OLD RATTLER
SHE WAS A city woman, and she looked too old to want to get pregnant, so I reckoned she had hate in her heart.
That’s mostly the only reasons I ever see city folks: babies and meanness. Country people come to me right along, though, for poultices and tonics for the rheumatism, to go dowsing for well water on their land, or to help them find what’s lost, and such like, but them city folks from Knoxville, and Johnson City, and from Asheville, over in North Carolina-the skinny ones with their fancy colorless cars, talking all educated, slick as goose grease-they don’t hold with home remedies or the Sight. Superstition, they call it. Unless you label your potions “macrobiotic,” or “holistic,” and package them up fancy for the customers in earth-tone clay jars, or call your visions “channeling.”
Shoot, I know what city folks are like. I coulda been rich if I’d had the stomach for it. But I didn’t care to cater to their notions, or to have to listen to their self-centered whining, when a city doctor could see to their needs by charging more and taking longer. I say, let him. They don’t need me so bad nohow. They’d rather pay a hundred dollars to some fool boy doctor who’s likely guessing about what ails them. Of course, they got insurance to cover it, which country people mostly don’t-diem as makes do with me, anyhow.
“That old Rattler,” city people say. “Holed up in that filthy old shanty up a dirt road. Wearing those ragged overalls. Living on Pepsis and Twinkies. What does he know about doctoring?”
And I smile and let ’em think that, because when they are desperate enough, and they have nowhere else to turn, they’ll be along to see me, same as the country people. Meanwhile, I go right on helping the halt and the blind who have no one else to turn to. For I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the Lord. Jeremiah 30. What do I know? A lot. I can tell more from looking at a person’s fingernails, smelling their breath, and looking at the whites of their eyes than the doctoring tribe in Knoxville can tell with their high-priced X rays and such. And sometimes I can pray the sickness out of them and sometimes I can’t. If I can’t, I don’t charge for it-you show me a city doctor that will make you that promise.
The first thing I do is, I look at the patient, before I even listen to a word. I look at the way they walk, the set of the jaw, whether they look straight ahead or down at the ground, like they was waiting to crawl into it. I could tell right much from looking at the city woman-what she had wrong with her wasn’t no praying matter.
She parked her colorless cracker box of a car on the gravel patch by the spring, and she stood squinting up through the sunshine at my corrugated tin shanty (I know it’s a shanty, but it’s paid for. Think on that awhile). She looked doubtful at first-that was her common sense trying to talk her out of taking her troubles to some backwoods witch doctor. But then her eyes narrowed, and her jaw set, and her lips tightened into a long, thin line, and I could tell that she was thinking on whatever it was that hurt her so bad that she was willing to resort to me. I got out a new milk jug of my comfrey and chamomile tea and two Dixie cups, and went out on the porch to meet her.
“Come on up!” I called out to her, smiling and waving most friendly-like. A lot of people say that rural mountain folks don’t take kindly to strangers, but that’s mainly if they don’t know what you’ve come about, and it makes them anxious, not knowing if you’re a welfare snoop or a paint-your-house-with-whitewash con man, or the law. I knew what this stranger had come about, though, so I didn’t mind her at all. She was as harmless as a buckshot doe, and hurting just as bad, I reckoned. Only she didn’t know she was hurting. She thought she was just angry.
If she could have kept her eyes young and her neck smooth, she would have looked thirty-two, even close-up, but as it was, she looked like a prosperous, well-maintained forty-four-year-old, who could use less coffee and more sleep. She was slender, with natural-like brownish hair-though I knew better-wearing a khaki skirt and a navy top and a silver necklace with a crystal pendant, which she might have believed was a talisman. There’s no telling what city people will believe. But she smiled at me, a little nervous, and asked if I had time to talk to her. That pleased me. When people are taken up with their own troubles, they seldom worry about anybody else’s convenience.
“Sit down,” I said, smiling to put her at ease. “Time runs slow on the mountain. Why don’t you have a swig of my herb tea, and rest a spell. That’s a rough road if you’re not used to it.”
She looked back at the dusty trail winding its way down the mountain. “It certainly is,” she said. “Somebody told me how to get here, but I was positive I’d got lost.”
I handed her the Dixie cup of herb tea, and made a point of sipping mine, so she’d know I wasn’t attempting to drug her into white slavery. They get fanciful, these college types. Must be all that reading they do. “If you’re looking for old Rattler, you found him,” I told her.
“I thought you must be.” She nodded. “Is your name really Rattler?”
“Not on my birth certificate, assuming I had one, but it’s done me for a raft of years now. It’s what I answer to. How about yourself?”
“My name is Evelyn Johnson.” She stumbled a little bit before she said Johnson. Just once I wish somebody would come here claiming to be a Robinson or an Evans. Those names are every bit as common as Jones, Johnson, and Smith, but nobody ever resorts to them. I guess they think I don’t know any better. But I didn’t bring it up, because she looked troubled enough, without me trying to find out who she really was, and why she was lying about it. Mostly people lie because they feel foolish coming to me at all, and they don’t want word to get back to town about it. I let it pass.
“This tea is good,” she said, looking surprised. “You made this?”
I smiled. “Cherokee recipe. I’d give it to you, but you couldn’t get the ingredients in town-not even at the health-food store.”
“Somebody told me that you were something of a miracle worker.” Her hands fluttered in her lap, because she was sounding silly to herself, but I didn’t look surprised, because I wasn’t. People have said that for a long time, and it’s nothing for me to get puffed up about, because it’s not my doing. It’s a gift.
“I can do things other folks can’t explain,” I told her. “That might be a few logs short of a miracle. But I can find water with a forked stick, and charm bees, and locate lost objects. There’s some sicknesses I can minister to. Not yours, though.”
Her eyes saucered, and she said, “I’m perfectly well, thank you.”
I just sat there looking at her, deadpan. I waited. She waited. Silence.
Finally, she turned a little pinker, and ducked her head. “All right,” she whispered, like it hurt. “I’m not perfectly well. I’m a nervous wreck. I guess I have to tell you about it.”
“That would be best, Evelyn,” I said.
“My daughter has been missing since July.” She opened her purse and took out a picture of a pretty young girl, soft brown hair like her mother’s, and young, happy eyes. “Her name is Amy. She was a freshman at East Tennessee State, and she went rafting with three of her friends on the Nolichucky. They all got separated by the current. When the other three met up farther downstream, they got out and went looking for Amy, but there was no trace of her. She hasn’t been seen since.”
“They dragged the river, I reckon.” Rock-studded mountain rivers are bad for keeping bodies snagged down where you can’t find them.