Butterfly Weed by Donald Harington Read Free Book Online Page B

and when I tried to get her to elaborate she told me, as if I didn’t know, that there was no such of a thing as divorce in these here parts, and Doc had had a wife a number of years previously, whom he hadn’t seen in many a year, and another wife who died. “But you’ll jist have to git him to tell you his own self about all of that,” Rowena said.
    What with all that therapy and attention from Rowena—I don’t know if I was her only patient but she gave me the impression that I was—I was getting better day by day and reaching the point of wanting to get out of bed. “Doc,” I requested one morning, “how about lettin me sit in the rocker ’stead of layin in this bed all day and night?”
    “We aint out of the woods yit,” he declared.
    I sighed, “Tell me, Doc,” I said with a little exasperation, “how come you always say ‘we’ as if you’re the patient too? ‘Time for our breakfast,’ you’ll say even if you’ve done et. ‘Now let’s take our temperature,’ you’ll say, but you aint takin your own. Yesterday you said, ‘We wanter watch out we don’t git ourselfs a intestinal perforation,’ but there aint a bit of danger that you will ever git one!”
    Doc looked a little bit crestfallen. “Wal, don’t ye know, I reckon hit’s jist plain ole empathy, ” he observed. “I aint never had a patient that I didn’t feel like everything happenin to them was happenin to me too. Ever baby I’ve delivered was birthed by me. Ever time anybody died I died too.”
    There was such a melancholy in his speaking of these words that I softened my annoyance. “Okay, I get the drift. But don’t ‘we’ get pretty goddamned itchy and on edge when ‘we’re’ confined to bed all the time?”
    “Yeah, I reckon we do. That’s how come me and Rowener tries to keep ye beguiled.”
    I was charmed by his use of that word, which can mean either to cheat, to deceive, or to amuse, to entertain, the latter meaning carrying the connotation of whiling away the hours and diverting one from one’s problems. It set me to pondering how the latter meaning could have grown out of the former, as if the ways we really entertain ourselves involve some kind of deception. A good story beguiles us: by deceiving us it entertains us. Maybe it’s even necessary to make some kind of corollary: a story is successfully delightful in proportion to its deception.
    But although Doc Swain had both beguiled and regaled me with quite a lot of anecdotes, jests, and tall tales that I had not heard before, he hadn’t yet got to the stage of telling me real stories, that is, extended narratives with plot development running through beginnings, middles, and endings. And despite my occasional promptings, he had not yet begun to tell me the most important story: his own. “Doc,” I would prompt, trying to get it out of him, “is it true that you were once a basketball coach?”
    “ Basketball? ” he would put me off. “I never knew nothing about basketball.” And, as I would eventually learn, that was quite true: he never knew nothing about basketball. But he had coached it.
    Maybe I’m giving the impression that Doc didn’t have anything better to do, when he wasn’t killing time chatting with Latha Bourne on her store porch, than to sit around telling me tales and windies. My picture of him might run counter to the traditional idea of the overworked, underslept physician who had to see a hundred patients a day or night at all hours. In truth, Doc Swain was not the slave of his job…but he was the slave of his research, which he was keeping private. I knew that he spent a great number of hours each day in a back room of the house that he called his “laboratory.” He explained that of course he was his own pathologist, but that wasn’t all he was doing back there in that room. For all I knew, he was creating a monster, like Frankenstein. I can remember a few occasions when Rowena said to me, “Colvin caint see you this