The Nettle Patch

AN ATLANTIC STORY

by CONRAD RICHTER

IT WAS Kinzie’s fault in the first place. He came home without Star and Boss. Oh, he heard their bells all right. They were in the big swamp beyond the nettle patch. He had the Covenhovens’ black and tan hound along. That swamp was a rich treasure place to a hound’s nose. He ran so far ahead you couldn’t see him. But when they went in after the cows, it sounded like something came for the dog through the brush. It made a monstrous racket. What it was, Kinzie didn’t know, but the hound popped out a-yelping and hid behind the boy.

Then it was that Kinzie reckoned he better come home and get the rifle.

“You let your hands off that rifle,” Sayward said. “Guerdon can go back with you. Why, that rifle’s twice bigger’n you are.”

“I kin handle it, Mam,” Guerdon promised.

“You mean you’d let Kinzie shoot his self with it. When he’s big enough he can have it.”

“Uncle Wyitt had it when he was ‘leven,” Guerdon threw at her, but he didn’t wait for an answer. It would do no good. She would never let Kinzie have it. Resolve was the only one she’d trust it to, for he was her favorite. Well, Guerdon reckoned, maybe he was just as well off. That rifle would be mighty heavy to tote all the way out there and back. He’d just as soon carry the corn cutter. Will Beagle had made it and he said you could lay an Indian’s guts on the ground with it.

Guerdon took the corn cutter down from its peg in the log barn and went out the far door, keeping the barn between him and his mam so she couldn’t see what he carried. She’d be liable to make him put even that back.

Once they got to where Kinzie heard the noise, it was thick with brush and dark as candle time. The vines in here had butts like trees. It had places you had to watch out or the quicksands would get you, and other places called prairies, where no butts grew, only grass and weeds. But if it had any heavy, thrashing beast in the swamp any more, it kept mighty still, now that he had the corn cutter. All Guerdon could hear was the sweet lonesome notes of the swamp robin and the faraway bells of Star and Boss. He and Kinzie had to go through the bull laurel to get near them. It was something to see in June, the flower bunches big as your head and waxy white in this dark place.

Now why wouldn’t those ornery cows come home? The flies were as bad in here as around the house. Besides, Sayward had them build a fire outside the house in fly time. The cows would stand in the smoke to get away from the pests, and when the smoke moved, they moved too. They had as much sense as a human. Some said that when cows didn’t come home, it meant a spell had been cast on them. Then they forgot they ever had a stable to stand in or a master to milk them.

Guerdon halfways believed that. He was on ahead now. They were out of the bull laurel and in the nettle patch. He was all sweated and those nettles burned like fire when they touched him. He bent down to crawl the path under and between two big stands of nettles. He should have looked where he set his hand. He heard Kinzie holler behind him but it was too late. He thought he felt a nettle sting the end of his second finger. When he looked down, there the “spotted sarpent” lay. Oh, never had he seen anything so fat and ugly. It almost made him puke to see it and think his hand had reached down by it. Now he had the mark of the beast burned on him, and already the poison was a-spreading in his veins.

“Did it git you, Guerdie?” Kinzie was hollering to him.

“Oh, it got me all right,” Guerdon said.

“I never heerd it rattle,” Kinzie called.

“It’s a black-spotted one,” Guerdon said. “Them kind never rattle.”

Savagely he finished off the curled-up beast with the corn chopper. Then he backed out to a clearer space where it had more light to look at his hand. He could see the ugly twin marks. Hell’s needles, they were, the devil’s thumbprint. Already he reckoned the finger looked a little different, a mite fuller and more yaller. It was starting to swell and the yaller was turning black already. After his finger, it would go to his hand. And after that, his arm. He wished he was home. His mam would know what to do, but he was a good ways from home. He couldn’t wait till he got back now.

He walked around with Kinzie following till he came to a log half as high as he was. It was stitched in moss, and green like it had been dipped in paint.

“Take this corn cutter, Kin,” he said. Kinzie took it wondering. Guerdon laid the suffering finger on the top of the log like the neck of a gypsy fowl on the chopping block. “Now you kin cut it off.”

Kinzie gravely studied the finger.

“Clear off?” he wanted to know.

“Just at the top knuckle. Not the hull finger.”

“It’ll bleed.”

“I want it to. That’s what’ll git the pizen out.”

“What if I miss it?”

“Go ahead. You kin whack at it agin.”

“I mought chop your hand off.”

“You won’t. You kin see better’n that.”

