Butterfly Weed

by Donald Harington

  So there will be one less voice in the chorus of those dotards out there. Maybe it will even inspire me, as we approach the real thickening of the watery plot of our story. Son, this is where it commences to get exciting.

  It may have been toward the end of my second week in Stay More—I wasn’t paying a bit of attention to the calendar—when one morning Colvin came into my room and took my temperature and blood pressure and then asked, as he customarily did, “Well, Doc, did anything out of the ordinary pass?” and I replied with something like, “No, Doc, just six white horses a-flying over,” and after he’d winked and said, “Then it aint no wonder you’re a-feelin better,” and we had our laugh, he asked, “Doc, do ye reckon you feel up to hoppin in my car for a little spin?”

  Rowena shaved me and I dressed and had a big breakfast, and Rowena had packed a hamper with a fine lunch of fried chicken and potato salad and I don’t know what-all. It just looked like we were going to be gone for the better part of the day. And we were. Doc explained he wanted to take me to Parthenon.

  You’ve mentioned that village in each of your novels, but I don’t think you have bothered to speculate upon the circumstance whereby some old settler, more literate and imaginative than usual, had chosen to name his town after a temple dedicated by the Greeks to their favorite goddess, Athene Parthenos, meaning Athena the Virgin, because she was practically the only one of those immortal Greek women never to lose her cherry. All over America people were naming their new towns after Greek towns, and this Newton County feller thought he was doing the same, but he was mistaken. The name of the town was Athens. There was a hill in Athens called the Acropolis, meaning “high town,” and he might have used that name, as I believe you did in disguising Parthenon’s name in your novel Some Other Place. The Right Place. But this feller didn’t use “Athens” or “Acropolis.” He used the name of the temple on top of that hill. For all he knew, he might as well have called the town “Innocence” or “Chastity” or “Maidentown” or “Virginville.” But in his confusion over classical matters, he called it originally “Mount Parthenon,” which could only be translated as suggesting that we get ourselves up atop a virgin. Hell, it took eighty years for the natives themselves to learn how to pronounce the place. They used to call it “Par-THEE-nun,” and even corrupted that to “Par-THEE-ny.”

  But Colvin pronounced it correctly when he told me where we were going, so I asked him, “Are you taking me to a big stone building on a high hill?”

  He smiled. “Yep, Doc, we’re going up a hill to see a mighty fine big stone building, all right, the biggest stone building in Newton County, but that aint the Parthenon. I reckon strangers might think the town was named after that building, but the town has been there since 1840 and the building wasn’t done much more’n a dozen years ago.”

  We drove northeastwards from Stay More a number of miles, the road mostly following along the east bank of the Little Buffalo River, and it was one of those gorgeous summer days with cottony tufts of clouds stuck hither and yon over the azure. I enjoyed that ride, especially in comparison to the last time I’d been in Doc Swain’s car, when he was transporting me down the mountain from the Widder Whitter’s. I paid close attention to the turnings and forks in the road, in case I needed to remember how to get out of Stay More, because as we’ve said before it’s even harder to escape than it is to find. But I could also sit back and enjoy the scenery and the fine cigar Doc had given me. “Beautiful country” was all I could say.

  Actually, and fortunately for that part of the tale, the road is mostly downhill from Stay More to Parthenon, and that “up” he used was just geographical, as we all tend to speak of places north of us as “up” from where we are.

  Fording Hoghead Creek (and all streams in those days had to be forded; there wasn’t a bridge anywhere in Newton County), I saw the godawfullest creature that I hope I ever have to see, and I thought for a moment we’d actually come across one of those gowrows or jimplicutes of legend. “What in hell was that?!” I said. Doc Swain laughed and explained it was just an oversize aquatic salamander, called a “hellbender.” It had scarcely disappeared from sight when a huge bird swooped down as if to attack it, a bird with a very long and agile neck that must’ve given rise to the legend of the giasticutus. “Just a great blue heron,” Colvin said, his “just” letting me know that there were more prodigious creatures out there.

  We talked a lot, not just making chitchat or nature-study observations. It had not quite sunk into me yet that my companion, this mild-mannered, affable, folksy country doctor well into middle age, was actually the Doctor Colvin U Swain whose fabulous life and adventures had been captivating me (and, I hope, you) in recent days. Almost as if I were testing him to prove it, I asked, “Doc, what ever happened to Kie Raney?”

  Colvin gave his head one shake of sadness. “Oh, he departed, some years back. Nobody knows for sure what he died of. I went over there, but just in time for the funeral, too late for an autopsy. Doc, sometimes”—Doc’s eyes glazed up a bit—“sometimes of a night I sit on my porch and look up at the stars, you know, and think about him. If that old Archer is shining up yonder amongst the constellations, I’ll recall ever word of that solemn oath Kie Raney made me swear.” He gave me a sharp look and asked, “You haven’t heard anything to give ye the notion I’ve ever violated a single one of those promises in that oath, have ye? Wal, Doc, before you’ve heard it all, you’ll know how and why I had to violate ever blessed dang one of ’em.” And he fell into a silence that lasted the rest of the way to Parthenon.

