Doc: A Novel (33 page)

The pharmacist sent dried milk thistle, sage, kelp, licorice, lavender, ginseng, and sorrel, to be steeped in boiling water with black tea. Jau Dong-Sing brewed the medicine up and encouraged Doc to drink it when he came by to eat noodles.

I am happy to help him, since he has always treated me with respect. I hope that he will be better soon
, Dong-Sing thought, pouring more bleach into the wash water.
Sometimes his handkerchiefs are difficult to clean
.

Joker

“I
t may have been the most vile, undrinkable, horrifyin’ beverage in the history of mankind,” Doc told Morgan, who felt bad for laughing so hard but couldn’t help himself. “And Mr. Jau—poor soul—he is watchin’ me with such eager anticipation! ‘How you like dat, Doc?’ he asks me. And at that very instant, I was thinkin’: I sincerely believe I would rather die than choke this down three times a day … But I could hear my mamma’s voice. Now, sugar, it was very kind of Mr. Jau, and if you can just get through the next twenty seconds without up-chuckin’ …”

For the third time in half an hour, Doc laid his dental tools on the office table and turned away to cough and curse for a while, which gave Morgan time to catch his own breath. Somehow Doc made having consumption seem funny; Morg was damned if he understood how, but when the two of them were alone like this, he ended up laughing himself blue about half the time.

He poured Doc a drink and knew to wait until Doc could answer before he asked, “You ever tried Wistar’s? That’s supposed to be pretty good for a cough.”

“Morgan,” Doc said, “I have tried them all … Balsam of Cherry. Borax water. Kerosene and lard. Turpentine and sugar. Calomel. Bunchberry juice. Fish liver extract. Root of pitcher plant. Everything but eye of newt—which may have been in Mr. Jau’s concoction, now that I think of it.” He paused to clear his throat. “Laudanum stops the cough, but it stops everything else, too. Can’t work when I’m that fogged.” Doc picked up his tools. “Bourbon does the job, and I tolerate it better. Light?”

Morgan lifted the lamp again and held it so there was no shadow on the denture Doc was finishing: two front teeth, cleverly linked in a gold setting.

“It’s like a little sculpture,” Morg marveled. “Or … jewelry, almost.”

“Jewelry is mere adornment,” Doc said, peering through a magnifying glass that was clamped into a brass stand on his desk. “This will change your brother’s life in a small but significant way. If it’s the last work I do, I’ll die a happy dentist.”

Consumption was one thing. Death was another. Morg banged the lamp down.

Doc looked up, surprised; he sobered when he saw Morgan’s face. “What?”

“You keep joking about dying, and I wish you’d quit. It’s like you’re trying to get used to the idea,” Morg said. “Making friends with it, almost.”

Doc stared, but he sounded impressed when he finally said, “Well, now, ain’t you somethin’.” He lifted his chin toward the lamp. Morg held it up, and Doc went back to work on the denture. “There was some bleedin’ after the race,” he admitted quietly, “but it wasn’t arterial. And it’s over. Took time for things to settle down afterward, is all.”

True enough, the cough didn’t sound as awful as it had right after the fall. Doc’s color was better, too, but Kate said he still wasn’t sleeping well, and that made him cross.

Cross ain’t the half of it, Morg thought. Doc would tear into folks, sudden as a dogfight, and he was taking some real chances during card games. He swore he wasn’t starting anything, but Doc’s idea of “clarifyin’ a point of contention” came awful close to spitting in a man’s eye. “Doc,” Morgan had warned a few nights ago, “you gotta be more careful. I won’t always be around—” To protect you, he was going to say, but Doc cut him off and snapped, “Well, neither will I, and I am damned if I will spend my time listenin’ to ungrammatical, repetitious, imbecilic nonsense without a challenge!”

Still, he was cheerful enough right now, whistling softly while he smoothed away an almost invisible burr on the gold bezel that held the teeth.

It was interesting to watch the work, and Morg was glad to be allowed back into the office. He’d been banned after Wyatt’s first appointment. Doc only let him come back today because it was the final fitting for the denture.

