Queen of October by Mickle Shelley Fraser

Author:Mickle, Shelley Fraser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2013-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

14.

A Visit in My Grandfather’s Office

The back entrance to my grandfather’s office opened into a room he called his lab. Beyond this was the treatment room and then the waiting room. Even though a young doctor drove over from Searcy every other Tuesday to hold a clinic at the other end of Main Street, no one was willing to let my grandfather retire. No one who had started with him wanted to change, which was a compliment to my grandfather, since he didn’t believe in much treatment. Yet that also meant he’d never killed anyone. His own medicines were, in a sense, a form of treatment. But his specialty was histories.

His files were the size of law books, each one with the patient’s name on it sitting in a bookcase behind a glass door, and the number and size of them never dwindled. Often I had heard him say to patients that he thought it was time to take a new history. Then they would start again at day one. My grandfather would take notes, writing in a large black-bound book, throwing in questions. Often he would repeat what the patient had just said, starting with: “Now let me get this right.” My grandfather was more than a just good listener; he was, in himself, an entire show, sort of like the one on TV called “This Is Your Life.”

That’s probably part of what Joel had meant when he claimed that my grandfather was a great actor. Joel’s mother had once suffered from nasal blockage. My grandfather supposedly exploded it with a piece of cotton dipped in the Outside Medicine, which was taking a great risk, considering the Outside was poisonous to the inside. But Mrs. Weiss had been cured, even though she had the side effect of smelling Maulden’s Outside Medicine for several days afterward. In fact, a direct clue that someone had been at the Maulden Clinic was the distinctive odor of the Outside Medicine. It was the best remedy for acne and common zits that anyone could buy. Even Mr. Barber recommended it at the drug store, because he knew he didn’t have anything to match it. On many days a whiff of my grandfather’s Outside Medicine could be detected in the halls of the high school and in the aisles of stores all over town.

I sat on a stool in the lab, because I could hear my grandfather talking with a patient. My grandmother had sent me to fetch him for supper. But I wasn’t in a hurry to get back to the house, and I didn’t want to bust in on anybody naked.

Mrs. Elizabeth Clayton was relating the activities of her gall bladder, and she was talking a lot. She had a list of foods that set it off. She was, she said, down to eating almost nothing. She had lost fifteen pounds, and there was no way the flesh was not going to stop falling off—which, considering how much she must weigh, was a blessing in disguise, I thought.

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