About the time the auction started in on the household furnishings — I remember them bidding on a piecrust table — Doc MacPhellimey wandered over to us. Doc was a tall, you might say spindly, man, much admired if not outright loved for his gentle ways and his healing gifts. Doc had “the sight,” as they say. He could look at someone who was sick and just know what was to be done, even when there was nothing could be done at all. Among the men, our fathers, he was also particularly popular for his loquaciousness over a pint or two of beer. Doc could take the simplest recounting of events and make it magical when he talked of it.
That afternoon he sat down with us on the hay and said, “So, you fellers, what’s the topic of the hour?”
Davy Crockett (I swear that was his name) answered, “Oh, Doc, you know. We’s feeling kind of bad about Mary, and wonderin’ ’bout what’s gonna happen to her.”
“And,” I added, because I wasn’t going to leave it with that joker Davy, “thinking that maybe she’s better off without that Creegus Maxin in her life.”
Doc took out his clay pipe and a small oilcloth pouch of tobacco, and he started packing the pipe while he spoke. “Well, now, she’s like kin to you all. You’ve grown up with her, and you know things about her and Creegus that your parents probably pretend you don’t, just like they pretend they don’t know ’em, neither.”
That right there was one of the things about Doc MacPhellimey and us — he could get inside the truth of something in a way you trusted, when you knew the rest of the grown-ups would hem and haw and change the subject.
“Also, you’re right,” he said, looking at me. “She’s had the devil of a winter, but she’s much better off without him.”
Johnny McClendon put in, “My da says he run off with a floozy. Run off to Chicago.”
“What’s a floozy?” asked Luke Willette, who was eight that year.
Doc didn’t answer Luke’s question, but he leaned in close, real conspiratorial like, and said, “I’ll tell you boys a secret. I know what happened to Creegus Maxin.” The way he said it, his eyes aglitter, made the hair prickle on my arms. He leaned back then for a moment and, producing a match, struck it against a barn door hinge. With Doc, this was an indication that he was going to launch into a story, and I saw a couple of men on the outskirts of the auction crowd nudge each other and turn in our direction while he was getting the pipe lit. A moment later he crushed the head of the match between his nicotine-brown fingers, then leaned forward again.
“Were any of you boys in town last October when Mary brought Creegus in to see me? She was driving the buckboard, looked to be alone, and I noticed as she pulled up outside my office that she was sitting kind of hunched and uncomfortable herself. I was all alone at the time, and I got up from my desk to see what it was about.
“Creegus, he’d been lying flat in the back of the wagon. He pushed himself up as I came out, and kind of skooched to the end of the buckboard. Before he got down he slid out a long-handled shovel that had been at his side. I looked to Mary as I passed her, but she just sat staring into her hands, as if the reins had burned the skin off ’em and she didn’t know what to do next.
“Her old man, now, he was hobbling around the wagon, all his weight on that shovel head, and his knee bent, his foot up behind him. I asked him, ‘What is it happened to you, Creegus? ’ When he came near, I could smell the whiskey coming out of his skin in the heat and see that his eyes were swimming with it — something I never want to see on you boys, ever.
“Creegus, he launched into his story so hard that I could tell he’d been worrying it the whole way in from his farm. ‘That damn dray did it,’ he said. ‘I thought he’d gone lame on me, but he’d just throwed a shoe off’n that hind leg of his, and I had took him in the barn and had ahold of him by the pastern, bent and trapped betwixt my knees and I guess I’d put one or two nails into him and was reaching for the next. They was on the sawn-off stump right beside me, and that damned horse pulls hisself right outten my grip and drops that hoof straight down to my foot. And that iron shoe come loose on the way down, so it hit me first and then his hoof ’bout drove it into the ground right through me. Doc, it was like my toes was being sliced off, and my whole head had like a sun explodin’ in it.’ And then he cursed and he spat. ‘When I could see clear again,’ he said, ‘I grabbed my birch switch and I flogged that damn dray within an inch. My foot was like fire itself but I wasn’t gonna let him off on account of that, nossir!’ And I shook my head and told him, ‘Yes, certain I am you taught that horse his lesson.’ ”
Luke had his face all screwed up. “But that horse didn’t do nothing,” he said. “Was the man dropped his foot.”
Doc nodded and said, “You’re right about that, young Luke.” Four or five of the men had come up by then. One of them set a Mason jar on the hay beside Doc and then moved off to listen with the others.
Doc paused to take a sip, and he smiled. “I helped Creegus inside. Mary hung back on the wagon. Now that boot was on him so tight that I wanted to cut it off, but he wouldn’t have it. Said he couldn’t afford boots and I wasn’t about to ruin that one. He said he’d wear the boot till he healed if he had to. But you know, I couldn’t have that or I’d be cutting his leg off by Christmas. I soaked a cloth in ether and held it to his face and put him out cold. Then I worked that boot off like he’d asked, even though it surely didn’t improve things for him. The foot was filthy, but even after I washed it clean, it looked like an eggplant with toes. That horseshoe had come down on what’s called the cuneiform, and I expect it had fractured right straight across his foot. If you break one bone in your foot, boys, you’re like to break a dozen. I bandaged it up tight so everything would line up all right, and left him sleeping on the table. He was going to have to be off that foot the whole of the winter, and that meant Mary would have to make do all by herself as well as tending to him. So I needed to talk to her.
“She was still sitting up behind the horse. I made her get down and come inside with me. She wouldn’t meet my eye, and about every step she took she winced. She didn’t want to go first through my gate, but I insisted, and when I got a look at her from the back I could see why. There were blotches on that gingham dress. I knew well enough it was blood. I took her into the back room, away from her old man. Turned up a lamp and said, ‘All right now, Mary, you need to take down your dress and let me have a look at that back of yours. You don’t have to say one word to me, because I’m going to know when I see it. So you can tell your daddy that you said nothing to Doctor MacPhellimey.’
“She had tears on her face, but she nodded and did as I told her. The camisole she had on was worse than the dress. Fairly striped with blood, it was. I saw clear enough that the plow horse wasn’t the only thing Creegus had beaten that morning. Mary, that brave girl, had gotten between the poor horse and her crazy father and Creegus had kept right on going. Terrible welts. The camisole was stuck to her, so I had to peel it off. She near fainted from that, and then she hugged herself to me and cried her heart out. Creegus’d whipped her all the way to her legs. I cannot imagine how she’d driven the buckboard into town. And you just imagine, you boys — she’d had to change clothes first, to hide what he’d done before she brought him in to me. Well, I dressed her wounds and let her rest awhile, but when I tell you she’s a strong young woman, I mean she’s stronger than most of the men hereabouts to take what she did.”