Джералд Керш - Nightshade and Damnations

“Why, of course, you’re right, Corporal Cuckoo,” I said. “I’d just go on and on banging on a typewriter and chucking my money down the drain, so that in five hundred years from now I’d be no wiser and no richer than I am at this moment.”

“No, wait a minute,” he said, tapping my arm with a finger that felt like a rod of iron, and leering at me shrewdly. “You’d go on writing books and things. You’re paid on a percentage basis, so in five hundred years you’d have more than you could spend. But how about me? All I’m fit for is to be in the army. I don’t give a damn for philosophy, and all that stuff. It don’t mean a thing to me. I’m no wiser now than I was when I was thirty. I never did go in for reading, and all that stuff, and I never will. My ambition is to get me a place like Jack Dempsey’s on Broadway.”

“I thought you said you wanted to grow roses, and chickens, and bees, and turpentine trees, and whatnot,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“How do you reconcile the two? . . . I mean, how does a restaurant on Broadway fit in with bees and roses, etcetera?”

“Well, it’s like this . . .” said Corporal Cuckoo.

“. . . I told you about how Doctor Paré healed up my head when it was split open so that my brains were coming out. Well, after I could walk about a bit he let me stay in his house, and I can tell you, he fed me on the fat of the land, though he didn’t live any too damn well himself. Yeahp, he looked after me like a son—a hell of a lot better than my old man ever looked after me . . . chickens, eggs in wine, anything I wanted. If I said ‘I guess I’d like a pie made with skylarks for dinner,’ I had it. If I said: ‘Doc, this wine is kind of sour,’ up came a bottle of Alicante, or something. Inside two or three weeks, I was fitter and stronger than I’d ever been before. So then I got kind of restless and said I wanted to go. Well, Doctor Paré said he wanted me to stay. I said to him: ‘I’m an active man, Doc, and I’ve got my living to get; and before I got this little crack on the head I heard that there was money to be made in one army or another right now.’

“Well, then Doctor Paré offered me a couple of pieces of gold to stay in his house for another month. I took the money, but I knew then that he was up to something, and I went out of my way to find out. I mean, he was an army surgeon, and I was nothing but a lousy infantryman. There was a catch in it somewhere, see? So I acted dumb, but I kept my eyes open, and made friends with Jehan, the kid that helped around the doctor’s office. This Jehan was a big-eyed, skinny kid, with one leg a bit shorter than the other, and he thought I was a hell of a fellow when I cracked a walnut between two fingers, and lifted up the big table, that must have weighed about five hundred pounds, on my back. This Jehan, he told me he’d always wanted to be a powerful guy like me. But he’d been sick since before he was born, and might not have lived at all if Doctor Paré hadn’t saved his life. Well, so I went to work on Jehan, and I found out what the doctor’s game was. You know doctors, eh?”

Corporal Cuckoo nudged me, and I said: “Uhuh, go on.”

“Well it seems that up to the time when we got through the Pass of Suze, they’d treated what they called ‘poisoned wounds’ with boiling oil of elder with a dash of what they called theriac. Theriac was nothing much more than honey and herbs. Well, so it seems that by the time we went up the hill, Doctor Paré had run out of the oil of elder and theriac, and so, for want of something better, he mixed up what he called a digestive.

“My commander, Captain Le Rat, the one that got the bullet that smashed up his ankle, was the first one to be dosed with digestive. His ankle got better,” said Corporal Cuckoo, snapping his fingers, “—like that . I was the third or fourth soldier to get a dose of Doctor Paré’s digestive. The Doc was looking over the battlefield, because he wanted a dead body to cut up on the side. You know how doctors are. This kid Jehan told me he wanted a brain to play around with. Well, there I was, see, with my brains showing. All the doctor had to do was reach down and help himself. Well, to cut it short, he saw that I was breathing, and wondered how the hell a man could be breathing after he’d got what I had. So he poured some of his digestive into the hole in my head, tied it up, and watched for developments. I told you what happened then. I came back to life. More than that, the bones in my head grew together. Doctor Ambroise Paré believed he’d got something. So he was keeping me sort of under observation, and making notes.

