Riding a Dead Horse and Chesapeake City’s Crystal-Ball Doctor

Riding a Dead Horse and Chesapeake City’s Crystal-Ball Doctor

Locust tree at left where Jack strangled himself. Tent occupants: Wiggsey, the dog for all seasons, with his best friend.

Dr. Van Norden’s house and office, built by Mr. Lindsey in 1917. Dr. Van Norden lived there from 1941 until about 1948. Jim Peaper and family lived there and the current residents are Cathy and John Watson. Stone fence built by Taylor S. Stubbs

I woke up early that mid-summer morning in 1946 and ambled outside to pick some grapes from our flourishing arbor. And before I sat down on the back steps to enjoy them I did a few forward rolls and, dizzy, sat up just in time to see a robin dart onto the grassy island next to our pump trough. She stood erect and motionless, proud red breast puffed out, and beak lifted high. She then skittered quickly across the grass with her body tilted level with the ground like a speed boat leveling into its plane. Stopping abruptly, she again presented that boasting chest and attentive head. In a flash, she pivoted her body downward, placing her beak about an inch from the ground, with head tilted as if listening for some weak though important message. She stabbed the ground, bringing up a wriggling, startled worm. Repeating her quick-footed, level dash and her martial stance—with the frenzied worm dangling in her beak—she lifted off and glided with a graceful swoop into the pecan tree.

Then I turned toward our lane just in time to see Uncle Ernest, who stumbled up next to me and squatted with exaggerated effort accompanied by a long groan of fatigue. He had just arrived from a night of bar hopping that ended with his eviction from Earl White’s tavern on Chesapeake City’s North Side. He promised to tell me an adventure story after he rested his eyes on our couch. And, geez, I just couldn’t wait until I could hear another one of his true stories, just as I know you can’t wait, pensive reader, until you read it in the next week’s posting.

So I cooled my heels and thought about a crazy thing that had happened earlier that summer. Old man Dave McNatt, a local farmer who tilled our forty acres, had horses, mules, cows, and many other domesticated farm animals. The cows he’d graze on our fields occasionally, but the mules and horses were there often. Well, one of the horses he had was a bad one. As you know, sometimes an animal can be as ornery as a person. At any rate, this horse, a large, brown stallion named Jack, was wild and hard to manage, and one evening, before McNatt returned to his farm with the other mules and horses, he had tied Jack to one of our locust trees. Well, old Jack snorted, whinnied, and stomped the ground like crazy that evening before bedtime.

The tree was right outside my bedroom window, and let me tell you, sympathetic reader, that when I woke up the next morning I saw a startling sight. Jack was lying dead on the ground, strangled around the base of that tree, with his eyeballs bulging out and his purple tongue dangling to the ground. He had twisted himself around and down to the bottom of the tree trunk until he had no where to go, so that his head and neck were snug up against the trunk. He had struggled valiantly—in one direction only. His enormous body lay fully across the area where I had pitched my tent a few days before.

And do you believe that Old Dave McNatt didn’t bother to remove the carcass. As days went by the body swelled up to twice its size, its belly especially, bloating up like a gigantic hairy balloon and stretching as taut as a bass drum. I remember how bizarre it was to look up at the prostrate Jack as I stood there on the ground, but it was even more remarkable to see it from the hall window upstairs, where I could take in the full absurdity of it all.

But you must know that as a kid I didn’t think it was that bad, because my buddies, Junior and Dick, and I would climb to the top of that belly and slide down it. We even switched him and pretended to ride him. We played on poor old Jack every day, never mind what my mother said: “My, the very idea! Don’t you dare climb on that disgusting thing?” And yet, sixty-seven years later I can still feel my bare feet stepping on that distended, hairy belly, a belly that grew larger day by day. And I can still feel my fingers digging into that taut, hairy horsehide as I struggled to reach the top. Yep, we enjoyed an unusual sliding board, which I’ll bet no other kid ever had, until the flies and the stink got so bad that Pop had to pay a renderer to haul it away.

Later that summer I started my first job: pulling weeds out of Dr. Van Norden’s garden. The doc lived on South Chesapeake City’s Third Street, just up from the school. He wanted me to begin work at noon, in the heat of late July. After an hour of battling the infested weeds, the heat, and the biting insects, I decided that being a wage earner at ten years’ old was not only exhausting but unnecessary. And the more weeds I pulled the more unnecessary it became. So, after about an hour, drenched with sweat, with a sunburned and welt-dotted face, I knocked on his door for my pay.

He opened the door, peered out and beckoned me in. Let me tell you about Dr. Van Norden, my first doctor and my first employer. He was a small man so it won’t take long. Thin and maybe five feet tall if you were to stretch him out, he had a head that made up in magnitude for what his shriveled body lacked. He had piercing eyes, a long nose, and a full head of pure-white hair.

He drove a 1915 Pierce-Arrow automobile, and when he ran it around town it looked as if there was no driver because he could just barely see over the dashboard. Folks said that he always drove through town ignoring the stop signs and pedestrians. Nevertheless, he paid me for my labor with a tarnished quarter. Four years earlier he had given me my school vaccination on my left bicep. The quarter I spent that evening; the vaccination I still have, and if I flex my muscle it’ll pop right out at you.

The winter before I pulled those weeds for him I was his patient. Pop took me to him because I had a bad cold with a high fever. Feeling miserable, I sat next to his desk as he told me to chew on a small absorbent, paper tab and then spit it into his hand. He made a fist for about five seconds, cocked his head to one side and said: “Um humm, 102 degrees—not good.” Then I answered his questions: “Are your mouth and lips dry?” “Uh-huh.” “Do you stick your feet out from under the covers at night?” “Uh-huh.” “Do your bowel movements have an odor?” “Uh-huh.” Well,” he said, “Everything points to nux vomica, but we’d better make sure.”

Then he pulled out from his drawer a crystal ball about the size of a baseball that had a foot-long string attached to it. He cleared his desk and poured and folded what looked like sugar (the Nux Vomica medicine) into a tiny piece of white paper. Next he placed it about eight inches from the tab I had saturated. After that he grabbed the end of the string attached to the crystal ball and held the dandling ball about six inches above the saliva tab.

I sat there wide-eyed at the spectacle and looked over at Pop, who nodded his approval. Then, believe it or not, that crystal ball began swinging back and forth between the medicine and my saliva. “There’s the proof,” Doctor Van Norden said. So Pop paid him two dollars, took me home, and dissolved the medicine in a glass of water. That evening he gave me a teaspoon full of it every hour, and the next morning I felt fine—no cough, no sore throat, and no fever. I was cured.