said angry words. He pulled on his boots and poured himself a drink from his flask.
“Aye,” he said, “she’s a winning lass, and I’ll not be the man to stand idly by and see her come to harm! It’s dark the night, and Eulalie Kershaw is an old rullion, but I’m away to fetch Granny Blackshears!”
Then up he rode, six miles along the chilly length of Rosy Ridge, and he was as angry and as frightened as any Scotchman could be—or any native Missourian either, for that matter. He knocked upon the door of Granny Blackshears’ cabin, as so many other plaintive people had knocked before him. When the door opened, it was a man who lifted the latch, and Thin Jimmy was the man.
“No,” said he, “Granny ain’t to home, nor will she be. The Huckstep babe and mother are badly took, over at Lorn Widow, and she’s there a-tending them.”
Sweat stood out on Andrew Drummond’s forehead.
“Look you here, Thin Jimmy,” he cried, “there’s naught to be done for Adela Mercer but what your granny can do! Aye, the lass is wandering in her wits the night.”
Thin Jimmy stood there, tall and strange in his wool and buckskins, and he looked down at Mr. Drummond. “She’s bad took?”
“Weeks agone!” exclaimed Andrew Drummond. “She’s no better now. The fever was high within her when my woman left the house;, and the poor bairn talks about her side, and she makes an ourie noise when she tries to breathe.”
Candle-light shone again Andrew Drummond’s eyes, and he couldn’t examine Thin Jimmy’s face. “Well, I can go down myself,” Thin Jimmy whispered, for all his shyness. “It sounds as if it might be a liver inflammation.”
Old Andrew Drummond drew his tartan shawl close around his shoulders.
“Has your granny taught you, lad, aught of what she knows?”
“I reckon,” said Thin Jimmy, “that she’s taught me all.”
“Aye,” Drummond told him. “I brought a led horse along. Fetch your paraphernalia, now, and come away with me.”
Thin Jimmy went to the far end of the cabin, and there were stored, on shelves and hooks and pegs, a million pokes and bottles and little bundles of bark and dried weeds. Most carefully he selected several things and wrapped them together; and he fetched them all those miles down to the Mercer house, riding silent behind Andrew.
Adela was having a miserable time when they got there. Neighbor women had come into the room, and Mrs. Drummond had returned as well. Deliriousness no longer overcame Adela, though the appearance of her face was terrible to see, and her coughing too, and the pain with which she breathed. It was years since Thin Jimmy had stood nigh to her, for all the presents he had deposited on her stoop; she stared up, wondering out of her big brown eyes, and he looked just as wondering.
At last that wild young man did find his voice, and he asked her the questions he needed to ask, and he found just where the pain was plaguing her. The neighbor women got over their awe of him, and loosened up and told him things which Adela hadn’t told about herself; although Miss Eulalie sat over by the lamp and glared and sniffed.
Then Thin Jimmy asked Andrew Drummond to lead him into the kitchen where the stove lids were red. He opened the bundles he had brought, and he took out handfuls of smartweed and wormwood and the bark of sumach roots, and these things Jimmy put into a pot to boil.
“They were gathered correct,” he said. “They were gathered at the right time of the moon, and they were cured according to the ways that Granny knows. And now I’ll do what I can. But in the meantime, here are some other medicines for you to put in her bed, and let her keep them nigh her all the time.” And he gave to Andrew Drummond a small dried potato, and a knuckle from a pig’s foot, and a pair of craw-dad claws.
Well, that was witchery all right, but old Andrew was willing to grasp at any hope offered. So he wrapped them according to instructions, and his wife put them close beside Adela’s body beneath the bed-clothes.
Out from the kitchen appeared Thin Jimmy, and he had boiled the strength from the weeds and bark that were stewing; and then he had strained and boiled them further. He added lard too, and turpentine; but because he was a man and because he was scairt of all the world, and perhaps most especially of young females, he had Mrs. Drummond proceed from there.
The woman rubbed that stuff around the painful portions of Adela Mercer, and pressed a flannel cloth above the mixture again and again, and passed a hot iron over the flannel.
“You got to heat it in,” Thin Jimmy had cautioned her. “You got to keep heating it in, or it will bring no relief to her internals.”
More kinds of doctoring he had ready to hand, and he employed them. He cooked up mandrakes and blue-flag roots, and another kind of root as well. That strange dose he made Adela swallow down soon after the salve was applied, and again before he left the house at dawn. Everybody on the eastern limits of Rosy Ridge had heard of his visit by that time, for it was a wondrous thing to think of Thin Jimmy shedding his retiring habits, and playing doctor to a girl that her Aunt Eulalie couldn’t help no way.
And other people than the householders had heard of Thin Jimmy’s adventure: the Bobcats were waiting for him in full force, with Letcher Billins at their head. Andrew Drummond had offered Thin Jimmy his horse for riding back home, but Thin Jimmy was accustomed to shank’s mare and said that he’d much prefer to leg it.
So he set off; and then as he passed the sycamores that grew beyond the turning of the road (and that still grow there in modern times) he came face to face with five young men who sat their horses and stared at him.
Letcher Billins didn’t hold with witch-doctoring, and most especially Billins was always quick to pride himself because of his light heart and when he considered that the witch-doctor was rivaling him in Adela Mercer’s affections. Letcher and his associates had attended a dance at Mammy Park’s place, far down the Billingsgate road, and more than a little corn liquor had flowed their way. Some young men wouldn’t be eager for dancing when certain young ladies lay sick abed, but Letcher Billins was always quick to pride himself because of his light heart and risibilities.
