Butterfly Weed (15 page)

Their house never burnt down (Alonzo moved in with the Widow Kimber and left the house on Main Street to the newlyweds, although he kept his office next to Colvin’s in the front), and the sun just went on rising and setting the way it always had, but Colvin and Piney had some problems. You’d think they might have sort of complemented each other: since he knew everything there was to be known about medicine, she knew everything there was to be known about everything else. Whenever somebody died and they sang that funeral hymn “Farther along we’ll know all about it, farther along we’ll understand why,” it didn’t apply to Piney, because she already knew all about it; she already understood why everything was. Between them, Colvin and Piney were totally omniscient. But Colvin was too strong-willed and opinionated to allow some woman, even his beloved Piney, to get the upper hand. They argued. If Colvin tried to point out that the Republican Party had always been the traditional party of the people of Stay More, all the way back to the Civil War, and was therefore the
right
party, Piney (and in those days women weren’t even supposed to
care
about politics) would likely come back at him with the information that the Democratic Party was the only
just
and
valid
party, and that Woodrow Wilson was the only person who could keep us out of another war. Never mind that she might be proved wrong; never mind that Wilson didn’t keep us out of the next war; never mind, goddamn it, that the Republicans are right, or wrong, just as often as the Democrats are. If Piney said the Democrats were
the
party, then they were. There were no ifs, ands, or buts to Piney. She knew everything.

The seventh daughter of a seventh daughter can tell you what beliefs are “true” and which are just superstitions, and not just about the Republican Party. Piney could tell you that it’s just an old notion that if you find a pin in the road and pick it up, it’ll bring you good luck, but she could prove that it’s true that if you find a pin in the road and don’t pick it up, it’ll bring you bad luck all day long. She’d also let you know that it isn’t true that singing at the table will bring misfortune on the whole family, but it’s certainly demonstrable that if you sing before breakfast, you’ll cry before supper. She was an expert on beliefs having to do with marital relations: she knew in her bones that it’s true that two persons using the same towel at the same time are sure to quarrel, but it’s only a superstition that you can “take the cuss off ’n it” by twisting the towel between the two of you. If Colvin was helping her do the dishes, as he often happily did, and they accidentally dried the dishes or their hands on the same towel, there was nothing for them to do but go ahead and wait until some bone of contention came along and then have a real bad quarrel over it and get it out of their system. And usually the quarrel was over something she
knew
she knew, and he had the temerity to challenge her belief.

But as often as not, Colvin for the sake of harmony would let her have her way, or concede she was right. She was a real good cook, and if she insisted that fish had to be baked although he liked his fried, he didn’t raise any objection. If he liked his sweet potatoes mashed but she kept them in the skins, that wasn’t the end of the world, as far as he cared. Even when it came to okra, which he’d always had sliced and fried in cornmeal, he wasn’t going to raise a fuss if she served ’em whole and slimy. When Piney started in to redecorating his office, putting up curtains and moving things around, he never even protested that he couldn’t find anything anymore. When she ordered from Sears Roebuck a fancy dark gray cheviot suit of wool for him to wear, he protested that there wasn’t another man in Newton County who had long
tails
on his coat. Piney just smiled and said there wasn’t another man in Newton County like him, period. But when she tried to get him to wear this new felt hat she’d ordered with it, a kind of homburg to replace his old floppy fedora, and he couldn’t persuade her that he didn’t want to look
that
genteel and swellish, all he could do was try a bit of psychology: the dent in the crown of the hat, he pointed out to her, was like an advertisement (she would have understood “symbol” better) for the dent in the crown of his penis, and he even yanked out his tool to show her the exact same resemblance, saying, “Now damned if you want me to be Old Peckerhead, do ye?” Piney just replied, “As long as men are going to personate their peckers anyway, by having
heads,
what does it matter whether you personate it with the dent in your hat or the part in your hair?”

