Butterfly Weed by Donald Harington Read Free Book Online Page A

judgment of him, you may also have to make it of me, because I’m not sure, even yet, that I know. Mary Celestia yonder accuses me to my face of not knowing, don’t you, Mary? Yes. Could be that she, like some women, just suffers from the insufficiency of my speaking of it. I don’t tell Mary Celestia every blessed day that I love her. That would turn it into a routine, like eating or breathing or taking a shit. There’s nothing routine about love, and it’s not something we do all the time, or even most of the time. I don’t love Mary every day. Some days it hits me all of a sudden in a way I can’t express that I love her more than anything ever got loved in the history of mankind, but other days I don’t even think about it.
    You know, I tried to point out in my folk-speech book, Down in the Holler —sizable parts of which I collected in Stay More that summer—that among the euphemisms and prudish taboos of the Ozarker even the word “love” is considered more or less indecent, and the mountain people seldom use it in its ordinary sense, but nearly always with some degrading or jocular connotation. If a hillman does admit that he loved a woman, he means only that he caressed and embraced her.
    And as far as I know, or was ever able to find out, Doc Swain never caressed, nor embraced, nor even touched your Latha Bourne. There was a woman—and also a girl—that Doc Swain had caressed and loved, over ten years and more previously, and this is going to be a story about them.
    So I lay there looking through that window, watching Latha’s store porch and watching her and whoever was on the porch talking to her, and whatever fantasies I could fix up in my idle mind involving myself and her or whoever. But that wasn’t all I did, of course. Rowena would bring me my breakfast of scrambled eggs or oatmeal, biscuits or toast, and make sure I drank a whole quart of fresh milk. Then she’d lather my jowls and shave me expertly with a straight razor that she kept keenly stropped, all the while keeping up a running palaver of chitchat. She even contributed to the story of Doc Swain by adding a few anecdotes and more interesting items that she had learned about him.
    Then she’d give me what the doctor prescribed as “a Brand bath.” Like my youthful misunderstanding of castor oil as a lubricant for furniture casters, I misunderstood this name to mean that it would permanently brand me, like cattle, but Doc eventually explained it was named after a German doctor named Brand who’d invented it as a therapy for typhoid. It was a lot harder to take than the “enemers” that Rowena also administered. It involved getting into a galvanized tub—I think it was just a sort of oval-shaped trough for watering livestock—and having Rowena dump buckets of fresh well-water over me, cold as a well-digger’s ass. Colder! Colder than a preacher’s balls! ’Scuse me, Mary. That water would make me scream, and then my teeth would start a-chattering, and my fingernails would turn blue. Doc called the Brand bath “a cardiovascular tonic,” but it near about gave me a heart attack. A wonder it didn’t give me pneumonia. But just when I’d got colder than I could stand, Rowena would commence a-rubbing me, like a massage only real hard, on my arms and legs and back and sides and all, until my blue skin had turned red as roses, and then, without drying, I’d get wrapped in an old linen sheet with a double blanket over that and put back to bed. All that rubbing Rowena done, especially around my lower stomach, would give my ole ying-yang a bone, and if I hadn’t been so sick I would’ve begged the gal for a little relief. Mary Celestia, it’s time for your nap, sweetheart, you don’t have to listen to this.
    But all of my “commerce” with sweet Rowena was limited mostly to friendly banter, sometimes off-color, and to her answers to occasional questions of mine, for example, Was Doc ever married? “Still is,” Rowena said,