“I know doctors. Well, anyway, I went to work on Jehan. I said: ‘Be a good fellow, Jehan, tell a pal what is this digestive, or whatever your master calls it?’

“Jehan said: ‘Why, sir, my master makes no secret of it. It is nothing but a mixture of egg yolks, oil of roses and turpentine.’ (I don’t mind telling you that, bub, because it’s already been printed.)”

I said to Corporal Cuckoo; “I don’t know how the devil you come by these curious facts, but I happen to know that they’re true. They are available in several histories of medicine. Ambroise Paré’s digestive, with which he treated the wounded after the Battle of Turin was, as you say, nothing but a mixture of oil of roses, egg yolks, and turpentine. And it is also a fact that the first wounded man upon whom he tried it really was Captain Le Rat, in 1537. Paré said at the time: ‘I dressed his wounds and God healed him’ . . . Well?”

“Yeahp,” said Corporal Cuckoo, with a sneer. “Sure. Turpentine, oil of roses, eggs. That’s right. You know the proportions?”

“No, I don’t,” I said.

“I know you don’t, bub. Well, I do. See? And I’ll tell you something else. It’s not just oil of roses, eggs, and turpentine—there was one other thing Doc Paré slipped in in my case, for an experiment—see? And I know what it is.”

I said: “Well, go on.”

“Well, I could see that this Doctor Ambroise Paré was going to make something out of me, see? So I kept my eyes open, and I waited, and I worked on Jehan, until I found out just where the doctor kept his notebook. I mean, in those days you could get sixty or seventy thousand dollars for a bit of bone they called a ‘unicorn’s horn.’ Hell, I mean, if I had something that could just about bring a man back from the dead—draw his bones together and put him on his feet in a week or two, even if his brains were coming out—hell, everybody was having a war then, and I could have been rich in a few minutes.”

I said: “No doubt about that. What—”

“—What the hell,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “What the hell right did he have to use me for a guinea pig? Where would he have been if it hadn’t been for me? And where do you think I’d have been after? Out on my neck with two or three gold pieces, while the doctor grabbed the credit and made millions out of it. I wanted to open a place in Paris—girls and everything, see? Could I do that on two or three gold pieces? I ask you! Okay; one night when Doctor Paré and Jehan were out, I took his notebook, slipped out of a window, and got the hell out of it.

“As soon as I thought I was safe, I went into a saloon, and drank some wine, and got into conversation with a girl. It seems somebody else was interested in this girl, and there was a fight. The other guy cut me in the face with a knife. I had a knife too. You know how it is—all of a sudden I felt something pulling my knife out of my hand, and I saw that I’d pushed it between this man’s ribs. He was one of those mean little guys, about a hundred and twenty pounds, with a screwed-up face. (She was a great big girl with yellow hair.) I could see that I’d killed him, so I ran for my life, and I left my knife where it was—stuck tight between his ribs. I hid out, expecting trouble. But they never found me. Most of that night I lay under a hedge. I was pretty sick. I mean, he’d cut me from just under the eye to the back of my head—and cut me deep. He’d cut the top of my right ear off, clean. It wasn’t only that it hurt like hell, but I knew I could be identified by that cut. I’d left half an ear behind me. It was me for the gallows, see? So I kept as quiet as I could, in a ditch, and went to sleep for a few hours before dawn. And then, when I woke up, that cut didn’t hurt at all, not even my ear—and I can tell you that a cut ear sure does hurt. I went and washed my face in a pond, and when the water got still enough so I could see myself, I saw that that cut and this ear had healed right up so that the marks looked five years old. All that in half a night! So I went on my way. About two days later, a farmer’s dog bit me in the leg—took a piece out. Well, a bite like that ought to take weeks to heal up. But mine didn’t. It was all healed over by next day, and there was hardly a scar. That stuff Paré poured into my head had made me so that any wound I might get, anywhere, anytime, would just heal right up—like magic. I knew I had something when I grabbed those papers of Paré’s. But this was terrific!”