There Is a River

by Thomas Sugrue

  “I’m going to try these things,” Dr. House said. “We’ll see what happens.”

  Edgar stayed that day and night at the Hill. Next morning Dr. House came from Carrie’s bedroom and shook his hand.

  “You were right about the locked bowel,” he said. “She’s better now. But I don’t see how it can be a pregnancy.”

  Edgar returned to Bowling Green. The following November Thomas Burr House, Jr., was born, a seven months’ baby. He was so small and fragile that he was carried around on a pillow. No one but Carrie believed he would survive the winter. He was sick most of the time and inclined to convulsions. One day in March he had so many that Carrie asked Dr. House to call Edgar.

  This time when he arrived from Bowling Green there were two local doctors present besides Dr. House. One of them pointed at Edgar and said, “If you’re going to fool with that faker, I’m through.” He left. The other physician, Dr. J. B. Jackson, who had long been the Cayce family doctor, remained.

  Carrie was sitting in a low rocker in the living room, by the front window. In her lap lay the baby, convulsing regularly every twenty minutes. Edgar turned away and went into the bedroom across the hall. Dr. House and Dr. Jackson followed him. He lay on the bed and went to sleep. When he woke, Dr. House was sitting beside him; Dr. Jackson had gone back into the living room. The door was open. Edgar could hear him talking to Carrie.

  “Now, Mrs. House, you can’t do what that man tells you to,” he was saying. “What he tells you to give your child is poison.”

  Edgar walked in and stood by the fireplace. Carrie kept rocking, staring down at the baby. Dr. House came in and sat beside her.

  Carrie spoke to Jackson.

  “You’re one of the doctors who told me I had to have an operation, aren’t you?” she said. “I didn’t have one. Now my baby’s dying, and you can’t help him. But you don’t want me to do what Edgar says. Well, I’m going to do it.”

  Dr. House spoke to her coaxingly.

  “What he prescribes is an overdose of belladonna,” he said. “You know yourself how poisonous that is. Of course, he gives an antidote. But how do we know it will work?”

  “The only thing we know is that the baby’s going to die if we don’t do something,” Carrie said. “This is our only chance. Measure out the dose, Dr. House. I’ll give it to him myself.”

  Dr. House went to his room and came back with the belladonna. Carrie administered it. In a few minutes the baby relaxed, stretched, and went to sleep.

  “Get the antidote ready,” Carrie said.

  Jackson turned to Edgar.

  “You gave something else,” he said. “A peach-tree poultice. I don’t know how to make it, or what good it will do, but you prescribed it. Do you know what it is?”

  “I’ll fix it,” Edgar said.

  He was glad to get out of the house. He wanted something to do. Standing there, watching the baby as it lay in Carrie’s arms, waiting for it to live or die, was more than he could bear.

  What could a peach-tree poultice be? It couldn’t be made of leaves, for every limb in the orchard was bare. He shinned up one of the peach trees and picked off the youngest, tenderest branches. They would make a good brew, if that was what was meant. He took them over to the kitchen, a building separate from the house, and put them in a pot, pouring hot water from the kettle over them.

  Mrs. Evans came from the house to help him. When the brew was strong enough they dipped towels in it, rinsed them, and carried them into the house. Hours that seemed endless to Edgar dragged by. Then, as he brought a fresh batch of towels into the living room, Carrie looked up at him and said:

  “He’s all right. I knew if anyone could save him, you could, Edgar.”

  He went outside and stood in the cold night, taking deep breaths. Dr. House joined him.

  “There’s no use in being a mule,” the doctor said. “You saved Carrie, and now you’ve saved the boy with this trance business of yours. It still sounds like foolishness, but it’s pretty accurate foolishness. I’m afraid I’ll have to believe in it myself.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Edgar said. “After tonight, I’m beginning to believe in it, too.”

  Standing under the winter sky, watching the stars and knowing he had done a good thing, he felt that he understood himself for the first time. He had saved a human being, a child, from suffering—perhaps from death, by the use of a power that had been given to him by God. It was his greatest dream come true. Wasn’t his life meant to be lived that way?

