There it went, Benton thought—all the carefully worked out deductions, the elaborately constructed theory of the exhaustion syndrome. For Jackson was a hill man, and under Benton’s theory the people of the hills had to be immune.
“What the trouble, Doc?” Jackson asked. “Did I say something I shouldn’t?”
Benton shook himself mentally. “Not at all. I was just wondering. What have you been doing, Lem?”
“To tell the truth,” said Jackson, “not much of anything. A little farming, that’s all. An odd job now and then. I feel so beat out I’m not up to a day of honest work. I guess I’d have to say I don’t do much of nothing.”
Then he went on, “Some while ago I had a good job down in West Virginia, but I lost the job. If I could’ve stayed on, I’d be sitting pretty now. Short hours, work not too hard, and the pay was good. But they up and fired me. The foreman had it in for me. I tell you, Doc, there simply ain’t no justice. I was as good on the job as any of the other men.”
“What kind of work?” Benton asked, not really caring what kind of job it was, but just making conversation.
“Well, I suppose that even if I hadn’t been fired the job wouldn’t have lasted. They closed down after I left. It was a small chemical plant. They were making DDT, and I hear they banned the stuff.”
Benton felt himself go limp as relief flowed through him. His theory still stood up, he thought triumphantly. Lem Jackson was the exception to the rule his theory had set up that helped to cinch that theory. But even as he felt elated at this evidence that his deductions had been right, he told himself that his reaction was wrong. He should have been glad, it seemed to him, when he first had thought Jackson’s symptoms shot his theory down—for, come to think of it, this business of DDT and the human body was a ghastly thing. But, in a perverse way, he had become fond of his theory. After all the work and thought he had put into it, no one, not even the most humane person in the world, would have wanted to be proved wrong.
“Lem,” he said, “I’m sorry, but there’s not a thing I can do for you. Not yet. There are others like you. Perhaps there are a lot of others like you. It’s a condition that has just come to be noticed and there is work being done on it. In time, there may be a cure. I am sorry I have to be this honest with you, but I think you’re the kind of man who would want that kind of honesty.”
“You mean,” Jackson said, “that I’m going to die?”
“No, I don’t mean that. I mean I can’t make you feel any better. You probably won’t get any worse. There’ll be a time, I’m sure, when there’ll be drugs or medicine.”
And all that would be needed, he told himself rather bitterly, was a pill or a capsule with a requisite dosage of DDT incorporated with carrier ingredients.
Jackson picked up his battered hat and got slowly to his feet. “Doc, all the people in the hills say you’re a square shooter. ‘He don’t feed you no crap,’ they told me. ‘He is a doctor it’s safe to go to.’ You say probably I won’t get any worse.”
“Probably not,” said Benton.
“And maybe someday there’ll be a medicine that’ll do some good.”
“I am hopeful.”
Watching Jackson leave, he wondered why he had told him what he had. Why the brutal honesty? Why the giving of some hope? “There is work being done on it,” he had said; but that had been a lie. Or had it? There was one person working on it and that one person, he grimly told himself, had better buckle down to business.
That evening he drafted a careful letter, setting forth in precise detail what he suspected. Then, as he found the time, working in the evening after office hours were over, he typed the letters and mailed them out. Then he sat back and waited.
The first reply came, in two weeks’ time, from JAMA. His letter, it said, could not be considered for publication since it lacked research evidence. JAMA was kind enough, but final. It did not even suggest he institute further research. But that was only fair, he admitted to himself, since there had been no research to start with.
The second reply, from the National Institutes of Health, was barely civil in its officialese.
The third, from the Association for Biochemical Research, was curt.
On a Saturday afternoon, when the last patient had left, he sat at his desk with the three letters spread out before him. It had been unrealistic, he admitted, to think that any one of the three would have paid attention to his letter. After all, who was he? An unknown family physician in a town that was equally unknown, advancing a theory unsupported by any kind of research, relying only on observation and deduction. The reactions to what he had written could have been expected. Yet there was no question in his mind that he should have written the letters. If no more than a gesture, it was something that had needed to be done.
So now what did he do? Work through the medical association, starting with the county, going to the state? He knew that it was useless. Smith, he was certain, might give him support; but the others would laugh him off the floor. And even if this were not so, it would take years before there was any action.
A chemical company, perhaps. There would be millions of dollars’ worth of business for a DDT capsule once what he now knew became general knowledge. But a chemical company, knowing the hassle of getting approval from the Food and Drug Administration, might shy away from it. Before a chemical company would even touch it, there would have to be years of laboratory work to provide supporting evidence to place before the FDA. On an idea so “far-out,” he knew, no drug or chemical firm would put up the money that was necessary.
So he was licked. He had been licked before he even started. If Abbott had not died, there might have been an even chance. Abbott, writing about the syndrome, would have found a publisher, for he would have produced the kind of book publishers dream about—sensational, controversial, attention-grabbing. Published, the book would have created enough furor that someone would have worked on the theory, if for no other reason than to prove Abbott wrong.
But there was no use thinking about it. Abbott would not write the book. No one would write it. So this was the end of it, he thought. All the years he had left, he would carry the knowledge that he had found a truth the world would not accept.
The world! he thought. To hell with the world! The world was not his concern. His concern was for the people of this community, for Lem and Ted, for Burt and Herb, and for all the others. Maybe he couldn’t help the world, but there might be a way, by God, he could help his people!
Lem Jackson lived on Coonskin Ridge, and Benton had to stop a couple of times to ask his way. But he finally found the farm, with its tilted acres and the little, falling-down house crouched against the wind that whipped across the ridges.
When he knocked, Jackson let him in.
“Come and sit by the fire. It’s a nippy day and a fire feels good. Mary, how about pouring Doc a cup of coffee. What brings you out here, Doc?”
“A small matter of business,” Benton said. “I thought maybe you’d be willing to do a job for me.”
“If I can,” Jackson answered. “If I’m up to it. I told you, remember, I’m not good for much.”
“You have a truck outside. This would be a hauling job.”
“I can manage a hauling job.”
Mrs. Jackson brought the cup of coffee. She was a small, wispy woman with hair straggling down across her face, wearing a bedraggled dress. From a far corner of the room, faces of children, quiet as mice, stared intently out.