Butterfly Weed (20 page)

“Right,” Colvin complimented her. “But do they do anything else for your pretty torso?” The class giggled, and he was as abashed at his adjective as she was.

“I reckon they protect my lungs,” she said, “like the rest of my bones protect the rest of my innards. Bones is all we got to protect us from gittin squoze and scrunched by the cruel, mean world. But lots of times we git scrunched anyhow. I know a man who died of broken bones.”

“Bones can break, shore,” Colvin agreed. “But they’re also springy and pliable. I could jump out that winder right chonder, and maybe not break a thing.”

“LET’S SEE YE, TEACHER!” the thirteen of them chorused.

Colvin wasn’t sure he could survive the drop with all his bones intact and he realized he was getting off the track. “Wal now, if I was to break my fool neck, I’d not only fail of making my point, but I wouldn’t be around for the next part of the lesson, which is this: there’s both a practical reason and a purty reason for everything. The practical reason you’ve got a skeleton inside of you is to hold ye up and protect yore innards and get ye to moving around and about. But what could be purty about having two hundred bones? Anybody?”

The students stared at the textbook skeleton and screwed up their faces in concentration. They looked at one another. They examined their elbows and their kneecaps, their fingers and their toes; they poked their cheekbones and rapped their skulls. Finally Russ Breedlove offered, “Is it so’s folks can be sure you’re dead, if that’s all that’s left of ye?” Colvin suggested there were easier ways to determine if somebody was dead. A girl suggested that it’s mighty pretty to know you can sit up straight and walk tall because your skeleton is a-holding ye up. Various other near-the-truth answers were exchanged before Tenny held up her hand and said, “Humans are the purtiest of all God’s critters, and the reason they’re the purtiest is because of the way their skeletons stand ’em up on their hind legs and let ’em move about so’s they can do anything!”

“Except fly,” Colvin said. “Some critters can fly. How do they do that?” Because they got wings, several students said. “But what are their wings made of?” Colvin asked. Feathers, of course, the students said. “No, feathers are just the skin. The wings are
bones.”
He went on to ask them to speculate about the many ways that humans are indeed, as Tenny said, the prettiest of all God’s creatures despite their inability to fly. He asked them to discuss the prettiness of the visible bones, but none of them were able to name any visible bones, until finally Tenny said, “Fingernails? Toenails? Teeth?” Tenny’s fingernails were somewhat dirty from her kitchen work, but she had the best teeth Colvin had ever seen, if she would only smile, so he complimented her on her answer, which made her smile, and then he got them to talk about why we use our mouth bones—our teeth—to make ourselves more pleasant. Why do girls always show more teeth than boys? He also wanted to point out that the pubic arch in the female pelvis is also broader, to allow for births, and he wanted to talk about the articulations and ligaments that connect the pelvis to the legs. He wanted to talk about cartilage and foramina and vertabrae and marrow, especially about marrow, to ask if they (or Tenny) could figure out how hard bone can be alive like the rest of the body. And he wanted to talk about how diseases can hurt our bones as well as our tissues, how tuberculosis, for example, thought to affect primarily the lungs, can also attack the bones and cause their abscess. He wanted to talk about arthritis and bursitis and how drinking lots of milk might keep them from getting the osteoporosis that was stooping their grandmothers.

But Jossie Conklin came into the room and said, “This period was over fifteen minutes ago, and you have made these boys and girls tardy for English.” Colvin had time only to say, “Well, see you next week,” and make a wave of farewell.

None of his pupils made to leave. Moments passed, with Jossie glaring at them, her hands on her hips. Finally Tenny asked the principal, “How come he caint jist teach us English too?”

“Miss Leach is waiting to teach you English,” Miss Conklin said. “She is waiting to teach you that you don’t say ‘how come,’ you say ‘why’; you don’t say ‘caint,’ you say ‘can’t’; and you don’t say ‘jist,’ you say ‘just.’ Now get out of here!” After they were gone, she said to Colvin, “You’ve got a number of patients waiting for you in your office.”

Tired though he was, Colvin spent the rest of the afternoon setting broken arms and legs and meditating upon the fragility of bones. It was starting to get dark before he could put his horse, Nessus, into the buggy’s harness and prepare for the long ride home. As he was driving off, a young lady came skipping down the hill, waving her arms for him to stop, and he recognized her long, flowing hair.

“Have ye got the fatty goo, Doc?” Tenny asked.

“The which?” he asked. He was delighted to see her again, but he was weary.

“I’ve been reading our hygiene textbook,” she said. “The part on fatty goo, how a body gits ‘accumulated lactates’ in the muscles that makes ye give out and come down with fatty goo.”