  Back in Bowling Green his burst of faith passed. Every day he saw his doctor friends. Their quiet cocksureness, their facile handling of medical and scientific terms, their occasional suggestions that he let bygones be bygones and continue the “interesting experiments” bogged him in a melancholia that deepened as he realized that the goal he now had set for himself was the lowest of his life: he merely wanted to be free of debt.

  In August, 1909, the last bill was paid and receipted. After seven years of labor he was stone broke.

  He went to Hopkinsville and stayed at the Hill with Gertrude, Hugh Lynn, Dr. and Mrs. House, little Tommy, and the rest of the family. To keep himself busy and to cover the humiliation he felt at being out of a job and without funds, he offered to move the kitchen over to the house and join it to the main building. It was a prodigious task, involving all sorts of impromptu engineering feats. During one of them, while the kitchen was moving on its rollers, Aunt Kate, who was helping him, said quietly to Edgar:

  “You’d better stop the blasted thing if you can. My finger’s caught underneath it.”

  There was no way of stopping the movement or even checking it. The kitchen rolled on, leaving the finger a battered mess.

  The job was finished without further mishap. When it was done, Edgar packed up and went off to look for work.

  —

  He returned for Christmas, though it was necessary to give up the job he had found in Gadsden, Alabama, to do so.

  “I couldn’t stay away any longer,” he told Gertrude. “I’ll get another job. Photographers are scarce in Alabama. I’ve already been offered a job in Anniston, with Russell Brothers. I’m going to work around the state until I find the right town, and then open a studio of my own.”

  “We’ll start all over again,” Gertrude said. “We can’t always have such bad luck.”

  During the holidays the squire took him to meet Dr. Wesley H. Ketchum, a homeopath who had opened an office in Hopkinsville. Homeopaths at the time were numerous and popular. They were called “spoon up and spoon down” doctors, owing to their custom of giving medicine in small and frequent doses, usually a teaspoonful at a time. Some people called their medicines “stomach water,” but the homeopaths, who mixed their own prescriptions, had a large following.

  Ketchum, a keen-faced, pince-nezed young man in his early thirties, greeted Edgar cordially. He had heard of the readings. He had talked with some of Layne’s old patients. He wanted to see a reading. Edgar said he no longer gave them for exhibition purposes.

  “How can I get one?” Ketchum asked.

  “If you come with a written request from a person who really needs help,” Edgar said, “I’ll give one. That’s the only condition.”

  “Wait here,” Ketchum said.

  They were in his office. He went out of the office and across the street to the Latham Hotel. In a few minutes he came back, waving a paper.

  “I have it,” he said. “This person needs help very much.”

  “Is it genuine?” Edgar asked.

  “On my honor,” Ketchum said.

  “Then I’ll give it,” Edgar said.

  “When?” Ketchum asked.

  “Right here, now,” Edgar said. He took off his tie, loosened his collar, cuffs, and shoelaces, and lay down on the examination table. The squire said he would give the suggestion. Ketchum h
anded him the paper. Edgar went to sleep.

  When he woke up, Ketchum was standing in the middle of the room, his thumbs hooked in his vest, teetering back and forth on his heels, smiling to himself.

  “Well, that beats anything I’ve ever seen,” he said. “You know, that would fool anybody but a fellow like me.”

  He teetered some more.

  “Yes, sir, if you’ll tie up with me we’ll make a barrel of money.”

  He laughed. “You were talking about me,” he said.

  “You say I think I’ve got appendicitis. Man, I know I’ve got it! I’ve been examined by six of the best doctors in the state. I’m going to be operated on next Wednesday.

  “You say I fell over a box and hurt myself. You tell me to go to an osteopath, and he’ll fix me up.

  “My boy, you’re a fake, but if you’ll tie up with me we’ll go all over the country and fool everybody. Yes, sir, you’re smooth. You’d fool anybody but me.”

  Edgar was boiling with rage. He tried to control himself when he spoke.

