The World Made Straight (5 page)

Carlton Toomey stuffed the rag in his back pocket.

“I've done that, but your daddy's too stubborn to change. Always has been. Stubborn as a white oak stump. But you've figured it out, else you'd not have stole my plants in the first place.”

“I reckon I need me a doctor,” Travis said. He was feeling better, knowing the older man was there beside him. His leg
didn't hurt nearly as much now as before, and he told himself he could probably walk on it if he had to once the Toomeys got the trap off.

“The best thing to do is put him down there below the falls,” the son said. “They'll figure him to fallen and drowned himself.”

Carlton Toomey looked up.

“I think we done used up our allotment of accidental drownings around here. It'd likely be more than just Crockett nosing around if there was another.”

Toomey looked back at Travis. He spoke slowly, his voice soft.

“Coming back up here a second time took some guts. Even if I'd figured out you was the one I'd have let it go, just for the feistiness of your doing it. But coming a third time was downright stupid, and greedy. It ain't like you're some shit-britches young'un. You're old enough to know better.”

“I'm sorry,” Travis said.

Carlton Toomey reached out his hand and gently brushed some of the dirt off Travis's face.

“I know you are, son, just like every other poor son-of-a-bitch that's got his ass in a sling he can't get out of.”

Travis knew he was forgetting something, something important he needed to tell Carlton Toomey. He squeezed his eyes shut a few moments to think harder. It finally came to him.

“I reckon you better get me to the doctor,” Travis said.

“We got to harvest these plants first,” the older Toomey replied. “What if we was to take you down to the hospital and folks started wondering why we'd set a bear trap. They might
figure there's something up here we wanted to keep folks from poking around and finding.”

Carlton Toomey's words started to blur and swirl in Travis's mind. They were hard to hold in place long enough to make sense. He tried to remember what had brought him this far up the creek. Travis finally thought of something he could say in just a few words.

“Could you get that trap off my foot?”

“Sure,” Toomey said. He slid over a few feet to reach the trap, then looked up at his son.

“Step on that lever, Hubert, and I'll get his leg out.”

The younger man stepped closer. Travis stared hard at the beads. They were red and yellow and black, a dime-sized silver peace sign clipped on the necklace as well. Hubert raised his head as he pressed and afternoon sun glanced the silver, momentarily blinding Travis. The pain rose up his leg again but it seemed less a part of him now, the way an aching tooth he'd had last fall felt after a needle of Novocain. Travis kept staring at the beads, because they were the only thing now that hadn't been drained of color. There was a name for those beads. He almost remembered but then the name slipped free like a balloon let go, rising steadily farther and farther away.

“That's got it,” Carlton Toomey said and slowly raised Travis's leg, placed it on the ground beside the trap. Toomey used spit and his rag to wipe blood from the wound.

“What's your given name, son?” he asked.

“Travis.”

“This ain't near bad as it looks, Travis,” Toomey said. “I
don't think that trap even put a gouge in the leg bone. Probably didn't tear up any ligaments or tendons either. You're just a pint low in the blood department. That's the thing what's making you foggyheaded.”

“Now what?” the son said.

“Go call Dooley and tell him we'll be bringing him plants sooner than we thought. Bring back them machetes and we'll get this done.” He paused. “Give me that hawkbill of yours.”

Hubert took the knife from his pocket and handed it to his father.

“What you going to do to him?” Hubert asked.

“What's got to be done,” the elder Toomey said. “Now go on and get those damn machetes.”

Hubert started walking toward the farmhouse.

“I'm sorry I have to do this, son,” Carlton said.

The knife blade made a clicking sound as it locked into place. Travis squeezed his eyes shut. For a few moments the only sound was the gurgle of the creek, and he remembered how it was the speckled trout that had brought him here. He remembered how you could not see the orange fins and red flank spots but only the dark backs in the rippling water. And how it was only when they lay gasping on the green bank moss that you realized how bright and pretty they were.

August
12, 1852

A.M.

