“For what it’s worth, I’m a fully qualified medical doctor. I’m sure my grandmother mentioned that to all of you at one point. I know there are a few … several of you who probably don’t want me seeing you on a professional basis, and I do understand why. But if there are any of you who’d let me examine you, I’d be glad to do so. And the fewer people Mrs. Chaisson has to see, the sooner she’ll get home to her … family. So I’ll be in the kitchen. If you’re not still holding a grudge against me, I’ll be glad to see you. Actually, I’ll be glad to see you even if you are still holding a grudge. Either way …” He shrugged, then stepped back inside and immediately looked at Mellette, who was standing near the room divider, smiling.
“Seriously?” she said. “That’s how you tell people you’re open for business? It sounded more like a challenge than an invitation. You know, come stand in my line, if you dare.”
“Best I can do. If the folks here want to see me, now they know they can. And if they don’t, I’ll be in the kitchen, cooking up a pot of gumbo.” Fixing gumbo, practicing medicine, all in the same room. What had he been thinking?
“But that’s not what Eula had me taking,” Miss Willie Bascomb scolded. “And you should know better than to give me the wrong thing, young man. Do you think I’m too old to see what you’re trying to do to me, switching off my medicine the way you are? It’s shameful. Just shameful!” She was a gray-haired lady with sharp eyes and an even sharper tongue.
“But it’s a simple anti-inflammatory for your arthritis,” Justin said. “The prescription’s easily filled at any pharmacy, and I can write you a script for ninety days so you won’t have to go to town for it very often.” Her knuckles were enlarged, fingers slightly bent into an outward curve. Nothing about Miss Willie had changed since he’d been a kid, and her condition seemed stable for the most part, but he didn’t want to prescribe an herbal potion when the market was full of great prescription drugs that could prevent further joint damage.
“But I don’t want me no prescription, Justin Aloysius. What your grandma gave me has worked well for as long as I can remember. Cures the aches, and that’s all I need.” She held up her crippled hands. “They haven’t gotten any worse in all this time, and it’s just plain foolish, wanting me to change my medicine when things are going well. Eula wouldn’t have allowed that.” She wagged a scolding forefinger at him. “And shame on you for trying.”
The only problem was Eula wasn’t here, and he couldn’t duplicate her herbal cures, which for Miss Willie’s condition was sassafras combined with prickly ash, cayenne and camphor, made into what his grandmother had called her rheumatism liniment. So in practical terms he was wasting his time with this patient because she wasn’t about to budge, just as he wasn’t. “Then I think we have a problem, because I can’t give you what my grandmother used to make. Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I don’t know how to make it.”
“Because you were off gallivanting in the big city when you should have been staying home, studying real medicine, young man!” Miss Willie sniffed indignantly. “I wanted to give you a chance for Eula’s sake. She talked so highly of you, said you were the best doctor there is. But she was wrong, and it would have killed her to see just how sorry you are.”
Talk about a bitter pill to swallow. “All I can do is recommend what my kind of medicine considers standard. It’s up to you whether or not you want to take it.”
“What I want to take is my leave, young man!” With that, Miss Willie slid off the kitchen stool, gathered up her patent-leather purse, which she stuffed into the crook of her arm, and her floral print scarf, which she didn’t bother putting on her head, and headed for the kitchen door. “You tell Mellette I want my usual. She’ll know how to fix it for me.”
Then she was gone. Miss Willie and all her one hundred pounds of acrimonious fire stormed out the back door, but not before she’d looked in the pot of gumbo and snorted again. “I don’t smell filé in there,” she said. “To make a good gumbo you’ve got to use filé powder, or do you have some fancy prescription for that, too?”
“Seems like sassafras is going to be your downfall today,” Mellette said, walking into the kitchen through the front door at the same time the back door slammed shut. She was referring to filé, a thickening powder made from dried sassafras leaves.
“She always was a tough old lady,” Justin replied, on his way to the kitchen cabinet to look for filé. “Who wants what she wants.”
“She swears by the liniment. Don’t think she’s going to change her mind about that, and at her age I guess that’s her right.”
“But I can’t give her the damned liniment.” He turned to look at her. “And as a registered nurse, I’m surprised you would.”
“When you hired me to come to Big Swamp to help your grandmother, what did you expect me to do? Dispense pills these people don’t want to take? That’s not what Eula wanted, not what she would have tolerated from me. So she taught me her ways and for the most part it works out.”
“So I’m paying you to practice my grandmother’s version of medicine? Because that’s not what I wanted.”
“What you wanted was to have me help her, which was what I did. On her terms, though. Not yours.”
“If I’d wanted someone to dispense more of what my grandmother dispensed, that’s who I would have hired. But I wanted a registered nurse, someone from the traditional side of medicine. Someone to take care of the people here the way traditional medicine dictates.”
“Then I expect you’ve been paying me under false pretenses because I’ve been taking care of these people just the way your grandmother did and, so far, nobody’s complaining.”
“You’re still doing that even now that she’s gone?”
“Especially now that she’s gone. They’re scared to death they’re going to have to give up the folk medicine they’ve trusted for decades, and I suppose if you have your way, that’s what’s going to happen. Which just adds to the list of reasons why they don’t like you.”
He pulled a tin marked filé from the cabinet and measured out a scant spoonful for the gumbo.
“Twice that much,” she prompted him.
“You’re a chef, as well?”
“I know how your grandmother fixed gumbo, and I’m assuming you’re trying to copy that since it’s probably the best gumbo I’ve had anywhere.”
He shook his head, not sure if he should be angry or frustrated. Or both. “So tell me, how am I supposed to treat Miss Willie when she won’t take a traditional anti-inflammatory?”
“You give her what she wants, then if you insist on one of the regular drugs, maybe you can prescribe it after she’s come to trust you.”
“Which will be when hell freezes over,” he snapped.
“Probably. But she’s reasonable. All the people here are reasonable, which is why, when malaria hit, they took quinine—”
“Quinine?” he interrupted. “Isn’t that pretty oldschool treatment for malaria?”
“Been around for hundreds of years, but it’s cheap, and it works. And it’s what I was able to get the pharmaceutical companies to donate to me.”
“Seriously?”
She nodded. “That’s the way it works here, Justin. For the most part we get donated drugs, prescriptions that have gone over the expiration date but are still good, partial prescriptions that haven’t all been taken. And quinine worked just fine for us. But I used it along with Eula’s prescribed water and orange juice fast, along with warm-water cleanses. It all worked together,