Butterfly Weed (8 page)

Some years later, about the time of the War, a couple of fellers claimed they’d run into Lora working in a whorehouse down to Little Rock, but it was just a rumor. Nobody ever saw Lora again. Of course Alonzo was very sad, and he realized he probably was really in love with that girl. Sometimes he’d go back up the hillside to that place where the butterfly weed was, and he’d stand there a long time, thinking, and watching the butterflies if they were there, and each summer whenever the butterfly weed burst into bloom, with its bright orange flowers that was almost the same color as the butterfly, Alonzo would have the peculiar notion that Lora had turned into a butterfly weed, or even into a butterfly. But folks were a lot more superstitious in those days, and inclined to have such fanciful ideas.

His sad experience with Lora didn’t stop Alonzo from fooling around, and pretty soon he had got Clara McKinstry with child, the boy Phil, and also had got Samantha Tennison with the child Linus. He even knocked up one of his sisters (it was a wonder it took him so long), Esther, who was so ashamed of the baby that she’d hardly given him a name, Milo, before taking him up the mountain to the deepest woods, where she left him to die, but the baby was discovered by a she-wolf, who suckled him and raised him and taught him…but Milo Swain is another story unto himself and I don’t have time for it.

I don’t have time either to tell of how Alonzo was recruited to join the Rebels during the War by the brazen whore Virdie Boatright, the only woman ever to lay with him so many times that he had not a drop of jism remaining, although the three gallons of it he left in her did not leave her with any babies. I can’t stop to tell the sad story of Delphie Bullen, another girl like Lora who tried her best to keep Alonzo from taking her cherry, and, when she couldn’t escape from him in whatever way Lora had, drowned herself in that spring up on Ledbetter Mountain, which to this day still gives water that aint fit to drink. I’d like to tell you the story of how Alonzo became a bushwhacker during the last part of the War, and in that renegade capacity seduced girls hither and yon wherever he found them, including a sweet young thing named Cassie Sizemore, who, like Lora and Delphie before her, tried to resist him, and did a pretty fair job of keeping him off, until he finally begged just a single kiss, which she let him have, to her undoing. But Cassie Sizemore didn’t get knocked up by Alonzo. She later married Tom Whitter and had a respectable life which lasted until the next war, the First Big One, where Tom was killed, leaving her alone as a widow in their cabin on a mountaintop, which is where I met her as an old lady, that time I had the typhoid and she took care of me until Doc Swain arrived. I had no idea on earth that she’d once been kissed by Doc Swain’s dad, Alonzo, nor did Doc himself know this. But she told me the whole story without mentioning Alonzo Swain by name. I just figured out, from the way she described him, that he was the same feller. And I also figured out that when he kissed her and breathed into her, it gave her the power of telling the future.

No, that story too has to go by the wayside in order for me to get on to the main story, which didn’t take place until many years after the War, when Alonzo was already nigh on to middle age and was restless because the whole business of catching women and filling them with jism and fathering woodscolts was beginning to bore him somewhat, so in his listlessness he took up the study of medicine. Next to Jake Ingledew, who had become governor after the War, Alonzo was the smartest feller in Stay More if not all of Newton County, and folks thought it was a shame he never done anything worthwhile with his brains, he was too pussy-struck to have time for serious matters, or rather he considered the pursuit of women the most serious matter there is. But as he approached middle age and maybe his glands begun to give him a moment’s peace, he decided that the best way to make a living was to study medicine and become Stay More’s first physician, because Stay More kept on growing and getting bigger without one. In fact, the only doctor in that part of Newton County was a feller lived in a kind of cave-house over toward Spunkwater, name of Kie Raney, and Doc Raney was the closest thing to a friend that ’Lonzo Swain had in all this world. Gilbert Alonzo had been so busy all his life a-humping gals that he hadn’t had time for buddies. As he told it to Kie, who’d been able only to dream of having sex with a female, “Women has got three holes but men has got only two, and they aint neither one as good a fit. No offense meant, Hoss, but given my druthers I’d as lief not spend so much time here with you.” But Doc Raney had treated him for blue balls or the clap so many times that he practically lived at Doc Raney’s cave-house the way I was to live at Doc Colvin Swain’s, and both of ’em was bachelors so Alonzo and Doc Raney had spent a good deal of time running around together, hunting in the woods and just a-settin on the creek bank drowning worms, and they were good pals. At least Doc Raney didn’t mind one day when Alonzo said to him, “Hoss, how long would it take fer ye to teach me everthang ye know about this yere doctorin business?”