And speaking of matters sexual, we may as well reveal that as often as not, Piney
knew
that the best place for the female in the process of coitus was woman-on-top. This was not because she wanted to dominate, or prove her obvious superiority, but because in her absolute certainty about everything, she
knew
that this position allowed both of them more control over the hiking to climax: she could let go, he could hold back. True? But it worried Colvin somewhat; man is, after all, a depositor, while woman is a receptacle. Man stashes; woman seals. He argued that gravity alone should be the determinant, and he tried to win the argument with his medical knowledge: “Sperm can swim upwards, but semen can only flow downwards.”

“Do you want to have fun,” she asked, “or do you want to have a baby?” Dr. and Mrs. Swain had a lot of fun, and, knowing everything, she let him go on believing that all the ways they did it, every time they did it, they were just dead-level set on having the time of their lives, when in fact she had decided to have a baby. She never asked him if they could. She never discussed raising a family with him. They never talked about times of the month or taking precautions. As far as Colvin was concerned, there ceased to be any connection between what they were doing and the existence of sperm and ova. Piney not only continued to believe that a woman can regulate and control the steady rising to climax in both herself and her partner, but can also control her conception and her contraception, and when she was ready, she conceived. She knew the exact moment, the exact instant, that one of those upward-swimming spermies, an audacious little scamp she’d already given a name, met up with her ripe fat lucious egg and said, “Howdy sweetheart, let’s cuddle up and multiply!”

She didn’t tell Colvin. She
knew
that the sex of the fetus was male, and she
knew
that the baby would be named after her father, McKay Coe, and the boy would be called Mackey Swain, and she
knew
that “Mac” means “son of” in Scotch-Irish, and that Mackey means virile or manly in Irish, and she
knew
that Mackey Swain would grow up to become a virile doctor like his father, and she
knew
that Colonel McKay Swain would serve with great distinction as a surgeon in some future national war, and that great stories would be told about his heroism on the battlefield, where, however, he would be mortally wounded.

“How come you’re a-weepin, darlin?” Colvin asked her one day, when she was thinking about Mackey’s tragic death, for indeed it was the first time Colvin had ever known her to cry. People who know everything do not cry. Crying is the result usually of not understanding something, of being unable to deal emotionally with a situation because it is not understood, and if you know everything you have no reason to cry. Piney was terribly embarrassed over her tears, which were not necessarily the result of a mother’s inability to grasp the reason why her beloved son will have been taken from her prematurely, because she fully
knew
that in order to serve his country and his fellow man as he will have had to do, Colonel Mackey Swain will have had to be willing to give up his own life, which he will have done, so it will not have been his death, nor the absolute foreknowledge of it, that made her cry, but rather the sudden fear, the overwhelming fear, that when the moment will have finally come that she will have been informed by telegram of her son’s death, she will lose control. And she had never lost control. In response to her husband’s question, she could only shake her head, wordlessly, and continue shaking it until he grew bored and left the room.

But Colvin’s magical physician’s fingers detected, in only the second month of her pregnancy, that she was with child, and he was as happy as he was mystified that she had not told him nor asked for his knowing collaboration in the happy event. When he confronted her with his findings, she confessed that she had known the exact moment of the conception, and that she had already named the child McKay “Mackey” Swain, and that she had been secretly sewing the layette ever since. She knew that the boy would be a brunette, that he would have a slight left clubfoot, that he would speak his first word at the age of eight months and take his first step at the age of eleven months, and that he would be toilet trained before his second birthday. She knew he would marry a Dinsmore at the age of eighteen. She knew everything about him, and she was happy to have the chance, now that she had confessed his conception, to tell Colvin everything that she knew about Mackey’s entire life and heroic death.

