There Is a River

by Thomas Sugrue

  Edgar lay down on the family couch, a horsehair sofa that had been part of his grandmother Cayce’s wedding suite. He put himself to sleep.

  Layne, watching, saw the breathing deepen. There was a long sigh, then the body seemed to sleep. The squire sat in a chair near by. His wife, nervous, stood up. Layne began to talk in a low, soothing voice, suggesting that Edgar see his body and describe the trouble in the throat. He suggested that Edgar speak in a normal tone of voice.

  In a few minutes Edgar began to mumble. Then he cleared his throat and began to speak in a clear, unafflicted voice.

  “Yes,” he said, “we can see the body.”

  “Take it down!” Layne said to the squire.

  The squire looked at him helplessly. The nearest pencil was in the kitchen, tied to the grocery list.

  “In the normal state,” Edgar went on, “this body is unable to speak, due to a partial paralysis of the inferior muscles of the vocal cords, produced by nerve strain. This is a psychological condition producing a physical effect. This may be removed by increasing the circulation to the affected parts by suggestion while in this unconscious condition.”

  “The circulation to the affected parts will now increase,” Layne said, “and the condition will be removed.”

  Edgar was silent. They watched his throat. The squire leaned over and further loosened his son’s shirt. Gradually the upper part of the chest, then the throat, turned pink. The pink deepened to rose, the rose became a violent red. Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes passed.

  Edgar cleared his throat again.

  “It is all right now,” he said. “The condition is removed. Make the suggestion that the circulation return to normal, and that after that the body awaken.”

  “The circulation will return to normal,” Layne said. “The body will then awaken.”

  They watched while the red faded back through rose to pink. The skin resumed its normal color. Edgar wakened, sat up, and reached for his handkerchief. He coughed and spat blood.

  “Hello,” he said tentatively.

  Then he grinned.

  “Hey!” he said. “I can talk! I’m all right!”

  His mother wept. His father seized his hand and shook it again and again.

  “Good boy! Good boy! Good boy!” he said.

  SEVEN

  They went into the kitchen to write down what had been said. The squire gave his version, Layne gave his. Edgar kept trying his voice. His mother busied herself with the coffee pot, smiling and drying her eyes as she bustled back and forth between the pantry and the stove.

  “This is the greatest thing that ever happened to you, Edgar,” Layne said, “but it may be the greatest thing that’s happened to the rest of us, too.

  “If you can do this for yourself, why can’t you do it for others? It shouldn’t be any more difficult for you to see another man while you’re asleep than it was to see yourself.”

  “Maybe I was just reading my own mind,” Edgar said. “Don’t they say that there is a record in the mind of everything that goes on in the body?”

  “He did it before,” the squire said. “He saw himself when he was hit with a ball and prescribed a poultice.”

  Layne nodded. He had heard the tale.

  “But he also saw books that were placed under his head,” he said, “and afterward he could see the pages of the books in his mind. Why couldn’t he see other people’s bodies if they were before him and tell what was wrong with them?”

  “I’m willing to try,” Edgar said. He felt grateful to Layne and so happy that he could not have refused him anything within his power.

  “Tomorrow,” Layne said. “We’ll try it tomorrow, on me. I’ve been ailing with stomach trouble for years. I’ve had all sorts of doctors look at me. I know their diagnosis. I’ll be able to tell whether you are describing the right symptoms and how close you come to the right kind of treatment.”

  “Sounds crazy to me,” Edgar said, “but I’ll try it.”

  He laughed. He was so happy and relieved that he was ready to attempt anything, believe anything, do anything.

  When Layne left, his mother said, “You may lose your voice again if you try what Mr. Layne suggests.”

  Edgar shook his head.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “If I have the power to help myself, then it can’t be wrong to try and use it to aid someone else.”

  His mother was pleased. He had answered her in the language of morals, though she had not brought up such a question.

  “I just wanted to hear you say it,” she said. “I feel that way, too. Remember, I’ve often thought about you as a doctor, and we’ve always believed there was a reason for your experiences. This may be the answer.”

  The squire finished lighting a cigar and arranging the fire at its end.

  “He’ll cure anybody,” he said. “I’ll bet on it!”

  Edgar looked at his mother.

  “Don’t forget to thank God for this miracle,” she said. “It was He who performed it.”

  Next afternoon Layne arrived with a series of questions he had written concerning his condition. Edgar declined to read them.

  “They wouldn’t mean anything to me anyhow,” he said. As on the previous day, he put himself to sleep. Layne sat by, holding a pad and pencil. When Edgar woke up, Layne waved the pad at him gleefully.

  “You went all over me!” he said. “Gave me a perfect diagnosis, told me how I feel, and what to do—medicines, a diet, and a set of exercises. If it works, our fortunes are made!”

  Edgar looked at what Layne had written down. There were names of parts of the body, names of medicines and foods, and instructions for exercises.

  “How could I tell you these things . . . ?”

  He stopped, realizing suddenly that his voice was still with him, still normal.

  “I’ve never heard of most of the names you have here,” he went on. “I’ve never studied physiology, or biology, or chemistry, or anatomy. I’ve never even worked in a drugstore. Are these patent medicines?”

