Busy with Chapbooks
It’s gotten very bad, lately, so I might as well confess that I don’t have the heart for it, today. I cannot answer to you, my ancestors who have lived (some of them) in the United States since before it was the United States. You, Henry Herrick, who as magistrate in Salem, Massachusetts, hung the witches in Salem town in 1672! I applaud you, I venerate you. We can all agree, surely, that it was the right thing to do at the time. And after the winds had shifted, how beautifully you tacked your sails! Yes indeed, your confession that the devil had lured YOU into thinking that that old pipe-smoking hag that you had chained hand and feet in the town jail (or gaol, don’t know which variant was current at the time) and whose inherited, ramshackle property neatly abutted your well-tended field…was a witch! Well, it was masterful.
And you—Dr. Nicholas Coleman Pickard! You were no fool, either. You were smart enough to choose a life with no internet, and to do only two things that stuck in the family memory. You left your country practice and your ailing relicts and took a train ride (I presume it was train, though there’s absolutely no excuse not to Google it, since it could have been a carriage) to Richmond, Virginia. I want to know, of course, what you ate on the train, or what you read, or whether you sat, motionless, and stared out the window. You were alone with your thoughts, wise man.
But you made sure your granddaughter, who was my grandmother (and how is that possible?), was a writer, just like all the rest of us. You had her tell your tale, the tale of a broken country doctor, whose cherished son had heard the siren song of his mother, a staunch abolitionist. Did she give him Uncle Tom’s Cabin, after she had finished with it? Did she stir what fire there was in his muscular young groin—did she fan the flames of heroism?
Pickard ended up on the train, going to Richmond and Libby Prison. A hell-hole, worse than Alligator Alcatraz. An old warehouse, it was now where the Confederates stored the wounded and dying. Those two terms were interchangeable, the country doctor knew. Especially in a small cramped room with no ventilation in the middle of a Virginia summer; the smell must have been unendurable.
A cry breaks out in the cacophony of the room. A bird knows the sounds of her fledgling crying for food from their nests in the forest. Pickard turns his head involuntarily toward the sounds coming from the cot crammed with so many others in the foul room. There are no paths, no aisles. He steps over other people’s wounded sons, trying to find his own.
No luck, only a strapping young black man raising his head weakly from the pillow. He glances at the boy, sickened by the sight. The boy gestures again and then calls…
“Father!”
He falls back, dead.
(Of course, my grandmother was telling this tale…)
Pickard draws nearer, disgusted at the sight, but curious, as a medical man would be, at this intersection of life, death, and disfigurement. He sees that the man isn’t black at all. He recognizes mercurochrome when he sees it, dripping off the face of the young man.
The young white man.
The man who is his son.
He can bear no more—the noise, the cries, the desperation all drive him to flee. But not without his son. He tries to lift his body, but any medical man would have known it was impossible.
Dead weight.
He’ll flee, but come back the next morning, after a very bad night of it. He’ll grease the palm of the Confederate soldier who has the one thing in life that matters to him. He’ll even be civil, though it kills him. And he’ll take that long carriage or train ride back. His son, now in a plain wooden coffin—and how that materialized is another story—is lying several train cars away.
Pickard made it back to Lena, Illinois, to his fire-eating abolitionist wife. He has another child with his dragon-wife and then leaves, to go find gold.
WHAT!
You do know, Doctor, that this is a joke in our times. The guy who runs out for cigarettes, and come right back…
…20 years later!
Dude, the Gold Rush was in 1849, which is why (I think) there’s a football team somewhere out there called the ‘49ers. You took off in the late 1860’s. Oh, and your obituary ratted you out, since you died at your daughter’s house, not sitting around the campfire, where the bucket awaits for you to kick. And you had been doctoring there up until 3 years before your respectable death, you who admired Christian principles unto the day you died.
Anyway, I have no time for you, my Ancestors. No time even to save this country I love. No time to save the country from its worst enemy, which is us. “Us” is going to have to wait, in line with the Ancestors.
Lady’s birthday is next week.
And I gotta make a chapbook.
Here’s the textblock below.
Desperately Seeking Janet
“The problem I’m having,” I told Lady, “is that we’ve lost the art of recuperation. In fact, I wonder if we’ve even lost the art of sickness. It used to be an honorable estate, just like marriage, but now it’s stigmatized. You used to be able to be a sickly person, a person who enjoyed—in every sense—ill health. Look at Florence Nightingale: she got done with the Crimean War at a relatively young age, came home, went to bed, and never got up again. True, from her sick bed she did a great deal—invent modern nursing, pioneer statistics in health sciences, even try to reform the War Office. But she did it all as an invalid, which is absolutely what I want to be at the moment.”