Kinzie stood stock-still. He squinted this way and that, lifted the corn cutter several times. But he didn’t bring it down.

“I ain’t good at this. I never done it before.”

“Give it here!” Guerdon cried, exasperated. “If you kain’t, I kin.”

He shut one eye and measured with the corn cutter. Then he drew it back and struck.

“Now give me a piece from my shirt,” he told him shortly. “You ought to be able to cut that off.”

2

WHATEVER tarnal thing it had in the swamp before, its spell must have been broken when Guerdon killed the snake, for the cows started to come in by themselves just then. They walked high with their bells a-ringing, but Guerdon just about made home. He came to the cabin with the skin tight as a drum over his arm, a fire in his eyes, and the world spinning around. His pappy asked stern what he had been doing. “Nothin’. I just got stung out in the nettle patch,”he said.

His mam took one look at him and put him to bed downstairs, where she could tend him. First she unwound that rag from his aching finger and washed it with warm water from the kettle. She washed his face and hands and the rest of the arm, too. Never did he expect his mam’s strong hand could be so easy. Not a word of scold for his finger or his shirt, and his pappy never quibbled over the whiskey she poured from his jug over the wound. She gave the boy to drink of it, too, and he didn’t know which burned the harder, his throat or the stump of his finger. He felt he could sleep a little now, but do you reckon she would let him? No, she raised up his head every few minutes and made him drink water from the gourd. He drank so much she had to hold him up on his unsteady knees while he made his water hot and scalding in the old cedar bucket.

“It’s good it wa’n’t my first finger, Mam, or I couldn’t fire off a rifle,” he told her, and she nodded grave, like she’d let him take out the rifle every day if ever he overed this.

It was a sealed book, he reckoned, whether you overed a snake bite or not. Only God Almighty knew. Soon as folks heard about it, they came by to see how he was making out. He could tell he was pretty sick the way they looked down on him. They all had some cure they wanted Sayward to try, and his mam listened ca’m to each how it was done.

Molly Weaver said the best was to take him out and dig a hole in the ground and then bury his hand and arm in it up to the shoulder. Mrs. Covenhoven said she would kill a skunk, and failing in that, a cat, and put its hide warm on the wound, the bloody side under. A black cat was best. And Will Beagle said it had a stone some places, and if you put that stone on where a snake or wolf bit you, the stone would draw the poison out. All you had to do when it stopped drawing was turn the stone around to some fresh place. He believed he could find such a stone in the woods around here if he went and looked for it, but Sayward said she would stick to her own receipt.

Nobody that dropped in that evening left right off. They all hung around, you could tell, waiting to see what happened. They wanted to carry the news home he was either better or a gone Josie. Even Colonel Suydam stayed. When he first stopped in with his cane he said he wanted to see this boy who had the cheek to chop off his own finger. Guerdon could hear their talk coming to him. Sometimes what came through his head made sense, and sometimes it didn’t.

Mary Harbison said when they first went up to the place they had now, many a day she looked out the door and saw a rattlesnake on the doorlog looking in. She said one time she gave little Salomy a bowl of milk from Zephon Brown’s and went out to work in the corn patch. Something made her go back and look in the cabin. There was her baby still a-setting on the floor drinking at the milk and a spotted rattlesnake lapping up what she spilled. She stood there not knowing what to do, for if she ran in, that snake might strike her baby. She waited till Salomy reached her spoon at the snake. Then she screeched before she thought, and the snake slid out through a hole in the chinking. She said she hated real bad to kill that snake. She felt sure it knew Salomy was just a babe and harmless, and she felt grateful to it for not hurting her.

Afterwards Mollie Weaver told about the woman she knew back in the old state. That woman’s baby always cried in the morning because she had no milk for it. One night her man got awake and found a snake in bed a-sucking at her breasts, and that’s why she never had any milk for her babe, because after her man killed the snake, she had plenty.

Now why did Colonel Suydam have to go and spoil that story! He said he didn’t believe it. But he could relate one he couldn’t explain. Back home somebody from the country fetched in a live rattlesnake with twelve buttons and the storekeeper put it in a hogshead where the boys had fun with it. First time the Colonel looked down at it, he didn’t know what came over him. He saw those snake eyes a-blazing up at him from the dark hogshead and it made him feel faint all over. For the first time in his life he thought he was going to swoon. He believed he would have fallen in the hogshead if somebody hadn’t helped him off. He judged that’s how rattlesnakes put a spell on birds and small beasts with their eyes. No, Jake contradicted him, they did it with their smell. He once smelled rattlesnakes after a rain, and that was the orneriest smell he ever did smell. A woman would have passed out.