  “Some of them are,” Layne said. “Some are simple mixtures that don’t require a prescription. I’m going to get them all and start the schedule. We’ll see how it works. If I get well, we’ll try this on others.”

  In a week Layne was so improved that he wanted to begin experiments with other people. Edgar was worried.

  “How do I do it?” he asked.

  “Clairvoyance,” Layne said.

  The word meant nothing to Edgar. He went to his mother and asked her the same question.

  “In our dreams,” she said, “we sometimes can do things that we can’t do when we’re awake. I have that happen to me often. Perhaps we have powers like that. Maybe everything is in us, as some people say—I’ve heard preachers talk about it—and it takes work and study to bring it out. You couldn’t study, but you worked hard, and wanted to help others, and perhaps this is what the lady in the vision meant when she said, ‘Your prayers have been heard.’”

  He was not inclined to agree; he was afraid to. Sleeping on books and reciting lessons from them was one thing; telling a man what was wrong with him and prescribing medicines was quite another. He might kill somebody.

  “There’s no chance of that,” Layne said. “I know enough about medicine to tell whether a thing is dangerous. Besides, medicines that might be poisonous or have narcotics in them require a doctor’s prescription; we couldn’t get them filled even if you prescribed them. So you’ll have to give me simple remedies. I’ll suggest that. If you name a medicine that I can’t get, I’ll ask you to name a substitute that is obtainable.”

  In three weeks from the time he began the treatments Layne felt so well that he rented two rooms over his wife’s millinery store and fitted them as his office. He intended to practice suggestive therapeutics and osteopathy, he announced. Edgar knew that h
e was expected to help.

  Meanwhile his voice was dwindling. Day by day it became weaker.

  “We’ll try again,” Layne said. “Come over to the office and we’ll break in the new couch. It just arrived.”

  Edgar went, doubting and worried.

  When he woke from the self-imposed sleep his voice was normal again. There was no alternative now. He had to help Layne.

  “I’m willing to try someone else,” he said, “if you like. The only condition I set is that you don’t tell me who the person is, either before or after. I don’t want to know.”

  In a few days the attempt was made. When Edgar awoke Layne patted him on the shoulder.

  “A perfect diagnosis,” he said.

  “How do you know?” Edgar asked.

  “The doctor said the same thing, last week, only he didn’t know a cure. You gave me one.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “Perfectly safe. And simple. This thing is wonderful. It can’t miss.”

  Months passed. Layne officially opened his office, with Edgar, as silent partner, doing the diagnosing and refusing to take any money.

  “It’s bad enough,” he told Layne mournfully, “but to take money for it—that would be the end.”

  His father frequently came to the experiments, and it was a comfort to Edgar to know that someone was there to watch what went on while he was asleep and be sure that what Layne told him afterward was actually what had happened. It wasn’t that he mistrusted Layne; he mistrusted himself, while he was asleep.

  Layne found that he had to tell Edgar where the people were at the time. Some were in the outer office when, unknown to them, the experiments went on; others came for examination and were told to return in a few days for a diagnosis and outline of treatment. Meanwhile they were checked on by Edgar. Layne called the experiments “readings” and described Edgar’s sleep state as “a self-imposed hypnotic trance which induces clairvoyance.”

  The patients, according to Layne, improved under the treatments, and many were cured. He himself was immensely better; at least there was no doubt about that. But Edgar remained uncomforted. One dead patient was all that was needed to make him a murderer.

  He wanted to quit, yet he couldn’t. About once a month his voice dwindled and faded, and he needed Layne to give the suggestion necessary to its return. After a while the periods of its strength began to lengthen. He didn’t know whether this was because he was gradually overcoming the condition or whether it was because he was allowing himself to be used for the help of others. Sometimes he hoped one way, sometimes the other.

  Few people knew what he was up to. He told Gertrude, of course, and she was inclined to worry about it. There was a common belief at the time that subjects of hypnosis eventually went insane and that, at the very least, their health suffered from habitual immersion in trance.

  “I’m glad you have your voice back, and I don’t believe Layne is any Svengali,” Gertrude said, “but I can’t help feeling that it is not good for your health. I wish you’d stop.”

  “I wish I could,” he answered.

  Carrie Salter thought that Gertrude’s fears and Edgar’s doubts were nonsense. She went to Layne’s office to witness the experiments, asked questions on the progress of the patients, and flatly said that God had given Edgar a gift intended to be used to help people.

  “I don’t care what the rest of you think,” she said, “but believe me if I’m ever sick I’m going to get a reading from Edgar and I’m going to do just what it says. I don’t believe the doctors know what they’re talking about anyhow, at least half the time.”

  Such faith frightened Edgar. He prayed that either it be justified or the strange power be taken away from him.

  —

  He was a full-fledged photographer now, and with the return of his voice Mr. Bowles sent him on trips to the surrounding towns. In each place he set up shop for a few days, photographed the school children, newlyweds, and babies and made postcard pictures of the town hall and other public buildings.

  On a night in May, 1902, he arrived in Lafayette. The hotel clerk had a message for him.