  “If it’s a fake,” he said, “it’s not my fake. I don’t know anything about it.

  “But maybe you can tell me how I happened to pick on appendicitis. If I’m a fake why didn’t I say you had stomach trouble, or sore feet, or a bad heart?

  “If I’m a fake, I dare you to prove it. And if you do, I’ll never give another reading as long as I live!”

  He strode out of the office. The squire followed him.

  When they had gone, Ketchum called to his secretary. She had been sitting behind the half-opened door to the inner room, taking down Edgar’s words in shorthand.

  “Type out those notes as soon as you can,” Ketchum said. “I think I have this fellow where the hair is short.”

  When the transcript of the reading was ready, he put it in his pocket and went up the street to the office of Dr. James E. Oldham, the local osteopath.

  “Oldham,” he said, “I’m Ketchum, the new homeopath. The regular doctors don’t like me any better than they like you. I thought we ought to get together. Maybe we could be friends.”

  Oldham acknowledged the introduction and shook hands.

  “How about looking me over?” Ketchum said. “I’m not feeling too well.”

  “Glad to,” Oldham said. “Just strip to the waist and get on the table.”

  While he was disrobing, Ketchum continued the conversation.

  “Do you know this fellow Cayce, who gives readings?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Oldham said.

  “What do you think of him?” Ketchum said.

  “He’s smart,” Oldham said. “He catches on quickly. He usually shows a pretty good smattering of medicine.”

  “I suppose people tell him things,” Ketchum said.

  “Yes,” Oldham said. “I treated him when he couldn’t talk. He learned all he knows from me.”

  “He recommended patients to you in his readings, didn’t he,” Ketchum said, “when he was working with Layne?”

  “Yes,” Oldham said, “but I diagnosed the cases myself.”

  “Suppose he took a patient away from you? He did that, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Oldham said.

  “Did the patient die?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  Ketchum got on the treatment table. In one hand he held the folded copy of the reading.

  “Well,” he said, “I think he’s a fake, too. To tell you the truth I have a reading that he gave on me, this afternoon. I think I’ve got him trapped. Now you go ahead and examine me and tell me what you find.”

  He lay on his face and Oldham examined his spine, pressing on various vertebrae.

  “Have you had a pain in your right side?” Oldham asked.

  “Yes,” Ketchum said.

  “I’ll bet you think you’ve got appendicitis,” Oldham said.

  “Good God! That’s exactly what Cayce said!” Ketchum unfolded the reading and stared at it, his head hanging over the end of the table.

  “There’s a lesion here,” Oldham said, pressing on two vertebrae. “Probably caused by a fall or strain.”

  “What would you do for it?” Ketchum asked.

  “It’s not hard to fix,” Oldham said. “I’ll get my wife in here and have her hold your feet while I give your back a twist.”

  “That’s what Cayce says,” Ketchum answered from the end of the table. “He even says your wife should hold my feet.”

  That night Edgar and Leslie went back to Ketchum’s office, at his request. He was holding on to his side with his right hand when they entered. With his left he waved them to a seat.

  “You’re not a fake,” he said to Edgar. “I’ve just been a damned fool.”

  He related his experience with Oldham.

  “I was fooling this afternoon about teaming up with me,” he said, “but I mean it now. We can do a great deal of good for a lot of people and make a fortune for ourselves. We can find new cures for diseases. We can revolutionize medicine. What do you say?”

  “Nothing doing,” Edgar said. He was still mad. “I’m glad you discovered your mistake,” he said. “You’ve found out I’m not a fake, like all the other doctors who’ve investigated me. Now if you fellows could convince me that you-all are not fakes, maybe I’d join up with you!”

  ELEVEN

  It was a quiet Sunday night in Montgomery, Alabama, late in October, 1910. A photographer of the H. P. Tressler staff, returning from a week’s trip into the country, entered the studio building and trudged upstairs, lugging his equipment. He was a slim, tired-looking young man, with long legs and arms and a round, boyish face that made him seem younger than his thirty-three years.