“Half a year, at least,” Kie Raney said.

“What would ye charge me fer it, or swap with me fer it?” Alonzo asked.

Kie Raney thought about that. He did not answer right off, but a few days later he said. “Wal, ’Lonzo, I’ll tell ye. Next time ye sire a woodscolt, if nobody wants it, you could jist give ’im to me. I aint never gon fine me a womarn, but I’d shore like to have me a kid of my own.”

So Alonzo said that oughtn’t to be no problem because the country was already full of his woodscolts and he’d see if he couldn’t get the next one away from its mother and give it to Kie. And so Kie commenced that day to teach Gilbert Alonzo the solemn study of medicine.

Doc Raney himself had learnt pretty near everything he knew from studying with granny doctors and witches and yarb doctors and such, and experimenting around on his own with all kinds of mixtures of yarbs to find out what they were good for, and it didn’t take Kie too awful long to teach all of that stuff to Alonzo, but Kie had also mastered a big thick book called
Home-Study Guide to Materia Medica, Pharmacy, Therapeutics, and Surgical Procedures,
and he helped Alonzo spend a few months reading his way through this book, and gave him quizzes on it, to help. Finally he said to Alonzo, “I’ve taught ye all I know, but there aint no teacher near as good as experience, so it’s time ye started practicin. Jist don’t practice in my territory. And don’t fergit that baby you owe me.” Of course that word “practice” has always had two meanings that would seem to be different but they aint. On one hand, it means to do something over and over until you learn how, but it also refers to a doctor’s general line of work. Doc Colvin Swain said to me, “In his practice, a physician never stops practicing,” meaning even when he’s supposed to know what he’s doing, he’s still just trying to learn it.

Alonzo went back home to Stay More to get out of Doc Raney’s territory and set up his own practice. He was Stay More’s first physician, but for the longest time, the only patients he could practice on, apart from the mental defectives who loitered around Ingledew’s store, were older women with imaginary complaints who just wanted Alonzo Swain to visit with them, because he was still the sightliest-lookin feller in Newton County although his golden blond hair was beginning to gray. Some of these women he treated and some of ’em he “treated,” if you know what I mean. Because Alonzo never did lose his rollicking lust for the fair sex.

The last of the seven boys he fathered happened like this. There was a keen-lookin dark-haired gal named Corinna McKinstry, the prettiest of the six daughters of old Vester McKinstry, the horse rancher and squire of Sidehill, some ways west of Stay More. One day Alonzo happened to be out that way, fording a creek on his horse when he spied her a-washing her pretty feet in the stream. The first glimpse of her made his jemmison stand up in the saddle and nearly poke its head above his waistband. She was so pleasant to behold that Alonzo was afraid he’d fall in love with her the way he had loved Lora Dinsmore and thus he might lose her as Lora was forever lost.

Once a year at least Alonzo still visited that little stand of butterfly weed, to pay his respects, or try to figure it all out, or whatever. He didn’t want to force Corinna to turn into a flower clump. So he was real careful with her, and courted her for a long time without trying to spark her or woo her or even touch her; he just talked to her, sweet as he could, and was even sort of like a father to her. He sure was old enough to be her father, him in his late forties at that time and her not yet twenty. And with all them other daughters, old Vester hadn’t paid Corinna much notice, so she was probably real happy to get all that attention from “Lonzie,” as she took to calling him.

Well sir, this went on for a right smart spell of time, months and months, even though it was a good day’s ride from Stay More to Sidehill, because Alonzo was determined to make a conquest of her in his own sweet time. Then the poor girl came down with pleurisy. This is a trouble with the lungs, where the lining of the lungs gets inflamed, and if it isn’t cured it can lead to consumption, or tuberculosis. Alonzo hadn’t ever even touched Corinna, but now he had to massage her chest and strap her chest, which is part of the treatment for pleurisy, and in the process he got a pretty good feel of her breasts, and her nipples were swollen, and he couldn’t tell if she was breathing so hard because he was getting her aroused or because of her lung trouble. Of course this was happening right in her house, in her bedroom, with her mother somewhere in the next room and her father not far away. For a whole week, he came every day to Sidehill to massage her chest and strap it and dose her with creosote and a bit of laudanum which was for her pain but which also seemed to calm down whatever excitement all of that stroking of her titties was causing. But she wasn’t getting any better, and in fact her pleurisy had worsened from dry to wet, meaning it had abscessed and was getting runny.