Guerdon believed he felt a mite better. It had worse things in this world than to lay here with nothing to do but have folks talk and worry over you. He couldn’t get over how good his mam had been to him. She was so ca’m most times you thought she took you for granted and didn’t give a whoop for you any more. But let something real like stone-blindness or black plague come along and you found out how much she liked you. Why, she’d chop off her own finger if it would help him any, he could tell. It gave him a feeling for her like old times. Every once in a while her face hung over him, seeing how he was. The rest of the time he was satisfied to lay there with the sociable feel of folks sitting around the cabin and the sound of their talk flowing over him soft and easy like the soapy water his mam had washed him with.

3

IT WAS Jake Tench who kept saying that rattlesnake bite was worse for a young one than a growed person. When Guerdon’s mam and pap went to the door with Colonel Suydam, Jake came over and held Portius’s whiskey jug to the boy’s mouth. He told him he better drink if he wanted to live. “More,” he said while Guerdon choked and sputtered. “More,” he kept saying, till Sayward came in and took the jug away from him.

When Guerdon lay back, the room purred like a cat from the whiskey. After a while the ends of the cabin started to go up and down like they were loose, and the loft like a cradle rocking. That whiskey was fighting the poison now, he could tell, for he felt a heap better.

“My lights and livers! ” he yelled before he knew it, sitting bolt upright in his bed.

The company talk stopped short.

“ Yi-i-i-i-i-i! ” he shrieked like he was in pain.

“What’s wrong, Guerdon?” his Aunt Genny wanted to know.

“Hallelujah and salvation!” he howled at the top of his voice like he heard the circuit rider do. “Hallelujah and amen!”

The folks were staring.

“He’s gittin’ religion,” Mary Harbison said.

“I’m runnin’ out the devil!” he hollered. “Vamoose! as the Lord said to the white-whiskered man. Git out, you dod-rotted, long-haired, long-eared, longhorned devil!”

“Guerdon!” his mam said sharply.

He felt too good to stop now. He yipped and hooted. When he saw Huldah, Libby, and Kinzie looking down at him from the loft hole, it only set him on.

“I’m a peddler!” he shouted. “I’m come from Maytown. I’m a-tradin’ razors and breastpins. See this here fine whisker cutter! It’ll cut your meat and slice toenails! All you got to do is buy it and put it in your pocket ! You’ll wake up with a clean shave and a clean shirt in the mornin’. And five shillin’ in your pocket!”

“The pizen’s put him out of his mind,” Mrs. Covenhoven said.

His mam made him lay back. All were staring at him save Jake Tench, who was laughing fit to kill.

“He’s drunk, that’s what he is!” Aunt Genny said finally.

Soon as his mam let him loose, Guerdon heaved up again. What his Aunt Genny said put him in mind of a catch she sang when company came to the Covenhovens. It had plenty of verses, and he only knew a few. Now he yelled those verses at the top of his voice, keeping time with his head and hand at the same time: —

A slew of laughing followed that.

“He knows it nigh as good as you, Genny,” Mollie Weaver spoke.

“He ought to. He’s heard it oft enough,” Aunt Genny said.

“You kin tell singin’ runs in the Lucketts,” Will Beagle said with a look at Genny, for, though she was married, never had he given her up.

Sayward pushed Guerdon flat in bed again.

“Now lay down and hush up,” she told him, but he thought by her eyes that his tomfoolery made her laugh like the rest.

Jake Tench came across and looked down.

“Looks like he’s overed it,” he said like he was disappointed. “He ain’t a-goin’ to die after all. I reckon me and Will kin go home now. We won’t have to take the measurements for his grave box. Of course, you never kin tell. Sometimes they take a turn for the worse. I knowed a boy once—”

“Now let him alone, Jake,” Sayward said sharply. “You done enough to him.”

“All that saved his skin was the whiskey,” Jake declared. “How much would you a-took for him two hours back?”

“Not the whole country and you thrown in,” Sayward told him.

Guerdon looked up at her, closed his eyes, then opened them and looked at her again. It wasn’t so bad to get bit by a “spotted sarpent ” as he reckoned. He was short a finger above the knuckle, but he had his mammy back. A mam like he had didn’t grow on every bush. He’d chop a whole finger off for her any time she wanted it.