  A light was burning in the reception room of the studio. A man was curled up in one of the easy chairs, dozing. He leaped to his feet when the photographer walked in.

  “Are you Edgar Cayce?” he asked.

  The photographer nodded. “Yes,” he said.

  “We’ve been looking all over for you,” the man said. “You’re famous.”

  He pulled a fistful of clippings from his pocket.

  “New York Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Denver Post, Kansas City Star . . .”

  He handed the clippings to Edgar. The first one was a page from the New York Times of Sunday, October 9th. From it stared two pictures that were familiar—they hung on the walls of the Cayce living room in Hopkinsville. One was of Edgar, the other of the squire. Between them on the newspaper page was a picture of Ketchum. A streamer headline said: ILLITERATE MAN BECOMES A DOCTOR WHEN HYPNOTIZED—STRANGE POWER SHOWN BY EDGAR CAYCE PUZZLES PHYSICIANS.

  Edgar sank into a chair and began to read:

  The medical fraternity of the country is taking a lively interest in the strange power said to be possessed by Edgar Cayce of Hopkinsville, Ky., to diagnose difficult diseases while in a semiconscious state, though he has not the slightest knowledge of medicine when not in that condition.

  During a visit to California last summer Dr. W. H. Ketchum, who was attending a meeting of the National Society of Homeopathic Physicians, had occasion to mention the young man’s case and was invited to discuss it at a banquet attended by about thirty-five of the doctors of the Greek letter fraternity given at Pasadena.

  Dr. Ketchum made a speech of considerable length . . . He created such widespread interest . . . that one of the leading Boston medical men who heard his speech invited Dr. Ketchum to prepare a paper as a part of the programme of the September meetings of the American Society of Clinical Research. Dr. Ketchum sent the paper, but did not go to Boston . . .

  The man coughed to attract Edgar’s attention.

  “I’m a reporter,” he said. “I wanted to ask you about this. What’s it all about? Is it true?”

  “I don’t know,” Edgar said.

  He sm
iled helplessly.

  “I’m the man,” he said, “but I don’t know anything about this report. I know Ketchum. I’ve given some readings for him, when I’ve been at home for visits. But I had no idea he was going to make a report about it. I’ve been out in the country for a week. I haven’t heard from my wife in that time.”

  “That’s what I want to get,” the reporter said. “The personal stuff. How do you happen to be here in Montgomery, working for Tressler? He wasn’t sure it was the same man, when the stories began to break, but he knew you were from Hopkinsville, and when he saw the picture of you he was sure. But he said you came to him from Russell Brothers, and that you had been working for them over in Anniston and Jacksonville.”

  Edgar explained. “I used to have a studio in Bowling Green, Kentucky. It was burned out. So I left my family in Hopkinsville while I came down here to work, until I could save enough money to open another place of my own. I left Russell Brothers last July Fourth and came over here.”

  “Well, your troubles are over,” the reporter said. “Looks as if you can forget photography now. Say, how does it feel to be famous?”

  Edgar looked at the clippings.

  “Would you call it fame,” he asked, “or notoriety?”

  “That’s up to you, I’d say,” the reporter said. “It depends on what you do with it. People are continually popping up as nine-day wonders. Some stay on top, some are never heard of again.”

  Edgar nodded. “It depends on what I do with it,” he said, “and what others do with it. That’s the trouble. I never know what’s going on when I’m asleep. I have to be sure the people I work with are honest and have the same ideas about it as I have.”

  “What is it, anyhow?” the reporter asked. “How does it feel?”

  “I can’t describe it,” Edgar said, “or explain it. It’s just something that’s in my mind, like knowing how to take a picture, or like writing a letter, or even like getting up out of a chair. You think you’ll get up out of a chair, and you do, and all the things that happen to bring it about are mysterious—but they’re mysterious because you do it so easily that you don’t think about them. Maybe that’s not just the way it is, but when I lie down and want to go into this sleep, I do. And when I lie down and want to go into the other kind of sleep—the kind we all know, that rests us—I do. That’s all I know.”