Early the next morning, Cathern opened the door of the soddy as she did every morning, milking bucket in hand. She sat herself down by the cow and began to draw on the teats; the cow bellowed. Cathern sniffed the driblet of milk, frowned and ran her hand over the cow’s hindquarters. She glanced at Jonathan. Then she picked up her bucket and ran. Alvah appeared almost at once. He examined the animals quickly, picked up the stick that had done the beating, and brought it down on his boughten boy. While Jonathan lay stunned, Alvah fetched the horsewhip. By the time he finished, my grandfather lay unconscious in a pool of his own blood.

10

The next morning when Alvah came to check the boy’s condition, Jonathan turned his face to the wall – which indicated to Alvah that the beating had been properly gauged: it had done no permanent damage. But by evening he was worried; the boy would drink nothing. Animals died when they didn’t drink. The following morning was the same; Alvah tried without success to force water down him. Wify tried, too. Both failed. At about noon, when Alvah was of half a mind to fetch the druggist from Sweetbrier, the black wagon of the Peaslee Traveling Medicine Service appeared in front of the wooden house. The Peaslee man cured all ills, mental and physical, animal, human, and vegetable: cure guaranteed was part of the bargain. The lettering on the outside walls was bright red outlined in yellow. Inside were bottles with heavy glass stoppers in them, just as there had been in the wagon Wify’s father drove.

‘What good is this stuff to me?’ Alvah growled, his mind on the boy in the sod hut.

‘Why, Mister Stoke,’ the Peaslee man began – nobody else called Alvah anything but Alvah – ‘your horse got a hoof wound? Just put this on it—’ Peaslee’s Iodine and Resublimated Tincture, said the label. ‘And a drop of this—’ He added a drop from another bottle. Then he lifted his arm, bottle in hand.

‘So what?’ Alvah said.

A sudden burst of smoke, dense and red, formed as if by magic and floated upwards; I doubt it did anything for hoof wounds but it was certainly good for catching an ignorant farmer’s attention, even Alvah’s, whose father-in-law, the great salesman of the east, had been a quack of the first order himself. Alvah took the salesman to see Jonathan.

‘It’s his teeth, Mister Stoke,’ the salesman said; he had a mustache of drooping streamers that swayed in the wind. ‘I’ve seen it happen before. They’ve turned septic.’

‘He’s a lot of trouble to me. Years of trouble.’

‘With teeth like that he can’t help it, Mister Stoke. Ain’t rightly his fault,’ the salesman said. The salesman could sometimes get a dollar apiece for real teeth, although the market wasn’t what it had been in its heyday during the Civil War. In those days, in a single night, anybody with a pair of pliers could make enough money to last a lifetime: you waited quietly at the edge of a battlefield, any battlefield, anywhere from Pennsylvania to Texas; when the shooting stopped and the living retired to base camp, you yanked your way through every dead mouth you could get to. Competition was fierce and sometimes ended in a set of molars not strictly military in origin, but think of it! Two dollars a tooth on the London markets, where ladies and gentlemen in silk were scrambling over each other to chew with the teeth of American soldiers. The Peaslee man had moral support, too. Respectable medical journals said that natural teeth caused cancer and pleurisy; they could drive men mad. Who was a mere Peaslee man to argue with respectable journals? Alvah fetched Alyoshus and George. The four of them tackled Jonathan, knocked him out, laid him down. Alvah held his head steady while the salesman pulled out all of his teeth with a copper-plated wrench.