There Is a River

by Thomas Sugrue

  Once it was Dr. Gay. In the spring of 1915 Gertrude complained of symptoms of appendicitis, and Dr. Gay prepared to operate. The day before she was to go to the hospital a reading was taken. It said surgery was unnecessary and suggested that the capsules which Gay had prescribed be reinforced with one-sixtieth of a grain of another drug and that they be continued as a medicine. Since the case was not yet serious Gay tried the suggestion. After a week the symptoms disappeared.

  “You’re doing this on purpose,” Gay said good-naturedly. “I think that subconscious of yours likes to play jokes.”

  He sat down and took off his glasses.

  “Seriously,” he said, “I think a lot about this thing. I knew very well that you didn’t have appendicitis last year, and I knew very well last week that your wife did. Even the X ray agreed with me about your case. Yet I was wrong both times, and you were able to tell me so by going to sleep.

  “Your appendix undoubtedly had to be taken out, or you would have died. When I gave your wife the medicine you suggested, she got well.

  “The boy’s eyes are all right. They might have been anyhow, but we wouldn’t have put tannic acid in the solution, and we might have taken one of the eyes out.

  “Do you know what it is, or how it works?”

  Edgar repeated the explanation he was supposed to have given while asleep, as reported by Ketchum. Gay smiled.

  “It’s a law in action all right,” he said, “but in reverse, or sideways. Something’s gone wrong somewhere, and this stuff runs out of you like water through a hole in a dam. We’ve all had the sensation of feeling that knowledge was around us all the while, if we knew how to get it. This seems to be one of the ways.”

  He sighed.

  “I wish I were a little younger. I’d like to go into this and follow it through. But I don’t know whether I have the stuff to tackle it, at my age.”

  He put his glasses back on.

  “But somebody should, and I hope somebody does, someday. It’s worth studying.”

  —

  He was continually getting requests for readings from people who had met the Dietrichs. One of these came in the fall of 1914, from a lumber merchant in Lexington, Kentucky, named W. L. DeLaney. DeLaney wanted Edgar to come to Lexington and give a reading for Mrs. DeLaney, who had been ill for many years. He wanted Edgar to bring a physician with him, if possible, to take down the suggestions and inaugurate the treatments.

  Edgar wired Blackburn and stopped in Bowling Green to pick him up. Blackburn was willing to go but had to give up the trip at the last minute because of an emergency operation. Edgar went on to Lexington alone.

  The DeLaneys lived in Hampton Court, a dead-end street. Mrs. DeLaney, a patient, pleasant woman, suffered from what was vaguely described as swelling arthritis. Her joints and flesh were enlarged; she was paralyzed so badly that for three years she had not been able to feed herself, and for five years she had been unable to comb her own hair. She lay on a stretcher; she could not bear to be touched by sheets.

  Mr. DeLaney, who was quiet and small, conducted the reading, taking down only the prescriptions and suggestions for treatment. A physician was present. When Edgar woke up, he asked what had been given.

  “Everything,” Mr. DeLaney said. “Everything, including the kitchen sink. You have something for every square inch of her body, I think. If we do all this, something has GOT to happen.”

  Six months later Edgar returned and gave a check reading. Mrs. DeLaney called him in and proudly combed her hair for him. She was slowly getting well. Later a strange rash broke out all over her body. A check reading, taken in Selma, said an ingredient had been left out of the medicines—black sulphur.

  The lack of this had caused the rash.

  After another six months—in the autumn of 1915—Edgar again returned. Mrs. DeLaney now could walk a little; she fed herself and had almost normal movement throughout the upper part of her body. The rash was gone.

  During that visit Edgar was introduced to a neighboring family, the Kahns. They were Reformed Jews. Solomon, the father, ran a grocery business and all his children helped him. There were eight of them: David, Julian, DeVera, Raymond, Yetra, Hazel, Leon, and Joe. Fanny, the mother, was a tall handsome woman with the face of an Arab. She had been talking with Mr. and Mrs. DeLaney, and she wanted to get a reading for Leon, who was not well. Edgar sat up half the night with the family grouped about him, telling tales and answering questions. David, the eldest boy, was especially inquisitive. He was eighteen and had been studying at the state university in Lexington.

  The reading for Leon outlined treatments. When Edgar called to say good-bye, Fanny gathered her husband and children together and spoke to them.

  “We have seen a wonderful thing,” she said. “I want you children to promise me that you will never forget this man.

  “David, you are the eldest. I want you to promise that you will devote a portion of your life to seeing that the work of this man is made known to the world. The world needs it.”

  “I promise,” David said.

  Riding home on the train, Edgar puzzled over the scene. Back in Hopkinsville several readings had been taken on the manner of conducting the business and making it known to the public. One of these had said that the work would succeed when there was a Jew in it. They knew no Jews; Edgar had never known one. But ever since then he had been on the lookout for a likable one, wondering who the fellow would be. The eager young face of David Kahn had impressed him. Was he the touchstone?