Summoned to Franklin Farm.

Nance Franklin, age
34.

Complaint: Female bleeding.

Diagnosis: Excessive uterine haemorrhage.

Treatment: Tincture of valerian. Black haw tea. Cold cloths
applied to abdomen.

Twelve
P.M.

Haemorrhage lessening. Continue to apply cloths and minister
with valerian, black haw tea.

One
P.M.

Bleeding arrested. Pallor improved. Pulse firm.

Treatment: Bed rest for week. Dose of Dover's Powder once
daily. Black haw tea twice daily.

Fee: Four dollars. Days work repairing my roof by two
oldest sons.

P.M.

Dewy Morton, age
10.

Complaint: Arm hurt in fall from barn loft.

Diagnosis: Fracture of tibia, left arm.

Treatment: Laudanum to set arm.

Splint, cloth sling. Wear four weeks.

Return to confirm salutory mending.

Fee: One dollar, twenty-five cents.
Paid with shoeing of horse.

Royce McCall, age
31.

Complaint: Fits, frothing at mouth.

Diagnosis: Epilepsy.

Treatment: Half-dram solution of iodine and iodide potash
twice daily. Avoid excessive agitations of body and mind.

Note: Next time in Asheville order Dunglison's Treatise on
Special Pathology and Therapeutics.

Fee: One dollar. Paid with eight pounds butter.

Attended lecture in Asheville by Doctor Justice on Botanic
Medicine. Confirmed my views on eschewing cupping and
blistering of patients and felicitous use of plants. Must devote
further study to injurious symptoms of mineral preparations.

When he woke there was so little light he thought it must be night. The inside of his mouth felt tacked over with sandpaper. His ankle and head throbbed and his mind was stirred up like murky water. But it soon began to clear. Travis heard at first what he thought his own heart but soon realized the sound was the ticking of a clock. His eyes began adjusting to the dim light and he found himself in a room. He lay in a bed and a frayed quilt covered him to his neck, above a bare yellow lightbulb. Venetian blinds allowed in a few dim, motey stripes of sun. Enough to realize it was not full dark but early evening.

Travis raised up on his elbows and the leg caught fire, not just where the trap had bit into his leg but lower. He remembered feeling the knife blade settle not on his throat but his heel. Carlton Toomey had worked almost delicately, using a slow, sawing motion. At first it hadn't hurt enough to override
the pain from the trap. Then he'd felt the Achilles tendon snap apart like a thick rubber band. Travis didn't remember anything after that.

A voice came from the room's far corner.

“I'd not try to move much.”

Travis looked toward the voice, trying not to move anything below his neck.

Carlton Toomey sat in a ladderback chair, dressed in the same work clothes he'd had on earlier. Travis remembered more quickly now, scattered images and thoughts put back in proper sequence. He remembered scaling the falls, the click of the trap, everything up to the moment he'd passed out the last time.

Travis's throat was so dry his voice was nothing more than an unintelligible raspy whisper.

Carlton Toomey left the room and came back with a quart jar filled with water. Hubert came in the room as well and leaned in an easygoing way against the wall. Hubert had changed into jeans and a flannel shirt with its sleeves hacked just below the shoulders. He still wore the beads. Love beads, that's what they're called, Travis thought.

“Here,” Carlton Toomey said, and lifted Travis's head.

Travis sipped until the glass was empty. Water had no taste, most folks claimed, but Travis knew if they'd been thirsty as he was they'd know that it did. Not like anything else you'd ever tasted, not like that at all, but the clear, cool tang he'd smelled in deep, mossy woods after a long rain. The water helped him think better, maybe because one bodily alarm bell
had been stilled. The pain in his head and leg seemed to pull back a bit as well.

“Hate I had to take that knife to your foot,” Toomey said, “but we got to be certain sure you don't forget there's a price to be paid for stealing. I'm of a mind you got off easy. There's places in this world they'd have cut your hand off.”

“I need to get to the doctor,” Travis said.