“What,” cried Lady, “not possible. Your spot is at the last red table before the shrine to Clara Lair. You can’t be an invalid!”
“There’s no transition,” I told her. “I went from being at imminent danger of paralysis to being, seemingly, out of the woods. And am I grateful? Yes, but I long, somehow, for a lingering recovery. And I definitely wish I had been more demanding, a la Florence. She made everybody’s life impossible by being the constant martyr. How everyone pressed her, a poor frail woman forced by cruel fate to face insuperable odds! Yes, I should have had all you people around, and put you to work! My pillow! How can you expect me to rest, let alone recover, when my pillow is as hard as a rock! Janet! Fluff the pillow at once, Janet!”
“Who’s Janet?”
“You are,” I told Lady, “since all chauffeurs are named James, and all ladies’ maids are named Janet. And as Janet, you would have been completely at my beck and call. Janet! Janet! I must have my tea! At once, and see that it isn’t stone cold as it was yesterday! Ah, how all of you vex me, try me, a poor cripple barely able to raise his head above the pillow, and all of you—hale and able bodied—doing nothing but vex me! I suffer, I suffer, how greatly do I suffer!”
“Marc?”
“Yes, you, Janet—you are the very worst of the lot! How you loll about, wagging your tongue at any passerby, throwing yourself at the butcher’s boy and the postal clerk, when you know, Janet, you know that I lie in agony, virtually having crossed the vale and into the arms of our savior, and do you care? Not a whit! Ah, fie, Janet.”
“Fie, Marc?”
“Fie indeed,” I told her, “and I’ve always wanted to use that word. Anyway, the point is that someone—if not a league of someones—should have been lingering around my bed, anxiously pressing cooling handkerchiefs to my fevered brow….”
“But you fell, Marc, you didn’t have a fever….”
“If I am in bed,” I scolded her, “I have by definition a fevered brow. Every invalid knows that. So first you refuse to be Janet, and now you completely ignore my fevered brow, which may in fact trigger—I fear it greatly—a reverse. And nothing, as you know, could be worse than a reverse!”
“You mean a relapse?”
“I have no idea what a relapse is,” I told her, “but a reverse would call for the gravest of measures. Janet, summon the doctor—the doctor must attend me at once, ere I perish!”
“But how do I know…”
“Curse the girl! Haven’t I told her that I am having a reverse? Janet, fetch the doctor, and then have the goodness to summon the solicitor, and then the vicar or the curate, whichever it is who abides in the village and attends to those soon to leave this vale of tears!”
“But Marc….”
“No, Janet, another morn I shall not see, and may it rest on your shoulders, Janet—you, who met my love with insolence; You, who closed your ears to my feeble pleas for succor; You who closed your eyes even as I grew pale, and lingered facing the grim visage of death itself. Yes, Janet, you vexing creature, on your head shall rest the death of one who loved too much, and was cast a base coin by all who knew her!”
“Her, Marc? Don’t you mean ‘him?’”
“I shall not be gainsaid,” I cried. “Do not try me with trifles, I so soon to cross the bar, to meet my maker face to face….”
“Hey, Tennyson,” said Lady, “I know that one! ‘And I hope to meet my maker face to face….’”
“You really made a hash of it, you know,” I told her. “You were completely useless as Janet. And you know what? There was absolutely no Janetry anywhere on the horizon, all those months when I suffered alone and unattended, cruelly cast off from an uncaring world….”
“Well, you could have called….”
“No, I was thrust onto the dust heap,” I told her. “When the story of my life is writ…”
“You mean written….”
“IS WRIT,” I told her. “And I certainly know what I mean. No, the stones themselves will shed passels of tears….”
“Passels?”
“Passels—and don’t ask me what they are, or send me searching through Google to find out. If I tell you the stones themselves…”
“Fie, Marc,” said Lady, getting up from the seat she had never sat in (which made it easy to vacate, and anybody can see that!) “Fie, Marc, this post has been a complete waste of time! No information, no narrative, just a lot of tomfoolery, and I won’t be called Janet!”
She flounces out the door.
You see how cruelly I am used?