  Selma was a sweet narcosis for such thoughts. It reduced them to daydreams and embroidered them with all sorts of pleasant fancies: a reading would be given for a mysterious person who only sent his name and address. The person would turn out to be a philanthropist, anxious to find a worthy cause for his money. He would build a great hospital in Selma, and there, after a great many cures had been effected, doctors would come from all over the world to study the treatments and get readings on diseases in which they were specialists. Sometimes the thought would strike Edgar that he ought to go out and look for the philanthropist, but he rationalized such ideas away with the facts before him: he had a wife, a child, and a business; he could not go off and leave them. Perhaps a man who was free of such responsibilities, like young David Kahn, might go out and find the philanthropist.

  Meanwhile he was doing what work he could in the field before him. He gave readings for those who asked for them; he worked in all the activities of his church; he was a good neighbor; he was a sincere Christian, though imperfect like all others. He would live thus until the way to greater service was shown to him.

  When the war came in 1917 it took many of his young friends to France, including David Kahn. Watching the members of his Sunday school class leave for training camp he realized he was forty—getting old. He also realized how much he depended on these young friends. Slowly, in his thoughts and daydreams, he had been turning to them for the hope of realizing his dreams. He had never told them about these dreams; he would be ashamed to do that. But he nourished them with the youth he gathered about him.

  They wrote to him from the trenches and told him how much the training he had given them in the Bible and Christian action was helping them in their hours of crisis. One of them told this story:

  Driving an ammunition truck up to the front one night through an enemy artillery attack, he found himself getting more and more frightened. To bolster his courage he began to sing, as loudly as he could, the favorite hymn of the Seven Class, “I Love to Tell the Story.”

  His singing punctuated the detonations. Suddenly the tune was taken up on all sides of him. He was not alone. Soldiers were moving up with him on both sides. They adopted the hymn as a marching song, and when the attack ceased and the air was quiet, it roared out into the night. The ammunition truck drove through to its destination.

  The war ended, and the country became fil
led with a restless energy that looked for new ways in which to expend itself. Soldiers began arriving home, looking for jobs. Some wanted to return to their old occupations; others, stimulated and made dissatisfied by their uprooting, wanted to seek greener fields. Might not this be a good time, before they all settled themselves again, to get something started for the readings? A hospital, perhaps? He himself was more of a family man than ever. On Februrary 9, 1918, Gertrude had given birth to another son, Edgar Evans Cayce. It would have to be someone else who started things. Yet the itch to see something under way had got hold of him. The old wounds had healed.

  The itch apparently got hold of his subconscious, too. One day in March, 1919, when he had not given a reading for several weeks, he went to sleep to give one diagnosis, and eight more tumbled out of him voluntarily. Seven of these were checkups, and the requests for them were in the mail. The eighth diagnosis was for a new patient. The request for this reading also was in the mail. The patient was one of his female cousins in Hopkinsville, who was pregnant. The reading said that the child would be born and would survive, but that conditions indicated a very hard time for the mother, with a possibility that the birth would be fatal for her. Extreme caution was urged. The child, a girl, was born in due time. The mother died.

  Finally David Kahn returned from France. He wired Edgar from the transport, asking him to be his guest in Lexington. When Edgar got there, David was enthroned as the family hero. He had become a captain and looked very handsome in his uniform. He was full of plans for the future, both for himself and for Edgar. His mother urged them on. She had complete faith in the readings. Another child, Eleanor, had been born to her, but Leon had died, because the treatments were not carried out: no doctor would administer them.

  “I do not want that to happen to others,” she said.

  “What do we need to get this work in shape so the people can get the benefits of it?” David asked Edgar. “Whatever it is, it will take money. That’s what I’ve been thinking about. We’ve got to raise some money.”

  “A hospital,” Edgar said.

  He knew exactly what he wanted; he knew exactly what to say.

  “A hospital where we can give the kind of treatments the readings outline,” he said. “If we had a place that would follow the diet, give the right electrical and osteopathic treatments—and give them at the right time—and give the medicines, too, then we’d have something. If we had enough money, we could run it free.”

  “There’s money everywhere,” David said. “How about the oil fields that are opening up in Texas? I’m going out there and look things over. It should be easy. There isn’t any person who wouldn’t give money to a cause like this. I have a friend in Atlanta . . .”

  “We could keep copies of all the readings and have people correlate the things in them and experiment with the medicines and treatments,” Edgar went on. “We could take special readings on certain diseases . . .”

  “I told my friends in the army about this, and they were all interested,” David said. “They are in all parts of the country. We could go to different cities and present it to the people in them . . .”

  They talked all night, each about a different thing, but in perfect accord. They left Lexington together, heading for Atlanta. David—he was now Dave to Edgar—exuded energy, enthusiasm, and optimism. They would make millions; they would build a hospital; they would run it free. They would make a scientific fact of psychic phenomena; they would produce medicines and medical truths that would benefit the whole world.

  From Atlanta they went to Birmingham; from Birmingham they went to Selma, where Edgar packed the rest of his clothes while Dave explained their plans to Gertrude. She was dazed.

  “Who is going to run the studio?” she asked.

  “Dad’s coming down from Hopkinsville to be the manager,” Edgar said. “I’ll get a photographer to work for him.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To Texas.”