  “You’re to call the Bowling Green operator,” he said. “There’s a long-distance call for you.”

  The voice at the other end of the wire was familiar. It belonged to Frank Bassett, one of Hopkinsville’s younger physicians.

  “Got a job for you over here in Bowling Green, if you want it,” Bassett said. “Friend of mine named L. D. Potter runs a bookstore. His right-hand man is leaving him to start in business for himself and he needs an experienced hand right away. I told him you were the fellow. It’s a nice spot and the salary’s good.”

  Edgar made up his mind while he was listening. He wanted to get away from Hopkinsville, from Layne, from the readings. It might be all right to give them, but he wasn’t sure; he wanted time to think things over. What worried him most was that Layne was not a physician. With a doctor’s approval, under a doctor’s supervision, he would not have been afraid to try any kind of experiment; with a correspondence school healer it was different.

  “I’ll take the job,” he told Bassett. “I’ll go to Hopkinsville tomorrow and leave for Bowling Green tomorrow night.”

  When he entered the Potter store two days later he felt that he had come back home. There were the books he knew so well; there were the pictures, the frames, the stationery, the notebooks, and the fresh-smelling boxes of pencils. The customers even appeared to be the same—bookstore devotees, he had discovered, were a type. He slipped into the job as easily as into an old pair of shoes.

  He found Bowling Green to be a pretty little city of 10,000, on the Barren River, at the junction of the Memphis division of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. It bustled with students from three colleges: a business university, a Bible school, and Ogden College, an institution founded by a rich Bowling Green citizen to provide free higher education for the students of Warren County, of which the city was the seat.

  The business life of the city clustered around Fountain Square, a lovely island of lawn and shade trees in the center of a sea of red-brick buildings and showy store fronts. State and College streets were its east and west boundaries; Main Street and Frozen Row enclosed it on the north and south. On State Street, a few doors past the end of the square, was the Potter store.

  At the end of the first day Mr. Potter took him down State Street, past the square, to a large frame house, painted cream with white shutters and standing about as far north of the square as the store was south of it.

  “This is Mrs. Hollins’s place,” Mr. Potter said. “It’s a boardinghouse where a lot of the young professional folk stay. The meals are good, and it’s only a short walk to the store. I think you’ll like it.”

  They entered a large reception room. To the left was the dining room. Ahead was a stairway, leading to the second floor. Mrs. Hollins, a short, stout, smiling lady, came to greet them. She took Edgar upstairs to show him a room.

  “The young men have the upper floor,” she explained. “The ladies stay on the ground floor. I’m a widow, you know, with two daughters. They stay here with me. We’ve some real nice young men; I’m sure you’ll like them. How would you like a roommate? I have a big room here, made for two. Just one boy in there now. Let’s see if he’s in. He’s a doctor—eye, ear, nose and throat specialist. Here . . .”

  She knocked at a door. It opened and a short, wiry young man stood looking at them and smiling.

  “This is Dr. Hugh Beazley,” Mrs. Hollins said. “Hugh, this is the new clerk at Potter’s—Edgar Cayce’s his name. He’s thinking of putting up with us, if we can put up with him, eh?”

  Edgar shook hands with the young man.

  “You’re from Hopkinsville, aren’t you?” he asked. “I know about you, but I’ve never met you.”

  “You’re one of the Cayces,” Dr. Beaz
ley said. “I’ve never met all of them. Has anyone?”

  Mrs. Hollins stood, nodding and smiling.

  “I’ll go down and tell Mr. Potter you’re going to stay,” she said to Edgar. “If you two want to bunk together, all right. If not, I’ll find another room.”

  “I’d love to have you move in,” Dr. Beazley said. “I’d like some company.”

  “So would I,” Edgar said. “I was afraid I was going to be lonesome.”

  They went down to dinner together, and at table Edgar met his dormitory mates. Two of them were brothers: Dr. John Blackburn, a medical practitioner who wore a full vandyke beard to disguise his youth; and Dr. James Blackburn, a dentist. The others were Joe Darter, secretary of the Y.M.C.A., and Bob Holland, who worked in a department store. They were all about Edgar’s age. He liked them at once. They were friendly, helpful, and full of the joy of life. They were doing things that mattered, too; things that Edgar had always dreamed of doing. That night he wrote to Gertrude:

  This is the place for us. It’s full of young people, and they are all busy doing something. The town is beautiful. At night it is quiet and the coolness from the trees in the square comes right in my window. The streets are so clean and the houses all look as if they had just been washed. You will love it, I know . . .

  He joined the Christian Church and the Christian Endeavour Group. Joe Darter took him to lectures and parties at the Y.M.C.A. He opened a bank account. Life was beginning all over again.

  The dream lasted two weeks. Then his voice began to fade. After closing time on Saturday he called Layne by long distance and whispered his predicament over the telephone. Layne told him to come to Hopkinsville. He took the night train, went to Layne’s office the next morning, and put himself to sleep.

  When he awakened his voice was normal.

  “This is liable to hit you at any time, Edgar,” Layne said. “Why don’t you let me come over to Bowling Green on Sunday once in a while? We can keep your voice in good shape, and I can ask about my patients.”