He was too tired to correct her pronunciation. So instead of saying fatigue, he said, “Yeah, Temmy, I reckon I’ve got the fatty goo purty bad. It’s been a long day.”

“Can somebody die of fatty goo?” she wanted to know.

“Wal, I aint never heared of nobody a-dying of it,” he said, “although I reckon everbody when they get real old and worn out, if they haven’t already died of something else, they’ll jist die of fatty goo.”

“But not while they’re young?” she asked. “Because I think I’m a-dying of it, I’m so tard and beat out.”

“Angel, hit’s been a rough day for everbody but twice’t as bad for you, having to work in that kitchen and all. You jist git you a good night’s sleep, and them ‘accumulated lactates’ will go away.”

She would not let him go. “My old heart is calling it quits. I jist don’t have any pulse left.” She offered him her wrist.

He held her wrist. The skin was like silk, and warm, and he’d rather have sniffed her pulse than felt it. He didn’t need to drag out his pocket watch to know that her heart was beating perfectly normal. “That’s a mighty purty pulse ye got, gal,” he declared. “Purtiest pulse I ever seen. Not a bit slow nor fast, neither one. Now you jist go hit the hay.” He raised his coach whip to send Nessus onward.

“Doc!” she said, urgently. “If I don’t see ye again…or if I have to wait ’til ye come to that Other Place to see you again, in case I’ve gone to my reward when you come back next week, I jist want ye to know…I want to tell ye right here and now before I’ve quit this world, you were the nicest man I ever met!”

“Why, thank ye, Tunny,” he said. “That’s right kind of ye. But I ’spect you’ll be a-sittin on the front row of class next week, answering all the tough questions that nobody else can answer.”

She brought her other hand from behind her back. “I snuck ye a bite of supper,” she said, and gave him, wrapped between two sheets of notebook paper, a nice ham sandwich. “Have ye got fur to go? Whereabouts do ye live at?”

He told her that Stay More was a number of miles up the road, and he’d better be gittin on. “Night-night, Temmy,” he said. “Thanks for the samwich.”

She stepped up onto the buggy’s running board, as if to hang on there, threw her head at his, and gave him a big kiss meant for his cheek but landed half on his mouth, and then she was gone, and so was he.

Nessus knew the way home, and Colvin, as soon as he’d finished Tenny’s sandwich, dozed off and let the horse take the buggy home, as he had done so many times in the long-ago days when he was returning from calls paid on patients in all hours of the night. Colvin not only dozed but dreamt, and in his dream he began to give Tenny a complete physical examination from head to toe. She was totally naked for it, and her beautiful body distracted him in the process of giving her a thorough stethoscopy, followed by a bronchoscopy, a pharyngoscopy, and a laryngoscopy. While performing the latter, he heard a repeated laryngeal sound and, paying closer attention, he determined that it was simply Nessus neighing. The horse was trying to tell him that he was home. He staggered into the house and in reply to Piney’s “How was school?” he mumbled that it had given him a bad case of fatty goo. Then he hit the bed and resumed his dream, giving Tenny a fluoroscopy, an arthroscopy, and even a cystoscopy, following by a proctoscopy. In his comprehensive physical examination, he discovered that Tenny’s hymen was intact, confirming his observation that the areolae of her breasts were virginal pink, and he mused upon this exceptional circumstance, rare for an Ozark girl, unless she has no brothers or an impotent father (which in fact was the case, but Colvin didn’t know this yet).

Colvin’s complete attention to Tenny’s body was so meticulous that it prevented him from seeing any of the sundry Stay Morons who needed his attention for their ills and were trying desperately to mesh their dreams with his. The line of dreaming patients grew. The patients patiently waited for admission to his dreams, but the doctor was busy. All night long, and for several nights thereafter, the doctor was not available. People were beginning to worry whether they were dreaming properly or not. They tried catnip tea, taken warm just before bed, to help their sleep and dreams. Infusions of fresh alfalfa are supposed to help, but it was October and dried alfalfa doesn’t do the job. Nervousness and restlessness inconducive to good dreaming can also be palliated by infusions of the roots of butterfly weed, hard to locate in October because if the monarch caterpillars hadn’t chewed up the plants already, the first frost would’ve got it.

Then somebody came up with the brilliant idea that the only way to get the doctor’s attention in dreams would be to sleep in closer proximity to him. “Get up, Colvin!” Piney woke him on Saturday morning. “There are people sleeping all over our front porch!” He was irritated, being interrupted in the middle of his endoscopy of Tenny, but he got up, dressed, and went out to the front porch, and one by one began to rouse the sleepers, each of whom would blink, rub their eyes, and ask him if he was “real.”

