The Mountain Doctor

I

June, 1926
THIS spring we have had troublous days in the mountains. One Sunday when there was no church service the men went off to a shooting match up Possum Fork, a setting for moonshine. Aunt Nancy begged her son, Mose Martin, not to go, but he gayly waved back, singing out that he would be all right and would be home again before nightfall.

Some of the men got drunk, and one of them, Hamp Parry, began to shoot at the mules, killing one and wounding others. When Mose Martin said to him, ‘Now don’t make trouble. Let’s stick to our shootin’ match and have our fun,’ Hamp up and shot Mose through the chest; and as Mose fell he fired at Hamp. How badly injured Hamp was no one knew, but word came that Mose was dead; so I hurried to Phronie, his wife, in her little cabin way down in the bottom.

Soon her brothers appeared, and Phronie moaned, ‘He’s dead, he’s dead!’

‘No, he ain’t ’ quietly said Ko Hensley. ‘He’s alive and talkin’, and wants the doctor.’

Ko hurried back, while I clambered up the hill, snatched up my bags, and, since Billy was already saddled, jumped on his back and started off. Others followed, and Mose’s mother ran mutely to her cabin, hopped on her mule bareback, and brought up the rear. Billy, conscious of trouble, sped along until some of those behind called out to go more slowly, but Aunt Nancy on her big mule urged us to lose no time.

Three miles up Big Birch we saw coming toward us a stretcher borne by six men, with Ko Hensley riding ahead. ‘He’s dead,’ said Ko. It was for me to go back and tell Phronie that all was over, but my return before the others was omen enough to the little widow, whose four children clung to her, sobbing but not quite understanding.

At the funeral the people poured in from all the coves and heads of ‘hollers’ and creeks for miles around, for Mose was ‘a good fellar.’ They laid him to rest in the lonely little burying ground next to us.

That day the deputy sheriff, one of our men, led a posse up Big Birch to arrest Hamp Parry. They were met by Hamp’s four brothers lined up in front of the cabin with leveled Winchesters. Thereupon the posse retired, but that night three riders were dispatched to the county seat to consult the High Sheriff, and all the trails were guarded. It was suspected that Parry was still living, but all sorts of stories were in the air. I myself hoped he was dead, so that further bloodshed might be avoided.

The riders returned armed with authority and a machine gun; they were deputized to take Hamp dead or alive, but were instructed not to let any Martin kin assist them. Meanwhile they asked me to be ready for emergencies. At dawn they sent Silas March, a relative of Hamp, to advise him to surrender. Silas did not return, and the men were still waiting for him when Parry’s sister came and told them that, her brothers and Silas had taken Hamp on a stretcher down a back trail to the hospital at the county seat, thirty miles away, where he would surrender.

Now the slogan is, ‘With Mose Martin dead, Hamp Parry cannot live.’ In these mountains a wrong is never forgotten — nor is a good turn, either!

II

Recently we have had ‘a big tide,’ as the onrush of tremendously swollen creeks is called. It rained all one night, and again in torrents the next day. I had gone out on foot upon a call when a man hurried ‘to notify me to be scairt, for the creeks are risin’ sharp.’

I almost reeled as I crossed the footbridge; usually it stands six feet above the creek, but now it was almost level with the seething yellow waters. Greasy was certainly on a rampage, having risen with incredible rapidity. People had to drive their animals up on the mountain side for safety. Five hundred huge logs, loosed from their moorings, swept down with the raging flood, along with trees, sledges, and pigs; and finally, as we were watching, a great hemlock plunged, roots foremost, into the stream and headed for the footbridge—bang, rip! Then everything swung into the current and was whirled and churned onward toward the Kentucky River.

Poor Liz Craig’s garden in the bottom lands, upon which she had labored with steady devotion, was utterly denuded; nothing was left of it but a mass of stones, the earth being all washed away. Landslides blocked the only exit from our territory, and we were completely bottled up here until the men could dig out a road,

III

It is difficult to give an adequate conception of our remoteness and isolation. With the exception of a settlement or ‘foundation’ worker, a very occasional drummer, and a man who buys up live stock, no one from the outside world ever penetrates this ‘land of beyond ’ — except bootleggers. To understand the mental attitude of the mountain people, one has to imagine what it has meant to be thus marooned for one hundred and fifty years.

