Edgar Pangborn - Davy

Pa Rumley blathered on, not exactly claiming that God and Abraham and all the angels had worked together showing gentle Mother Spinkton how to construct her Home Remedy, the Only Sovran Cure for All Mortal Complainders of Man or Beast — but you were sort of left of a breathing exercise-he did it because he couldn’t bear doing much more than what a musician would call a scale or a breathing exercise — he did it because he couldn’t bear to let any crowd get away from him, any time, without selling it something. After five or ten minutes more of Mother Spinkton’s character and biography, he squared away for a brisk analysis of a dozen or more diseases, and he was so tender and hopeful and horrible about it — hell, nobody could beat him at that; he’d have you locating so many simpletons [21] Out to lunch. — N. D. throughout your anatomy you simply couldn’t spare the time to die from more than half of them. He’d wind up that section with a horde of widows and orphans at the grave, which Mother Spinkton might have prevented same had they but of knowed — come one, come all! Well, it called for an effort — Mother was one whole dollar a bottle. But did she sell?

Yes.

It’s a matter of sober fact that she was a bird, and I do know, because Pa believed in her himself or appeared to, and had no more mercy on us than he had on the public. If you got sick and admitted it, you drank Mother Spinkton or faced Pa’s displeasure, and we loved him too much for that.

It was Mother’s unpredictable nature that made it impossible to get the best of her. Mother Spinkton could tear into anything at all — epizootic, measles, impotence, broken ribs, cold in the head — and if she couldn’t cure it she wouldn’t try, she’d just start up such a brush fire somewhere else in you that it didn’t matter. Dab some of her on a mortal wound and you would, naturally, want to die, but she’d keep you that interested you couldn’t manage it, for the sheer excitement of wondering how much she was going to hurt next, and where. Of course it might turn out to be an entirely different kettle of shoes of another color, but I’m trying to analyze the psychology of it.

Pa’s own belief in her was a puzzle to me, but I state it for a fact. I’ve watched him making up a fresh batch according to the secret formula he’d worked out himself, just as careful and hopeful and bright-eyed and bushytailed as an Old-Time physicist with a brand new bang. And then by danm he’d drink some. I don’t know — sowbugs, horseradish, hot peppers, raw corn likker, tar, marawan, rattlesnake’s urine, chicken’s gall-bladder and about a dozen more mysterious yarbs and animal parts, usually including goat’s testicles. Those last were hard to get unless we happened to be near the right kind of farm at the right moment, and Pa did allow they weren’t absolutely essential, but he said they gave her a distinctive Tone that he was partial to himself. Tone was important. He’d drunk her with and without that Tone, he said, and it was possible that for the yucks it didn’t really matter, because the first swallow was calculated to lift any yuck directly out of the studious frame of mind — stifi, if you cared, Tone was important. Pa Rumley liked to discuss vintages too. I never became that expert. All I could tell was that in some vintages Mother Spinkton wouldn’t much more than stink out a town hall, but in her best years she was well able to clear a ten-acre field of everything movable, including the mules.

That morning in Humber Town, when Pa had wound up his spiel and was about to start passing out bottles with Tom Blaine wrapping up and collecting coin, along comes a hardcase old rip pushing through the crowd snorting and moaning with a hand to his chest and his long scrawny face all puckered up in the wildest sort of misery, so that I had to goggle twice and swallow before convincing myself that this antique calamity was my own Da, Sam Loomis, acting half again as large as life and rarin’ to go.

“You theah! You talk of healing’? I’m comin’ forward, but there a’n’t no hope for me, not the way my mis’ry’s been ground into me by a life of sin. An, Lord, Lord, f’give a mean horr’ble old man and let ’m die, can’t you?”

“Why, friend!” Pa Rumley responded — “the Lord f’gives many a sinner. Come for’d and speak your mind!” He was a little uneasy. He told us later he wasn’t sure he’d seen Sam and me talking together, at the fence.

Sam, that old scoundrel — my Da, mind you — said: “Praise him evermore, but le’ me lay my burdens down!”

“Let the poor soul come for’d there, good people — he’s a sick man, I can see. Make room, please!” They did, maybe as much from pity as because Sam might have something catching. He did look just about finished — coughing, staggering, fetching up against the backboard of the wagon and letting Tom Blaine support him. If I hadn’t seen that head-shake signal I’d have been over there lickety-doodah, and maybe spoiled things. “Comes on me sudden sometimes,” he said, which took care of any critics who might have noticed him with me before the music, steady and hard as nails. “Real sudden!” — and with his face turned away from the crowd he sent Pa a wink.

After that you’d have thought they’d practised it for years. I whispered to the nearest ear, which happened to be Minna Selig’s: “That’s my Da.”

“Ayah? Did see you together.”

Bonnie said: “A’n’t he a pisser!”

I near-about busted with pride.

Pa Rumley was leaning down to him, a soft angelic smile slathered over what you could see of his face outside the black foam of beard. His voice was globs of maple syrup out of a jug. “Don’t despair, man — nay, and think of the joy in heaven over the one sinner that repenteth. Now then, where at is this pain?”

“Well, it’s a chest mis’ry all kind of wropped up with a zig-zag mortification.”

“Ayah, ayah. It hurts a mite cross-ways when you breathe?”

“O Lord, I mean!”

“Ayah. Now, sir, I can read a man’s heart, and I says to you lo, about this sin, it’s already near-about washed away m repentance, and all you need is to fix up the chest mis’ry so to make straight the pathway for the holy spirit and things — only you got to be careful of course.”

Tom Blame was right there with a bottle of Mother Spinkton, a look of gladness, and the father and mother of a wooden spoon. I have never understood, myself, how ordinary maple wood could hold together under the charring and shriveling effect Mother always had, but there’s nothing I can do except tell history the way it happened. Bedam if those two old hellions didn’t jaw it back and forth another five minutes, with Tom holding the spoon, before Sam would let himself be talked into swallowing some. They were taking a chance, I think: if the old lady had eaten her way through the spoon while they talked, the crowd might have lynched the pack of us.

Sam took it at last, and for a few seconds things were pretty quiet. Well, often you don’t feel anything right away except the knowledge that the world has come to an end. Sam of course had been brought up on raw corn likker and fried food and religion; all the same, I don’t believe anything in a person’s past could actually prepare him for Mother Spinkton. He got her down, and when his features sort of rejoined each other so that he was recognizable again, I thought I heard him murmur: “This happened to me! ” It was all right: any yucks who overheard him probably thought he was looking at the nice kind of eternity. Then as soon as he could move, he turned his head so that the yucks might observe the glow of beatitude or whatever spreading over him, and said: “Ali, praise his name, I can breathe again!”