Piney made such a project out of Mackey that Colvin was forced to get himself a dog. This was Galen the First, although of course Colvin didn’t call him that, because he didn’t realize that the dog would be only the first of many, many dogs to whom he would give that name. He just called him Galen, after the ancient Greek physician, whom Colvin admired because he’d founded experimental physiology, and Colvin owned and read with pleasure his
Corpus Medicorum Graecorum,
and considered himself in many ways a Galenist. Galen was just an ordinary bluetick hound dog, scrawny and gangling and smelly, but he was devoted to Colvin in ways that Piney was not (although it is hard to imagine anything deeper than her devotion to him), and Galen went everywhere with Colvin, on every house call he made. I would like to discount as mythical the stories I heard that Galen sometimes licked the wounds of injured persons and thereby effected the healing. Surely that is stretching the blanket! If one is a collector of folk narratives, or “oral history” as they’re calling it these days, one learns to distinguish between the colorful, extravagant, but factual retellings of remembered events, and the embellished reshapings or reimaginings of “reality” which sacrifice truth for the sake of charm. Lord knows, Colvin’s entire story is shot full of the latter, but I think I’m doing a good job of not foisting upon you anything incredible or inconceivable, and that is because I’m editing the story as it came to me, and I must exercise the editor’s prerogative to stand up and say, No! it is not likely that Colvin permitted Galen to lick anybody’s wounds! Why, there’s not any more truth to
that
than there is to the story of Sukie Ledbetter, who claimed that Colvin cured her of her “barrenness” by permitting her to have intercourse with Drakon!

Where was I? Yes: Piney was so absorbed with that little Mackey in her womb that Colvin needed a dog to keep him company. Piney might have known everything, but she didn’t perhaps know that the reason Colvin and his dog were gone from the house so much was to escape from her constant recital of the life story of Mackey Swain. This was the period when Colvin became involved in the story of Nail Chism, the Stay More shepherd who was convicted of raping young Dorinda Whitter and sentenced to the electric chair in Little Rock…which is a story you’d admire to put into a novel at some future time, before or after this one. Remind me to tell you how Colvin helped hide Nail when he escaped from the prison, and how Nail used to could hear the trees singing, and all.

Well, I wish I could also suggest for one of your future novels the World War II story of the heroism of Colonel McKay Swain, but the sad truth is that Mackey Swain was stillborn. Piney may have known everything, but she was wrong about that. When she started gaining a lot of weight, she
knew
that pregnant women were supposed to do that, and not even Colvin realized that she was gaining a lot more weight than pregnant women usually do, and when she had some terrible headaches she
knew
that pregnant women are supposed to get headaches. But one day she discovered that everything was growing dim to her sight, and there were spots before her eyes, and she began violently throwing up, and she
knew
that these things weren’t supposed to be happening. Colvin wasn’t home or in his office. Just the week before, old Alonzo Swain, seventy-eight, had taken down his shingle, turned the office over to his son, and retired, for good, and was spending his days in the Widow Kimber’s bed, so he was not available in this emergency. Piney waited for as long as she could stand it, hoping Colvin would return to the office. Waiting, she began taking her own pulse, which was very rapid, and she was growing drowsy and dizzy and blind. Finally, she decided that she’d just better try to get across the road to Doc Plowright’s. She could hardly stand up and felt she would faint, and she was so dizzy she had to get down on all fours and crawl, out onto the porch, down the steps, across the dirt road into Doc Plowright’s yard, and up his steps. Piney, knowing everything,
knew
that there isn’t any such thing as “God,” but she prayed, anyway, prayed that Doc Plowright would be home. From what we know of Jack Plowright, she ought to have had the sense to have prayed that he would
not
be home. He was home, though, and he helped her onto his examining table and asked her a bunch of questions in an effort to find out where she hurt and what was a-troubling her. But there was nothing he could do because he had no idea what diagnosis to make.

Fortunately, Colvin came home, having been out on a call setting a broken leg, and after noticing that his wife wasn’t anywhere around the premises, and that Galen was acting kind of peculiar, he asked Galen, “Whar’s Piney?” and Galen did two or three complete turns and then headed across the road to Doc Plowright’s, and Colvin had the sense to follow him.