Wyatt didn’t feel a thing when that first tooth was pulled, but Morgan still had a knot on the back of his head from where he hit the doorknob going down. When he came to, Doc was furious with him. “Dammit, Morgan, I didn’t know whether to shit or go bust! There’s Wyatt in the chair, and there’s you on the floor, and there’s the Eberhardt boy with eyes like saucers, sayin’ ‘I pump drill now, sir?’ I can’t have it, Morg—not while I’ve got a patient under ether. It’s too dangerous!” So Mattie Blaylock came with Wyatt for the next three appointments. She was real good about things, too, cooking him soft stuff like eggs and soup for a few days after each session, while his mouth was sore.

“What is that song?” Morg asked after a while.

Doc looked up, puzzled.

“The one you were whistling.”

“Was I—?” Doc thought for a moment. “Oh! The Rondo from Beethoven’s Violin Concerto.”

Morgan knew what a violin was, anyways. “You play fiddle, too?”

“Not by a wide mile,” Doc murmured, eyes on the mount. “When I was in dental school, I went to every concert and recital I could at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. Fell in love with that piece … I was studyin’ the score when we were learnin’ to make bridges. Comes back to me, I guess.”

Must be hard on him, Morg thought, being so far from things like that. “Real pretty tune,” he said.

“Indeed. You have excellent taste, Morgan.” Doc put the tools down and stretched out his back, then winced suddenly, like he was snakebit. He sat still for a time, but relaxed again and went on. “Our houseboy—Wilson?—he disapproved of whistlin’ somethin’ fierce. Always said it was common. ‘A low-class, cracker habit,’ Wilson called it, but Mamma encouraged the practice when I was a boy.”

“Why would she want you to do something low-class?”

“Helped me establish control over the
orbicularis oris
.” Doc gestured with a finger, circling his mouth. His hand dropped into his lap and he considered Morgan for a time, like he was deciding something. “I was born with a harelip,” he said finally. “The defect was repaired when I was a baby.”

Morgan couldn’t help staring.

Doc threw his head back and stared right back, like he was daring Morg to make fun. “It is nothin’ to be ashamed of,” he declared.

And you could tell somehow: it was his mamma’s voice Doc heard when he was saying how it was nothing to be ashamed of, but he
was
ashamed—a little, anyways. You could tell that, too.

Morg made himself stop looking at Doc’s mouth. “I knew a kid once who had a harelip. I didn’t know they could fix it.”

“My Uncle John is a fine surgeon. You can—Oh, hell—Dammit! Some kind of—obstruction in the bronchus—I just can’t seem to—”

Morg put the lamp down and waited again while the bourbon was administered and the coughing eased off. Since the fall on the Fourth, Doc had been drinking more than usual. He drank it a little at a time, though, and it didn’t seem to affect him beyond helping with the cough. His eyes stayed clear and his hands were steady when he went back to work on the denture. It was such finicky work, but he seemed to have all the patience in the world, doing it. Strange, for a man who’d fly off the handle so easy, otherwise.

“I wouldn’t last five minutes doing what you are,” Morg said. “How can you spend so much time on something so little?”

“It’s hours for me, but it’ll be in Wyatt’s mouth for years. The tiniest flaw will be a trial to him … We all have different gifts, Mamma used to say. I’ve watched you and your brother walk straight into a mob and wondered, Where do they get the sand? I couldn’t do what you do.”

“You’ve got plenty of sand, Doc.”

“Morgan,” Doc said, “I am doin’ my best … How are you and Mr. Dickens gettin’ along?”

“I like him better than Dostoevsky,” Morg admitted. “Oliver Twist reminds me of Wyatt when he was a kid. I liked how Oliver stands up for himself and that other kid when they was so hungry. Wyatt was like that. He cannot abide a bully. Never could, even when he was little.”

“And why do you suppose that is?”

“Just his nature, I guess.”

“You met Mr. Fagin yet?”

“Yeah. Ain’t made up my mind about him. He’s good to feed all those boys, but he’s teaching them to be pickpockets, too. That don’t seem right.”

“But that is just what makes Fagin interestin’. Raskolnikoff, too. Fagin does his good deed with a bad purpose in mind, but the boys are still fed. Raskolnikoff kills the old woman, but he wants to use her money to improve society. As Monsieur Balzac asked, May we not do a small evil for the sake of accomplishin’ a great good?”

“I don’t know.” Morgan frowned. “It’s still an evil.”

“And yet, that seems to be the principle behind the crucifixion. Sacrifice the Son, redeem humanity … Hold the lamp up while you’re chewing that notion over.”