  Hugh Lynn looked admiringly at his father.

  “Are you going to be a cowboy?” he asked.

  His father patted him on the shoulder.

  “No, we’re going to find oil, and make a lot of money, and build a hospital where sick people can come and get well.”

  “How much money are you going to make?”

  “Oh, about a million dollars.”

  Hugh Lynn smiled.

  “Can I have a pony then?” he asked.

  FOURTEEN

  When Hugh Lynn stepped off the train in Texas, his feet sank in mud up to his ankles. His brown and white sport shoes were ruined.

  “Hey!” his father called. “That’s no way to dress in cowboy country. Where are your boots?”

  “Where’s your gun?” Dave Kahn called. “Reach for it!”

  They had come to meet him and drive him to the well at Comyn.

  They wore leather boots that laced to the knee, rough clothes that were stained with mud, and ten-gallon hats. He hardly knew his father in such an outfit. Edgar had gained weight and looked strong and healthy.

  “Your mother says you’re to look after us,” Dave said. “How can you do that without a gun? Our enemies are pretty powerful here. They’ve got the biggest cattle-rustling gang in the country. They all carry two guns.”

  Hugh Lynn didn’t answer. He was staring at the cow ponies tied to the hitching post at the station. Across the street he could see men who were dressed like cowboys, except that they didn’t have chaps and weren’t carrying guns.

  “Come along,” his father said, “I want to hear all about home. How is mother? How is the baby?”

  They bundled him into a big Marmon car and roared off down the mud track that seemed to be the road. Hugh Lynn was bounced back and forth between his father and Dave, while he tried to shout answers to his father’s questions above the noise of the exhaust, which apparently had no muffler.

  Comyn turned out to be a crossroads rather than a town. The well was in a field, and it wasn’t the sort of well Hugh Lynn was used to seeing. It was a massive wooden derrick, sixty feet high, which lifted and dropped a pipe into a hole far too small for any respectable well. Near it was a small engine which made a terrible sound. It needed a muffler worse than the Marmon.

  All the ground was muddy. Water was pumped into the hole to lubricate the pipe and the bit at its end, and it was supposed to drain off into a homemade pond; but most of it wandered around through the black dirt, turning it into a sticky mire.

  “When it comes in,” Edgar shouted above the din of the steam engine, “it’ll spout oil higher than the derrick!”

  Hugh Lynn wondered what was keeping it from coming in. It was now the summer of 1921. Why did it take the readings so long to find oil, when other people were hitting it without any such help? That was what his mother had sent him to find out. He was only fourteen, and she had been reluctant to let him go, but her worry about what had already happened to Edgar finally overcame her worry about what might happen to Hugh Lynn. Both were sure that Edgar was being used to give readings, without his knowledge, on things other than the oil well. They suspected that the well that was constantly about to come in, but somehow never did, was a blind to keep him there, giving readings on wells that were being drilled elsewhere.

  This, so far as Hugh Lynn could discover, was not true. Everyone was concentrating on bringing in the well at Comyn, and most of the time Edgar and Dave were driving around the country getting leases on the surrounding land, so that when oil was finally struck, they would have command of the whole region.

  When not touring in search of leases they stayed in a group of double-roofed shacks about fifty yards from the well. These were the property of the Ringles, a terrifying family of gigantic men who worked on the well and had an interest in the company. Old Man Ringle, the father, was the biggest and most frightening of them; the smallest was Cecil, his nephew, who w
as married and occupied one of the shacks with his wife. Edgar and Dave and Hugh Lynn lodged with Cecil, while the two Ringle sons stayed with their father.

  After his arrival Hugh Lynn was present at all the readings. All of them were on the Comyn well, and they were accurate so far as predicting the stratum that would next be encountered in the drilling. It was on the strength of these predictions that the company’s funds were being spent on leases.

  One thing about the readings struck Hugh Lynn as curious. He wrote to his mother about it.

  “I’m afraid to copy it down during the reading,” he wrote, “and they don’t pay any attention to it. But each time the reading says that unless all the people are ‘in accord’ about the purpose for which the money is to be used, nothing will ever come of it. I have been wondering if it could mean that the well won’t come in. How could it keep the well from coming in if it is being drilled in the right place? If the well keeps going down, won’t it strike oil no matter what the men think?”

  He got his answer in a few days. There was trouble at the well. Someone dropped a tool down the hole, and operations had to be suspended while it was fished out. Old Man Ringle was mad, and he posted himself or one of his sons at the well every night to keep an eye on things. Nevertheless, another accident occurred. The bit that was digging out the hole far down in the earth ceased functioning. It was broken, and its parts had to be fished up.

  Now everyone stayed at the well, watching the pipe, or casing, rise and fall, to the tortured breathing of the small engine. Hugh Lynn looked apprehensively at the Ringles, who had taken to carrying guns in their belts. He was particularly impressed with the way they handled the six-foot monkey wrenches that were used to fit the casing together. They held them as if they were nail scissors.

  The other men on the job were his friends, particularly Dad Roust, an old driller who told wonderful tales, and Joshua, a strong young man who had been a cowboy and told stories of the plains that made William S. Hart seem tame.