“Forty-seven years ago, in a little village in the hills of Vairmant green and far away, there lived a woman, simple, humble, Godfearing, mild, like it might’ve been any one of the lovely companions and helpmeets I see before me right now in this good town — where I got to admit I a’n’t yet beheld a member of the tender sex that a’n’t lovely to behold.” (There were just two good-looking women in that whole expanse of landscape and I was sitting between them.) “That’s a fact, no flattery, gentlemen hark! Well, this gentle woman in Vairmant of whom I speak was bereavered of her good man in her middle years, and thereafter she devoted the remainder of a long and blessed life to the healing of the sick. Even her name was humble. Evangeline Amanda Spinkton was her name, and I want you should remember that name, for it’s a name you’ll come to bless with every breath you drawr. Some do say, and I believe it, that Mother Spinkton — ah yes, so a grateful world calls her now! — had in her veins the mystic Injun blood of Old Time. That’s as may be, but there’s no doubt at all the dear angels of the Lord guided her in her lifelong endeavor, her search after them essences of healing that the Lord in his infinite wisdom and mercy has placed obscurely in the simple yarbs that do dwell in the whispering woods or the sunkissed fields or along the gently murmuring streams—”
That gives you his style anyway. Pa never let anyone else handle the pitch for Mother Spinkton; even if he was down sick in bed and too mis’ble to live he’d r’ar up out of it to take care of that. He said he reverenced her too much to let any mere God-damn crumb-bum piddlebrained assistant lay a mortal hand on her sacred hide. He claimed also that he could taste and smell a crowd with a special knack nobody else possessed — except his grandfather of course, dead going on forty years — and this knack always told him right off whether to use gently murmuring streams or dark murmuring caverns. Either one might work all right — oh sure, it would work, he’d say, and spit over the footboard between the mules if he was driving, which he liked to do — it’d work, but the g.m.s. yucks are the common type, and the dark caverns type is different, that’s all, and it’s the mark of a real artist to be able to spot that difference and govern yourself accordingly. Long Tom Blaine used to give him an argument about it when the weather was right — Tom said yucks are yucks and that’s it.
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] 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?”