The logging company will soon invade this region; its men are already blazing a way for the laying of their track. Then it will be good-bye to these grand old virgin trees. I shall hate particularly to see one great oak go; I call it Jean Valjean.

Part of our work here consists of trying to convert the people to a public health programme. We hold mothers’ meetings, give physical examinations and inoculations, treat hookworm cases, preach the need of screens to keep out the myriads of flies, and urge the installation of outhouses, of which only a very few exist, here and there. Until sanitation can be achieved, hookworm and infectious diseases will continue to sap the vitality of the people.

Just now, typhoid is taking its toll. One typhoid patient lives eight miles away, but he is so solicitous, because of the death of a companion who had worked with him in the logging, that I have made frequent trips to see him. His little wife is a marvel for carrying out directions. Once, after I had told him that he could have something more to eat and was starting out to mount my horse, he called frantically after me, ‘Doc, doc — if you don’t tell my ole woman yourself, she’ll never give it to me!’

I find that most of the people are ready for preventive serum. This is due, I believe, to the experience of those who went out to the war. Recently the nurse and I, returning from a day’s work of inoculations, were halted by a man who wanted us to go and see his little boy. We accompanied him to an almost impossible place, so steep and muddy and slippery that we had to dismount and walk. The child had diphtheria, and this was the third day of his illness. He was a sweet little fellow, rousing even then to tweak his father’s ears in play; but there was very little I could do for him, and he died that evening. It is the first case of diphtheria I have heard of in the mountains. The child’s death will serve, I think, to overcome any further objections to toxin antitoxin.

There is a man midwife here in the mountains. He took to his job twentysix years ago when he was a young married man, and has ‘kotched babies’ ever since. Then there is old Granny Bevin, who has had sixty years of ‘bringin’ babies,’ and says she has never lost a woman. It is needless to add that the ways of both pass understanding. We are gradually introducing prenatal examinations and puerperal care, bringing comfort and better results to the patients and giving the babies the right start.

One very good thing is that every mountain mother nurses her baby. In consequence, I have found that the mortality of young infants is not high. The real trouble begins when the babies are fed all sorts of things which they should not have, and this practice is so general that I am surprised at the survival of so many fittest. There is a superstition that every baby must have hives before it is ten days old. I wonder what is done to bring them on; perhaps it is the ‘leetle grain’ of corn liquor that is given to the babies ‘for their good.’

IV

Billy is always quick to solve his own problems in his own way, and the other day he gave me a start. He was going briskly along a narrow trail that skirted the mountain with a deep ravine on one side when, suddenly, he became frightened at I don’t know what and leaped a fence with me on his back. There we were inside, the ledge outside, and the trail so narrow that I feared to risk Billy’s jumping back.

It was a snake fence, every topmost rail nailed in place. I heard chopping on the mountain side, so I blew my whistle. A woman who had been gathering firewood came to my call, knocked off the upper rail with her axe, and lowered the others, and we then made an ignominious exit.

V

March, 1927
Over three months ago a man came to me to say that Cora Craig’s ‘least one’ had been ‘burnt up,’ and that I had better go to her at once. The man was Bill Boggins, of whom Granny Howard says, ‘He’s the worst man in the mountains — won’t stop at nothin’.’ In spite of his reputation, I had noticed that Bill was always the one to do another a good turn; so, with my inherent trust in the mountain man, I put fear aside and went with ‘the worst man in the mountains’ out into the dark night.

At that time Billy was out of commission, needing a shoe, so I borrowed Bess, the nurse’s horse, and Bill rode ahead with his carbide light held at just the right angle to shine on my path. I found the child fearfully burned. After I had done what I could for it, Bill offered to take me back; but when I told him I would stay with the baby he said he would go for the child’s father, who was logging over on Lonesome Creek. This meant a ten-hour trip, but Bill seemed to think nothing of that when it was a question of helping others.