And then he came back to Delight with the other Bobcats in tow. His insides were heated as if an iron had been passed across his skin instead of Adela’s.
The Bobcats said, “Thin Jimmy, we’re eager to have a word with you,” and Jimmy Blackshears was plumb astonished when he glimpsed them.
“Talk away,” he said. “I’d take it kindly if you didn’t talk too long, for I’ve six miles ahead of me.”
“You’re more than that behind you, maybe,” said Letcher Billins, and the other boys ho-hoed to hear him say it. “You’ve mad-stones and blood-stones and funny herbs, and all other kinds of rigmarole. You hain’t no doctor; so I warn you to keep your spooky habits far removed from Miss Adela Mercer.”
And Thin Jimmy up and answered him, “I’m trying to cure her of her misery.”
“Well enough, witch man,” said Letcher Billins. “I don’t misdoubt your intentions. I just don’t desire you casting any spells.”
Thin Jimmy folded his arms across his flat chest and looked hard at them all. His eyes went back in his head. “If I can cast a spell that will heal her body,” he said, “I’d count myself fortunate. And if it can be done with pigs knuckles or blue-flag or wormwood, I aim to do it.”
Well, he looked mighty purposeful. The Bobcats hadn’t yet lashed themselves into any devilment, so they pulled their horses aside and let Blackshears pass until he had vanished in the Rosy Ridge direction.
But then they got to talking amongst themselves, and they joked Letcher Billins unmercifully about such goings on.
“How would you like it,” one of the Tinley boys inquired of Lane Cutts, “if your girl was being magicked away from you?” He said it sly, but loud enough for Letcher Billins to hear, and Letcher pulled his mouth down tight.
He invited his cronies over to the saw-mill shack to wet their whistles before they rode for home, and I reckon the whistles thought they needed a lot of wetting.
They sat around with a jug or two, for a couple of hours. Dell Tinley said that he had heard of a youngun who was cured of heart ailments by having a hole drilled into a blue beech tree and some of his hair stuffed into the hole; and Angie Steedman swore that there wasn’t anything better to stop the flowing of a bloody wound than seven spider webs laid acrost it, especially if the webs had been spun in November.
Thus they kept on rallying Letcher Billins and reciting magic words and mumble-jumble, until about nine O’clock Letcher got up and heaved his empty jug against the stove.
He ripped out his knife and carved the air around his head, and he brayed, “Any man who says I’ll stand by and let Adela be witch-doctored to her death, has got to give me the first bite! I’m going up there on Rosy Ridge and open that critter’s carcass, and see if he’s actually plagued with moonbeams!”
So the rest all swort that they would go along. They went squawling away up the hill road, past the Drummond house and the MacBean place and then west along the trail that we call Lovers’ Walk.
The cold morning air soaked a little soberness into their arms and legs. They were steady enough, but they weren’t yet kindly of heart; and when they grouped their horses around the Blackshears cabin they were still fighting mean.
Letcher Billins, most of all, was enraged at the meddling manners of Thin Jimmy.
“Unbar your door!” he yelled. “Lock up your spooks in their swill barrels, Jimmy Blackshears. Come outside and say us a miracle!”
Thin Jimmy was sound asleep when they began their outcry, but it didn’t take him long to blink the sleep from his eyes. He put on some duds, though not many, and he opened the door most steady. He stood there with his bare c
hest shining in the morning sun.
“Well, well,” Letcher Billins told him, “do my eyes deceive me? You look just like an ordinary human, without your shirt, although the hair doesn’t grow as thick as it might.”
And Jimmy Blackshears asked them quiet, “Why do you folks make so much rumpus? Is somebody sick?”
Billins leaned down over his horse’s neck and he narrowed his gaze. “Adela Mercer is sick,” he said. “She’ll be sicker if you continue doctoring her. I’ve come up to warn you to keep your distance from that house, with all your toad-ears and skunk-musk and turtle-feet!”
Thin Jimmy turned pale; it was the paleness of eager rage, and the Bobcats had no sense to understand his feelings.
“I want to cure her,” he said, “because she’s mighty sweet and mighty pretty. And I reckon I’ll cure her, too, for I know the medicine she needs.”
Then Letcher Billins turned around on his horse and pleaded with the other Bobcats to observe how he held his temper. “And you, Thin Jimmy,” he said. “I reckon I ought to shoot you in your tracks, or slice the ears from off your head. You set foot in the Mercer yard again and you’ll need more than a blood-stone to cure you!”
It is hard to tell what went on in Thin Jimmy Blackshears’ mind, for he had never exchanged angriness with anyone so far as known; never before had he been challenged or ordered about his business. He knew the milk-snakes of the gullies better than he knew the manners of human beings . . . he knew the kind of voices that none of the Bobcats could speak with. And he wore a wolf’s fang, to make him brave.
He eased forward and he put his hand on Letcher Billins’ bridle with all carnestness. “I’ve never had trouble with no man,” he said. “I’ve never courted troublesome doings. But don’t let none of your friends halt me on my path toward Adela Mercer’s, for most surely I will kill any man who gets in my way.”
A Treasury of Doctor Stories Page 25