Alonzo went back over to that cave-house medical school for a “consultation” with his friend and mentor, Doc Kie Raney, saying, “Hoss, ye never taught me how to handle wet pleurisy,” and Kie told him how to use pleurisy root, which is one of the many names given to nothing other than these here big fat roots of the butterfly weed. Now of course the stuff grows all over creation, but Alonzo knew that there was only one patch of it that would suit him, and that was the patch up on the hillside where Lora had disappeared so many years before. So he went back up there and found the place and talked to that butterfly weed, saying, “Lora, sweetheart, I’ve got to dig up your root and use it to heal a pore young gal who’s got pleurisy. You won’t mind, will ye?” He didn’t get any answer, but he went ahead and dug up a clump and took its big root and brewed it into a tea for Corinna McKinstry, and it cured her, or leastways it arrested the disease so that pretty soon she was feeling normal again. One day she smiled and said, “Lonzie, sometimes I wish I was still sick, so’s you would feel my bosoms again the way ye done.”

“Aw, hon,” said Alonzo, “you don’t have to be sick for me to do thet! Would ye like to take a little stroll up to see the butterfly weed that cured ye?” And pretty soon they were heading for the woods, where he showed her the patch of butterfly weed that had included Lora, and still did, for that matter, for he hadn’t dug her all up. Of course he didn’t tell her about Lora, and they lay down beside Lora, and Lora watched them while Alonzo closed his eyes and pretended she was Lora, and got on top and unloaded his jism and got off.

Naturally she had soon stumped her toe, as they used to say of an unmarried girl who has a cake in her oven. She knew what had caused it too, and she tried to get her Lonzie to make it legal, but all he could say was, “Why, chile, I caint be yore man. I’m old enough to be yore paw!” And it looked as if poor Corinna would have to have a woodscolt like all those other girls that Gilbert Alonzo Swain had unloaded his jism into.

Having a woodscolt wasn’t all that uncommon in those days, and it happened even in the best of families. But Corinna had some pretty set ideas about what was right and proper, and she made up her mind that she wasn’t going to have a baby out of wedlock. So she said to him solemnly, “Lonzie, if I caint have ye for my man, I’ll get me a man who looks jist like ye!”

He laughed, because he knew that there wasn’t any feller anywhere as well-favored as he was. So he wasn’t worried that she’d go and take up with some other feller.

But she actually commenced looking around for a likely feller to become her husband. She searched high and low for anybody that favored Lonzie, knowing that as pretty as she was, she shouldn’t have had any problem latching onto him if she found him, so long as he wasn’t already married. She knew if she found him, she’d better not never tell him about the cake in her oven. She knew she’d have to find him soon enough to persuade him that he was the father when the baby came along. She didn’t have an awful lot of time.

And who do you think she latched onto? There was a certain son of Mellie Chism, grown to manhood, who had inherited from his father not only his handsome features but also his conviction that the only purpose of life is chasing women. The one way that Ism was different from his daddy was that whereas Alonzo was a confirmed bachelor, Ism had always believed that once he found the prettiest girl on earth, he would marry her and settle down and stop chasing women.

When Ism and Corinna met, they knew they were made for each other. He looked almost exactly like his daddy, but not quite so much that Corinna would know that Ism actually was the son of her Lonzie. And she was the loveliest creature that Ism had ever beheld, with her hair as black as a crow and her skin fair as a swan. He used all his skills, practiced with dozens of women, to talk her into laying with him, and she only pretended to be hard to get, and pretended to be a virgin, because laying with him was exactly what she wanted. Ism even practiced the same method of fucking as his daddy, quick on and quick off, hard in and limp out, and she should have guessed who he’d inherited that tendency from, but she didn’t. She let him do it to her every day for several weeks, and even pretended like she enjoyed it, even took on each time as if she was having one of those deaths. After a couple of months, she told him that all that fucking had put her in a family way, so they had best think about starting a family, and did he reckon he might see his way to becoming her man? He didn’t need to be asked twice.