Morg tried, but it was too much to get his mind around. “I know what Wyatt would say. Fagin’s still a fence. Raskolnikoff was a murderer and a thief. Wyatt don’t care that James and Bessie run a decent house and treat their girls right. They’re still whoremongers.”

“And I suppose it doesn’t matter that my mamma inherited her people. Or that she was a gentle mistress, taught by her elders that slavery was Athenian in its dignity and blessed by the Bible itself.”

“She was still a slave owner,” Morg said quietly, braced for the reaction. Doc could be real touchy about his mother.

“We are none of us born into Eden,” Doc said reasonably. “World’s plenty evil when we get here. Question is, what’s the best way to play a bad hand? Abolitionists thought that all they had to do to right an ancient wrong was set the slaves free.” He looked at Morg. “Trouble was, they didn’t have a plan in the world for what came next. Cut ’em loose. That was the plan. Let ’em eat cake, I guess.”

He was muttering now, eyes on the bridge. “Four years of war. Hundreds of thousands of casualties … All so black folks in the South could be treated as bad as millworkers in the North! Pay as little as you can. Work ’em ’til they’re too old or sick or hurt to do the job. Then cut ’em loose! Hire a starvin’ Irish replacement! That’s abolitionist freedom for you … Heartless bastards … ‘Free the slaves’ sounds good until you start wonderin’ how Chainey and Wilson would make a livin’ when they were already so old they couldn’t do a lick of work. What was a little child like Sophie Walton supposed to do? No kin who’d care for her …” He looked up. “I doubt the abolitionists anticipated the Ku Klux Klan either, but here it is, makin’ life worse than ever for black folks.”

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” Morg said.

“Infinitely sad, but damnably true.”

Doc sat back in his chair and stared out of the window for a long time. “Bein’ born is craps,” he decided. He glanced at Morg and let loose that sly, lopsided smile of his. “How we live is
poker
.” Doc looked away and got thoughtful again. “Mamma played a bad hand well.”

He shook the mood off and went back to work on the denture. Morgan lifted the lamp, feeling vaguely unsettled by the conversation. Naturally, Doc saw things different, being from the South. Still … there had been a lot of arguing about Emancipation, even in the North. Nicholas Earp was all for the war when it was to punish the secessionists. After the Proclamation, he wrote Newton and James and Virgil to quit the army and come on home. “I won’t have my sons risking their necks for niggers” was what he said, but the boys stayed on and fought to the end. And Wyatt tried to join up when he was fifteen, except the old man caught him both times and dragged him home again. Somebody had to get that eighty acres of corn in.

“Doc? You think maybe it was the Klan got Johnnie Sanders?” Morg asked.

Doc stopped what he was doing. “Never thought of that … He was friendly with Belle Wright. Sometimes that’s all it takes.” He turned the idea over for a while. “No. They’d have lynched him, I imagine. And they’d want a crowd for the occasion. The Klan enjoys an audience as much as Eddie Foy.” He sat still for a time, frowning. “I don’t suppose you recall … Was that army captain—Grier, the one with the Arab mare?—was Captain Grier in town when the Elephant Barn burned down?”

Morg’s face went blank. “Hell, Doc. I don’t remember. Why?”

“Just curious. Johnnie might’ve gone into the barn to bring out that horse.” Doc went back to his work and to Dickens. “So, now, what do you think about the odious Bill Sikes? There’s a pure bully for you, no redemption involved.”

Morg didn’t answer. Doc looked up. “Struck a nerve, did I?”

Morgan’s face had darkened, but Doc was looking past him now. “Tell me about bullies, Wyatt. I wager you have made a study of the breed.”

Morg turned and wondered how long his brother had been standing in the doorway, listening.

Wyatt took off his hat and hung it on a peg. “They were beaten,” he said simply. “Ninety-nine out of a hundred still are, inside. A man beats his boy, he wants a son who won’t buck him. He’s trying to make a coward. Mostly, it works.” Face expressionless, Wyatt walked to the window and held the curtain aside, gazing back toward Iowa as he spoke. “That’s why a bully will fold. You just … 
look
at him, the way his old man did. It’s not anger. It’s scorn. A bully sees that look? He’s nine years old again. Small and weak, like his pa wanted him. It’s all he can do to keep from crying.”

Doc looked at Morgan, whose eyes slid away.