Carlton nodded.

“That's where we're soon enough headed. But some things got to be made clear first about what you're going to say when we get there.”

“You're gonna regret this,” Hubert said. “We best put him below the falls. It ain't too late.”

“We're not doing that,” Carlton Toomey said, “so shut up about it.” He turned back to Travis. “The quicker we get some things clear the sooner we go to the hospital. If we dodder around here too long that ankle likely could get infected, especially with a rusty old trap germing it up. They might have to chop that leg of yours plumb off. You hear me?”

“Yes sir.” Travis wanted to say more but the pain made it hard to talk.

“You're going to tell whatever busybody wants to know that you fell climbing the falls. Not a word about that trap neither. You never was on my land and you never saw no pot plants. The only reason we showed up was you yelling for help. You understand?”

“Yes sir,” he said again.

Hubert stepped closer to the bed. He was a big man, though
not as big as his father. His nose had been broken, maybe more than once, enough that it swerved to the right, making his whole face appear misaligned. He looked at Travis as though he were nothing more than a groundhog or possum they'd caught.

“He ain't going to do it, Daddy. Soon as he gets to that hospital he'll be testifying like a damn tent-revival preacher.”

“He'll do like we tell him,” Carlton Toomey said. “Travis here is smart. Smart enough to outslick us twice, smart enough to keep his mouth shut now.”

“I won't tell,” Travis said, and he was suddenly more afraid than he'd been before, because he remembered the hawkbill's blade, how for a moment he thought that blade was going to slit his throat. “I swear it, Mr. Toomey.”

“Then tell it back at me what you're going to say when we get there.”

Travis told how he'd fallen trying to climb the falls, how the Toomeys had found him. The words came hard, and a skim of sweat covered his face when he'd finished.

“One other thing,” Carlton Toomey said. “Who'd you sell them plants to?”

He didn't bother to hesitate or lie.

“Leonard Shuler.”

“He know where you got them from?”

“No sir.”

“Didn't go out of his way to ask, I bet,” Hubert said to his father.

Carlton nodded, his eyes on Travis.

“Satisfied him to act like them plants fell out of the sky, and
you just shackling along with nothing more to do than stretch your arms out and catch them.” Carlton turned the glass in his hand, the same way he might test a doorknob. “That seems to be more and more a problem around here,” he said, “people thinking anything they happen across is theirs for the taking.”

Travis shifted his leg slightly.

“My leg's hurting bad,” he said.

“It's likely to hurt more when we start moving you,” Carlton said. He turned to his son. “We best get to it.”

The two men lifted Travis from the bed and the pain returned, reverberating through his body until they laid him in the car's backseat. He knew the men had been working on this vehicle, not the green pickup, because the hood was still up. For a few moments Travis had a terrible fear that it would not start, that the Toomeys would have to do more repairs while he waited in the backseat. But Carlton Toomey slammed the hood shut and got in.

“Take the truck and get them plants down to Dooley,” he told his son before cranking the engine. “We'll meet back here.”

“What about the pills?”

Carlton Toomey nodded at a paper bag in the floorboard.

“I'll take care of that,” Carlton Toomey said. “I know someone obliged to take them off our hands.”

They bumped out of the yard and onto a dirt road leading to the two-lane.

“It won't be long now,” Toomey said, but it seemed forever to Travis because the fire in his leg hadn't dimmed much since they'd laid him in the car. What Carlton Toomey had said
about the bear trap's rusty steel worried him. Old Man Jenkins had once told about a man up near Flag Pond who'd gotten lockjaw from rusty barbed wire. The man had lost his ability to swallow and drowned from a cup of water his wife poured down his throat.

Travis raised his head slightly, spoke to the back of Toomey's head.

“Make sure they give me a tetanus shot,” Travis said, gasping the last word as they hit another bump.

Carlton Toomey's dark eyes appeared in the driver's mirror. The eyes seemed disembodied, as if they'd slipped free from the face.