Charms for the Easy Life (6 page)

The girl giggled some more and said, “Who said I was yours? Who said? Jesus, do tell!”

Without warning, my grandmother walked to the adjoining wall, knocked on it hard, and shouted, “She might not be yours now, but she will be in the morning. Get it over with and let me sleep. Hurry up and be quiet!” We heard not another word, moan, giggle, or stir from them.

B
IT BY BIT, my grandmother moved in with us. After we returned from the beach, she would spend one night a week, and then two a week and so forth, until, by the late autumn of 1936, she was fully established in our home. Her medical journals and mail-order novels covered every flat surface in the house, except for the kitchen counters, which were jammed with bottles of tonic, jars of salve, and in the middle of all this, a battered, silver-fished herb bible bound with rawhide. It looked to have survived a fire or two. The first job my grandmother gave me was to copy its contents into a new notebook before the bible finished disintegrating, taking a hundred years’ worth of curative memories with it.

From the first day she was with us, my eyes stayed wide open in astonishment. I was continuously full of looking, because not only did she come, but her thriving medical practice came with her. Although I had been out on many house calls with her and opened her door to many Saturday-morning patients, nothing could compare with having the afflicted beat their paths across our yard, past my bicycle and old tire swing, up the steps I sat and shelled peas on, through the screen door into the kitchen. And they came right away. She had left a sign on her door notifying patients that she had moved, asking them to pass word to friends and family. I answered the door for the first patient, who said, “Little girl, can you see if Miss Charlie Kate would take a look at me?” I didn’t think of myself as a little girl, and if he hadn’t looked so desperate for help, I might have told him that I was a young woman now and I was memorizing “Christabel,” shaving unseen parts of my legs in secret, and attending romantic movies with my mother. Instead, I ran yelling for my grandmother. I told her a man was at the door who was covered in angry sores and wet blisters.

She trotted to the door. This is what she did for him: She had him sit in our dining room while she boiled every root known to man in my mother’s large cast-iron pot, and then she commanded him to drink the potion. He said a little verse from Ezekiel over the cup before he downed it. When he finished, she fixed him another cup, and then gave him a tube of zinc oxide and told him to smear it liberally over every inch of himself. She said, “I would rub it on you only if I were insane.” My mother came in from the grocery store while my grandmother was packing leftover pieces of root in her black bag. I was sitting at the other end of the dining room table watching this poor man, listening to him talk about the Millennium, which he was convinced would come in 1955. How far away that year sounded! Just as he was speaking of graves gaping open to release souls to the clouds, I heard my mother shout, “What? A leper? Holy Jesus!” She came into the dining room, yanked me away from the table, and made me stay in my room until he was gone. I remember I was highly disappointed. (I have to say that the pot made everything taste like poison and was put on the porch to be planted with begonias the following spring. Strange to tell, but they thrived and were the envy of all.)

The leper had walked to our house from the Outer Banks, where he worked as a jackleg mechanic on fishing boats. He must have made his way to Wake County and then begun asking for directions to Miss Charlie Kate’s. Although most people would assume that by this time all the remaining lepers in the world had been collected into colonies in India or in the big leprosarium in Louisiana, this was not the case, not in actuality. They were reported to roam much in the manner of gypsies and were sighted usually toward the wild, farther reaches of the coast where the famous Lost Colony became—not meaning to sound funny—lost.

My grandmother was proud that her reputation was so widespread as to have reached a fishing boat mechanic on the Outer Banks. Later in her life, when a newspaper reporter annoyed her with questions about her nonexistent official credentials, she asked him, “When was the last time anybody walked a hundred miles, scabbed and blistered, seeking your advice and authority?” This leper was thereafter referred to as our first emergency patient, but before long, other cases came. However, I will say that none was ever as exotic in a biblical sort of way as the leper. The lame and toothachy and headachy quickly learned she was there, and presented themselves at our door. All these pained people would call through the screen, “Little girl, can you please fetch Miss Charlie Kate for me?” Women in despair over colicky babies came, it seemed, in droves. These women were always young, usually pale and limp, always poor and apologetic for having nothing to offer my grandmother in payment except things like pretty conch shells or old stockings and, once, a promise of changing the sick baby’s name to Charlie Kate. I remember my grandmother’s prescription for these screaming babies: “Say a prayer, and turn your baby heels up and head down three times an hour. Put seven knots in a string and tie it loose around her middle, and leave it there until it rots off. Give a little water on the hour hand and let her eat after you eat. Walk away from strong root foods like turnips and onions—do not even smell the pot boiling. In between feeding her, sit in a straight chair with her across your knees, head down, looking at the floor. Keep a trifling bounce steady. Your knees will feel good to her gassiness. She’ll go to sleep for nothing to look at but the floor. Anybody would.”

If no calls came in for a day or two, my grandmother would become restless. She would jump up from reading and announce, “I’m going to
find
somebody.” Then she would drive downtown to City News and Candy because she knew the place would be full of patients. The town’s living dead accumulated there. They sat around on old automobile seats and spat in a brass spittoon that they passed around like a collection plate. This place sold every magazine and newspaper in the world, although nobody ever bought much of anything except lawyers from down at the courthouse, who liked to go about with
The New York Times
folded under their arms. It was actually an outlet for bootleg gin, which accounted for the constant feeling of destitution and fatigue, all these tired hearts waiting for the next shipment to arrive. Despite the gloomy atmosphere, I loved to accompany my grandmother there. A true joy in my life was the sight of her outside my school, waiting for me, calling out the car window, “Don’t get on the bus! Ride with me to the News and Candy!” She always let me fill a small sack with hard candy while she bought a
New Yorker
and a
Saturday Reviewof Literature.
Then she would range around, from one old alcoholic to another, shaking hands, asking after spouses in her usual way: not “How is the wife?” but “Is she dead yet?” None of the old men seemed startled or offended by this. Their answers were mainly that the wife was near death, or that she had just died and they had been getting along fairly poorly since. And then somebody would ask, “Can you take a look at me?” My grandmother would answer, “I just came to get a magazine, but I guess I could.” She would ask me to trot out to the car to get her bag, acting as if it were so very lucky that she happened to have it. If the men had known she had come specifically for them, they might not have come forward so easily.