There were even more of them sleeping there Sunday morning, spilling over into the yard, and the spectacle of all those folks dreaming up a storm at Colvin’s place caught the attention of old Jack Plowright, across the road, who, despite his spotty record of misdiagnoses and outright malpractice, was not exactly anybody’s fool, and deduced that these were prospective patients, some of whom had been waiting so long for Doc Swain’s attention in their dreams that they were now emergency cases. Doc Plowright stepped over there and invited them to come and see if he couldn’t treat them just as well in the world of “reality” as Doc Swain was failing to do in the world of dreams.

Thus, the magical days of the dream cure came to an end. Maybe, even, there were other elements of the enchantment of the old-time Ozarks that somehow were also ceasing to exist at that moment. As a matter of fact, because elsewhere in the nation it was the beginning of what has been called the Jazz Age, perhaps the Ozarks were going to be dragged into it.

Doc Plowright had his hands full, so much so that Colvin understood it would be a violation of that old oath he had sworn to Kie Raney if he did not pitch in and offer to help. So he spent the rest of Sunday actually receiving actual patients into his actual office, curing them all, and cleaning off the porch. Sunday night he slept his first dreamless sleep in many a moon, having concluded his complete physical examination of Tenny, and thus he was moderately refreshed and eager when he arrived for work Monday morning at the Newton County Academy.

There was a long line of students waiting outside his office, and Tenny was at the head of the line. She was almost as beautiful in real life as she had been all week in his dreams. Perhaps, he reflected, in a way she was even lovelier, because she hadn’t had on a stitch of clothes in his dreams, and somehow having all the secret parts of her body covered up with a pretty cotton floral-print dress gave her an allure that she didn’t have nude.

“I’ve missed ye so, all week,” she said, “even though I dreamt about ye ever night, all night long.” Once she was inside his office and the door was closed, she fell upon the lounge as if using up the remainder of her strength to do so, and declared, “Doc, I’m afraid I’ve got a metabolism.”

Colvin suppressed a chuckle and said in feigned seriousness, “I’m right sorry to hear that. What are the symptoms?”

“Jist like the book says,” she said, holding aloft her copy of
The Human Body.
“There’s a steady wastage of proteins from my cells. Also, I have faulty oxidations. I caint find the part where it says you can die of a metabolism. Can you?”

“Not me,” he declared. “But jist the other day, I had me a feller who took down real bad with a metabolism and it killed him right off.”

Tenny began to look happy, “Really? And there wasn’t nothing you could do for it?”

“Metabolisms are tricky,” he said. “You don’t want to mess with ’em. But the best way to prevent a faulty metabolic reaction is eat a big breakfast. Have you done that?” She nodded. “Then eat a big dinner, is all I can tell ye. Will ye do that?”

“I’ll try, but caint ye give me nothing for it?”

Colvin opened some bottles and took out both some yellow placebos and some green placebos. The yellow pills, he explained, were for the steady wastage of her proteins, and the green ones were for her oxidations. “Take one of each twice a day,” he said. “I’ll see you in class.”

After he’d sent her on her way, he realized that his complete week-long physical examination of Tenny had not actually included a basal metabolism test, but all of his other tests had confirmed his earlier impression that she was the healthiest specimen he’d ever come across in his years of practice, so it was very unlikely that anything was wrong with her metabolism.

As the semester progressed, Tenny’s alarms paralleled exactly the subjects covered in the textbook. Before they had finished the bones, she was convinced she had all the symptoms of multiple myeloma, and it did Colvin no good to inform her that usually the disease strikes only males above the age of fifty. As a consolation, when she thought she had spontaneously fractured her wrist as a result of the myeloma, he set it in a cast for a week, long enough to get them into the chapter on muscles. But when they studied muscular activity, she came down with all the symptoms of the Duchenne type of muscular dystrophy, and Colvin had to command her to take off her clothes, not so he could prove that she wasn’t a male (because he’d already proved that many nights in his dreams) but to prove to her that she wasn’t fooling him: she was definitely
not
a male, and only males get Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy. “See,” he said, and told her to get dressed, perceiving that she was more blindingly beautiful in the absence of her actual clothing than she had ever been in his dreams, and he had to turn his face away to protect his eyesight. After the chapters on the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system, she was sure she had multiple sclerosis. Colvin dreaded to introduce the chapter on the structure and functions of the cerebrum, so he wasn’t too surprised when she became convinced she had cerebral palsy. Colvin unwisely attempted to argue that she couldn’t possibly have it because she was not exhibiting the spastic movements of a sufferer of that disease, and he demonstrated how the cp victim attempts to walk. Instead of convincing her that she lacked this behavior, he was unwittingly teaching her how to become spastic.