  We came down off the mountain into this lovely village, about the same size as Stay More but with one considerable difference: in the distance, on a hill, rose a group of buildings that seemed somehow mysterious because they were so unusual. You’re an art historian, aren’t you? Didn’t you ever observe how any pastoral landscape painting, filled with meadows and shepherds, et cetera, et cetera, generally has some old buildings rising up in the distance? That feller who did those pretty things with the thunderstorm and the half-nekkid gal nursing her baby under a tree? George E. Owney? Didn’t he also do one of some fellers playing their guitars with a couple of nekkid gals hanging around? Pastoral Symphony or something like that? Well, you know in both those paintings of his there are these buildings in the background, not necessarily houses, though they could be, and not necessarily temples, though they could be, but human structures of some kind, as if to show that Nature may be pastoral but she aint wild, she’s been tamed by man, and those buildings in the distance give you the awfullest urge to go and get inside of them, out of the rain, out of the sun, out of the country. It’s like the buildings are a refuge against Nature, if Nature gives you any trouble.

  Well, up on that hill was this cluster of buildings, and Doc Swain broke the silence that had come on him with thoughts of Kie Raney’s oath in order to start telling me about those buildings, even before we got to them. The buildings were still being used as a public school, shut down now for the summer, but Doc explained they had once been a private school, the Newton County Academy it was called, although the local folks had referred to it as “the college.”

  Back in the years after that first great war, the one that involved the whole world, folks were so poor in Newton County that there wasn’t enough money raised from the taxes on their property to support public schools. Of course Stay More had had its own elementary school, first through eighth grades, for some time, and at one time Jasper, the county seat, had had a kind of high school, which is where your Latha Bourne went, riding in each day with Raymond Ingledew in his buggy, a long way to go for an education.

  So a lot of Newton County people were willing to listen when the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention proposed that a “mountain mission school” be established to provide some good education for the backwoods boys and girls of the hill country. If you know anything about the Baptists, you know how partial they are to “missions,” either foreign or domestic. A mis
sion is a kind of meddling. Its purpose is to convert. The Baptists came into Newton County—hell, they didn’t come in; they’d already been there ever since displacing the unconverted Indians—and they decided to build their mission school to convert the older boys and girls from heathen illiterates into good Baptist Bible readers.

  That was a period, just at the start of what the rest of the country knew as the Jazz Age, when the Baptists were somehow raising the money to build these schools in several places around the Ozarks and Ouachitas—at Blue Eye, Missouri, and in Arkansas at Maynard, Hagarville, Mt. Ida, and Parthenon. They chose Newton County because they considered it “the most destitute field in Arkansas,” and they picked Parthenon instead of the county seat at Jasper only because Parthenon is closer to the geographic center of Newton County. With the help of “subscriptions” from some of the better-heeled upstanding Parthenonians, and a few Stay Morons, like John Ingledew the banker, who, although he had no use for the Baptists, being like all the Ingledews not so much an atheist as a nontheist, was willing to put up a couple hundred dollars as his share toward building the campus. The main building alone cost $15,000, the most money that had ever been spent on a single structure in Newton County. Even abandoned for the summer, with some windows broken and dust everywhere, as it was when Colvin took me through it, it was still impressive: the largest stone building anyone had ever seen or imagined, two whole floors of six classrooms and an auditorium that would seat two hundred. It had even had a library! Nobody had ever heard of one of them things before, and thought it was some kind of berry which would turn you into a liar if you ate it. Although the contents had not been considerable, maybe three hundred volumes all told, it was the only thing approaching a book repository in all of that country. But when the building had changed hands from the Baptists to the state of Arkansas after a decade, the library had disappeared.

  The Baptists had sent a young flatlander lady, Miss Jossie Conklin, to be the head of what was officially named Newton County Academy. Naturally the locals considered her a “furriner,” because she was from a “foreign country”—Texas. She had graduated from Baylor College, the biggest Baptist school in Texas, and she also had a “B.M.T.” from one of those angel factories, the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, where she’d met the feller Tim James, who not only outranked her with a “Th.M.” but would also replace her after a couple of years as principal of the Newton County Academy, which he accomplished by marrying her. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

  Shapely Miss Jossie just showed up one day at Colvin’s door and commenced talking a blue streak. He had some trouble understanding her at first, because of her Texas accent, and he mistook her for one of those women homesteaders who had invaded the Ozarks a few years earlier. He kept waiting for her to reveal what her ailment was. He was mighty glad to have an awake visitor to his office, the first in a coon’s age, and he suspected that she was such a foreigner she hadn’t even heard about the dream cure that everybody else was freely availing themselves of. He hoped she had something really serious wrong with her, so he could make her into his first paying patient in over a year. But the longer he listened to her, the clearer it became that she didn’t really have anything wrong with her, or, rather, she had a whole bunch of problems but they weren’t medical. He offered her a drink of Chism’s Dew to calm her down, but she managed to blurt out that she never in her life had ever touched a drop. Even without the Chism’s Dew, he managed to get her to slow down and repeat some of the more difficult parts of what she was saying.