The place became something of a waiting room for the chronically pathetic. Men bared gums and asked her to comment on abscesses. They asked her to diagnose the causes of swollen feet, tongues, fingers, noses, everything on a body that could swell. One man proclaimed, “I am swollen in general.” Another said, “I want you to pronounce on a blood blister, if you would be so kind.” Still another man bared his chest and displayed a mysterious rash shaped like the star of Bethlehem, and when my grandmother asked him how long he had had this, he told her he had been born with it, but that didn’t mean he liked it. He wanted it taken off. She told him he had lived with the rash seventy years and could live with it another ten, and so he buttoned up his shirt and that was that. She would always glance into the spittoon, and if something worrisome was in it, she’d say, “Who spit out these coffee grounds?” Whoever confessed would be sent to Mary Elizabeth’s Hospital with a note for the radiologist to run barium tests at my grandmother’s expense.

Stomach ulcers were the predominant ailment among these men, living as they did on gin, cigarettes, and candy. My grandmother would take men into the storage room and view cases of piles and hernias and, once, a case of inflamed testicles that caused a man to disregard my presence and say, “Charlie Kate, my privates are on fire.” While she was in there, I would sit and look at magazines and listen to the inevitable murmurs of memory that arose as soon as the door to the storage room was closed: “Remember the time Charlie Kate sewed Licky Smith on her table, and how he came back to work fat and happy and so proud of his red thread? Remember when she went to that girl’s house who spent all one Easter Sunday jumping off the porch trying to get rid of her baby, and how she tied her hands and feet to the porch rail and made her watch her neighbor playing with her children in her yard? Remember when she got Tessa Jerrod’s arm out of the wringer? I was there. She unplugged the machine and it still didn’t let her go, and Charlie Kate said, ‘By God, I am telling you to let this woman’s arm loose!’ The wringer widened and out flopped Tessa’s arm, flat as a breadboard. Everybody there, like me, who had come running on account of Tessa’s screaming, felt the Holy Spirit in the wash shed. Rosalinda Herbert’s neuralgia was healed on the spot. Amos Johnson’s hair started to grow. Buttercup Spivey’s dropped kidneys rose. Malcolm Taylor stopped wanting to scratch his missing leg. Everybody saw the miracles all around.”

More than once, she told the men as she was packing her bag to leave, “I will remind every one of you that a drunkard makes an ugly corpse.” They would cock their heads and regard her words like a bunch of scholars who had just heard something wise and true, and never before considered.

My grandmother’s grand reputation was made more so by, of all people, the real doctor who had earlier sent her ten dollars. He caused marvelous opportunities to come her way after she told him she knew of his grave and shameful error. One night in January of 1937 she was called out to the long row of mill houses on Beale Street to treat a tiny blind baby racked with whooping cough. My mother and I went with her and took turns jumping out of the automobile to run ahead and salt icy patches on the road to town. We sat in the backseat with a large bag of salt between us, and when my grandmother stopped, predicting a slick place ahead, one of us would scoop into the bag with a measuring cup and then hop out. We did this because the chains for the tires had been stolen from our garage, along with tools, old toys, anything that could be traded for food or whiskey at the Hooverville by the railroad yard.

I knew that my mother had grown up in this mill section, but I had difficulty imagining her running about, playing with these ragged children who were still outside in the raw cold of midnight, chasing each other up and down the street with icicle daggers. As we walked up the steps and into the sick baby’s house, I heard her shrieking, but that was the only sound. It seemed so very strange to me, and then I realized that between the sharp cries I was not hearing a mother saying everything would be all right. There was no mothering sound.

The mother looked to be my age. She stood holding the baby in the middle of a room that might have been a pretty little space the first fifteen minutes it was in use. But now the stains on the walls had stains, and the one electric bulb overhead dangled like something one would expect to see in a cell on death row. She was doing such a useless job of comforting the baby that she may as well have laid her in her crib to scream alone and walked out. My grandmother said to her very directly, “Give me the baby.” She took her to the settee to examine her abdomen. I was asked to come hold the baby’s legs still. They were jerking violently up into her chest, and although she was only about two years old, she seemed to have in her legs the power of five grown men.

My mother went out to the car and brought in four wooden poles and one of the bronchitis tents we always packed when a case of whooping cough was suspected. The tents were nothing more than sheets, but my mother had embroidered baby animals on them, so a sick and miserable child could have some sort of pleasure. During that bad winter and early spring, thirty or forty children used this tent. After my mother constructed the tent over the crib, she sat down with the young woman and took the baby’s medical history, which proceeded along a string of “I don’t know” and “I can’t remember” until the question of the baby’s blindness arose. My mother asked if she had been born that way.

The baby’s mother said, “The doctor, he caught her and then he put the drops in and sort of spilled some on her and I sort of got the feeling he did it.”