Contrary to Granny Howard’s expectations, it was the next day, on my return from this visit, that bad luck overtook me. Bess was going down a hill when she stumbled upon a rock, falling and hurling me straight over her head so that I struck almost squarely on my face. I remember the sensation of hurtling through the air, and I heard a crash — then there was a blank as I lay there unconscious. A mountain woman who was riding ahead of me says that she turned and was glued to her mule with fright as she saw Bess scrambling up and almost bringing her feet down upon me.

When I came to, the mountain woman was standing over me. I had an awful sense of something wrong, and, putting my hand to my nose, I found that it was crunched and bleeding terribly. As I lay there I got hold of the crackling bones, straightened them out as best I could, and poked up some gauze. Though faint from bleeding, there was nothing for it but to remount and ride the four miles home. The next day, swollen beyond recognition, I rode the thirteen miles to the railroad and took the night train for Louisville, where I put myself in the hands of a skilled specialist. He said I could be thankful my malar bones were not smashed; a stiff hat had saved me.

After a week I started back with a warning not to take cold, but in two days my throat began to feel sore, and when I asked for a mirror, what was my dismay to see a typical diphtheria infection! I had been intending to exchange my antitoxin, for it had reached its age limit; now there was nothing to do but send a messenger to take the night train for the county seat, where he could get fresh antitoxin and culture tubes. Returning, he managed to catch a ride on a freight train to the foot of Pine Mountain, from whence he walked over and reached me before sunup. I jabbed in the initial dose and then hurried the culture tubes back to the laboratory — to receive the diagnosis, ‘positive.’

Some weeks later, when I started north for convalescence, it was over a mountain so icy that one man had to brace his shoulder against the lurching mule while another held me on. All’s well, however, that ends well, and here I am in the North, itching to get back into the mountains.

VI

Summer, 1927
I returned in late March. The slow coming on of spring in this high country is entrancing, with the tan fuzz of the birch, the white ‘sarvice’ bloom, redbud intermingled with dogwood, the flame of azalea, and the new graygreen tips of the hemlocks waving in the wind. Imagine an entire mountain side carpeted with blue ‘woolen breeches’ against the hazy blue of the more distant Cumberland ridges, and you have the background of this tapestry that Nature spread out before me.

The mountains in this region are not over three thousand feet high, but they are steep beyond belief, and many are unclimbable. They come to sharp ridges on top, only wide enough for man and beast, and often the valleys are simply creek beds or mere trails. At every turn on a main creek the vista is a V, with a mountain contour filling in the gap. On the side trails there is no vista at all — just the forest growth and the rough outlines of crag and cliff; only when the leaves fall off does one see to advantage the vast rock formations.

In May we planned a five-day trip into the mountains beyond us. Aunt Curdie, a frail little woman of eightytwo who could boast of ninetyfive grandchildren and thirty-six greatgrandchildren at the last count, said that she would like to go with us the first thirty-three miles to Wooton, to visit a brother whom she had not seen for many years. She made a new black sunbonnet, and ‘packed her poke’ several days in advance. Because of her pride, she said, she did not want to ride a poor and ornery nag with his bones sticking out, so a suitable horse was secured for her.

Two days before we were to start, I was called to an accident up Big Birch. I had almost reached my destination when Aunt Curdie met me, having come to warn me not to ride Billy any farther because there was blasting ahead. She spent the rest of the day doing chores, and that night she died. There was a great gathering of the clan. They buried her high up on her own mountain side, where lay her kin.

Her death took a good deal of the spirit out of our trip, but we held to our plans and set off laden with saddlebags and oats for our horses. Somehow we made a wrong turning, but did not know it until we were met by a panting boy who had seen us bound straight for the quicksands and had taken a short cut to head us off. We were to spend that night at the home of a Johns Hopkins physician thirty-five miles away — the nearest doctor to us. He has his own settlement and practice among the mountaineers, and is doing a fine work. He and his wife had told the people that if they saw us coming there would be a dance that night — which explained the heads poked out of cabins here and there as we passed.