  Finally he understood that this pretty gal in her ruffled blouse and smocky jumper was offering him a kind of job. She was fixing to start a school and wanted him to be the school’s doctor. It wouldn’t be a full-time job, since they had only 144 students to start with. It would only require that he make one trip a week to Parthenon, to check up on things, and to be available in emergencies at all other times. They could pay him twelve dollars and fifty cents a month, a pittance, but it was twelve dollars and fifty cents more than he had been making. Of course, if he were willing to conduct a class, one afternoon a week, teaching hygiene to freshmen, they would add another seven-fifty on top of that, making twenty dollars a month. And if he could coach basketball…? No? Well, coaching basketball was optional, and also voluntary, meaning no pay. Also voluntary was participating in the book drive for the library, if Dr. Swain might himself happen to have, or be able to locate, any suitable volumes?

  He listened to her proposal with gravity. Now we know that Colvin didn’t think much of “school.” His brief experience at the age of eleven with the Stay More school, his memory of the tales Kie Raney had told about his years teaching at the Spunkwater school, and his brief experience at the St. Louis medical school, had pretty much soured Colvin on the concept of an institution of formal learning. He knew he couldn’t coach basketball, and he wasn’t sure he could teach hygiene, whatever that was, but he certainly was willing to be a doctor for the pupils if they needed him.

  He had a question he wanted to ask. Why had she chosen him? Why not one of the doctors in Jasper, which was closer to Parthenon? “Everybody says you’re the best doctor in the world,” she said. “They tell me you practically invented the idea.” He was flattered, and since he needed the money and could easily spare one day a week, or seven for that matter, he agreed to do it. “I have just one question for you,” Miss Jossie said. “Of what persuasion are you? Not that it matters, too much, because we Baptists are tolerant of sects, but we’d just like to know which of the sects you follow.”

  He thought she’d said “sex,” and he answered, “Why, the weaker variety, I reckon.”

  “I don’t believe I know any such,” she said, and he figured she was asserting that she wasn’t weak, herself. “Do you observe Sundays?”

  Colvin was not comfortable discussing sex with a stranger-lady, not unless it had something to do with her own condition. “Any day or night of the week suits me,” he said.

  “Well, then, I don’t suppose it matters which day you come,” she said.

  He blushed and said, “Or night, one.”

  “How about Mondays, starting next Monday?” she asked.

  She was a mighty feisty gal, and he wondered if she was making him a proposition. “Where?” he wondered.

  “Just come to the Academy, to the main building, and you’ll find me,” she said.

  That day we drove up to Parthenon, Colvin showed me, on the ground floor of the big stone building, the small room, now being used just as a storeroom for junk, old textbooks, and supplies. Mice had made a nest in one corner, and a broken window had allowed a free-ranging chicken to come in and lay some eggs. The chicken flew off with a squawk as we entered. The room had been stripped of whatever furniture it had held, but Colvin showed me where the desk had been, and, by the window, a kind of sofa, a lounge actually, a backless couch with one end curled up into a headrest, which had served as both the examining table and the infirmary bed for the occasional patient who had to stay, but, on Colvin’s first visit to the room, had misled him into thinking that was where Miss Jossie intended to engage in sects, causing the both of them considerable embarrassment, which had ended with Miss Jossie patting her dark hair back into place, straightening her jumper, and saying, “It isn’t that I’m not that sort of girl, I mean, well, I’m really not that sort of girl, you know, but we hardly know each other, now do we? Perhaps after we’ve had a chance to get better acquainted…but aren’t you a married man? Not that I wouldn’t even dream of being with a married man, I mean, I never have, but it isn’t inconceivable, you know, it’s just that it makes it rather complicated, don’t you think? Now please understand I’m not rejecting you, not totally anyway, I just…” She kept on a-talking like that until he interrupted her with a question: Why did she have this here sofa in her office? “My office?” she said, agog. “This is your office. Would you like to see the rest of the building?”

  “Would you
like to see the rest of the building, Doc?” Colvin asked me, and took me on a tour. Down the hall was the principal Miss Jossie’s office, perhaps still being used as a principal’s office and smelling of the body odor of one of the four Baptist men who had succeeded Jossie as principal during the school’s decade of existence as Newton County Academy. Two of the larger classrooms were on this floor. An anti-goggling staircase rose to the second-floor auditorium, which still had all two hundred of its seats in place and remained the largest gathering place in the county, larger than the courthouse’s main courtroom or any church. Up there also was the library, one room with two of its walls lined with bookshelves, empty. Colvin had been recruited to “volunteer” for the book drive and had canvassed his neighbors in Stay More for contributions of reading matter, discovering that only one of them had any books, the woman still living in the old Jacob Ingledew house, the lady you’ve chosen to call Whom We Cannot Name, so I will refrain from revealing my knowledge of her name. She contributed to the lie-berry of the Newton County Academy a set of the Brontë sisters, a set of Macaulay’s essays and poems, and a set of Gibbons. From his own meager lie-berry Colvin was able to sacrifice a set of Bulfinch and Mary Olmstead Stanton’s Practical and Scientific Physiognomy; or, How to Read Faces.