Dead in the West by Joe R. Lansdale

Author:Joe R. Lansdale [Lansdale, Joe R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Horror, cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents, Westerns
ISBN: 9781936666232
Publisher: Gere Donovan Press
Published: 2012-01-11T04:31:14+00:00

THE DOCTOR'S STORY

About a month ago this wagon rolled into town. It was brightly painted. Red and yellow with blue and green snakes twisting together on the side. At the top of the wagon painted in black were the words MEDICINE WAGON. An Indian was driving the wagon. He might have been mixed with negro. It was hard to tell. I'd never seen the likes of him before. He had shoulders broader than any man I've ever known, and he was darn near seven feet tall.

He had a woman with him. A colored. A high yeller, to be exact. And she was a comely thing. Still, they were an Indian and a colored, and that got a lot of folks in these parts off on a bad foot with them immediately. If they had not been such a curiosity, and things hadn't been so dead around town, they might have got run out the first day they showed up.

The Negress read palms and that sort of thing. The Indian made potions. Not like a snake oil man, but like a medicine man. You know, someone that wanted your money but was trying to give you something for it too. They also sold some harmless things. Love potions and charms. The usual rubbish. But mostly they sold medicine, and it went fast, and I'll tell you why. It wasn't for the reason you'd think. It wasn't alcohol-laced with a bit of sugar and vinegar. It was medicine that worked.

It sort of got my goat, and I'm not ashamed to say it. I'm a trained doctor. Just a country sawbones, mind you, but no slouch either. But there were things this Indian could do, I couldn't even come near doing.

Old Mrs. Jameson had the misery for years. Her hands would knot up like old plowlines.

The knuckles would swell, inflame. It would get so bad sometimes the skin would crack.

I'd tried all the conventional treatments, and the best I could manage was a bit of relief from her pain. Something to get her through a bout until another came. And it got so the bouts were closer and closer together. The poor woman could hardly open her hands.

They looked like broken bird talons.

But when the Indian came to town, and word got around that his medicine worked—

everything from taking warts off the face to the curing of the croup—she went over there and bought some salve from him. Up until that point I'd been surprised at some of his cures, but I hadn't seen anything that struck me as miraculous. Then old Mrs. Jameson rubbed that salve on her poor old hands and the pain went away. And she came by to show me how she was doing. As much to gloat and show me up for a quack as anything else, I guess. But there was no denying. Not only were her hands better, they were starting to cure themselves of the damage already done. In a week's time of rubbing on that stuff the Indian gave her, she had hands like a twenty-year-old.

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