And there was a dance! A ‘caller’ announced the intricate figures of the running-set — ‘Shoot the Owl,’ ‘Bird in the Cage,’ ‘ Killiecrankie,’ and others. The running-set is the sole survival of an ancient dance brought to this country in the eighteenth century. It is a dance of great beauty and wildness, executed with swiftness, and yet so smoothly that there is never any cessation of rhythm, sustained by a clap of the hand and a glide, sometimes a shuffle of the feet, and on occasions accompanied by a fiddle. The fiddler plays his instrument across his knees, while someone beats time with wooden sticks at the ends of the strings.

As we went on our way the next morning we had to cross a branch of the Kentucky River. We were told that we could not ford it for some miles on account of the flood, but should have to cross a mountain and come out farther up. This we did, but the waters were high even so. I happened to be in the lead and had started to ford the stream when, to my horror, the water came over my saddle. It happened so quickly that I had no time to turn, and before I knew it I was almost completely immersed, while of Billy nothing was visible but his head, which he held as high as he could.

Fearing that Billy would be unable to swim, weighted down as he was with me and the saddlebags, I slipped my feet out of the stirrups ready to try my own fate at swimming with my clothes on; but Billy, his eyes bulging with fright, held his footing and labored on until he gained shallower water. Meanwhile some men ran shouting from a cabin up on the bank and pointed out a safer crossing to my friends behind. It was quite the narrowest escape I have had in the mountains. I had a time of it getting dry, for all my extra supply of clothing was soaked.

That night I slept like the dead. It seemed to me that I had just dropped off when one of my friends shook me, saying, ‘It is half past three, and they say breakfast is ready.’ We took a ‘soon’ start that day!

VII

By the time summer arrived I felt that I needed a rest, so I made arrangements to go north for a vacation. The night before I left, the nurse and I had just finished a confinement case and I had gone out to mount Billy when I saw a light flashing in rapid zigzags through the trees. It was a signal calling us to a second case six miles away. ‘Honest?’ said the nurse, when I went in to tell her. At 3 A.M., while we were still with this second case, a call came for a third, five miles in the other direction. The nurse went off to that while I remained with the other.

They say in the mountains that the babies heard I was leaving!

A short time before I went away I had given great joy to bright-eyed little Alafair, aged six, by bestowing upon her a doll with real hair that said ‘ Ma-ma ’ and went to sleep — its name was Polly. A few days later when I chanced to ride by, I found Alafair sitting on a log sobbing her eyes out, while several children stood about, gazing at her in unspeakable sympathy.

‘What’s the matter?’ I called out.

‘Oh,’ said one of her companions, ‘Polly’s gone.’

It seemed that Alafair had watched the nurse bathe the baby, and, wishing to emulate her example, she had even tried to improve upon it and had put the doll in hot water and ducked its head under — with tragic results for Polly. Alas for the dangers of a little learning.

Since I was to pass where she lived on my way to the train, I placed another doll in my saddlebag, and when I arrived at the cabin I asked her father to lift the child and let her peek into the bag. She darted one look of rapture at Polly number two, and then at me. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘pull her out’ — which she did with the best will in the world.

On this trip out, a storm was threatening, and, fearing that it would break, I tied to the saddle my traveling hat done up in an oilskin bag. I really am careful about tying things on securely, but somehow it slipped off, and I had to travel to New York hatless.

VIII

January, 1028
The usual mountain cabin is picturesque, with lovely lines and a graceful curve of the handmade shingle roof. Most of the cabins are built of faced logs with notched ends, the space between the logs being chinked with mud. In a rough sort of way they reflect the family history of their occupants. At first they consist of a single room with a chimney at one end; then a lean-to kitchen is put up behind; and as the family grows a second room is added, and sometimes a porch in front. On the large creeks here and there one will find a cabin with a window, but in the remote regions they have no windows at all, and more than once, in broad day, I have had to search for my patient with a flash light. Plenty of air comes in through the open chinks and the wide space between the roof and sides, and the door always stands open.

