Was it a sign? he wondered. Had his subconscious mind reached back and laid a bony finger on this isolated incident to tell him what his conscious reasoning could not tell him?
The phone rang and it was not until the third ring that he realized what it was. Almost as if in a dream, he reached out for it.
“Hello,” he said. “Dr. Benton here.”
“Are you all right?” Harriet asked.
“Sure, I am all right.”
“Do you know what time it is?”
“No. No, I hadn’t noticed.”
“It’s two o’clock,” Harriet said. “I became concerned about you.”
“I’m sorry, dear,” he said. “I’ll be right home.”
Late in the fall, Ezra Pike stopped by the office, not because he was sick, but because he had butchered one of his hogs and was bringing Benton a sack of sausages, Mrs. Pike being known throughout the valley as an expert sausage maker. Regularly, each fall at butchering time, Pike came by with a sack of sausages for old Doc.
It was one of the regional eccentricities that Benton had finally become accustomed to, although it had taken him a while. Over the course of any year, a lot of people would come by with something for old Doc—a bag of black walnuts, a basket of tomatoes, a clutch of fancy baking potatoes, a comb of honey fresh from the hive—free-will offerings that Benton had learned to accept with considerable grace.
Although patients were waiting, Benton had Pike step into his office and settled down for a chat with him. Toward the end of their talk he asked the question he had wanted to ask.
“What do you know about the Barr family?”
“You mean the ones that bought Abner Young’s place?”
“Those are the ones,” said Benton.
“Not really much,” Pike answered. “They come from Ohio, I think. Were farmers there. Don’t know why they moved here. I know Barr pretty well and have talked with him, but he never told me and I never asked. Maybe because they got Abner’s place dirt cheap. When Abner died, the farm went to some shirttail relatives out in California—nephews, I gather. They didn’t want to be bothered with it. They never came for the funeral or to settle the estate. They told Abner’s lawyer to sell it for what he could get as soon as he could, and he offered it cheap.”
“So that was the way of it. I never really got to know Abner. He was in a couple of times. A crusty old customer. Once he had a foot infection. Stepped on a nail, the way I remember it. The other time he was on the verge of pneumonia. I tried to get him to let me send him to a hospital, but he wouldn’t do it. Wound up that I gave him some drugs and he went home and managed to live through it. Didn’t see him after that, didn’t really hear much about him until I heard he died. Found dead by one of the neighbors, wasn’t he? Probably he got sick and figured he wanted no more to do with me. Afraid I might send him to a hospital. Likely neither myself nor a hospital could have helped him much. He was one of those characters who fought a doctor tooth and nail.”
Pike chuckled, remembering his neighbor. “I know people said he was a mean man, and in some ways I suppose he was. Ran people off his place with a shotgun. The pheasants were knee-deep in his fields and he would allow no hunting. Wouldn’t even shoot them himself. Never had much to do with his neighbors. Kept to himself. He’d gone sour on humanity. But he loved other things. He let his fence rows grow up to brush so that rabbits and woodchucks and birds would have a place to live. He always fed the birds in winter, and if English sparrows or blue jays came to feed he never tried to drive them off, or was put out about it the way a lot of people are. Said they got hungry, too.”
“You sound as if you knew him fairly well, Ezra.”
“Oh,” said Pike, “we had our differences. He was a hard man to get along with. Unreasonable and had a bad temper. Had some funny ideas, too. He was an organic farmer. Never put a pound of commercial fertilizer on his land, refused to use pesticides. Said they were poison. Long before that lady wrote her book about a ‘silent spring,’ he said that they were poison.”
Benton sat straight up. “You mean he never used any pesticides? No DDT at all?”
“That’s what I mean,” said Pike. “And the funny thing about it was that he grew as good a crop as any of the rest of us—that is, as long as he grew any crops. As he grew older, he farmed less and less. A good part of his land was idle. But what little he farmed, he farmed well. Abner was a first-class farmer.”
Pike stayed a while longer and they talked of other things, but Benton scarcely heard him. His mind was buzzing with what Pike had said about Abner Young never using pesticides.
DDT! Benton thought. For the love of Christ, could it be DDT?
Here was the Barr family, farmers out of Ohio, where they probably had used DDT, then moving to a farm where not a grain of the chemical ever had been used. And among all the farmers in the valley, they were the only ones who had suffered from the exhaustion syndrome. Could it be that they had gotten used to DDT or something else in the pesticides, and now were sick because of the lack of it?
The other farmers were okay, he figured, because there still were traces of DDT in their soil, and by working in the soil they were picking up enough of it not to yet experience any ill effects from the lack of it.
And the folks out in the hills? That was simple enough, he told himself. They had never been exposed to it, had never developed whatever need for it the others had acquired. They had never been exposed to it because they were so bone poor they could not afford to buy it. Raising their own food, consuming what they grew, never eating commercially canned foods or buying foods that might have been grown on DDT-drenched land, they had never been exposed.
The next day was Saturday, and in the afternoon, after office hours were over, Benton went through his files once again and found what he had expected to find: that, with only two exceptions, townspeople who had gardens and who actually worked in them had never mentioned any of the symptoms of the exhaustion syndrome.
He phoned Helen Anderson. When she came on the line, he said, “This is your friendly family physician and I’m going to ask you a silly question. Please don’t laugh at me, for maybe it’s important.”
“Ask away. You know I wouldn’t laugh at you.”
“All right, then. When DDT was still available, before it was banned, did you use it in your garden?”
“Sure I did,” she said. “I think most gardeners did. I used it for years and years, and I tell you I miss it. This new stuff, the bugs positively like it. They lap it up and settle down to wait for more. It doesn’t even faze them. Herb used to fuss at me for using DDT. He said he didn’t want his vegetables salted with chemicals.”
“And Herb? Herb never works in the garden, does he?”
“Doc, you know damn well he doesn’t. He makes fun of me and my gardening. You have heard him do it.”
“But he eats stuff from the garden?” Benton asked.
“Are you kidding? Of course he does.”
“Fine,” he said. “Thank you for not laughing.”
“Doc, what is going on? Has this got something to do with Herb—with the way he feels?”
“Maybe. I don’t know yet. Maybe I’ll never know. I’m just scrabbling around.”
“All right,” she said. “I won’t ask. When you know, you’ll tell me?”
“You can count on that.”
He made several other phone calls to people who had gardens and to those who didn’t. The two exceptions said they had never used DDT because they didn’t want to mess around with it. It was too much work, they said. No, they said, their gardens didn’t do as well without it and through the summer they had always bought some garden stuff from others and, like most people, had always used a fair amount of canned goods.