Inside, the cabins are really very cosy, with the glow of the open fire and the deep shadows. On each side of the fireplace hang dried gourds, strings of red peppers and ‘shucky’ beans, sometimes twisted tobacco or ginseng roots. There are always from two to four beds in a room, and usually a homemade chest and low, split-bottom chairs. I have been in some of these mountain homes so poor as to have no chairs, and in one where sixteen children were reared to adult life with no cooking facilities beyond the open fire. Then again, there are a few very old cabins that are really spacious with their great beamed rooms. Many are papered with leaves from magazines and old newspapers, which are in constant demand from us for this purpose.

In every cabin the first thing to catch the eye as one enters is a muzzleloading rifle or a modern Winchester, or both. They rest in forked sticks nailed near the door, ready for any occasion. Sometimes the old rifles are scarred with notches, which represent so many killings. Less sinister is the banjo or fiddle, also hung on the wall in the same fashion.

Outside are the bee gums and the big iron kettle for washing, which is constantly in use. The yard is carefully swept, and is surrounded by a ‘picketing’ fence to keep out the roaming, aggressive razorback hogs. Within this enclosure are beds of ‘pretties.’

The chimneys are so large that most of the heat goes up them. This is true of our own; and when the wind blows ‘contrary,’ we are covered with soot and dust in a twinkling. If this settles upon our food, we have to blow off what we can and ignore the rest. Large chimneys, however, have a secondary use: in one such a mother hid her son while the deputy sheriff was looking for him. The spaces between logs in our cabin need rechinking. The lizards are able to dart freely in and out, and on one occasion I was startled by a snake wriggling along a side log. But why mind it? ‘It ain’t pizenous,’ said Sue.

Children here do not seem to play games. They simply romp, fling rocks, and begin at any age to ride nags. Once I came across a six-year-old boy on a donkey that was standing stockstill in the middle of the creek. The child was wailing at the top of his lungs. ‘What’s the matter?’ I shouted. ‘The dad-burn critter won’t go. ’Torter be killed!’ he yelled. I went to his rescue and got the beast started. Since then the boy and I have been great friends, and he stones off the loose mules to keep them from following me.

Love me, love my horse. I must not write too much about Billy, but I shall have to mention how he cranes his beautiful neck and, giving a snort, tosses his head indignantly if I chance to be late with his morning rations. He is always willing to leave his oats, however, for an emergency call; sensing the necessity, he speeds on the outward trip, but uses his prerogative of duty performed to snatch a few oak leaves on the return. In snake season I have to keep my eyes open for rattlers and copperheads as I ride along the narrow ridges. When a copperhead lay in the trail I forced myself to go on, letting Billy jump over it; but one time when I came suddenly upon a bull pawing the earth, looking at me with bloodshot eyes and bellowing with lowered head, I turned tail — and in our hurried retreat Billy leaped over a huge sow nursing six piglets.

IX

In September I was hastily summoned to attend my first snake-bite patient. A woman had been milking a cow when a snake bit her hand. Fortunately it was not a rattler, but I found her arm badly swollen and painful, and her heart working wildly.

After treating her, I started back, and since I had sixteen miles to go I thought I would eat my lunch as I rode. I returned by what I supposed would be a shorter way, through God-Forsook Gap, and got into a narrow valley — a trough so dense and mysterious and with such overhanging cliffs that I could appreciate the words of Daniel Boone, ‘so wild and horrid that it is impossible to view them without terror.’ Billy seemed to share my feelings, for he carried me flying past Boogerman’s Creek. It was too gruesome to eat my sandwiches, and later, on a less fearsome trail, I found them all in crumbs, and my canteen of water was exhausted.

Darkness set in, but there was a sickle moon; and in a little while the sky was studded with stars that seemed very near at hand as they shone through the single row of trees on the tops of the ridges. About nine o’clock I saw the gleam of firelight through a cabin door, and got off my horse to ask for a drink of milk. The man who came to the door said that his cow had died a few days before; but he added, ‘You look peekid. I reckon you better stay the night.’ After being regaled with corn bread and beans and coffee, I took off my shoes and gratefully lay down in the bed with two members of the family. It was a corn-husk mattress with a feather bed over it, and oh, so comfortable!

Few people in the mountains undress for the night — a custom dictated partly, I suppose, by modesty, for men, women, and children all sleep in the same room. Often the only light in a cabin comes from the glow of the fire, although sometimes there is a carbide light or a lamp without a chimney.

X

In the fall of the year everybody lends a hand at ‘foddering’ — which means stripping the leaves from the cornstalks to make roughage for the cows. The stalks are left standing, with their one ear of corn on each to get well dried and later to be gathered and served ‘on the cob’ to the stock. (In the winter, nags in the mountains have no oats.) After the foddering is over, a corn field looks like an army of sentinels by day and ‘a grist of goblins’ by moonlight.

When the crops are gathered and the creeks are low, then comes the time for funeralizing.’ A preacher is not always available at the time of death, so that funerals are held long afterward, — years, perhaps, — whenever the finances of the family are equal to the occasion. Usually several preachers are secured, and the funeral is often for several members of the family at once.

We attended one such funeral for an old man who had been dead eight years and a younger woman. As we rode up, many horses and mules were tethered here and there. The people were assembled on the hillside beyond the cabin, some of them sitting on planks laid across logs, the immediate kin in front, while others sat on the ground behind. During the services, which lasted for hours, the men would wander off for a smoke or a drink, while the children grew restless and skipped in and out; but those who remained seated gave their unwavering attention. After expounding hard doctrines, the preachers held forth upon the virtues and possible damnation of the deceased, but always with sympathy and understanding.

When the first preacher arose, he asserted that nobody would get to Heaven unless he went the regular way through the——church. Felix S., who sat in front of one of my friends, was much disturbed by this, and whispered, ‘Uncle Cal did not belong to any church.’ Then Rachel spoke to him, and, reassured, he whispered back not to be uneasy, for Uncle Enos would preach next, and he was equal to any occasion; he would get Uncle Cal into Heaven all right.

And Uncle Enos did. He assured them that Uncle Cal was the best man that had ever lived in the mountains; that he had been good to everyone; that he had housed the homeless, and had given a hand to the widows and orphans. If anybody came to spend the night, he had cared for the animals just as he did for the people, and had never turned away anyone who needed help. He would surely go to Heaven. ‘But,’ he added, ‘if Uncle Cal had belonged to any of those other churches, he would probably not get through.’

One day just before Christmas we had several calls to make, and the nurse and I started out together. Everything was covered with ice, so that the earth was like grease. As we were crossing our second mountain, along a descending ridge, we found the trail obstructed by a huge fallen chestnut, and there was nothing to do but go around it straight down the steep slope to the ravine below. I started ahead, leading Billy, but lost my footing and began to slide, with the horse coasting after me. ‘Look out!’ shouted the nurse. ‘Billy will kill you!’ Some how I managed to grab a sapling and swerve off the course, while Billy shot past me and brought up in a thicket of laurel fifty feet below. No coaxing could dislodge him, — he had had enough, — so down I crept to the bottom, far below, and to the cabin which was my destination, where a man came out to help us. Used to precipitous places, he got Billy down, and then the nurse’s horse, she sliding after.

At the cabin, which consisted of one room, we found a little girl ill with pneumonia. In the corner stood a big branch of holly, which served for a Christmas tree; it was beautiful, but, alas, was trimmed with cuts from a stray Sears-Roebuck catalogue and a stick dressed as a doll. I resolved that she should have a real doll as soon as I could get one to her.

We could not possibly return the same way we had come, but had to circuit the mountain. On the way a snowstorm set in. Under the shelter of some hemlocks we tied our horses, and built a fire to warm our feet and make some hot coffee (we carry a small outfit for just such emergencies). We ate our sandwiches with zest. The horses collected such balls of snow under their hoofs that it was easier for us to walk the rest of the way — seven miles through the storm. It is a great life!

(The final episodes of ‘ The Mountain Doctor’ will be published in the December issue)